"Girl? What girl? I'm the only one here, and it's been that way since they put me here last night."
Thomas turned to point back in the direction of the door to the common area. "There's a sign right out there that says this is her room. Teresa ... Agnes. No mention of a shank named Aris."
Something in his tone must've made the boy realize this wasn't a joke. He held out his hands in a conciliatory gesture. "Look, man, I don't know what you're talking about. They put me in here last night, I slept in that bed"―he pointed to the one with the rumpled sheet and blanket―"and I woke up about five minutes ago and took a pee. Never heard the name Teresa Agnes in my life. Sorry."
The brief moment of relief Thomas had felt when he'd heard the toilet flush officially shattered. He shared a look with Newt, not knowing what to ask next.
Newt shrugged slightly, then turned back to Aris. "Who put you in here last night?"
Aris threw his arms up in the air, then let them come back down and slap against his sides. "I don't even know, man. A bunch of people with guns who rescued us, told us everything would be okay now."
"Rescued you from what?" Thomas asked. This was getting weird. Really, really weird.
Aris looked down at the floor and his shoulders fell. It looked as if a wave of some terrible memory had washed over him. He sighed, then finally looked back up at Thomas and answered.
"From the Maze, man. From the Maze."
CHAPTER 5
Something softened in Thomas. This kid wasn't lying―he could just tell. The look of horror that had taken hold of Aris was one he knew well. Thomas had felt it himself and had seen it on too many other faces. He knew exactly what kind of terrible memories made someone look like that. He also knew that Aris had no clue what had happened to Teresa.
"Maybe you should sit down," Thomas said. "I think we have a lot to talk about."
"What do you mean?" Aris asked. "Who are you guys? Where'd you come from?"
Thomas let out a slight laugh. "The Maze. The Grievers. WICKED. You name it." So much had happened, where could he start? Not to mention that worry over Teresa was making his head spin, making him want to run out of the room and search for her immediately, but he stayed.
"You're lying," Aris said, his voice having dropped to a whisper, his face now a full shade paler.
"No, we're not," Newt responded. "Tommy's right. We need to talk. Sounds like we've come from similar places."
"Who's that guy?"
Thomas turned around to see that Minho had returned, a pack of Gladers standing behind him on the other side of the doorway. Their faces were scrunched up in disgust at the smell out there, their eyes still full of the terror of seeing what filled the room just behind them.
"Minho, meet Aris," Thomas said, taking a step to the side and gesturing toward the other boy. "Aris, meet Minho."
Minho stuttered out a few unintelligible words, as if he couldn't quite decide where to start.
"Look," Newt said. "Let's take down these top beds and move them around the room. Then we can all sit and figure out what's bloody going on."
Thomas shook his head. "No. First, we need to go find Teresa. She must be in some other room."
"Isn't one," Minho said.
"What do you mean?"
"I just checked this whole place out. There's the big common area, this room, our dorm room, and some seriously shucked doors that lead outside―where we came in from the bus yesterday. Locked and chained from the inside. Doesn't make any sense, but I don't see any other doors or exits."
Thomas shook his head in confusion. It felt like a million spiders had just spun cobwebs through his brain. "But ... what about last night? Where'd the food come from? Didn't anyone notice other rooms, a kitchen, anything?" He looked around, hoping for an answer, but no one said a word.
"Maybe there's a hidden door," Newt finally said. "Look, we can only do one thing at a time. We need to―"
"No!" Thomas shouted. "We've got all day to talk to this Aris guy. The label by the door said Teresa should be here somewhere―we need to find her!"
Without waiting for a response, he headed for the door back to the common area, pushing his way past boys until he was through. The smell hit him as if a bucket of raw sewage had been spilled over his head. The bloated and purple bodies hung like carcasses of game set out by hunters to dry. Their lifeless eyes stared back at him.
