Disclaimer - The Maze Runner belongs to James Dashner. As this is a reworking of a scene from The Scorch Trials itself, the majority of the dialogue between the TMR characters, as well as the setting/plot itself, were written by James Dashner. No copyright infringement is intended!
Chapter 25 - Running, Raids and Confusing Reunions
Ten Days Later
"These boys better be really, really hot." Karly gasped as we staggered up to the top of yet another underground incline on our way to Janson's specified point to meet Group A.
"Don't get your hopes up." The sporadic half-light of the tunnels illuminated Teresa's wry smile a few steps ahead as the scattered laughter of those who had heard echoed off the walls.
If we'd been tracking the days correctly, we'd been in the web of tunnels for just over a week. The walls were polished metal, the floors nothing more than dirt packed hard by the tens of people who must have come through here before us.
At first, we'd thought the tunnels belonged to WICKED, another Maze-like structure, but the more we looked around as we walked (and there was very little else to do, other than thinking about Thomas Edison, which all of us were trying not to do) the more it became clear that the tunnels had another use. There had once been long strips of circular lights running the whole length of the tunnel, but by now, barely any of them were working – we would walk miles in total darkness, other times there would be five or six working bulbs in one area. The only daylight we'd seen was in the occasional sections of the tunnel that contained 500m skylights and an emergency exit. Every 100m or so were the remains of emergency telephones – most of which appeared to have been gutted with something, circuits sparking and insulated wires hanging out like electronic entrails. There were markings and ragged posters all over the walls – some advertising local fast-food stores, others advertising theatres and gyms in towns that had once been nearby. These had all been covered over more recently with laminated signs describing the progression of the Flare and an emergency number for 'sightings'. Like wild animals. Nobody read those more than once.
One of the eeriest things about the tunnels was the jumble of random objects that littered them, fragments of discarded humanity. More books than you could count – classics like 1988, Treasure Island, Jane Eyre and Grapes of Wrath, mixed in with 'Watership Down', 'Harry Potter' and a disconcerting number of survival pamphlets – all of them slightly damp and yellowed from the humidity and the air down there, broken Kodak cameras, odd items of clothing, yellowed and riddled with holes, and lone childrens' toys slumping in corners, abandoned to the dust, the lint balls and the damp. Why they had been discarded – an escape to a new life, succumbing to the Flare or succumbing to one of its victims – we couldn't know for sure, but, in the almost continual half-light, our imaginations were more than willing to fill in the gaps.
I mean, the Cranks had also been a pretty big clue that these tunnels didn't belong to WICKED. There were signs of them everywhere: some Flare posters that had been torn down from the walls, their protective plastic splintered, abuse scrawled over others, the remains of what looked like disembowelled animals that I'd rather not think about appeared every mile or so and, in a number of the cubicles where the emergency telephones had been, there were deep scratches in the walls that no desert animal could have made. As sickening as all of that was, it was the easy part. In some of the other emergency cubicles, there actually were Cranks – usually one, maybe two – rocking backwards and forwards in the narrow space, gnawing or mumbling incantations into the darkness. Some of them shouted at us, others didn't. We never stopped either way.
It was on the sixth day, about fifty miles deep in the tunnels that we met the wandering band of Cranks near Emergency Exit 87. Like the man we'd seen outside the bus, they were wearing normal clothes, but their bodies were emaciated, worn away in the tunnels, their faces scratched and bleeding. They didn't even wait to speak before they leaped at us, seven or eight of them, tearing at our packs and our faces, screaming unintelligible abuse all the while. They were so strong. Even the smaller ones. But they were so far Gone that it only took a few well-aimed arrows and fifteen minutes before they lay on the ground around us. There was something immensely different between killing a mechanised monstrous slug in a Maze and killing a breathing human being. Nobody spoke for hours after that. To my surprise, it was Teresa who had mentioned it first, as we tried to force beef jerky and apples down our throats that night:
"We had no choice. They'd have followed us otherwise. We could have lost people and they would have attracted others."
I didn't ask her why she was so sure. I didn't want to think about there being an alternative to what we had done to them.
The only other unusual encounter we'd had with Cranks had happened the day before. Clanging sounds had echoed up the tunnel from one of the nearby junctions. Instantly, we'd formed a huddle, weapons out – bows, arrows and spears pointed towards the source of the noise. After a few of seconds, a couple had appeared from around the corner – the thumping had been their feet as they ran across the dusty ground. One of the figures was male, the other female, both tall and thin and both had wrapped their heads and faces in frayed beige cloth with slits cut for them to see and breathe through. The only visible parts of their bodies were their hands – the skin scorched to a dark red, cracks and oozing blisters standing out against it.
They'd told us they were Cranks from a city up ahead. Told us that not all Cranks were 'past the Gone' – so sick that they were animals. Some of them were still human, just not the humans they had been. Told us we had to learn 'who to make friends with and who to avoid. Or kill' and that we'd 'better learn quick if you're coming our way.' The two had demanded to know where we'd come from, how we'd got here, asking with a feverish intensity from the eight metre distance they kept between themselves and our spears, but as soon as we mentioned WICKED and our task, they lost interest. WICKED were clearly old news around here. They told us one last thing before sprinting back off up an emergency exit, leaving us blinking in the burning shaft of daylight they'd created:
"If you don't have it yet, you'll have it soon."
