Nearly an hour ago, gunshots and cries had overtaken his hearing, but at that moment, the only persistent sounds were his sniffs and his hands fiddling with his right arm's sleeve.
"I killed," the words escaped his mouth as if his mind was no longer in control of itself. "I killed dad."
No one was there to listen to his remorse, much less share it. Test MCME1 had proved that only he could go against orders; something he was being punished for. Nonetheless, refusing them had served for nothing, since, in a fit of anger, the newly founded group's Commander shot his father.
The body disappeared just as quickly as he was grabbed by his arms, pulling and pushing him out of the Test's room to the one he was currently in; staring into the darkness with nothing else better to do than cower and cry in a corner. With no lights and the constant uneasiness, he wondered if that room was the so-promised Probation. Since Group S was formed, the Commander has done nothing but talk about it.
"A place so horrible that killing is the only way out," he said under his breath, raising his hands to his hair, following a pattern for no reason other than to appease part of his mind. "Locked and kept away."
Not much time had passed since his first kill, and he surely didn't want to repeat it anytime soon, even though it seemed that he would have no alternative. It was almost maddening; the tests, the missions. He was only nine years old. Back when he lived with his family, nine-year-olds didn't kill — not for survival, nor for amusement — yet he was being forced to.
The worst part for his conscience; his first kill had been a child. They were just like him, a little taller and paler of skin, but still a kid no older than seven or eight years old. Even if they were infected, even if they could become a potential threat later on, how could the grown-ups expect him to keep killing other kids like nothing was wrong? It was very much wrong in his opinion. Crank or not, adult or child, nobody deserved such violent ends.
He rubbed his eyes, getting the tears to flow down his cheeks instead of bottling up. No cries would help his situation, he knew that much, but somehow crying relaxed him. Only one thing was missing: the comforting hugs that his brother gave him back when they were still together. Back when they were happy in their home with their parents and the maddened people were their only worry.
Compared to those days, his current life felt like a nightmare. One which it would take years to wake up from.
"Soldier S5," said a man with a flashy suit and long face, like a rat's, standing tall under the frame of the room's only door to the outside. "Your punishment for disobeying orders has been set. We'll be lenient. Since you're still young, two days of solitary confinement should be enough. Repeat today's events, and the punishment will increase with every infraction."
Rat Man showed no compassion as he turned his heels swiftly, got out to the hallway, and closed the door behind him.
The room fell back into a dark abyss, enclosing him in it for the two promised days; with hardly twenty minutes of light per meal and a torch to access the bathroom at the side of the room. There was nothing for him to do, except supposedly reflect on his wrongdoings, which he was in no state of mind to acknowledge.
"My brother's next," he mumbled, almost digging his nails into his skin while hugging himself to sleep. "They'll make me kill him. He'll die. I can't kill him. I can't."
A gasp provided the air his starved lungs lacked, though didn't calm his breathing at all. He dug his nails deeper into the fabric surrounding him, needing to get out of the sleeping bag as soon as possible. It was suffocating — the dark night, the constricting feeling — nothing allowed him even a second of calmness.
The back of his head slammed against the main building's wall as he continued his struggle to rip the sleeping bag from the inside. Images appeared in his mind like flashes of light: a pile of bodies, a girl whose face was blurred, a gun just like the one he carried in his holster, and a boy.
The boy was the most baffling. Not only was his face completely recognisable, but a loud noise and multiple cries accompanied it.
"William, what are you doing here?" A woman's voice surged in his mind, though not like the girl's the previous day.
It was such a noticeable distinction between the voices that there was no doubt which one was the telepathic message and which was the memory. While the girl's was directly echoing in his mind, like his own thoughts, the woman's seemed to be somewhere more distant, like how he remembered the Griever's sounds as it chased him the previous day. However, a great addition to separate them further was his skin, which crawled as the woman's voice appeared once again.
"That information is restricted, William. I understand your feelings, but Variables are not to be tampered with. If we had stopped him, the whole Trials would have served for nothing." There was a brief pause, as if the woman was trying to analyse him, or maybe just staring at him with pity. No matter how it had been, dread crept up in every fibre of his being, making the little sanity he had left incline towards his desire; making someone pay for what they had done. "Return to your living quarters before your Commander notices your absence."
He wanted to run, punch the wall even. His hand balled into a fist, begging his body to deliver the blow. However, contrary to his nightmarish memory, in the Glade, there was nobody to do so. And, even if there was, it could be a completely innocent person that didn't deserve to be beaten up.
"One." He breathed in and out deeply while ripping the sleeping bag apart.
With his new-felt freedom from the fragile fabric, he slammed his back against the main building's wall and kept counting. From one to five, and from five to one. Despite the thought being sudden, and almost baffling as to why or when he had started using such a method to calm down, he couldn't complain. After all, it was working.
