Soli Deo gloria
DISCLAIMER: I do NOT own The Maze Runner. When I first bought and read the three books in the series (plus the prequel), I wasn't too keen on it. Then months, months, later, my friend borrowed a couple and her enthusiasm made me want to read them again. BOOM, THEY TURNED OUT TO BE EXCELLENT BOOKS. (Perhaps the arrival of the movie instigated me reading them again as well.)
I was jogging and this idea popped into my head: after all, two minutes in jogging you feel like your legs will never stop hurting and that you can barely move for another second. Yet in The Maze Runner, Thomas learned that '. . . his body was in perfect shape.' Frankly, I find that hard to believe. He'd just survived a night out in the Maze and yet the next day BOOM he can run in the Maze again. The entire world is filled with the damage of sun flares and 99.9% of the population are not immune to the Flare, and yet, to me, the most unrealistic part of this entire series is that Thomas was able to run for miles on end in the Maze and not be a moaning, agonized pile of sore, strained muscles the next day. So, I'm trying to come up with some sandbags to plug up this plot hole. Hence, my attempt. :)
It was a long, white-walled room, stretching to the size of a football field. Thomas faintly remembered the idea of football, a game typified by a brown ball and men wearing bulky protective wear. Accordingly, though, the football fields of the world were gone, turned instead into grey, blackened tombs. Those that'd survived were nothing more than haunted, abandoned buildings, reeking of decay and disuse. Teresa had once asked about the sports of the old, pre-flare world, and that dismal account had been soberly related to them by WICKED staff members.
Needless to say, however, Thomas and Teresa both felt a hope for amusement still lasting despite the decimated world being destroyed.
Thomas and Teresa worked long hours in libraries, labs, conference rooms, and classrooms. They were the most promising, the most intelligent. One of the boys they'd sent to the Glade, who'd been dubbed Newt (they'd gotten into the habit of calling each other their new names before they went into the Maze. WICKED thought it would burn into their memories the new identifies they'd take when they entered the Glade), said that the two of them were " . . . a couple o' bloody nerds."
They couldn't help it. They both had active, curious minds. WICKED fostered their obvious inclination for knowledge with a bottomless pit of books, computers, and journals, even old newspapers they sneaked from old, important, flare-infested towns. Thomas and Teresa stayed up late conducting experiments, writing down observations, and having thoughtful discussions, which oftener than not turned into argumentative debates. However annoyed and frustrated they'd get, they'd somehow always end up talking inside each other's head and sending the other into a fit of laughter.
Their life at WICKED headquarters was hard enough without them being angry at each other for paltry matters for long.
They were the two most perceptive, the most promising; therefore the most was piled on them. Their meetings with WICKED staff members were nearly double the rest of the boys and girls. It'd be the two of them in a conference room with a bunch of professionally dressed, cold adults staring at them expectantly. The scientists around them would prompt them to tell them of their progress, and Thomas and Teresa (who was far more cooperative than him), reluctantly explained their latest discovery or book.
Months and months passed after the first Gladers were dumped into the Maze. Each month another boy and another girl went under the Swipe and were dumped unceremoniously into their particular Mazes. Thomas and Teresa watched with tightly pressed lips as their friends, their classmates, all went. It wasn't a worry over how they'd survive. They'd panic and cry the first week, but they'd be driven by the idea of survival and get integrated into the community. The beetle blades gave a first-person view of the entire Maze. Thomas and Teresa spent many an hour in swivel chairs, staring, awestruck, at the view of the Maze.
"It's massive," Thomas would often murmur to himself, half-amazed and half-horrified at what their brains had conceived.
"As the Gladers would say, It's shuckin' huge," Teresa said.
Each of the Gladers, before they were abandoned, clueless and vulnerable, in the metal Box, were trained to the utmost of their ability. WICKED had the idea that if they instilled many different survival skills into their subjects, they'd be able to retain most of the skills (if not the abilities) when they arrived in the Maze. Besides their classes with textbooks about the human brain and how best to stimulate it, the boys and girls had been trained in different survival skills, such as gardening, breaking sod, assuring the survival of their farm animals, how to build a fire, get clean water, etc. It mattered not that one of the parts of the plan was to send fresh supplies each week at a precise time. Thomas and the rest of the kids knew that Phase Two would require them to even tougher and grittier than when they had life in the domesticated Maze.
Thomas and Teresa had been far more occupied with the mental training than with the physical; so when the news dropped that they'd be soon going into the Glade, WICKED rearranged their schedule, to their silent dismay. Now half of their day was devoted to physical exercise.
