#grievers

The first thing she was aware of was pain. A pounding deep inside her skull that seemed to rattle against bone like someone had locked a drummer in there, handed him two hammers, and told him rent was due. Every pulse slammed into bone hard enough to make her think her brain was trying to punch its own way out. And—nausea. Jesus Christ, the nausea. It rolled through her in thick, ugly waves, all hot throat and cold sweat, like her stomach had turned into a washing machine full of knives. She felt like she was gonna spill her guts all over—

Hold up. Where the fuck was she?

Her brain, obviously trying to be helpful, to offer context like good brains do, immediately served her up a plate of... absolutely steaming nothing. No name, no place, no reason, no face, not a single useful fact. Her mind was empty. Not fuzzy. Not dim. Not partially there in the way of a dream slipping through your fingers. Nothing. A smooth, shining void, like someone had scooped out her entire identity with an ice cream spoon and left the carton upside down on a counter to drip itself into fucking oblivion.

Her eyelids peeled apart with all the grace of tape being ripped from skin. Blinking lights. Red, then dark, then red again. Harsh and mechanical, stuttering over iron bars and metal walls and shadows cut into hard geometric shapes. It took her several long, miserable seconds to understand that the cold pressing into her spine was metal too. Bars against her back. More above her. More around. A cage. Just great. The space around her was a box, iron ribs creating a little prison cell with all the warmth and charm of a butcher’s freezer. The air smelled like rust and something sterile, like a hospital had decided to put on leather gloves and start a side hustle in the BDSM porn industry. This must be death, she thought blearily. Yep. I kicked it and lost all my boring human baggage and I'm going to Hell, judging by the poor interior design. Points for commitment to misery, but where was the fire? Where were the demons with pitchforks? Whoever was running Hell’s design department needed to get their shit together. Then another thought elbowed its way in through the nausea. Isn't Hell supposed to be down? She was no expert on afterlife architecture, but she was pretty sure damnation traditionally involved descending. This thing sure felt like it was going up. But before she could even finish the thought, the lights blinked red one last time and the cage jolted to a stop.

That's when the sun came in. That blinding, brutal fucker pouring down from above where a hatch just opened. It wasn’t light so much as an assault. A holy act of violence. The kind of sun that looked at your retinas and said, I’ll be taking those. Her hand flew up on instinct, shielding her face as she squinted through tears the brightness dragged out of her by force.

Shapes leaned over the opening. Faces, all peering down at her with wide, stunned eyes. Boys. All boys. Some younger, some older, all staring down at her with expressions so staggered, so thunderstruck, so completely derailed that for a second she almost forgot her skull was trying to implode. There were a dozen of them around the opening, stacking over one another to look in, wide-eyed and open-mouthed in a way that suggested their brains had not merely frozen but fully shut down and were now displaying a critical error message no one could fix. “Holy shit, is that—” one boy gasped, his voice cracking like he’d just hit puberty twice. “Do you… do you see this?” another breathed, like he was afraid his eyes were lying. “A girl?!” somebody practically shrieked. And that one word went through the cluster like a lit match dropped in dry grass. They were talking over each other instantly, voices colliding, tripping, rising half an octave too high with shock. It was like they’d never seen one in their goddamn lives. Their gazes swept over her in one stunned, greedy pass, her face, her hair, her body—Even sprawled half-conscious on a metal floor, sick as hell and pale under the brutal wash of sunlight, she looked unreal. Her hair was blonde, long, spilled around her shoulders and back in tangled, luminous layers that caught in the light like spun gold. Her skin was white enough to look carved, all cold planes and delicate lines, her eyes were—

The crate bars screeched open above her and even more light got in. Apparently there had not yet been enough violence done to her skull. Why the fuck did they have to do that? She could practically feel her stomach climbing up her throat. Definitely gonna throw up now. Everything spun. Her vision pinwheeled. The faces above blurred, sharpened, doubled, then blurred again, and then some idiot jumped in next to her. A well-meaning idiot, judging by the way he landed in a crouch and immediately held his hands up like she was a feral cat. Tall-ish. Brown hair. Green eyes. Sharp-jawed in a way that would have been handsome if Cass’s brain had currently been accepting aesthetic input. It wasn't. Instead, it decided this was clearly a throw hands first, throw up later kind of situation. “Hey… it’s okay, we're not going to hurt you—” he said softly. He seemed sincere. Truly. Unfortunately for him, sincerity was not currently outranking boy in cage with me on her threat assessment scale. Her fist connected to his stomach with enough force to send him stumbling back until his spine hit the bars. He wheezed, clutching his gut, eyes going huge with shock. Not offense, interestingly. Just shock. Like his brain had not considered “first girl I ever see wakes up swinging” as a probable branch of the interaction tree. Neither had the boys above, judging by the collective uproar. “Oh, shit!” “She decked him!” “Thomas!”

