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It was a strange thing really, to stand among people Newt knew were dying, and know that he was dying too.
Not physically. His body would live on once he himself was gone. But his personality, his thoughts, his hopes, his dreams, his mind—everything that mattered was dying. Being eaten away, slowly, by the virus that was indirectly responsible for the hell that had been most of Newt’s life.
A cure. WICKED thought they could make a cure. And they thought they could use the Immunes to do it. Newt didn’t buy into any of that. Maybe they thought they were doing good, maybe they thought it would work eventually, but he knew on the gut level, the same visceral place that told him he was dying, that killing children wasn’t the way to do it.
He could still see them, all of the people who’d died. George had been first. He couldn’t even remember who’d been second. Chuck had been the final death of the Maze, but they’d lost many afterward—in the Scorch, or to WICKED. Even Teresa had abandoned them. Hadn’t she? Newt didn’t know. He hadn’t remembered all that much to begin with, but even what he had was going.
The virus was destroying it.
The Flare.
Newt’s friends were immune. True, they were as mortal as any other person, but they could walk through the world without fear of their minds being taken and transformed into something akin to an animal’s, but worse, because animals were at least intelligent. Whereas people like Newt, who’d caught the virus and weren’t immune to it, well—
Most of them were past the Gone. Long past. Whether there was anything left of their minds, or only pure madness, there was no way to tell. And for the rest of them, it was only a matter of time.
He could feel it happening. Little bits of his sanity breaking away slowly, like a raft caught on a rock in the middle of a raging flood. Only the pieces weren’t swept away, they stayed in his brain and rotted there, and turned the world upside-down, impossible to understand.
The strangest things made him angry. A loose rock lying beside a heap of shattered glass. The specific way a sparrow cocked its head. The tink of a bottlecap on cobblestones. And it wasn’t just normal irritation, it was spine-tearing rage, the kind that made him want to rip out someone’s throat.
That wasn’t something he’d ever wanted to do back when he was sane.
Strange to think of sanity as an era that he’d left behind.
But there was no getting around it. He’d caught the Flare, he was already insane. You just couldn’t tell yet. It was all inside his head.
His thoughts didn’t act like they used to. They went too fast or too slow or they repeated themselves. Over and over. Like a broken record.
you let them die you let them die you let them die
Logically Newt knew he couldn’t have saved any of the people they had lost. But he was a Crank now. Logic no longer dictated his reality.
Crank. Such a stupid word, such a fitting word for the thing Newt would soon become, the thing he already was. Not quite human, no, not anymore, but close enough still to be horrifying.
They’d taken him to the Crank Palace. So this place was called, though to title it a ‘palace’ seemed rather grand in Newt’s opinion, given that it was mostly tents, and houses, and broken down storefronts, all spiraling inward slowly to the Central Zone. He hated it here, but at least he couldn’t hurt anyone; besides the guards, every person here was also a Crank.
And from what Newt could tell, it was every Crank for itself.
The place was bitter and run-down. Broken glass lay everywhere, and the air was thick with the stench of waste and hopelessness. Fabric flapped miserably in the wind, broken windows stared sadly from hovels that might have been poor attempts at homes, and people…what had once been people…wandered among them, sometimes hurrying and avoiding eye contact, other times striding purposefully, and occasionally crawling on all fours while wearing nothing but ripped shorts.
Newt looked away.
The worst part about this place was that only about half the Cranks were past the Gone, so there was a mix of people who still had most of their consciousness, versus people who’d lost it all to the madness that had consumed their minds. You could look to the right and see a woman leading her son by the hand, both of them dirtied but appearing fairly normal; then you could look to the left and see a man chewing off his own foot. It made Newt sick, but not as sick as it should’ve. He’d seen too much to be terribly phased.
Two days he’d been here now. He’d be dead already if not for the Launcher that he’d managed to get a hold of. Even the Cranks who were past the Gone didn’t seem to want to mess with arcing bullets of electricity.
Newt hadn’t had to use too many of the Launcher grenades, but they wouldn’t last forever. He tried not to think about what would happen when they ran out.
Brakes squealed outside the gates. He glanced up, mildly interested and recognizing the sound; it was the same truck that had brought him here. There was no reason for it to be picking up any Cranks, so it must be bringing in new ones.
Sure enough, moments later the gates creaked open with a squeal of rusty metal, making Newt’s nerves screech. As he shook off the jolt of unreasonable rage that shot through him, two figures were shoved through and onto the hard path, both dripping wet, one extremely tall and the other extremely short. The short one was bleeding heavily from his side.
The tall one jumped to their feet and launched themself towards the gates just as the metal squealed shut. Barely deterred, they latched their hands around the bars and screamed, “WAIT!”
Like that was going to work. Newt shook his head.
“We’re not supposed to be here. You don’t understand!” They slammed their hands against the metal, hard enough that it had to sting. “We weren’t doing any harm, just let us out of here and you’ll never see us again, we won’t come near the city I swear I—”
“Nice try, kid,” came the dry voice of one of the guards. “You’re infected. This is the only place you belong.”
“Please,” they begged, and their voice was raw enough that it bit through the wall Newt had put up around his heart. “Please, at least give us medical aid. M-my partner, he’s um, he’s bleeding out, he needs help—”
“He’s already dead and so are you. Good as, anyway. Just shut up.” The guard’s voice grew fainter as she moved away. “Save yourself the energy.”
“She’s right.” The shorter person spoke up for the first time, rasping a little in clear pain. “You’ll just tire yourself out, Ranboo.”
The tall one—Ranboo, apparently—turned around with an expression of clear despair, an expression Newt knew well, the look of someone well aware that the truest parts of them were dying and there was nothing they could do about it.
Something inside him broke and before he knew what he was doing, Newt was on his feet and walking over to them. Ranboo had dropped to their knees next to their partner, and looked up as he approached, fear in eyes that were dark green like the vines that had climbed across the maze walls.
“St-stay away,” they squeaked out. “We can fight.” They glanced at their partner, whose blood was slowly staining the dirt, and amended miserably, “I can fight.”
