“Why does it need to be a secret?” Wells pressed. “Why did you act like you didn’t want anyone to see you?”
His father’s face hardened. “There are things about being a leader that you couldn’t possibly understand at your age.” He turned on his heel, heading back toward Phoenix. “Now, this conversation is over.”
Wells watched in silence as his father strode off, knowing full well that when they sat down together at dinner that night, they would both act like nothing had happened.
He turned back to the wall, to look at the name his father had touched so tenderly. Melinda. He tried to make out her last name, but it was too scratched-over for him to read. As close as he could tell, it started with a B.
Melinda B. The dead woman his father had once loved, whose memory brought him back to the wall over and over again. The woman who, if things had been different, could have been Wells’s mother.
Wells reached down and rebuttoned his jacket, then turned back toward Phoenix, leaving the ghosts of his father’s past behind him.
“Chancellor Junior was completely out of line,” Graham was saying. “And who the hell knows what he’ll do next?”
“I don’t know,” Lila was saying, “we can’t just—”
“It’s fine,” Wells said, interrupting them. “I’ll make it easy for you. I’ll leave.”
“What?” Kendall said, startled. “No, Wells, that’s not what we want.”
“Speak for yourself,” Graham snapped. “It’s exactly what I want. I say we’re better off without him.”
Wells wondered if Graham was right. Had he done the same thing that his father did long ago, and made an error in judgment because of a girl? What would the Chancellor say, if he were here right now?
“I hope you will be,” Wells told them, surprised by the amount of sincerity, and lack of resentment, in his voice.
Then without meeting anyone’s eye, he spun on his heel and went off to pack his bag for the last time.
CHAPTER 25
Bellamy
The stairs led down to an enormous metal door embedded in a rock wall. It had a huge, impenetrable-looking circular lock, but the door itself was ajar.
“Sort of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?” Bellamy pointed to the gap between the heavy door and the rock.
“Not really,” Clarke said, slipping past him for a better look. “Until recently, they were the only human beings on the entire planet. There was no one to keep out.”
“Can you see anything?” he asked, trying his best to keep the concern out of his voice. He’d been hoping to catch the Earthborns who’d taken Octavia out in the open. Desperate as he was to find his sister, even Bellamy knew better than to waltz right into an enemy compound in the middle of the night. But once Clarke got an idea in her head, there was no stopping her, and he had no intention of letting her go at it alone.
“Not yet.” She spun around, and her face softened as she saw the worried look in his eyes. “Thank you,” she said quietly. “For doing this. For being here with me.”
Bellamy just nodded.
“Are you okay?” Clarke asked.
“It’s just Jim Dandy.”
Clarke reached over and squeezed his hand. “Aren’t you excited? You’re finally going to meet people who understand your weird, old-man Earth slang.”
He managed a smile, but when he spoke, his voice was serious. “So, do you think they’re expecting us?”
“No, not expecting us, exactly. But Sasha said they’d be happy to help us.”
Bellamy nodded, hiding his fear. He knew that if something bad happened to Clarke and himself tonight, they’d never be seen again.
“Let’s do it, then.”
Clarke pulled open the door, flinching as the creak of rusty hinges rang out through the silent night air. Then she slipped in between the gap and motioned for Bellamy to follow.
It was dark inside, but not pitch-black. There was a strange ambient light, but Bellamy couldn’t tell where it was coming from.
Clarke took Bellamy’s hand, and they crept along what seemed to be a tunnel through the rock. After a few steps, the ground began to slope down sharply, and they had to slow their pace to keep from losing their balance and tumbling to the bottom. The air was much cooler here than it’d been outside, and it smelled different as well—damp and mineral, instead of woodsy and crisp.
He forced himself to take a deep breath and keep his steps slow. The weeks he’d spent hunting had changed the way he moved, his feet seeming to float soundlessly above the ground. Clarke seemed to do it naturally.
But then she stumbled, gasping, and he pulled her close to his chest. “Are you okay?” Bellamy’s heart was pounding so fast, it seemed like it was trying to betray him to the Earthborns.
“I’m fine,” Clarke whispered, but she didn’t let go of him yet. “It’s just… it drops off here.” The stone floor had given way to steep metal stairs.
They made their way down slowly, following the stairs as they twisted sharply downward. It was hard to tell in the dim light, but it seemed like they were spiraling into an enormous cavern. The walls were damp and made of stone, and the farther they went, the colder the air became.
As they descended the stairs, Bellamy thought about what Clarke had told him about Mount Weather. He tried to imagine what it would’ve been like, running blindly for the safety of an underground bunker, saying good-bye to the sun and sky and the world you knew as you hurried into the darkness. What had gone through the minds of the first people who clambered down these steps? Were they overcome with relief at their good fortune, or sorrow for all those they’d left behind?
“Do they have to go up and down these stairs every time they leave?” Clarke whispered.
“There might be another entrance,” Bellamy said. “Otherwise, why haven’t we seen anyone yet?” As they reached the bottom, Clarke and Bellamy fell silent, the lonely echo of their footsteps far more eloquent than any chatter.
The stairs ended in a vast, empty space that seemed more like a cave than somewhere humans could’ve lived for centuries. Bellamy froze and grabbed Clarke’s arm as an echo bounced through the darkness. “What was that?” he whispered, jerking his head from side to side. “Is someone coming?”
Clarke gently shook his hand off and took a step forward. “No…” Her voice contained more wonder than fear. “It’s water. Look at the stalactites,” she said, pointing at the craggy rocks above them. “The condensation collects on the rock and then drips down into some kind of reservoir. I guess that’s where they got their drinking water during the nuclear winter.”
“Let’s keep moving,” Bellamy said, grabbing hold of her hand. He pulled Clarke through an opening in the rock and into a hallway with dull metallic walls, similar to the old corridors on Walden. Long strips of lights ran along the ceiling, wires spilling out from cracks in the plastic cover.
“Bellamy,” Clarke said breathlessly. “Look.”
There was a plastic case on the wall, similar to the locked boxes on the Colony that housed control panels. But instead of a screen or buttons, there was a sign. At the very top was an eagle inside a circle, holding a plant in one claw and a bunch of arrows in the other. The words ORDER OF SUCCESSION ran above it in two columns. The column on the left contained a long list of titles: President of the United States, Vice President of the United States, Speaker of the House, and so on.
Next to each title were the words SECURE, MISSING… and DEAD.
Someone had circled the word dead in black ink for the first six titles. Secretary of the Interior had been marked as SECURE at first, but then someone had crossed that out and circled DEAD in blue ink.
“You think someone might’ve taken this down by now,” Bellamy said, tracing a finger across the plastic case.
Clarke turned to him. “Would you have taken this down?” she asked quietly.
Bellamy shook his head with a sigh. “No. I wouldn’t have.”
They continued down the hall in silence until they reached an intersection. There was another large sign, except that this one had no plastic cover.