Hey everyone!

I'm pretty sure that the next chapter is gonna be the last one, so keep an eye out for chapter 17 and my Scorch Trials fanfic!

-Plerfstacks :)

Chapter 16

For the next few days, Anna tried to keep the Glade on its feet until Thomas had gotten through with the Changing and was able to help them get out. This was easier said than done, however, because the Gladers were attacked every night by Grievers, picking off one of them every night, which put the rest of the boys (and Anna) into a bit of a tense mood.

She managed it, however, with the help of Newt, who seemed just as stressed out as she was. This was the first time since he'd become her second that she felt as overwhelmed as when she'd been the sole leader.

It didn't help their current situation that half of their Med-Jacks had fallen into a state of depression after one of the Grievers had gotten Zart on the first night after Thomas was stung. Clint and Zart had been best friends since Clint first showed up in the Box, and now that Zart was dead, Clint didn't seem to know what to do with himself. Anna had tried to counsel him, but nothing she said seemed to help. The only one who seemed to be getting through to him was Newt, probably because Newt was the only one who could relate to what Clint was going through. This resulted in Newt spending most of his spare time in the Homestead with Clint, and therefore Anna didn't see much of him. While she understood that she shouldn't be jealous of her friend for being able to spend more time with Newt than she was, Anna couldn't help but feel a twinge of selfish resentment every time she watched Newt's tall, slim silhouette walking to the Homestead.

After their hasty dinner of a way-too-small piece of bread three nights after Thomas's stupid nobility stunt, Anna and Newt led the Gladers to the Homestead for their customary huddling-in-a-corner-and-not-sleeping sort of night. Anna took advantage of this time to go see how Thomas was doing. He'd stopped screaming earlier that day, and Anna was hoping he'd come out of it soon. She hated to admit it, but she really needed the kid's help, and Anna could tell that Teresa wanted him to wake up soon, too, as she'd taken to standing around beside Thomas's bed and refusing to talk to anybody. Anna had carefully approached her once, only to be glared at by her fiery blue eyes that seemed to pierce right through Anna's small bubble of confidence upon entering the room. She had backed out the way she came, and hadn't seen much more of Teresa after that incident. She wished she could make friends with her, though, because as the only girl in the Glade for more than two years, Anna really needed another female around.

Thomas seemed to be doing alright, as she was told by Jeff. He seemed even more overworked and frazzled than she was, and Anna would have given him the night off if his only coworker hadn't been incapacitated. Instead, she walked out with an apologetic smile and went to go huddle in a room to escape the Grievers.

On the way, she ran into Newt, who gave her a small smile as he walked past her. Anna reached out and grabbed his elbow as he passed, and he turned around to face her.

"What's wrong?" she asked. "You seem funny."

"I'm gonna go check on Clint," Newt replied. "I think he's gonna be fine, but I still want to make sure…" As he trailed off, he slid his arm out of her grip and began to walk towards the end of the hallway once more, leaving Anna feeling confused and slightly hurt.

The Grievers came again that night, as everyone was expecting. They took another one of the Gladers with them, Matt, who'd been a good friend of Minho's. They were down another Runner, and Anna realized that they probably weren't gonna get a new one. They probably didn't need a new one, actually, because the Runners were getting little to no progress done out there as it was, and Anna was considering telling them all to stop running the Maze entirely.

Thomas woke up that morning. Anna was informed of this pretty much within five minutes of it happening, and she rushed over to the Homestead to see him as soon as she got the news. Newt was already there at the door, and Anna caught up to him before he went inside.

"Hey," she said. "Did you get the news?"

"Yeah," he responded. "Jeff told me. Tommy'd better have some bloody memories. I'd hate for this to all have been for nothing."

Anna agreed. She and Newt walked inside to find Clint (who seemed more or less like his old self) and Jeff standing outside a barely-open door.

"Is he in there?" Anna asked.

"Yeah," Clint replied. "Chuck's in there with him."

Anna pushed open the door to reveal a very sickly and pale, but otherwise unharmed Thomas sitting on a bed, in conversation with Chuck. She stepped inside, followed by her second-in-command. She cut right to the chase; as soon as Thomas glanced up and made eye contact with her, she began to fire questions at him.

"Thomas, what did you see?" she asked. "Do you know how to get out?"

Thomas looked overwhelmed by the rapid-fire way that Anna was talking to him, but he managed to formulate an answer.