Asserting dominance in Hell wasn't on her to do list for today but she didn't exactly remember her to do list, so she's raw dogging it. She didn’t wait to admire her handiwork. The second after that punch landed, she was already up, one hand on the frame, foot finding leverage, body flowing into motion so fluid and instinctive it looked rehearsed. She climbed the inner bars, pivoted, caught the edge overhead and vaulted. Someone grabbed for her wrist and she slipped away like water. Another tried to block her and she ducked beneath him. In two breaths, she was out of the cage and became a living blur. “Whoa—HEY!” someone shouted behind her. “Stop!” another voice, panicked. And then, louder, like an alarm: “We got ourselves a runner!”

If this is Hell, she was gonna find another neighbourhood of demons, because only now it occurred to her that it's a bad move to hit the first one you encounter and anger the rest. A good note to self.

The world hit her all at once—too bright, too dry and with waaay too much green for Hell. Trees, grass, crops, wooden buildings scattered like a little settlement in the center of… something. It should've felt alive, but the air wasn't damp with life. It was arid, hollow, and she felt dust cling to her tongue like it owned real estate there. Behind her, a stampede. Not one set of footsteps, many. Boys yelling, calling to each other.

For people who had spent who even knew how long anymore trapped in a death maze with no memory of the world before, they had gotten very used to routine. The Box came up once a month. It brought supplies and a Greenie. They greeted the poor shank, hauled him out, watched him puke and panic, answered his questions badly, told him the rules of the place and life lurched onward. That was the order of things. Predictable in its misery. Manageable in its misery. This was the universe snorting a line and kicking the table over.

“Holy shit,” Minho muttered under his breath as he was chasing her. She was fast. Not just quick. Terrifyingly, impossibly fast. Even weaving half-blind from whatever the drugs had done to her, she made choices mid-stride that shaved off time and distance with predatory instinct. She cut corners without losing balance. She adjusted to uneven ground without looking. When someone stumbled into her path, she changed direction in a single smooth shift that cost her almost no speed at all. Minho felt the deeply offensive and wholly unfamiliar experience of having to work for it. By the time he hit full pace, lungs biting, she was still widening the gap. “You have got to be kidding me.” He’d trained Runners, he was the best they had, but he had to dig deep just to keep her in sight, and whenever she felt him gaining, she surged forward like some hidden engine inside her kicked alive. “Fuck,” he was gasping now, because what in the actual fuck was this? Little Miss Top Runner just came out of the box and decided to show him what she's got right out of the bat?

Her breath dragged sharp through her throat. The nausea hadn’t left, it rode her hard, threatening mutiny at every step, but there was no time for it now. She saw it then. A towering monolith of stone, so tall it seemed to reach the clouds. Hundreds of feet enclosing everything. No climbing out. No seeing over. No horizon. No world beyond except the slice of sky they permitted. The sight of it punched the breath out of her and her chest knotted, but then her eyes locked on what seemed to be the only way out of this shit. A massive, ominous gap that felt like it was breathing.

No red carpet needed.

She darted straight for it, cutting off the desperate shouts behind her.

The shout that went up behind her was ugly. Collective. Helpless. The boys hit the entrance in staggered succession and then faltered, because the rules that kept them alive snapped tight around their throats. Only the Runners belonged in there, and even they operated under the law of the Doors. In at dawn. Out by dusk. Never ignore the time. Never get trapped inside when night fell. “She’ll get herself killed!” Newt shouted, breathless and furious at the uselessness of the statement because yes, obviously, thank you, excellent contribution. Alby arrived seconds later and took in the scene with one hard sweep of his eyes, face darkening. “Minho,” he snapped. “Take every Runner we’ve got and find her.” Minho didn’t need telling twice. He was already moving again, already barking orders to the others as they plunged into the Maze.

