Jessica remembered the last few years of her life in great detail. Oh yes, how she remembered. Her life flickered in memories in her mind. Every action, every single word she spoken, how it had all led to this moment.
It started with her job at WICKED. She was always called smart growing up, and it was natural for her to join the company that was dedicated to find a cure. She, determined inside her mind, would be the one to find a cure. She would help end the disease and all of this madness. She was twenty years young with a dream and a set destination in her mind. With a mind filled of imagination and will-power, she walked into the walls of WICKED.
She remembered meeting the Creators. They were the head of the company, the sole founders. Warm smiles and greetings were passed around. They talked with her, admiring her passion and skills. She smiled brightly, feeling giddy inside as she watched them praise her work. One commented that she would be a great addition to the science department. She had left that building feeling proud and confident.
It had almost been to easy to get a job. Maybe WICKED was desperate to find people to help with a cure. Jessica wasn't complaining. Immediately she had started on her work. It was observing the blood of immunes. Something made them different from everyone else. The fact that they were young- the oldest person found with immunity was a mere 13 years old- weighed heavily on her mind. That's something she should look into, she decided, as she placed the vial filled with blood on the rack. She brushed a strand of hair that had fallen into her face and looked towards the windows of the lab.
Something caught her attention, however. A small boy, around 4 or 5, was being escorted by a scientist. She would later learn that his name was Thomas. Rather, his new name was. She had flinched when she heard his screams. His high-pitched screams. They resonated within her ears. He hadn't begged them to stop, oh no. He had repeated his old name for an hour, before he finally accepted it.
She was doing the right thing, she promised herself later when she was alone in her room. WICEKD is good. WICKED was doing the right thing. They were going to find a cure. The ends justified the means. Everything will be normal again. Thomas will be okay. WICKED is good.
She repeated those last words inside her head as she cried herself to sleep.
She was around twenty-seven when rumors of a new experiment started to fly around the lab. A major one that would take up a lot of their resources. A maze. The four kids around the compound were to help build it. At least, Thomas and Teresa one, and Aris and Rachel, the other.
She hadn't seen much of Thomas ever since he had past by her window that first day. She hadn't seen much of the other kids either, but Thomas stuck out to her the most. He was strong-willed and very intelligent, even as a young teenager. She was told that he was being kept isolated and in schooling. It was part of the experiment for a cure, as he was an immune. All the four kids were. The plan was to introduce him to everyone else soon, and Jessica couldn't wait to meet him. From his teachers, he sounded like a genius.
One day, Jessica had been called into the Creators offices. She sat in the chair in front of them, feeling extremely nervous and anxious. She carefully watched their faces as they broke the news to her. She was being moved to a very important project, with an important job. The Maze Trials.
They explain to her how she was a loyal and intelligent worker, and that she deserved to oversee the maze that Thomas and Teresa were to work on. She would have a handful of workers under her command, ranging from scientists to engineers to builders. Once the trials were started, she would be a head scientists in analyzing the data they received. They said they expected a lot from her, and they hoped she would live up to it. She had stood up, profusely thanking them as she shook their hands. She was getting the chance she wanted. Finally, finally, she was working with some great data that had the potential to solve everything. She was getting all of the puzzle pieces, she just had to start putting them together.
The next day, she was reassigned. She had met Thomas and Teresa, brilliant young minds, and had started to work on the project with them. She had fun in drawing out plans, arranging pieces, and looking at data. She had continued like that until the end of the building.
One day, she met all of the test subjects. The trials were done with construction, and everything was hooked up. All that was left was to prep the first group of subjects and send them in.
She had seen the teenagers from a distance. She wasn't working in the health department, so there was no need to meet them just yet. She watched as they all talked and had a great time together in the cafeteria. She knew what they were for, obviously, but that fact hadn't really registered until she was standing over them lying in a hospital bed.
"You'll be fine." She had smiled over them. "You're very important to our research, and we appreciate everything you're doing for us." She had said.