"I don't know exactly what I saw, and yes, I do know a way out."

They called a meeting of the Council that afternoon. The Keepers were all so interested in what Thomas had to say that Anna didn't have to yell at them to shut up before they began.

"Go, Thomas," she said. "Tell us everything."

"Where do I even shucking begin?" he muttered, seemingly to himself. "Okay. I don't know exactly what it was that I remembered; bits of it have faded, but I do know this: The Maze is a test. It was fabricated to mess with our brains; to make us think. We're part of a massive experiment to discover who-knows-what, and we're just lab rats in a big testing center. They want us to find a way out, because now we've run out of time. Teresa triggered the Ending, and now we have to get out of this mess."

"Slow down," Newt said, holding his hands up. "Start at the bloody beginning."

"Uh, okay. The beginning. I guess this all starts where we were taken away from our families when we were young and put in this big lab. I don't know why we were the ones to be chosen, and I don't care, to be honest. They trained us from the start, teaching us things and tracking our brains. They even gave us stupid names to replace our old ones."

"Wait," Anna said. "These aren't our names?" Thomas shook his head.

"No. They named us after famous scientists and that sort of thing. Newt for Isaac Newton, Thomas for Thomas Edison, and Anna for someone called Anna Winlock."

"Shuck," Anna murmured. All this time, she'd clung to her own name like a lifeline in her sea of deleted memories. It had been the only thing that she'd been able to keep from her old life, and here she was finding out that her lifeline was really a fake; a shadow that she'd been holding onto and now found herself being swept away.

The general murmur of surprise at this proclamation quieted after a second, and Thomas went on.

"Teresa and I were different, though," he said. "We were pretty much in the center of it all. We… helped the Creators do this to you—to us."

"Explain," Newt said shortly.

"We helped design the shucking Maze. And… there's one more thing."

"Well, then you'd best bloody say it, then," Newt pressed, his voice annoyed.

"We… We can…"

"Just tell us!" Anna cried.

"We're telepathic!" Thomas yelled. "We can talk to each other in our heads!"

Anna frowned.

"Okay then," she muttered. "I really wish you'd told me about that earlier so I could have kept a better eye on you shanks…"

"But how do we get out?" somebody yelled from across the room.

"Oh, yeah," Thomas said, nodding. "We've got to go into the Maze. Off the Cliff. We need to use the words that we decoded from the wall movement to open a door or something."

"If we're gonna go into the Maze, we need to do it tonight," Anna decided. "We're not gonna think about it long enough to get scared. We need to do it at night when all the Grievers are in the Glade, and then maybe that will increase our chances."

There was a murmur of assent around the room, and Anna dismissed the Council, wondering what she'd gotten herself into.

That night, Anna and a group of about thirty-five Gladers who had agreed to come gathered around the East Doors. They had waited until the Grievers were out ravaging the Glade, as had become the usual occurrence, to head out. Anna hadn't let anyone bring any sort of light with them, because she was worried it would attract Grievers. The group huddled in the darkness, all of them scared out of their minds.

"Shouldn't we have some sort of pep talk?" Minho asked. "Ya know, to psych us up?"

"Be my guest," Newt replied. Minho turned around so he was facing the Gladers.

"Be careful. Don't die," he said bluntly. Newt rolled his eyes.

"Great. We're all bloody inspired."

Anna stifled a nervous laugh as she stared out into the depths of the Maze.

"Alright, guys," she said loudly, trying to shake herself out of her nervousness. "We're gonna make it tonight. Tonight, we aren't just test subjects. We're gonna march right into whatever shucking laboratory that's been playing with us, and we are going to show them what we're made of!" Her speech ended with her voice a confident yell, and the crowd of Gladers began to yell out battle cries as they waved their fists in the air.

"We're gonna make them pay!" Anna screamed, almost as if she were talking directly to the Creators, challenging them. She turned around and ran into the Maze, adrenaline pulsing through her as the Gladers followed suit.

Anna's adrenaline rush lasted up until they saw the first Griever. She came to a screeching halt and flung her arms out to stop the rest of the Gladers from being eaten alive. She led the group around a corner, and she poked her head out around the stone wall to see what the Griever was doing.

"Everyone be quiet," she breathed, shushing them. She crept forwards, wondering frantically what they should do. The Griever didn't seem to be going anywhere, but they couldn't just walk right over it. Anna hadn't had time to decide before one of the Gladers had leapt past her and directly into the path of the Griever.