A familiar, sickening tickle of revulsion filled his stomach and triggered his gag reflex. Closing his eyes for a second, he willed his insides to settle. When they finally did, he began his search for some sign of Teresa, concentrating with all his might on not looking at the dead people.
But then a horrible thought struck him. What if she ...
He ran through the room, searching the faces of the bodies. None of them was her. Relief dissolved the fleeting moment of panic, and he focused on the room itself.
The walls surrounding the common area were as plain as could be; smooth plaster painted white, no decoration of any kind. And for some reason, no windows. He walked quickly around its entire circumference, running his left hand along the wall as he did so. He came to the door to the boys' dorm room, went past it, then made it to the big entrance through which they'd come the day before. There had been a torrential downpour at the time, which seemed impossible now, considering the bright sun he'd seen shining behind the crazy man earlier.
The entrance―or exit―consisted of two large steel doors, their surfaces a shiny silver. And just like Minho said, a massive chain―with links a full inch thick―had been threaded through the handles on the doors and pulled tight, two big key locks snapped shut to keep it that way. Thomas reached out and pulled on the chains to check their strength. The metal felt cool under his hands, and it didn't give at all.
He expected thumps from the other side―Cranks trying to get in just as they were at the windows in the dorm room. But the room remained silent. The only sounds were muted and coming from the two dorms―distant shouts and screams from the Cranks and murmurs of conversation from the Gladers.
Frustrated, Thomas continued his trek along the walls until he made it back to the room that was supposed to be Teresa's. Nothing, not even a crack or seam to indicate another exit. The large room wasn't even a square―it was a big oval, round and cornerless.
He was completely perplexed. He thought back to the night before, when they'd all sat there and eaten pizza like the starved people they'd been. Surely they'd seen other doors, a kitchen, something. But the more he thought about it, the more he tried to picture what things had looked like, the fuzzier it became. An alarm went off in his head―their brains had been tinkered with before. Had it happened again? Had their memories been altered or wiped?And what had happened to Teresa?
Desperate, he thought about crawling across the floor to look for a trapdoor or something―some clue to what had happened. But he couldn't spend another minute with all those rotting bodies. The only thing left was the new kid. He sighed and turned back to the small room where they'd found him. Aris had to know something that would help.
Just as Newt had ordered, the top beds had been unhooked from the lower ones and placed around the room against the walls, creating enough space for the nineteen other Gladers and Aris to sit in a circle, everyone facing each other.
When Minho saw Thomas, he patted an empty spot next to him. "Told ya, dude. Have a seat and let's talk. We waited on you. But close that shuck door as much as you can first―smells worse than Gally's rotting feet out there."
Without responding, Thomas pulled the door shut, then walked over and sat down. He wanted to sink his head into his hands, but he didn't. Nothing indicated for sure that any kind of danger threatened Teresa. Something weird was going on, but there could be a million explanations, and plenty of them included her being okay.
Newt was one bed to the right, sitting so far forward that just the edge of his butt rested on the mattress. "All right, let's get started on the bloody storytellin' so we can get to the real problem―finding something to eat."
Right on cue, Thomas felt a hunger pang, heard his stomach growl. That problem hadn't even occurred to him yet. Water would be fine―they had the bathrooms―but there was no sign of food anywhere.
"Good that," Minho said. "Talk, Aris. Tell us everything."
The new boy was directly across the room from Thomas―the Gladers sitting to each side of the stranger had scooted to the far ends of the bed. Aris shook his head. "No way. You guys go first."
"Yeah?" Minho responded. "How about we all just take turns beating the living klunk out of your shuck face? Then we'll ask you to talk again."
"Minho," Newt said sternly. "There's no reason―"
Minho pointed sharply at Aris. "Please, dude. For all we know this shank could be one of the Creators. Somebody from WICKED, here to spy on us. He could've killed those people out there―he's the only one we don't know and the doors and windows are locked! I'm sick of him acting all snooty when we've got twenty guys to his one. He should talk first."
