“Phew!” Minho said, dropping his pencil; he stretched his arms up over his head and yawned. “Sweet run today.”
“Not too shabby,” Newt muttered, grinning to himself.
Then they grabbed new pieces of paper and started turning their words into a visual map.
—
Alby sat on the bench by a flagpole, alone. Night had fallen, and the doors had long since closed. An empty plate sat next to him; crumbs dotted his shirt. His eyes were closed; his body was perfectly still.
“Alby?” someone said, walking up to him.
“Shh!” Alby hissed. “Leave me alone. I want to listen.”
“Fine.” But the kid stayed close, closing his eyes like Alby.
Outside the huge enclosure of their home, the walls of the maze began their process of changing positions. The ground trembled, and the distant roar of stone against stone filled the air. Alby had something close to a smile on his face.
“Thunder,” he whispered.
“What?” his visitor asked.
“Thunder. I remember thunder.”
A tear trickled its way down his cheek. He didn’t wipe it away.
—
Thomas sat in his chair, silent and sullen as Dr. Paige worked on measuring his vitals. He had a full load of classes today, and he dreaded it with a heaviness that made him want to cry.
“You’re quiet this morning,” the doctor said.
“I need to be,” he replied. “Please. Today, I need to be quiet.”
She whispered her response. “Okay.”
Thomas pictured his friends going about their various activities in the Glade. Tried to imagine what they were doing that very second. And he thought about something he’d been thinking for a while: Someday he should probably join them there. It would be the right thing to do.
Dr. Paige stuck a needle in him, and this time he felt it.
—
Thomas went along in his weird, boring, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes uplifting life. Watching his friends tough it out inside the Glade and the maze. But also watching them prosper, work hard to make it a better place. Rules were established, jobs assigned, routines worked out. The Homestead was three times bigger than when they’d started, and Minho had been named Keeper of the Runners.
All these things and much more happened as the days turned into weeks turned into months. Teresa and Chuck were his constant companions, and he loved having them around. They made his life bearable, even fun at times. But it was hard to get too flippant when the place where you lived constantly reminded you of two things: your friends were in an experiment, and that experiment existed because an awful, hideous disease rampaged in the outside world.
And so, he lived. Day in, day out. Getting his body monitored, attending classes, doing as he was asked. Like helping Teresa prep the new boy each month for insertion. The basement, where he’d made so many fond memories, was now a place he visited only once a month. It seemed darker and danker than it ever had before. He did whatever he could to find time for the observation room, taking his own notes on what he saw, sharing those with Dr. Paige. The better the analysis, the more sessions he got.
Mostly, it was a life of boredom, interrupted by sweet times with Teresa and Chuck. Made tolerable by the ever-increasing kindness of Dr. Paige, who seemed to be the only member of WICKED with a heart, the only one who remembered what it was like to be a kid. She didn’t shy away from repeating what she’d said that day, about loving them like her own children. But it was always laced with a sense of danger, as if she knew on some level that letting herself feel that way might be the biggest risk she’d ever take.
It was a strange world. But Thomas was alive, and he lived.
230.08.21 | 10:32 a.m.
His crazy day started with a knock on his door, during a morning break.
When he opened it, a boy he’d never seen before stood there, with Randall, of all people right next to him. The man had been scarce lately—in fact, Thomas was pretty sure he hadn’t seen him since the day George had died. And he didn’t look so good. He was thinner than before, and his complexion looked gray. As for the new boy, he was a touch taller than Thomas, with blond hair, and his eyes were as wide and curious as a baby’s.
“This is Ben,” Randall said. “He’s one of the new subjects we picked up the last few days, and he’s the perfect age for insertion. Dr. Paige wants you to prep him before you run through your daily checkups and tests.”
Randall turned away without waiting for a response, walking quickly down the hallway, as if late for an appointment. Poor Ben stood there, blinking nervously.
“Don’t worry about that guy,” Thomas said, opening his door wider. “He’s always been a weirdo. Come on in. Believe it or not, I can remember what it feels like to be brand-new here.”
“Thanks.” Ben entered the room timidly and sat down at the desk when Thomas motioned to the chair. “They found me in Denver.”
And then the kid transformed in an instant, bursting into tears. He put his hands over his face, and his shoulders lurched with each sob.
Denver? Thomas had studied plenty about the city—how it was a safe zone, a gathering place for those who didn’t have the Flare. They evidently had put extreme precautions in place to make sure no infected ever entered, and it was surrounded by heavily fortified walls. The fact that Ben came from there struck Thomas as…odd. Didn’t this mean that his parents had been healthy? And yet WICKED had taken him away?
Thomas realized the boy was still crying. “What happened?” he asked, not sure how to act. “I mean, take your time, but I’m here to listen.” He almost rolled his eyes at the lame choice of words.
“We’d finally found a place to live,” Ben said through his tears. “Somewhere nice. And neither one of my parents had the Flare—I know it! They wouldn’t have let us in if they did.” It was all coming out in a flood now, his tears evaporating into anger. “They asked if I would join their study and my dad said no and they grabbed me and took me anyway. They pushed my mom down and threatened to shoot my dad. Who are these people? Why am I here?”