"Two."
His head tilted to watch the night sky. The moon enlightened the Glade dimly, but it wasn't enough. The surroundings were still too dark. His chest tightened the more he thought about it, making his hands sweat as he rubbed them against his dirt-covered trousers.
"Three." He closed his eyes, giving in to the darkness for less than two seconds before his senses kicked in, snapping his eyes open and widening them to adjust themselves to the lack of light. "Four."
The grass under his hands felt soothing, as if the soft caresses to his palms were trying to tell him that everything would be alright, but something was still missing. That little sting he had carried since the day before never left his heart, even when he had been trying to sleep hours ago. It took long minutes, and exhaustion, to knock him out. Although, now that he sat facing the door — his hands close to his holster, his sweatshirt drenched in sweat, and his eyes tiredly glancing at the carved names — sleep didn't feel like the right thing to give into.
Only when the sweatshirt became uncomfortable to wear, William took it off. His skin didn't get red easily, yet he could notice a faint reddish tone, mostly in areas with scratches. What he didn't expect to encounter was the confirmation of the nightmarish memory he had during his sleep and had fought so hard to ignore until then.
Tattooed on his right arm, and written with white ink to make it easier to read, the short phrases 'Soldier S5, property of WICKED. Current status: DEFECTIVE' became something he could in no way ignore.
'I hoped it would take you longer to see that.' The girl's voice appeared unannounced, making him flinch. 'You remembered, too, didn't you? The doctors can't stop making a fuss about your brain patterns.'
Who are you? He wanted to talk to the girl, but his words never seemed to get through.
'I'm sorry, William. This is all my fault.'
With his eyes closed, he tried to channel his need to talk to somebody and contact her. He thought random words and imagined himself sending them off to space, hoping she was somewhere where she could receive them.
'Darn it.'
'William,' the girl's voice was faint, yet carried a surprised tone that almost made him smile.
'That's not fair,' he said. 'You clearly know me and you've been saying all kinds of weird things since yesterday, but I don't even know your name.'
'Teresa,' she replied in an oddly nostalgic tone. 'But you used to call me Tessa.'
While he couldn't remember being used to communicating telepathically, his paused breaths and calmer heartbeat were a clear sign of his body's commodity. His skin didn't crawl, his chest didn't tighten, and his mind begged to keep listening to Teresa's voice, even if they only ended up discussing the most mundane and unimportant subjects possible.
'Alright, Teresa, and what did you do?' He asked, placing a hand over his right arm to prove to himself that the words written there were indeed a permanent tattoo and not made of temporary ink.
The lack of reply was nerve-wracking. He wanted to hear her voice right away, know what she had done, and decide if the need of having her voice around would outbalance whatever she had done to him.
It took a minute of infinite waiting for her to reply. 'I gave WICKED our location. I'm the reason that you're in the Glade.'
WICKED, that was what was written on his arm, that he was WICKED's property. But, if he, for some unknown reason, belonged to them like a mere object, or in his case a soldier, how had they ended up in a position where WICKED had no idea where the two of them were? And why would Teresa want to go back? Did she have a reason, or had she simply acted out of fear?
'Why?' He glanced down at his arm, re-reading his tattoo for the tenth time in the last five minutes.
'To find a cure to the Flare,' replied Teresa, though her voice cracked at the beginning of the sentence. 'A cure for you, and the millions of people suffering out there.'
'For me?' William repeated, furrowing his brow at the new information about himself. 'What about you?'
'I'm Immune, William. But you're not. You're infected,' Teresa said, her grief-stricken voice becoming all he could concentrate on. 'Even if I send you the Bliss when you start showing symptoms, you might not keep your sanity for longer than six or seven months at most.'
'What does being infected have to do with being sent here? Am I dangerous or something?'
'Nobody knows you're infected, William. I didn't tell them. They would have killed you.'
'Well, I'm already in a place with no way out and monsters that can and will attack me, so I think killing me would be quite the generous thing to do.'
'There's another way out of the maze, but you can't take it yet. Once you're here, I can't protect you. In Probation, you'll be safer.'
He stopped to think. How in the world would stay in that place be safer than outside? In either situation, WICKED was willing to kill him. It didn't matter if it was through gigantic goop machines or a simple gun, both were just different methods to achieve the same end.
'What's Probation even for?' he asked.
'It's technically the worst punishment they could give you,' replied Teresa. 'But in reality, it's just to test you. If they find what they're looking for in your brain patterns, the investors might forget about the cure and change their plans.'
'Change their plans? To what? Death?'
'War.' His mind was devoid of her voice for a few seconds, but she appeared once again, only to add to her previous statement. 'People are scared. Control points are falling apart, the amount of infected surpasses the healthy, and most cities no longer exist. If you get out of the maze, you'll either be transported with the others from one point to another on the map while the cities fall into the infected hands, or …'
'Or what?'