Thomas groaned on the inside. One thing he knew was that the kid would never open up if Minho terrified him.
Newt sighed and looked over at Aris. "He's got a point. Just tell us what you meant about coming from the buggin' Maze. That's where we escaped from, and we obviously haven't met you."
Aris rubbed his eyes, then met Newt's gaze. "Fine, listen. I was thrown into this gigantic maze made out of huge stone walls―but before that my memory was erased. I couldn't remember anything about my life from before. I just knew my name. I lived there with a bunch of girls. There must've been fifty of them, and I was the only boy. We escaped a few days ago―the people who helped kept us in a big gym for a few days, then moved me here last night―but no one explained anything. What's this stuff about you being in a maze, too?"
Thomas barely heard the last few words of what Aris had said over the sounds of surprise coming from the other Gladers. Confusion swirled in his brain. Aris had announced what he'd been through as simply and quickly as describing a trip to the beach. But it seemed crazy. Monumental, if true. Luckily someone voiced exactly what Thomas was trying to sort out in his mind.
"Wait a minute," Newt said. "You lived in a big maze, on a farm, where walls closed every night? Just you and a few dozen girls? Were there creatures called Grievers? Were you the last one to arrive? And did everything go buggin' nuts when you did? Did you come in a coma? With a note that said you were the last one ever?"
"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Aris was saying even before Newt had finished. "How do you know all this? How ..."
"It's the same shuck experiment," Minho said, the earlier belligerence gone from his voice. "Or same ... whatever. But they had all girls and one boy, we had all boys and one girl. WICKED must've built two of those mazes, run two different tests!"
Thomas's line of thinking had already accepted that. He finally settled himself enough to speak. He looked at Aris. "Did they call you the Trigger?"
Aris nodded, obviously as perplexed as anyone else in the room.
"And could you ...," Thomas began, but hesitated. He felt like every time he brought this up, he was admitting to the world that he was crazy. "Could you speak to one of those girls inside your mind? Ya know, like telepathically?"
Aris's eyes widened, staring deeply at Thomas as if he'd understood a dark secret that only someone else who shared it could understand.
Can you hear me?
The phrase appeared so clearly inside Thomas's mind that at first he thought Aris had spoken aloud. But no―his lips hadn't moved.
Can you hear me? the boy repeated.
Thomas hesitated, swallowed. Yes.
They killed her, Aris said back to him. They killed my best friend.
CHAPTER 6
"What's going on?" Newt asked, looking back and forth between Thomas and Aris. "Why're you guys looking at each other like you just fell in love?"
"He can do it, too," Thomas answered, not taking his eyes off the new kid, seeing the others only in his peripheral vision. That final statement by Aris had terrified him; if they'd killed his telepathy partner ...
"Do what?" Frypan asked.
"What do you think?" Minho said. "He's a freak like Thomas. They can talk in each other's heads."
Newt was glaring at Thomas now. "Serious?"
Thomas nodded and almost spoke to Aris in his mind again, but said it out loud at the last second. "Who killed her? What happened?"
"Who killed who?" Minho said. "No more of your voodoo klunk while we're around."
Thomas, eyes watering now, finally broke his gaze with Aris and looked over at Minho. "He had someone he could do this with, just like I did. I mean ... do. But he said they killed her. I want to know who they are."
Aris's head had dropped; his eyes looked closed from where Thomas sat. "I don't really know who they are. It's too confusing. I couldn't tell the bad guys from the good guys. But I think somehow they made this girl Beth ... stab ... my friend. Her name was Rachel. She's dead, man. She's dead." He covered his face with both hands.
Thomas felt an almost painful prick of confusion. Everything pointed to Aris's having come from another version of the Maze, set up in the same format except with the ratio of girls to boys being switched. But that would make Aris their version of Teresa. And this Beth sounded like their version of Gally, who'd killed Chuck. With a knife. Did that mean that Gally was supposed to have killed Thomas instead?