Chapter 1: Wrong Place, Right Time
POV: Alec Morgan
Consciousness returned like surfacing from deep water—panic first, confusion second, then the horrifying recognition of faces that shouldn't exist outside a television screen.
The metal walls vibrated around me, groaning under atmospheric pressure. My stomach lurched as we plummeted, and for one wild moment I thought I was still dying. Still sprawled on that rain-soaked highway, watching headlights grow larger through my windshield. The drunk driver had run the red light at sixty miles per hour. I'd seen him coming, tried to swerve, felt the impact crush my ribs like dry kindling.
But this wasn't death. This was something far more impossible.
The dropship. I knew this place—had watched it crash a dozen times through my laptop screen during late-night binges of The 100. Every rivet, every harness, every panicked face strapped in around me matched the show perfectly. Clarke Griffin sat three seats over, blonde hair falling across her face as she gripped her restraints. Wells Jaha beside her, jaw clenched with determination he wouldn't live long enough to use. Finn Collins making jokes to hide his terror.
And there—Octavia Blake, eyes bright with wonder instead of the warrior's steel they'd later hold. Jasper Jordan whooping with manufactured excitement. Monty Green, quiet and thoughtful, completely unaware that his best friend would try to kill him someday.
My hands tightened on the harness until pain shot through my palms. Real pain. Real blood welling up where the metal edges bit into flesh. This wasn't a dream or a hallucination brought on by oxygen deprivation. Somehow, impossibly, I was inside the show I'd watched obsessively for years.
The body I wore wasn't mine—taller, broader through the shoulders, with callused hands that spoke of manual labor. Farm Station clothes, judging by the rough fabric. The memories were there but distant, like looking at someone else's photographs. Alec Morgan, eighteen years old, arrested for stealing medical supplies for his sick sister. The sister had died anyway. The real Alec had volunteered for the mission as a form of suicide, preferring to die on Earth rather than waste away in the Ark's recycled air.
Instead, I was here. David Alen, twenty-six-year-old graduate student who'd died in a car crash on I-95, somehow inhabiting this kid's body as we plummeted toward an Earth that would try to kill us in a hundred different ways.
The knowledge hit me in waves. Not just memories of the show, but comprehensive survival information flooding my consciousness like someone had downloaded Wikipedia directly into my brain. How to identify edible plants. Purify water. Build shelter. Track animals. Start fires with friction, chemicals, magnification. The information was perfect, complete, accessible—but I'd never actually done any of it. Theory without practice, like knowing exactly how to perform surgery but never having held a scalpel.
"Prisoners of the Ark, hear me now," Chancellor Jaha's voice crackled through the speakers. "You've been given a second chance, and as your Chancellor, it is my hope that you see this as not just a chance for you, but a chance for all of us, indeed for mankind itself."
I barely heard him. My mind raced through implications, through the cascade of disasters I knew were coming. The Grounder attack at the river. The virus Murphy would bring back. Mount Weather's blood harvesting. The bombing of Tondc. Praimfaya. ALIE's City of Light. How many would die? How many could I save without revealing what I was?
The dropship shuddered violently, throwing us against our restraints. Someone screamed. The impact was coming, and after that—
After that, I'd have to become someone else. Farm boy Alec Morgan, harmless and slightly lucky. Not David Alen, who knew exactly which plants were edible because he'd memorized every survival manual ever written. Not someone who could see combat patterns two seconds before they happened. Not someone whose body would heal from injuries that killed others.
The crash would be my first test. The blood already seeping from my palms as I gripped the harness with superhuman desperation would be my first secret.
The retro thrusters fired with a bone-jarring roar, but they weren't enough. We hit the ground like a meteor, the impact driving the breath from my lungs and snapping my head back against the headrest. Metal screamed. Someone was crying. The lights died, plunging us into darkness broken only by the red emergency strips.
Then silence.
I flexed my hands experimentally, feeling the deep cuts across my palms where the harness had bitten through skin. The wounds throbbed, but already I could sense something happening—a warmth, a tingling. When I peeled my fingers away from the metal, the bleeding had slowed. The pain was receding.
"What the hell," I thought, staring at my hands in the dim red light. The cuts were still there, still raw, but they weren't as deep as they should be. The edges looked cleaner, like they'd been healing for hours instead of seconds.
Adaptive regeneration. That's what the flood of instinctive knowledge called it. My body could heal from injuries at an accelerated rate, the speed scaling with severity. Minor cuts would close in hours instead of days. Life-threatening wounds might heal in hours instead of weeks. But it came with costs—massive caloric demands, fever during major healing, exhaustion afterward.
And it had to stay secret. In this world, being different meant becoming a lab rat or a weapon.
"The outer door is on the lower level," Clarke said, her voice cutting through my internal panic. She was already unbuckling herself, taking charge like she always did. "Let's go."
I forced myself to move, to act normal. Around me, the other prisoners were stirring, some groaning in pain, others laughing with relief. I wiped my bloody palms on my pants and stood on unsteady legs, following the crowd toward the lower level.
