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‘What’re you going to do to him?’ Thomas shouted, really scared for his friend.
Thomas stayed quiet. Sometimes they could be so condescending. ‘Thomas? Sound good?’ Leavitt repeated. Thomas felt a rage so strong he could barely contain it, like a fire starving for oxygen. He didn’t understand how, but somehow he kept it all in. ‘Sounds good,’ he muttered.
‘What’s that?’ Thomas asked, falling right into their trap. Curiosity often won when it came to him.
‘Please,’ Thomas whispered, feeling the fight drain out of him. Minho – tough, reckless, always-joking Minho – had a look of such terror on his face that Thomas couldn’t bear to watch any more.
Minho continued to struggle and scream. He managed to move his chair, sliding it back until he hit the wall farthest from the Griever. On the left side of the screen, something flashed into view, a blob with spikes dragging it along the ground. Right before it ran into Minho, it stopped. The metal spikes receded into its skin and the creature flattened out. Thomas was desperate now, seeing one of his few friends on the verge of serious damage – possibly even death. ‘Randall!’ he begged. ‘Listen to me! Please, just … stop that thing. Just stop it! Just … hear me out! Let me talk, and then if
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‘You see that?’ Randall asked. He was also watching Minho. The creature was draped over the boy, almost like a blanket. ‘Did I not tell you that we’re almost there, we’ve almost perfected the greatest soldier?’ Thomas didn’t see anything besides his friend, literally inches from death, and a man who seemed to have lost his grip on reality – if he’d ever had it in the first place.
Thomas finally realized what the man was saying. ‘What do you mean you have three others to show … this?’ He pointed to all the screens in front of him, the control deck, the ceiling above. ‘You do mean a recording of it, right?’ The next half second seemed to stretch out forever. Please, please, please, he thought. Tell me that yes, you recorded it. ‘I’m sorry to say the answer is no,’ Randall replied. ‘It’s more effective if Minho goes through it again.’ He sighed. ‘On so many levels, Thomas.’
He hadn’t seen Minho for over a year, even though he’d survived the punishment with the Griever. Well, at least physically. Alby said that mentally, emotionally … Minho was different. He wasn’t as talkative, or reckless, and he certainly never mentioned the word escape again. The passing of time can certainly heal a lot of wounds, but the way Alby described their mutual friend, Minho would need about twenty more years.
The other members of their ‘maintenance-room clan’ met once a week. Everyone but Minho. He hadn’t shown up once since the fateful day, and Newt said their friend wouldn’t even consider it. He was a shell of the person they’d all got to know. It made Thomas incredibly sad. He’d really liked Minho, and everything about their situation seemed so unfair.
Thomas believed in the cure – at least, he told himself he did. But WICKED treating them like lab rats – sometimes that turned his sadness into anger. Often he’d have to kneel by his bed and pound on the mattress with both fists until he collapsed from exhaustion. He wanted it all to be over, a cure in hand, and he did his best to stay positive in that regard.
WICKED continued to isolate him and Teresa, so he relied on the latest gossip from Alby, Newt, and his most plentiful source, Chuck. That kid had a brain like a sponge, soaking in every little comment he ever heard or overheard. They might tease him without mercy, but when Chuck spoke, people listened.
‘These people are survivors, Thomas. I know you were young – terribly young – but surely you remember the awful state of the world after the virus spread and reached us out here. Things weren’t supposed to …’ She paused, and something in her eyes told Thomas that she’d said something she hadn’t meant to. ‘But my point … the world became a place of horror and death and madness. By nature … by definition … anyone who survived those first waves of sheer terror had to be a little hardened. Tougher than normal. It’s what helped them survive. The weak – they either died or will soon.’
Before Thomas could respond, he saw Newt and Alby coming towards them, faces alight with big grins. ‘Well, look who the bloody copper dragged in,’ Newt said, pulling Thomas into a big hug. He pounded his back a few times before letting go. ‘It’s a bit strange seein’ you without sneakin’ about and all. Welcome to society.’
Thomas opened his mouth to respond, but someone half tackled him from the left, almost taking him down. It was Chuck. ‘What’s up, you little runt?’ Thomas asked, mussing the kid’s hair in the oldest grandpa move in the books. ‘Pretty much running this place, is all,’ Chuck said, puffing his chest out. ‘When I’m not sneaking over to Group B to get me some lovin’ from the ladies, that is.’ This made them all bust up,
‘What’re they doing in here?’ Newt asked, his whisper sounding like a small explosion in the eerie silence. Thomas jumped at the sound, then stumbled. Newt tripped over him, and then they were both laughing, legs and arms tangled in a pile on the ground. They were either stressed or starting to crack up. ‘Are you sure WICKED knows what they’re doing with you?’ Newt joked as they picked themselves up and brushed themselves off. ‘You seem a little more clown than elite.’