The boys tried. All hands, or better said, legs on deck, all runners in the Maze to find her until dawn. They told themselves it wasn’t about her being a girl, that they would’ve done the same for any greenie, any new arrival lost and sick and terrified. But they all knew better. She was the only girl they've ever seen and it felt like a personal failure to each and every one of them to not manage to calm her down and keep her from getting killed out there. Of course she bolted. All of them were guys. God knows what went through her head about this whole thing. She was confused and sick from all the drugs the sick fucks who put them there pumped into her beforehand and she acted on instinct. They had no idea who's instinct would be to go straight for the nightmare of a maze surrounding their Glade, but still. It was their fault. And it pressed on them so hard they couldn't breathe when the runners eventually came back empty handed at the end of the day. Absolutely nothing. Not a trace of her in that cursed place. They were actually questioning the possibility of collective hallucination. I mean...it all felt too good to be true. A goddamn girl. Not a word any of them had even said without either laughing and shaking their heads at the absurdity of, or feeling stupidly soft inside, like you’d accidentally touched something in yourself you weren’t supposed to. Girl was something you only whispered to yourself at night when the silence got too much and your brain gave you fragments of what you’d lost. A shape you could barely remember. Something beautiful and fragile that didn't belong here.

And now she was gone. Dead.

Chuck cried first. He sat down hard on the ground near the Homestead and cried with the blunt honesty only someone his age could manage, tears running down his freckled face. “We didn’t help her,” he choked out. “She was scared and—” Frypan crouched beside him and put a hand on the back of his neck, face twisted with his own sorrow. Someone else punched a tree. A couple of boys turned away entirely, faces tight and eyes wet. Minho stood off to one side, hands on his hips, staring at the shut doors like if he glared hard enough they’d reopen out of shame. What a fucking joke. I am the Keeper of the Runners and I couldn't find one drugged and sick girl in my own Maze. Thomas took the blame in quieter, more intimate bites. He replayed the cage over and over. If he hadn’t jumped in. If he’d spoken slower. If he’d stayed farther back. If he’d stood different, moved different. Rationally he knew the outcome probably wouldn’t have changed. She had woken ready to fight through anything in reach. But rationality was a weak shield against guilt. Newt, for his part, was getting angrier by the hour. Not at her, poor girl didn't know any better, but at the whole impossible set of circumstances. At the fact that she’d been terrified enough to run straight into the worst place they had. At the boys themselves, a little, though he knew it wasn’t fair. They had stared. Of course they had stared. Christ, he had stared too. You couldn’t not. But from her side of it? Waking trapped, drugged, memory wiped, surrounded by stunned teenage boys gawking down at you like you’d fallen from another dimension—yes, all right, fair enough, a tactical retreat into the murder labyrinth did make a certain deranged kind of sense. Gally barked at anyone who came near, snapped at questions, kicked a crate hard enough to bruise his foot and then swore like he didn't have it coming. Everyone left him to it. They all knew what he was like when fear put its hand around his neck: louder, meaner, all edges. “This is on her. We told her to stay put. She should’ve stayed put,” he said once, voice too sharp. Alby paced. Short, brutal turns, hands on his hips, then rubbing his temple. He wanted to blame someone, but who was there to blame? The boys for staring? For being boys and completely unequipped for this? Her for running? Impossible. When you came into the Glade you were one of their own. That was what they were supposed to do: receive the greenie, orient him, protect him, absorb him into the brutal little family that had formed in the shadow of the walls. And they didn't even manage to—An useless thought, like all others on the matter. It was over. She was dead. Once those doors closed for the night, they knew it with certainty. Nobody survived a night in the Maze. That was the only absolute in this godforsaken place.

If you’re asking yourselves how things looked like from her point of view and what exactly she did in those charming little first hours inside the Maze, well, the answer’s embarrassingly simple: she tried to find a fucking exit. Because what else do you do when you wake up in a metal coffin with your skull being used as a percussion instrument, your memories missing, some poor bastard’s abs now permanently aware of your existence, and a small nation of stunned teenage boys staring at you like you’d personally descended from the heavens to ruin their concentration forever? Wait for Hell to formally introduce itself with a welcome pamphlet?

No, you try to get the fuck out.