And so we kept walking. Walking. Rest. Food. Sleep. Toilet break. Running. Walking. Food. Walking. Running. Rest. Sleep. Walking. Running. Every once in a while we'd meet a fork in the road and pull out the maps to decipher Janson's instructions and hope we hadn't turned the wrong way somewhere else and were walking blindly into the den of a flesh-eating horde or a sea of empty tunnels where we'd eventually starve. So, we'd been wandering through like that, checking the maps whenever there was a light, rationing food, sleeping whenever we couldn't stand and keeping lookouts as often as we could.
Until Sonya, at the front of the group on the tenth day, stumbled and stopped – so suddenly that Mariella went careening into the back of her, almost knocking her into Harriet.
"What is it?"
"Why have we stopped?"
"If we stop, Sonny, I'll never be able to start going again."
"Shush a minute, guys." Sonya pulled her rucksack off her back and rummaged around in it for the map we'd been given, before pointing down at whatever had tripped her up. "Look. I think this is it. And the instructions say it wouldn't be glowing unless Group A were in visible range."
Embedded in the earth by Sonya's feet was a 'W' crisscrossed with lines, so small it could have been mistaken for a broken VW badge, except for the fact that the metal was shining with the same blue light that had appeared when Janson arrived back at the Rescue Centre. This was what we'd been looking for for ten days – a badge the size of a bottle cap?
Charlie had found her map now and offered it to Sonya, her fingers resting on the identical symbol in the centre and the words below it, printed in the same cerulean. INITIATE MISSION.
"Well that's helpful." Everyone was clustered around the blue W, trying to make sense of the information and Karly was standing at the front, her arms crossed and her eyebrows raised. "We're in a metal rabbit warren. How do we 'initiate mission' from down here?"
Charlie frowned and picked up the map from the ground, her grey-blue eyes focused on the symbol. "Can I try something, Harriet?"
Harriet looked surprised and a little pleased that she was still being consulted – without words Teresa had made it very clear that she was assuming the role of leader in this task, and with her knowledge of both Thomas Edison and Group A, we hadn't staged a coup yet. "'Course, Charl. Last time you did that, you got us out of the Maze, didn't you, whiz kid?"
Charlie smiled briefly but her eyes never left the symbol as she stepped back and forth on the spot, holding the map at 90 degrees. "It's just that I thought I saw something on it earlier – when they first gave it to us next to the Flat Trans – but then it disappeared. But this light is the same, so if I could just – yes!"
The younger girl stopped dead, holding the map completely still and blowing her hair out of her face. "There."
As she held the map and the ink symbol itself over the metal symbol in the ground, slowly but surely, more letters began to form on the paper, illuminated by the blue light.
LEAVE VIA THE NEAREST EMERGENCY EXIT. OBSERVE ALL SIGNS, LADIES – J.
"All that just to tell us to use the fire exit?" Mariella rolled her eyes, but as she was closest to the ladder, swung herself up onto it. "Now what did he mean about the sign? We've seen most of these before."
Mariella was right – the majority of the posters on the emergency exit shaft that we'd all crowded into seemed to just be photocopies of the ones that had lined the walls for the last forty miles: Flare warnings, emergency numbers and restaurant advertisements. But, near the top of the ladder, just below the wheel that would allow us to open the escape hatch was a small red sign, almost hidden behind the bars.
"What about that one, Ella? By the wheel?" I called up. She saw it too and climbed up a couple of rungs until the sign was at eye level.
"Yeah...yeah, we haven't seen this one before. It's a warning sign. It says 'Location Warning: extreme heat.' And then there's another one that's been stuck below it that says: 'Location warning: flat ground?' Guess we'd better sort those before we think about anything else?"
Mariella leapt back down to the ground as Teresa frowned and stepped forward.
"Okay, so extreme heat is obvious. We saw it with those Cranks yesterday – it's clearly at least 45 degrees centigrade out there and it's desert, so there isn't going to be any protection."
Fi's voice came from the back of the crowd: "Should we do what those Cranks did? Rip up things and cover our skin with it?"
"No." Harriet shook her head. "We'll need the sheets. Both for protection when we sleep and if we run out of water. We've all got sunscreen in those first aid kits, right? If we use that and then just use the sheets as protection if the sun comes up?"
Teresa nodded. "Fine. Whatever. But why would 'flat ground' be a warning? Surely that's a good thing – we're not going to waste energy."
Raven, who had been deputy of the Trackers in the Maze, scrunched her nose up.
"That's true – if there was any kind of incline, the warning would make sense – exertion, trip hazards – but if it's flat…"
"Then it can't be about that." I was thinking about Janson's warning, that nothing was as it seemed. "You said that second warning was stuck on, right?" Mariella nodded. "Then maybe it's not a warning for everyone, but just one for us."
