CHAPTER 8

I stand there, at Thomas' bedside, unable to move. Did he… ?

No.

He couldn't have.

I look around. The first person whose eye I catch is Newt. He looks… hurt.

'Newt…' I whisper, but he turns and leaves. I look back at Thomas, considering for a moment. After a hesitation, I follow Newt.

'Newt!' I call after him. The sun is beginning to set. He doesn't stop walking, so I jog to catch up with him. 'Newt, why won't you talk to me?' I step in front of him, forcing him to look at me.

'What am I supposed to do?' Newt says quietly. 'He remembers you. He loves you. There's not much else to it.'

I stare at him, taken aback. 'Are you… blaming this on me?'

Newt can't meet my eyes. He glares at the ground. I see water collect in his eyes. He looks defeated.

'I shouldn't have said… what I said. I thought you felt the same way. But I've only known you for a couple days. Clearly he's known you longer.'

'Newt…' I look at him, helpless. He turns away, but this time I let him. Not knowing what else to do, I go back to the hut.

Clint greets me with a cautious smile. 'Everything okay?'

I nod. 'Yeah, I'm good.' Changing the subject, I say, 'What time is it?'

'Must be around 6. Dinner time.' Jeff grins. 'Wanna go get some food?'

'Nah,' I say. 'You guys go ahead. I'll keep an eye on Thomas.'

Clint and Jeff nod and leave to go get food. As soon as they're gone, I pull a small wooden chair over to Thomas' bed. I sit down slowly, trying not to make a noise. I dip a clean cloth in a bucket of water, wring it out, and place it on Thomas' head. His face isn't the same ashy gray color it was before. Color is returning to his face, and the veins on his arms and legs are less visible. He's still alarmingly discolored, but I can tell he's improving.

A few minutes later I take the cloth from Thomas' forehead, dip it in the water again, and wring it out. I place it on his head again. This process repeats every few minutes as the cloth begins to dry. I notice there's a trickle of water running down his temple, and I grab a dry cloth to wipe it away.

As I wipe away the trickle of water, Thomas slowly opens his eyes, looking at me.

'Hey Grace,' he smiles weakly. 'What are you doing here?'

'I'm a Medjack, today was my first day.' I shrug.

Thomas laughs and then groans. It must hurt to laugh. 'Is that the only reason you're here?'

I sigh. 'How are you feeling?'

'You didn't answer my question.'

'Fine,' I say. 'I want to know what you meant when you said you remember us. But I'm also here because it's my job.'

'Okay, okay,' Thomas says. 'I remember a lot of things. Not just us. I remember… deserts. The Lab. The Creators. It's… different than I thought it was. It's…' He pauses, shuddering.

'Hey.' I put a hand on his arm, letting him know I'm there for support. 'You don't have to say anything if you don't want to.'

Thomas shakes his head, and then forces himself to sit up. I help him, propping a pillow up behind him. His weight is completely supported by the bedframe.

Meeting my eyes he says, 'We were put here for a reason. We're supposed to be some big medical mystery. The Creators… they're watching us, studying our brains.' He shakes his head again. 'It's… horrible there.' A tear falls to his cheek. 'I can't say anything else about it.'

'Okay,' I say. I offer him a smile, which he returns. I wonder what he means by saying it's horrible, but I don't ask.

'Let's talk about the other thing,' Thomas says with a lopsided grin. 'The… us thing.'

I take a deep breath, thinking for a moment. Before he begins to tell me about what he remembers, I decide to tell him about my dream.

'Thomas, before you say anything…' I hesitate. 'I… remember us, too. I didn't know if it was real, because the only other thing I remembered was my name. But yesterday, after I ran into the Maze, I came back and fell asleep. I had a dream about us. We were in this place that we called The Lab. Everything was white, even our clothes. You woke me up and we went for a walk through the hallways. We walked to the end of a hall and came across this heavy metal door, and… we went outside. The sun was so bright, and this desert… it was…'

'Beautiful,' Thomas finishes. 'I almost kissed you. Then the Guards came and pulled us back inside.'

'That's all I remember,' I say.

'Well let me tell you the rest,' Thomas says. 'We were dragged back to our rooms and locked inside, alone. The Creators needed to keep us separate. They told us that they needed to make sure we were the right people, and in order to do that they needed to study our brain activity, alone. They said it wasn't safe outside of the Lab.'

