It was the women.

After four months of no women getting pregnant, scientists and doctors were able to figure out it was the women that lost their fertility, not men.

Most people thought that couldn't be accurate and they were just scapegoating women, but nobody could disprove it. Whoever it was that lost their fertility, it still meant babies weren't being born.

When the last child was born, riots started around the world. That's when most people said it began; not five years later when Patient Zero got infected, but when the riots started. Hopelessness was born that day, and ironically enough the baby was named Hope.

Hope died five days after being born. More riots followed. The next youngest child died a week later, and the third youngest child a few days after that. It seemed that almost all of the last pregnancies weren't even healthy pregnancies, and the babies died of disease and weakness and a number of other things if they made it through birth.

Doctor Abigail Griffin led the team that searched for a way to keep humanity alive. They were humanity's last hope for a future, and after a year and a half of research they had nothing to show for it.

And then, one day, a baby was born. It had been over two years since a healthy baby was born and scientists and doctors around the world had been searching relentlessly for a way to continue the human race, and a lower class woman— a seamstress— had a baby in secret. If the day Hope was born caused riots, the day that baby was born caused mass panic. Everybody wanted to know how this baby had been born, how this woman had been able to give birth, and how it happened with her and not with anybody else.

It caused religious uprisings. It caused religions to change and religions to be founded. It caused people to see hope again, for however a brief time. A name was never released, so they called this baby simply "the miracle child." It was the child that should've never existed.

Due to the riots, the government had to airlift the woman, the baby, and the woman's other child out of their home, and not much was heard of them after that. Nobody ever figured out who they were, just that they existed. A single picture had been released of a woman holding a baby and a young boy standing beside her, but that was it.

Four years after the miracle child was born, it was announced that a cure for infertility had been found. Human trials began, and the women being tested began ovulating again. They saw that as a good sign. No side effects were recorded besides a light fever.

At twenty hours, three minutes, and six seconds after Subject 319 had been injected, a new side effect appeared. She began thrashing in her bed and screaming, and by the time the doctors arrived she'd hit her head and was bleeding heavily from the wound. Subject 319— known as Patient Zero around the world— attacked the doctors, and one was bitten before they were able to strap her to her bed. A few minutes after Subject 319 began acting erratic, another subject began showing the same signs. It was the patient that had been injected with the cure right after Subject 319 had been, and upon reexamining their notes, two things became clear: Subject 319 was the first person injected, and the time between the patients showing symptoms was the exact amount of time between the patients being injected the day before.

It took twenty hours for symptoms to show up. The man that had been bitten went home that night and called off the next day, feeling sick. Twenty hours after Subject 319 had bitten that man, there were fifteen people infected. Twenty hours after that, there were five hundred. Within a month, it had spread to every major city on the planet. Within a year, it was everywhere.

It seemed that humanity would run out before they reached old age.

The infection eventually spread so far that all known surviving humans gathered and were taken to one location, a walled-off city known as the Ark. There were only a few thousand people, most of whom doctors or scientists that had immediately become high priority when the outbreak began.

The Ark had been a military base. They'd built it up and added the wall and made it completely self-sustaining. There was a farm, there was solar power, and there was a water source. They had animals and schools and a library. They had more doctors than anything else, and they had soldiers to spare. The law was tightly upheld. Breaking laws lead to riots, and riots led to anarchy. Laws were punishable by banishment, and a few times there'd been hangings in cases where they'd meant to make a point. The leader now was a man named Chancellor Jaha, and his second in command was all about the rules.

The wall surrounding the Ark was the taller than the buildings inside it by at least twenty feet. There were parts you could go inside the wall and view the outside from above, though it was off-limits to most people. It was made of iron and had only one gate, and that gate hadn't been opened in over four years.

That's where Clarke Griffin sat now, in one of the observation rooms in the wall. She had her sketchbook with her and she was watching the ground below outside. A single infected person had wandered fairly close to the wall and was looking at it curiously.

She loved to study the infected people. Clarke had a place she could sit during the day, a place where she could see the plains outside and be alone. Infected people roamed there a lot, and she could see them fairly clearly if they came close enough. As of now, she'd studied them more than anybody else in the Ark. Most doctors were more concerned about fixing infertility; they thought it wouldn't matter too much what was happening outside the walls if inside they only had another sixty to eighty years anyway.

Clarke was the daughter of lead doctor Abigail Griffin, and the third youngest person alive. Nobody knew what happened to the miracle child, so now the youngest was a boy name Jasper. Clarke knew him pretty well, and being the youngest definitely suited him.

