CHAPTER TWENTY
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

     RADIO SILENCE. Ever since the dropship that backfired had landed, the Ark had gone completely silent on the radio. And now as she stared at it, she couldn't help but feel immeasurable guilt that she had never taken the opportunity to contact her mother one last time. They had concluded that they had finally run out of air. That no one would be coming down to help them.

The Grounders had been their own kind of silent as well. After the bridge had blown, they had not arrived at their doorstep as they had planned. Taylor was unsure if this was a good thing or a bad thing. It seemed as though things were almost too quiet and it was too good to be true that they had actually scared the Grounders into staying away.

Tearing her eyes away from the eerily quiet radio, she stood up abruptly and sped out of the dropship into the fresh air of the bustling camp. Eventually she made it to Raven's tent, where Taylor decided she might need a little help in crafting bullets. Even if she didn't, she needed to do anything that would take her mind off of things.

When she pushed aside the flap to the tent and ducked in, she almost barreled directly into Finn, who was exchanging a strange glance with Raven. The two fell silent the moment she had entered the tent and all three glanced between each other for one of the longest uncomfortable silences she was sure she had ever been a part of.

"I think I'm interrupting something, so I'll just, uh, come back later," Taylor rushed out quietly, taking a few wobbly steps backward, swatting her hand behind her in order to find the exit of the tent.

Raven opened her mouth to say something, but it was quickly interrupted by a loud crash and someone yelling out, "FIRE!".

Taylor, Raven, and Finn gave each other quick looks before hurrying outside. What they were greeted with was less than what the group could have remotely hoped for at the given time. A raging fire swallowed the smokehouse whole, illuminating the faces of all who looked at it in shock. Octavia and Murphy stumbled out, coughing before they hit the ground just feet in front of the blazing building.

     "This is all your fault! I told you it was too much wood!" Murphy shouted at a boy that stood just in front of the structure, shoving him roughly in the chest. When Murphy started to throw punches at the boy, Del, is when Bellamy stepped away from Octavia and into the middle of the fight.

"Hey! Stop!" he rebuked, pushing both away from each other. "Save it for the Grounders!"

"Bell, what the hell are we gonna do?" Octavia questioned warily from her seated position in the dirt. "That was all the food."

It didn't take long for all of their food to burn to a crisp that was nothing but piles of ash in their camp. Standing next to Bellamy, it appeared as though not one morsel of meat was left from the fire. Smoke billowed up slightly from all around her, the ground still warm underneath her boots.

"Any idea what happened?" Clarke questioned, walking up through the ash to approach the two.

"Murphy says that Del kept feeding the fire, mostly because Octavia told him it was a bad idea," Bellamy explained with a distasteful expression on his face. Taylor couldn't exactly blame him — she was having the same feelings herself. The last thing that they needed was for their food supply to be taken out almost entirely.

"And we believe Murphy?" Clarke asked, disheartened. It was mainly because of Clarke's convincing of second chances and all that had even kept Murphy in camp. As much as Taylor wanted to blame Murphy for what had happened, she truly couldn't. Octavia had even vouched for his story.

"I do, yeah," Bellamy responded, Taylor nodding along when Clarke looked at her for an answer.

"Definitely. Last week I caught Del feeding some of our berries to a rabbit, so it makes sense that this is his fault," she added on, pinching the bridge of her nose with her fingers. Clarke shook her head, her eyes wandering down to one of the charred animal skeletons that had remained from the fire.

"We have some wild onions and nuts in the dropship. It's only enough to last us maybe one or two weeks," she brought up dejectedly. "What's left here?"

"Nothing," Bellamy replied, standing up from where he was crouched near one of the skeletons. "It all burned."

Thinking pensively for a moment, Clarke nodded slowly before turning to the other two. "Then we have to hunt," she concluded. "Anyone we can spare goes out." She turned to walk away, but Bellamy caught her arm before she could leave.

"With the whole Grounder army out there?" he asked disbelievingly, clearly not approving of that course of action.

"Look, we can't defend ourselves if we're starving," Clarke justified indignantly.

"She's right. Not only that, but the whole camp will fall apart and things will get even worse if we're all dying," Taylor agreed with a nod. Bellamy looked down in thought for a moment before finally conceding.

They made sure that the announcement was spread through camp quickly and soon enough people were gathered in the dropship, grabbing weapons and getting into groups.

"Each group takes someone with a gun, and they're for killing Grounders, not food! We don't have the ammo. Use the spears for hunting. Get what you can and be back by nightfall," Bellamy commanded, his voice booming through the small space. "No one stays out after dark!"

"I'm with you, looks like the numbers are going to be a little uneven," Taylor said, turning to Clarke, who nodded in agreement. This time, she refused to be the one who stayed back and simply watched the camp, making sure things didn't go to hell, just like she had been every other time Bellamy and Clarke had gone out. The job had fallen to Bellamy after her objections to doing it once again.