The door mechanism sparked and hissed. Finn stepped forward with that cocky grin I remembered from the pilot episode. "Hey, you want to be first on the ground? Your choice." He pulled the lever before anyone could stop him.
Sunlight flooded in, warm and golden and impossible. Real sunlight, not the artificial glow of the Ark's recyclers. I squinted against it, letting the others push past me as they stumbled outside. Their whoops and cheers echoed off the trees.
"We're back, bitches!" Octavia Blake yelled, throwing her arms wide as she ran down the ramp. The same words, the same moment, exactly as I'd watched it happen dozens of times. But now I was here, breathing the air, feeling the gravity pull at my bones.
I followed more slowly, cataloging every detail. The way the light filtered through the canopy. The smell of growing things and clean earth. The sounds of birds and insects that shouldn't exist after a nuclear apocalypse. My downloaded knowledge identified a dozen plant species in the first few steps—some edible, some medicinal, one that would cause paralytic poisoning if prepared incorrectly.
"Beautiful," Clarke breathed, staring up at the trees with wonder.
"Magnificent," Wells agreed, moving to stand beside her.
I hung back, watching the group spread out to explore. Jasper was already climbing, Monty close behind. Finn struck heroic poses for an imaginary audience. The delinquents dispersed like teenagers everywhere, giddy with freedom and completely unaware of the dangers surrounding them.
My hands throbbed. When I looked down, the cuts had closed enough to stop bleeding entirely. Pink lines marked where the wounds had been, already starting to fade. In another hour, they'd be gone completely.
"First secret kept," I thought grimly. "Only about a thousand more to go."
Clarke and Wells were arguing about the wristbands now, their voices rising. I knew this argument, knew how it would end. Wells would convince most people to keep them on, at least initially. But the damage would be done—the first cracks in their united front.
Time to establish my cover.
I stumbled slightly as I approached them, playing up the disorientation. "Hey, uh, sorry to interrupt," I said, pitching my voice higher, more nervous. "But shouldn't we, I don't know, keep those on? Just in case?" I gestured vaguely at Clarke's wristband. "I mean, what if they're not just tracking devices? What if they monitor our health or something? My mom was always going on about how we should never trust our first assumptions about technology."
Clarke looked at me with sharp interest. "Your mother?"
"Botanist," I said quickly, the lie rolling off my tongue with practiced ease. "Well, agricultural specialist. Farm Station. She died in the culling." The emotional truth behind that statement helped sell it—someone had lost their mother, even if it wasn't exactly me.
"I'm sorry," Clarke said, her expression softening slightly.
"Yeah, well." I shrugged, aiming for that particular brand of teenage awkwardness that made adults want to pat your head. "She always said plants don't lie, but people do. Maybe the Ark people are lying about what the wristbands really do."
Wells nodded approvingly. "That's actually good thinking."
I ducked my head, letting them interpret my flush as embarrassment rather than the relief it actually was. First test passed. I was just Alec Morgan, Farm Station kid with a dead mother and basic pattern recognition. Not David Alen with perfect knowledge of what was coming.
"So what's your name?" Clarke asked.
"Alec Morgan," I said. "And you're Clarke Griffin, right? And Wells Jaha?" At their surprised expressions, I laughed nervously. "Come on, everyone knows who you are. Chancellor's son and the girl whose dad got floated for treason. No offense," I added quickly.
"None taken," Clarke said dryly, but her eyes were calculating now. She'd remember me.
The group was starting to coalesce around the idea of finding Mount Weather, the supposed safe haven marked on the maps. I knew better—knew it was a trap that would cost them months of freedom and dozens of lives. But I couldn't say that. Not directly. Not yet.
Instead, I hung back and watched, memorizing faces. Learning names. Cataloging who was still alive, still innocent, still unbroken by the horrors to come. Some of them would die in the next few weeks. Others would survive for years only to fall to later catastrophes.
I could save some of them. But not all. And the question that would haunt me was simple: which ones were worth revealing my secrets for?
The sun was setting by the time we'd established a rough camp near the dropship. Fires had been started—not efficiently, but they were burning. Shelter was minimal but functional. People were pairing off, establishing social groups, testing boundaries.
I sat apart from the main groups, close enough to seem social but far enough to avoid scrutiny. My hands had healed completely now, not even a scar to mark where the cuts had been. The demonstration of my regeneration had been successful, but it left me acutely aware of just how different I was from these people.
Jasper was telling jokes by the fire, his voice bright with the kind of happiness that wouldn't survive the next few days. Monty laughed at everything his friend said, loyal and supporting without knowing what that loyalty would cost him. Octavia danced, free for the first time in her life, unaware that freedom would turn her into a killer.
Clarke sat with Wells, but her attention kept drifting to Finn, who was charming a small group with stories of his spacewalk. The love triangle that would define so much pain was already forming.
And somewhere out there in the darkness, Lincoln watched. The Grounders knew we were here now. The clock was ticking.
I closed my eyes and let the sounds of the camp wash over me. Laughter. Conversation. The crackle of burning wood. For just a moment, I could pretend this was what it seemed—a group of kids granted an impossible second chance on a beautiful planet.
But I knew better. I'd seen how this story ended, and it was written in blood.
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