Chapter Text
"Oh, shuck me."
Thomas had to agree with the sentiment. They'd taken a risk in doing this, and it looked like the risk had been a waste.
"Gods," Minho whispered. "Look at him. There's nothing left."
It was killing Thomas just to look at the... thing in the makeshift cell. "I have to go," he said abruptly. Without waiting for an answer, he left. He needed space. He needed to think.
He hadn't gotten any more creative about his hiding places since the Glade, so really it was no wonder that someone found him eventually. The only wonder was that it was Brenda instead of Minho. But then, Thomas had known for a while that she'd known the old him, so maybe he was just even less creative than he'd thought.
Silence hung between them for a while before Brenda said, "I'm sorry."
"Why are you apologizing?" Thomas asked bitterly. "You warned me. Not your fault I didn't listen." In fairness, Minho hadn't listened either, but Thomas was too deep in self loathing to be fair. "Not your fault I forgot the letter," he muttered.
He was pretty sure Brenda heard him, regardless of how quiet he'd been, but to her credit she didn't say anything. "We have facilities," she said a little reluctantly. "WICKED's best surgeons are here, the immune ones anyway. And we have access to all the data from the Trials."
He turned his head to look at her. "Where are you going with this?" He had a feeling he knew, but it was terrifying even to think of it.
"I'm saying," Brenda said slowly, "that we'll try. No promises. But the whole point of this place was to finish what WICKED started and save the world. And I didn't break all the rules and open the Flat Trans again just so we could give up and kill him."
Somehow that actually made Thomas feel better.
~
Jeff looked up at Thomas and offered him a sad smile and a soft shake of his head. Thomas nodded, understanding. He hadn’t really expected there to be a change. “I just want to talk to her,” he murmured.
He knew it was stupid. He knew she couldn’t hear. But things had been strained between him and Minho since reaching paradise--Thomas hadn’t told him about the note and he knew Minho could tell he was keeping secrets--and he’d been short on friends. Short enough that he’d found himself telling his troubles more and more to the one person in the world least capable of offering advice. And after his talk with Brenda yesterday, after a sleepless night where he’d fallen out of his hammock three times from tossing around, after dodging Minho once more… after all that, he needed someone to talk to.
Jeff grimaced but nodded and stepped aside. Thomas stepped up and took the seat by the bed. Tentatively, he took the hand that wasn’t bandaged and splinted.
He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again. He wasn’t sure what to say.
Finally he started talking. “He’s alive,” he said. “We found him, we brought him back, he’s alive.” Some of the tension in his shoulders unknotted as he spoke, like saying it aloud made it real. At the same time...
"I thought I lost both of you," he said, voice cracking. "I didn't know how I was going to survive it, after Chuck... And when Minho told me you'd survived, it felt like a miracle. But this..." He took a breath to steady himself. "This feels like a cosmic joke. There's nothing of him left, not anymore."
He let go of her hand so he could press both of his to his eyes, fighting back tears. Why had he agreed to this? Why had he let this happen? Why had Minho so stubbornly insisted on it?
"God, I wish we still had the swipe," he said past his hands to the girl in the bed. "At least then you could answer me." He thought, anyway. True, Teresa had spoken to him from her last coma, but that had been technologically induced and meant to let her speak. This was brought on by physical trauma.
A knock on the doorframe startled him and he turned around to see Minho standing there. The Asian wasn't looking at Teresa. "We're needed," he said shortly. "Come on."
~
Brenda hadn’t been lying when she said they had facilities. One of the hills around their little settlement had been hollowed out to make room for a lab that rivaled anything at WICKED’s original headquarters.
“This was our backup plan from day one,” Brenda explained. “Before we even started the Maze Trials we were starting to set up. Discreet teams came out here bringing supplies, setting up the power grid, building this place and a few other necessities like a jail and a hospital.”
There were dozens of questions Thomas wanted to ask. He’d known there was more to paradise than what they’d first seen, but where the shuck had this come from? How much of WICKED had come along? How equipped were they? Why had they retreated to paradise at all if they were so well-equipped to find a cure? The questions tangled around each other and around his heart, pounding in his throat, and he couldn’t seem to get any words out at all. Minho, however, had no such problem.
“‘Backup plan’ my butt,” he said. “You made a hundred geniuses build a society and then conveniently we get transported to a place with no society and have to do it all shucking over again. This was the plan all along, wasn’t it?”