“I’m not going to hurt you.” Newt’s own voice came out more gently than he’d realized it could. Channeling his days of welcoming Greenies to the Glade, he stuck out his hand. “My name’s Newt. Welcome to this shithole that we’re all as good as stuck in. Your friend looks like he needs somethin’ to patch him up before his bloody guts spill out all over the path which, as you can see,” he added with a mocking gesture at the extremely grimy cobblestones, “we clean every single day.”
Ranboo blinked at him blankly, like they didn’t catch the joke, but the guy on the ground laughed, low and rough in a way that reminded Newt a little of Alby. “I like him. Let’s go with him, Ranboo.”
“What if he kills us?”
“I’ll literally die either way.”
“I’m not going to kill you!” Newt cut in exasperatedly. “But that wound sure will, so move your butts. Up you get, chop chop, all that klunk.”
Ranboo scrambled to their feet, wrinkling their nose as they helped up their friend. ”Klunk?”
“Would you rather discuss my dialect than go find your partner some medical attention?” Newt raised an eyebrow and Ranboo shook their head, dropping their gaze. “Good, thought not. Let’s move. Anyone gives us trouble, I’ll zap ‘em.”
He started walking across the courtyard, headed for the spiral staircase, and the two newbies Cranks followed him. For a minute or so, Ranboo tried to support the shorter one, but soon just ended up carrying him, ignoring his weak protests that he could ‘walk by himself.’ Newt rolled his eyes.
“Where exactly are we going?” Ranboo inquired, and the specific pitch of their voice made Newt’s brain buzz. He grit his teeth, shut up shut up shut up shut up, tried to turn off the repetitive thoughts and had to bite his lip three times before he managed to recover his sanity.
Sort of.
“Gotta nick some first aid from one of the storefronts. Don’t worry, I did it the first day I got here. These Cranks can be selfish about their medic supplies, but they’ll bow down before electric shocks, don’t you fret.” Ah, this was a roll he knew how to play. He’d done it enough in the glade—showing a Greenie around, explaining the ropes, acting like the whole thing made perfect sense while he himself could barely hold it together some nights. It almost smoothed down the wrinkles in his mind, it was so familiar.
He kept walking, ignoring the Cranks on either side. The man singing ‘Happy Birthday’ over and over and over to himself, the woman painting her toenails with her own blood, the girls tearing out each other’s hair and giggling as if they were having a slumber party—he registered them only dimly, the way one might notice trees or rocks in the middle of a landscape. Ranboo, on the other hand, jumped and flinched every time they passed a particularly Gone Crank.
“W-what’s the matter with them?”
“Same thing that’s the matter with me, and you, and all of us. Got the Flare, it’s only a matter of time until we’re the same way.” Odd though it was, saying it to someone else almost made it easier to accept.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” Ranboo said softly, ducking their head to press against their partner’s. “We had a plan…we had a future. We were supposed to live.”
“Weren’t we all,” Newt said. “Look kid, either jump off a roof or learn to deal with it. You’ve only got so much time, you’d better make the best of it.” He stopped outside the same shop he’d nicked supplies from before, the broken window showing the path of his previous entry. “Wait here.”
Ranboo lifted their head. “Where are you going?”
“To get bandages to patch up that gaping hole in your guy’s side. Obviously.”
“Why are you helping us?” Their brow furrowed. “I don’t get it. Why would you do this?”
Newt blinked at them and felt a hundred memories flicker through him, broken flashes from the Maze and from the Scorch and from the city. He remembered Chuck dying, and how Thomas had screamed. He remembered his own broken realization, standing in that dark room in WICKED’s facility and faced with the stark proof of his deteriorating mind, that somehow, somewhere along the way, he’d caught the Flare.
Thomas should have killed him. Newt had left the note begging him to. But either he hadn’t seen it, or he’d chosen to ignore it, and either one felt like a pin driving into his heart.
“Look…,” he said at last. “I’ve seen a lot of people get hurt and I’ve seen a lot of people get killed. I’m not gonna last much longer but if I can help anyone else before I go out then I will. I don’t know how far along you guys are but maybe if I help you, you have a chance at a decent couple months, you maybe have the chance to love for a little longer.”
Love. It was something he’d never found. Dreamed of maybe, dreamed of definitely and sometimes all you hear at night is his laugh and his voice whispering low, I want to be a runner-
“I’ll be back,” was all he finally said, and he hefted his Launcher and stepped through the glass.
The inside of the building was as dirty as it had been the last time, pieces of shredded toilet paper and what was probably the bones of some animal scattered about on the grimy floor. Light filtered through the cracked windows and holes in the roof, casting a vicious glare upon the hunched-over bodies of the Cranks who’d sheltered here. Some of them were so far Gone that they did not even move, pressed up against a wall and muttering quietly to themselves. Others, though, were awake. Alert. And, from the way they tensed when Newt appeared, ready to fight.
He raised the Launcher. “Don’t try anything.”
One of the Cranks snarled, low and too cracked to be fully human. A woman, intelligence still flooding her gaze, put a hand on his shoulder as if to calm him.
“What do you want?” she said.
“First aid supplies. Bandages. That’s it.” Newt glanced around, picking out the velvet red of a first-aid kit tucked between two sleeping Cranks. “That’ll do.”
“What gives you the right to take it from us?”
“Are any of you bleeding out on the floor?” When she reluctantly shook her head, Newt extended a hand. “Well I’ve got a buddy who is. So hand it over.”
He’d never been good at the tough guy act.
Her eyes hardened. “It’s mine,” she said, and her voice dipped into a frequency somehow both too low and too high, each a little bit off. “It’s mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mi-“
Newt clenched his teeth, fighting the surge of fury that shot up his throat like the crack of a gun. The thoughts that weren’t completely his pounded into his brain, too loud to shut out, screaming at him to kill her kill her murder her rip out her eyes and smash her skull against the nearest rock and MAKE HER GIVE IT TO YOU SHE DESERVES TO BE DEAD DO IT NOW—
“SHUT UP!” Newt screamed aloud, flinched at the echo of his own voice. He sucked in a slow breath and raised the Launcher. “Look, I don’t want to hurt you-“ Liar liar liar liar you know you do kill her murder her sHUT THE FUCK UP- “—but I will if I have to. These grenades are pretty bad for that brain of yours.”
