Chapter Twenty-four

We circled around the group of thirteen people, who comprised eleven teenaged boys (one of whom was Aris), a man whose appearance suggested that he was of Hispanic origin and a girl who looked to be about the same age as some of the members of our group. All the while, we kept our weapons trained on them, letting them know we meant business. We were here to capture Thomas and we were not going to leave without him.

I, of course, had no idea at this point which of these people was Thomas. I could rule out Aris (who I already knew), the girl (wrong gender) and the man (too old), but that still left ten possible candidates. However, I soon noticed that Teresa's gaze was focused on one boy in particular, a sandy-haired youth of around sixteen, which led me to suspect that this was the boy we were looking for, the boy we were supposed to kill. No-one spoke for several seconds; we continued to stand in our circle, pointing our weapons at Group A and their two companions. For a moment, I was reminded of the time Patra and her lynch mob surrounded Aris, Rachel and myself, intending to kill the last two kids to arrive in Group B's Glade. Now I was in a similar situation, only this time I was among those threatening a group of trapped (and unarmed) people.

Two boys, one Asian, whose face showed signs of having been badly burned recently, the other fair-haired, his stance suggesting that he did not have full use of one of his legs, attempted to speak to Teresa. But she ignored the first and interrupted the second with a firm "shut up", adding that the bows would start shooting if anyone, by which she meant WICKED's remaining male subjects, plus the man and the girl who were with them, tried anything. Those from Group B who were armed with bows and arrows tightened their grips, as Teresa, spear in hand, strode into the midst of the people we had surrounded. She paused for a moment in front of the girl, but did not stop until she got to the sandy-haired boy, training her spear on him.

"Teresa," the boy said. "Teresa, what's . . .?"

"Shut up," was Teresa's only response. The boy tried to speak again, only to be cut off in mid-sentence when she lashed out with the butt of her spear and knocked him to the ground. "I said shut up," she said, hauling him to his feet and pointing her spear at him once more. "Is your name Thomas?" she demanded, her spear still trained on him.

"You know who I . . ." Again, the boy was interrupted by a blow from Teresa's spear, a blow which, though more violent than the first, did not knock him down. "You know who I am!" he shouted, all but confirming my suspicion that he was Thomas, the boy we had been told to kill. This, however, was not enough for Teresa, who, her tone conveying disgust, told him she "used to" know him, then repeated her earlier question. Watching the scene unfolding in front of me, I wondered why she was doing this. Surely, if she had been a member of Group A, she should know if the boy in front of her was her former friend. Unless WICKED had manipulated her memory somehow, which I wouldn't put past them. But I barely had time to think about this before the boy shouted: "Yes! My name is Thomas!"

Teresa was keen for everyone, especially Thomas and his companions, to know she wasn't playing games. She said she was going to start counting and, at each multiple of five, one of the people with Thomas would be shot with an arrow. There were twelve girls in Group B who were armed with bows and arrows, one for each of Thomas's companions; they raised their weapons in readiness, while the rest of us waited to see how this would play out. Teresa said she was prepared to have the bows keep shooting until all the people we had encircled were dead except Thomas, at which point we were going to take him anyway. And something about her tone told me she was not bluffing; indeed, she actually seemed to be enjoying this.

Drawing herself up to her full height, she started counting. "One!"

That was as far as she got before Thomas stepped forward and, ignoring the shocked comments of his companions, walked towards her. The other girls of Group B and I watched in silence as he stood only inches from the person who had once been his friend, but now regarded him as an enemy. Teresa, I recalled, had never told us precisely what had happened between herself and Thomas to turn her against him and it wouldn't be long before it no longer mattered. By my reckoning, we were close to the two-week deadline Janson had given us and we were supposed to capture and kill Thomas before it expired; only then would we be allowed access to the safe haven and, with it, the promised cure.

"Fine. Take me," was all Thomas said, his voice showing no sign of emotion.

"I only made it to one." Clearly Teresa had not been expecting Thomas to surrender so readily.

"Yeah. I'm really brave that way."

Teresa promptly "rewarded" Thomas's bravery by knocking him to the ground with her spear.

Long story short, Harriet and Sonya got Thomas into the sack and tied him inside using the rope we had brought with us, securing it at either end. We then, after a parting warning from Teresa that any of Thomas's companions who were foolish enough to follow us would find themselves on the wrong end of our arrows, set off across the desert, Sonya and Neffy dragging the sack containing our prisoner behind them. Harriet took the lead, while Teresa walked alongside Thomas. I'd noticed that she was whispering something to him shortly before we began our trek, though I couldn't hear what she was saying; when Neffy asked about this, Teresa's reply was that she was telling Thomas how much she was enjoying her chance to get her revenge. But revenge for what? What had Thomas done to Teresa to make her enjoy doing this to him? I could not begin to imagine a scenario where I would be happy to see Indira or Flossie trussed up in a sack, on her way to be murdered.

