Another chapter, five years after the first. I definitely didn't expect to still be writing this in 2023, though my dedication is making itself just as apparent as my bad executive functioning. Oh well. I have more of this story to tell, though the ending is getting close. As a new effort to post chapters that aren't several months apart, I have decided to combine two of my loose plans and edit the story chapter by chapter to be posted on AO3 on a regular basis (It feels like a kind of loss to change the original text on here, where I have developed my writing through the years). I figured that this will boost my engagement with the story as a whole and make me write new chapters. I'll see how it goes once my account there is completed, and hopefully, whoever has made it this far into my biggest ever writing project will get to see a satisfying end. If you're reading this, thank you. This story has meant a lot to me over these five years, and I can't wait to finish it at last.

Chapter 58. City

It hurt to leave the girl behind, still wiping her face. But there was a new hope in her eyes. She stared with it, pleading for the Gladers to leave right away and find her a cure. And the guilt of that look was far more painful than going, so Thomas went out the door as fast as possible. Whether he would see this child again was something he shouldn't waste time thinking about.

Out in the icy wind, his shoulders shook almost as hard as the girl's letter, which he waved through the air to 'get the viruses off', as she'd demanded. He made sure to be in view of the open door to reassure her. When Newt shut the door with a last breeze of warmth, Thomas got to work on the picture frames, fiddling with the opening mechanism to the best ability of his stiffening fingers. He hoped they would end up somewhere with warmer clothes once the drive was over, if it ever would be.

Tiny snowflakes bit into his hands, but he tried to keep them away from the papers. Not that they should be important —real or not, this child would not be saying a final goodbye to her family through this letter. Still, he slid it into the frame carefully, so it would not get wrinkled. Did that mean he didn't believe she could be saved? Did it mean he was getting too invested? Falling into a trap?

The frame made a 'click!' as he closed it. The thing was see-through on both sides, but the letter took up three pages.

Newt held out a second frame, already opened. Thomas took it, grateful that he wouldn't have to bother with the tiny latches.

"Poor child," he said as he added the second paper to the frame.

"She'll be alright," Newt said, in the same reassuring tone he'd used with the child. It was an effective tone.

The girl's father waited where he'd left them, almost leaping forward when he spotted them.

"How is she?" He demanded. "Healthy? Does she have enough food?"

"She's hanging on," Newt said. "Lucid. Too early to be that affected."

"If she's not… I never heard of the tests being wrong, but maybe…"

"No," Thomas said quickly. The look of impossible hope hurt more than any other. "She's infected."

"How do you know?" The poor man had latched onto the thought that there could have been a mistake.

"It's the look in the eyes. Or behind them," Newt explained. "We know what it looks like."

"Fine." The man closed down and grabbed the framed letters, staring at them with unmoving eyes. "I'll bring you back to your… friends."

In the time they'd been gone, the car had been fuelled and prepared to leave, although they would have to leave in the wrong direction to divert suspicion. Joan and Rat Man waited inside of it as they neared the gate before the gas station.

"Are you sure you're going with them of your free will?" The man asked.

"Yeah," Thomas sighed. Imagine going anywhere with Rat Man voluntarily. Especially when he was behind the wheel.

"I could help you get away," he went on, despite Thomas' confirmation. "You know, they took my cousin some years ago. Annoying little brat. He managed to send a message out after a while, asked me to help him escape."

Newt frowned, seeming to reevaluate the man. Thomas hoped he wasn't considering his offer. He was too tired for another escape. "It didn't work, though," he said, as if he knew.

"No. They must've caught on. Almost caught me, too. I always wished I'd told him no. Can't imagine what they did to him, if they were bad enough to steal him from his parents in the first place."

"I might know who you're talking about," Newt said, glancing at Thomas with astonishment. "It was ages ago, but I remember… Gally was talking about a cousin near the border."

The man shook his head. "Don't know that name. Must've been a different guy."

"It's not his real name. I've no idea what that is. But you look similar enough, for cousins."

Thomas couldn't disagree. Something about the nose was way too familiar, although this one didn't look as if it had been broken at any point. He probably shouldn't mention that incident.

"Oh." The man seemed to stare into the past, unsure whether to be happy about what he found or remain pessimistic. "Well, you could send him this way if you get the chance. I always welcome family. What's left of it."

At that, neither of the Gladers wanted to ask if their friend had any other potential relatives.

They said their thanks and went on their way.

Once they returned to the back seat of the car, Rat Man sighed and started driving. "This little break has cost us our head start. What took you so long?"

"We were just retrieving a message," Thomas said. "And —Ow." He had smacked his head against the window. They were off the road again, back on the path they'd made through the woods. The established path did not make the drive smoother.

"There are seatbelts for a reason," Rat Man condescended.

"I'm using the…" Thomas looked down. "Seatbelt." He wasn't.