She stood up and the intelligence that had deepened her eyes fled from her expression. “You’re just a child,” she said in a terrible sing-song. “Just a little baby thing. Come here, let me rock you to sleep.”
She lifted her hand and made it into the shape of a claw. Newt’s brain went blank with panic and before he could think, before he could realize what the consequences would be, he pulled the trigger.
The grenade smashed into her chest and white electricity arced through her body, sizzling so hot and close that he could smell it and it made him think of the storm out on the plains. She screamed once and fell to the ground, twitching violently, and Newt was moving, running towards the first aid kit, even as the room came alive.
The other Cranks hadn’t liked that much. A man bared his teeth at Newt, one eye bleeding as if he’d been scratching it. Two old women stood up and actually hissed, as if they were cats, and he was sure for a moment that they were both about to leap upon him.
But they didn’t. Newt’s hands closed around the first aid kit, and at the movement, the sleeping Crank beside it woke up.
Her eyes opened and met his. Newt realized then that she was a child, younger even than Chuck had been, and also that she was Gone, farther so than any of the others in this room. The crazed insanity in her eyes seemed to reach into his throat and tie his vocal chords into a knot.
“You hurt our friend,” she said with a giggle that reminded him of the Grievers’ howls. “Didn’t anyone tell you to play nice?”
She stood up.
Newt wasn’t stupid. He ran.
And the Cranks gave chase, he could tell without looking back; if the screaming and howling and pounding of footsteps wasn’t enough, the fact that half of them were yelling “GET HIM” would have been. He didn’t dare glance to see if they were gaining on him, he just put all his effort into reaching the broken window he’d come through, knew from experience that the moment he left the building—
He was through the glass and skidding onto the dirt. Praying the first time hadn’t been a fluke, he pushed himself to his feet, fast like he’d taught himself back when he’d been a runner, and looked through the window.
The Cranks had pressed themselves up against it, screeching incoherently and hammering their fists against the pane. But none of them were coming through. Their crazed minds would look at the hole in the window and see it as a barrier just like the rest of the glass.
Newt glanced around. Ranboo was standing nearby, still holding their partner, staring at him with round eyes that were only slightly touched by madness. “A-are you all right?” they stammered out.
“As all right as anyone can be in this shuck place.” Hell? There was no hell. Newt knew only the Crank Palace. “Come on, let’s get away from here, find somewhere safe…safer. The walls go all the way around, but there’s gotta be somewhere that’s got less of these things.” The things he was rapidly becoming one of.
He started walking, heading for a corner of the courtyard that was bloodstained but unoccupied. Ranboo hurried after him, murmuring quietly to their partner, “Just hang in there, Tubbo. Only a little longer.”
Newt slung the strap of his Launcher back over his chest and knelt down on the course grass. “Put him here.”
Ranboo hesitated, glanced around as if looking for somewhere nicer, then reluctently bent and set Tubbo on the ground. He immediately attempted to sit up. Newt rolled his eyes.
“You’re exactly like Tommy. Get a bullet to the buggin’ shoulder and he’s all ‘Oh I’m fine…’ then proceeds to collapse.”
“Tommy?” Tubbo muttered, furrowing his brows. “Is he here?”
“We must be thinking of different Tommys,” Newt remarked. Ranboo sat cross-legged and squeezed Tubbo’s hand.
“Tommy’s dead,” they said quietly. “Remember?”
Tubbo sighed and lay back down, putting one hand over his eyes. “Yeah….yeah, I remember.”
Newt surpressed the burning curiosity that bubbled up in him at this little snippet of history from the mysterious pair. Unzipping the first aid kit, he yanked out a roll of bandages and a bottle of antiseptic that was probably too old to do its job right, but it was better than nothing. With Ranboo’s help, he rolled a complaining Tubbo onto his side, hitched up his shirt, and started bandaging his wound. It was a nasty looking rip straight down his rib cage, and Newt frowned. “How the shuck did you end up with this?”
“Cranks,” Ranboo said softly, unwinding another roll of bandages. “Like the ones that killed our friend. We strayed too close to the city, and they attacked us.”
“Then these people showed up,” Tubbo agreed wearily. “Shot the Cranks, tested us for infection, then shoved us in a truck and dumped us here. Assholes.”
Newt secured the last wad of bandages in place with a length of tape and sat back. “Well, at least you’re not bleedin’ out all over the ground now. That should make things a lot easier.”
“Thanks for helping us,” Ranboo said without looking at him, drawing circles on the grass with one hand.
“Yeah, no problem.” Newt sat back and really studied them for the first time, taking in all the peculiar details that would help him pick them out in a crowd. Pure black hair with a long white streak down the left side, green eyes staring heavily from a face slightly scarred and smudged with blood. Their mouth and nose were covered with a piece of black fabric that had been roughly tied into something mimicking a mask. He wondered the story behind that.
Tubbo, meanwhile, was fairly average looking, short with brown hair and the right side of his face peppered with scars. He’d sat back up and was tentatively prodding the bandages. “Damn, you guys did a pretty good job.”
“Saved your life,” Ranboo said, their eyes growing dim. “At least for a little while.”
Silence fell. Newt rocked back and forth, watching afternoon sunlight streak the ground. The end of his third day was coming.
He wondered how long he had until his mind collapsed, imploded in on itself like a dying star.
“I wish we could repay you somehow,” Ranboo said suddenly, turning to look at him. “You’ve been so kind to us, and with no real reason. I wish we had something to give back.”
“Don’t gotta give anything. That’s not why I helped you, I wasn’t expectin’ anything. That’d make me quite the slinthead.”
“What are all these words?” Ranboo asked curiously, taking a few strands of Tubbo’s hair and braiding them together. “I’ve never heard ‘em before.”
“You’d be surprised how easily language evolves when you put fifty boys in the middle of an unsolvable maze and force them to build a society.”
Ranboo’s eyes grew huge. “A maze?”
“Wait, Boo.” Tubbo had been resting his head in their lap, but now he jolted upright, hissing in pain at the movement. “We heard about this. Remember? Rumors of WICKED’s maze trials. I didn’t think they were real.”
