ANGEL OF DEATH!
☆彡 CHAPTER TEN

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      POOLS OF LIGHT DIPPED INSIDE the entrance of the cave, luring Pandora towards the shining outdoors. She was eager to breathe in fresh air since she'd been cooped up in the damp dark place for the entire night. As she stepped out, the world seemed as peaceful as it did before, still intensely green and lush around her. The acidic musk still lingered in the breeze, but there was no mysterious fog to be seen.

      "It's clear!" Her voice echoed to the end of the cave. Moments later, Bellamy appeared out from the tunnel of darkness with Charlotte hesitantly stepping out after him.

      Silence lingered in the air and she could only hear the steady beat of her own heart. They scanned the area, yet there was no sign of anyone from the hunting party. A small sigh of anxiousness leaped from her mouth. Hugo had been with that group. Thoughts perplexed in her head that he somehow hadn't found shelter, that he met the same fate as Atom—whom she too didn't know had made it out of the reaping fog.

      "Anybody out here?" Bellamy yelled. "Hugo? Jones?"

      "We're here!" A voice shouted. From the faint volume, the location of the survivors was distant. They scouted through the trees until they found four teenagers. Her heart lifted when she saw that one of them had been Hugo.

      "Lost you in the stew," Bellamy stated. "Where'd you go?"

      "There was a cave not far from here," Hugo explained, pointing towards the distance.

      "Are you guys alright?" Pandora asked, quickly examining each of the delinquents. None of them had visible wounds, nothing that she presumed had been from the mist.

      "We're alive," Hugo offered, exhaling as he spoke.

      "The hell was that?" A boy next to him questioned.

      "I don't know," Bellamy replied, then glanced over them. "Where's Atom?"

      The boy shrugged, and Bellamy gave them a shocking stare.

      "I thought he was with you guys," Hugo admitted, tawny eyes gaping towards the freckled rebel.

      Maybe Bellamy didn't show that he cared much about Atom, he was just another one of the hundred criminals, but Pandora knew that he was still worried about him. His sister had feelings for Atom and he had no idea how she'd react once she learned he'd gone missing.

      Pandora bit her lip nervously, remembering that Atom had been right behind her when they were running into the cave. He was another delinquent gone because she didn't help him. "Well, he wasn't," the brunette revealed. "We need to look for him."

      "We should split up," Bellamy suggested, and they all nodded in agreement. "Charlotte, stay with me."

      Pandora and Hugo made eye-contact, obviously picking each other as partners. She walked past him, and he followed beside her, accidentally bumping his shoulder against hers. It came to his confusion when her arm flinched back from the brief contact.

      "You okay?" He question, peering down at her.

      She rolled up her sleeves to reveal the blotches of red bumps with dry black ichor that coated her arm. Hugo gawked at it, a mix of concern and disgust on his face. "'Tis but a scratch," she insisted, pulling down her sleeve.

      "You sure? I mean, that looks pretty bad."

      "I'm fine," she assured.

      "Does it hurt?"

      "Just a bit." That was a lie. It hurt like hell, possibly infected, but treating it would have to wait. "Now eyes sharp for Atom."

      A high-pitched shriek tore through them like a shard of glass. Pandora and Hugo exchanged glances, both of their eyes widened with fear. Again, the shrilling scream echoed in the distance, making her blood run cold.

They both took out their weapons in case the commotion happened to be a grounder attack, and sprinted through the woods. Her legs were pounding furiously on the uneven track, racing closer towards the noise. They met up with the other group and froze when they saw Bellamy hovering above a body.

      Atom.

      Every muscle in her body become rigid, she couldn't move, afraid to even take a breath. His body laid on the grass and was soaked from head to toe with acid—his skin blotted with bloody blisters and boils that looked ten times worse than the ones she had gotten. She could see the desperate rise and fall of his chest. He was barely clinging to life.

      She could feel the presence of the Angel of Death, waiting to rip out his soul to feed its immortal hunger. This was the reason she didn't want to see Jasper, she didn't want to witness another death, but it was too late, the boy lying a few meters away from her was dying, practically dead already.

      Bellamy rose up when he noticed the rest of the group arrive. The little girl walked over towards him, eyes fixated on Atom as he choked. "I...can't...breathe," he sputtered.