Plastering a smile to her face, she watched as they had screamed and struggled as the memory wipe began. She had helped design it, yes, but she had never seen it in action. She pressed her lips together, noting a few things on her clipboard as she saw the subjects slowly start to lose consciousness. "Pre-" She stopped, and cleared her throat. Her voice was weak and scratchy. "Prepare them for transport." She said, much more clearly. She spun on her heel and left the room. She had a lot of data to analyze.
The screams of the teenagers were on repeat in her head as she tried to break down the brainwave patterns she had recorded from their memory swipe.
She was still the head scientist for the Maze Trials as Thomas went in. She thought it a bit odd that Thomas wanted so desperately to take part of it. She remembered seeing his disgust as he watched the screen. She shook her head, and watched him enter the Glade (as they called it) for the first time. It was a year since the Trials had first started, and the data they were collecting were fascinating, yet she was no closer to a physical cure. Sure, it helped them understand the difference between immunes and non-immunes, but it didn't help her understand how to put that into a cure. Millions of questions still ran through her head, yet she pushed it aside. Maybe Thomas' data would be different, be useful.
She had watched all of the important parts of Thomas' life in the Glade. Specifically, Thomas running into the maze at night. Tears streamed down her face. She knew he was going to die. As the boys had said, no one had survived a night in the maze. It was gruesome and viscous. How Thomas and Teresa and her could create something so evil and awful, she would never know. No one was supposed to die in the Maze Trials, yet they still did. They were labelled as accidents, and the trials kept on. However the list on the Glade wall was growing longer and longer. Thomas was sure to join them.
She had almost cried tears of relief when Thomas appeared in the doors the first glimpses of light. He was bruised and bloody, and obviously exhausted, but he was alive. She had closed her eyes and sunk down in her chair. She was up the entire night, just watching the cameras. A child was left to die, one that she knew well, and she couldn't sleep. But for now, Thomas was safe, and he was alive.
She wouldn't realize until later that Thomas reminded her of her little brother that succumbed to the Flare when she was thirteen.
Jessica never really thought about not being immune until an outbreak spread. The Creators were dead. They had contracted the virus and had gone with an e-mail and well wishes. They all committed suicide overnight, along with a handful of guards and scientists. A bit of everyone from every department had died overnight. Some sort of pact, or a mass-suicide.
She had a panic attack in the bathroom when she heard about it. She thought she was safe here in WICKED. The doors were locked, bacteria was always being killed, and everywhere you looked there was Flare-prevention equipment. She had fallen to her knees in them middle of the restroom, finding it hard to breathe.
Now she was forced to realize that she was never safe anywhere. She was never going to be safe until she found a cure. She gasped between shallow breaths, sitting on the ground, as she thought of everything. She thought of the teenagers in the Maze Trials. She thought of her parents that had fled the city, and her brother that died of the disease. She grasped at her chest as it started to loosen.
She stood up and fixed her appearance. She was going to find a cure, she just knew it. She would stop at nothing to make sure this wouldn't happen to anywhere ever again.
In the back of her mind, she didn't truly believe that. But it was the only thing that kept her going.
Jessica was having a normal day. After Maze A had escaped, she was now reassigned to recording and analyzing data from the teenagers. She was also to monitor their brainwaves. She had just finished drawing Subject A5's blood for the third time, before she sent him back to their room. She grabbed a petri dish and squirted some out. He wasn't an immune, and she needed a control to compare the blood samples to. She had just set down the dish when it happened.
The alarms will ringing all over the compound. She darted through the doors to the lab as the warning bells blared. She sprinted down the hall, her lab coat flying behind her. She was holding a large pipe to defend herself. She wasn't trained in defense the like the guards, didn't have a Launcher. She didn't know what was going on. Cranks? Escapees? She didn't have an idea. Well, she didn't until she saw the teenagers. They had just turned the corner, out of sight, when she spotted them. The underlying panic had started to ease a tiny bit. Cranks hadn't breached the city and the walls, it would be okay.
Even though Thomas and the other teenagers were the most promising results she's had in a while, she thought it was better to let them escape then have Cranks run into the building. She briskly walked down the corridor now, her arms resting easy at her sides.