Sonya was frowning too, but she seemed to understand me. "Right. So, maybe it's more about our mission than the land itself."
Karly, next to me, suddenly gasped and jumped in. "Yes! That's it – observation. Other than the actual freaking running, observation was the most important thing in the Maze. If there are mountains and rocks and stuff, then we could hide, but if it's flat ground-"
"-then the boys are going to see us the second we get out there." I finished.
Teresa nodded again, her face full of focused concentration now that we'd solved the next mystery. "That's fine." She picked her weapon up off the floor – a thick branch with a serrated blade strapped onto the end of it. "We just start the plan immediately. I'll go first, you follow me. Does everyone remember what we're going to do?"
We nodded. We'd talked about it so much that I'm pretty sure it was etched into all of our brains like the lines of a Broadway actor who'd been playing the same role for three years – any of us could have taken any part.
"Good." She climbed deftly up the ladder and opened the escape hatch slightly, letting in the light of the approaching dawn a few centimetres at a time so our eyes could adjust. Waves of sand blew in through the gap she'd left and crusted on the floor and over our clothes and rucksacks. Then Teresa put her eyes to the gap, before pulling back to take one final look at us. "They're there. 200 metres or so – there's about ten of them and it doesn't look like they're armed. So remember girls, surround them, weapons out and look like you'd happily stab them in the gut. Don't kill any of the others unless we have to."
She didn't have to tell us twice. Charlie didn't look convinced, so I leaned over to her.
"Got your nasty face ready, kiddo?"
"Grrr!" Charlie blinked up at me in the light and narrowed her eyes, baring her teeth, frowning as hard as she could. I laughed quietly, attracting an irritated glare from Teresa. "Like that?"
"Steady on, Stitch! That was pretty good – less teeth though, and then you'll send them running, 'kay?"
She grinned, adjusted her expression and growled again softly, but her eyes were fixed on the escape hatch, her hands in her pockets in an effort to stop them shaking. Teresa was speaking again.
"Get ready with the bag, ladies, and stick to the script. Follow me quickly, 'cause we need to take them by surprise. It's the only way that bastard will get what he deserves. Harriet, Sonya next to me, Lily, Karly take the back. Here we go – weapons ready."
As the girls assembled on the ladder and Karly and I took our places bringing up the rear, I felt my stomach flip over, and not just because of the mission. My fingers drifted to the lizard.
'Promise me, Lily.'
I don't know what I promised you, N. I hope this isn't breaking it.
The familiar feeling of nausea was creeping through my body along with the adrenaline. I didn't want to hurt these boys – they'd been through the same hell we had, had been just as brave, just as smart and a little less lucky - and I just hoped Teresa's plan would work, so we wouldn't have to. I felt the note that I'd scribbled the night before in a moment of madness – or hope, take your pick - shift in my pocket. What if he's not there? What if he died? What if he isn't even real? Then at least I'd know.
I took my knife from Karly. And Teresa opened the hatch.
The Scorch
They didn't call it the Scorch for nothing. Even though it was dawn and the sun was only just peeking over the horizon, the heat hit us like a wave as soon as we stepped out into desert – and immediately sunk three centimetres into the sand, blinking against the grains being blown into our eyes. Time to go. As soon as our eyes had adjusted, everyone assumed the planned V-formation behind Teresa. The adrenaline coursing through my body made my hands shake around the knife I was clutching, trying to keep my face impassive as we surrounded Group A before they had time to react, weapons pointed towards them amid their cries and murmurs of confusion. I hope this is quick.
I saw Aris first. He was standing on the edge of the group of about twenty ragged boys, his eyes wide as he spun in a circle, taking all of us in without meeting our eyes. He was dirtier than the last time I'd seen him – as I'm sure we were – and there was a long red cut snaking from his jaw to his nose but he seemed relatively unharmed. Like all the others, he was unarmed, and a white sheet filled with water bags and food scraps was in his right hand.
It was the boy standing next to Aris that Teresa was looking at, that most of the group were looking at. His dark brown hair was matted and falling into his face, and like Aris, his eyes were filled with shock as he stared right back at Teresa. Thomas. As I looked at him, the same feeling that had come over me in the Rescue Centre scraped away at my conscience again. He didn't look like a monster, an abuser, a manipulator. I know that's often the point, but his stance – hunched shoulders, taking a step back and leaving himself wide open to attack - the confusion and something that looked like hurt on his young face, the cuts and bruises all over him. He looked like a kid, and I thought again about my note, feeling more certain of what I'd scrawled there. To my surprise, to his left was a girl with thick brown hair pulled back into a ponytail – Janson hadn't mentioned a girl. From the way she was scowling at Teresa, the boys must have picked her up along the way.
"What's this crap about, Teresa? Nice way to greet your long-lost buddies."
The bows swung their aims towards the muscled Asian boy who had spoken. He had black hair cropped close to his head and enormous, powerful arms and he looked closer to my age than Thomas or Teresa's. His expression and his voice were saturated with contempt, bordering on anger as he curled his lip at us. The Asian boy took a step closer, and I could suddenly see the boys who had been hidden behind him – Teresa opened her mouth to respond but-
"Lily!"
