It was dark. It was so dark that she thought she had gone blind. She felt around the floor and walls, bumping into boxes and crates. Metal. It was all metal.

Panic began to swell in her chest like a balloon. Her breathing picked up its pace, and she scrambled backwards into a corner as the cage she was in started to move.

Where am I?

The thought raced through her mind over and over again, but the thought she had next was somehow even more terrifying.

Who am I?

She thought hard, trying to remember her name, remember anything. She had no solid memories, like all the specific things that made her who she was had been plucked from her brain. She could not remember her family or friends or where she came from or how she got there. Hell, she couldn't even remember what she looked like or how old she was.

Her head was starting to hurt, and there was a dull throb in her left ear accompanied by a slight ringing that would not go away. She rubbed her ear with the heel of her hand, but that only made the pain worse.

She began to sob, and she pulled her legs to her chest, burying her face in her knees.

She didn't know how long she stayed like that. She cried for what felt like forever as she desperately tried to remember anything about herself or her past. Finally, the tears stopped coming, and a numbness spread through her body. Her head ached; her ear still throbbed, though the ringing had died down a bit.

The box she was in continued to move upward. It had been a long time now. Her eyes had not adjusted to the dark at all, and she feared that maybe she really had gone blind.

She took a few deep breaths, trying to ensure that she wouldn't freak out again. It would do her no possible good. She unfolded herself and shuffled around on the floor of the lift until she reached a box. Letting her fingers feel around the top, she opened the lid and hesitantly plunged her hand inside it.

She grabbed the first thing she felt and pulled it from the box. It felt like a bundle of rope. She sat it down beside her before digging back into the box. She pulled out what felt like an empty bag, a backpack maybe. She tossed it aside. Next, she found a shoe and then its pair.

Finally, she found something that could help her out just a little. Her hand closed around a metallic cylinder. Feeling the end of it, she knew it was a flashlight. She easily found the on switch.

Light flooded around her. She had been right; she was in a giant metal box. The confirmation didn't make her feel any better. In fact, the only bright side about having the flashlight was that she could now see that the top of the box looked as though it were supposed to open somehow. However, when and how and to what was still a mystery to her.

She shone the flashlight into the box and finished snooping around. If this huge trap was going to open, maybe there was something there that could help her out. She found another bundle of rope, an empty canteen, a couple of little boxes of matches.

She pulled the empty backpack from earlier towards herself and began packing in the supplies. Who knew what was waiting for her outside of this lift. She needed to be prepared to run, and she needed to be prepared to survive on her own.

She dug back into the box. Gardening gloves. Nails. A hammer. A pocket knife (which she slid into the back pocket of her shorts).

She moved over to a crate and pried the lid off. She almost rejoiced at the sight of the water bottles. She grabbed one, popping off the cap and downing half of it with ease. Grabbing a few more, she stuffed them into her backpack and moved on to another box.

She found bars of soap and a few extra pairs of socks and shorts and shirts that all seemed just a tad too big for her. She stuffed a couple in the bag anyway. She also found what appeared to be guys' underwear. She stuffed a couple of those into her bag as well. Better guys' underwear than no extra underwear at all.

She had gone through almost all of the items when the lift suddenly lurched to a halt with a loud clanking noise. She quickly grabbed the backpack and forced it to zip shut. With a deep breath, she switched the flashlight off and tucked it away in the side pocket of the backpack. She slung the bag over her shoulders and tightened the straps.

She waited, looking up into the complete darkness that had swallowed her up again. Then, stacking a few crates on top of each other against one of the walls, she carefully perched herself on top of them. She pushed on the top of the lift. Nothing happened. She tried again, and this time she had to stop herself from falling off the crates.

The top was sliding open with an awful grinding sound of metal on metal. The loud noise hurt her left ear, and she was almost tempted to cover it, but she needed to be prepared to jump out as soon as possible. She grabbed the folded pocket knife from her shorts and clutched it so hard in her right hand that she could feel the imprints it was leaving.

She heard noises–voices maybe. She stared calmly into the light, letting her eyes adjust to it. As soon as the opening in the top was big enough, she sprung upwards, landing on soft grass. She could hear the crash of the crates inside the box as they tumbled down. She rolled on the ground and jumped to her feet.

She spun in a circle, staring at the faces of about thirty-something boys of all different races and heights and ages. They stared at her in turn with confused and dumbfounded faces. She caught a few murmured words.

"What the shuck?"

"Is that a–a girl?"

"You gotta be shuckin' kidding me."

"She scattered all our supplies!"

She quickly flipped open the knife in her hand, and a few boys stepped back.

"Back off!" she warned, the sound of her own voice surprising her.

A rather tall boy with dark hair tentatively stepped towards her.

"Hey, slim yourself nice and calm. No one's gonna hurt you."

"Back off!" she said again, slicing at the air between her and the boy.

He held up his hands and stood still.

"My name's Nick. Can you tell me anything about yourself? How about your name?"

Her brow pushed together as she vaguely tried to remember anything once more, not that she planned on telling these people.

Enough people had backed away from her that she could finally assess her surroundings. She was in a huge field with trees and buildings and gardens. She looked up at the four enormous gray walls that surrounded the plain. Each had an opening down the middle.

A way out, she thought.

She looked back at the boys and suddenly lurched at a couple of them. They moved away from her, and she darted for the nearest wall opening. She clung to her knife tightly, and her backpack bounced on her back as her feet took her as fast as she could go.

The boy called Nick nodded ever so slightly towards a stony-faced Asian kid and a blonde boy with a square jaw. The two looked at each other, and then, they sprinted after the girl. They easily gained on her.