She was there at the walls when Thomas squeezed himself under the shutting gate. She gave a small, sad smile when he flipped A.D Janson off and ran away. Everything would be okay. WICKED would get them back and she could restart her research.
Deep down, she wished that WICKED would never find them. She wished that the teenagers could live a happy life with the rebels outside the city. They deserved that much.
It had been probably a year since Thomas' escape from WICKED. Jessica was now a weary thirty year old. Teresa was back in the labs, now with all of her memories, and a new passion for finding a cure. Many events happened over the year, too many, that she didn't even know the full extent off. Jessica had been reassigned to taking data from Minho, one of the immunes that they had recaptured from the raid WICKED had conducted, many months ago. The teenagers hadn't come back for him, and frankly, she didn't know if they ever would. Nevertheless, she continued her research. They were promising, and her and Teresa were developing stages of a cure that were being tested.
However, she didn't know if Minho's blood was enough, or even the right one. With each immune, their blood was slightly different. Something caused their genes to mutate to either fight or defend against the virus, so each person was unique, only slightly. To make a cure, they needed a very specific type of blood. One that she only found in Thomas. She didn't have any of his blood left to test her theory though, having it been accidentally spilled when the panic of Maze A breaking out.
She sighed through her nose, and placed another sample of the virus on Minho's blood. It was way too dangerous to use a live version of the Flare in contained quarters, and yet that was only for the ready-to-die scientists, of which she was not, yet. So, she had created an adaption, removing its ability to spread like a germ, and altered a few versions to make it behave correctly. It didn't stand up to the actual Flare, which explained why all of their cures weren't working on people with the actual disease.
Teresa made a pleased noise and called her over. Teresa had been working on something that Jessica had started. She was fixing it, trying to force the potential cure to work. "I think its working!" She crowed, filling a syringe with a blue liquid.
Jessica looked at her and grinned, walking with her to the non-immune subjects infected with the Flare. Jessica watched as Teresa injected the cure into a young girl. This would work. This had to work. All of her hard work of the past ten years boiled down to this cure.
Jessica watched as the girls body rejected the cure, only a few short days later. Needless to say, it hadn't worked.
Jessica was already making her way down the stairs as soon as the alarm had sounded. She knew something was wrong, catching a glimpse of Teresa and Thomas in the building. She grabbed the handhold attached to the wall as things around her shook. The city was under attack. It had been like this for a while. People were living in fear as those outside the walls tried to make their way in. But it had failed each time. However this time, they had succeeded. And they used a lot of explosives.
People screamed from outside the building as her feet hurried faster down the stairs. The elevators were too risky to go in, and she didn't want to get trapped in there. She almost tripped down the stairs, holding the handhold again to steady herself. She ran through the entrance as soon as she hit the bottom ground. Immediately, smoke stung her eyes and filled her lungs. She coughed heavily, holding her shirt to her nose and mouth as she ran away.
She didn't know where to run, she just knew to run away from WICKED. Perhaps the teenagers in Maze A were trying to rescue their friend finally, or the rebels outside had found a way in. Either way, WICKED would be a target. But there was nowhere safe to run to. All around her, buildings were on fire. She flinched from explosives as they rocked the small city to the ground.
In her gut, Jessica knew this would be her end. Even if she survived the mass bombing of the city, where would she go? She wasn't immune, and couldn't survive past the borders of the quarantined city. The disease would still be in the air, and was carried by those that were immune, even if they weren't affected by it.
Overcome by an odd calm, Jessica stood in the middle of the street as she reflected over her life. It had been short, yes, and most of it was in pain and suffering. She had doubted herself many times, and in the end, hadn't reached her goal. There would be no cure, but after this, there would be no infected. She pushed away her feelings of guilt. Guilt for Newt trying to take his own life, guilt for Thomas' poor childhood, guilt for Minho's suffering as their lab rat. Instead, she cleared her mind as she watched a hurtling bomb come closer to her. It landed near her, and the ticking filled her mind as the clock counted down.
She closed her eyes, and waited.