"What the shuck, Dan!" she screamed, watching helplessly as the Griever began to tear into the poor kid. Before she could fully comprehend the situation, three other Grievers had come to see what all the commotion was about. They crowded around Dan; his piercing shrieks of pain rang in Anna's ears. He had sacrificed himself for the rest of the Gladers, and Anna was just standing there like an idiot. She snapped herself out of it and motioned for the Gladers to follow her. She snuck closer to the Grievers, staying close to the wall. She began to push the Gladers in a single-file line past the gory scene that had once been Dan.

They had gotten most of the Gladers past the Grievers when they suddenly lost interest in Dan and turned on the group of teenagers. Anna shoved the remaining Gladers out of the way of the Grievers as she scrambled to save herself as well. They'd almost reached the Cliff, and all they needed to do was get Thomas and Teresa in the Griever Hole. They were so close.

The Grievers were upon them by that point, and there was nothing Anna could do as she watched her fellow Gladers get massacred. As she grabbed her switchblade and began hacking away at the Grievers' metal arms, she began to look around for Newt. Had he already been brutally murdered? Anna glanced around her with mounting panic until she saw that familiar flash of blond hair and she breathed a sigh of relief. She returned her full attention to grappling with the Griever that had gotten a hold of her arm in one of its metal claws while she'd been looking for Newt. After a moment of wildly wrestling with the thing, she managed to rip its arm right off, leaving the claws embedded in her wrist. Yanking it out with a stifled gasp of pain, Anna wondered whether Thomas and Teresa had made it. She turned her head slightly and saw Thomas practically throwing Chuck into the Griever Hole. Why was he taking Chuck?

She didn't have much time to wonder, though, because the Grievers were closing in on them and their numbers were dwindling. Please, Thomas, she silently prayed, wishing she could talk to him in her head like Teresa could. Hurry the shuck up.

Out of the corner of her eye, Anna saw a kid named Will, previously a Builder, slide off the edge of the Cliff and fall into the abyss below, completely missing the Griever Hole. Her stomach clenched into a knot, but she ignored it as she ran over to help Jeff, who had his own problems. The slug-like creature had him pressed up against the wall, and it was advancing on him menacingly with its flashlights shining in his eyes and its knives and needles brandished. Anna was about two steps away from getting to him and helping him when the Griever lashed out with its blade, slicing Jeff cleanly across the throat and letting him crumple limply to the ground. Anna froze, blood pounding in her ears as she watched the Griever turn around, almost in slow motion. It loomed over her, its knife's blade still dripping with Jeff's blood. Anna didn't know what to do; she scrambled backwards uselessly as the Griever stared down at her. Suddenly, its mechanized arms fell lifelessly at its sides and the Griever flopped to the floor of the Maze and lay still. Anna gaped at it for a moment until she realized that all of their assailants had seemingly died all at once. Shouts of triumph exploded from the Gladers as they gathered together once more. Anna surveyed the group. There wasn't a single Glader who hadn't sustained at least small injuries, and she herself wasn't too great off either. As she stared victoriously at the bodies of the shut-down Grievers, she was also struck with how small the group had become. They had cut their number at least in half, and the casualties were strewn about all over the floor.

"We need to go through the Griever Hole," Anna said after a moment. "Thomas and Teresa must have done it."

The Gladers took turns jumping off the Cliff into the Hole, and Anna felt a twinge of fear every time someone did. She kept worrying that somebody would miss the Hole entirely, and add to their losses. Nobody did, however, and eventually she and Newt were the only ones left in the Maze.

"You're bleeding," Newt said to her as they stood on the edge of the Cliff. Anna glanced down. Sure enough, her right wrist was covered in blood where the Griever had clawed her. She dismissed this, however, and simply said,

"Just jump off the Cliff, Newt. I'll be fine."

Newt nodded and walked to the very edge. When he jumped, Anna felt herself seized with panic that was more than she'd felt every other time somebody had jumped into the Griever Hole. She was convinced for a second that he'd miss, but Newt disappeared into the Hole just like everyone else. Anna stepped up once he'd gone, and without thinking about it, she leapt off the ledge.

A/N:

Anna Winlock is an actual scientist who lived in the 1800s-1900s, and she was the inspiration for my OC's name before I wrote this. Just a fun fact :)