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Thomas, of course, had noticed Newt’s limp.
As he had noticed so many things about their second-in-command that, at times, he wondered whether there remained anything in Newt that could truly escape him—any thought too fleeting, any gesture too slight, any alteration in his expression that did not somehow find its way into the strange, involuntary vigilance with which Thomas had begun to observe him. He could not have said when it had begun, nor why; only that, without quite meaning to, he had made a study of the boy, learning the small and secret language of him: the little crease that gathered between his brows whenever he was concentrating; the way his mouth betrayed him, twisting at one corner when he was trying not to laugh; the particular inclination of his head whenever someone was talking nonsense; the faint weariness that settled over him at the end of a long day, softening his features for a moment before vanishing the instant someone called his name and needed him.
And Thomas, quite from the start, had noticed his limp—the way Newt favoured his left leg, as though some portion of his own body had become an unwelcome burden, grown familiar enough to be carried without complaint. There was never any ceremony to it, no grimace or sigh by which the discomfort might announce itself; only the smallest betrayals—a subtle shift of weight, a slight adjustment of posture, the briefest hesitation before he moved again.
And yet, for all the questions Thomas pestered him with—about the Glade and the Maze, the Runners and the Keepers, about the things he remembered and those he did not, questions that seemed to spill from him with such ungoverned abundance that even Thomas sometimes wished he possessed the means to shut himself up—this was the one thing he could never quite bring himself to ask.
Not since that first night, when Newt had told him, Those are the Runners. Best of the best, those guys. Have to be. Everything depends on them, and Thomas, with all the tact of someone newly arrived and still blissfully ignorant of the subjects upon which one ought not to tread, had blurted, Why aren’t you one?
Newt had answered readily enough. Was, till I hurt my leg a few months back, he’d told him. Yet, somehow, the question had felt more revealing than the answer, and Thomas had not dared to pursue it. He had meant only to ask why Newt was not a Runner when Thomas could see no reason why someone so capable, and so plainly respected, should not have been among the best of them; instead, without knowing he had done so, he had touched upon something private, something belonging to a time before Thomas, perhaps kept hidden precisely because it was never meant to be disturbed. Newt had offered him only the barest outline of the wound, a few words marking the edge of some deeper darkness, and left everything beyond it concealed. And Thomas, who was still in the process of getting to know himself but had already discovered that he possessed very little talent for leaving mysteries alone, had found himself strangely unwilling to strike a light into this one.
As though, beneath the restless tide of his curiosity, some deeper instinct warned him away from the answer.
Which, Thomas suspected, was a first.
Tonight had altered something.
After stumbling upon Newt in a moment so unguarded that Thomas had felt almost like an intruder simply for having witnessed it, and then sharing the strange intimacy of being allowed to tend to his injured leg, the need to know what had happened to his friend had followed him with the quiet tenacity of a shadow. Whenever his thoughts grew still, there it was, waiting at the borders of his attention. He could push it aside, distract himself, bury it beneath a hundred other thoughts, but it always returned, casting a strange pall over his mood that he could feel without quite understanding.
Long after the Glade had surrendered itself to darkness, Thomas lay awake in his hammock, staring into the blackness above while the night breathed softly through the crowded space behind the Homestead, stirring the shadows between the sleeping boys.
And thought of Newt.
He had been thinking of him a great deal lately.
Too much, perhaps.
The thought should have been harmless. There was, after all, no such thing as a mind police—no one lurking to peer behind his eyes and catalogue the thoughts he had been foolish enough to let wander there. And yet the very notion of being known in this particular way filled him with a strange, almost shameful unease. He did not understand it. There was nothing wrong with thinking about Newt. Nothing forbidden in it. Nothing that ought to have made his thoughts feel like secrets.
And still, they did.
Perhaps because Thomas had begun to fear his own mind.
Someone had stolen his memories. That much he knew. Whatever life had existed within him before the Maze had been taken apart and locked away somewhere beyond his reach, leaving him with fragments where there ought to have been a whole. He could not remember the hands that had done it, nor why, nor where those memories had gone when they were torn from him.
But sometimes he wondered whether they were truly gone at all.
Perhaps someone else had them. Perhaps someone else now knew what lived inside his head better than he did.