It was clear she was currently in a maze. Didn’t need a PhD in architecture to figure that out. Towering walls rose on every side, slabs of old grey stone so high they made a prison out of sunlight. Corridors split and branched and doubled back with the kind of enthusiasm only true evil and deeply underfunded urban planning shared. Dead ends. Forks. Long passages narrowing into turns sharp enough to hide a fresh nightmare. It had all the classic features of a maze. A neat little playground of despair. But after that first obvious conclusion came the unsettling part: her mind slid into it as if the architecture had brushed against something inside her and that something had sat up, stretched, and gone, Oh. This. I know this. Every corridor imprinted itself on her memory almost the second she entered it, as if some part of her had unrolled parchment and started sketching the routes in real time. She didn’t have to force it. Didn’t have to repeat landmarks to herself or count turns aloud. It happened on its own. Each intersection branded itself into place. Each passage slotted into an expanding structure in her head with eerie precision. Left turn after narrow corridor. Cracked wall after ivy seam. Fork with thicker sand to the right. Three long strides from one stain to the next. Eleven more to the bend. The pattern grew without effort, like her brain had found the exact kind of puzzle it had been starving for and was greedily consuming every piece. She noticed everything. The angle of hairline fractures crawling through stone. The way sand gathered thicker in certain corners where the wind was redirected. The faint differences in wall texture from one section to another, as if some parts had been rebuilt or repaired. The sounds, too, how some corridors carried echoes longer, how others swallowed them, how the air changed temperature in nearly imperceptible shifts that told her something about direction. A good memory would have been remembering the last few turns. This was something else entirely. This was her mind behaving like an obsessive cartographer on drugs. As though this kind of problem had once been home territory. That was observation number one about herself, because her brain obviously hadn't given up on the who the fuck are we campaign.

Observation number two came when she tripped. It happened because the floor changed under her just enough to catch the edge of her boot where the sand got deeper along the base of the wall. One second she was sprinting, the next her footing gave, and she went down hard on one knee and both hands. Skin tore open against grit and stone. Pain flared bright enough to punch straight through the haze coating everything. Life sharpened. The nausea didn’t vanish, but it settled into the background. The pain grounded her in a way nothing else had yet managed. It dragged her out of that unreal, floating wrongness and slammed her back into something more useful. I'm real. I'm here. I'm alive. She stared at the raw skin on her knee, blood beading through sand stuck to the wound, and felt an almost absurd wave of relief move through her. I'm real. I'm here. I'm alive. It was still a work in progress, that conclusion. Her situation continued to feel deeply incompatible with sanity. But pain helped nonetheless. She pushed back to her feet and kept moving.

The deeper she went, the more the environment told on itself. The air was dry in a way that turned breathing into labor. Not the ordinary dryness of a hot summer day. This was harsher. It bit at her skin and left her tongue feeling powdered. When the wind threaded through the corridors in sudden low gusts that came around corners like something exhaling, it carried sand with it. Desert, she thought. This place, whatever the hell it was, was in a desert. Which opened a fresh branch of unpleasant questions. If this thing was in the middle of a desert, then escaping it might not be salvation. Escaping might simply mean dying somewhere with a wider view. What if the boys back there, those wide-eyed, dumbstruck boys in the green clearing, were living in the only survivable patch for miles? Was escaping worse than going back? Was there even such a thing as “out” here, or was she just running herself in loops until her body gave in?

A screech interrupted that train of thought, splitting through the silence so violently it seemed to scrape the inner walls of her skull on the way through. She froze so hard her spine locked. The sound came again, dragging along the corridors in jagged echoes. That was when she saw the source of said screech. For one genuinely offended second, her mind refused to classify what it was looking at. The thing crawled along the wall and that was way worse than if it had run on the ground like a normal monster. It moved with too many limbs—jointed, sharp, wrong. Not spider, not insect, not machine, not animal, but an ugly, deeply personal insult built out of all four. Metal gleamed under dirt. Tubes and fleshy parts seemed braided together. A tail dragged behind it with a grating scrape against the stone. The front of it, if you could call that the front, though honestly the whole thing looked like every end was its own fresh problem, twitched with rows of teeth or blades or some moist, clacking arrangement of both. Damn thing looked like a bad acid trip brought to life.

Wrong neighborhood. Absolutely the wrong fucking neighborhood.

Suddenly the idiots back there didn’t seem so bad. Punching one in the stomach? Fine. She could apologize, right? She could do a little “my bad, reflexes” speech. But this? This thing? She didn't think a basket of cookies would do. She ran, took hard turns, cut through narrow passages, ducked under jutting stone, used every bend in the path to break line of sight. She thought she was being smart, except the thing wasn’t fooled. It definitely knew the damn neighbourhood. Every time she thought she’d shaken it, every time the scraping tail and metallic chatter faded just enough for hope to crawl up out of its grave, it came back from another angle. Closer. Ahead when it should’ve been behind. Above when it should’ve been nowhere. The sound of it ricocheted through the corridors until she could no longer tell whether she was hearing the creature itself or the architecture mocking her with memory.

