CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
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     A HARD POUNDING ON HER CHEST brought her back to consciousness, her immediate reaction to being able to breathe again was coughing up the water that had made a home in her lungs. A pair of hands guided her to her side, where she let the water go.

     Gasping desperately, she saw that she was lying on the edge of the large lake that the waterfalls fed into. Rocks and pebbles shuffled under her lightly, rubbing together to make a sound that she was actually extremely relieved to hear. They made it out.

     Clarke's concerned face was the next thing she rested her eyes on, her breathing still ragged but growing steadier. "Can you hear me?" she asked, putting two fingers on Taylor's neck to check her pulse.

     "Yeah, I can hear you," she confirmed, her voice barely audible as a result of the coughing she had just done. Clarke had fresh blood flowing from a cut on her head, Taylor assuming she hit her head when she fell from the waterfall.

     "Can you stand?" she went on, examining the other parts of her to see if there was any other sign of external injury.

     "I'm fine, Clarke, just —" she started, getting cut off when Anya yanked her off the ground and started to tie her hands together. "What the hell are you doing?"

Looking over at Clarke in a panic, the girl just stared at her despondently with a slight air of determination, like she had some sort of plan that would get them out of this. She jerked lightly on both of their binds, Taylor only now noticing that Clarke had her hands tied together as well.

Anya led the two of them into the forest with purpose, not saying a single word to them unless she felt it necessary. "Where are we going?" Clarke questioned, only getting pulled forward more roughly in immediate response.

"Be quiet," Anya reprimanded, eyes scanning around the wooded area suspiciously. Rightly so, Taylor had only just then begun to wonder how long it would take the Mountain Men to gather a ground force to go after them.

"Why not just kill us and get it over with?" she pushed on, Taylor shooting her a warning look to just stop it, Clarke only returning it with one that was attempting to reassure her. It didn't.

"You can tell the Commander what the Mountain Men are doing," Anya replied, Taylor furrowing her eyebrows and stopping in her tracks. Clarke followed suit and pulled the opposite direction with her binds.

"So let's work together," Clarke suggested, her tone exasperated. "We don't have to be enemies."

"And unite with someone as weak as you? I have what I need," she dismissed, already moving to turn around in the opposite direction.

"I think even you know that continuing to go to war is a bad idea," Taylor told her gruffly, while Clarke yanked her back once again.

"We both want the same thing," she agreed, looking Anya directly in the eyes almost pleadingly. Before she could respond, she put her hands on their shoulders and shoved them to ground level. The sharp whistle of a dart flying past them rang out, the dart in question sticking into a nearby tree.

"They found us," Clarke breathed, her eyes darting around in slight panic. Taylor thought back to the Mountain and what they had found inside. A new sort of fear made her swear to herself that they were going to get away. They had to. She wasn't going back and they had to get word to someone if they were going to help their friends.

"Run!" Anya urged them, dragging both of them behind her while Taylor caught sight of Clarke grabbing the dart out of the tree before following after.

She was unsure of how long they trudged along as fast as they could, considering the fact that two of them were tied up and unable to run as well as they would have been able to otherwise.

"Quiet," Anya hushed as Clarke stepped on another stick rather loudly. "You can't even walk in the woods."

"If I'm such a burden, cut me loose," Clarke protested.

"Heavy footfalls, broken branches, you even smell like them," Anya went on, as if Clarke hadn't said a word at all.

"And how talkative, right? Because it's not like you'd ever make unnecessary noise or anything," Taylor mumbled sharply under her breath, Anya glancing back threateningly in her direction. She met her gaze with a challenging look, getting absolutely tired of Anya's attitude.

They made it to the top of a hill, where they could see the Mount Weather scouts searching for them below. She led them back down to the other side near a pool of water that Clarke knelt down to take a drink from.

"Not to drink," Anya scolded. Clarke dropped the water she had collected in her hands exasperatedly and looked at Anya incredulously.

"Then why stop? We should be running." Her question was only met with a palm full of mud directly to her face. Anya wasted no time in doing the same exact thing to Taylor, who inhaled deeply in attempts to not lose it on the woman in front of her.

"You reek," she said. "Cover yourself with it."

And they did so. Once it had been deemed that they had slathered themselves in just enough mud for them not be tracked by their smells, they kept going. Taylor found herself growing tired after the constant running, struggling to get herself up on the elevated area that Clarke and Anya were on.

Down below, the Mountain Men were still behind them, still following them. "How are they still following us?" Clarke asked openly, Taylor letting out a frustrated sigh. She only wished this could be done with.

"Because of you," Anya answered with malice, looking at the both of them in anger. "Time to end this." She leaned over and picked up a sizeable rock, no hesitation evident in her expression. The movement caused both Clarke and Taylor to jump back defensively, Clarke throwing her arms up.

"I'm stepping where you step. I'm covered in mud. So is Taylor. We're doing the same thing! We're not leaving a trail!" she begged, Anya stopping in her movements for a moment to look back down at the men below them.

"They're following something," she pointed out.