“They were real enough to Phil, or he wouldn’t have told us to take Tommy and run.”
“I know, I just…” Tubbo slowly lay back down. “Wait, so those weren’t just an urban legend? They actually happened?”
“You bet they did,” Newt muttered. “We only escaped from them…I don’t even know, a month ago? A few weeks?” Time had blurred so thoroughly he couldn’t actually say.
“Goddamn,” Tubbo whispered. “And I spent all this time thinking maybe things could have been different if we’d refused to go along with Phil’s conspiracy theories. But I guess he was right.”
“Right about the trials, sure,” Ranboo said, now running their fingers sadly through Tubbo’s hair. “But about us leaving? I don’t know. It didn’t make a difference in the end, I mean, look what happened to Tommy.”
Newt grit his teeth, battling the pervasive urge to ask them what they were talking about. It wasn’t his business, really it wasn’t, and he’d be pissed off if someone started bugging him about his past, but the intrusive thoughts were clawing at him, biting at his skin, turning everything to nettles, ask them ask them ask them ask them-
“I’m sorry,” he said out loud and the thoughts mercifully went silent. “For whoever you lost. I’m sorry.”
They both looked at him as if they had forgotten he was there. Then Ranboo’s gaze cleared. “Oh…thank you.”
Newt hesitated a moment, internally at war, then sighed and relented. “Do you mind if I ask what happened? What does this have to do with the Maze Trials?”
Tubbo closed his eyes and Ranboo bent their head. “We ran away two years ago with our best friend,” they said. “His name was Tommy, and he was immune to the Flare.”
Newt sucked in a breath. Immune. Like nearly all of his friends. Which meant…
“His dad had heard rumors of WICKED capturing immunes. Of the maze trials they had conducted, or were going to conduct. And for a number of reasons, most of which he didn’t say, he believed our neighbors were spies for them and had reported Tommy’s immunity.”
“So he told us to run,” Tubbo cut in. “Ranboo and I, we’d already lost the rest of our family, and Phil had taken us in. So when Tommy left, we went with him.”
“For the first year and a half we tried to stay only in quarantined areas, places free from the virus.” Ranboo started undoing the braid they’d made in Tubbo’s hair. “But it was impossible. There were no really Flare-cleared places, only ones where the Bliss was consumed so frequently that the madness wasn’t obvious.”
“We avoid infection for the longest time.” Tubbo’s voice cracked, betraying the raw emotion that until then, Newt had seen only in his eyes. “But eventually we couldn’t deny it any more. We had the Flare, there was no way we couldn’t. So we were just…walking, trying to enjoy the time we had left, you know we figured when we hit the Gone Tommy would have to kill us and it would be horrible, but at least he’d be able to go on, maybe get a job in Denver. That’s where we were headed when we got jumped by Cranks. We told Tommy to run but he just…”
“He didn’t,” Newt said, and suddenly he could see it so clearly, as if the broken emotion in the boy’s voice had transmitted it straight to his brain. And it was like what Alby had done almost, throwing himself at the Grievers, even knowing the sacrifice would most likely, ultimately, do nothing.
“He took a fatal blow for me,” Tubbo said, raw pain only dimly veiled in his voice. “Even though I’m already as good as dead.”
“When he fell, we stopped fighting.” Ranboo’s words were haunted with the same emotion that beat under every one of Newt’s thoughts. “There was no point any more. But then the people came, and killed the Cranks and…you know the rest.”
Silence fell. Newt rocked back and forth, arms around his Launcher as dusk whispered into the sky. He knew the desire to give up better than he’d have liked to. He remembered well the escape from the Maze, the moment he had seen Alby die, and how bitterly, how truly, he had wanted to stop fighting.
“Maybe Tommy would have been better off in the Maze,” Ranboo started, but Newt was already shaking his head.
“No. That place was hell. I don’t remember my life before it, when I was with WICKED, but I’m pretty sure that was no birthday party either.” He cracked his knuckles, thinking of walls so high they were impossible to climb and a sky that had gone from blue to slate gray in the space of a night. “Trust me, saving your friend from the Maze was the best thing his dad could’ve done. Even if it ended eventually, at least he had your friendship, at least he saw the world, at least he didn’t spend every hour of his buggin’ life being driven slowly insane by the walls around him and never knowing whether he was going to get out.”
“But you got out.”
“Yes. Eleven of us made it, out of the original fifty.” Newt met Ranboo’s eyes. “The others who died? Their deaths were horrible. Nothing I would wish on anyone, except maybe the shucked people who put us there. So trust me when I say that your friend was better off with the life he led, however short.”
Once again, silence fell, and darkness accompanied it, almost seeming to light the lamps as it slithered through the shadows. Newt watched it quietly, thinking of nights in the maze when the others were asleep and he would walk out to the wall where the Gladers carved their names, brush his hands over the stones and remember the people who’d left their mark here some time before they died.
So many of them died.
“So…why are you here?” Ranboo said quietly, still stroking a hand through Tubbo’s hair; the boy’s eyes had drifted shut. “If you were in the Maze, aren’t you immune?”
“No. I’m a ‘control subject.’” Newt curled his lip. “One of the few who can actually catch the virus and gee, look at that, I did.” He exhaled. “It’s fine, though. At least I know my friends are all right on that front. And maybe they’ll find a way to take down WICKED.”
For a moment, the only sound was that of crickets chirping, somewhere in the grass. Then Ranboo murmured, “It’s kind of strange, isn’t it? Knowing you’re going crazy.”
Broken thoughts and urges you don’t understand and sudden anger at a leaf falling and you know why it’s because you’re a Crank you’re a Crank you’re a Crank-
“Yeah,” Newt whispered. “It is.”
“We had a plan.” Ranboo tucked a strand of Tubbo’s hair behind his ear. “Back before we got infected. We were going to run away to live together at the top of a mountain, away from everything, and be happy and grow all our own food and find a kid to adopt and- and-“
A tear slipped down their cheek. They slapped at it angrily, but Newt had already seen it fall.
His heart had been broken so many times over. He hadn’t known it could shatter again.
