Chapter Text
“You’re not getting through this door, Thomas.”
The door opens.
For a few seconds, nobody moves, but then his friends—a lot closer to the door than him—pass the treshold in a hurry. Everything happens quickly, after that:
Thomas uses the gun he stole to shoot electricity at Janson and the soldiers, but they have shields to protect them. He throws the gun. It clatters on the ground.
He starts running.
Janson pursues, speaking urgently, “Shut the main vault door, shut the main vault door!”
The door starts to slide closed again.
Thomas keeps running, giving it everything he’s got. For a moment, he thinks he might actually make it.
The door slides shut in front of him.
He comes to an abrubt halt.
Through the window, he can see his friends in varying degrees of distress, and he gets it; he wouldn’t want to leave them, either, but they can’t end up like those bodies he saw. They can’t.
“Don’t, guys, just run!” he says, and that’s the moment Janson and the guards catch up to him.
Aris destroys the panel on the other side. Janson tries and fails get through. Meanwhile, the soldiers try to wrestle Thomas into submission, but he’s not going down without a fight. He needs to know that his friends are gonna be okay.
“RUN!”
The soldiers taser him. The last thing he sees before he falls is his friends running away. The last thing he thinks before passing out is:
Good.
“I told you.” Janson’s voice is fading. “You’re not getting out of here.”
(It’s late at night. They’re in the bunkroom, and they should be asleep, after the day they had.
Long day at the lab. Sitting across from each other, both at seperate screens. Building simulations. Making graphs. Delaying the inevitable.
They’re supposed to be asleep, but he kept tossing and turning, and Teresa sighed and held up her blanket so he could sneak in her bed. They huddle together.
“Do you ever think about what’s out there?” Thomas whispers.
There’s a long moment with no answer, and he thinks maybe she didn’t hear him properly, but he doesn’t want to repeat it. It doesn’t feel safe, even here, under the blankets when everyone’s asleep.
“What’s out there? Like the Scorch?”
“There’s gotta be more. I mean, the world’s so big. There’s gotta be a place where we can all just…” He trails off.
They’re not allowed to leave, so of course he wonders. But the two of them, they’re special, or so Ava always says. They shouldn’t even want to leave. There’s a cure to be found. There’s work to be done.
Ever since Ava allowed them access to the lab, things changed. They started wearing white, like Ava. He got used to sight of beakers and test tubes, wires and screens lit up blue, to the smell of disinfectant and latex, the sound of tanks bubbling and the hum of electronics. Used to monitoring vital signs, studying brain activity, testing different variables.
One thing, though, he never got used to. It feels awful and gut-wrenching every time it happens, and he hopes he won’t ever get used to it. Sometimes, he envies Teresa's detachment, but the thought of viewing the others as test subjects only makes him feel sick.
“We could go look.”
Teresa shakes her head. He can’t see her do it, since it’s so dark, but he can hear her head moving across the pillow. “You know it’s not allowed. Where would we even go?”
He could go back to the place he came from. He could find his mother.
He barely remembers his mother.
The place he came from is long gone, anyway; Ava said so. This, he believes.
“…I don’t know.”
She bumps her knee into his. “Maybe,” she says, and he can hear the smile in her voice, “maybe after we find a cure, we could go together. See the world we saved. Maybe it’d be okay, then.”
How can you still think we’re the good guys?
The thought crosses his mind, but Thomas doesn’t say it. It’s not so black-and-white as that. There are people out there, who need help. But they’re not the only ones. This, what they’re doing, it’s all about choosing who to save.
“Okay,” he says, but his stomach twists at the future she paints.
She yawns. “But you have to tell me, if you want to leave. Okay?”
“I wouldn’t leave without you.”
“No, you have to promise. Promise me you won’t.”
“Okay, okay, I promise. I won’t go anywhere without you. We keep each other safe, remember?”
“Right,” she says sleepily, sliding closer. “I promise, too,” she whispers. “I'm not ever going to leave without you.”)
He wakes in a bunk bed, similar, but different. It takes a moment to orient himself. To remember what happened.
He realizes it was a dream. Another memory, like the one of his mother, giving him away to WCKD.
Remember, she said. I love you.
He remembers now.
The door was closing, and he didn’t make it through, but his friends got out. They’re safe. That’s all that matters. He just hopes they’ll keep on running.
They run through the sandstorm, their breathing laboured by the dirty air, and their eyes are stinging. The noise of the sandstorm is similar to a strong wind. Wind-driven dust sandblasts their bare skin.
It’s Teresa who finds the abandoned building. As soon as she discovers it, she goes in, and the relief to be out of the storm is instantenous. The others soon follow. They can take refuge here, for now. The building seems to have been a mall, before; in a different, kinder world.
Finally, they can catch their breath. Finally, they can react appropriately to what just happened.
“What’s going on?” Teresa demands, looking from her friends to the boy from the different maze. Aris, she thinks, that’s his name.
Teresa's heart has been pounding since she woke up in the medical wing by her terrified friends, and then they were running, and she didn’t know why, and she still doesn’t know why.
She can guess, though. She remembers Janson now. She knows he didn’t really ‘rescue’ them from WCKD.
“Thomas and I found these bodies,” Aris says, his face pale and ashen.
“They were dead?” Newt asks sharply.
“No.” Aris frantically shakes his head. “No, but they weren’t alive either. They were strung up. The life was being drained out of them, and we were going to be next.”
The harvesting.
It’s difficult, reconciling the sudden rush of memories and knowledge with the person she was in the maze. Someone with no clear memories. No clear purpose, other than to survive, and to help her friends survive. In a way, it was kind of refreshing, to live without the burden on her mind. But it’s back now. She’s back, now.
