Chapter Eight

I was in the Maze with the other Runners when Rachel came up in the Box; we returned to find everyone gathered around a girl we had never seen before, as far as we could recall, which for most of us meant however long we had been in the Glade. But those of us who had been through the Changing were different. Henrietta, Patra, Martha and Beth had all regained some of their memories, though, from what I'd seen, those memories were at best hazy; they all spoke of remembering "bad things" like the Flare, but they were unable to provide any details. And no-one, not even the four who'd found themselves on the wrong end of a Griever's sting, recognised anyone who came up in the Box - until Rachel arrived.

The other Runners and I had just finished our business in the Map Room and emerged to find Beth standing almost nose-to-nose with the newest addition to the Glade, yelling at her. I knew I shouldn't eavesdrop, but, with the way Beth was shouting, I couldn't help overhearing.

"Don't act all fuzzing innocent with me! I've been through the Changing and I saw you! You're with them!"

"I don't know what you're talking about," protested the new girl, whose name was unknown to me at that point. She was of average height and appeared to be around fifteen to seventeen years old, with dark skin and short, tightly curled hair. In short, not much different from the other girls in the Glade. "I can't remember anything before I woke up in that Box."

"The Creators!" Beth shouted at her. "The sticks who sent us here! And now they've sent you to take us home, where we'll all live happily ever after!" She gave a derisive laugh. "I don't think so! There's no such thing as "happily ever after"! The Flare . . . The Flare . . ." For some reason, she was unable to complete her sentence; she just kept repeating the same two words over and over. I'd seen this before, with all of those who'd been through the Changing, but the new girl obviously hadn't.

"Are you all right?" she asked, genuine concern showing on her face. It was clear that she didn't understand the reason behind Beth's outburst. Neither did I, come to that. Changing or no Changing, Beth had never made wild accusations against anyone until now; nor had Henrietta, Patra and Martha. But this girl, the fifty-ninth person to be sent to the Glade, seemed to have triggered something in Beth, causing her to turn on her for no apparent reason.

Beth gave the newcomer a shove, sending her sprawling on the ground. "Get away from me! You're evil! Bad! You should be thrown down the Box Hole! You . . ." She broke off suddenly as she glanced round to see several people, including Harriet and Sonya, standing there, watching with open mouths as she ranted and raved at our newest addition. Without saying a word, Harriet and Sonya stepped forward and, taking hold of Beth's arms, led her away. Beth struggled to get free and go after her victim once more, but our leaders' only response was to tighten their grip.

"That's enough!" Harriet said. "Rachel was sent here, same as you, me and everyone else in this fuzzing place. I don't know what connection you had, or think you had, with her before, but she's one of us now whether you like it or not. And you will leave her alone, unless you want to spend the next month in the Sin Bin. Is that clear?"

Beth nodded, albeit somewhat reluctantly. But it seemed even a reluctant nod was better than no nod at all where Harriet was concerned because she and Sonya immediately released their grip on Beth's arms. Beth walked away without looking back, leaving the new girl (Rachel, according to Harriet) standing there speechlessly, a look of utter astonishment on her face. And I couldn't blame her; it was bad enough that she'd had her memory wiped and been sent to this place, but to have someone accuse her of being in league with the people running this whole set-up . . .


Carrying the tray containing my evening meal, I was on my way to join Indira, Flossie and Christie when I spotted Rachel about to sit down at a table on her own. "Hey!" I called across to her. "Wanna join me and my friends?" She hesitated, the memory of Beth's outburst clearly fresh in her mind; it was equally clear that the incident had made her reluctant to approach the other girls in the Glade. "Come on," I told her. "We won't bite."

In the end, Rachel agreed to accept my offer, probably the first friendly gesture she had received since arriving in the Glade, and followed me to the table where my three friends were already seated. It was at the far end of the Mess Hall, so we had to pass quite a few people to get there; this included Beth, who glowered at Rachel, but didn't say anything since Harriet and Sonya were at the same table and she wasn't about to risk seeing if Harriet would make good on her promise to send her to the Sin Bin if she bothered Rachel again. I told Rachel to ignore her. "Most of us are OK round here," I said. "It's just the ones who've been through the Changing who are . . . different."

"That's what she called it." Rachel nodded in Beth's direction, then quickly looked away. "But what does it mean?"