But sitting there, lit only by the final shreds of sunset and the dim glow of the fairy lanterns that stringed the courtyard and somehow hadn’t yet been torn down, the splintered shards came together and hardened into something like resolve. Something Newt had last felt when he’d been separated from Thomas in that ruined city of the Scorch, and had vowed he’d go no farther without finding him.
“We’re getting you out of here.”
Ranboo’s head jerked up. “Huh?”
“You don’t have forever, yeah? None of us do. But we’re getting you out of here. You still have a chance to escape, to live for a little while and love each other.” Newt jumped to his feet. “Stick close to me for the next few days, these shuck-heads tend to shy from my Launcher. I’ll find a way out of here, Trust me.”
Easier said than done.
Newt hadn’t been to the Central Zone before, only heard about it, but now he figured he oughta check it out, see if anyone knew a way to escape. Though the thought of talking to the other Cranks made him viscerally shudder.
“You don’t have to come with me you know,” he said to Ranboo the next morning. Upon hearing his plans, they and Tubbo had both insisted on accompanying him, but Newt wasn’t sure that was smart. “I mean, this whole place is hell but that’s gotta be the lowest pit.”
“You’re doing this for us,” Tubbo cut in before he could say more. “Least we can do is go along.”
So the three of them set out, winding their way through the dead silent complex of hovels, old houses so bent and twisted it seemed as if they’d caught the virus themselves. The sun was low in the sky but already hot, burning into Newt’s back.
This place was so damn eerie. There were Cranks here and there, and sometimes he could hear them screaming, but he knew by now that this early in the morning most of them were down Central. There were more the closer they got, some walking normally, some staggering like the zombies they resembled, others passed out or staring glazed-eyed up at the sky, clearly engulfed by the Bliss.
“Stupid drug,” Ranboo muttered shakily, skirting a man who lay slumped against the wall. “We’ve seen it everywhere. Some people tried to kill us once because they thought we had some on us.”
“The world’s a shitty place these days,” Newt said. “The desperation and hopelessness, ya know, it drives people mad even before the sickness does it.” Hearing his own words was almost surreal. He hadn’t been out here long but he’d seen enough to know that humanity was being beaten slowly to extinction.
Soon they were close enough to the Central Zone to hear the babble of voices, all high-pitched and a little frantic, like the buzz of a disturbed hive of bees. Here they stopped for a moment to rest, Tubbo leaning on a wall and pressing a palm to his bandaged side while Ranboo hovered anxiously beside him.
“We gotta be careful in there,” Newt said. “None of ‘em are far enough Gone that they’ll try eatin’ us with no reason, but—”
Ranboo winced. “You do realize that implies they’d eat us if they were given a reason?”
“I mean.” Newt shrugged. “It ain’t that far fetched. Point is, slim it calm, if you freak out you’re more likely to get targeted. And stick close to me because I’ve got the gun. Let’s move.”
“You’re a bundle of cheer this morning,” Tubbo remarked as he started walking. Newt rolled his eyes.
“The buggin’ virus in my brain killed all my cheer long ago.”
The mood immediately sank. Not that it had been over much high to begin with.
They cleared the last few structures and found themselves in an open courtyard absolutely over run with Cranks. There were open fires here and there, men and women sitting around and roasting things over the flames, though one of the fires was surrounded by a couple who were clearly past the Gone, because they were poking their fingers into it and laughing at their own burned flesh. Newt shuddered.
With every passing minute he swore he could feel it—his mind crumbling a little more. The thoughtless anger surged up even more now, and sometimes he felt the urge to do completely nonsensical things, like cry at the top of his lungs for no reason, or arrange bottles in a row and then stomp on them. So far, he’d managed to keep it in check, ignore the irrational ideas, but he knew he couldn’t hold out forever.
One of the Cranks ambling past stopped and looked at him. “Oh, hi,” she said, in a voice surprisingly friendly and only slightly too high. “Name’s Jinx. I haven’t seen you before. Are you new?”
“Been here a few days,” Newt said. “These two just got here last night.”
“So you’ve decided to come and check out the central hive, is that it?” She flung out a hand at the surroundings almost mockingly, long bluish braids swinging down over her shoulders. “I doubt it’s everything you’d hoped for. But we have some fun.”
The way she said fun made Newt’s spine crawl. “We’re only here to see if anyone’s ever found a way to escape.”
Her head snapped towards him. “Escape? You wanna escape? How come, I mean, ain’t you just gonna go crazy anyhow?”
“I don’t care about myself. But they don’t deserve to spend the remains of their lives here.” Newt gestured at Ranboo and Tubbo, who’d wandered a short distance away and were drawing on the cobblestones with some discarded chalk, laughing gently and sadly with each other. “They’re not too far along. They’ve still got a chance at a life.”
Jinx studied them, face unreadable, for long enough that Newt’s fingers twitched anxiously over his Launcher. Before he could do anything, however, she turned towards him, eyes unnaturally bright. “You know what, kid? I admire you. That’s a good deed you’re doing. Very good. Good, good, good, good-“
“Yes, yes,” Newt said, stepping back. “Thank you.”
“I appreciate good kids,” Jinx said, and it was funny how she called him kid, when she couldn’t have been too much older than he was. “So I’ll let you in on a secret. Me and my friends are gonna get out of here come tonight. We’ve got a plan and we know how to unlock the gate. You coming?”
Newt couldn’t believe his luck. The first Crank he talked to, and she was actually planning an escape. Tonight. How perfect was that? “I’d love to come. I mean, we’d love to come. Honestly, it doesn’t matter if I get out, so long as they do.”
She patted his cheek. “You’re cute.” Before he could ask what she’d meant by that, she was striding away from him. “Come on inside,” she called over her shoulder. “You should meet the rest of the gang.”
Newt shouldered his Launcher and glanced over at Ranboo and Tubbo. “Hey, come on.”
They looked up, again with brief vacancy followed by recognition. Then Ranboo was scrambling to their feet, pocketing the chalk and helping Tubbo up, and a few minutes later all three were following Jinx into the Bowling Alley.