The track was the size of a football field. The roof hung overhead a story high, and the walls were an uninspiring, bland white. Except for a little cut out and knob in one corner, the walls were seamless.
Lights shone from above. The track was separated into seven laps, lines and arrows and numbers marking the blue asphalt. A stainless steel bench screwed to the ground provided the only seating. Thomas sat with his hands clasped together and his knees sticking out. Teresa sat next to him nursing a half-filled, plastic water bottle. Neither of them said a word but each knew the other's thoughts.
Thomas sighed heavily and said, "What's the point? What's the point of me being physically fit if the End is coming just a few days after I arrive?"
"I don't know. But the better question is why I'm training with you," Teresa said. She cocked her head and said, "Well, since I'm arriving in a coma and all."
Thomas gave her a real, amused smile. "That's because you can't stand to see me suffer in silence."
"Maybe not. I could just as easily cheer you on from the bench, perfectly relaxed and unexerted," Teresa pointed out.
"You could. But you wouldn't," Thomas said.
Teresa sighed heavily and laced her arms around her drawn knees. "True, unfortunately," she said dejectedly, sighing heavily, which just made Thomas smirk. She glanced at her watch and said, "It's twenty 'til and you've got eight laps to go."
"Two miles in twenty minutes," Thomas muttered to himself. He got up, stretching his arms over his head, feeling the cracks and pops of his joints. His muscles ached from weeks of constant, unrelenting running. The other guys and girls laughed and called him a sissy every time he spent a free day in bed, all fatigued and sore. But then the guys and girls slowly disappeared out of the upper WICKED floors; descended into the Maze, only to be seen again from an impersonal screen.
Thomas thought uneasily of his fellow imprisoned comrades in the Maze as he stretched his arms down to the tips of his toes, the strain bearing on his shins. Many of them ran as Runners in the Maze. He knew he'd be one when he entered the Maze. Could he keep up with them? Well, not only physically in the Maze, but also in keeping with their community. Even with the Swipe, their personalities showed through as they became different people in the Maze. They'd been changed from pre-Maze kids to Gladers, yet retained many key points of their personalities. Newt, for example, was still humorous, orderly, and a good friend, just like he'd been in WICKED headquarters. But Thomas now wondered when he entered the Maze, would he still be able to be friends with these guys?
Teresa drained the water bottle and crumpled it as she swallowed thickly and stood up. "Bet you can't keep up with me," she said innocently. She began to bend and bow, like a tree in the wind, her fingertips touching the tips of her grey running shoes.
Thomas laughed. "Nah. I can beat you."
"Way to jump the gun. You know I'm a lot more motivated than you, and motivation counts for a lot," Teresa pointed out matter-of-factly.
"So does having longer legs," Thomas said. One of his legs stuck out at a perpendicular angle as he tried to make his point.
"Are you trying to prove a point, Thomas?" Teresa said. She glanced up from tying her shoes. Her blue eyes twinkled and dared him, and for once, Thomas felt an odd sense of doubt. She looked like she could easily beat him, run circles around him, in fact.
Teresa stretched slowly into a straight standing position, her hands bowed at her sides. She gave him the tiniest of raised eyebrows, a slip of a sneaky smile, a barely suppressed grin. And for the life of him, Thomas couldn't move. He simply stared at her, his mouth slightly agape until he closed it, swallowing nervously.
"I can beat you in a race. C'mon." Teresa walked easily up to the starting line, jumping in place. Her hair she slipped back into a dark ponytail.
Thomas slowly approached her side, taking lane 5. He craned his neck slightly, almost to catch her eye, to see her face and see it grin with laughter at him. But instead her icy blue eyes stared determinedly ahead, undeterred and unyielding to his attention.
"Hey. Teresa. You okay?" he asked softly. He waved a hand all in front of her face, but she didn't even blink.
"On the count of three, Thomas," Teresa said. Suddenly she dropped like she was dodging an arrow aimed straight at her heart. Her legs bent and her chest pressed against her knees, and her head tilted up slightly, her eyes peering up; her ponytail trailed along her shoulder and Thomas, oh, stupid, stupid, lovestruck, stupid Thomas, stared at her, forgetting that his running training was going to save his life in that winding, unforgiving Maze and its properly named Grievers.
"One," Teresa said.
Thomas's eyes slipped off her stony, determined face and onto her lane number. 6.
