FORGE OF OAK, Thomas ✓

007

     Thalia awoke to a weak, lifeless light his first thought was that she must have gotten up earlier than usual, that dawn was still an hour away. But then she heard the shouts. And then she looked up, through the leafy canopy of branches of her window.

    The sky was a dull slab of gray—not the natural pale light of morning.

    She jumped to her feet, put her hand in the wall to steady herself as she craned her neck to gawk toward the heavens. There was no blue, no black, no stars, no purplish fan of a creeping dawn. The sky, every last inch of it, was slate gray. Colorless and dead.

    She looked down at her watch—it was a full hour past the mandatory waking time. The brilliance of the sun should've awakened her—had done so easily since she'd arrived at the Glade. But not today.

    She glanced upward again, half expecting it to have changed back to normal. But it was all gray. Not cloudy, not twilight, not the early minutes of dawn. Just gray.

    The sun had disappeared.

Thalia found most of the Gladers standing near the entrance to the Box, pointing at the dead sky, everyone talking at once. Based on the time, breakfast should've already been served, people should be working. But there was something about the largest object in the solar system vanishing that tended to disrupt normal schedules.

In truth, as Thalia silently watched the commotion, she didn't feel nearly as panicked or frightened as her instincts told her she ought to be.

And it surprised him that so many of the other looked like lost chucks thrown from the coop. It was, in fact, ridiculous.

The sun obviously had not disappeared—that wasn't possible.

Thought that was what it seemed like—signs of the ball of furious fire nowhere to be seen, the slanting shadows of morning absent. But she and all the Gladers were far too rational and intelligent to conclude such an thing. No, there had to be a scientifically accepted reason for what they were witnessing.

And whatever it was, to Thalia it meant one thing: the fact they could no longer see the sun probably meant they'd never been able to in the first place. A sun couldn't just disappear. Their sky had to have been—and still was—fabricated. Artificial.

    In other words, the sun that had shine down on these people for two years, providing heat and life to everything, was not the sun at all. Somehow, it had been fake. Everything about this place was fake.

    Thalia didn't know what it meant, didn't know how it was possible. But she knew it to be true—it was the only explanation her rational mind could accept. And it was obvious from the other Gladers' reactions that none of them had figured this out till now.

   Do you see this? Thalia asked Thomas through the mind link, looking around the glade for Thomas.

   I wish it wasn't true. But, I think everything here is fake. Thomas replied.

  Thalia sighed, looking around and spotting Thomas. She ran to him, putting a hand on his shoulder. "Yo." She said.

   "Hey, Lia. So, what are we-" Thomas began but was interrupted by Chuck.

"What do you think happened?" Chuck said, a pitiful tremor in his voice, his eyes glued to the sky. "Looks like a big gray ceiling—close enough you could almost touch it."

I wonder if his neck must hurt from staring that much. Thomas spoke through her mind, and Thalia almost chuckled if it were not that everyone had not known about their little.. well, they didn't know what to call it.

Thalia and Thomas followed Chuck's gaze and looked up. "Yeah, makes you wonder about this place." For the second time in twenty-four hours, Chuck had nailed it. The sky did look like a ceiling. Like the ceiling of a massive room.

"Maybe something's broken. I mean, maybe it'll be back." Thalia shrugged.

Chuck finally quit gawking and made eye contact with Thalia. "Broken? What's that supposed to mean?"

Before Thalia could answer, the faint memory of last night, before she fell asleep, came to him, Teresa's words inside her mind. She'd said, I just triggered the Ending. It couldn't be a coincidence, could it?

A sour rot crept into her belly. Whatever the explanation, whatever that had been in the sky, the real sun or not, it was gone. And that couldn't be a good thing.

"Thalia?" Thomas asked, lightly tapping her on the upper arm.

"Yeah?" Thalia's mind felt hazy.

"What'd you mean by broken?" Chuck repeated.

Thalia felt like she needed time to think about it all. "Oh, I don't know. Must be things about this place we obviously don't understand. But you can't just make the sun disappear from space. Plus, there's still enough light to see by, as faint as it is. Where's that coming from?"

Chucks eyes widened, as if the darkest, deepest secret of the universe had just been revealed to him. "Yeah, where is it coming from? What's going on, Thomas? Any ideas?"

Thomas reached out and squeezed the younger boys shoulder. He felt awkward. "No clue, Chuck. Not a clue. But I'm sure Newt and Alby'll figure things out."

"Thomas!" Minho was running up to them. "Quit your leisure time with Chucky and your girlfriend here and let's get going. We're already late."

Thalia was stunned. For some reason she'd expected the weird sky to throw all normal plans out the window. Oh, and she was not his girlfriend.

"Your still going out there?" Thalia asked, clearly surprised. Thomas seemed glad she asked the question for him.

"Of course we are, shank," Minho said. "Don't you have some, Med-Jack things to do? Newt said to go to Jeff." He looked from Chuck to Thomas. "If anything, gives us even more reason to get our butts there. If the sun's really gone, won't be long before plants and animals drop dead, too. I think the desperation level just went up a notch."

"You mean we're going to stay out there overnight? Explore the walls a little more closely?" Thomas asked.

Minho shook his head. "No, not yet. Maybe soon, though." He looked up toward the sky. "Man—what a way to wake up. Come on, let's go."

Thalia was quiet as she ate breakfast. Her thoughts were churning too much about the gray sky and what Teresa—at least, she thought it had been the girl—had told her in her mind to participate in any conversation.

What had she meant by the Ending? Thalia couldn't knock the feeling that she should tell somebody. Everybody.

But she didn't know what it meant, and she didn't want them to know she had someone's voice in her head. They'd think she really gone bonkers, maybe even lock her up—and for good this time.

After a lot of deliberation, she decided to keep her mouth shut and went off the the Med-Hut for her first day of training, below a bleak and colorless sky.