      Charlotte reached into her pocket to take out the knife that Bellamy had given her and placed it in his hands. "Don't be afraid," she whispered in her young and delicate voice even though the intentions of the knife were far from innocent.

      Bellamy peered over at the others. "Go back to camp," he ordered. Hugo attempted to nudge Pandora to leave, but she remained, still frozen with shock. With a sigh, Hugo dispersed along with the others. Pandora and the younger girl stood at the edge of the trees. "Charlotte, Pan, you too."

      Charlotte walked away, her shoulders slumped forwards. "I'm not leaving him," Pandora declared. This time she would not run away.

      He sighed, knowing there wasn't anything he could do to convince her to leave, and kneeled down next to the shuddering body. "Kill me," Atom begged. He gripped onto the knife and gulped as he grimaced at him. Pandora bent down next to him, staring worriedly into Atom's clouded eyes which had been doused with acid. "Pa...n...Bell...amy... please." Both of them locked eyes with each other, unsure of what to do. She couldn't kill him and by the looks of Bellamy's face, neither could he.

      Footsteps crunched against the leaves, and Bellamy looked over his shoulder to find the blonde princess, gaping in horror at the sight. He clenched his jaw, and then Clarke placed herself on the other side of the body.

      "I heard screams," Clarke told them, watching Atom as he winced in traumatizing pain.

      Bellamy inhaled sharply. "Charlotte found him. I sent her back to camp." He then shook his head, silently telling her that he couldn't kill the dying boy.

      Clarke glanced down at Atom, examining his body to see if there was any chance she could save him. Then she looked back at the two of them, shaking her head. From that, Pandora knew for sure that Atom wasn't going to make it.

Bellamy's jaw tensed, and he nodded, understanding what Clarke was about to do. Pandora placed her hand on top of Bellamy's as a comforting gesture for both him and herself.

      "Okay," Clarke forced a smile. "I'm going to help you." She began humming, it was soft and soothing as she braced him for a merciful death. She combed her fingers through his raven hair. Bellamy handed her the knife and she took it, still holding her gaze onto Atom. She plunged the knife into his neck, still humming as she did so.

      Bellamy looked at her, shocked that she was strong enough to do what they couldn't. Pandora, however, watched Atom's life vanish from his eyes. She realized that her shadow had taken another soul. She couldn't take her gaze off his lifeless corpse as a string of memories flashed in her mind and blended with reality. Atom was no longer himself in her eyes, he was the red-haired boy that she once had been in love with. "Reggie," she muttered, a tear droplet running down her cheek.

      Bellamy's eyes darted towards her, brows furrowed together as he stared at her with confusion, and then went back to Atom. They sat beside the corpse until Clarke finished humming.

      Then, the three of them called out for some of the others from the hunting party to help them carry Atom back to camp. Hugo and another boy volunteered, using the parachute they planned to use for their hunted meal instead to carry the deceased boy. Bellamy and Pandora hung in the back of the group, both caught up with thoughts troubling their consciousness.

      "You said 'Reggie'," Bellamy spoke up. "Why?"

      She didn't meet his eyes when he looked at her. "No, I didn't."

      "I remember you talked about him that one time when we were in the library," he explained. "Isn't he your boyfriend, or something?"

      "Was," she corrected. "He's not around anymore."

      "You guys broke up?"

      "He died."

      "Oh," he exhaled, feeling a sliver of regret for mentioning it. "I'm sorry, I didn't know."

      She felt uncomfortable in the silence and decided to render the topic. "How'd you get here, Bellamy? The ground, I mean. And don't tell me you stole a guard's uniform because I know that's not the truth."

      "You aren't gonna like the answer, Pan."

"Just tell me the truth."

His eyes fell over at hers and he sighed. "I shot the Chancellor."

      "What?" She wasn't expecting that.

      "Yeah," he nodded. "Shumway told me if I killed the Chancellor, I'd get a spot on the dropship. And of course, I did it. I had to. O's all I had left."

      "So people die so that you can survive," she scoffed slightly. "Funny how that works."

      He decided to brush off her comment. "What about you? I told you my secret, now you tell me yours."