Describing what happens to someone who's going through the Changing is a sure fire way of putting people off their dinner, so I just told Rachel that a few of the girls, including Beth, had been stung and it had done strange things to them, changed them. None of us knew much about the Changing apart from the four who'd been through it already and they wouldn't (or couldn't) talk about it, but it somehow brought back fragments of memory. However, no-one knew what caused the changes in behaviour that went with the process. Flossie had a theory that it was something to do with whatever had caused us to lose our memories in the first place, but it was just a theory, nothing more.


Not long after this, the two of us joined my friends at their table. As we tucked into the roast lamb and vegetables which Marie and her Cooks had prepared, my friends and I told Rachel about ourselves, how Indira and Flossie had been among the first girls sent to the Glade, how I arrived a month later, how Christie came a month after that. We also talked about our jobs, explaining that Flossie and Christie were Medics, while Indira and I used to be Medics but had later become Runners.

"What's a Runner?" asked Rachel, an expression of intense curiosity etched on her face.

"It's what we do," I said, nodding towards Indira. "You see, we're in the middle of a huge Maze and we're looking for the way out." I glossed over the fact that, even after more than two years, we'd had no luck finding an exit; Rachel would find that out for herself soon enough. "The Runners are the ones who map the Maze, but it's not easy because the walls move every night. Same time as when the Doors close," I added, recalling how surprised I had been when I first saw those impossibly tall stone walls start to move. By now, I was so used to seeing it happen that I hardly took any notice; it was just part of our daily routine and I had long ago ceased to think about what kind of mechanism might lie behind it. Like everyone else in the Glade, I was just grateful that the Doors closed without fail at the end of each day, protecting us from the horrors that roamed the Maze after hours.

"Weird," Rachel said after a while.

My friends and I looked at her. "What's weird?" Christie asked, her mouth full of food.

Rachel paused for several seconds before replying. "I don't know. I just had a sudden . . . feeling that I've been here before. All this seems familiar somehow." She looked at each of us in turn, as though she was studying us, trying to figure out what made us tick. "Have any of you ever felt like that?" she asked after a while.

We shook our heads. "No," I said. In all the time I'd been here, I'd never once experienced even a flash of deja vu, never sensed that I'd somehow been in this place before I was sent up in the Box. Everything that had happened to me before I woke up to find myself in total darkness had been wiped from my memory; even now, I could recall facts about the world, but not how and where I had learned that information, nor how it related to me as a person. And I'd long since given up trying to remember, choosing to focus on building new memories, memories of the Glade and the girls to whom it was both a home and a prison. Admittedly not all of those memories were pleasant, but at least I had memories now, which was more than I'd had when I first arrived.

With Rachel, however, things seemed to be different. She'd said she felt as though she'd been here before, though she was unable to elaborate when we asked her what she meant by that. Perhaps the Creators hadn't been as thorough with her memory wipe for some reason and a few traces had been left behind, though that didn't explain why she'd said this place seemed familiar. Unless Beth's allegations had some basis in fact and Rachel was indeed involved with the Creators in some way. Which she might well be; there was no way of knowing since her memory loss made it impossible for her to confirm or deny this.

I immediately dismissed the idea. As Harriet had said earlier, Rachel had been sent here just like everyone else; she was no different from the rest of us. She was just another teenaged girl who'd been taken from her family and had her memory wiped of all personal information except her first name, before being sent to the Glade. Whether she'd been involved with the Creators or not didn't matter; she was one of us now, for better or for worse. It was probably best to regard Beth's accusations as the ravings of someone who'd been through the Changing and was still suffering from the lingering effects.

In any case, Rachel had just found another question to ask. "So how do you become a Runner?"

That at least steered our conversation away from the tricky subject of whether or not we'd ever had any flashes of memory that might suggest we'd been in the Glade before we arrived in the Box. "You need to prove yourself," I replied. "If you do, one of the Keepers might recommend you to Yoko - she's the Keeper of the Runners. But not many sticks make the grade and it can be dangerous out in the Maze. People have died in there," I added. "Either that or they've been stung by the Grievers - they're a kind of giant slug - and gone through the Changing. And you've seen what that did to Beth." I meant this to be a warning to Rachel that she might want to put any ambitions she might have of becoming a Runner on hold, at least for a while. Instead, it served as a catalyst for a series of questions which kept Indira and myself up long after everyone else had gone to bed.


The next day began like any other. After eating our breakfast in the Mess Hall, the other Runners and I entered the Maze and began another day's worth of running through those ever-changing passages, searching for the exit which continued to elude us. At the end of the day, we returned to the Glade and entered the Map Room, where we set to work drawing up the day's Maps. This was followed by the usual routine of examining our efforts and comparing them to the Maps we'd drawn over the last few days, hoping there might, just might, be a pattern to the way in which the walls moved. We'd concluded long ago that something about those movements had to be significant, but we couldn't figure out what it was and we had no more luck that evening than we'd had on previous occasions. Finally, we decided to call it a night and hope we'd have better luck tomorrow. Just as we'd done the evening before, and the evening before that . . .

