There was no glass left in any of the windows, and thick vines covered a large portion of the surviving walls. There was something almost predatory about the way they wrapped up the sides, snaking through the gaping windows and up out of what had once been a chimney, as if the earth were trying to erase all evidence of human life.
“Can we go inside?” Wells asked when he realized he’d been staring at the house in shocked silence.
“No. I think it’ll be more fun to stand here all day and watch you gaping like a fish.”
“Cut me some slack. This is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Sasha blinked at him incredulously. “You lived in space. You’ve seen Mars!”
He grinned. “You have to use a telescope to see Mars, and even then it just looks like a red dot. Now come on. Are we going inside or what?”
They walked toward the side of the house farthest from the collapsed wall, where there was a window about two meters from the ground with an inviting ledge beneath it. Wells watched as Sasha climbed up onto the ledge with ease, then lowered herself through the window, disappearing into the darkness inside.
“You coming?” she called back to him.
He grinned again and climbed through the window, landing with a soft thud that jolted all other thoughts from his mind. He was standing in a house, an actual home, where people had lived before the Cataclysm.
He turned his head from side to side. It seemed like they were in what had once been a kitchen. The floor was covered in cracked yellow and white tiles, and there were white cabinets hanging slightly askew over a deep sink, the largest Wells had ever seen. The only light came from the broken window, which, filtered through the surrounding trees, gave the room a faint, greenish glow, as if he were looking at an old photograph. But this was undeniably real. He took a few steps forward and gingerly ran his finger along the counter, which was covered in generations of dust. He reached up, and even more gently, opened one of the cabinets.
There were stacks of plates and bowls inside. Although they’d slid to the side when the cabinet came loose, it was clear they’d been arranged with care. Some seemed to belong to a set, others were one of a kind. Wells removed a plate from the top of the pile. This one had an illustration on it, though it looked like it’d been done by a child. There were four stick figures with oversize, smiling faces, standing in a line holding one another’s misshapen hands. I LOV ARE FAMLEE was printed in wobbly letters above their heads. Wells replaced the plate carefully and turned to see Sasha staring at him out of the silent, dusty gloom.
“It happened a long time ago,” she said quietly.
Wells nodded. The words I know formed in his brain but got lost somewhere on the way to his mouth. His eyes began to prickle and he turned away quickly. Eight billion. That’s how many people had died during the Cataclysm. It’d always seemed as abstract as any huge figure, like the age of Earth, or the number of stars in the galaxy. Yet now, he’d give anything to know that the people who’d eaten dinner together in this kitchen, with those plates, had somehow made it off the burning planet.
“Wells, come look at this.” He turned and saw Sasha kneeling next to a pile of rubble on the far side of the room, where the wall had caved in. She was brushing dust and bits of debris off something on the floor.
He walked over and crouched down next to her. “What is it?” he asked as Sasha pulled at what looked like a clasp. “Careful,” he warned, remembering Clarke’s snake.
“It’s a suitcase,” Sasha said, her voice a mix of surprise and something else—apprehension? Fear?
The case fell open, sending a new cloud of dust into the air, and they both leaned forward for a better look. There were only a few items inside. Three small faded shirts that Wells examined one at a time, carefully replacing each exactly as he’d found them. There was also a book. Most of the pages had rotted away, but enough remained for Wells to tell it was about a boy named Charlie. He hesitated before putting it back inside the suitcase. He would’ve loved to examine it in the sunlight, but for some reason, it didn’t seem right to take anything away from the house.
The only other recognizable item was a small stuffed bear. Its fur had probably been yellow at one point, though it was hard to tell with all the dust. Sasha picked it up and stared at it for a moment before pressing a finger against his black nose. “Poor bear,” she said with a smile, although she couldn’t quite keep her voice from catching.
“It’s just so sad,” Wells said, running his finger along one of the T-shirts. “If they had left sooner, maybe they would’ve made it out in time.”
“Where were they supposed to go?” Sasha asked, shooting him a look as she rubbed dust off one of the bear’s paws. “Do you have any idea how much it cost to get to one of the launch sites during the Forsakening? The people who lived around here didn’t have that kind of money.”
“That’s not how it worked,” Wells said, an edge creeping into his voice. He took a deep breath to regain his composure. It felt terribly wrong to shout in a place like this. “People didn’t have to pay to go on the ship.”
“No? Then how were the Colonists selected?”
“They came from the neutral nations,” Wells said, suddenly feeling like he was back in a primary tutorial. “The ones that weren’t greedy or foolish enough to get caught in nuclear war.”
The look Sasha gave him was unlike anything he ever saw on his tutors’ faces, even when he was wrong. They never stared at him with a mixture of pity and scorn. If anything, Sasha looked more like his father. “Then why does everyone on the ship speak English?” she asked quietly.
He didn’t have an answer for that. He’d spent his whole life imagining what it’d be like to see real Earth ruins, and now that he was here, thinking about all the lives that had been extinguished during the Cataclysm made it difficult to breathe.
“We should get back,” he said, rising to his feet and reaching out to help Sasha. She glanced at the suitcase for a long moment, then tucked the bear under her arm and took Wells’s hand.
CHAPTER 15
Bellamy
It had taken a while to convince Clarke to head back to camp. She’d insisted on looking for more pieces of wreckage, for anything that would provide some information about the other Colonists. But as the shadows lengthened, Bellamy’s skin prickled in a way that had nothing to do with the chill creeping into the air. It was foolish to spend too much time in the woods with the Earthborns lurking about. Once their little spy told him where to find Octavia, Bellamy would go after them—spears and arrows be damned. But he didn’t want to face them until he was prepared, and certainly not with Clarke by his side.