Thomas sat on his bed, frozen. He had absolutely no idea what to say. He’d always wondered about everyone’s parents, and it seemed like his suspicions had been true. WICKED said they all came from families with two sick parents and no other care available. Was this some anomaly or one of many lies?
Ben started crying again, burying his head in his arms on the desk.
“I’m sorry, man,” Thomas said, feeling the boy’s sadness deep within himself. “They’re trying to find a cure for the Flare, and they’re desperate.” That was all he had. He didn’t have the heart or words to try anything else. “But hey, things aren’t so bad, I promise.”
Ben picked up his head, wiped his tears, then nodded.
“Come on, let me show you around.” Thomas stood up and walked to the door, opened it, and escorted Ben into the hallway. Calling himself a big fat liar the whole time.
—
After giving Ben a tour of the complex, Thomas sat with the new kid in the observation room, introducing him to the maze. He didn’t have the heart to come right out and say that he’d be sent in shortly, not after the tearful display earlier. But he was sure the kid wasn’t stupid.
He tried to keep it positive.
“Most of the guys love it. Sleeping in the outdoors with their friends.” It wasn’t lost on Thomas that here he was, telling lies as easily as WICKED seemed to. It bothered him, but he didn’t know what else to do. He wanted the boy to feel better.
His thoughts fizzled away as something developed on the right side of the main display. On one of the screens, a beetle blade was following Gally, who kept looking over his shoulder as if he were up to no good.
“Uh-oh,” he whispered, placing the view of Gally on the huge screen in the middle.
“What’s wrong?” Ben asked.
For a few seconds, Thomas had completely forgotten that Ben existed, much less tha
t he was sitting right next to him.
“Um, nothing,” Thomas answered absently. “Just, uh, I want to see where my friend is going.” Worried something bad might happen to traumatize Ben on one of his first days, he quickly escorted him into the hallway. He made him stand several feet from the door. “Listen, wait here, okay? I’m going to call a friend over to finish up your tour. It was great to meet you.”
“Okay,” the boy said, obviously feeling stupid.
Thomas felt bad but rushed back into the room, leaving the door open a crack so he’d hear when Teresa arrived. He found his seat again.
Gally had made it all the way to the south door and was just now turning back toward the Glade, searching the area, obviously wondering if anyone was watching him. Evidently he didn’t care about the beetle blades, just the other boys. Looking confident that he hadn’t been noticed, he focused his attention on the left side of the enormous door itself, the row of protruding spikes towering above him.
“What are you up to?” Thomas whispered. “Come on, you stupid beetle blade, get me a better angle.”
As if the little mechanical creature had heard him, it scurried faster, crawling next to Gally along the wall. Then it turned around and scuttled backward so that any observers could clearly see the boy’s face.
He was crying, his cheeks so wet it’d obviously been going on for a while. Thomas didn’t understand that at all. What was he doing sneaking around forbidden territory? Not being a Runner, he wasn’t allowed in the maze itself, and he looked intent on entering it.
Thomas suddenly remembered Ben, waiting out in the hallway.
Hey, you there? Thomas immediately called out to Teresa. Then he turned down the volume so Ben couldn’t hear what was going on. Come get this new kid out of my hair. His name’s Ben, and he’s just outside the observation room. Gally is up to something weird.
Okay was her simple response.
Gally had just broken the rules and stepped around the edge of the door. He was now officially outside the Glade. He closed his eyes, started taking deep breaths. A strange smile spread across his face. His arms came up from his body, sticking out at his sides, as if he were imagining that he could fly. And suddenly Thomas understood. Gally had stepped outside the Glade just for the rush of it.
Then the display screen erupted in a blur of movement. Thomas sucked in a breath of air when a Griever appeared out of nowhere, its grisly wet skin suddenly filling the screen, Gally covered by its body. There was an inhuman moan and a surge of machinery. The beetle blade bolted; its camera now showed nothing but vines and stone, all of it shaky. But Thomas heard Gally scream. And it wasn’t a scream of fear, it was a scream of pain.
The camera view tilted back into place, and the Griever had disappeared. Gally clutched at his side with one hand, pulled himself along the ground with the other. It took a few agonizing seconds, but he finally got himself back into the Glade proper. Boys were running toward him. One named Clint was at the front of the pack, hauling a first-aid kit. WICKED had finally figured out the proper dosage for the serum, and Clint held a syringe in his free hand as he ran.
Gally’s screams were something Thomas thought he’d never be able to forget.
He heard a gasp behind him and spun around to see Ben peeking through the narrow gap of the open door. The boy’s eyes had widened in horror.
“What just happened?” he asked in a timid voice.
Thomas fumbled for words. “Oh, that? They, uh, sometimes they do these drills, test their response times. Nothing to worry about.”
He didn’t fail to realize he’d just used one of Dr. Leavitt’s favorite phrases.
Teresa arrived just then to whisk Ben away.
Poor kid, Thomas thought.
230.12.17 | 9:06 p.m.