And Teresa knows all about the harvesting. They don’t deserve it. They don’t deserve to be drained just because they’re immune. She gets it now, better than ever before; why Thomas did what he did. But the world doesn’t deserve to suffer, either. Millions and millions of people, in pain, changed against their will, watching that horrible change in their loved ones.
“Where are we supposed to go?” says Winston.
“Back, obviously,” says Minho. “We can’t just leave Thomas there. You know he’d do it for us, if the roles were reversed.”
It feels like she’s torn between two people: the one who woke up in the maze; threw things down from a treehouse, brandished a knife at Thomas, held a vigil by Alby’s bedside, stayed with Thomas in the pit after Gally took control, and told Chuck to just stick with her; the one who escaped the maze with her friends.
And the one who lost her mother to a horrible disease. Who worked tirelessly, endlessly, at a possibility for a cure. Something, anything, to help those millions of people who do not deserve this fate.
Teresa picks the part of herself that has existed the longest.
“I agree,” she says, with a heavy heart. “We all should go back.”
“We can’t just go charging in and hope for the best,” Newt counters. “Did you see what we’re up against here? We need a plan.”
Silence follows.
And stretches. Frypan coughs awkwardly.
“Wait, I think I know what to do,” Aris says. “Thomas and I overheard Dr. Paige talk about some rebel group—the Right Arm. They live in the mountains.”
Ah, yes. The Right Arm.
Teresa barely manages to surpress a flinch.
If Thomas hadn’t sold WCKD out to the Right Arm… If WCKD hadn’t put him in the maze as retaliation… Nothing would have had to change. She wouldn’t be feeling like this.
“…People. In the mountains. Mountain people, that’s the plan?” Newt says.
“Do you have a better idea?” Frypan asks.
Newt doesn’t.
It’s decided: they’re going to seek out the rebels in the mountains.
But first they’re going to explore the abandoned mall; scour it for supplies or signs of life.
Teresa hesitates before following them.
Thomas paces around the bunkroom, antsy. The door is locked again, of course. They made him take a shower again, and after that, gave him new clothes to wear with “Property of WCKD” printed on the back of his shirt. Then they took some of his blood.
There’s gotta be a way out of here. Some way to escape. But if there is, he hasn’t found it yet.
After what feels like an eternity, soldiers arrive. They’re armed and he’s not, and they outnumber him, so he lets them lead him to the interrogation room where he first met Janson. Only, this time, it’s not Janson sitting on the opposite side.
“Dr. Paige,” Thomas says, taking his seat. “You’re looking well for someone who put a bullet in her head.”
Ava smiles at him. It’s a kind smile, one that crinkles the corners of her eyes, and if he didn’t know any better it’d make him let his guard down. But this is the woman who put them in the maze. She is responsible for the deaths of Alby, Chuck, and everyone else.
“I’m glad you’re here.”
“Yeah, I bet,” Thomas says. “One more subject for you to harvest. That’s all we are to you, aren’t we? Subjects.”
Once again, he finds himself thinking about that early memory which resurfaced in the helicopter. After his mother gave him away, he met Ava. She’d smiled at him then, too, and she told him it was okay.
Nothing about this is okay.
“You were more than that, to me,” she disagrees softly, but her eyes are cold and practical. She implores: “Everything can go back to the way it was. You can come home.”
“This isn’t my home! I don’t belong here. I never did.”
“Yes, you do,” she counters. “All of you do. This is about survival.”
Anger swirls hot underneath his skin.
“What about the survival of my friends, huh? Do you have any idea what it felt like, watching them die in front of me?”
“And do you think I didn’t feel those losses?” she demands. “I’m not a monster. I only want to find a cure.”
“At the expense of us!”
She shakes her head, and sighs. “You used to understand.”
Thomas tries not to let on how much that bothers him; that he used to be close to her. That she remembers it, all of it, and he doesn’t. They used to be on the same side.
“Yeah, well, the old me no longer exists; you made sure of that. And good riddance.”
Ava studies his face. “You have no idea,” she murmurs. “Do you?”
Thomas frowns. “What?”
“Your attempt to bring back your memories didn’t bring back all of them, did it?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. “Just bits and pieces. I’m sure more of those bits and pieces are still coming back to you, now. But you don’t remember selling valuable information to rebels. You don’t remember what it cost me.”
Thomas blinks, and he remembers one of those pieces, which came back to him in the maze, I couldn’t keep watching them die.
He helped them. Even before he lost his memories, he tried.
Thomas closes his eyes briefly as he feels immense relief. He opens them again, to find Ava still watching him.
“And I’m willing to forgive this,” she says. “You’ve been punished enough in the maze; I’m willing to let things go back to the way they were, Thomas.”
“Everything changed,” he says quietly. “We can’t go back.”
She’s silent for a moment.
“The choice is simple. You either join me, or you join the other immunes.”
“I’m not going to help you,” Thomas says, voice dripping with derision as he looks her in the eye. “I’m never going to help you again.”
She’s silent again, face unreadable, and then: “Very well. I’ll have you prepped for harvest tomorrow. You’ll all be transferred to the city soon.”
Fear shoots through him at the thought of ending up like those bodies he saw, but he pushes it back down.
He won’t go down without a fight; but he’s got no weapons while the guards have guns and tasers and syringes. He doesn’t have any illusions about his chances.
“City?”
“Our base of operations,” she expains calmly.
The door opens.
“Dr. Paige.”
It’s Crawford, the woman he held hostage to find Teresa.
“I know you said not to interrupt, but this is important. We’ve studied the blood sample taken from subject A2, like you requested.”
“And?” Ava demands.
Dr. Crawford hesitates. “You’re gonna want to see this for yourself.”