      "I didn't realize we were playing truth or truth."

      "Hey, yours can't be as bad as mine. I freaking shot someone, Pan."

      "Well, so did I."

      Bellamy shut up and stared at her, confusion masking his gaze.

      "It's a long story."

"We've got a long way back to camp."

Pandora took a deep breath. "It happened a year ago," she began. "Hugo and Reggie were becoming distant for awhile, they were busy working on this experiment with gene-mutations. I'd rarely see them besides whenever I needed to take a dose of the serum and a few short conversations with Hugo whenever he came home. I missed hanging around them, acting like normal teenagers.

      "So one day I decided to go visit them in their lab. But Hugo kept begging me not to go inside, that I wouldn't like what I found. That just made me even more curious so I went in anyways. Reggie was inside except he wasn't the Reggie that I knew. His eyes were bloodshot and...inhuman. He had black veins that were throbbing out of his sickly pale skin. I realized that he had tried to speed up the gene-mutation process, yet it drove him insane.

      "Reggie kept saying that we needed to leave the Ark. I mean, that was our whole plan from the start. But our pod wasn't done yet, but Reggie kept insisting that we get inside. It would kill us if we went, so we tried to tell him that, but Reggie wouldn't listen. He managed to get a hold of his dad's gun and pointed it at us. Hugo tried to stop him, but eventually Reggie was pointing the barrel to him. I slapped the gun out of his hand, but he tackled Hugo down and I thought he was gonna kill him. So I took the gun and I-I pulled the trigger."

There was a moment of silence between them. She hadn't spoken out loud about what happened on that disastrous day, she always pushed it away. But once she finally said it, a weight lifted from her shoulders and although it might've only been a feather in a ton of nightmares, she didn't feel like she was gonna collapse from all those suppressed memories.

"So that's how you got arrested?" Bellamy asked, still trying to process it all.

"No," she shook her head. "Hugo took the gun from my hands and told the guards that he was the one that did it even though I tried telling them it was me. He took the blame for my own crime."

      "If Hugo got arrested instead of you, then how'd you wind up in the Sky Box?"

      "I tried to break him out," she explained, then paused for a moment, realizing that she had spilled a terrible secret that she meant to keep locked up. "You can't tell anyone about what I did."

      "I promise I won't," he reassured. "Just don't mention what I did either."

      "Sounds like a deal."

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      The night sky stood like an inky canopy of darkness over them. As the hunting party, along with Clarke, Finn, and Wells, carried themselves back to camp, no one spoke much. There was only the chorus of slapping footsteps on the dirt path. Sometime on the trip, Bellamy had switched places with Hugo to help carry the body. Her friend lingered close by her side and although no words were spoken, she found that his presence was comforting enough.

      They opened up the gates and delinquents rushed towards them, gushing curiously and fretfully at the body laying in a gurney which was concealed under a tarp. Pandora and Hugo arrived moments after they hauled the corpse in.

      Bellamy and Mbege lowered the gurney down. "Get Clarke whatever she needs," he told a passing delinquent.

      "I better go get his grave dug," Wells announced and Bellamy nodded.

      Octavia thundered out from the dropship and approached Clarke. "It's about time. They're gonna kill Jasper," she spoke urgently. "Did you get the medicine?" Pandora felt color drain from her face, she didn't want the Blake girl to see the boy she had feelings for was the brutally dead corpse laying in front of camp.

      "Yeah, I..." Clarke began, attempting to draw her attention away from the commotion. "Come on. Let's go talk." She put a hand on her arm, turning her away, but Octavia moved past her and strode anxiously towards Bellamy

      "Octavia, stay there," he warned, stuttering on his words. "Please, stay back."

      "Why?" He tried to get in her way and she pushed him. "Stop." She hissed at him and then lowered herself towards the body. Slowly, she lifted the jacket from his bloody face. "Atom." She gasped.

      "There's nothing I could do," Bellamy tried to explain.

      "Don't." His sister snapped, raising a hand at him. Her gaze fell to Atom, taking one last look at him with eyes burning with tears. She covered his face with the jacket and got up to leave.

      "O...O... please–" Bellamy began.