The idea disturbed him deeply.
If they could read his mind now—if some unseen hand might reach into that secret realm and turn over, one by one, all the things he had tried to keep hidden—what would they make of Newt?
What would they make of the tenderness with which Thomas lingered upon the sound of his voice, the particular shape of his smile, the little mannerisms that had taken root in his memory as though they had found there some soil peculiarly suited to them? What would they make of the way Newt had begun to inhabit his heart, settling there with a familiarity Thomas could neither account for nor command?
And, worst of all, what would they make of the fact that Thomas did not entirely want him to leave?
It was ridiculous.
He was being ridiculous.
And yet… Newt was there in the first moments after waking, in the long stretches of work when Thomas’ hands were occupied, and his mind was free to wander wherever it pleased. He thought of Newt when the sun climbed above the walls and poured its light across the Glade; thought of him beneath the merciless brightness of noon; thought of him again when evening descended, and the stone turned gold beneath the dying sun.
And now, lying alone in the darkness, Thomas found that even here—where there was nothing to see, nothing to hear but the muted breathing of sleeping boys and the restless whisper of the night—his mind returned to him, as inevitably as the tide to the shore.
And apparently, not even his dreams could carry Thomas beyond Newt’s reach; somehow, he followed him there, too.
He did not know when sleep finally took him. One moment he was lying awake, listening to the slow creak of rope and the distant murmur of voices fading; the next, he was running.
The Maze rose around him.
Its stone walls towered on either side, immense and ancient beneath a sky the colour of bruised twilight, while the corridors stretched before him in impossible succession, turning and twisting with a terrible familiarity that frightened him more than their strangeness ever could have done. He knew these passages. Or thought he did. Every corner seemed to promise recognition, every wall to conceal the memory of something just beyond the reach of his mind.
And Newt was ahead of him.
Thomas caught the pale flash of his hair between the shadows, the movement of his shoulders, the rhythmic striking of his feet against the stone.
He was running.
And there was no limp.
Newt moved with a speed that seemed almost unnatural, swift and effortless, his body carrying him through the Maze as though it had never known injury. There was something beautiful in the ease of it, and something terrible. Thomas tried to follow, but Newt was faster—far faster than he ought to have been—and each time Thomas thought he had nearly reached him, Newt rounded another corner and vanished.
“Newt!” he called, but his voice seemed to vanish among the walls. “Newt, wait!”
There was no answer. His footsteps came back to him instead, multiplied and distorted by the stone until the Maze seemed crowded with him—an army of breathless Thomases racing through its corridors, all calling after Newt, all pursuing, and every one of them hopelessly behind.
Then Newt appeared again, standing at the far end of another passage.
Thomas slowed; his heart was beating hard enough to hurt.
Newt had stopped before one of the towering walls, his face turned upwards towards the ivy that spilt down the stone in thick, dark ropes. Its leaves stirred though there was no wind to move them, brushing softly against one another in a whisper too faint to be called a sound, yet unmistakably there. Newt reached for it without hesitation.
Or perhaps the ivy was reaching for him.
Newt began to climb.
“Newt!”
Newt did not turn. He only climbed higher, one hand after another, his fingers disappearing among the leaves, his body growing smaller against the enormous wall. Thomas could see the muscles shifting beneath his shirt, the pale line of his face whenever he glanced upwards, and, with a clarity that seemed utterly at odds with the dream, the certainty of every movement as he ascended.
“Newt!”
Still nothing.
A terrible suspicion took hold of him then: Newt could not hear him.
Panic gathered inside Thomas with sudden, primitive force, an ancient terror for which he could find neither name nor cause, yet which his body, dreadfully, seemed to recognise. And suddenly he was running, as though the distance between them were no mere stretch of stone and earth, but something upon which life itself depended.
Yet no matter how fast he ran, Newt remained beyond his reach.
Something lay between them.
Thomas could not see it, yet he felt it the instant his outstretched hands encountered the emptiness before him—a boundary without shape or substance, clear and absolute as glass, dividing him from Newt with an impenetrable stillness. “Newt!” His palms struck against the unseen surface, and the shock of it travelled coldly through his arms. Beyond it, Newt continued to climb. Thomas could see him. He was there, close enough that Thomas ought to have been able to reach him; and yet the distance between them had become immeasurable. Thomas pressed harder against the invisible barrier. It did not yield. Newt did not hear him.