Thomas leaned over the glass, its top beaded with drops of water, and looked over at Newt. His friend’s face was illuminated by the green light, and for a moment he looked sick. Thomas shook the thought away. ‘We probably shouldn’t mess with this,’ Newt said, looking up from the vat. ‘Looks bloody radioactive to me. We could wake up with three extra fingers and one less eye in the morning.’
Every time Thomas thought he’d kind of got used to things around WICKED, he came across something like a glass container in which a hideous monster with glowing tumours grew like a foetus in a womb.
‘What if they freak out?’ Thomas whispered. ‘I don’t want forty girls attacking me at once.’ ‘I thought you went for that sort of thing,’ Newt whispered back. Thomas could barely see him, but he knew his friend was smiling.
She slipped off into the barracks room, a shadow among shadows. ‘I hope they’re on our side,’ Newt said. ‘That girl’d take down half of us, yeah?’
Miyoko reappeared, this time with another girl right next to her. She was a blur as she ran past Thomas, streaking through the door and straight at Newt. They embraced in an unstable hug, stumbling back in the dark little room.
‘I hate them,’ Newt said loudly through his sniffles. He pulled back from his sister and wiped his cheeks. ‘I hate every one of them! How can they do this? How can they steal us from our homes and keep us separate like this? It’s not right!’ He yelled the last word, and Miyoko winced, eyeing the door. ‘No, no, no,’ Sonya said in a soothing tone. She put her hands on both sides of her brother’s face, looking straight into his eyes. ‘Don’t say that. You’re looking at it all wrong. We’ve got it better than ninety-nine percent of kids out there. They saved us, big brother. What are the odds we’d
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And then the truth was clear as day. Thomas’s friends were being sent into the Maze and he wasn’t. He didn’t know if he’d ever be sent in. He was different from his friends, and no one could ignore it any more. They stood, backs against the wall, some glaring at him as if he’d known about this the whole time. As if he’d been lying to them. Even Newt, down at the end of the line, looked at Thomas, anger twisting his face. Thomas was absolutely crushed.
Thomas felt powerless. He looked down the line of boys who had been his friends, and his heart broke over and over. Minho, Alby, Newt – their eyes brimming with resentment. How had everything crashed so suddenly?
WICKED had done something terrible to their memories. Something to do with their implants, probably. If that was the case, if this was something permanent, Thomas couldn’t imagine anything more horrible. It was all they had, their memories. He thought back to when Randall had taken away his name – it had felt like losing part of his soul. And this was far, far worse.
‘Do you know where we are?’ Newt asked. Alby looked up sharply. ‘No, I don’t know where we are,’ he snapped, as if Newt had asked him a hundred times and he was sick of hearing it. ‘Well, bloody hell, neither do I.’
Thomas’s friends gathered, confused. Some crying in fear. Some of them with such bright expressions of hope on their faces that it just about broke his heart. It seemed pretty obvious that their memories were still lost to them.
Thomas sat in the chair, staring at the bank of monitors across from the control deck, feeling a little better than he had in months. Which wasn’t saying much. At least he actually wanted to take his next breath instead of wishing that maybe it wouldn’t happen, that some mysterious illness would strike him dead on the spot. It had been a long time since he’d felt … okay. And today he felt okay.
Sadly, their memories had never returned, a thing that still galled Thomas to no end.
He claimed he was grooming Chuck to do great things, but the truth was that Thomas needed him. Being alone often brought his memories crashing in, and Chuck was a beacon that lit the darkness. Dr Paige seemed more than happy to acquiesce, considering the value of studying Chuck’s reactions to the things he witnessed. It was pure selfishness on Thomas’s part, but he couldn’t let it go. He flat-out needed Chuck, like a kid with a security blanket. Chuck was a constant bright spot in what had been a miserable couple of months since sending the first batch of subjects in, after stealing their
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‘Don’t mess with Teresa,’ Thomas said, slowly shaking his head back and forth as if in pure awe of her powers. ‘If I teach you nothing else in life, my son, it’s that. Don’t mess with Teresa.’ ‘Come here, you little devilled egg,’ Teresa said, now chasing Chuck around the room, trying to smother him with hugs. For all his flirting jokes, the kid hated it when she did that.
How weird it must be to wake up with your memories erased. Dr Paige had explained many times how it worked, but what did it feel like? That was what Thomas wanted to know. To have a completely intact picture of the world and how it was … but with everything that mattered scrubbed out. Friends, families, places. It was a fascinating and terrible thing.
‘Or coffee,’ Dr Paige added, showing a rare spark of personality. ‘I’d kill a Griever with my bare hands for a cup of coffee.’ Thomas and Teresa exchanged looks of surprise, then amusement. The woman had just made a joke. Maybe the world was ending.