Clarke flipped through her notebook. It was full of drawings, notes, everything she'd ever learned about the infection from her mother or from watching them or from people who'd gone outside the walls and come back.

Infected individuals would feel slightly feverish as it took hold. When twenty hours were up, the person would suddenly become violent and full of rage. They didn't seem to understand or respond to language. While few people had been able to actually study them up close, it was widely known that an infected person would have no problem with killing anybody, be it a family member, a child, or a loved one. They seemed to only know blind rage.

They were still alive, though you couldn't tell it by looking at them. They still had bodily functions. They still had to eat. Somehow they were still alive, after years of the infection raging, so they were eating something somehow. They didn't recognize when they had injuries; they just kept going. They didn't show any sign of getting tired.

"Do you ever think about that?" Wells asked, bringing her back to reality.

"About what?" she said, turning to actually face him. Clarke wasn't exactly friendly with Wells, after what he'd done. He and his father, the leader of the Ark, were responsible for getting her father killed. It was a sore subject and something that Clarke would never be able to forgive Wells or his father for.

"About how somebody in here is going to be the last living human," he said. "Eventually it'll be just one person, and then humans will be gone."

"You don't know that," Clarke said. "They could fix it. There could be more people somewhere else."

"Do you really believe that?"

Clarke looked back outside. The infected person that had been at the wall was walking away. "I don't think I could choose not to."

Standing up, she left the room that Wells wasn't supposed to know about, her sketchbook under one arm.

She entered the main courtyard and saw Raven Reyes leaving the Council building in a hurry. They made eye contact and Raven motioned for her to meet her.

"What is it?" Clarke asked as Raven shut the door to her office behind her. Raven was the Ark's head mechanic, and its youngest one at age nineteen. She'd been found outside the wall a few months after the Ark first started taking people, injured and alone. By the time Clarke's mother finished helping her, the nerve damage to her lower left leg made walking without a brace and cane impossible. She could still get around fairly well, and she didn't stop for anything when she was in mechanic-mode. Raven and Clarke had become good friends since then, and they'd helped each other through a lot.

"So the council's in session right now," Raven said, sitting in her chair and propping her bad leg up on the desk. "And I overheard something when I was fixing the lights in the room outside the meeting."

"Raven," Clarke said, scolding. "You can't do that. That's enough to get you banished."

"Don't you want to know what I heard?"

Clarke's hesitation made Raven smile.

"They were talking about executing that Blake guy, so apparently he did something super awful to earn a hanging."

Bellamy Blake was the last person to have been found not infected outside the wall. They said he'd gotten to the wall nearly dead and they brought him in and nursed him back to health. That was almost four years ago, Clarke remembered. When he was out of medical he'd been quiet and paranoid of everything around him, especially doctors. They'd all attributed it to him not being around people for so long. Since then he'd mostly kept to himself.

"I wonder what he did," Clarke said. "They haven't hung anybody in years."

"The council is also debating sending people outside. They said that there's another military base a hundred miles south of here that could have supplies or even people," Raven said. "Your mom's very much for sending people out. Kane thinks it's too big of a risk."

"What'd they decide?"

"I didn't hear. That's when I almost got caught so I had to leave. I bet they're gonna do it, though."

"Did you hear anything else about the base?" Clarke asked.

"It's called Mount Weather. It's a base inside a mountain, like a bunker. That's why they think there could be people there. If there aren't people though, there'd definitely be supplies, but there's a city between here and there which means a high risk of running into infected people."

Clarke processed what she'd heard. It was definitely a risk, but more supplies would be useful and more people would mean a higher chance of finding somebody with the answer to infertility or the cure to the infection.

"What do you think they'll decide?" she asked.

"I think they'll do it," Raven said. "It's something worth going after, and Kane seemed to be the only one opposing it."

They sat for a moment in comfortable silence before Clarke broke it.

"Do you really think there's people out there? At that base?"

"Maybe," Raven said thoughtfully. "What do you think Blake did to get himself hung?"

Clarke looked up at her with a small smile growing on her face. At the sight of it, Raven began smiling too, knowing she was planning something.

"We could go ask him."

…

Clarke and Raven walked to the guard's holding area. They could go almost anywhere in the Ark thanks to Raven's position, but getting in to actually see a prisoner was going to take some creative lying and some of Raven's specialties.

Clarke clutched her small medical kit closer to her as Raven worked on the wiring beside the door to the holding area.

"Count to thirty and you'll have your distraction," Raven said, cutting a wire. "You'll have five minutes starting then. When the five minutes are up, Shumway will come in and let you out and you'll say you got everything you needed. If he says he's going to report you, you say…?"