Brenda shrugged apologetically. “It was a plan all along,” she admitted. “Here we are.”
The door they’d stopped at opened onto an observation room. A man and a woman in white lab coats and another two men dressed in fatigues and armed with Launchers stood in the room, all four looking through the observation window. The scientists looked over their shoulders at the new arrivals; the guards (Thomas suspected they were former Crank Palace guards) did not. There was tension in their shoulders and their eyes were fixed on the figure on the other side of the glass. It was an effort--he wasn’t sure he wanted to see--but Thomas turned his eyes to him as well.
Beyond the glass was another observation room, or at least a safe space to stand before reaching the far room. The glass in the room they were in had to be a mirror on the other side, Thomas figured; the glass ahead was totally see-through. And up ahead was…
“Gods,” he muttered. “Why hasn’t anyone cleaned him up?” Why wasn’t there even a bed? There was a sink and toilet, and at least there was toilet paper and a soap dispenser, but there was no shower and no privacy and no bed to speak of. It made his stomach churn to look at it.
“Because it took a Launcher shot just to get him to stay down long enough to move him here,” the female scientist said tartly. “Giving him a bath is a little out of the question at this point.”
Minho shifted, and without even looking Thomas knew he was tensing for battle. He felt the same.
The male scientist seemed to sense the danger, because he hurried to smooth over his colleague’s misstep. “But,” he assured them, “we’re hoping that will change in the near future. That’s why we asked you here today.”
Thomas looked at Minho, but Minho looked just as baffled as he felt. He looked at the scientists. “I thought we were here so you could observe him with people he knows.”
“Exactly.” Brenda took a moment and backed up. “Thomas, Minho, this is Sandra Kramer and Dmitri Dietrich. Sandra is--was--the best behavior scientist WICKED had who could come here with us.” In other words, Thomas surmised, the best who was immune. “She also holds degrees in psychology and psychiatry, making her the only one here qualified to dispense those medications. Dmitri is our resident neurosurgeon. He helped install the original Swipe technology, and before the Flare hit he was doing some very interesting work with nanites. Gregory and Marcus over here are former guards at Denver’s Crank Palace, here to step in if something goes wrong.”
“And what exactly might go wrong? What are we doing here?” Thomas knew his voice was too sharp but he couldn’t bring himself to care.
Dr. Kramer was the one to speak up this time. “Right now we’re just establishing a baseline. We’ve had strangers in already, and Brenda and Jorge were in earlier. We need to know how he reacts to friends. From what we understand, you’re the closest friends he has.”
Thomas nodded. They were at that. “And--that baseline will help you cure him?”
A shrug and an apologetic grimace were the first answer, and sent his stomach plummeting before Dr. Kramer hurried to add, “It’ll give us something to compare the cure against. Any attempts at curing him would be meaningless without a baseline.”
“Kramer and Dietrich have already worked out a few treatments they’re going to try,” Brenda explained softly. “They just need this data before they can start.”
Thomas nodded and looked at Minho, who glanced at him and then turned to the scientists. “So let us in already.”
Dr. Dietrich keyed in a code and one glass panel slid aside with a pneumatic hiss.
In the room, Newt’s head whipped around and his eyes locked on Thomas and Minho as they entered.
Thomas swallowed, mouth suddenly dry, but went into the second observation room, Minho right beside him. “Hey,” he said lamely.
Newt’s lip curled back and he hissed, evidently not impressed. Thomas stopped in place, watching his friend just as intently as Newt watched him.
It was… discouraging, to say the least. Newt was covered in bruises and blood, not all of which could be his. Dirt was crusted on his hands and neck. His shirt was ripped, exposing a patch of skin that was rippled--Thomas presumed that was another remnant of his fall. But his physical state was easier to look at than his face. His expression was… alien. It wasn’t Newt. It wasn’t even human.
The silence stretched out between them, none of the three willing to say anything. Thomas half-expected Brenda to pull the plug and tell them this wasn’t getting them anywhere. Until…
“So, Tommy. Come to apologize?”
Thomas’s eyes jerked unwillingly up to Newt’s face. There it was. The animal tilt of his head, the sneer that looked so out of place, the cruel gleam in his eyes. He was crouched in a position that looked somehow inhuman, giving the illusion his bones were bending the wrong way; but the voice that had come from that mouth was all Newt.