While Thomas struggled to put on the seatbelt discreetly, Newt explained what had happened, excluding most of what had been said.

"It depends on how far they've gotten with the cure," Joan said, "but surely there will be enough time to save that girl. It's unlikely to progress fast in her situation."

"Do you know more specifically how it's going with that?" Thomas wondered. Her statement was suspiciously vague.

"Well, no. I don't. Our communication has been limited. All we know is that safe bases have been set up and the research is underway."

Of course. "And where were they set up?"

"What's with all the questions?" Rat Man —back on the normal road, thankfully— glanced back at Thomas with the utmost suspicion. "You're not being controlled by the chancellor so she can listen in on our answers, are you?"

How absurd. Thomas scoffed. Now they were suspicious of him? Well, at least they would be united by mutual distrust in that case.

"That wasn't a no, Thomas."

He didn't want to give a response, no less for the reason that he couldn't conclusively do so. For all he knew, he was being controlled. It would be sort of funny if they were real and Thomas was the illusion. Wait… Would that even work? Maybe he could be in the actual world, in his actual body, and under the complete control of WICKED, to the extent that he thought it was his own head messing with him when it was somebody else putting thoughts in there. Maybe he was not his real self, though, but a virtual copy acting on the assumption that it truly was the person it was pretending to be. And now his head hurt, sore from all the circles it had been running around in.

He tuned back to the sound of Newt's angry tone, which had been speaking for a while next to Thomas' partial awareness.

"So why not remove the bloody things?" He asked.

"Just remove them?" Rat Man sounded like he'd been asked why the ocean couldn't be red. "It's not that simple to remove something that somebody else put in your brains years ago."

So, they were on the topic of the Swipe.

"But not impossible?"

"Well, no. But the risk of brain damage, or even death—"

"Can't be higher than it would be if they got a hold of us again."

"The two are too close to take the chance," Joan said apologetically. "If it were safe, we would be on our way to get the implants out."

"So we just live with them forever? Have WICKED in our brains until we kick the bucket?"

"It's nothing to get upset about," Rat Man said. "It doesn't affect you in any way."

"Any way that you know about," Newt grumbled.

The car swung to the left menacingly. "I know more than you do, so I can tell you that with our resources, an outcome where it's removed and you live is about as likely as you surviving by cutting it out on your own. There should be a knife back there, if you like your odds."

"Maybe that's better than being controlled again."

"It would halve the amount of complaining in here, so go ahead."

Newt didn't have anything to say to that. Thomas looked over and saw him run his fingers over a pocket knife, as if he considered it. It was unsettling to think about, but was it really an unreasonable urge to get rid of the Swipe? To be under the overwhelming and unbreakable control of someone, mind and body at constant risk of infiltration, it was something that filled Thomas with desperate dread, too. But it was no solution.

"We're going to bring them down," he said. "and when we do it, we'll find whoever did this and have it undone."

"It doesn't matter if there's no WICKED left to control you, does it?" Rat Man dismissed.

"It does matter," Newt said, leaving it at that.

It took the whole day and the night following it, but as Thomas jolted out of sleep, he saw something man-made on the dawn-lit horizon. And this was not another re-appropriated gas station, or a research facility, or a ghost town. It was a city, surely, and one full of life. A Berg was flying over it, picking up speed as it drifted further away. Tiny cars drove back and forth outside the high wall. It promised something new. The silhouettes of tall buildings called to him with all the stability he should have had. In another life, without WICKED or the Flare, he could have lived somewhere like that with the mother he had only vague memories of. Even with the Flare, he would have memories. He could still have lived, and he wouldn't have understood it, but uncertainty and distance from any progress on a cure would have been a blessing.

Even the deep simmer of injustice was awed by the sight of the true world. It was a world he could still be a part of, and that thought gave the setting a dreamlike aspect, all the more enforced by the slanted morning sun that rose up behind the buildings like a halo. But it was no dream. A city from his dreams would not be surrounded by concrete walls and barbed wire. Only the very tallest of the buildings could stand above the shadow of the virus.

The process of gaining entry was similar to the one of the illusionary Denver. The bored guard didn't question their false identities, hurrying them through the infection test without noticing that they were holding their breaths. Newt was cured, but nobody really knew what that meant yet. If it offered a permanent defense. It was good enough for the test, though, and soon they were inside. Rat Man had worried they would be detected as runaways, but the guards outside were more interested in playing cards than ratting them out to WICKED.

The city was both like Denver and completely different. There weren't more or fewer people walking around, hurrying to their normal jobs like they probably did every day. There were rows of apartments and streets of shops that were starting to open for the day. Conceptually, it was the same. The same kind of people, the same kind of shops. But this was here. He felt the city around him, the chatter, and the slamming doors, and the thick smell of new asphalt. He had been around it all before, but he had been numb to it without realizing. In this place, it was clear as the pale, sunny sky that his memories had been of a lesser quality. Even the hidden memories, those that recognized the storefronts and the smells from his childhood, were stronger than those, reawakened in a way that made his eyes tear up just a little. He had never been here before, he was sure of that, but he was here now, in the certainty of all his senses being hit at once in real-time.

