Sorry I haven't been posting the new chapters. I just really thought nobody liked the first one so I didn't bother posting this one. But it seems some of you do want to read more, so here I give you a section from The Death Cure, just after Thomas flees Vince's warehouse with Brenda, leaving the rescued Immunes, Minho and the others behind. (Some facts may be a little off-center. I apologize in advance.) PS. Julie is just a random character I have made to exist as a part of Group B. She passed the Trials like everybody else and is now searching for a way to rid herself of the nightmares.

ENJOY XX

-Courtney

She sees Minho enter the dim storeroom and her heart speeds up considerably. He's alive. Dirty, tired and bruised, and alive. She's only spoken to him once- and she was unconscious for the most of it- but the connection she feels toward him is more than real.

She watches as he paces the room in front of the sleeping Immunes who are sprawled out on the concrete floor. He looks angry, frustrated about something. He slides a hand up into his dark hair and ruffles it up quickly, clenching his fingers into a fist. He hasn't seen her yet. She straightens up in her dark corner, fixes her hair. "Hey Minho," she says, her voice sounding louder than normal in the otherwise silent room. "Everything okay?"

He immediately stiffens at the mention of his name, like he's just heard the voice of a ghost. He turns and looks for her, and it takes his curious eyes a moment of wandering before they lock on her. His eyes are haunted and dark rings have started to pronounce themselves under them. Bruises colour his jawline and grey scars, where he was burnt by lighting in the Scorch, are scattered down his arms and neck. She still sees the beauty of him, the stability in his frame, that small fragment of something hopeful in his eyes, regardless of the small imperfections.

"Do you remember me?" she asks after he's quiet for a while. His lips turn up into a weak smile and all the anger she saw in him before is gone, hidden.

"I never got your name," he says, picking his way through the field of sleeping bodies toward me.

"It's Julie," she replies as he slumps down beside her, leaning his back against a row of metal shelving.

"Last time we met I remember boring you to sleep," he says quietly, tiredness dulling the edges of his usually lively voice. He leans his head back so it rests against the shelf and closes his eyes. I see his Adam 's apple move under his olive skin as he swallows. He looks vulnerable, the one trait she's never seen in him before. She likes the thought of it.

"Oh, really?" Julie replies slowly, as if through a daze. "I remember it a lot differently," He shared something with her, something he mightn't've said to anyone else, not even Thomas. "I heard about your friend Newt not being immune. I'm really sorry,"

Minho tenses up beside her, his slender hands balling into tight fists. He starts to shake slightly, like whatever is building inside him is trying to physically announce itself. For a moment she's afraid he'll unload on her, punch her until she passes out. But that thought goes away quickly and she feels guilty for ever thinking it.

His eyes move behind his eyelids and he frowns like he's in pain. "I don't really want to hear about that right now," he mutters through gritted teeth. I may as well be torturing him, she thinks with horror.

Then she feels pain in her chest, so great it threatens to destroy her. For Minho. For her memories. For everything. Then words are flowing out of her mouth steadily before she is even aware she is speaking.

"I had a friend named Beth who stuck with me the entire time. The Maze, the Scorch...she battled through like the rest of us, but she was different in how she viewed the world. It was like she was looking through a lens that only showed butterflies and rainbows on the other end. She thought we could beat the world and end up happy. And I was starting to think we could, too." she takes a breath. A pause. "Then we get back here and Rat Face tells us she's got the Flare." the sentence is so short, so simple, but she feels the weight behind it. She feels the blossoming anguish in her gut and the warm tears running down her cheeks. "So I tell her she'll be fine, that I'll help them find a cure. I'll help them find the cure. And Beth, being the ray of sunshine she was, was supposed to agree and stick it out for as long as possible. So we ship out to Denver looking for you guys. We get there with no problems, stay in a budget motel in some dirty part of the city. I promised her we were going to find help in the city. We even snuck her in through a break in the wall. I knew it was bad. I knew it would spread the disease inside the walls, but at the time I didn't care."

"So Beth and I get our own room, just in case any guards came and tried to make trouble for us. Better to save the masses, right?" she swallows hard, tries to push the next part of the story out of her throat. "I go out to find Teresa, to tell her we should start moving, and when I come back to the room, there's Beth lying in a pool of her own blood. At first I think the guards had found her, murdered her when they found out she was infected. But then I see the knife tucked under her leg and the slits down her arms. She'd killed herself. The girl who only saw the best in people and the light in dark situations. She'd opted out because it got too tough,"

She goes quiet after that, the tears falling freely now, cascading down her face and dripping from her chin. She wipes them away subtly, wanting to hide them from the boy, unwilling to let him see her in a state of weakness. Minho has gone still beside her but she can feel his irregular breathing against her arm. For a moment he shifts his arm, as if debating whether or not to put it around her, but then he must decide not to.

"Newt's still out there," he says. "And he's no Beth. He won't kill himself." She doesn't get mad or offended, just sad. She knows now that Beth was broken inside, relying on a string to hold her together. And when that string was severed she fell apart like an unraveled rag doll. She doesn't know Newt but she'd seen the desperation of those with the Flare first hand. It didn't matter what he was like before; one day he'll be begging to die.

A second later Minho goes rigid and she feels his shift in moods. "I-I'm sorry, I didn't mean it like that," he turns to her. "I didn't mean-"

"It's ok." she says. Short and simple. Maybe she means it, maybe she doesn't. But the time for saying so has come and gone as she realizes the tension between them has shifted again.

"Okay, good," he says without feeling, as if he hadn't meant to apologize in the first place. Then he pushes himself to his feet and walks toward the door he came through, disappearing through it without a single glance back at her. She sits in the dark, as she had before he'd come in, but it is different now. She feels as if something within her is missing and its absence is welcoming in the darkness.