Chapter Text
Recovered documents written by Newt. It is believed to be written shortly after Thomas just arrived in the Glade. Later these documents will be compiled into the Book of Newt.
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We call it the Glade. It has been home to us for so many years, for some longer than for others. The walls reach high, the walls slide shut and in the middle of the night, we hear the Grievers and the Maze.
Every. Single. Night.
We try to figure out when we can leave, if we can ever, but so far, nothing has worked.
Okay, maybe I am skipping a lot of important parts of the Glade and its origins, without context whatsoever.
Now we are with many, however it all started with Alby.
You see, every month, a Glader is sent up by the Box. Someone had to be the first and our first Glader was Alby. For a month he had to figure out how to survive all by himself.
Then, the box came back up and there was Gally.
Now there were two. Two people can work harder than one and more and more got done inside the Glade. There was a place to eat, a place to sleep and a place to hide when it rains.
Besides, Alby appreciated the company.
A month went by, and the Box brought me, Newt, their third.
Eventually, we realized that maybe it was for the best that we would have rolls assigned to us. Alby became our First-in-Command, Gally became the Keeper of the Builders, and I became the Second-in-Command. Establishing order in the start, might help in the future, especially because we were counting on the Box bringing more Gladers.
The Box brought us our fourth.
A girl.
When we opened the Box, we saw her sitting in the middle of it. “A girl?” Alby asked out loud.
It was like we had never seen one before in our lives, but truth be made known: we all had no idea. When you come up the Box, you don’t know a thing. Eventually it dawns on you that you have a name, but that’s the only thing they let you keep.
Your name. Just a fraction of your identity.
The girl had scoffed from inside the Box. “No, I’m an elephant,” she had sharply retorted. “Of course, I’m a girl.”
Things became different when Y/N arrived. She’d sit for hours on end near the entrance or the exit, whatever you would call it. And when the walls would shut, she’d saunter off, finishing up some chores.
Alby, Gally, and I had no clue how to deal with her, because she was snappy and slightly mean.
Eventually, Y/N dropped the bomb to Alby. “I want to check out what’s out there,” she one day said during supper.
We all gawked at her, because there was one rule that Alby had installed when we got here: No one leaves the Glade.
He had shaken his head, told her it was too dangerous and dropped the subject.
However, she would not let this go. Day after day we would hear her arguments. She knew when the walls would shut. She wanted to map something out. She’d only leave for an hour.
Stubborn from the very start.
It took her an additional two weeks before she’d convinced him.
At first, she’d leave for an hour tops, but the more secure she became, the more she’d ventured out. And when more boys arrived, things had to become more structured. More systematic. So, Y/N became the Keeper of the Runners.
Every morning at dawn, she’d get ready and waited near the exit, waiting for the doors to slide open.
One day, when there were ten of us here, she hadn’t come back. Gally was pacing in front of the now open walls, but every second that ticked by, it became more pressing that we might not ever see Y/N again.
But then, as we already felt the wind slapping us in the face, which was one of the obvious signs that the walls would close, she rounded the corner. She sprinted, fear written all over her face.
“She’s not going to make it,” one of the Gladers muttered, but we all hushed him, because she would make it.
She was Y/N of all people.
If someone was going to make it, it was going to be her.
The walls started to slide shut and Alby had to physically stop Gally from going into the Maze. She squeezed herself through the closing walls and right before they snapped close, she fell in Gally’s arms.
“Don’t ever do that again,” Gally had said to her.
She ignored him. “Those weird noises we hear at night, that screeching and awful noise,” she panted, “those things are alive.”
“Alive?” I parroted.
Then we had no idea what on earth we should’ve called them, but when Y/N had drawn them, we decided to call them the Grievers.
When Minho came up in the Box, she convinced us to add Minho to the Runners. From that moment on, they began to map out the Maze and created the Map Room together, a sacred space which was only for Alby and the Runners.
For close to a year and a half everything went its way, but then the Box came up with a note.
Send the girl back.
At first, we didn’t want to let her go, but the Box wouldn’t go down and for two months it stayed that way.
We had lost a few boys to sickness and what not but handing one of us back to the people we didn’t know who’d send us in this Glade, was something we weren’t ready for. Finally, as food began to run out, she decided she would go.
Y/N stepped in the Box.
She named Minho the Keeper of the Runners and told him to continue mapping the place, because when she came back, she’d wanted him to have made himself useful.
No one had liked it.
Gally—who had loved her for a long time, but never had the guts to admit it—was out of it. Let’s just say that you really didn’t want to be a Builder at that time. No matter how many times Y/N had told us that she loved us and that it would only be for the best if she went back, we had such a hard time believing it.
And there she went.
Y/N stayed away for six months. With each passing month, we so hoped it would be her when the Box came up, but it was never her. We had missed her so much, but we refused to carve a line through her name, like we did with every Greenie who had lost their lives in the Glade.
But six months sure was a lot.
Finally, the Box came up and when we opened it, she was there. Our Y/N.
We all feared she’d lash out, considering Y/N could be a hot head from time to time prior to her leaving. Gally was the only one who dared to jump in the box. Instead of screaming at him to leave her alone, she fell in his arms.
She remembered her own name and the names of the Gladers who had been there when she left.
There was just one giant black stain in her memory and that was the time she wasn’t here in the Glade with us. Across her left eye she has a thick and jagged scar and on the left side of her face she had burns. They looked painful and well taken care of at the same time.
Y/N was withdrawn and had more of an attitude than she had before, but we all understood. Whatever it was that she had gone through, it mustn’t have been easy. Every time a new Greenie complained about her attitude, we’d tell them that she’d been through more than any of us could ever imagine.
In those six months she hadn’t been there, Gally had worked on something, because he—more than any of us—believed she’d be back. When he took her on a bit of a tour, to tell her what had changed in the time she wasn’t with us, they finally ended near where we slept. She asked for her bed, only to discover the few belongings we had here belonged to someone else.
Gally had ignored her disappointment and showed her the newest bed he had built for her. No girls had come up and he wanted her to have a tiny place for herself. A place where she’d had privacy from the rest of the boys.
And Gally’s bed wasn’t too far from hers, because after she had left, he wanted to stay close to her forever.
Minho had continued to map the Maze, together with Ben. It took Y/N two weeks before she became a Runner again, though Minho kept the title of the Keeper of the Runners.
Y/N and Gally sat on the platform a lot, watching over the Glade. No one knew what they were talking about, but sometimes I think those two truly got each other. Gally isn’t much of a talker, yet sometimes I see him unable to stop blabbing when Y/N’s near him. Y/N doesn’t open up, but I feel like they truly get each other.
But then Thomas came along, and our lives changed forever.
—Newt