And then I saw him.
There was a moment of pure euphoria – of relief, of recognition, of understanding - he was tall, taller than I remembered and thinner too. His dark blonde hair had grown out past his shoulders rather than just flopping over his forehead and the same myriad of cuts and bruises that marred the others covered his skin too. But his voice; his voice was exactly the same. As his shout rang through the air, our eyes locked. His were dark now - the colour of the earth before the Earth went to hell – and wide with emotions I wasn't sure of, fixed on my face, staring at me with all the intensity I'm certain I was mirroring. He knows me? His eyes were older too than the boy in my head; his face, his whole body more tired than the boy I remembered. But he was N, and the whole situation - the knife in my hand, the mission, the Flare - seemed to melt out of my awareness because he was there. He was alive.
'Don't ya' see, Lilby? I've already told you?'
Yes.
Yes, of course you have.
He'd been telling me from the beginning. Laughter bubbled up in my chest, bizarre in the burning wind and the heat of the desert.
"Speak to her again and I'll shoot." Karly's voice was acidic behind me, tearing me out of my trance. It seemed to do the same to N – he looked surprised, almost like he hadn't realised he'd spoken aloud.
"Don't even think about it!" My own voice sounded strange and sharp. I took a breath and softened it. "Nobody else needs to get hurt."
The expressions of the boys changed at my words, some immediately looking defensive, some angry, some confused and others just looked frightened. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Teresa look between me and N and then send me a glare that said plainly 'shut up', probably with some expletives thrown in.
Teresa paced towards the boys again as the sun rose even higher. She stopped a couple of metres in front of N and the Asian boy. The other boy visibly bristled and N seemed to refocus, tensing and looking down at Teresa, confused:
"Teresa? What the bloody-'"
"Shut up." She spoke in the same cold, emotionless tone that Karly had. "And if any of you make a move, the bows start shooting."
Teresa lifted her spear again and paced between the frozen boys, searching their faces just like we'd planned, until she was standing in front of Thomas.
"Teresa." Her name was barely more than a whisper and the emotion Thomas gave those three syllables surprised me. This didn't look like somebody who wanted to hurt her. I wasn't sure he had it in him.
Teresa set her jaw and said nothing, just staring at him.
"Teresa, what's-"
"Shut up." He couldn't.
"But what-"
Faster than an arrow from a bow, Teresa flew backwards and swung the butt of her spear into Thomas' skull. What? That wasn't what we agreed. Some of the girls shared worried looks as Thomas crashed to the floor, his hands against his head, moaning. Horror and anger crossed N's face and he moved forwards, starting to reach out towards Thomas, and the Asian boy put up his fists, as if he could help from there, but Raven just moved her spear closer to them, shaking her head, and the boys reluctantly dropped their arms.
"I said shut up." Teresa's voice was empty but her eyes were shining. "Is your name Thomas?"
He wouldn't answer her at first, telling her she knew who he was, and she hit him again with the spear until you could see the welt rising on his skin, until he screamed:
"Yes! My name is Thomas!"
Having gained his admission, Teresa backed away from him through the crowd of boys, who instantly got out of her way, their eyes burning with a mixture of confusion and hatred. As she moved she told him:
"You're coming with us, Thomas. Come on. Remember, anyone tries something, the arrows fly."
On cue, every girl with a bow took a menacing step forwards, making all the boys take an identical step back, moving closer together under the influence of the sharpened steel. All except the Asian boy anyway:
"No way!" He shouted back. "You're not taking him anywhere."
As planned, nobody responded. We'd decided that communication wasn't allowed. It would make us seem too human. Teresa merely spoke the next line of the script, her eyes still locked on Thomas.
"This isn't some stupid game. I'm going to start counting. Every time I hit a multiple of five, we'll kill one of you with an arrow. We'll do it until Thomas is the only one left, then we'll take him anyway. It's up to you."
In the tunnels we'd agreed that was a bluff – if they still needed convincing, we'd shoot one in the leg or something – but, judging by the look on Teresa's face, I wasn't so sure she was bluffing anymore. The Asian boy looked like he was going to fight again, but N grabbed his forearm and held him in place, a frown creasing his forehead. Every couple of seconds, his eyes would flick to me, then Teresa, then the bowmen. Our eyes met again and I looked away. Be like stone. Don't react to them.
"One!"
Thomas moved immediately, not taking any chances, pushing through the friends who tried to catch hold of him, until he got out into the open, walking until his face was a couple of centimetres away from Teresa's.
"Fine. Take me."
"I only made it to one."
"Yeah. I'm really brave that way."
I think most of us there agreed, but Teresa couldn't let him speak like that – the group could try something. She slammed the spear into him, into his stomach this time, so hard that he rolled to the ground again and spat blood into the desert sand. Stop talking. Just stop talking and come with us.
"Bring the bag." Teresa ordered and Harriet and Sonya moved forwards with the burlap sack.
