Jonah pushed until his knees threatened to buckle, and still the flames stopped dead at the treeline not cold, just invisible, like a candle behind a door he couldn’t open.
He sat at the eastern perimeter, back against a supply crate, staring at the wall of green two hundred yards out.
He’d tried pushing past it three times in as many days.
Each time the field dimmed closer in, and he’d stumbled back to camp half-blind to his own fire.
The HEARTH gauge sat at two.
He’d burned one yesterday trying to see the ridge.
Got nothing but a migraine and Cricket’s voice in his ear asking if he was having a stroke.
Bellamy wanted to hit the Grounders first.
Clarke wanted a wall.
Octavia wanted them to stop calling it a war.
Jonah wanted to see past the trees before the raid came, because the raid was coming.
He could feel it the way he’d felt the acid fog rolling in a weight at the edge of the field that hadn’t resolved into flames yet but would.
He closed his eyes.
Opened them on the field.
Forty-seven flames, most clustered near the dropship.
A few at the smoke-house.
Two moving toward the creek.
All of them inside the radius he’d mapped a dozen times, and none of them the patient shapes he’d counted at the Grounder perimeter three days ago.
He focused on the treeline.
Let the near-flames blur.
The field flickered.
Thinned.
For half a breath he thought he saw something a flicker of warmth past the green wall, too distant to count and then the gauge dropped and the whole field went shallow.
The dropship flames faded to outlines.
The two heading for the creek vanished entirely.
Jonah let it go.
Blinked hard.
The field snapped back, and the HEARTH gauge ticked from one to a sliver he didn’t have a name for.
“You’re doing the face again.”
He didn’t turn.
Cricket dropped onto the crate beside him, legs swinging, and held out a canteen that smelled like pine needle tea and optimism.
“Trade?” Cricket said.
“One sip for whatever you’re staring at that’s got you looking like you’re trying to set the forest on fire with your brain.”
“Not trading.”
“Then it’s just tea.
Shocking.
I’m going soft.” Cricket took a sip, made a face, handed it over anyway.
“Bellamy’s rounding up volunteers for his genius plan to go poke the Grounders with sticks and see what happens.
You should probably talk him out of it before somebody I like gets killed.”
Jonah drank.
The tea tasted like boiled dirt, which meant it was exactly what Cricket said it was.
“He won’t listen.”
“He listens to you more than he listens to Clarke, and she’s got the whole ‘daughter of the council’ thing working for her.
You’ve just got”Cricket waved a hand vaguely at Jonah’s face”whatever this is.
The quiet-math-guy routine.
It’s very compelling.”
“I’m not stopping him.”
Cricket’s legs stopped swinging.
“Huh.
That’s new.”
“He’s wrong about hitting first.
He’s right that we need to know when they’re coming.” Jonah handed the canteen back.
“I’m working on it.”
“Working on it how?”
Jonah said nothing.
“You know, most people, when they say they’re working on something, they mean they’re building a thing or talking to a person.
You mean you’re sitting alone at the edge of camp doing the face until something in your head breaks the right way.
It’s deeply weird.”
“Go sell something.”
“Already did.
Monty’s trying to distill pine sap into antiseptic and he paid me in fruit leather to tell him which trees don’t make you itchy.” Cricket stood, brushed dirt off their jacket.
“You look like you’re about to pass out, by the way.
Just in case the face didn’t tell you.”
They left.
Jonah sat.
Let his vision rest on nothing.
The field pooled back slowly, the HEARTH gauge creeping from empty to a quarter-full.
It wasn’t enough.
It wouldn’t be enough.
Every time he pushed the range out, the cost came in close, and the camp needed him near more than it needed him far.
Except when the raid came, near wouldn’t matter.
They’d all be dead before he saw the knife.
He opened his eyes on the flames again.
This time he didn’t push.
He just looked at the treeline.
Somewhere past it, disciplined and patient and camouflaged, people had been counting the camp since the drop deciding, on their own clock, what the sky-people were made of.
The field didn’t move.
Jonah stood.
Walked the perimeter.
Stopped at the northern edge, where the forest thickened and the ground sloped down toward the river.
He’d never pushed range here.
Always the east, where the ridge was visible and the Grounder scout had walked away.
He focused past the trees.
Let the camp-flames dim.
The field stretched.
Not far twenty yards, maybe thirty but it stretched, and this time the thinning didn’t feel like drowning.
It felt like walking into a room he’d been standing outside of.
Two flames.
Faint.
Barely there.
Too far to count clearly, but there.
The HEARTH gauge dropped to nothing.
Jonah’s knees buckled.
He caught himself on a tree, breath gone, and the field collapsed like a tent with the poles cut.
For five seconds he couldn’t see anything not the camp, not the forest, not his own hands.
Then it came back.
Slowly.
The flames nearest him first, then the rest, blooming back into focus the way sight returns after a flash one at a time, then all at once.
The gauge sat at zero.
His hands were shaking.
The copper taste was back.
Two flames.
North.
Close enough to the camp that if they moved, they’d be inside the perimeter in an hour.
He turned.
Walked back toward the dropship, legs unsteady, and found Bellamy near the fire, Clarke beside him, both of them bent over a map scratched into the dirt.
“North ridge,” Jonah said.
Bellamy looked up.
“What?”
“Two of them. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
Maybe three.
North side, past the river slope.”
Clarke stood.
“How do you”
“I know.
Get people ready.
They’re close.”
Bellamy didn’t argue.
He turned, barked two names into the camp, and Clarke was already moving toward the dropship.
Jonah sat down hard on the nearest log.
Let his head drop.
The field was still there, shallow but present, and the HEARTH gauge was still empty.
He’d bought the camp twenty minutes.
Maybe thirty.
He had no idea what was happening at the fire ten feet in front of him.
The raid came an hour later.
Four Grounders, not two Jonah’s count had missed the pair that swung east while he was blind.
They hit the supply cache near the creek, killed one of the guards, and were gone before Bellamy’s group could close the gap.
The second wave came at the northern perimeter, right where Jonah had called it.
Bellamy’s people were ready.
It was still bloody a boy named Travis took a spear through the shoulder, another lost three fingers to a blade he didn’t see coming but the line held, and the Grounders pulled back.
The camp counted it as a win.
Jonah counted the dead guard and the two wounded and the knife-fight at the fire he hadn’t seen because he’d been watching the trees, and did the arithmetic he was getting tired of doing.
He found Clarke afterward, near the dropship, stitching Travis’s shoulder by firelight.
“They knew we were ready,” she said, not looking up.
“The northern group.
They pulled back the second they saw we had people positioned.”
“Yeah.”
“How did you know?”
Jonah said nothing.
Clarke tied off the stitch.
Looked at him.
“I’m not asking you to explain it.
I’m asking you to keep doing it.”
He left.
The field was back to normal by nightfall HEARTH at one, range steady, all forty-six remaining flames visible and accounted for.
The body near the creek was cold.
Travis’s flame flickered but held.
Jonah walked the perimeter one more time before the watch rotation changed.
Stopped at the northern edge, where the Grounders had tested the line and lost.
There was a blade in the dirt.
Point-down, deliberate, standing upright like a grave marker.
He pulled it free.
Turned it over.
No blood.
No markings.
Just a knife, left where he’d know to find it.
A message from an enemy that had noticed the sky-people were watching back, and wanted him to know they’d noticed.
Jonah slid the blade into his belt.
Walked back to camp.
His hands had stopped shaking, but the weight at the edge of the field hadn’t moved.
The raid was over.
The war was still coming.
RANGE EXTENDED: northern perimeter, 230 yards.
The field shows what you look at.
It does not show what you look away from.