The Immunity Illness

CHAPTER 24, Minho

Hiding his broken heart was the worst feeling, right alongside his crossed fingers. He kept fighting because it was all he knew how to do. He'd trained to fight for his life since the minute he and so many others had popped into the Glade on the Very First Day, yet he couldn't fight himself. There was no stopping the soul-sucking vacuum of his thoughts as they flattened him with facts and logic. He'd have to scrape together some serious power and luck to fight the dirtiest organization on Earth.
       He may have been broken, but he also yearned for victory. Motivations evolved, priorities grew. Life became about more than surviving. An old, fuzzy memory came into light: a poem he'd read long ago. He wasn't sure when, but the verses stuck with him profoundly.

"Breathe the air not in spoil.
Misery erects from gloom;
Take your soul from its gray,
Blessed light shall banish your toil."

       The dusty, sharp words lingered in Minho's mind for the next hour. And that number was approximate; the Box Gate had given him a new watch, per request. He perplexed over the meaning of the lines. They seemed to smolder and blaze, demanding for him to absorb their wisdom. He wondered why he remembered them now, and only them. Only a stupid poem. Breathe the air not in spoil. Hmm. Avoid breathing dirty air.
       "Ow! Forget it, it won't work."
       Aris backed away from Frypan, abandoning his attempt to apply a glob of pain cream onto his swollen jaw. It had taken Thomas three apologies to finally be forgiven for punching him. Minho glanced at his watch and sighed. Misery erects from gloom. This one was tougher to decipher. The source of misery comes from unbreathable air—metaphorically, he guessed.
       Thomas moaned quietly on the rocks below Minho. His wan skin glistened with sweat, and he'd since taken the wool blanket to cover up in. Minho muttered to him,
       "Need the thermometer again?"
       "I don't know." Thomas closed his eyes. "Probably."
       Minho hopped down from his stone platform and stumbled over to the cardboard package. Take your soul from its gray. This verse must have been talking about salvation from misery, if misery was supposed to symbolize gloom and gloom was supposed to symbolize the air not in spoil. So the air not in spoil was obviously a direct analogy to—
       "Earth to Minho," Frypan said ruthlessly. "This is Houston calling. Earth to Minho."
       "Shut your hole," he snarled back. He looked up from the package and gripped the thermometer in his palm.
       Frypan held his hands up. "You were standin' there like Aris when he goes robot on us. Sorry not sorry for double-checking."
       Thomas sat up when Minho approached him. The temperature-taking routine had become consistent for the two of them, occurring every fifteen minutes or so. Minho took a knee beside him and raised the blue and white device to his forehead. After a few seconds, it beeped and flashed red.
       "Hundred-three," he told Thomas disappointedly.
       Thomas laid flat on the rocks and hummed an unspoken reply. He tucked the blanket closer to his chin, mumbling,
       "My temp isn't gonna go down. You can quit trying to help me."
       "That's optimistic of you."
       Thomas arched a brow. "Oh, and you're the optimistic one now?"
       "Realist, for your information."
       "I'm a realist too."
       Minho snorted. "Sure you are."
       "Let's not pretend you weren't a blubbering mess when we got trapped in the Maze. Who saved your skin that day? Definitely not a pessimist."
       Minho got up, unable to admit that he had a point. He twirled to observe the distant camp and fiddled with his shirt button. Blessed light shall banish your toil. Night had fallen across the Horizon. There was no blessed light here. He frowned, comprehending the moral of the verses at last.
       There was peace in acceptance.
       And this stupid poem had popped into his mind to tell him that. Minho quit fidgeting and gazed over at the unruly part of the field, toward the location of the old Group B farm.
       "I'll be right back, guys," he alerted the others, stepping off the rockbed.
       "Is there a problem?" Frypan pried. He looked in the direction of the camp, almost longingly.
       "Nope. You can hold up the fort till I return."
       "Yeah. Can do." Frypan massaged the nape of his neck, nodding slightly.
       Minho turned his back on him and continued past the Hill, breaking into a jog. He entered the camp with caution, peering around for obstacles obscured by the semi-darkness. It was still light enough to read landmarks, and he was thankful for that. He passed a fallen tent here, a squabbling pair of men there. Once he tracked someone down who didn't look hungry to gut him for his wristwatch, he asked,
       "Do you know where the dead are buried?"
       The stout woman's expression darkened. She said somberly,
       "There's a small farm a ways from here. The girls had to be buried en masse, and there's a boy who—"
       "Thanks," Minho talked over her. He shuffled his weight from foot to foot. "I figured, but I had to be sure."
       "No problem, sweetie." The woman walked away, and he couldn't decide whether to flush or cringe at the term of endearment.
       Minho swung a right into the untamed wilderness of the field. He struggled to wade through the tallgrass, following an undefined path visible only from memory. Insects sang noisily. They nipped at his flesh as he moved deeper into the humid forest of leaves, and whenever his anxiety kicked in, he bent his head to admire the dim stars in the sky.
       Sometime later, the tallgrass thinned. One feature was impossible to miss even fifteen feet away: a bitter, rotten scent of upturned soil. That scent alone brought the ghost of a kick ramming into his ribs again as he lay in a patch of weeds, defenseless against ten Crank girls. Minho inhaled shallowly as he stepped into the wide open space.
       It was dark. Selfishly, that relieved him. The mounds of dirt were easier to look at. He strode to the largest lump—Group B. Bile constricted his airway, and he swallowed it. What had gone so wrong? Ten girls were right there, none any better or worse than him. He plucked an orangish flower from a patch nearby and laid it atop the mound, whispering,
       "Sorry." His voice sounded weird.
       For a moment, he felt like an idiot speaking to nothing but a lump of dirt, yet he owed Group B something. He owed them one 'sorry', if only that. Minho plucked another flower and strolled over to the singular mound on the other side of the farm. This grave hit him harder, because it was an actual grave. This wasn't like Winston or Jeff or Jack, where he could imagine their bodies had poofed into sparkly confetti the second he'd left them. No, this grave belonged to Gally, and he was very dead. Minho placed the flower onto the dirt.
       "Thank you," he said gently, staring at the coarse earth underfoot. He lowered his voice drastically, afraid to say a truth that could so quickly turn into a lie. "It won't be in vain."
       It wouldn't be.
       Minho cleared his throat and trudged away from the mounds, leaving behind the terrible excuse for a graveyard. A proper burial in the Deadheads was too much to ask for these days, let alone a proper life.
       "Blessed light shall banish your toil," he said to himself, hoping that wherever the Gladers and Group B's went when they died, they found that blessed light.