Inside it was dark and smoky. Fires burned in the former bowling pin niches, and people lay in the alleys, asleep or staring vacantly at nothing. Jinx led them confidently over to the group tending the fire on the far left, all bending low and a little too close to the flames.
Newt stopped a few feet back and made a subtle motion to Ranboo and Tubbo, who came to a nervous halt on either side of him. Tubbo was panting slightly and once again pressing a hand to his wounded side. Newt shoved away the worry that screeched through his body, reminding himself that he’d seen people survive much worse.
“Hey buddies,” Jinx addressed the group around the fire. One of them, a tall and dark-skinned man with hair a pale blond, looked up with an irritated expression that slipped quickly into curiosity as his gaze settled on Newt.
“Who’s them?”
“Some folks who want to escape too. I figure we can take ‘em along and maybe they’ll be useful on the way out.”
Useful. The word made Newt’s teeth clack. He breathed in slow, ignoring his thoughts.
“Yeah, well.” The man grunted quietly and returned his gaze to the fire. “The more the merrier, I guess. What’s their names?”
“I’m Newt,” Newt made bold to speak. “This is Ranboo and Tubbo. We’re new here but we’re willing to fight like hell to leave.”
The man turned back around, slow and deliberate this time, and looked Newt in the eye. “I hope you mean that,” he said. “Because if you get dropped durin’ the fight, we ain’t stoppin’ to pick up your ass. Nor will we expect you to do the same for us. Once we’re through them gates, you’re on your own.”
“Ten-four,” Newt said with a salute that had perhaps a little too much sarcasm in it. The man raised an eyebrow but only turned away, perhaps noticing the Launcher and deciding picking a fight wasn’t worth it.
“Don’t mind Ekko,” Jinx said. “His bark is worse than his bite. Oh, and he’s the same age as me by the way.” The man glared at her, but she only laughed and poked his nose. Several times.
Ranboo edged forward. “So, um- so what’s the plan?” they inquired. “I mean, do we just run at the gates or—?”
“We go tonight,” Ekko said, gaze on the fire. “Midnight. Cause a distraction first, see how many guards we can get down here while we sneak away. Bust the damn lock—I know how to pick it. Then we step out there and go wild stabbin’—shootin’ in your case—until the Munies either give up or die.”
The idea should’ve made Newt ill. From the look on Ranboo’s face, it did for them. But all he felt was a detached understanding, accompanied by the faint hope that it might work.
His mind was going. The idea of stabbing and shooting the guards shouldn’t have been so easy to stomach, but it was. Newt didn’t have much time left.
Everything went wrong in the middle of the day.
It started when two guards walked into the Bowling Alley. None of the other Cranks looked up, and Newt did only very disinterestedly, because the guards were often strolling around despite being clearly outnumbered. His disinterest evaporated however, when one of them, very clearly. Called his name.
“Newt?”
Newt’s head snapped around and he stood up, without even considering that he should have pretended not to hear. Next to him, Tubbo sat up and frowned. “Does she know you?”
“Don’t think so.” Newt took a few steps forward, mind racing, and raised his voice to speak to the guard. “Hello?”
“Hey.” She frowned uncertainly. “You’re Newt?”
“Yeah.”
“Couple of people came in here lookin’ for you. Said you’re from WICKED and got picked up by mistake or something. I don’t know.”
Newt felt like a rubber band in his brain had been stretched and snapped back. ”What?”
Tommy and the others. Had to be. He shouldn’t have been such a fool as to believe they’d let him go that easy. They were his friends, or at least he’d thought they were, until Tommy ignored his bloody note—
Newt grit his teeth. “Tell them to get lost.”
It was all downhill from there.
Thomas, being Thomas, wouldn’t take no for an answer, and showed up with Minho and Brenda and Jorge to try and convince Newt to go with them. As if. He was a Crank at this point, his sanity was going down the drain faster than he could breathe. If he went with them they’d have to watch him go crazy and then, assuming he didn’t kill them the moment he hit the Gone, they’d have to murder him, and since Thomas had already failed at that, Newt would rather take his chances with the other Cranks and die when the time was right.
All the things he said to them got lost in the widening cracks in his brain. He knew he screamed at them to leave, he knew he begged to be left alone, he knew they kept trying and kept pushing until something inside Newt snapped and he threatened them, never believed he’d actually have to point a Launcher at his own best friends to get them to let him die, and one of Ekko’s group tried to kill them and Newt shot him instead and the whole world turned to chaos—
When his sanity returned, crumpled like a piece of paper abandoned by a writer on the floor, all Newt knew was that his friends had left him, just as he had wanted them to.
So why, why, was he crying?
Thick, ugly tears that poured down his cheeks, uncontrollable sobbing that wouldn’t stop no matter how hard he tried to close his throat. Newt clutched the Launcher to his chest as he were drowning and it was all he had to keep himself from going under, and he bent so low his forehead touched the floor, and he cried.
A hand touched his back. He raised his head and met Ranboo’s concerned eyes.
“Are you all right?” they whispered.
Newt straightened a little and shook his head, unable to force out words. Ranboo sat down next to him and patted his shoulder, and Tubbo came over and sat too, and for a moment they were all that existed in Newt’s sinking ship of a world.
He just wanted it to be over. He just wanted to die. No more of the excruciating wait for death, the knowledge that he was losing it and soon all that made him would be gone.
But he couldn’t, not yet. He had to get them out first. After that, whatever happened was out of his hands.
The night of the escape began in fire.
“What are you doing?” Newt demanded, watching Ekko poke a stick into the fire until it caught, flames flickering around the curling bark. The man glanced over at him doubtfully, raising one pale eyebrow.
“What’s it look like, kid? This is gonna be our distraction.”
Newt’s irritation at being called ‘kid’ slid instantly away. “Our distraction? What do you m- hey what are you— STOP!”
His shout did absolutely nothing to prevent Ekko from throwing the burning stick at the extremely flammable wooden wall. In the space of thirty seconds, the side of the Bowling Alley caught on fire, and thick smoke began to fill the space. The moment the rest of the Cranks realized what had happened they started to scream, some stampeding towards the exit while others running at the flames with crazed eyes. Newt drew back in a panic and crashed straight into Tubbo.
