Hello everyone! It's been almost a week since I posted chapter 17 of my Maze Runner fanfic, and now I'm finally getting around to posting the first chapter of the sequel! Yay! :D

Enjoy!

-Plerfstacks

P.S. If you haven't read my first fanfic (Before He Came), then this story probably won't make a ton of sense, so make sure to read that one first!

Chapter 1

Anna and Teresa's shared room was covered by a blanket of awkward silence for quite a while. The two girls had never been the best of friends, and now that they were in the same shucking room for a whole night, Anna didn't know what to do. She contented herself with staring up at the boards that made up the top bunk, which Teresa occupied. Anna realized that this was the first time that she could remember sleeping in a sturdy, air conditioned building that wasn't in danger of falling over. She frowned, unsure whether to feel happy that she finally was able to experience this, or annoyed that she had been deprived of such simple things. Anna didn't have to decide, however, because Teresa spoke from above her.

"Anna?"

"Yeah?" Anna replied.

"How long were you guys in the Glade before we got out?" Teresa asked.

Anna didn't have to think about the answer to that one, but it was a moment before she replied.

"Two shucking years."

Teresa fell silent as she apparently thought about this.

"Wow," she eventually said. After a moment, she spoke again. "And you were the leader from the beginning?"

Anna nodded, then realized that Teresa couldn't see her.

"Yep," she said out loud. "From day one."

"If you don't mind my asking… How?"

Anna frowned.

"What do you mean, how?"

Teresa paused for a second, apparently thinking about how to phrase what she wanted to say.

"You know… How did you get the position? Did they elect you?"

"No," Anna replied honestly. "I sort of elected myself. On the first day, we were super disorganized and didn't know what to do, so after we all woke up without our memories, I sort of began giving people instructions on what to do. The job stuck, I guess."

Teresa didn't reply, and the room lapsed into awkward silence once more. As the silence grew heavier, Anna surprised herself by speaking up.

"Teresa, I just wanted to, um, apologize."

"What?" Teresa asked. "What do you want to apologize for?" Anna sighed.

"You know. Being a shuckface to you and Thomas in the Glade. It's just that… I'd never really understood Thomas, and when you showed up the day after he did, I sort of pinpointed both of you as trouble. Then it turned out that you guys were actually the solution to all our problems."

Teresa didn't seem to know what to say.

"Uh… Thanks, Anna," she said after a while. "Apology accepted."

Anna could tell that their conversation was over, so she rolled over, her face towards the wall, and fell asleep.

Anna was awoken during the night by the sound of the door opening and somebody stepping heavily into the room. Anna blinked blearily as she glanced towards the door. She couldn't see anything, but as her eyes adjusted she could make out a very shadowy figure moving towards her, carrying something that looked dangerous. Anna was about to call for help when the person—whoever it was—leaned over her and aimed the dangerous-looking thing at Teresa, who made a small noise of surprise. A second later, Anna heard a quiet zap sound and the person picked Teresa up from the top bunk. Had he just killed her? What the shuck was going on? Anna was speechless as the person carried Teresa's limp form from the room and shut the door behind him. A quiet click told Anna that he'd locked it, but she climbed out of bed to make sure anyway. When she jiggled the doorknob and it didn't open, Anna crept back to her bed, shivering with unexpected cold, and after two hours or so she found sleep again.

When Anna woke up for the second time, daylight was streaming in through the window. She climbed out of bed, remembering suddenly what had happened to Teresa. She had to find a way out of the room. Picking up her switchblade, Anna walked over to the door, wondering if it really was locked, or if that had been a figment of her imagination.

"That won't work," said a voice directly behind her. Anna whipped around, brandishing her knife at whoever it was talking to her. In a flash, she'd pinned the sandy-haired boy up against the wall and was holding her knife inches from his throat.

"Who the shuck are you?" Anna hissed. The boy looked at her, wide-eyed. He glanced down at her knife's blade, and then back to Anna.

"My name is Aris," he managed. "I don't know what's going on. When I went to bed, I was in a room that looked like this one, but nobody was there with me. Now you're here, and you're, um, trying to kill me." Anna looked from the seemingly-innocent boy to her knife and back again. She reluctantly released him, and he stumbled away from her as soon as she did. She flipped her blade back into the closed position, staring at her new companion all the while.

Anna suddenly noticed something out of the corner of her eye, and she turned to the window, pushing the horrible frilly curtains away. The light was still very dim, but once she could make out what was out there, she recoiled at the sight of zombielike people trying to break into the room, clawing at the glass and pressing their faces up against it. Their faces were horribly lacerated, some of them missing an eye or their nose. Anna looked away from the awful scene outside, and instead focused on getting out of the room. She looked around for something to break out with. Her eyes landed on her boots lying on the floor, and she grabbed it and began to beat the living shuck out of the doorknob using the heel of her boot. After a few good whacks, it broke off and Anna slipped her feet into her shoes and pushed the door open. She immediately gagged at the smell radiating outward from the room on the other side, and her eyes began to water as she motioned for Aris to follow her.

The room was dark, much too dark to see; Anna and Aris tiptoed carefully through the maze of tables and chairs.

"Where's the light?" Aris whispered.