"We're taking him with us!" She continued. "If anybody follows, I'll hit him again and we'll start shooting you. We won't really bother aiming. Just let the arrows fly any old way they feel like."
After a few seconds, Harriet and Sonya had forced Thomas into the bag. He didn't struggle, but every time one of the other boys moved or shouted out, Teresa would hit him again until moans sounded from inside the sack. Stop! I wanted to shout at them - don't you see she won't stop?
It was only when Harriet and Fi picked up the end of the bag with his head in and lifted it off the ground, when Thomas realised what was about to happen, that he started to shout again. "Teresa! Don't do this to me!"
It wasn't a threat. It was a plea. She hit him again, with her fist rather than the spear and he screamed. I could see Charlie across the circle, somewhere behind Aris. Her lips were pressed together and hot tears were rolling down her face.
"Since you obviously don't care about yourself, talk again and we'll start shooting your friends. That sound good to you?"
All that came from the bag was a hollow sob of pain. The note I'd written didn't feel like madness anymore. Teresa knelt by the bag and whispered something in a harsh tone, then stood up and barked:
"Okay, let's get out of here. Make sure you hit as many rocks as you can along the way."
We dissolved the circle around the boys and made one around the bag instead, walking quickly towards the cover of the nearby hills, Harriet and Fi dragging Thomas behind them in the burlap sack. We just wanted it to be over.
My chest ached as we walked, both for the boy who was still sobbing in the bag on the floor and for the one I'd left behind, still holding the arm of his friend, fixing him to the spot. I knew what I was about to do. I just had to time it right.
The Asian boy was still screaming abuse at us as we walked – between names so inventive that I'm not sure how to spell them – something about 'finding us' when the 'time is right'. With my free hand, I'd managed to work the knot of my pendant loose and the lizard was cool in my palm. I flashed a quick glance at Teresa; she was still at the front and looking forwards, focusing on not reacting to the shouts from Group A. That was all I needed - my spear fell into the dust and I started sprinting back towards the group of boys.
I was about to break the only rule we'd decided on and I had seconds.
I could hear Karly and Raven and Teresa shouting behind me, but I blocked them out, the abuse from Group A getting louder and louder as I skidded to a stop about 15 metres in front of them, but I wasn't looking at them. I was looking at him. My hands were shaking as I fumbled with the lizard, pulling the note out of my pocket and wrapping it around the carving. Please be looking at me.
Before the boys could do anything, before they could move towards me, as revenge or a hostage or a bargaining chip, I looked straight at N - 'I've already told you'– and, with absolute certainty, cried:
"Newt!"
Taking aim, I flung the pendant with the strap wrapped around the note through the air and it sailed over the gap between us, faster than I expected. Newt – I knew it, I remembered – caught it and, without waiting to see what happened, I ran, ran back to the others, ran until my lungs ached, ran until I could only just catch the Asian boy's scathing words on the desert wind:
"That could have been a bomb, you total slinthead."
"Well, it's a bloody good thing it wasn't, isn't it?"
N –
I can't explain it, but I know you somehow.
If we meet again, I'll try to explain.
I'm sorry. I'll find you again.
We won't let her kill him.
Lily
Four Days Later – Heading for the Safe Haven
It sounds impossible, but we were still running. It was colder now than it had been and clouds had rolled in from the North, black and heavy. When we'd spoken to Thomas the day before, after we'd decided not to deliver him to Janson's 'designated Killzone', he'd told us about what happened to his group in the last electric storm. The thought of that only made us run faster – maybe we could get to safety before the storm broke.
It didn't help that we had no idea what we were running to; when we'd reached the end of the Pass a few days before, we knew the Safe Haven – or at least where it was marked on the map – had to lie somewhere in front of us, but the mountains fell away into miles and miles of dusty flat ground. There weren't even any plants, let alone anything that looked like a Safe Haven. Then again, since when had WICKED made anything easy? As Harriet said, by the time we got there, we'd still have a couple of hours to work it out before the deadline hit.
Running here, even though it was flat, was even harder than running in the mountains, where there was less sand and more protection from the wind that was ripping across the plain. We were almost leaning into the wind as we ran, at a 45 degree angle to the ground, trying to see through the fog of sand that the growing storm was throwing up.
Every few minutes, I found myself twisting around to make sure that the disappearing trio – Teresa, Thomas and Aris – were still making their way down the mountainside. Both Thomas and Teresa had been there when we'd eaten the night before, but somewhere along the walk to the campsite, we'd lost them – everyone had been too wrapped up in conversation or lost in their own thoughts that we hadn't noticed until we were almost at the bottom of the slope and had set up camp.
What to do next had divided the group – some shouted that Thomas and Teresa had never been part of our group and that Aris had made his own decision, that we should go on without them. Others thought we should go back and make sure Thomas was okay - we'd promised to protect him – and I couldn't pretend I didn't feel that way. Teresa, I didn't like – there was too much about her that didn't make sense, too many gray areas and emotions that seemed to contradict each other, but Thomas was nothing like the 'monster' she'd painted him as. Yes, he was an unimpressive fighter, but he was smart and seemingly more principled than a lot of the girls from our own group. He'd fallen into step with me as we walked the day before.
