But as they approached the clearing, all thoughts of the kiss were pushed aside by the shadowy outline of the infirmary tent. Clarke took off with the medicine tucked under her arm.

The tent was empty except for a delirious, feverish Thalia, and to Clarke’s surprise, Octavia, who was just settling back in her old cot. “The other tent is just so small,” Octavia was saying, but Clarke couldn’t do more than nod.

She flung the medicine chest onto the floor, filled a syringe, and plunged the needle into Thalia’s arm. Then Clarke turned back to the box, searching for painkillers. She quickly gave Thalia a dose and smiled as her friend’s face relaxed in sleep.

Clarke knelt next to Thalia for a few more minutes, breathing a deep sigh of relief at her steady pulse. For a moment, she looked down at the bracelet on her wrist and wondered if, somewhere up in the sky, someone was monitoring her own heart rate. Dr. Lahiri, perhaps, or another of the Colony’s top doctors, reading the hundred’s vital signs like the day’s news. Surely they had seen that five people had died already.… She wondered if they’d chalk the deaths up to radiation poisoning and rethink their colonization efforts, or if they’d be smart enough to realize they’d been killed because of the rough landing. She wasn’t sure which scenario she preferred. She certainly wasn’t ready for the Council to extend its jurisdiction to Earth. And yet her mother and father had devoted their lives to helping humanity return home. A permanent settlement would mean, in a way, that her parents had succeeded too. That they hadn’t died for nothing.

Finally, she scooped the medicine back into the chest and placed it in the corner of the tent. Tomorrow, she’d find a place to lock it up, but for now, Clarke felt like she could finally rest. If someone was indeed monitoring their body count up in space, she was going to make damn sure they didn’t drop below ninety-five.

She took a few shaky steps and collapsed on her cot without even bothering to take off her shoes.

“Is she going to be okay?” Octavia asked. Her voice sounded far away.

Clarke murmured yes. She could barely open her eyelids.

“What other medicine was in there?”

“Everything,” Clarke said. Or at least, she tried to say it. By the time the word reached her lips, exhaustion had numbed her brain. The laste it wn a thing she remembered was hearing Octavia rise from her cot before falling into a deep, dreamless sleep.

When Clarke awoke the next morning, Octavia was gone, and bright light was streaming in through the tent flap.

Thalia lay on her side, still asleep. Clarke rose with a groan, her muscles stiff from their hike yesterday. But it was a good kind of pain; she’d walked through a forest that hadn’t been seen by a single human being in three hundred years. Her stomach squirmed as she thought about another distinction she’d inadvertently earned—the first girl to kiss a boy on Earth since the Cataclysm.

Clarke smiled as she hurried over to Thalia. She couldn’t wait until she was well enough to hear all about it. She pressed the back of her hand against her friend’s forehead and was relieved to feel that it was cooler than it had been last night. She gently pulled back the blanket to look at Thalia’s stomach. Her skin still showed signs of an infection, but it hadn’t spread any farther. As long as Thalia had a full course of antibiotics, she’d make a full recovery.

It was hard to know exactly, but based on the strength of the light, she guessed that at least eight hours had passed since Thalia’s last dose. She turned and walked over to the corner where she’d stashed the medicine chest, frowning slightly as she realized it was open. Clarke crouched down and inhaled sharply, blinking to make sure her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her.

The chest was empty.

All the antibiotics, the painkillers, even the syringes—they were all gone. “No,” Clarke whispered. There was nothing. “No,” she said again, scrambling to her feet. She ran over to the nearest cot and started to throw the bedding aside, then did the same with her own.

Her eyes landed on Octavia’s cot, and her panic momentarily hardened into suspicion. She hurried over and began rummaging through the pile of blankets. “Come on,” she muttered to herself, but her hands came up empty.

“ No.” She kicked the ground. The medicine wasn’t in the tent, that much was clear. But whoever had taken it couldn’t have gone far. There were fewer than a hundred human beings on the planet, and Clarke wasn’t going to rest until she found the thief who was jeopardizing Thalia’s life. She probably wouldn’t have to look very far.

After a quick search of the flat to make sure her parents weren’t home, Clarke hurried to the lab and entered the code. She kept expecting her parents to change the password, but either they didn’t know how often she visited the kids, or they didn’t want to stop her. Perhaps they liked knowing that Clarke was keeping them company.

As she made her way toward Lilly, Clarke smiled at the others, though her chest tightened when she saw how few were awake. Most were growing sicker, and there were more empty beds than there’d been the last time.

She tried to force this thought out of her head as she approached Lilly, but as her eyes locked on her friend, her hands began to tremble.

Lilly was dying. Her eyes barely fluttered open when Clarke whispered her name, and even when her lips moved, she didn’t have the strength to turn the shapes into words.

There were more flaky red patches on her skin, although fewer of them were bleeding, as Lilly no longer had the energy to scratch them. Clarke sat there, fighting a wave of nausea as she watched the irregular rise and fall of her friend’s chest. The worst part was that she knew this was only the beginning. The other subjects had lingered on for weeks, their symptoms growing increasingly gruesome as the radiation poisoning progressed through their bodies.

For a moment, Clarke imagined carrying Lilly to the medical center, where they could at least put her on high-intensity pain medication even if it was too late to save her. But that would be tantamount to asking the Vice Chancellor to execute her parents. Then he’d just find someone else to finish what her mother and father had started. All Clarke hoped was that their research proved conclusive so that the experiments could stop, so that these test subjects wouldn’t have suffered in vain.

Lilly’s translucent eyelids fluttered open. “Hey, Clarke,” she croaked, the beginnings of a smile flickering on her face before a new wave of pain washed them away.

Clarke reached over and grasped Lilly’s hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. “Hey,” she whispered. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” Lilly lied, wincing as she struggled to sit up.

“It’s okay.” Clarke placed a hand on her shoulder. “You don’t need to sit.”

“No, I want to.” The girl’s voice was strained.

Clarke gently helped her sit, then adjusted the pillows behind her. She suppressed a shudder as her fingers brushed against Lilly’s back. She could feel every vertebra poking out from her sallow skin.

“How did you like the Dickens anthology?” Clarke asked, glancing under Lilly’s bed, where they kept the books Clarke had stolen from the library.

“I only read the first story, the one about Oliver Twist.” Lilly gave Clarke a weak smile. “My vision is…” She trailed off. They both knew that once the subjects had trouble seeing, the end wasn’t far. “But I didn’t like it, anyway. It reminded me too much of the care center.”