I nod. 'But… how did we know each other? My dream… there was so much connectedness. We had to have known each other for… years.'

'Months,' Thomas says. 'We had met only a few months before then. That day was about a year before we were sent here.'

'A year?' I ask. 'We'd been there for over a year?'

Thomas nods. 'We met when we were… taken from our families. We have special brains, but our parents I guess don't. We were about 15 when we first came to the Lab. I heard crying one night, about a week after we came. So I left my room and I came to see where the crying was coming from. I found you and we got to know each other. I would sneak out every night to come visit you.'

All of a sudden my head pounds.

There is a loud banging on the door.

'Open up!' yells a low, male voice.

'Sh…' a woman wraps her arms around me as we hide under a table. My mother. 'It's okay, darling. You're okay.'

I stifle a sob. My voice squeaks. 'Momma, why are they here?'

'They just want to check in. Don't worry baby. It's okay.'

All of a sudden the door breaks open. Three figures rush in, wearing hazmat suits and holding large firearms.

One of the men charges to the table, flipping it over and grabbing me by the arm.

'Come here, sweetie. You're safe now.' His voice is low, too low to be soothing.

'No!' I yell. I try to pull my arm back. 'Leave me alone!' I kick the man where I know it will hurt and he doubles over with a groan. All I hear is a buzzing in my ears. I sprint to the back door, desperate to get away. I notice my mother, laying on the floor. She's laying in…

I gasp and run to her.

It's blood.

'No,' I mumble, falling to my knees. 'No. No.' I sob. 'Momma.' I cradle her head in my arms. My shirt soaks in blood. She was shot in the shoulder, close to her heart.

'Baby,' she whispers. Her eyes become glossy, and her body falls limp.

A man in a hazmat suit comes up to me. 'Grace. Come here. We'll protect you.'

I glare at him. 'My name isn't Grace. It's…'

I gasp. Another… another memory.

Thomas looks at me, alarmed. 'Are you okay?'

'I… yeah.' I shake my head. 'I just remembered something. My mother.'

'You remembered?' Thomas furrows his brow. 'What do you mean?'

'It's like the dream I told you about. It's like a vision or something.'

Thomas thinks for a moment. 'Weird,' he mutters. 'How do you just remember things?'

'I don't know.' I shrug. Now that he mentions it, it sounds odd. None of the other Gladers seem to be like this. So why does my old life keep coming back to me? And why is it coming in pieces?

I rub my forehead, trying to clear my mind. 'Let's… let's go back to what you were saying. I was crying, you came to visit every night…'

Thomas nods. 'I asked you why you were crying. You said it was because your mother…' He hesitates. I assume I know why.

'Died. I know. That's what the memory was. Men in hazmat suits with guns came to get me, and they killed my mother.'

'Yeah,' Thomas says. 'We met the night you came, and you were plotting to escape. I convinced you to stay because they needed us. I told you they probably didn't mean to kill your mom, they just needed you to come with them. You told me about the ride back to the Lab, in this scary van, and how there was another boy and a girl in there with you, both crying in a corner. It was Newt and his sister, Sonya. They watched their parents die too. But the Creators put them in a different section of the Lab, so we didn't find them for another few months. During those months, I came to visit you every night. We grew close, telling each other about our pasts. About three months after we got to the Lab, I came to your room during the day and we went on that walk, the one you said you had a dream about.'

'What happened after the men dragged us back inside?'

'The Creators brought us to some sort of meeting room. They told us that we… couldn't be around each other anymore. We were messing with the data. We had to be completely isolated from each other in order to help them with the Experiment. They locked us in different rooms, almost like we were prisoners. For the next month, we only saw people three times a day, and those people were the guards who brought us meals.'

'In my memory, the one of my mother, right as a man came to take me away, he called me Grace. I… I said that my name wasn't Grace. But… what is it then?'

Thomas shakes his head. 'I don't know. You introduced yourself to me as Grace. I vaguely remember that I had a different name, too. But I can't remember what it was. I'm just Thomas now.'

'But… you're okay with that? Not knowing your name? Not knowing who you really are?'

Thomas looks at the ceiling. 'No,' he says, 'but that doesn't mean I'm going to let it hurt me. I'll figure it out when we get out of here.'

When. He said when we get out of here.