"Over here somewhere," Anna replied. She moved towards where she thought the light switch would be, but she was stopped by something hanging from the ceiling. She reached out and groped blindly around for what was in her way, and her hand closed around what felt like skin. She shuddered, but decided not to investigate this any further and instead look for the light switch. Finally she found it, on the far side of the room.

"Here it is," Anna said triumphantly, flicking it.

She immediately gasped in horrified shock as she realized what had been hanging from the ceiling. Aris was standing on the other side of the room, his mouth agape as they both took in the disturbing sight that they were seeing. There were shucking dead bodies hanging by their necks from the ceiling, and their faces were grotesquely purple and puffed out like they were holding their breath. Anna was struck by a sudden thought, and she looked around in a panic before realizing that these weren't the Gladers. They were, in fact, the people who'd rescued them the previous night, and Anna fought the urge to throw up as she looked upon the very dead faces of the people they'd talked to just the night before. She hurried over to the door that led to the boys' room, and yanked off her shoe so she could bash the doorknob off. Her hands were trembling as she hit the knob with her shoe and it clattered to the floor. She pushed the door open, revealing the Gladers standing inside, staring at her with a mixture of fear and relief on their faces. Newt was the first to rush forward, embracing Anna and then stepping back to look at her, Aris, and the room behind them.

"We thought you were somebody come to kill us all," Newt said breathlessly. "Gosh, Anna, you scared me." Anna smiled slightly and looked around at the other Gladers.

"Guys, this is Aris," she said, gesturing to him. "I don't know where he came from."

"Where the shuck is Teresa?" Thomas asked. "She was talking to me during the night; she said something was wrong."

Anna was momentarily confused, but then remembered that Teresa and Thomas had that freaky mind thing going on.

"I don't know," she answered. "Somebody came and took her during the night. Then Aris showed up."

Thomas looked slightly panicky.

"What if she needs help?" he fretted. "What if they're hurting her?"

"Relax, Tommy," Newt said. "I'm sure she's fine. And anyway, she can fend for herself. She's tough."

Thomas, though he nodded, still seemed worried.

"Look, Greenie," said Anna, though she now used the term as more of a nickname than an insult. "We'll find her eventually. For now, we just need to figure out what's going on."

"Right," Newt said, turning around to face the Gladers. As he did so, his long hair shifted to the left slightly and Anna could see something dark peeking through the back of his shirt.

"Newt," she said. "What the shuck is that on your back?"

Newt looked over at her, momentarily confused. Then he seemed to understand, and he nodded.

"They gave us all bloody tattoos," he said. "I dunno how they did it without us noticing, but we've all got one. You probably do, too."

"Do I?" Anna asked, turning around and moving her hair aside.

"Yeah," Newt replied. "It says, Subject A6—The Variable."

"The what now?" Anna asked.

"Well, I'm the bloody Glue, so I wouldn't be complaining," Newt said.

"And mine says that Group B is gonna kill me," Thomas added. "You should be grateful."

Anna was very confused.

"Group B?" she asked. Aris, to her surprise, nodded.

"Yeah," he said. "My group. I don't know where they went."

"Alright, we seriously need to discuss things with you, shank," Anna sighed. "You seem to know stuff that we don't. So start talking."

Aris frowned.

"Why me?" he asked.

"Just quit whining and explain, shuckface!"

Aris seemed offended, and maybe a bit intimidated, but he began to talk.

"Well, I don't know much more than you do," he said. "But all I know is that I woke up in a maze with a bunch of girls, and I was the only guy there. They didn't trust me, and the only one who I really made friends with was named Rachel. We eventually got out of the Maze, and we got to this weird-looking room, and…" Aris's voice began to sound choked. "And this girl called Beth, who'd gone completely nuts a couple days before, threw a—a knife—at Rachel. She died in front of me. Then we got taken here, and just when I thought we'd be safe, I was taken from my group in the middle of the night and the next thing I knew I was in a room with you." He gestured at Anna. "That's it, I swear."

Anna frowned.

"Okay. Then I guess we should focus on finding food. That should be our priority for now."

The Gladers nodded in consent, and they split up to go see if somebody had left them food lying around. Their search was fruitless, though, and they returned very discouraged.

"Hey, it'll be alright guys," Anna said, trying to sound confident. "They brought us here, didn't they? If they wanted to kill us, they would have done it before instead of letting us starve."

The Gladers didn't seem very reassured, but it was the best that Anna could do at the moment.

The next couple days were spent lying around in their room, very rarely speaking to one another. They weren't able to find food anywhere, and the group of seventeen Gladers grew weaker and weaker as the days passed. Anna didn't even try to motivate them, because she herself had fallen into a lethargic state of lying sprawled on a mattress, daydreaming about food. She tried to sleep most of the time, but found it hard to relax when she constantly felt like she was about to faint from hunger.

On the third day, Anna was roused from the state of half-sleep that she'd been in by a murmur of noise from the other Gladers. She sat up, her head spinning from just that small effort. She stood up laboriously and walked to where a group of five or so Gladers had gathered by the door, peering out into the large room on the other side. She pushed to the front of the group so she could see better. Anna's eyebrows shot up about an inch as she ogled the large pile of an apparently random selection of food ranging from apples to trail mix.

"Shuck," she murmured in awe. "They didn't decide to kill us after all."