And then, beneath the panic, came something worse.
He knew this.
He had felt this before.
Somewhere.
At some time he could not remember.
The knowledge existed within him without a memory to give it shape, buried beneath whatever corruption had swallowed his past; and the harder he reached for it, the further it seemed to recede, withdrawing into those unreachable places where all the things he had once known now lay hidden. Yet he knew this. He knew what was happening. He knew what came next.
He simply could not remember how he knew.
“Newt, stop! Please!”
Thomas struck the invisible wall again. The sound that answered him was wrong—as though it had travelled through an immeasurable depth to reach him, like knocking upon the other side of a window in an empty house.
Newt reached the top, a small and solitary figure against the vastness of the sky, and Thomas could only stare upwards as something cold and nameless tightened within his chest.
“Don’t.” The word scarcely rose above a breath. “Newt, please.”
Newt turned; their eyes met, though Thomas could not tell whether Newt truly saw him. There was something in his expression that Thomas could not understand—not fear, exactly, nor sorrow. Something quieter and infinitely worse: resignation.
Thomas flattened both hands against the unseen barrier.
“Newt,” he called, his voice breaking against the emptiness between them. “No.”
He shook his head as though the gesture alone might undo what he was witnessing, then struck the barrier again, harder this time. Pain flashed through his palms, sharp and bright, but the invisible wall remained unmoved. For one suspended instant the whole Maze seemed to fall utterly still, the corridors holding their darkness around them as though the very stone had drawn breath and forgotten how to release it.
Then Newt jumped.
Thomas screamed.
He woke with the sound still tearing through his throat.
He lurched upright in the hammock, drenched in sweat, his chest heaving as though he had genuinely been running, and for several bewildered seconds he had no idea where he was. The darkness of the Glade seemed to close around him; the familiar shapes of hammocks had been warped by the remnants of the dream, the walls seeming too close, the shadows too deep, the whole place possessed of that peculiar unreality which clung to the world for a few moments after waking.
Someone was beside him.
"Thomas?"
Chuck.
The younger boy stood at the edge of the hammock, staring up at him with wide, frightened eyes.
“What happened?”
Thomas swallowed, trying to force air into lungs that seemed reluctant to remember how. “Bad dream,” he managed.
His voice sounded strange to his own ears, hoarse and distant, as though it had travelled back to him from somewhere far away. Chuck did not look relieved. If anything, his expression grew more troubled.
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “I figured. Don’t worry, we all get ’em around here. It’s just…” Chuck trailed off, worrying at the edge of his shirt as he searched for the right words.
Thomas wiped the sweat from his forehead. “What?”
“You kept screaming.” Chuck hesitated, glancing at him with an uncertainty that seemed almost too grave for his small face. “Screaming Newt’s name.”
Heat crept up Thomas' neck and into his cheeks, and he glanced instinctively around the space, suddenly anxious that someone else might have woken and witnessed the humiliating revelation. Frypan was still snoring heavily in his hammock; beyond that, there was only the soft, uneven breathing of the sleeping boys and the occasional creak of rope.
“I did?” Thomas asked, sheepishly scratching the back of his neck.
“Yeah.”
“Shuck,” Thomas breathed.
The Maze came back to him in fragments: the towering walls, the black ropes of ivy spilling down the stone, Newt climbing beyond his reach, and then—
Newt falling.
Or jumping.
Thomas could not decide which possibility frightened him more.
“What else?”
Chuck frowned, searching his memory. “You said something else, right before you woke up.”
Thomas’ mouth went dry. “What did I say?”
"I dunno." Chuck's brow furrowed. "It sounded like..." He paused, trying to catch hold of the words. "Like you said, 'I'm coming for you.' Or something like that."
Thomas stared into the darkness beyond Chuck's shoulder.
I'm coming for you.
The words echoed inside him.
Not as something dreamed.
As something remembered.
He closed his eyes.
Again, he saw Newt looking back at him through that impossible pane of glass.
A screen.
The word surfaced with such suddenness that Thomas nearly recoiled from it.
A screen.