Anyway, we began walking across the desert, heading back towards the mountains. As we walked, I heard the Asian boy shouting after us. I couldn't make out most of what he was saying and much of what I could hear consisted of insults directed at us in general and Teresa in particular, but there was something in there about the boys (and their two companions) finding Thomas. I also managed to make out the words "when the time is right", followed by "weapons". Which suggested that, despite Teresa's warning, this boy was planning to attempt a rescue, though his odds of succeeding when we not only outnumbered his group but also had weapons were pretty slim. But his words were enough to earn Thomas a punch in the stomach, courtesy of Teresa.

The boy immediately fell silent, clearly not wanting to see if Teresa would carry out her threat to have those of us who were armed with bows and arrows start shooting at his group. We continued our trek across the desert, heading back the way we had come, all of us well aware that the sun would soon be beating down on us unbearably, making it impossible for us to stay out in the open. We had to make it to the path through the mountains - which we had dubbed the Pass - before then; there was no other shelter for miles, just a barren wasteland that didn't contain so much as a crudely built hut.

All the while, Thomas was being dragged along in the sack, which Sonya and Neffy (following instructions from Teresa) were deliberately hauling across the roughest ground they could find. Of course, the terrain we were crossing was pretty rough anyway, but the two of them were taking great pains (no pun intended) to cause Thomas as much discomfort as possible. I wondered what was going through his mind at that moment; not only was he a condemned prisoner being pulled along in a sack, Teresa, the girl who used to be his friend, was acting as the ring-leader in all this. He must be hurting both physically and mentally, but he hardly made a sound for fear of being punched or kicked by Teresa, who continued to walk beside him all the while.

And she actually seemed to be enjoying the abuse she was dishing out, to be looking for an excuse to humiliate Thomas further. As if being dragged across the desert in a sack wasn't bad enough. But the worst humiliation from Thomas's perspective had to be the fact that his former friend was treating him in this sadistic manner, was prepared to see him dragged to his death, was acting as though she hated his guts to the point where she wanted him dead. The words which had been tattooed on Teresa's neck (Property of WICKED. Group A, Subject A1. The Betrayer.) a few days before we were sent on this mission were finally beginning to make sense.

When we got to the mountains, we faced the problem of getting Thomas up the steep slope without taking him out of the sack, which we had been told not to do until his friends could no longer see us. We tried dragging him the way we had while crossing the desert, only to find that he kept slipping back. It soon became clear that we weren't going to get very far if we carried on like this, so we had to carry him in teams of four - the first team consisted of Yoko, Sylvia, Hillary and Teresa - swapping over every so often. We continued in this manner until Teresa was satisfied that we were out of Group A's sight, at which point she told the girls carrying Thomas to "drop him". They did so without ceremony, dumping him on the ground like a sack of potatoes. The first thing he saw when the sack was taken off him was all twenty of us pointing our weapons in his direction.

At first, he attempted to joke with us, making a quip about how "special" he felt being surrounded by us and all our weapons while he was unarmed. But Teresa soon put a stop to that by threatening him with her spear and he realised the best thing he could do under his current circumstances was co-operate with us, even to the point of agreeing to let us kill him. "I don't have any shuck thing to live for anyway," he added, looking directly at Teresa. There was, I noted, an edge of spite in his tone as he said those words, as if he now hated her as much as she seemed to hate him. And, given how she had treated him, I could hardly blame him if any friendship he still felt for her was permanently extinguished. But, since we were supposed to kill him, it hardly seemed to matter.

With Thomas now walking with everyone else, we trudged the remaining few miles back to the cave where we had set up camp. By the time we arrived, the sun was high in the sky, threatening to bake anyone who stayed out in the open for too long. Not that we intended to expose ourselves to the unrelenting heat any more than we had to; we were going to spend the rest of the day sleeping in the shelter of the cave, before beginning our journey through the Pass and out of the mountains once night had fallen. As far as travelling across the Scorch was concerned, it was far more comfortable to do so at night, unless you could find the entrance to one of WICKED's tunnels.