"Why'd you leave me alone in the holding area anyway?" Clarke completed for her.

"Perfect. You're becoming a real criminal, Griffin. You remember how to open the door?"

"As long as your master key works, I'll remember," Clarke said. Raven's "master key" was a passkey with a coding bug she'd designed with an engineer named Wick that could open any door in the Ark. They'd never tested it on something in the guard's building, but it'd worked on everything else so far.

The doors to the holding area slid open and Raven stepped out of the line of sight and around the corner.

"What are you doing in here?" a loud, male voice immediately called out.

"Shumway," Clarke said as the door slid shut behind her, her voice dripping with fake enthusiasm. "I'm glad you're here. My mother wanted me to check on the prisoner before the hanging."

It was a weak excuse, but her guess was that if she came in knowing about the hanging that'd be enough for him to not overly question it. The doctor's excuse was as good as they had, and it was something she could actually see her mother doing. As long as it was a reason for her to attempt being here, that would work.

"I don't think so," Shumway said. "I haven't received any kind of order about a doctor's visit."

"Really? Well, I just have to check on him, take some blood, record some things. I won't be long."

"I can't let you in without an order from a council member. It's for your own safety," he added, actually looking sorry he couldn't help her.

Outside, a loud thud preceded a small scream of pain. Shumway ran to the door and opened it. Raven was lying on the floor, sprawled out dramatically. Her cane was across the floor.

"Shumway, thank goodness you're here!" she cried out. "Help me up!"

Shumway stepped forward and reached out to her. As he was distracted helping her up, Raven looked behind him at Clarke and winked as the holding area door slid shut.

Clarke could hear Shumway banging on the door and trying to open it. Raven had wired it so that it wouldn't be able to open no matter what for five minutes, so she had that long to get what she wanted out of Bellamy Blake.

Clarke used Raven's master key to open the first room, which was empty. The second and third were empty as well, but when she opened the fourth she saw a man sitting in the corner.

"Bellamy Blake?" she called out, making him jump.

He looked about twenty and was bleeding from a head wound. His dark hair was short and curly, and he seemed more muscular than Clarke remembered him being. She could see large brown eyes even in the dark lighting, and those eyes looked panicked at the sight of her medical bag.

"Are you Bellamy?" she asked again. He nodded cautiously.

Clarke entered the room and put the master key in her pocket. Glancing toward the camera on the wall, she made her way to the opposite corner of the room. The cell had no furniture and its only light source was a small window near the ceiling on the wall Bellamy leaned against. His hands were bound and there was a rip in his shirt on one of the sleeves. He looked like he'd been in a fight, though just getting in a fight wasn't something that'd get him hung.

Clarke put her medical bag beside him and got on her knees to look at him face-to-face. His eyes widened and his breathing quickened and he moved away from her, though in the space he had he could only go a few inches.

"I'm not going to hurt you," she said. She got out a cloth and put antiseptic on it. Slowly, she began wiping around the wound on his head, which was just above his hairline and no longer bleeding.

Bellamy eased into her touch after a moment, though he still seemed on edge. Clarke glanced down and saw his wrists were bleeding from the crude zip tie that bound them, but she knew she probably wouldn't have time to get to that too.

"Why are they hanging you?" she asked carefully, watching his face for a reaction. He clenched his jaw and turned his head away from her, giving her a worse view of his eyes but better view of the wound.

"I guess you'd know about their prisoner and why I'd want to see her," he said. His voice was deep and his words were clear.

"What prisoner?" Her hand paused as she tilted her head to see him better. Bellamy looked at her to see if she was lying.

"Aren't you Clarke Griffin?" he asked. "Isn't your mom Abby Griffin, the council member and head doctor?"

"Yeah," she admitted. "But I don't know about the prisoner or why you're being hung. That's why I'm here."

"Does your mom know you're in here, princess?" he asked, smiling a mocking smile.

"No, she doesn't. Now hold still," she said, grabbing him by the jaw and turning his head so she could work on the wound more. "Are you going to tell me why you're being hung?"

Bellamy didn't say anything for a moment. He hissed when the antiseptic hit his actual wound, but didn't react other than that.

"How about you take this off?" Bellamy said, holding up his hands. The zip tie did look painful, and Clarke knew it wasn't standard procedure to keep that on in the cells.

"Let me finish your head first," she said. "You talk while I finish."

"How about you finish and then I'll talk?"

Clarke bit her lip to keep from saying anything, but then sat back on her feet.

"All right. I'm done. Now you talk."