"They're not following us, they're tracking us. Search yourself. If I'm right, it should feel like a small bump, just under your skin," Clarke explained quickly, already feeling under her sleeves and shirt in search of any sort of tracker. Taylor slowly started to do the same, followed by Anya, who had finally put down the rock.

She ripped open her sleeve, revealing a sizeable bump on her arm. "It's you. Okay, I can remove it. But you need to untie my hands. I just something sharp and sterile," Clarke rambled, looking around as if something sharp and sterile might appear out of thin air.

Before Clarke had even finished her sentence, Anya had leaned over and started to bite into her arm. With a few grunts of pain, she ripped hard on the skin and spit out the tracker.

"I will not go back there," she told them with blood staining her teeth, both looking at her with wide eyes. It made Taylor want to be sick, but she couldn't tell if it was that or the exhaustion beginning to truly set in.

Regardless, she was being dragged again through the woods, not sure where they were or where they were even going at that point. Being chased by the Mountain Men had certainly derailed whatever Anya's original plan was to get them to the Commander.

She wasn't paying attention to where they were going, more so that her legs ached like nothing else and her mouth was completely dry. "Anya, you're still bleeding. At least let me bandage it before it gets infected," Clarke suddenly spoke, pulling on her restraints to stop them once again. But the minute Anya turned around, Clarke jabbed the dart directly into her neck.

The effects were quick, and she collapsed to the ground. Taylor stumbled back at the loss of weight from Anya's fall and fell to her knees a few feet behind Clarke. She started to tie Anya up just as she had done to her.

"I don't know...if I can keep going, Clarke," Taylor said weakly, between breaths that only seemed to get more labored.

"Taylor, we have to keep moving," she responded, cutting away the bonds that tied her wrists together before making her way back to Anya's body. Red marks burned at the place where the fabric had restrained her wrists, turning steadily purple at the edges.

Clarke heaved up Anya and supported her dead weight the best that she could, trudging in the direction of where Taylor recognized would be the dropship. The river beside them did look rather familiar.

"Come on," she urged, not looking back from the path that she had set for herself. Taylor pushed up from the ground steadily and made her way after Clarke almost shakily, trying her best to keep up.

Another few hours of walking is what awaited them, Taylor hating every minute of it. But when she finally saw the towering figure of the dropship, it almost made it all worth it. Almost. When they found themselves on the same ashy plain that they had left when the Mountain Men had taken them, she felt everything she had when they had stepped outside for the first time.

The guilt, the grief. It was haunting every part of her. "No one's here," she commented, Clarke staring at the wall of the dropship intently.

"Look," she said, pointing to a smudged message that was written out. Their names were both barely visible, but distinguishable nonetheless. Below it were coordinates that they could make out well enough to find their way to wherever their people were.

That gave Taylor more hope than she had for what had felt like a while. Anya started to shift just behind her where Clarke had left her, and she didn't realize until she was hit across the head sharply.

The rest of what happened was only a blur to her, as she fell and couldn't find the energy to get back up. The pain in her head and the distant sounds of fighting was all that she could focus on. But soon enough, Clarke was back at her side telling her that she needed to keep going.

Anya was tied up again and she was mindlessly walking through the woods. Again. Sticks cracked loudly under her untrained and tired feet, branches ruffled when she brushed past their leaves. The day melted into the night and she decided that the best thing she had seen in days was the lights of the camp that their people had made.

The Ark had indeed fallen, with enough grace for part of it to be used for a home for everyone that had fallen with it.

"Look at that," Clarke marvelled, looking on at the lights with hopeful eyes. It was the most hopeful that Taylor had seen her in quite a while as well.

"How many are there?" Anya asked, looking on at the place skeptically. Taylor could only assume that she was scared. It was only more of a problem that added to the threat of the original hundred that had been sent down.

"I don't know," Clarke admitted. Taylor leaned over and tried to catch her breath. She could make it to the camp. The distant voices of those on watch could be heard from that position and it only fueled her desire to just get there. "A lot, I hope."

She turned around and started to unwrap the fabric that bound Anya. "I'm letting you go. I'm not weak. But I'm not like you," she told her. "Our only chance against Mount Weather is if we fight together. To beat them, we'll need our technology and your knowledge of this world. I know my people would help. The question is, will yours?"

"The Commander was my second. I can get an audience," Anya agreed after a pause. Clarke nodded and held out her hand. This time, Anya grabbed her arm and nodded back at her. She glanced at Taylor and nodded, holding out her hand to do the same.

"Please hurry," Clarke said quietly before Anya finally started to retreat away into the darkness.

She didn't get far, however, when the sound of a bullet rang out and she fell to the ground with a yell. "Anya!" Clarke screamed, rushing forward to help, despite the fact that there was no real way for her to do that. A bullet grazed her arm when she did so, not hindering her in kneeling beside the fallen warrior.

Taylor stood there, shocked for a moment before she felt a sharp, hot pain in her left arm. Falling to the ground, Clarke's screams became distant and Taylor knew there was no way that she would be able to move anywhere.

It was hard for her to tell whether or not the bullet had entered her arm or grazed it, but she could feel the blood on her hands when she felt it.

At that moment, she could feel the exhaustion and pain take over and she made no effort to stay awake, welcoming the darkness with open arms.