Joan led them to a bank machine. It turned out that they had taken more from WICKED than a car and some food. While Rat Man explained how he had slowly leeched money from the main account and sent it to a secret, (most likely) untraceable one, Joan looked around them. The bank machine was where their contact would meet up with them, but the streets were emptying out as rush hour reached its end.

"We said eight to ten," she mumbled at the machine as she typed in a code.

"They're somewhere around here, just you wait," Rat Man said with scorn. "They probably want to make a grand entrance, or startle us."

"So you think it's one of the kids?" Joan asked, gathering up bills from a slot in the machine. "I suppose it would be against their interests to trick us, and we would know by now if they'd been discovered."

Joan had been in contact with 'the group', which consisted of Gladers, Glenners, and a scattering of old Right Arm members, as far as she knew. The only member she had met with in person was Brenda, who had been keeping an eye out for her, in case WICKED would allow her to go to the site of her son's murder. Strangely, they had allowed it, and Joan had joined the movement opposing them.

Since then, communication had occurred remotely, using whatever device was at hand and unlikely to be shared with more people than intended. The day before reaching the city, they had all leaned closer to her radio as it emitted a sequence of coded beeps. The beeps offered a location, but no name. Thomas hadn't been able to decide whether to be hopeful or nervous as he imagined who they might see. He wanted to see his friends, safe outside of WICKED's clutches, and outside of the illusions used to trick him. But seeing them like that might be the biggest trick of all.

Even standing on this snow-caked street that felt truer than any ground he had walked upon since his memories were wiped, that uneasiness reared its fanged head. He would be disappointed if they were faced with strangers, like Vince's old followers or WICKED defectors. Disappointed, but safe. He didn't have to put any faith in strangers.

After delaying for as long as possible, they went around the block, walking slowly in the pretense of taking interest in shop windows. They certainly were interesting, after all the time spent in WICKED's bland, white corridors. Far from worried about the upcoming meeting or the potential trap in its place, Newt took the lead, winding around corners to absorb all the newness displayed behind the glass. There were new books, and old, recognizable ones. There were clothes of all colors, and there was even a small flower shop with colorful bouquets of exotic, thick-leaved plants that Thomas had never seen before. Even the adults exclaimed over these mundane treasures from time to time, speculating about trade routes and new efforts to develop genetically modified flora.

Yet, with every window they passed, Thomas grew more distant. What had been so fascinating earlier had turned garish, so many things filled with individual content, so many questions raised by each item, each piece of paper littering the side of the street. He knew the crowds and the wares were far from their pre-flares peak, but even –especially- on the surface, the over-abundance was enough to drown in after the endless white and slightly less endless green. A throbbing started up behind his eyes, and that made him fear the worst. It wasn't exactly the same as a telepathic headache, but how could he be sure? He stared down at his shoes. His shoes were as close to a constant as it got. Looking at them loosened some of the tension in his chest.

They walked slowly, stopping occasionally to look at something. Thomas followed their pace, and now they were still. This time, somebody was approaching them. Steps in front of him, exhaled surprise behind. He looked up.

"Minho?" He asked, quiet in astonishment.

There he was, going down the street with sure familiarity, healthy as he ever had been. Spotting them, evaluating for a second, he grinned.

"Newt! Thomas!" In an instant, he was upon them, slinging his arms around their shoulders. "We were starting to lose hope, shanks."

"Yeah? Imagine how we felt," Newt said, but he was smiling as brightly as the rising sun.

Minho looked at Thomas expectantly. He didn't know what to say. He was happy to see his friend, but that earlier sense of dread had put up a barrier in him.

"Just wait until we get back to the others. there's a lot to catch up on," Minho promised.

"Like the reason you're out in the snow without a jacket?" Thomas asked. It wasn't what he'd imagined he would say when they were reunited, but it stood out. The clothes he did wear were newly acquired and clean. He smelled like he had showered recently. It even looked like he had some sort of product in his hair. He should have been able to dress in something warmer than a short-sleeved t-shirt.

"You slinthead," Newt chided as he noticed. "We didn't drive all this way to watch you freeze to death."

Minho laughed at them. "A jacket would hide all my hard work." He freed an arm so he could flex his bicep. "Don't want to disappoint the ladies, do I?"

"I don't see any ladies around," Newt said.

"And," Minho went on, "I want everyone to see my new shirt." He gestured excitedly at the faded logo on his t-shirt. "It's from my favorite game. The girl in the game store gave me a discount for it once I told her how to beat level thirty-two."