Thomas waited patiently for Dr. Paige to come back after taking his latest blood sample to the lab. In a rare occurrence, there was no one else in the room with him, not even an assistant. After a couple of silent minutes, he got curious.
He got up from his chair and went over to the counter. He opened a few doors, pulled out a few drawers. Nothing looked too out of the ordinary. Vials, syringes, paper-wrapped products. But then, in the last drawer to the right, he found an absolute gold mine.
A research tablet.
The thin, foot-long, rectangular device had a shiny gray screen, ready to reveal a world of information. He knew he’d probably need passwords, but this was an opportunity that might never present itself again. Refusing to consider the consequences, he tucked the device into the back waist of his pants, flopping his shirt over the remaining portion to hide it.
He was in his seat well before Dr. Paige returned.
—
That evening, he told an orderly he was feeling a little under the weather and wanted to bypass his usual session in the observation room. No one made too much of a fuss about it.
He wanted to dive into his pilfered research tablet. He’d also grabbed a few snacks in the cafeteria to make it a full night of entertainment. Sitting at his desk, no one around to bother him, munching on potato chips, he powered up the tablet and got to work. He hadn’t told Teresa about it yet. He wasn’t going to take the slightest chance of someone taking his treasure away from him before he at least had one shot at it.
To his great disappointment, and just as he’d suspected, most of the information portals on the device required passwords. And he could forget about remotely accessing the main WICKED systems. But there were enough things in plain sight to keep his attention, all filed in an open-access tab labeled History.
He dug through the documents, memorizing as much as he could. He learned the original names of his friends, laughing at some of them. Siggy, aka Frypan, had been named Toby by his parents. Toby. Thomas didn’t know why that struck him as so funny.
There was other interesting information. Schematics on the WICKED complex and its various buildings. An early military report on what would become the Grievers. Climate data going back to the year of the sun flares, as well as comparative charts to the averages before that time. Tons of information on the Flare, its symptoms, stages, prior attempts at treatment.
One seemingly random remark in a memo caught his attention—two staff members reminiscing about the time they had to “tinker with poor A2’s memories because his first meeting with Teresa had been such a disaster.” This made Thomas stop reading. He stared down at the tablet, thinking back.
He remembered the day he’d first officially met Teresa. How he’d been dizzy with déjà vu. Had WICKED been experimenting with their implants and memories that long ago? It made sense, in light of what they did to his friends when they sent them into the maze, something they’d have to be well prepared for. But Thomas felt dizzy considering the possibility—to think that there could be an entire meeting with Teresa that had been erased from his mind. What else might they have taken from him?
The more he thought about it, the more upsetting it was, which wasn’t helping anything, he told himself. So he returned to perusing the tablet for information.
After a few dead ends, he saw a file labeled Deleted Com.
He opened it.
It was a series of memos and correspondence that he had to think had been left out of the secure area by mistake. Communication between higher-ups at WICKED and several other entities that he could only guess were predecessors of the organization. There were a lot of acronyms, some of which he recognized from his various history classes. FIRE (Flares Information Recovery Endeavor), PFC (Post-Flares Coalition), AMRIID (Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases), and more he didn’t recognize. He scanned them, fascinated at what it must have been like living through that time period.
He stayed at it for hours, his eyes stinging from reading for so long. At a certain point, he started skimming, reading too fast to catch much of what the documents actually said.
Then he stopped on something interesting. A couple of acronyms he’d never seen before, along
with the words TOP-SECRET in red letters. This just might be something. He scanned a memo or two, his heart rate picking up with each word he read. Things he couldn’t believe. About a virus. About it being man-made. About it being released on purpose. About a population that had gotten too big to feed.
“Oh, man,” he whispered, reading through the last one again. He could barely believe what it said.
Post-Flares Coalition Memorandum
Date 219.2.12, Time 19:32
TO: All board members
FROM: Chancellor John Michael
RE: EO Draft
Please give me your thoughts on the following draft. It goes out tomorrow.
Executive Order #13 of the Post-Flares Coalition, by recommendation of the Population Control Committee, to be considered TOP-SECRET, of the highest priority, on penalty of capital punishment.
We the Coalition hereby grant the PCC express permission to fully implement their PC Initiative #1 as presented in full and attached below. We the Coalition take full responsibility for this action and will monitor developments and offer assistance to the fullest extent of our resources. The virus will be released in the locations recommended by the PCC and agreed upon by the Coalition. Armed forces will be stationed to ensure that the process ensues in as orderly a manner as possible.
EO #13, PCI #1, is hereby ratified. Begin immediately.
Wow.
That was all he got from Teresa after spilling everything to her.
Yeah, he replied. Wow is right. They thought the virus would only kill a certain percentage of the population—make it more manageable. They had no idea it would mutate and become this monstrous thing that’s basically wiped us out. I just can’t believe all this. Can’t believe it.
Teresa was quiet. She didn’t even broadcast how these revelations made her feel.
The worst part, he continued, is that there are several direct links to WICKED. Like, remember John Michael? That guy we saw at the Crank pits? He was the one who ordered the virus released!
The past is the past, Tom.