"So, Lily…" He looked a lot better when the threat of imminent murder wasn't hanging over his head. "How do you know Newt?"
I started a little. "Then that is his name…" I'd said it to myself but Thomas nodded.
"I don't really know. I had a lizard pendant when I came in here, with an N on the back. I guess I always knew it belonged to someone important – and I had a few really weird dreams. But it wasn't until yesterday-" I laughed shortly. "Ironically, it wasn't until yesterday, when I had a serrated knife pointing at his throat that I was certain he was real. That I hadn't just made him up to fill in the blanks, you know?"
Thomas' eyes drifted up the group to where Teresa was talking to Sara, tossing her spear from hand to hand. "Yeah." He said, a little sadly. "I know."
We walked for a few seconds in silence before Thomas suddenly said:
"He remembered you too, you know. Newt."
My stomach did that strange flip again. "How do you know?"
"Er, doubt you saw it yesterday, 'cause you were all too busy getting ready to shish-kebab my eyeballs, but he had a wristband on. Woke up in the Maze with it. It was leather with-"
" 'Lily' in black ink?"
Thomas' eyebrows shot up into his hairline. "How do you know?"
I flashed him a wry smile. "Like I said, weird dreams. How's your head?"
The place where Teresa had hit him had swelled up like an egg, black in the centre and purple round the edges. "Hurts like a mother."
He reached up and poked it gingerly with his fingertips. "I feel a bit like a prize guineapig with a huge rosette. Thanks for feeding me by the way."
When Teresa had tied him to a post, Karly and I had given him some cereal bars and water when Teresa's back was turned. I laughed again: "Don't mention it – the blueberry ones are disgusting anyway. Somebody had to eat them."
In a strange way, I'd realised that I liked Thomas. Even after being beaten up by someone he thought was a friend, dragged through a forest in a bag and tied to a post for seven hours, he was far more upbeat than I think I was that morning. So, that and what I'd promised Newt in the note I'd thrown at him meant that the idea of leaving Thomas in the mountains with a girl who'd promised to kill him didn't exactly sit right with me. The argument had reached a stalemate and rather than going anywhere, we'd decided to wait at the base of the mountain until we saw some sign of them - which took so long that as soon as they appeared over the mountain ridge, Harriet ordered us to start running.
We ran in silence, the wind that was getting up echoing in people's ears and the sand we were kicking up sticking to our skin. When we cleared the mountain range, Sonya caught sight of Group A coming around it, out of a cave entrance dug into the rocks we'd passed earlier. We were too far away to make out individual faces, but I was glad when I counted eleven - the same number that we'd met during the ambush. They looked tired, stumbling and running in bursts, but they seemed to be heading in the same direction - according to Thomas, Janson had told them to find the Safe Haven too.
After about two hours of moving as quickly as we could, Harriet eventually jogged to a stop and beckoned everybody around her.
"Okay girls. According to the map and the instructions from weasel guy, the Safe Haven or whatever leads to it should be around here somewhere. Everyone, eyes on the ground."
Everyone started shuffling across the desert sand, blinking furiously in the dust, looking for anything that could be the Safe Haven - a message, a tunnel entrance, a symbol, a monster - as Group A got closer and the clouds above us got more and more black. We kicked over stones, pulling at the remains of withering plants in the naive hope that a door would swing open somewhere. It didn't seem likely, but when you'd seen dead bodies vanish, skies turn off and killer slugs built like Swiss Army knives, hey, anything was possible.
As we shuffled, I found my thoughts drifting back to the boys. Janson had told us that the boys had taken the harder task in the Scorch. It had certainly showed - only eleven of fifty stumbled through the sand, some of them being virtually carried by others. It probably hadn't helped that the tunnels they'd just staggered out of had been marked in scarlet on the maps they clearly hadn't been given. I wondered what was in them. I wasn't sure the boys who had their arms wrapped around the shoulders of their friends would ever want to tell me. What do you want from us? I still didn't understand what WICKED were planning. 50 boys and 50 girls. 11 boys and thirty girls. What were we supposed to do? Were they seeing which group was fastest, like with the Maze? But that didn't make sense - we'd had different tasks this time. Did they want to weed out the best of each group? Maybe. But any ideas about what they'd do with the survivors then were too sick for me to think about for more than a few seconds. Maybe they won't do anything. Maybe we've served our purpose and they'll let us-
Amid the pebbles, the dead worms and plants, something fluttered on the edge of my vision. To the left of where we were running was a single stick in the ground, about knee height, with a thin orange ribbon attached that was whipping back and forth in the gusts. I knelt down next to it and caught hold of the ribbon, holding it still and in thin black lettering, stark against the orange background were the words:
THE SAFE HAVEN
My stomach dropped somewhere into my feet. What? Another riddle with a fatal time limit. We had an hour before Janson's deadline and we had a stick in the ground and a storm brewing. I hadn't realised the end of the world had allowed capitalism and its companies to play puppetmaster with the weather as well as the lives of children. By now, the others had spotted me and a crowd had formed behind the stick.
