All We Do ↠ Bellamy Blake

chapter one

'Fortune is like glass –

the brighter the glitter, the more easily broken.'

Publilius Syrus

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Day One

Countless teens were herded onto the dropship, so many that Olivia almost couldn't tell the difference, the faces blending into one. Looking down at her tablet, she ticked people off as she saw them, doing her best not to let her emotions rise up to the surface. She was helping them send a bunch of kids to their death – kids not much younger than her. Of course there was a chance that the ground was habitable but it was much more likely that the moment they'd land, the radiation would kill them instantly.

And yet, she was still stood there, ticking people off on her tablet. About halfway through the kids, she handed over the list of delinquents to a colleague, heading onto the bottom level of the dropship. The supplies on the dropship were close to zero but Olivia still had to tick things off the list there. She'd fought and debated with the Ark and managed to get them to allow her to put a storage box of supplies on there. Rummaging through it, she ticked off the few things they'd let her place on it as she wondered how she'd ended up leading this whole project.

When they'd asked her graduating class to plan a hypothetical trip down to Earth with the kids in the Skybox, she'd gone all out; she never did anything half baked and this was her final assignment before she could get a job working on real projects for the Ark so she'd wanted it to be perfect. If only she'd known that she was already working on a real project. Earth was seemingly uninhabitable, the chance of those kids surviving was super low and it didn't seem completely ethical. Despite this, she'd agreed to help because the only other option was leaving everyone on the Ark to die.

The tablet in her hand beeped, informing her that the ship would launch in one minute. Olivia's heart speeded up slightly – she was usually completely on time – as she quickly finished ticking everything off. They were on a tight schedule because they needed to send the kids off at an exact time in order for them to land on Mount Weather.

Sighing, she left the dropship, signing herself back onto the Ark. Olivia paused for a moment as she remembered that she hadn't closed the storage box, wondering whether that would be a big deal on not. The ride down to Earth would be rocky and the stuff in there would probably be thrown out and ruined, making all her effort with the Ark go to waste and leaving the kids with barely anything at all. The execution of all this had to perfect and leaving that box open wasn't perfect.

Hating herself for it, she placed her tablet onto the side, racing back onto the dropship. She rolled her eyes at herself when she spotted the box, finding that it was open and pleased that she'd remembered to come back. Before she could go over to close it however, she heard a shuffle from the corner, her head snapping over to the source of the noise.

Olivia's eyes landed on a man dressed in a guard suit that she didn't recognise at first. Her and the team had sorted through a detailed list of guards to assign to this project and his face had not been on there. Her eyebrows furrowed in confusion, her mouth parting. What was he doing on the dropship? When had he gotten on there? She took a step back, ready to run back onto the Ark and stop the launch when he raised a gun at her. Her heart stopped, her breath halting.

"Don't think about running back onto the Ark," he told her in warning, "Come closer." When she didn't move again, he gestured the gun towards himself, "I said come closer." Olivia gulped but did as told, her eyes filling with tears. "I need to be on this dropship," he explained, "I can't have you going back onto the Ark and telling them I'm here."