'Used. Everything you've ever feared, everything you've ever told me you never wanted to experience again, it'll become a daily thing. You'll kill people, even when you try to fight your own mind and body not to. They'll control you, send you free into the Crank cities, and let destruction happen.'
'If they can bloody control people, why did they not use that before? And why on me?'
'They did something similar, though only in places where they knew there were Immunes.' Teresa's voice was nothing more than a pain-filled whisper. 'People weren't desperate enough for a war when the Trials were still being implemented. But now that the results are vague, with no cure, it seems that it has become the only conclusion humanity — infected and healthy alike — can come up with.'
For the rest of the day and the weeks and months to come, Teresa became William's confidant and only friend. He asked as many questions as his heart and mind saw fit, and she answered as she could; sometimes with more details than others. Part of his mind wanted to be wary of her. After all, she had voluntarily admitted that she had betrayed him before. However, he hadn't cornered her, and he hadn't remembered a thing about her or the situation before she explained it to him in detail, which made him decide to deposit his trust in her one more time.
It turned out to work in his favour, since, the day he marked the end of his fourth month in the Glade next to the names on the wall, Teresa's company had saved him hundreds of times in various situations.
He was attacked by nightmares sooner than expected that night. They were never pretty, but that one in specific was horrifying. It wasn't about killing people, or suffering in solitary confinement, but about a boy. A boy that had been in the maze before him and had decided to take his own life by jumping off a wall.
It took a minute to reassure himself that he was still in the Glade, sleeping on the mattress that he had snatched from the main building's medical room. The scratching marks on it had increased with time, and now most of them were his own. Even the sheets, which he had managed to maintain decently clean thanks to the showers, were parched with all kinds of clothes and what was left of sleeping bags. Apart from the top and a portion of the middle-to-bottom part of the sheet, whatever was in his nails' reach ended up destroyed.
His nails had dug deeper than usual into the mattress, cutting the part of the sheets that he had just patched up the day before. A mix of a huff and a sigh was all he could muster while sitting up, the tattoo on his right arm being enlightened by the dim fire in front of him.
Nightmares had attacked his sleep from day one, yet none had contained people that weren't the Rat Man, a mysterious masked soldier, Teresa, or brief mentions of a brother he had. The boy's one was completely different. He didn't remember the situation, or what he was doing when the boy jumped off, only the pain in his chest, and his inability to think about anything that wasn't the boy; Newt.
'Another nightmare?' Teresa's voice appeared just at the right time.
'A buggin' horrible one at that,' he answered, which always made her tone lighten.
'What happened?' asked Teresa.
'I knew one of the boys from the name's wall. Newt. He killed himself, didn't he?'
Teresa fell silent, which wasn't the usual. She always responded whatever she could, even when she had no idea how to. His feelings were always her second worry, and speaking the truth was her first.
'Tessa? Is there something wrong?' He asked, feeling no need to pause his breathing to keep the conversation with his friend; a perk of telepathic interaction.
'I'm not sure,' she finally answered. 'The Maze's vigilance backup isn't working too well. Yesterday's recordings are nowhere to be found.'
'What—' His voice trailed off as a disorienting sight overwhelmed him, accompanied by the silence that preceded the storm.
There was a boy around the middle of the walls, where the ivy ended.
'William.' Teresa called his name, but his mind had blocked any thought that wasn't the boy.
Despite being far away and hardly remembering anything about him, William's gut was shouting the boy's name in his mind's stead. It was Newt. Newt was holding onto the ivy vines, ready to jump off at any given second. And William was too far away to catch him or even call his name to stop him.
'William, it's not real. They're just—'
Teresa's presence in his mind disappeared for the first time since the first day, just as Newt let go of the vines.
His senses kicked in too late, or perhaps just in time. After all, it didn't matter if he tried to help the boy out, he couldn't save hallucinations. The dark night hardly let him see anything around the spot where the body should be, but it was clear nobody was there apart from him. No corpse, blood, or cries for help from a half-dead boy.
He was alone.
Newt had only been a distraction to rid him of the only person keeping him sane; Teresa.
She was gone from his mind, and it didn't seem as if she would ever get back. He tried to imagine what he remembered of her, her pale skin and dark hair and called her name and nickname millions of times, but there was no response. He could only hope that WICKED hadn't killed her for helping him out.
What if they had? Could he forgive himself? It was all his fault, or that was what his persistent, intrusive thoughts wanted to make him believe. If he had only understood her position sooner, he could have tried to convince her of leaving him alone. At least one of them would have had their survival guaranteed. Now, neither would survive. Without Teresa, there was no way out. And, even if there was, only death and suffering would be awaiting him on the other side of the outer maze walls, making an unavoidable question appear in his mind.
Was surviving even worth it at that point?