"Well, there it is." Mariella was trying to smile. "That's it, right? We just wait now?"
"No." Karly's frown and stone expression quickly shut down any hopes people had about the Trial being over. "That's too easy. When have we got anywhere and found 'we'll done, guys, you did it.' Last time we thought that, Rachel got stabbed. There's got to be something else."
Sonya sighed heavily. "But there's literally nothing else here."
"So we stay ready. And we wait." Harriet had just finished her sentence when a cry sounded from behind.
"Hey - girlie squad!" The Asian boy. Not the best start, if I'm honest. "Where's our guy?"
Having seen us stop, Group A had changed direction and caught up. Gosh, they looked worse than us. Their clothes were ripped and bloody and, now I was closer to the boy who had spoken - Thomas had called him Minho - I could see a gory collage of blisters all over his legs and arms, a keepsake from the electric storm.
"There!" Karly stepped towards him, her chin up - she was half a head shorter - and pointed back to where Thomas, Teresa and Aris were running across the plain, most of the way to us. "With your girl."
Minho scoffed. "Teresa? You can keep her, Barbie. Scheming witch. Now what're you ladies gawping at?"
What a prick. His manner wasn't getting him anywhere. Everyone was bristling and I saw people's fingers drifting to their knives. Then another voice came from the group of boys.
"Min. Give it a bloody rest, ya' know? They're shattered too - don't know about you but I'd like to keep my eyeballs."
Newt. He'd been at the back when Minho had first jogged up to us, and he had his arm around the waist of a smaller boy with sandy coloured hair and a seeping wound on his forehead. The boy had an arm wrapped around Newt's shoulder and he looked more than a little unsteady. Newt was looking around our group, clocking our sheathed weapons as he pushed his hair back from his face, and his dark brown eyes suddenly met mine. I felt that strange tug of recognition in my chest again and was about to speak when he coughed suddenly and quickly transferred his gaze to Karly, who was glaring daggers at him. As Newt moved to the front, I saw he was sporting a heavy limp, putting hardly any weight on his right ankle as he gave Karly a tight-lipped smile.
"Can we see, please?"
She looked him in the eyes for a few seconds, before making a 'humph' noise and stepping back, her arms still folded across her chest. "Alright. Get out of the way, guys."
"Thanks. You okay, Clint?"
The huddle around the flag parted a little and Minho, Newt and the boy he was helping made their way towards it, closely followed by the rest of their group. They said nothing for a couple of long minutes, going through the same myriad of emotions that we had. Eventually, Minho moved round to the back of the group again and threw himself down onto the floor, crossing his legs under him and leaning his head on his hand, looking about as deflated as possible.
"Well, shuck me, ladies and gents. Guess we're stuck with each other."
I was sitting in the dust between Karl and Charlie a couple of metres away from the Safe Haven stick. After Minho had sat down, everybody had and we'd explained the whole 'kidnap Thomas' situation and the man in the white suit and they'd told us what had happened to them in the fallen city we could see on the skyline and the nearby caves. To cut a long story short, they'd met far more Cranks than we had. But now that we'd done that and debated the stick for as long as we could (which wasn't very long), a definite divide had formed between the two groups, boys on the left girls on the right. Nobody was speaking across it - unless you count the black looks that Karly kept shooting Minho (she hadn't forgiven him for the 'Barbie' thing) - and the boys were still nervously glancing at the weapons that each girl had at her side.
"Lily?"
"Mmm?" Charlie was picking sand out of her nails, her face the picture of concentration?
"Are we staying with the boys now?"
"I don't know. I think so."
She thought for a second. "That's good, right? The more fighters the better?"
Unless they give us something worse. "Yeah. I'm pretty sure that's good."
There was certainly no deadweight left in Group A. All of them had well-defined muscles, and some of them were enormous, veins bulging out of their arms. Minho was sitting next to the boy with the gash, Clint, and nodding over to Sonya and Harriet, gesturing, and muttering something that made the other boys snigger. Oh for gods sake. I got that they were angry about the ambush, and that they were tired and beaten up and had been through hell but frankly so had we. None of us chose to be in this shitty situation, and yet here we all were. Together, it seemed. We didn't have the time or any expendable people to ignore each other like this. What's the point anymore? I took a deep breath and pushed myself up off the floor.
"What're you doing, Lil?" Karly had twisted round to look at me with a questioning expression.
"Just give me a second."
Before I could change my mind, I strode over to Group A, to where Newt was sitting next to a heavy-set boy with thick black hair, and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned and, on seeing me, jumped to his feet, stumbling a little.
"Hey!" He was a lot taller than me up close; the top of my head was about level with his jawline. His expression was tired - cautious - but about as warm as I could hope for.
"Hey. Sorry. Er...Newt, isn't it?"
He smiled then - not the lopsided grin that had played in my mind for the past few months, but a ghost of it, tugging at the corner of his lips. He nodded, rubbing the back of his neck. "Yeah, yeah. Lily, right?"
