❝I'd rather die kind and forgotten than be remembered for being brutal.❞
( *undergoing slight formatting tweaks & adjustments -- the story itself will otherwise remain readable and unchanged! )
⠀⠀⠀⠀ Had Bellamy not volunteered, he wouldn't be sent o...
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( ミ☆ ) ONE deadly nightshade
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⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀Around midnight, a sweeping layer of fog had rolled into District Nine and had smoothed itself over the Harvest Plains like a low frost, clinging to this month's crops until the first signs of daybreak.
⠀⠀⠀⠀Even still, two hours past sunrise, Bellamy has trouble seeing beyond the early morning mist. But it's different out here, he knows. Here, beyond the Wall of District Nine, his home, where he can hear wolves howling in the distant outskirts of the forest—a pack of few, it seems, but even just one against Bellamy would feel like too many.
⠀⠀⠀⠀Somehow, if not by common sense, he knows they aren't following him. Yet. It takes a keen eye and gut instinct to track one of them down on a typical day — to figure out which way not to go—but with clouded visibility and muted sunlight, the only things Bellamy has to work with this morning are the wind, his ears, and a good sense of direction.
⠀⠀⠀⠀It helps that he's familiar with these woods like he's familiar with the layout of his home—a cramped wooden cottage on the crest of a small hill built for one family, though he, his eight year-old half sister, and his mother share it with another. Out here in the woods—about the only time he can be alone—Bellamy knows which tree stashes his foraging gear the same way he knows which floorboards creak in his living room; knows which way is north and which way is south like he knows exactly which hours his mother's mood fluctuates; knows the routines of the wildlife out here like he knows which cracks in his shared bedroom ceiling are old or brand new.
⠀⠀⠀⠀No one may ever find Bellamy out here in these woods, at least not for a little while longer, and it has nothing to do with the fog. Aside from him, only one other person in the world knows about his secret route beyond their district's Wall, and that person is his best and only friend, Cortessa Courtell. The Wall, made of high-density tungsten and solar panels long-since fallen into disuse, runs a little under a hundred feet up into the sky and spans two-hundred miles around their district, evenly, in the shape of an 'O'. There are multiple ways to get beyond the Wall—if you know where to find them—and they're used in secret by those brave enough to venture out here with what little weapons they might have. But none such exit is as good as Bellamy's, he'd argue, which he had discovered on accident—and has since been using—when he was only twelve.
