The rough hands of the guards shoved Aleksander into the dropship, strapping his seemingly limp body into the heavy harness of a drop seat. They flanked him with Wells on his right and Clarke on his left.
The moment the heavy airlock door hissed shut and sealed with a definitive, metallic thud, Aleksander opened his eyes. He didn't blink against the harsh emergency lighting. He just rolled his shoulders, stretching his neck until it popped, and offered a relaxed grin to the seat next to him."Morning, Wells."
Wells, who was already sweating in his heavy jacket, let out a breathless, stressed chuckle. "You're insane, Alex. They actually shot you."
"They tried," Aleksander corrected smoothly, leaning back against the uncomfortable metal headrest.
They didn't have to wait long. Beside Aleksander, Clarke groaned, her face twisting into a grimace as the chemical sedative began to wear off. She blinked hard, trying to clear her blurred vision. When she turned her head, her eyes went wide, absolute shock registering on her face as she saw the two boys strapped in beside her.
"Wells?" Her voice was raspy. "Why the hell are you here?"
Wells leaned forward as far as his harness allowed. "When we found out they were sending prisoners to the ground, We both got outself arrested. I came for you."
Before Clarke could even begin to process the weight of that confession, a massive
CRASH violently rocked the ship. The metal hull groaned a deafening, metallic shriek, and the cabin erupted into the terrified screams of a hundred teenagers. The dropship shuddered, throwing them against their restraints.
"What was that?!" Clarke yelled over the din.
"That was the atmosphere," Wells shouted back.
Above them, a row of dust-covered monitors bolted to the walls flickered to life, casting a cold blue glow over the panicked cabin. A pre-recorded video of Chancellor Thelonious Jaha filled the screens.
"Prisoners of The Ark, hear me now," Jaha's voice boomed through the crackling speakers. "You've been given a second chance, and as your Chancellor, it is my hope that you see this as not just a chance for you, but a chance for all of us, indeed for mankind itself. We have no idea what is waiting for you down there. If the odds of survival were better, we would've sent others. Frankly, we're sending you because your crimes have made you expendable."
A male delinquent a few seats down strained against his harness, glaring fiercely at Wells. "Your dad is a dick, Wells!" he yelled.
Wells just rolled his eyes. He didn't need the reminder.
Aleksander watched the exchange silently, completely unfazed by the violent shaking of the ship. His dark eyes shifted to Clarke when he felt her looking at him.
"Why did you come?" she whispered, her voice barely audible over the roaring thrusters.
Aleksander gave a small, easy shrug. "Couldn't leave you alone to face everything. Someone's got to make sure you don't try to draw any of those radioactive trees and get eaten."
A small, genuine smile broke through the panic on Clarke's face.
"Those crimes will be forgiven," Jaha's recording continued, utterly detached from the chaos in the cabin. "Your records wiped clean."
The ship plummeted further into Earth's gravity well, the turbulence worsening by the second.
"The drop site has been chosen carefully. Before the last war, Mount Weather was a military base built within a mountain. It was to be stocked with enough non-perishables to sustain three hundred people for up to two years."
Suddenly, laughter broke out in the back of the cabin.
A boy with shaggy dark hair had somehow unbuckled his harness. He pushed off his seat and floated effortlessly through the zero-gravity environment of the cabin, bouncing lightly off the walls with a reckless, exhilarated grin on his face.
"Spacewalk bandit strikes again!" someone shouted.
"Whoo! Go, Finn!" the other delinquents started cheering, their panic momentarily replaced by the spectacle.
Finn drifted down the aisle, stopping to hover right in front of Aleksander, Clarke, and Wells. He crossed his arms behind his head,
floating in a laid-back, horizontal position.
"Check it out," Finn gloated, looking directly at Wells. "Your dad floated me, after all."
"You should strap in before the parachutes deploy," Wells warned, his jaw tight.
Finn ignored him entirely. He flipped in the air, drifting closer to hang upside down directly in front of Clarke's face.
"Hey, you're the traitor who's been in solitary for a year," Finn said, smirking.
"You're the idiot who wasted a month of oxygen on an illegal spacewalk," Clarke fired back without missing a beat.
"But it was fun," Finn replied, his grin widening. "I'm Finn."
Aleksander finally spoke up, his voice cutting through the noise with chilling, absolute calm. "You're a biological projectile, Finn. And you're about to be a red smear on the floor."
Finn blinked, glancing over at Aleksander with a dismissive smirk. "What?"
"The retro-rockets are going to fire in exactly six seconds to counteract terminal velocity," Aleksander stated, his hyper-advanced mind perfectly tracking the ship's telemetry and descent rate. "Zero-G ends. You weigh what? A hundred and sixty pounds? When gravity snaps back at a sudden deceleration of five Gs, you'll hit that bulkhead with roughly eight hundred pounds of force. Your skull will crack like an egg."
Across the aisle, two more unnamed delinquents, emboldened by Finn, clicked their harnesses open and floated up toward the ceiling.
"Stay in your seats!" Clarke screamed at them.
"Your one responsibility is stay alive," Jaha declared on the monitors.
Three seconds. Two seconds. One.
BOOM.
The parachutes deployed, and the retro-rockets fired simultaneously. Gravity returned with a violent, bone-crushing vengeance.
The two unnamed boys who had unbuckled were instantly ripped from the air. They slammed brutally into the metal floor and the far wall. A sickening CRACK echoed through the cabin, followed by a wet thud.
The ship lurched, and Finn was violently tossed downward, hurtling headfirst toward the reinforced steel grating of the floor.
He never hit it.
Aleksander's arm shot out with blinding, inhuman speed. His hand clamped onto the heavy collar of Finn's jacket like a vice. While the rest of the delinquents—including Clarke and Wells—were pinned back in their seats by the crushing G-force, Aleksander barely felt it. The Phoenix blood and Dark Fey strength in his veins made the violent deceleration feel like a gentle breeze.
With one arm, he halted Finn's momentum completely, yanking the boy out of his deadly freefall and slamming him hard, but safely, into the empty seat beside him.
Finn gasped, the wind completely knocked out of his lungs, his eyes wide with shock and pure terror as he realized how close he had just come to dying.
Aleksander didn't even look at him. He just tightened his grip on Finn's jacket to keep him in the seat as the dropship continued its brutal, fiery descent toward the ground. "Like I said," Aleksander muttered over the roaring engines. "An idiot."