I nodded too, trying to smile back. "You were right the other day, you know."
He grimaced, flushing a little. "Ah. Sorry about that. Not all that sure what came over me."
There was an awkward moment where neither of us knew what to say. Talking to him later, I know he felt the same - it wasn't that there was nothing to say, but so much and so much that didn't make sense tangled between us that starting at all seemed too hard, so for a few seconds, we just looked at each other until Newt remembered something and his hand went to his pocket.
"Oh!" He scrabbled around and pulled out the lizard pendant, carefully balancing it in the palm of his hand and holding it out. "This is yours."
I took it and touched it gently, tracing the familiar lines with my fingertip before looking back at him. "Funnily enough, I think it's yours, actually. But thank you."
I unwrapped the leather from around it and held it back out to Newt. "Um, could you-"
"Oh - yeah, sure. Sure." He took the lizard back and gestured for me to turn around, before placing the strap around my neck with the lizard resting on my chest. "Like that?"
"Yep."
"Good that. Just let me-" Newt was fiddling with the knot on the end of the strap. "We've been moving for so bloody long, my hands are shakin' all over the place."
Newt's fingers brushed the back of my neck, cool against my skin as he tied the knot, and a strange shiver went down my spine, like the rest of me knew something that my mind didn't. Without thinking, I reached up and caught his hand in mine and he froze. Slowly and without letting go, I turned back to face him, not even noticing that every Glader in both groups was silent, watching us. Newt was staring at me too, his eyes wide, a frown creasing his forehead and I briefly wondered if the Flare was already worming its way into my brain, if I was already going crazy, when a smile flickered across his face and he squeezed my fingers and had pulled me forward before I even had time to process what was happening. I had to push up onto my toes to hug him properly, he was so tall, but he wrapped his arms around my back and I slid mine around his neck, both of us holding tight as if the other might suddenly blow away in the wind that was only getting louder as the storm built. As I held him, a total stranger in the middle of the Scorch, both of us filthy and battered beyond belief, a feeling of complete safety washed over me - which is insane considering the location - and I was suddenly convinced that this was the first thing in three years that had felt so unquestionably right. So normal. Like I'd done it a thousand times before. Like, despite our comically different dimensions, my body almost moved on autopilot to hug him back.
"It's so good to see you." Newt whispered in my ear, his words turning into a laugh. "I don't even know why, but I'm so bloody glad you're here."
When we eventually pulled apart, his eyes stayed fixed on me as I smiled, somehow laughing with him in this post-apocalyptic hellhole. "Yes.Yes, you too. Sticking hell. We've done that before."
Newt nodded. "That's just what I was thinkin'. I knew you, didn't I?"
I opened my mouth to answer him when a pointed cough came from the floor behind him. "If you guys are quite finished - what the everloving hell is going on?"
Ah. Now we'd stepped back, I could feel the shocked stares of all the other Gladers clustered around the flag and the way that the low murmur of sound that had been there a few seconds earlier had cut out completely. Newt came up with an answer faster than I did.
"Er, long story - I'll tell you later, man, okay?"
"If we get a later - shouldn't we be trying to work out what to do now we're shucked in the middle of the desert, Newt, rather than mixing with them?"
This annoyed me. Sick of Minho's stuck-up attitude, I stepped around Newt to be directly in his line of sight.
"Minho, just cut that out for a second. Don't you get that what we've got to do is obvious? Us, them, girls, boys, A, B, leaders, not leaders, it doesn't sticking matter anymore. Don't you see that?"
Minho just raised his eyebrows at me, but some of the others were nodding. Iona gave me a small smile and snuck over to offer one of our first aid packets to Clint. The dark haired boy handed Harriet one of their water bags. Finally. I sighed.
"Look, all I'm trying to say is, I think the part where we're enemies is over. The part where we're separated is over. So there's no point into splitting into petty camps like children, because whatever WICKED throw at us now, we've got to be ready to fight them. And together this time?"
It's almost a question. A rumble that sounded like a hundred barrels rolling across a cargo hold crashed through the skies above. Before Minho could answer, Newt did.
"Absolutely."
Hi everyone!
I've found a way to upload while I'm travelling, so here you go! :)
I know quite a few of you were waiting for Newly to meet up again - what do you think? Where do you think it's going to go from here, both for Newly and the gang in The Death Cure? (Which is where the next chapter will be)
Have a good week!
Star*
REPLYING TO REVIEWS:
LovingBOBThePacific: Haha, thank you - I'm glad it's good-different actually, that's a nice thing for a writer to hear! And yeah, I actually prefer Teresa to Brenda but I haven't got enough time in this story to develop her, so she's going to have to stay relatively unlikable. I know what you mean about the heat though - but I'm just so glad not to be working on exams that I'll take writing stories any day! :) Looking forward to hearing what you think about this one x
Guest (1): Thank you! That's so lovely - hope you liked the chapter! X
Guest (2): Haha - I did! :) They've officially met again, in real life rather than dreams! Hope you enjoyed x