"It's good to know your time and money are well-spent," Rat Man said, scowling.

"We've got it sorted," said Minho, all his warmth turned off. He hadn't noticed Rat Man until now. "And we have a good fourth-story window to throw you out of, if you're here trying to bring us back." He looked around them, searching for hidden enemies in the street. If Minho had been informed that the man was on their side, he didn't believe it.

"Don't worry," Thomas said. "He's an opportunist, and we're the winning side. And if not…"

Rat Man scoffed at him, though he couldn't fully conceal his concern about the threat of going out the window.

"The houses outside the walls don't have four stories. Did you build a base here in the city?" Joan asked skeptically.

"We made a research station here, but no. We picked out a few of the houses down by the water."

"So they were empty," Newt said. "I kept wonderin' what would happen if someone lived there, or if there were infected. We didn't plan for that."

"Well, there were a few infected around," Minho admitted. "There's still a group of them not too far away, but they haven't noticed us, and there's no point going after them. Plus, nobody else will come near the place thanks to them."

"The upside of bein' next-door neighbors with the cranks," Newt remarked.

Minho shrugged. "At least there's no rent."

"I doubt that 'research station' of yours came for free," Rat Man argued.

"We've got a few sponsors."

Before he could be asked to elaborate on that, Minho took off down an alley.

Apparently, Rat Man and Joan had too much dignity to run after him, but the Gladers followed right after.

"This the place you're talking about?" Newt asked as they slowed to a walk. Walls towered around them in an uncomfortably familiar way. The occasional doors were small and closed.

Minho shook his head. "Nah. We're just stopping on the way." He looked grim all of a sudden.

"Stopping for what?" Thomas asked.

"Just coffee," Minho said with an expression that suggested otherwise.

"And are you going to tell us what's wrong with the 'coffee'?"

Minho stopped before a glass door. He sighed, looking at the tables scattered around inside. "Somebody wants to meet you."

"Is it WICKED?" Newt asked.

"No."

"Someone from the Right Arm?" Thomas suggested.

"Nope."

Who could it be in that case? It clearly wasn't a friend.

Newt frowned. "Is it those 'sponsors' you mentioned?"

Minho smiled bitterly. "Let's just say we should have been more careful moving in."

So they had been discovered by someone.

"Someone found you, but instead of telling WICKED they decided to give you an apartment," Newt summed up.

"We've been lucky. And we promised him the Cure. It was mostly that part. It's not like WICKED's been delivering on that promise."

The adults had caught up, and Minho stopped talking. No doubt they sensed the tension, but they waited.

The soft melody of a bell greeted them first, followed by a disinterested youth behind a counter, who nodded in acknowledgment. He should probably have been more excited about customers, seeing as the place was empty. The end of a dark alley couldn't be the best place for a coffee shop.

Minho waved at a corner table, far from the entrance. The adults went to claim the table, while Thomas and Newt stayed with Minho as he placed an order. Once the employee had taken the payment, he disappeared through a door behind the counter.

"The coffee's been getting cheaper by the week," Minho told them. "So at least some things are starting to look up."

Thomas wasn't interested in economics, though. "Who are we meeting, Minho?"

"And how much does he know?" Newt added.

In that instant, the bell rang for a second time, and two tall men entered the shop. One of them pulled back a hood, the better to stare intently at Minho.

Minho raised his hand in greeting, and whispered to his friends: "That's the guy. If you start saying something you shouldn't, I'll kick you under the table."

The employee looked just as apathetic as earlier once he came out with their drinks and spotted the new arrivals. Joan and Rat Man were far more suspicious as they all convened at the table.

"Hello," the formerly hooded man said to Joan in a light voice.

"Who are you?" She asked.

"Nobody important." As the Gladers reached the table, he looked at them. "Minho, who have you brought?"

Minho ignored Rat Man's glare of death and answered. "I've told you about Thomas and Newt."

"Yes." The man inclined his head towards them. "I've waited for you. How wonderful that you've made your escape. Though my concern lies with…" he glanced back at the adults.

"As for them, I don't know," Minho admitted. "I guess they've defected from WICKED."

Rat Man looked indignant. "If I may, I'd like to know what this is about."

"You may know later," the man said dismissively. "For now, I think it's best if you go with Leo here. You must be tired after your long journey."

Rat Man wasn't inclined to accept that answer, but Joan got up silently, looking over at the counter. Even Rat Man had to realize that it was a bad idea to cause a commotion and summon unwanted attention. And, older though they may be, they were only helpers in whatever group had been formed to oppose WICKED, and if anyone had authority in this place, it was probably Minho. They followed the other man to the far end of the shop, out of earshot. For better or worse, the Gladers would take on whatever this new challenge was by themselves. That seemed as it should, even if the tiredness burned behind Thomas' eyes.