They pulled him up, dragged him over the edge of the Box, lifted him to his feet. Three or four boys dusted him off, hitting him harder than they needed to, but their whoops and laughs made it all seem okay. Like old friends welcoming home a lost soul.
At that exact moment, Newt looked up, straight into the camera. Thomas leaned back, for a second thinking his friend had somehow spotted him. Newt cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted. ‘Hey! Whoever sent us here! Send us some medicine. How ’bout a bloody doctor? Better yet, why don’t you take us out of this hellhole!’ Thomas went cold. It was crazy that Newt and the others really didn’t know who’d sent them there.
Thomas looked over his shoulder to see how the Gladers were reacting to the violent death. Some of the boys had dispersed, most of them wandering off alone. Alby was on his knees, leaning against the wooden spear he’d used to kill George, staring at the ground, completely still. Newt was near him, sitting cross-legged in the dirt, head in his hands, eyes closed, as miserable as a person could look.
The main command room was off limits to anyone younger than twenty-one. He’d heard someone say that once, but it sounded like a formality invented to keep them out. He, Teresa, Aris and Rachel were part of the ‘team’ when it was convenient. He knew they were all being analyzed just as much as anyone in the Glade. And after what he’d just seen, Thomas was beginning to feel very uncomfortable about things.
‘You keep saying we’re important, that we’re a part of all this,’ Thomas said. He pointed at Teresa, then himself. ‘We helped programme your maze. And helped send all our friends there. And now we just watched one of them die and you did nothing to stop it. Why? Why didn’t you guys go in and help? Someone needs to explain what happened, and someone’s going to do it right now.’ Thomas was shaking, trying to hold himself together. He sucked in a quaking breath, waiting for the man to answer.
He’d been struck by a realization that had never felt truer: it didn’t matter what they did or what they said. Anything and everything could be a test set up by WICKED. It was too much.
‘We didn’t come for a nice sit-down,’ he said. ‘We don’t want lies. We want actual answers. Please.’ ‘You killed someone,’ Teresa added, in a much calmer voice. ‘We didn’t sign up for this. We didn’t sign up for you killing our friends. Are we next?’
She walked towards the door and opened it, then looked back at them. ‘I’ve grown to love the both of you. Like my own children. I swear to you that nothing on this earth could be more true.’ She paused, on the verge of choking up. ‘And I’ll do anything – anything – to make sure that you have a world to return to someday.’
He’d always wondered about everyone’s parents, and it seemed like his suspicions had been true. WICKED said they all came from families with two sick parents and no other care available. Was this some anomaly or one of many lies?
One seemingly random remark in a memo caught his attention – two staff members reminiscing about the time they had to ‘tinker with poor A2’s memories because his first meeting with Teresa had been such a disaster.’ This made Thomas stop reading. He stared down at the tablet, thinking back. He remembered the day he’d first officially met Teresa. How he’d been dizzy with déjà vu. Had WICKED been experimenting with their implants and memories that long ago? It made sense, in light of what they did to his friends when they sent them into the Maze, something they’d have to be well prepared for. But
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Then he stopped on something interesting. A couple of acronyms he’d never seen before, along with the words TOP SECRET in red letters. This just might be something. He scanned a memo or two, his heart rate picking up with each word he read. Things he couldn’t believe. About a virus. About it being man-made. About it being released on purpose. About a population that had got too big to feed.
It was almost like they were both determined to forget. Thomas wouldn’t forget. He swore to himself that he’d always remember this. That he’d always remember that WICKED was trying to fix a problem their predecessors had created in the first place.
Thomas enjoyed it when he could, enjoyed the feel of snow on his face, the tingle of icy cold on his nose and fingertips. It felt like a way of spitting in the sun flares’ face. See? I’m cold. Now go suck it.
Thomas was in a sour mood. Everything about WICKED had worn him to the bone, hardened his heart. The Psychs, the Variables, the killzone, the patterns. Everything. He’d felt that way ever since the night he’d discovered the truth about their predecessors – that they’d unleashed the very virus to which they wanted to find a cure.
‘Can’t hide it any more, can I?’ Randall said, now bent over, leaning on his knees. ‘It’s the darndest thing!’ He lurched upright, swaying left, then right, before getting his balance. ‘The darndest thing, trying to hide the Flare from your bosses.’
He found himself thinking of Newt, maybe the one he liked most of all of them, not immune. There were only two futures for Newt: they found a way to treat this sickness, or one day he went insane, ending up like Randall.
She reached into a pocket and pulled out a surgical mask, slipped it onto her face. ‘I guess you guys don’t need one of these, eh?’ Her eyes showed the smile had returned.
‘No, Tom,’ Teresa snapped. ‘It’s be tough now or everyone dies later.’
