What happened on Earth before they arrived, they'll never really know. Even the outlines read most times like Council propaganda: there was an enemy and a war, another enemy and another war and a rescue. A sheen of intimidating awe around the ones they might call soldiers, the front-liners. A sense of honor, for winning, and a deeper sense of shame, that festers in the corners of the narrative, because it is narrative, because it is an official line.

So sometimes, in the idle hours, the Mecha survivors in the hangar deck discuss it, and unfurl their own tales about it, and speculate and wonder. The Council would place themselves in the protagonists' role, but that's not really true, and that's the core around which all gossip circles and around which reputations are built. At the real center, forming the real story, were the vanguard. One hundred juvenile prisoners taken out of their stasis and sent ahead, experimental rats, or sacrificial lambs. Half of them dead by the time the rest came down—more than half of the rest dead—some people would lump all the remainders together but anyone who's really looking knows it isn't true.

There's something different about them. Reputation is what it feels like, when she's clawing through junk heaps. The reputation of warriors, survivors—hidden brutality, perhaps—secrets that may be terrible. The swirling questions: what did they do, exactly, before we arrived in the tail of their shooting star? What did they survive, the 48 who were in the Mountain, and the 42 that came out?

All sorts of tales, in the echo chamber of the hangar deck, told in voices that bounce of metal, and in the background, the high clang of footsteps over metal, and the thud of boots on concrete.

Gina takes a break and pulls on her coat and slips outside through the heavy tarp they've put over the crack in the stuck door. Real mechanics are working on fixing that. She pulls the sleeves of the coat down over her fingers and tries to get the collar up in the vicinity of her ears. This cold is foreign. Not that she's never known cold—sometimes the heat breaks, sometimes the ship got cold, too—but she's never known it like this, like it's cut out of the air. Bleak, she thinks, bleak. From the doorway of the ship, she sees the detritus of Alpha Station's landing and then a large breaking of mud, cracked frost, frozen footprints, and puddles sheened over with half-formed ice. Last night was frigid. Below freezing. A couple nights like that so far but not in a row, and no precipitation, except for some bitter ice-prick rain at the beginning of the week. 

At the perimeter of the camp is the high wooden wall, with its evenly spaced birds’ nests along the top, for the Guard to keep watch. The high wooden wall that keeps them safe. On the days when she doesn’t believe that, she thinks of it, not like the prison it is, but like a reminder of the narrative of their village. Like a fairy ring, or a spell. The us, the them, the boundary, the protective circle. Near the edges of the camp are some bits of pale, dying grass, and above, a sky the color of pale slate that stretches on and on and on. Not as far as the blackness of space and stars did, but farther than she thought a sky could stretch. No clouds in it, but swirls of chalkier gray, and the outlines of tree tops if she tilts her head.

She blows the warm air of her lungs into her hands and stomps her feet. This was not the Earth she'd always dreamed of—because everybody dreams—but something both so vast it's dizzying and so truncated and small it's like a hand around her lungs, squeezing her breath. This Earth almost makes her panic some days. Squeezing, squeezing, squeezing: there's no way out because this is out; this is the escape; this is the goal, the Eden, the return home. This is all there is to it. This is it.

Not that she'd ever let anyone see. What she's known for, the reputation she's built, is cheeriness and optimism and gentle humor. But she doesn't need any of that now. She doesn’t need anything she’s known for. Not alone, by herself—ten-minute break; the cold air of winter starting to come down.

For a while, she sees not another soul. No one likes the cold, and the work inside is more urgent than the work outside, for now. But when she sees movement, she doesn't flinch. She knows the figure is human, but she perceives him as animal instead, or even as a bird. Like a bird flying overhead, its own straight line, and she is only to watch it and comprehend nothing but its beauty.

That's the man she sees in the near distance, by the perimeter. A mysterious thing, on his own mysterious and oddly, bleakly beautiful path. Except she knows he's patrolling, and she knows who he is. That’s Bellamy Blake.

Now that she's alone and there is no gossip and there are no tall tales and there is no speculation to bide away the time, reputation doesn't seem like the word anymore. But she doesn't know what is. Reputation feels heavy and distant and whispered in secretive tones. What follows him, what she sees around him like an aura, is something different. Mythos is too grandiose, stories too mundane.

Mystery, perhaps. Or distance. A sense she has deep down that he's become something else. He and the others, the survivors of the first hundred, they're strangers who haunt the town.

He has a history and she doesn't speak of it. 

In the camp, which she has never been to, and barely heard of, the kids built a sort of village and he was the leader: the older stowaway, the worst of the criminals—said he tried to kill the Chancellor and that's why he had to escape, couldn't blame him for that, either way—but he became some sort of father to them, or a general, or a Chancellor himself. His survivors still look at him that way. Most of them care nothing for the power vacuum that's swirling, already starting to settle down around Griffin and Kane, because who are they to follow who has never led them in the past? They stick with each other.

On the first day after the Mountain fell, he came inside and he found the little bar she'd made up with a couple of friends; he ordered a drink; he didn't say anything, and she didn't ask any questions. She remembers thinking to herself that this was a man who would sleep for days. The dirt on his clothes and his face and the stink of sweat and dirt and him, and the heaviness, and the specter of injury. Or he'd report to med bay, or be reported there. Instead, he drank that one drink slowly, and a second one quicker, and then he went to Kane and claimed a section of the Alpha ruins for his survivors, and he never looked back.

He's doing his own patrol now. Following the path of the Guard but without the jacket. It's like a second society lives embedded in her own, a second ghost village in her proto-village, a second type of person among the usual people that she knows.

One of her friends speaks of the power of Bellamy Blake. She believes all the rumors. But more than she sees it, that steady and indescribable power all about him. Like he's already done everything, so he'll do anything more. What Gina sees is all of that and sadness. Weariness she'd like to take away from him, somehow, if she could.

A Chancellor, she decides, of his own people. Responsible for them, as they huddle like ghosts in their wrecked wing, recover from their injuries, keep to their own. The ambassador for them, and the leader of them, and the father of them, and the sturdiest surviving one.

Whatever happened in the Mountain made Clarke Griffin insane. Now she's in the woods eating tree bark or something. If what people say is true. And she came from something, they add, like this makes it extra tragic, but Gina thinks that's probably the explanation right there. She came from something, so she had something to lose.

Bellamy's like her. He is the most alien of creatures, and he's just like her. She watches him and his steady gait. She wonders if he'll come closer. She wonders if he'll talk to her.

He's looking all around, as he walks: for threats, for movement, for something amiss. He used to be in the Guard, so he has all the training. She studies the set of his shoulders. Unbent. What pressure he must feel weighing heavily on them.

Heavy is the head that wears the crown—is the silly little phrase that comes back to her.

Does he feel even more squeezed, crushed, strangled, than she does, not by the endless desolation of the promised home but by everything he's meant to do and meant to carry all on his own? Everything secreted away by the Council, everything unknowable about the early days of the first Ark survivors on Earth, and he knows all of it, and he carries that with him too. More pressure. More weight. Her heart aches.