Survivor

Minus One

Everyone took a step backward. Silence ruled the room. A silence which was broken by Chuck asking:

"Who are those people?"

"The Creators," Both Minho and Vera growled. "I'm gonna break your faces!" Minho shouted, the alteration from the sickening silence to Minho's loud shout made Olive flinch and Thomas cover his ears, who then asked:

"What do we do? What are they waiting on?"

"They've probably revved the Grievers back up," Newt said.

"Don't jinx it you idiot!" Olive exclaimed, exasperated, getting paler with each passing second. She was filled with anxiety.

Newt continued anyway. "They're probably coming right-"

A loud, slow beeping sound cut him off. It came from everywhere, booming and echoing throughout the chamber.

"What now?" Chuck asked, not hiding the concern in his voice.

"No idea buddy..." Vera mumbled.

For some reason everyone looked at Thomas. They then saw that one of the doors was swinging open toward them.
The beeping stopped, and a silence settled on the chamber once again.

Two people then walked into the room.

One was a woman. An actual grown-up. She seemed very ordinary, wearing black pants and a button-down white shirt with a logo on the breast; WICKED spelled in blue capital letters. Her brown hair was cut neatly at the shoulder, and she had a thin face with dark eyes. As she walked toward the group, she neither smiled nor frowned. It was almost as if she didn't notice or care they were standing there.

She seemed familiar to Vera. And not just her looks, but the way she walked, her mannerisms-stiff, without a hint of joy. She stopped several feet in front of the Gladers and slowly looked left to right, taking them all in.

The other person, standing next to her, was a boy wearing an overly large sweatshirt, its hood pulled up over his head, concealing his face.

"Welcome back," the woman finally said. "Over two years, and so few dead. Amazing."

"Excuse me?" Newt asked. Meanwhile Olive was glaring the life out of the woman, as she was implying some of them died. Could her sisters be among the deceased? Olive thought if there was a mostly male group, why wouldn't there be a mostly female group.

Her eyes scanned the crowd again before falling on Newt. "Everything has gone according to plan, Mr. Newton. Although we expected a few more of you to give up along the way." She pointedly looked at some of the boys Olive didn't know.

The woman glanced over at her companion, then reached out and pulled the hood off the boy. He looked up, his eyes wet with tears. Everybody in the room sucked in a breath of surprise.

It was Gally.

It was Gally.

"What's he doing here!" Minho shouted. Vera glared, looking as if she was trying to hold back words not appropriate for younger ears. Olive just stared blankly at the woman for her lack of response to such hateful glaring.

"You're safe now," the woman responded as if she hadn't heard him. "Please, be at ease."

"At ease?" Minho barked. "Who are you, telling us to be at ease? We wanna see the police, the mayor, the president-somebody!"

This was the at the same time Olive kind of confessed she knew about her sisters by saying:

"At ease? You want me to be at ease with my younger sisters in potential danger are you crazy, ill or just an unfeeling being?!" At the end of her confession her skin was still really pale but her face was a bright red.