Raven’s hands hadn’t stopped in six hours wire, solder, scavenged components Jonah didn’t have names for coaxing a broken promise back into something that might still work.
Clarke brought water.
Monty brought tools.
Bellamy stood in the doorway twice, said nothing, left.
Jonah counted the camp forty-three flames inside the wall, two on watch, three foraging near the treeline.
The far edge of his range sat quiet.
Empty.
He didn’t trust it.
“Hand me the driver,” Raven said.
“The small one.”
Clarke passed it over.
Raven’s ribs forced her breathing shallow, but her hands stayed clean.
Precise.
Jonah watched her work and did the math nobody wanted him to do.
The Culling was scheduled for dawn, Ark time.
They had maybe four hours.
Maybe less.
“It’ll hold,” Raven said.
She wasn’t talking to him.
“It has to hold.”
The transceiver mount she’d jury-rigged out of a wristband casing and something that used to be part of the dropship’s landing gear looked like it would fall apart if someone breathed on it wrong.
Jonah had seen field medicine that inspired more confidence.
She caught him looking.
“You got something to say, say it.”
“Will it work?”
“Ask me when it’s done.”
Clarke stepped outside.
Came back with Bellamy, who looked like he’d been carrying something heavy and had finally set it down in the wrong place.
“The flares,” Bellamy said.
“From the distress locker.
If we fire them all at once”
“They’ll see it,” Clarke finished.
“The Ark.
They’ll know we’re alive.”
Raven’s hands paused.
She didn’t look up.
“And if this works, they’ll hear it too.”
Bellamy met Jonah’s eyes.
Held them.
The grudge was still there the radio, the wristbands, every time Jonah had counted the room and Bellamy had wanted to burn it but under it sat something newer.
An accounting that didn’t close clean.
“I’ll get everyone ready,” Bellamy said.
He left.
Clarke followed.
Raven soldered one last connection.
Set the iron down.
Breathed carefully.
Looked at the radio like it owed her an answer.
“Okay,” she said.
“Let’s find out.”
She flipped the switch.
Static.
Raven’s mouth went flat and hard.
She adjusted something Jonah couldn’t see, twisted a dial, and the static sharpened into a hum that might have been a carrier wave or might have been the sound of empty air pretending to be a signal.
“Ark Station, this is Raven Reyes on the ground.
Repeat, this is Raven Reyes.
Do you copy?”
Nothing.
She tried again.
Her voice stayed level, but her hand shook before she made it stop.
“They’re not there,” she said.
“Or the signal’s not strong enough.
Or I built it wrong and we’re shouting into nothing.”
“You didn’t build it wrong,” Jonah said.
She looked at him.
“How would you know?”
Outside, Bellamy’s voice carried across the camp everyone to the clearing, now, bring every flare we’ve got.
Raven stood.
Swayed.
Caught herself.
“Then we do it loud.”
The field lit red at the edges far range, the treeline, something moving that hadn’t been there ten minutes ago.
Jonah’s hand went still on the doorframe.
Not yet.
Hold.
He followed Raven outside.
The camp gathered fast.
Forty-seven flames, tight and close, every eye on Clarke as she stood in the clearing with an armful of flares and a face that said she was about to spend something that didn’t come back.
“The Culling starts in less than four hours,” Clarke said.
“Three hundred twenty people die unless we tell the Ark we’re alive.
So we’re going to light up the sky, and we’re going to scream into that radio until someone hears us, and we’re going to save them.”
She didn’t say all of them.
The silence after it did.
Bellamy handed out flares.
Monty rigged the radio to a battery pack.
Raven stood next to the transmitter, one hand braced on her ribs, and waited.
Clarke looked at Jonah.
“When?”
He counted the sky.
The Ark’s orbit would bring it over the horizon in eleven minutes.
The window was tight maybe three minutes of line-of-sight before the angle went bad and the signal scattered into nothing.
“Eleven minutes,” Jonah said.
“Then we have three.”
“Three minutes to stop a massacre,” Raven said.
She smiled like broken glass.
“No pressure.”
The far range pulsed.
Shapes moving, slow and deliberate.
Not animals.
Jonah’s chest went tight.
HEARTH sat at two.
Not enough to hold the whole camp and track the treeline.
Not enough to cover both fields.
He made the choice the field wouldn’t make for him.
The camp’s eyes went to the sky.
His stayed on the trees.
“Sixty seconds,” Clarke said.
The flames packed tighter.
Flares ready.
Raven’s hand hovered over the transmit key.
Jonah counted forty-seven in the clearing, two still on the wall, none watching the forest.
“Now,” Clarke said.
The sky lit.
Twelve flares arcing up, red and bright and burning, a message written in fire that said we lived.
Raven keyed the radio.
“Ark Station, this is Raven Reyes.
We are alive.
All of us.
Do not proceed with the Culling.
Repeat, do not proceed.
We are alive.”
Static.
She said it again.
And again.
Her voice scraped raw and she didn’t stop.
The far range sharpened.
Figures at the treeline, watching the sky, counting the flames just like Jonah had taught himself to do in a life he didn’t talk about.
“Ark Station, please respond.
We are alive.
Do not”
The static broke.
A voice came through, thin and stretched and impossibly far away.
Repeat, we copy.
Raven, is that you?”
Raven’s breath caught.
“Abby?”
“We’re hearing you.
Oh god, we’re hearing you.” Abby Griffin’s voice cracked.
“The Culling it’s already started.
We’re trying to stop it but”
The channel went to noise.
Raven slammed the transmit key.
“How many?
Abby, how many?”
Nothing.
Then: “Forty-eight.
We lost forty-eight before we could halt it.
The rest we’re holding.
You’re sure?
All of you?”
Clarke stepped forward.
Her face had gone white.
“Mom.
We’re here.
We’re all here.”
Jonah stopped counting the sky and turned to the trees.
The flames at the range’s edge went still.
Watching.
Learning.
HEARTH dropped to one.
The field dimmed everyone close and legible, the far range fading to shapes without detail, and he understood the trade he’d just made.
He’d spent the camp’s attention to reach the Ark.
The ground noticed.
“We’re coming down,” Abby said through the static.
“As many as we can.
We’ll find a way.
Just stay alive.”
The signal cut.
The camp exhaled.
Someone laughed.
Someone else started crying.
Clarke stood in the center of it, looking at the radio like it had just told her a truth she didn’t know how to carry.
Raven sat down hard, and the adrenaline let go all at once, pain flooding back into the space it had covered.
“Forty-eight,” Raven said.
Flat.
Empty.
“We were too late for forty-eight.”
“We saved the rest,” Clarke said.
She didn’t sound like she believed it.
Jonah looked at the far range.
The shapes were gone.
Pulled back.
Repositioning.
He counted the camp forty-seven flames, bright and loud and watching the sky, and not one of them looking at the trees where a war party had just learned everything it needed to know about how to break them.
The Pyre flickered.
A line he still couldn’t read, settling like a debt the field wouldn’t let him forget.
They’d won.
The Ark would fall and the Culling was done and three hundred people were breathing who’d have died.
Jonah turned from the radio to the treeline, HEARTH near-empty, and did the math on what he’d just spent to buy it.
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