Thomas realized suddenly that his mouth was dry. He had to swallow several times before asking, “For what?”
Newt shook his head, expression dropping with eerie speed into something almost pitying. It was like he was playacting at being human, and watching made Thomas want to throw up. It only got worse when Newt pulled himself to his feet, seeming somehow to take longer than he should to do it. His elbows and knees clicked as he stood, and he stretched his neck to crack that as well. He approached the glass, moving his hands like he expected them to touch the ground as well, a predator stalking his prey.
“For leaving me,” he said, too patiently, as he reached the glass. “For not doing what I asked.”
The words hit Thomas like a punch in the stomach. He’d thought about it. He had. He’d considered it--but he’d lost his chance back in the Crank Palace, he hadn’t seen Newt after, and as Brenda had pointed out, getting him here had cost them too much risk to waste it by killing him.
“No,” he said at last. “I’m not here to apologize.”
“Then why are you here?” Newt smiled, showing far too many teeth with the gesture, and propped his arms on the bar along the center of the observation glass. He tilted his head to the side slowly, and Thomas shivered. Everything he was doing was too slow and too patient. It was eerie, especially given how agitated he’d been when they first grabbed him.
Minho broke in. “We’re here to help you get better, shuck-face.”
Newt’s head whipped around in one of those too-fast movements again, eyes zeroing in on Minho this time. His smile spread a little wider. “And why would I want to do that?” he asked. He stepped back from the glass, spreading his arms out dramatically. “I like being this way.”
Minho clenched his jaw so hard Thomas could hear teeth creak. “You don’t like being this way,” he spat. “You were so desperate not to be this way you asked Thomas to shucking kill you before you got this bad. I saw the note, shuck-face.”
Thomas turned to look at him, startled. Behind the glass, Newt looked from one to the other and then scowled. “Tommy, Tommy, Tommy,” he said, still far too patiently. “You really need to get better at keeping secrets. Tell me you didn’t leave the note on the bloody kitchen table.” Aggravation was growing in his tone, but he still seemed to have control. That was good, and baffling, and hopeful. They’d been sure he was past the Gone, but he seemed almost--almost--normal. It was killing Thomas. He wanted to be in there with him, to run his hands over Newt’s face and reassure himself that he was real, that he was there, that they could do this.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t.” And then he made a decision. In retrospect, it was a stupid decision, but he didn’t stop to think it through. For just a second Newt looked like himself. For just a second Thomas thought things could be normal. And that one second was all it took. The door in this room, unlike the one behind, was opened by a simple doorknob on this side. Before Minho could stop him, Thomas opened it.
All pretense of control vanished. Newt hurled himself at Thomas, hands out and grasping for him. Thomas was bowled over, his back hit the ground, and Newt’s fingers were around his throat.
Thomas tried to cry out, but it was hard to breathe. He grasped Newt’s wrists, trying to pull his hands away from his neck; but Newt was too strong, and he didn’t seem to notice when Thomas’s nails dug into the soft spaces of his wrist. The humanity had vanished from his face and he was snarling at Thomas like an animal. The edges of Thomas’s vision started to go gray--
Abruptly Newt was yanked off him. Thomas recognized the arm--the only thing he could see in his limited field of vision--as Minho’s. There was a voice yelling “Calm down!” and it took Thomas a minute to process that that too was Minho’s.
Newt wasn’t calming down. He snarled again and squirmed, getting his chin under Minho’s arm and clamping down with his jaws. Minho yelled again, this time calling names Thomas didn’t recognize. The door opened, and there were the guards. Oh. That’s who he’d been calling.
Thomas scrambled back against the wall and at a signal from one of the guards Minho flung Newt to the ground and Thomas heard the telltale whine of a Launcher right before the grenade hit Newt. Sparks flew, electricity arced over his skin, and Newt wailed, a long inhuman sound.
Someone--Brenda, Thomas saw when he looked over his shoulder--grabbed his arms and dragged him back into the observation room. The guards grabbed Newt and dragged him back into the cell. They both wore rubber gloves; apparently this eventuality had been prepared for.
Minho climbed to his feet and stormed out into the main observation room again. “What the hell were you thinking?”
Thomas shook his head, numb. He didn’t know. It had been stupid. But Newt had looked so… human. Finally Thomas looked at Minho. “He’s gone, isn’t he?”
Minho looked at the bite in his arm and didn’t answer.