“What the fuck is he doing?” demanded the younger boy. “He’s gonna send us all to hell of his own making!”
“No I’m not.” Ekko bounded towards the exit. “Not if we move fast. Come on!”
And then the world exploded once against into chaos. Something buzzed in the back of Newt’s brain as the fire leaped across the wall, rapidly devouring anything flammable that lay in its path. Some cracked instinct screamed at him to run into the burning glow, just go just move it’ll feel nice and then you’ll be g o n e-
“NEWT!” A hand slammed onto his shoulder and the momentary lunacy left him as he spun to see Ranboo’s frantic eyes only a foot or so away. “Come on, we have to go!”
“I’m coming.” He pulled his shirt up over his face to protect himself from smoke and made for the doors, joining the crush of wailing Cranks attempting to flee. This whole place was a death trap really, especially in a fire—who knew how fast it would spread through the flammable hovels?
He almost ran into Jinx and discovered her laughing loud and unhinged, gun in hand—where had she got a gun?—as she danced out of reach of the fire. With a couple well-placed shots she cleared a path to the door and bounded towards it, and Newt chased after her, lungs already burning from the smoke.
“Wait!” The weak voice made him turn. Ranboo was stumbling after him, struggling to support a wheezing Tubbo. “I don’t think- he can run right now—”
Well that was a wrench in the plans. “Carry him,” Newt threw over his shoulder. “I’ve seen you do it before. We just gotta get out of the immediate danger zone.” Primal fear pricked his skin, felt like physical thorns, and Newt fought the irrational desire to grab his eyelids and pull as hard as he could. Come on, just hold onto your mind a little longer—
They were out of the Bowling Alley. The courtyard was even purer chaos than it had been earlier, Cranks running around screaming and several guards getting trampled underfoot. For one blinding second Newt thought that all was lost, that he and the people he’d sworn to help would all be killed simply by the result of Ekko’s distraction, but then Jinx was there, eyes wild and almost seeming to glow.
“Come on!” she cried and took off at a zig-zag run. Ranboo bolted after her, carrying Tubbo, and Newt paused for a second to glance back at the rapidly-burning Bowling Alley before he followed her.
He couldn’t have said, afterward, if it took them an hour or a minute to reach the outskirts of the Crank Palace. However long, it was a blur of desperate running, the kind of running he hadn’t done in years, made harder by the limp he’d carried ever since he’d tried to end his life, and there were people running next to him and in the delirious fog that had swallowed his mind Newt almost saw in them the faces of his friends.
By the time his vision cleared they’d reached the gates, and Ekko was picking the lock with quick and expert movements. They’d snagged at least two dozen other Cranks along the way, some past the Gone, all milling around waiting eagerly for those gates to open. Newt felt slightly sick at the knowledge of what they’d be releasing into the world.
He glanced to his left. Ranboo was standing there, Tubbo leaning heavily against them, their eyes haunted. “Some of those people…just ran into the flames,” they rasped out brokenly, and the last dredges of Newt’s humanity made his heart bang painfully against his ribs.
“They weren’t people anymore,” he said, knowing it wasn’t really a comfort.
Ranboo looked at him, eyes expressionless. “Soon we won’t be either.”
“That’s…true.” Newt raked a hand through his hair. “But you can’t get out of this place thinking like that. You’re not crazy yet, you’ve got a fair time ahead of you. Just don’t dwell on the future and you’ll be okay. Yeah?”
“What happens?” they whispered, twining their hand with Tubbo’s and squeezing tight.
“Huh?”
“What happens to us?”
Newt’s heart ached. His whole body ached. He was so, so tired. “What do you mean?”
“When we reach the end. Will we rip each other apart? Or will one of us go first, and leave the other to…to….”
Tubbo reached up and lightly tapped their chin. “That sounds like dwelling on it, Boo. I think he just said don’t dwell on it.”
“How can I not?” Their voice cracked. “We get out of this place, then what? We’ll never have all the things we were supposed to.”
“This is a fine time to be havin’ second thoughts,” Newt remarked, listening to Ekko mutter and curse at the lock. “Ranboo, the way I look at it is this. Stay here, all you’ve got to look forward to is a couple of months at most, more’n half your time spent scavenging or fighting to survive, watching the others go crazy and watchin’ yourself go crazy too. But get out and you can find somewhere to live out what you’ve got, spend all the time together you can. And yeah you’ll never get to do all the things you wanted to, and it sucks that this is the world we’ve gotta contend ourselves with, but you have each other and you have some time left to love and that’s more than most of us have got.”
Forever is never long enough.
Ranboo closed their eyes and the distant glow of the spreading fire illuminated the tears that streaked their cheeks. “You’re right.”
One of the Cranks hissed low as the lock finally clicked. Ekko stepped back and kicked the gate open.
“This is it, folks. One last push and we’re free.”
A launcher grenade arced through the darkness and struck him in the chest.
“EKKO!” Jinx shrieked and pointed her gun into the dark. One pull of the trigger, the shot cracked loud across the dark, someone outside the gate screamed high-pitched and quickly cut off. Then she dropped to her knees beside Ekko, looking trapped as she watched the electricity dance off his skin.
“He’ll be fine in five minutes!” Newt shouted. “Leave him, we gotta go!”
“Shut the fuck up, bitch boy!” was Jinx’s response. “You go, I’m staying.” She slapped Ekko’s cheek. “Wake up, you idiot!”
“Come on,” Newt gasped to Ranboo and Tubbo and made for the gate, raising his own Launcher and praying he had enough bullets left. As soon as he stepped around the edge of the wall, a grenade arced towards him, sparkling with electric bolts. He dodged and it slammed into someone behind him but aside from a glance back to confirm it wasn’t either of his companions, Newt didn’t care.
He raised his own Launcher, aimed it at one of the six guards facing them and fired. One fell. Another raised a pistol and shot it, and Newt ducked panicking, hadn’t realized they had real bullets. This made things harder.
“Aim for the trees,” he panted over his shoulder to Ranboo, who was trying to shield Tubbo with their body. “We just gotta get through these guys and then we’re out.” He glanced at the guards. One woman was glaring so viciously he wouldn’t have been surprised if she were a Crank herself, but the others all looked scared.