"Hey, Clarke, Taylor?" a boy asked almost excitedly from behind them. "Is it just you guys? You wanna maybe go together?" He lifted his gun slightly, indicating that he could be the one who would take the gun in the group. Clarke and Taylor exchanged a look before Clarke nodded slightly.

"Sure. I'll get some gear," said Clarke, before walking to the table where they were momentarily keeping the weapons. It felt strange to be waiting around for a group and weapons — it reminded her of going out to search for Octavia.

"You know, I've never actually been out on one of these hunting parties," the boy, Myles, chattered eagerly. Taylor smiled at him and didn't say anything in response, there not being much to say about going out into open space where Grounders could be waiting around any corner, prepared to kill them.

     "Let's get Clarke and get going, all right? We should get started as soon as we can," she finally said, beckoning Myles to follow her. They walked up to her while she was having a conversation with Finn. Taylor groaned internally, sincerely wishing that she could avoid the apparent tension that was happening between the two and Raven.

     "Hey, partner, we're wasting daylight," Myles warned Clarke cheerfully, his eyes drifting to Finn. "Oh, Finn, you're joining the band?" Clarke smirked and handed Taylor one of the two spears in her hand.

     "Sure," Finn agreed, not looking particularly enthused to be going with such an exuberant boy.

     "Awesome! I haven't really had the chance to hang with you guys much," Myles rambled quickly, turning around and pushing the tarp of the ship open. "Hey, do you even know how I got arrested on the Ark?"

     "I'm dying to hear about it," Finn replied with a sarcastic edge to his voice, smiling at the two others who were grinning at the boy's behavior.

     As they walked along the forest floor, Taylor felt slightly better being around someone who was just so relentlessly positive. It was something that she had almost forgotten existed within the small confines of the area they had built for themselves.

     It put her on edge slightly to be back out with the threat of Grounders ever so present and after what she had done, it all felt so wrong. But that was just life now. And it was time for her to just get used to it.

     Finn had an unreadable look on his face, Taylor and him slightly ahead of Clarke and Myles. Myles was still going on and on about whatever he had been talking about last — Clarke nodding, trying to maintain a facade of interest.

     "Look, about earlier —" he began with a roughly apologetic expression, Taylor taking that to mean he was referencing the strange situation that she had walked in on just before the fire.

     "No. It's not my business what's going on between you and Raven, okay?" she interrupted quickly, not wishing to talk about it any longer than she absolutely had to. She cast a look back at Clarke for a moment and leaned slightly closer to him with a quieter tone. "Just don't let whatever this is mess with everyone. Be fair to them and their feelings. That's all I'm gonna say."

     By saying that much she felt like she was overstepping a bit, but both Clarke and Raven had seemed distracted before the morning's events regardless. Not only did she not want to see them like that, but it was also something that they couldn't afford. And something had, indeed, gone wrong because not only could she see the guilt in Finn's eyes after she had spoken, but she could practically feel it radiating off of him.

     Not soon after that, Finn stopped dead in his tracks and leaned down to examine a print that was embedded in the soft, wet dirt. The group fanned out around him, checking the surrounding area for any other signs of an animal.

     "One of those scaly panther things?" Myles inquired as Finn looked down at the tracks.

     "Boar," Finn clarified, standing up and moving forward with Clarke and Taylor in tow.

     "Good, because that panther meat is nasty," Myles commented, trailing behind all of them at a slower rate. "I could eat a whole boar by myself, no joke. But you know the best part of the boar? It's gonna sound gross. It —"

     "Myles, quiet for a second," Clarke ordered, leaning down next to Finn, who was inspecting another track with a new kind of interest. Taylor furrowed her eyebrows and looked down at the prints herself. "What is it?"

     "These tracks," Finn pointed out, staring down at them with a now hardened expression.

     "They're perfect," Clarke finished, voicing the conclusion that Taylor had just come to in her mind.

     "Too perfect," Finn agreed. "We're the ones being hunted." Taylor jolted up from her crouched position next to Clarke at the speed of light and her eyes darted around between and up into the trees.

     "I don't see anything," Myles dismissed, pointing his gun around haphazardly.

     "We need to leave," Taylor finally said. Just as the words left her mouth, Myles was falling to the ground with a groan of pain. Two arrows were lodged into his body, leaving him quivering in pain in the dirt.

     "Myles!" Clarke shouted, leaning over to the boy who had fallen. Finn grabbed her arm and urged her up, Taylor already thinking along the same lines as he was.

     "Come on, we gotta leave him!" he told her. Taylor's feet were already carrying her away from where Myles had been struck down. Several more cries of pain sounded behind her and when she looked back, Clarke and Finn were both on the ground.

     That was when she started to panic slightly. It would be impossible to save them, just her and a spear, she knew that. Getting back to camp had to be her main priority, no matter how much it killed her to leave them like that.

     When she whipped around to run back to camp as fast as she possibly could, blinding pain overcame her and everything slipped away into utter, unfeeling darkness.