Two Turtle Doves

Five

There was a deck of cards in the room. You sat on the cold floor, back against someone's bed, inspecting them one by one. You didn't know how to play any games, but you were almost certain you had known a few before.

Thomas had been gone for a while, his absence becoming just one of the hundreds of things eating away at your gut. What if someone saw him? What if he was right about the bodies and then became one of them?

Newt was talking to Minho and you didn't want to interrupt their conversations, so you stacked up the cards and flicked them apart over and over. The incessant process became calming when you no longer had to think about what you were doing. You found yourself thinking that you wished you could stay in a thoughtless state-of-mind forever, which only made you think about the things you were trying to forget.

It was almost a relief to hear the startling sound of the vent being kicked open. But when you looked to Thomas, scrambling around the floor in a hurry with his eyes spread wide, relief was far from what you felt.

"We've gotta go," he mumbled. "We've gotta go right now."

Minho and Newt rushed up to him as you stood up, accidentally kicking the cards across the floor.

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"What do you mean we have to go?"

"What's he doing?"

But Thomas didn't listen to anybody. "They're coming for us."

"Who's coming?" you yelled.

Thomas didn't listen. He pulled sheets off of a bed and tied them around the door to thwart entry or exit. He propped a mattress up against the metal, too, as if it would keep them safely locked inside.

Thomas was saying too many things for anyone to understand at once.

"She's still alive," he told.

"Who's she?"

"Teresa?"

Thomas shook his head. "Ava."

"Who the hell is Ava?" you asked, stepping up to his side and placing hand on his shoulder. You pulled him away from the door, leaving a second sheet untied and dangling from the door handle.

"It's WICKED!" He yelled suddenly. The words were loud and you stumbled backward as he announced them, spit flying into your face. You remembered one of the first things you had thought when you entered the Maze the very first day. The thought hadn't bothered you all that much, but it came to you then. WICKED is good.

You studied the others' reactions. Minho's jaw droped a little. Newt's eyes grew wide. Fry breathed heavily.

"It's always been WICKED," Thomas continued.

Nobody spoke. You knew that whoever had told you that phrase -- WICKED is good -- was wrong. Nobody good threw kids into a Maze for years.

"We have to go," you announced, breaking the silence. Newt sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. He doesn't agree.

But others had already begun to move towards the vent that Thomas had come from and you knew that there was going to be no argument about it. The Gladers were leaving for good.

Before long, everybody had made it through the vent and into a long, white hallway that seemed to stretch on incessantly. As you studied the insipid walls, you realized that the boy Thomas had talked about -- Aris -- was with the group. Didn't he want to save his friends?