Desire ❃ newt

cнapтer 30

I awoke to a weak, lifeless light. My first thought was that I must've gotten up earlier than usual, that dawn was still an hour away. But then I heard the shouts. And then I looked up, through the leafy canopy of branches.

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

I jumped to my feet, put my hand on the wall to steady myself as I craned my 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.

I 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.

I 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 I silently watched the commotion, I didn't feel nearly as panicked or frightened as my instincts told me I ought to be. And it surprised me that so many of the others looked like lost chicks thrown from the coop. It was, in fact, ridiculous.

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

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

Our sky had to have been— and still was—fabricated.

Artificial.

In other words, the sun that had shone 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.

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

Chuck found me, and the look of fear on the boy's face pinched my heart.

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

I 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."

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

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.

"Kameron?" Chuck asked, lightly tapping me on the upper arm.

"Yeah?" My mind felt hazy.

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

I felt like I 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?"

Chuck's 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, Kameron?"

I reached out and squeezed the younger boy's shoulder. I 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 Thomas, who stood a few feet away from me and Chuck. "Let's get going. We're already late."

Thomas looked stunned.

For some reason I expected the weird sky to throw all normal plans out the window.

"You're still going out there?" Chuck asked, clearly surprised as well. I was glad the boy had asked the question for me.

"Of course we are, shank," Minho said. "Don't you have some sloppin' to do?" He looked from Chuck to Thomas. "If anything, gives us even more reason to get our butts out 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."