Before we could even think about going to sleep, however, we had to secure Thomas; we couldn't take the risk of him escaping and trying to get back to his friends. Following Teresa's orders, Cass and Martha used the rope which had held the sack closed during our trek across the desert to tie him to a dead tree just outside the cave, making sure the knot was positioned so that he couldn't reach round and untie himself. They then gave him a few granola bars and a bottle of water, before joining the rest of us as we prepared to sleep until evening.

"So what do you think?" I asked Indira and Flossie, as the three of us sat on our blankets, which we had laid out side by side.

Flossie, who had been contemplating the rocky ceiling, turned to look at me. "About what?"

"Thomas," I said, uttering our prisoner's name out loud for the first time since we'd captured him this morning. "Do you think it's true that he did something bad to Teresa? I mean, she's always made him out to be some kind of monster, but he seems like a perfectly ordinary guy to me." So ordinary, in fact, that I was beginning to wonder if he really deserved the fate that was in store for him and I suspected several of the others felt the same way. Indeed, I'd noticed earlier that everyone was taking great pains to avoid looking directly at Thomas, as if they felt guilty about what we were doing to him.

Flossie sighed. "I almost wish he was a monster. That or completely insane like one of those Cranks. It'd make it a lot easier to kill him."

"Well, Teresa doesn't seem to have any problems with the idea of being a murderer," said Indira. "In fact, there were a couple of times back there when I thought she was about to put her spear through him and save us all the trouble of keeping him alive until it's time to kill him. I mean, if we're going to do it, what difference does it make when we do it?"

"The chamber," I said, remembering what Janson had told us when we were first given this mission. Indira and Flossie looked at me blankly. "That guy back at the gym, the one who looked like a rat, said something about a chamber in the side of a mountain," I explained. "He said it had something to do with . . ." I was about to say "killing Thomas", but changed my mind at the last minute. ". . . our task. So maybe we're not supposed to do anything to Thomas until we get to that chamber. Maybe, if we kill him too soon, we won't pass the Trials." I wished we didn't have to kill Thomas at all, especially after we had witnessed so much death already, but we didn't have a choice, not if we wanted to be allowed into the safe haven. Our lives depended on us ending the life of a teenaged boy.

"But let's worry about it later," I added, lying back on my blanket. "Right now, I want to get some sleep." I closed my eyes.

Hours later, I was woken up by someone shaking me. At first, I was tempted to ignore it and go back to sleep, but whoever was doing the shaking didn't seem like they were about to give up, so I opened my eyes to find Harriet and Sonya looking down at me. The light was a lot dimmer than it had been when I went to sleep, but it wasn't completely dark yet. "Is it time to go?" I asked, recalling that we were supposed to start making our way through the Pass this evening.

Harriet shook her head. "Thomas has something he wants to tell us," she explained. "And we . . ." She nodded in Sonya's direction. ". . . think everyone should hear it. You wake Indira and Flossie; Sonya and I will see to the others."

Soon, we were all gathered before the tree to which Thomas was still tied, all of us except Teresa. Harriet said she had left about an hour ago to scout round and make sure Group A hadn't followed us. None of us said anything, but I could tell from the expressions on the faces of the others that they were curious to hear what Thomas had to say. I know I was. And I also knew whatever it was had to be pretty important or Harriet and Sonya wouldn't have gathered everyone together like this. It almost felt like one of the Emergency Meetings we used to have back in the Glade, except, instead of being assembled in front of everyone, Harriet, Sonya and the three remaining Keepers (Yoko, Flossie and Victoria) were standing with the rest of us, waiting to hear whatever it was Thomas had to tell us.

Presently, Harriet spoke. "All right. You talk first, then we will." These words were addressed to Thomas, who cleared his throat and launched into an explanation about how he believed all that stuff about us killing him was just another of WICKED's Variables, so maybe the way to pass the Trials was for us not to kill him. Perhaps we were being tested somehow to see if we would blindly follow orders or think for ourselves, make our own decisions. After all, since we had the advantage over him in terms of both numbers and weapons, we wouldn't be proving anything by killing him. So, if we followed Janson's instructions to the letter, we would fail the Trials.

We broke off after a while to prepare for the night's journey and discuss what Thomas had told us, most of which was stuff we had suspected already deep down. Something had felt off about this mission right from the start, but, until Thomas spoke to us, none of us had been able to pin down precisely what that something was. Now we had been convinced that the instructions Janson had given us were another of WICKED's devious tricks, that we were not supposed to carry out this mission right to the end. A few of us still had our doubts, but, by the time Teresa got back, the verdict was unanimous.

We were not going to kill Thomas.