The two of them looked at each other for a moment, neither speaking nor moving. Eventually Bellamy smiled.

"My hands too, princess."

Clarke sighed and pulled a pair of scissors out of her bag.

"Fine," she said, cutting him free. "Now talk."

Bellamy smiled at her, his eyes on the scissors in her hand still. He looked up at her, his eyes dark and barely human. His gaze felt cold and harsh, and Clarke felt regret in the fear growing within her.

"They're hanging me because I'm a monster."

He moved quickly, so fast Clarke barely had time to even react. With one hand, Bellamy grabbed the scissors from her. His other hand grabbed her by the wrist and twisted her as he stood, pulling her up as well. The scissors had broken and he now held something that resembled a knife to her throat. His arm crossed in front of her body and held her against his back.

"Sorry, princess," he said into her ear.

"Fuck you," she said, and he laughed.

"You're going to take me to medical," Bellamy said, "And then you're going to get me to the gate safely. Understand?"

Clarke said nothing. Her heart was racing and her mind was trying to come up with a way out. The scissors pressed to her throat were digging in but weren't sharp enough to cut skin without a lot of pressure.

Bellamy walked them to the door. "Tell them to open it," he said.

"I can't. I have to wait to be let out at a certain time."

"You came in here to talk to me without a way out? Brave princess," he commented. "How long?"

"About four minutes from when I walked in," Clarke said. "So, soon."

Outside, Clarke could hear Shumway getting back into the room finally. She was supposed to meet Raven back at the office afterwards, so at least Raven would be out of this situation.

"Call to him. Pretend like you're fine," Bellamy said quietly.

"Shumway!" Clarke's voice cracked as she spoke. "Shumway, I'm in here!"

She heard him just outside the door, messing with the electronic lock.

"How'd you get in there? I have to tell your mother about this," he was saying.

The door opened and Shumway froze at the sight of Clarke with half a pair of scissors to her throat and Bellamy behind her.

"Get inside," Bellamy said to him. "Sit in the corner."

Shumway put his hands up and slowly did what Bellamy said, glancing at Clarke every few seconds. Bellamy caught the door with his foot and pulled Clarke outside.

"Lead the way, princess. Take me to the prisoner."

"I don't know what prisoner you're talking about," Clarke said. "I wasn't supposed to be in there. I just wanted to know why you were being hung. I was curious. I don't know anything and I don't have any clearance to get in anywhere."

"Oh, we both know that isn't true," Bellamy said. "You got into my cell and Shumway hadn't let you in. You have a key. I saw it when you opened the door." His grip on her body tightened. "Take me to her, now."

"I can take you to medical, but I don't know where to go from there," she said.

"That's a good place to start," he said. Clarke opened the door to leave the holding area.

A few steps out, there was a sudden thud and Bellamy nearly fell forward onto her. His grip loosened and Clarke used that time to kick back into his shin and twist out of his grasp. Once away from him, Clarke looked back and saw Raven standing against the wall by the door, her cane in her hand like a bat. Bellamy had fallen to his knee and was holding the back of his head in pain.

"Glad I waited for you," Raven said, looking down at Bellamy. "I take it talking didn't go too well."

"You could say that," Clarke said.

Bellamy glared back at Raven, who prepped for another swing.

Before she could, Bellamy swung his leg back and kicked her legs out from underneath her. When Raven was down, Bellamy ran toward Clarke who could only back up as he ran at her.

He slammed her against the wall and held the scissors to her throat again, this time facing her. His entire body trapped her against the wall.

"Take me to the medical center," he said. "You know where she is. You're probably one of the doctors working on her. I bet that's how they train you."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Clarke cried. "I don't know!"

Bellamy studied her for a moment. She watched as his expression melted from enraged and murderous to remorseful and unnerved. The scissors fell from his hand and he took a step back. He looked toward Raven, who was pulling herself to a sitting position beside the wall.

"I'm…" He was shaking his head and backing up. His wide eyes were beginning to water.

Whatever he was about to say was interrupted by a siren ripping through the air.

"There were cameras in there," Clarke said over the noise. "People will be here any second."

"Please," Bellamy said, stepping toward her. She flinched away from him and he noticed and didn't get closer. "You have to help me. They have my sister here. They're hurting her. That's why they're going to hang me, because I wanted to stop them. You have to help me save her."

Clarke looked at Raven. The two debated it separately for a few seconds, and for whatever reason they both came to the same decision. Raven nodded to her.

"Help Raven move faster. She can make a distraction for us once we're there," Clarke said. Bellamy immediately went to Raven and helped her to her feet. "Let's go."