And who could blame them. There were about thirty Cranks on the inside of this gate, and as soon as something triggered them to move, the guards didn’t have a chance.
Time to be that trigger. Newt raised his Launcher and screamed, “RUN!”
He pitched his voice to the same frequency he knew would drive him insane, and sure enough it worked on the other Cranks. They were all charging forward in one screaming howl, like a wave of almost-humans breaking on the shore, and three of the guards turned tail at the sight and fled.
The Gone Cranks chased them down and sprang upon them with squeals vaguely approximate to toddlers being given their favorite food, and Newt had enough humanity left in him that he had to look away. His eyes fell on Ranboo, who had Tubbo by the hand and was looking around with eyes just a little too wild. “Where do we go?” they screamed. “Where do we go?”
Newt made a split-second decision. “This way!” He started running as best he could, stumbling on the uneven terrain, making for the dark hollow mouth of the forest nearby. It would be easy to lose the guards in the trees—
Not for the first time, his bad leg betrayed him and caught on a rock. Newt huffed in pain as he slammed to the ground. Agony shot through his calf and he wanted to scream and the thoughts were rushing loud into his head, get up and run and hit yourself and climb the wall and rip the nearest man apart-
Newt growled in frustration, forced himself to his feet and spun around.
It took a second for him to comprehend what he was seeing.
The female guard, the one who’d been glaring so viciously, had somehow, in the few seconds Newt was down, managed to attack Ranboo and force them to the ground. Tubbo had her arm in an iron grip and was struggling to keep her from aiming her pistol, but it was clear enough that he was losing the battle. As Newt watched in horror, Ranboo closed his eyes and turned his face away.
Giving up they’re giving up, and it was the maze all over again, able to do nothing but watch as the people he cared about died, can’t do anything can’t EVER do anything too weak too much of a coward kill them kill everyone kill yourse-
A scream punched its way out of Newt’s throat. It was high-pitched and twisted and somehow wrong, more monster than human, but he couldn’t care because he had not come this far only to watch the one of the people he’d sworn to save die before they had a chance to live what they had left.
Then the next moment he was moving, throwing himself through the air, slamming hard into the guard and sending her flying. She hit the ground and lay there, stunned, her gun skidding a foot or two away, and Newt could have left her there and run but-
Kill her kill her she’s everything she nothing SHE’S THE REASON FOR EVERYTHING YOU WENT THROUGH, and it was completely irrational but in that moment, Newt looked at the woman and it was as if she was actually the one who’d put him in the Maze, as if she were the face of WICKED.
He seized the gun, aimed it at her face, and pulled the trigger.
Newt heard the crack of bullet through bone. He saw her head snap back. But crazed madness had overtaken his mind and for no reason he could explain, he fired the gun again, and again, and again, screaming the whole time, until every last one of the bullets had met the woman’s face.
“Newt!”
Someone was shouting who was it there was no one there was nothing but death righteous death he had caused-
“NEWT! Stop! We need to go!”
His mind cleared and with the clarity came the awful realization of what he had done. Newt looked at the bloodied corpse of the woman he’d just killed, and at the gun in his hand, and it felt like his stomach had been ripped out by a Crank.
A Crank. Like him.
He’d never felt so sick in his life.
Robotically he turned his head to look at Ranboo. They were staring at him almost tearfully, hand tangled with Tubbo’s as if they were afraid of letting go.
“Newt, you just…you went completely….”
“Crazy. I know.” The words came out flat. “I’m losin’ my buggin’ mind.”
He looked around. The living guards had fled. A couple of Cranks were hunched over the dead ones’ corpses. From inside the Crank Palace, a red glow lit up the sky. It felt as if doomsday had come, though he knew it had passed long ago and this was a result of the aftermath.
“We have to get out of here.” Ranboo sounded exhausted, but somehow more alive than they had inside the walls. “It won’t be long before the rest of the Cranks turn on us.”
“Yeah,” Tubbo chimed in, rubbing his side. “We can run through the woods, head up into the mountains. I heard there’s some sort of summer camp up there—well, the abandoned site of one. Maybe it’s got somewhere we can stay.”
He couldn’t go with them. He didn’t belong there. He was too near to the Gone.
“You guys go. I’ll stay here.”
Ranboo’s brows squished together. ”Stay?”
“Yeah. Or…wander down to Denver with the other Cranks. Eventually.” Newt glanced down, twisting his hands. “I haven’t got much more in me. You’ve seen it as much as I have, my sanity’s on its way out. I belong here with this bloody lot, but you two don’t. You’ve still got what’s the most precious thing to us as have got the disease, and that’s time. You’ve got time. Use it well. All right?”
Ranboo still stared at him, eyes hollow pools of sorrow, but Tubbo took a step back and pulled them with him. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Me too.”
Then finally Ranboo spoke, in a low soft voice that made the madness inside Newt quiet a little. “Thank you. Thank you for everything. Thank you for lending us hope.”
Newt looked into their eyes, the expression there somehow both familiar and so foreign. Hope, that was it, hope, and it was something he’d lost a long time ago, after the first death in the Maze.
But these two still had it. Hope not for an infinite lifetime, but for beauty in the short one they had.
Newt was glad that somehow, strange as it was, he’d managed to keep that hope alive though for him it had gone out.
“Good luck,” he said. “Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
Then they were running. Two figures, one short, one tall, vanishing into the darkness so fast it was as though they had been nothing but shadows to begin with. Newt sat on the hillside as the Crank Palace burned behind him and watched them go, two people who’d unwittingly held off the madness for a little longer.
It was all that had held it at bay, the goal of helping them to escape. Now they were gone, and Newt didn’t have to fight it any more.
He smiled, and stood, and started walking down the hill toward the city. Through the swaying darkness he spotted Jinx and Ekko and a few other cranks, stumbling their way towards the lights that lay waiting, the lights of Denver, flickering with a deception of safety. None of them were safe. It was simply that the danger lay within them, rather than without.
He was dying. All of them were dying. And finally, finally, Newt didn’t have to regret it.