Time to look in on the girls...
2. Sonya
Once the contraption was removed from Sonya's face and she sat up, the memories hit her like a big, fat boulder in the head.
It was all jumbled together, all messed up. She saw faces, remembered names, cities, dates, but they were mismatched. She knew they were mismatched - there was just something wrong about the way they arranged themselves in her head.
One of the medics led her out of the room and down the hall. Sonya didn't count turns - she couldn't think straight - but they stopped in front of another door. Someone opened it and Sonya was gently shoved inside.
The door closed behind her and she looked around. A white room. Two bunk beds and a kitchenette. That was all.
And Harriet, Joan, and Dora, jumping up from their seats to assail her with questions.
"What was the first thing?"
"What's your name?"
"Where are you from?"
"What's - "
"Whoa!" Sonya exclaimed, throwing her hands up and cutting them off with a nervous laugh. "Can I sit? I just had a damn probe in my ear."
"Right."
"Sorry."
The four girls walked over to where the bunk beds. Harriet, Joan, and Dora sat on one bed so Sonya could lie down on the other bottom bed.
The moment her head hit the pillow, she had the first clear thought all day.
Anita Banks.
That was her name. She knew it with absolute certainty, like it was engraved in her bones. Like those were the words tattooed on her back, not "Property of WICKED."
Jasper.
That was where she was born. Jasper, Alberta, nestled in the Rockies.
And then, finally, an actual memory.
She is five years old. It's been two years since the darts rained down on her old encampment. Banff.
Most died. Died a horrible, sickening death, from a horrible disease. Her and her mother survived. They moved north, until they met other survivors, until they were back home. Jasper.
She is sitting on the bank of a river with two other girls, one on each side. They are holding hands and sitting in complete silence, staring at the sparse, trickling, murky water, enjoying the small patch of shade they found under a white, skeleton tree.
"The river used to be prettier," she murmurs. She remembers how it looked before the sun flares. Clear. Rushing. Lively.
She misses the plants, the trees. She loved - loves - them, loves reading and talking about them, examining them. Her knowledge is the one thing that is still hers.
"I wish I saw it then," one of the girls says. Her name is Jane. "No fancy rivers or lakes where I was."
"Me too," the other girl says. Her name is Penny. "Do you think it'll go back to being pretty?"
"I hope so," she replies.
They enjoy the silence for a moment longer, until it is broken by a scream, the sound of a Berg, and her mother barrelling up to the girls from the dead forest and urging them to stand up.
"Anita, sweetheart," she breathes out, "we need to run."
Sonya sat up in an instant and shook her head, hoping to God that the motion would make her once again forget those memories.
No chance of that happening. Sonya's memories were back for good, and she instantly regretted it. She didn't want to remember the men in the green jumpsuits descending onto her mother and friends, snatching them up in a Berg. Taking them to WICKED. Testing their intelligence.
"Sonya?" Harriet asked cautiously. "You all right?"
Sonya nodded slowly in reply. "I just... my head's finally cleared up."
"And you regret it," Dora deadpanned.
Sonya looked over at the girl with the short hair. She always though Dora was a little quirky, with her hair always shaved on the smaller side of her parting and the other side long enough to cover her ear. Sonya was never sure if she kept her hair like that because she liked it or because she wanted to give people a reason to smile at her. Dora always had a crooked smirk on her face that made you feel like you were the next target of her sarcastic remarks.
But she was always the most straightforward and honest one out of all of them.
"Yeah," Sonya agreed quietly.
"Maybe Thomas, Minho, and Newt were right," Harriet muttered. "Maybe it's about time we stopped letting WICKED mess with our heads."
"Figuratively and literally," Joan added. The younger, burly girl was sitting with her arms crossed and brow furrowed, making her look incredibly menacing for a fifteen year-old.
"We should do something," Dora decided. "Find Teresa and Aris, see where they stand. If even they aren't happy with their memories, then we have to - to - "
"Escape."
Dora met Sonya's eyes and smirked. "Just like the good old days."
Yes, some of these chapters will be centred on Group B OCs. After all, that group had more survivors, and I had a few ideas for how some of them would be.
Sneak peek of next chapter:
But Frypan's joy had disappeared in an instant. With the disappearance of the headache came an unexpected, foreign feeling of clarity. Clarity. It was something he had yearned for in the Maze, and he finally had it.
Seeing the big picture for the first time in his life had not been comforting, though, and his first thought had been that Thomas and Minho were right. That he should have never backed out of keeping the Swipe.
He finally understood Alby.