The track.
"Two." Her eyes flickered, just once, from ahead to above. She met his eyes and jerked his attention, yanked it straight down to the task at hand. Er, their feet.
Thomas felt a wash of realization and he nearly kicked himself as Teresa grinned in triumph to herself and whispered dangerously, "Three." And she didn't run or jog or even sprint but just went. Her arms swung in angles and her feet stomped and pushed away from the ground and sped away, light on her feet and her energy and determination carrying her farther and farther away.
Thomas cursed the second her hands lifted from the starting line and her body drew up and away. He caught back his balance and pushed himself forward, his feet echoing against the white, vast walls of the gym. His legs ate away at the distance separating the two as he knitted them closer and closer together. They sped along, parallel and almost together down the blue track. Two kids, young, healthy, strong, thin, their feet smacking against the hard track, their efforts full and hard. Their breathing was silent until they turned a corner and Thomas's heavy breathing filled his mind, and a burning filled his lungs, and his legs and body screamed in protest and yet he kept pushing forward. He had to catch up to her. Surpass her. Cross the finish line. Then turn back and greet her frustration and laugh at her scowl and stare wistfully at her.
He'd do all that. In the next two minutes. Hopefully in that order, anyway.
Teresa's breathing came out in fast little spurts, like she was half-choking the air she was swallowing. She came around the last curve and breathed in deeply and stared ahead, her jaw set and her lips pressed into a fine, stern line, and she sped forward.
Thomas launched himself after her, intent on beating her. Their moment of amusement and light banter was swept out of the moment. Their intentions turned from a friendly race to winning. Winning meant everything now.
Thomas felt sweat on the back of his neck. Even his months of constant, painful, relentless training sessions hadn't pained him like now. It was good practice for the Maze, then. But the Maze, and WICKED, and the sun flares were the least of his problems right now, right at the back of his mind. He came abreast to Teresa, whose face had gone white instead of a rough and ruddy red like his had. She breathed through her nose and yanked every breath in and out. She wasn't used to this. And her legs were shorter.
The finish line laid in white paint twenty yards ahead of them. Fifteen. Ten.
And Thomas found that one last reserve of energy, that one last spurt, that would from now on always find a way to come out in the end, and pushed his body, his aching legs, his thumping feet, across the line before Teresa could. And the guy's hands fell against his knees and he coughed and horked and snorted something awful. He drank in the fresh air like a fragrant wine. He felt a shudder run over him and he shook it off.
Less than a minute later he was looking over his shoulder, hurried and worried to find Teresa.
She'd sunken into a pile of limbs, her hands splat against the ground. Her body rocked as wave after wave of heavy breathing splashed back and forth within her. Her ponytail was broken, spilling out waves of black hair all about her head, curtaining her face from Thomas's view.
Thomas immediately walked over and fell to his knees besides her, whispering, "Hey, hey, Teresa, Teresa." His hands went to work stroking her pretty sweat-laced hair from her face. His hands hung like clasps against her cheeks, holding back her hair and tilting her head upwards to look him in the eyes. He sounded rough and breathy and really, really croaked.
Teresa, once she'd caught her breath, looked up. A crack in her hard expression showed when she said, swallowing, her voice as dry as sawdust, "Well. Something tells me you're going to be a Runner."
Her attempt at humor made Thomas feel better inside. "Yeah, maybe these past few weeks of training has something to do with that."
"Yeah. Maybe." Teresa breathed in deeply and drew back from his touch. She leaned back and back until she pulled her legs out and laid down, flat, on the track. Her chest inflated and deflated as her eyes flickered across the ceiling. They came across Thomas's watching her every move. She smiled a little at him.
"Fine. I didn't have to beat you. I just have to beat the Grievers," she said. Too cheerfully for Thomas's taste.
Thomas sighed and shook his head. "Yeah. I guess so." He wasn't in the mood to devote any of his thoughts to the gruesome Grievers, the looks, thoughts, and mechanics of which he knew all too well.
"Thomas," Teresa said. She held out her hand. It trembled from her running.
Thomas took it and pressed it between his two hands protectively.
Teresa smiled at his unspoken gesture and then closed her eyes. She relaxed, lying on that gym floor, and Thomas, for a long time, held her hand, not now or ever wanting to let her go.
So were Thomas and Teresa ever a properly named thing pre-Glade? 'In a relationship?' 'Besties?' 'It's complicated?' *shrugs*
Thanks for reading! (Review?) :)) God bless you!