As usual, Yoko was the last of the Runners to leave the Map Room. She was just locking the door when the alarm suddenly rang out across the Glade, causing all of us to look round with a start. We knew what that loud clanging meant, even though, barring the odd late arrival, we were usually out in the Maze when the alarm went off; some poor kid was being sent up in the Box, scared and alone, robbed of all personal memories except their first name. But, after the initial group of thirty, the Creators had always sent one person a month. Rachel had only arrived yesterday, so why was the alarm ringing now? There was only one way to find out.

"Let's get over there!" I called to Indira and Cass, the two Runners nearest to me. We started running in the direction of the Box, followed by the other Runners, arriving to find several girls grouped around the hatch. From the buzz of conversation among them, I gathered that they didn't know what to make of this new development.

"What's going on?"

"Have the Creators changed the schedule? Is it gonna be one new stick per day now?"

"Either that or they've decided to send the next kid a month early."

"But why? It's always been once a month until now. Why would they change it?"

"Search me. But there's something weird going on here."

"Yeah. First Beth flips out as soon as she sees the new kid . . . What's her name again? Rachel? So Beth flips out when she sees Rachel, accuses her of all sorts of stuff. Then, the very next evening, we get another new kid."

"Like I said, weird."

Spotting Indira and me, Rachel hurried over to us, looking as confused as everyone in the Glade. Actually, she was probably even more confused. The rest of us already knew about the alarm; it was just the fact that it wasn't supposed to sound today that had thrown us. When something has happened on the same day every month for more than two years, you expect it to keep happening on that day every month. So, when that schedule is changed suddenly and without warning, it's only natural to assume something must be going on. But at least most of us knew what the alarm was for. Rachel, as the newest addition to our little community, didn't and her next words made that clear. "What's happening? Why did that alarm ring just now?"

Indira and I quickly filled her in on the Box, explaining how it came once a week to deliver supplies, once a month to deliver a new person. The alarm only ever sounded if there was someone in the Box, but it hadn't been due to go off today and the fact that it had gone off was making people uneasy. Like I said, most of us had grown used to that alarm ringing on the same day every month, but it had never sounded two days in a row - until now.


A muffled boom told us the Box, along with its occupant, had arrived. As usual, everyone crowded around the hatch, eager to catch their first glimpse of the Glade's newest resident. I could hear people speculating loudly about what they might find when the Box was opened up. A girl called Jody suggested that perhaps it wasn't a person but a map showing us how to get out of here; she received several glares for saying something so stupid. Vera said it might be Felicia and Caroline, rescued from the Maze and sent back to the Glade. After all, their bodies had never been found and, unlike when Ada was killed, none of us had seen them die, so they might still be alive. That, however, sounded even more unlikely than Jody's suggestion about the map.

"Let us through! Make way!"

Everyone moved aside at the sound of Harriet's voice, making a path for her and Sonya. This path ended at the Box and, within moments, our two leaders were kneeling beside the doors on which Sonya had once painted the ominous warning about what would happen to anyone who thought the Box Hole might serve as an escape route. As they had done many times before, Harriet and Sonya opened up the hatch and peered into the Box, taking in the person who had until that moment been imprisoned in its dark interior. So far, so normal, apart from the fact that whoever was in the Box had arrived nearly a month early according to our usual schedule.

But, then, Sonya said three words. "That's not right."

"Very much not right," agreed Harriet. She straightened up and shook her head in disbelief. "What are those fuzzing Creators up to this time? First the alarm goes off twice in as many days, then they send us a . . ." She paused for several seconds as though whatever she had been about to say was so unbelievable that she didn't know how to say it. "That's never happened before," she added, shaking her head again.

"What do you mean?" asked a girl named Wendy. She'd arrived in the Glade eight months after me and was one of Victoria's Farmers, but that was all I knew about her. "What's never happened before?"

Harriet answered Wendy's question with one of her own. "Apart from having lost our memories, what does everyone here have in common? Or, rather, what did everyone here have in common?"

The only reply she received was several blank looks, forcing her to come right out and reveal what she and Sonya had seen when they opened the Box. "The new kid," she told us with the air of someone delivering a piece of very important news, "is a boy."