And with it came a sick certainty, deeper than reason and older than anything he could remember: whatever he had just witnessed had not been merely some grotesque invention of a mind left to wander in the dark, some meaningless arrangement of fears and fragments.
Perhaps that was the worst part.
Not the dream, nor even the sight of Newt falling beyond his grasp, but the terrible sensation that somewhere beneath the ruins of his forgotten past there existed a place where he had already lived this moment; that the terror which had seized him in the dream had not been born there at all, but recovered—dragged unwillingly back into the light from some buried corner of himself.
And for the first time, Thomas found himself wondering whether having his memories taken from him had been entirely the terrible thing he had always believed it to be.
Behind them, the door of the Homestead creaked softly.
Newt appeared in the opening a moment later, one hand still resting upon the latch, his hair disordered from sleep and his expression carrying the particular weariness of someone who had been dragged unwillingly from it.
“I heard someone up.”
His gaze moved first to Chuck, then to Thomas, taking in the sweat still damp upon Thomas’ forehead, the disarray of the hammock, the pallor that had not yet quite left his face. His brow furrowed, the last remnants of sleep giving way to quiet concern.
“What happened to ya?”
“Nothing,” Thomas answered too quickly.
Newt raised an eyebrow. “Nothin’,” he repeated, plainly unconvinced.
Thomas rubbed a hand over his face, suddenly and painfully conscious of everything at once: the dream, the screaming, Chuck standing there watching him, and now Newt himself, alive and wholly unaware of the terrible apparition Thomas had just watched plunge from the Maze wall.
“Just… a bad dream.”
Something in Newt’s expression softened by a fraction. “Ah.” He stepped farther outside, the boards giving a quiet creak beneath his feet. “That explains the screamin’, then. Happens to the best of us.”
Chuck, apparently deciding there was no earthly reason to keep this information private, nodded eagerly. “He was dreaming about you.”
Thomas groaned. “Chuck.”
“What?” Chuck asked, genuinely puzzled by the warning in his name. “You were.”
Newt looked at Thomas, but Thomas could not bring himself to meet his gaze. Heat climbed into his face anew, made considerably worse by the fact that he could practically feel Newt’s amusement growing by the second, the corner of his mouth lifting into a smile that was just restrained enough to become infuriating.
“So,” Newt said, leaning one shoulder against the doorframe, “was it a nice dream?”
“No.” The answer came so quickly that even Thomas seemed startled by it.
Newt blinked. “That bad, eh?”
“Worse.”
“Bit harsh.” Newt’s smile widened. “Sorry I’m givin’ ya nightmares, Tommy.”
“It wasn’t—” Thomas stopped, exhaled sharply, and tried again. “You were running.”
Newt’s smile faltered. “I was?”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“There was no limp.”
For a moment, Newt said nothing. Something unreadable passed across his face, too fleeting for Thomas to catch, before the familiar mischief returned and one brow lifted faintly.
“Well.” His mouth twitched. “Can’t blame your subconscious for havin’ standards, mate.”
Chuck snorted, and Newt pushed himself away from the doorframe, glancing towards the sleeping boys beyond them.
“All right, shanks. That’s enough excitement for one night. Back to sleep.”
Chuck obediently climbed into his hammock.
Thomas remained sitting in his.
“That includes you,” Newt said.
Thomas opened his mouth, thought better of it, and settled back into the hammock.
Newt gave a satisfied nod. “Good boy.”
He reached for the door, then paused once more. His eyes found Thomas again, and all teasing fell away, leaving only that quiet attentiveness Thomas had begun to recognise in him—the look of someone making certain, without asking outright, that he was truly all right.
Thomas gave him a small nod.
Apparently satisfied, Newt finally pulled the door shut.
Thomas lay still beneath the darkness, staring into nothing. Somewhere beyond the thin wooden walls, Newt’s footsteps faded inside the Homestead. Thomas listened until he could no longer hear them.
Then he closed his eyes.
For several seconds, silence held them in its dark and patient keeping. Then, from the neighbouring hammock, Chuck’s small voice drifted towards him.
“Did I mess up? Should I not have told him?”
Thomas let out a slow breath through his nose, keeping his eyes closed.
“Go to sleep, Chuck.”