The Asian boy tackled her to the ground. She could hear the cheers from the crowd. She squirmed and tried to slash at him with her knife, but her arm didn't bend that way, and all she could see was the grass and dirt that her face was currently mushed in.

The other boy pinned her knife arm to the ground. As he pried her hand open, trying to disarm her, he kept saying,

"Calm down, calm down. Give me the knife."

"Go to hell!" she spat into the ground.

The blonde boy finally managed to grab the knife. The Asian kid got off of her and pulled her to her feet by the scruff of her neck. He pulled off the backpack she was wearing and threw it to the blonde kid.

She tried to wrench her neck from the boy's hand, but he just grabbed her hair, which had fallen out of the bun it was in. She yelped and clawed at his hands, but he only pulled harder. Directing her back towards the crowd of boys, the boy walked her forward, and she had no choice but to grudgingly comply.

"Alright, you shanks, get back to work," Nick said to the other boys, who groaned but walked away nonetheless with fleeting glances at the girl.

Nick turned his attention to the girl, who was still halfheartedly struggling against Minho. Nick nodded to Newt's hands.

"What's in the bag?"

"Just some of our supplies," he said.

Nick turned back to the girl, narrowing his eyes just a tiny bit.

"So in one day, you've managed to steal from us, threaten us, and tried to get yourself killed," he said, stepping towards her.

The girl clawed the air between them, almost catching the boy's face. The boy holding her let go of her hair and twisted her arms behind her back.

"Why are you doing this to me? What do you want?" she finally asked.

"We didn't do anything," Nick told her. "It's happened to all of us. We wake up in the box; we end up in the Glade."

The girl was wary of his answer. He could be lying.

"Why can't I remember anything?"

She hadn't meant to ask it. It had flown out of her mouth so fast that she hadn't had time to bite her tongue.

"Like I said, it happens to all of us. Now, if we let you go, are you gonna run again?"

The girl's hazel eyes involuntarily flicked to the nearest wall opening, and she said "no" far to fast for Nick to actually believe her.

"That's what I thought," Nick said. "Put her in the slammer, Minho."

Her eyes got wide at that.

"Wait! Please, wait!"

Minho pushed her forward, and she stumbled on her own feet as they dragged under her. She fought against him, wrenching her arms painfully as they approached the northern part of the Glade.

"Just slim yourself nice and calm," he said. "We're just putting you in there until the walls close. Can't have any Greenies running off into the Maze."

Greenies? Maze? she thought to herself. What is this guy talking about?

She was thrown into a sort of dirt pit with a roof and a cage door that Minho secured with an old, rusted lock.

"Shouldn't be long," Minho said, glancing down at her as he clicked the lock. "Box came up late today. Usually, I'm not even back to see the Greenbeans when they come up."

The girl watched him walk away. She wrapped her hands around the bars on the door and looked across the Glade to the South wall. Surely, nothing that big could close. Clearly, these kids were all lunatics. She needed an escape plan.

Pushing her face to the door, she eyed the West wall. The opening on that wall seemed to be shrouded by the forest. That door would be her best bet. She just had to play along with their game. She would sneak into the forest and leave then. Until that time, she was stuck in a dirt prison. How humiliating.

She hung her head, leaning her forehead against the door. A lock of hair fell into her line of vision, and she studied it curiously. It was dark brown and tangled. She ran her hand through it, wincing as she came across the matted knots.

About five minutes later, she was joined by another boy.

"Nick sent me over to get you out. Well, after the doors close anyway."

She gave him a rather cold look as she pulled up the few tiny blades of grass that had decided to grow in the pit.

"My name's Alby. You haven't told us yours yet, and I know you remember it. It's the only thing we all remember."

She looked up at Alby, and a mild look of pain briefly swept across her face. She was quiet for a while before finally deciding to talk to him.

"Is it true that you guys can't remember anything either?"

Alby sat beside the door and nodded.

"Woke up in the box with nothing but our names. We started off with about thirty. Then we got a new Greenie every month like clockwork. You're our seventh Greenie, and our only girl."

"You've been here for seven months?" the girl asked, choosing to ignore the last comment for now. "Why haven't you left?"

Alby gave her a hard look, as though he were offended.

"You think we wanna stay here, slinthead?" he snapped at her. "You don't just waltz out of the Glade and back to your life. It's a lot more complicated than that."

Suddenly, there was a loud boom that echoed through the Glade. The pain in the girl's left ear seemed to triple, and she doubled over, clamping her hands over it, yelling out. The pain was made worse by the horrible grinding sound that followed.

"Slim yourself, Greenie," Alby said, a look of worry flashing over his features. "It's just the walls closing."

The pain only got worse, and she squeezed her eyes shut, a few tears leaking out.

"Make it stop! Shut it off!" she yelled at the boy, thinking that maybe they had control of the awful walls.

"Cool it, Greenbean! The walls close every night. Can't nobody here stop 'em, and if you knew what was out there, you'd want them to close," Alby said.

She wasn't listening; the ringing in her ear came back at full force. When the walls had stopped moving, she held her ear until the pain settled back down to a dull ache. She looked back up. Past Alby, she saw that the walls had in fact closed, trapping her inside the Glade with these boys that she didn't know.

"You okay, Greenie?"

She looked up at him with watery eyes.

"Stop calling me that. I don't even know what it means," she said, her voice cracking just a bit.

"Well, if you tell me your name, maybe I'd call you by it instead," Alby replied.

She looked away from him, not wanting to admit that she didn't remember her own name. Alby rolled his eyes and shook his head.

"Fine, don't tell me," he said, pulling out a key. "Don't care no way."

He unlocked the door and pulled it open.

"Come on, Greenie. You got a lot to learn."