      "Don't." Octavia stormed to the dropship and he watched her leave, wanting to be able to do something, but was utterly powerless.

      "I'll try to talk to her," Pandora suggested.

      "Yeah," he agreed in almost a whisper, his eyes filled with hurt from his sister's piercing words. She trudged through the crowd and followed behind the younger Blake.

      "Octavia!" Pandora shouted and she turned around.

      "What?" She demanded, eyes rimmed with held back tears. "Did Bellamy send you to talk to me?"

      "No," Pandora said. "I just wanted to say that I'm sorry. I know what it's like loosing someone that you care about."

      Octavia remained silent and then met her eyes. "Earth really isn't the dream after all."

      "Yeah," she agreed, glad that the girl was staying strong. "Let's check up on Jasper. I bet he's also had a pretty rough day."

      "So you're finally going to see him."

      "I think it's about time."

       Both of them climbed up the ladder where Clarke had already started making a tea from the seaweed with Finn. Jasper's body laid in the middle of the room, his ghostly appearance striking her.

      "How is he?" Pandora asked, concern present in her tone.

      "Once I give him the medicine, I think he'll make it," Clarke replied.

      A breathe of relief escaped her lips. They sat beside Jasper and Octavia brought his head into her lap as Clarke poured the drink into his mouth. The blonde looked up at Octavia, trying to figure out the right words to say. "I'm really sorry about Atom," she told her.

      "I guess we are gonna have to get used to people dying down here, aren't we?" She replied, her tone straining against her voice, and then looked back down at Jasper. "But not you. You hear me? You're not allowed to die." She grabbed a cloth and patted at the sweat building up on his pale skin.

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      As they waited for Jasper to wake up, Clarke cleaned up Pandora's fog burns.

      "Your blood," the blonde uttered in confusion as she dabbed it with a wet cloth, causing Pandora to tense up from the stinging. "It's black."

      Pandora panicked. "Oh yeah, it's always been like that," she played it off. "Nothing concerning really."

      "Interesting," Clarke muttered, pondering in suspicion yet also amazement of such a sight. "I've never seen anything like this."

      After completely disinfecting her injury, Clarke disappeared to find Wells. Hugo eventually came up to see how things were going. They all sat in a circle, passing around the alcohol Finn had found in an abandoned car.

      "Hey, Monty," Pandora began and his eyes darted up at her. "I'm sorry for being such a sucky friend. You've been in here and at Jasper's side ever since he got speared, and I've barely seen him."

      "You were just scared, Pan, but you're here now and that's what matters," he replied with a small smile. He took a swig at the container and started a coughing fit as he handed it to Octavia.

      She took a long sip and then separated it from her mouth to look at it.  "Disgusting. I love it." She passed it to Hugo who was about to bring it to his lips.

      "Can I, uh, get a hit of that?" Jasper asked, raising his head up.

      "Jasper!" They all stumbled up and rushed towards his side.

      Finn grabbed a container of water. "Let's start with the soft stuff," he suggested and poured the substance into his mouth. "Welcome back, buddy."

      Monty held his friends hand and smiled.

      "Was that a dream or did I get speared?" Jasper questioned.

      "You'll have a very impressive scar to prove it," Clarke, who just arrived back at the top level, revealed.

      "My savior."

      "I'm pretty sure my magical presence had something to do with you getting better," Hugo suggested, a smug grin stretched over his face. "I mean, I was here for like fifteen minutes and you just happened to wake up."

      Pandora smacked his arm. "Quit trying to steal Clarke's thunder, asshole."

      Clarke scoffed at them and then looked back at Jasper. "Thank you for not dying," she smiled. "I don't think I could've taken that today."

      "I'll try not to die tomorrow, too, if that's cool." Everyone's expressions filled with amusement. Jasper looked around and saw Octavia beaming with joy. "Oh, hello."

      They laughed. It was the first time in a tragic day that they found a moment of happiness.

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━ authors note!
i'm incredibly sorry for the long wait for an update. i've just been busy and it took me awhile to regain my inspiration. thanks to my fav beIIamyblakes for helping me out with this chapter and she's also the permanent proofreader for this book.

anyways i love you all and thank you so much for reading!! ❤️