Then came another sound.

Something deeper. A groan rolled through the stone under her feet and around her body at once, as if the place itself had a spine and someone had just forced it to turn. The corridor shuddered. Dust slipped from the walls. The vibration traveled through her soles and up into her bones like thunder stripped of weather. Then another. Farther off. Then another, closer. The walls were moving. This shit wasn’t static. Of course. Silly her. Of fucking course. A regular maze would have been too charitable. But the even stranger thing was that the shifts made sense. She didn’t know how to explain it. She only knew that each seismic groan, each grinding scrape of stone against stone, each opening and closure reverberated through her in a rhythm that seemed to click against some structure in her mind. The map inside her head didn’t panic when the maze changed. It adjusted. Recalculated. Routes redrew themselves. Connections reformed. Possibilities opened and sealed in rapid succession, and somewhere beneath the fear her mind answered with immediate comprehension, like this entire monstrous system spoke a language she knew. So when a wall began to grind shut right in front of her, she didn’t hesitate. She pivoted at the last second and shot into a side corridor with less than a breath to spare. Behind her came a scream and then a wet, mechanical crunch so ugly it turned her insides to ice. She stumbled, half-turned in motion, and caught the aftermath in a single flashing image. Stone pinned the monster and crushed it. Limbs jerked. Metal bent inward with shrieks of protest. It spread dark liquid across the sand. The tail thrashed once, twice, then sagged, blinking a furious red. She made it three more steps before her knees hit the ground, bile rising too fast to stop this time. She puked until her throat burned, the sound of her own heartbeat drowning everything else. When it was over she sat back on her heels, breathing ragged, mouth tasting like acid and dust, and stared at the dead thing. Real. Not a hallucination. Real and dead and leaking whatever the fuck. She swallowed hard. “Okay,” she rasped, voice shaking. “Okay. Cool. Coolcoolcool. Hell has robot spiders.” She was trapped in a nightmare and she couldn't get out.

No. Back to rational.

A maze always has an exit, Cass.

It felt so natural she didn’t even hear it at first. Wait, hold up—Cass. Cassandra. Her name. It hit her so hard she actually gasped. It didn’t bring a flood of memory with it, didn’t crack open the whole sealed vault of who she was, but it anchored. It gave the blankness edges. A center point. Something to hold. “Cass,” she said, quiet, just to feel it settle. The syllables steadied her just enough for her gaze to drop back to the crushed creature. Its tail was blinking red, because of course it had a glowing ass. She crawled closer and grabbed it, ignoring the voice in her head that sounded like survival screaming don’t touch the murder bug's glowing ass. Hard shell. Warm in places. Not entirely metal. Not entirely organic. The surface was segmented with manufactured precision, but beneath some of the seams there was softness, membrane, tissue. A glassy tube ran under part of the tail, filled with some pulsing fluid that made her stomach lurch again. Man-made. Built to track, corner, and kill. There was also something printed on the casing, half obscured by grime and damage. 7C. She'd seen 4A on a wall coming here, she'd seen 5D on another, further away. A system. Sections. 7C was a section. This thing corresponded to a section. Two possibilities unfolded in her mind as she held the thing's butt, one sicker and uglier than the other.

One: she was being watched. Broadcasted. Some sick experiment where her memories were wiped clean so some audience could see how she’d react in a horror show. Maybe there were cameras hidden in the stone and people somewhere eating snacks and booing when the monster kicked it. That would explain the rhythm of the walls in her chest, the way her instincts seemed trained already. Maybe she’d done this before. Maybe she’d rehearsed it. The second was way fucking worse and sadly, more likely. The boys she saw back there weren’t captors. They were prisoners too. Also dumped into this twisted sandbox, trying to warn her away because they knew about...this whole thing. Maybe they already know there's no way out. They’d looked scared when she came up. Not predatory. Not cruel. Just… stunned and young. One had sounded like a child, for God’s sake. Children. What kind of sick fuck would trap children here?

She had to go back.

If there was even the smallest chance those kids were trapped in here, if they were stuck in this hell the way she was, then she couldn’t just leave them to rot in this place. Nobody deserved something like this. The image of their faces, the wide eyes gawking down into that crate, their voices cracking with astonishment like she was some alien visitation, it all made her gut twist. Maybe they hadn’t been here long. Maybe they could tell her what this is. Maybe—

The walls groaned again and another screech followed. She closed her eyes for one brief second. “You have got to be kidding me.” What kind of fucking maze had two Minotaurs? The only response was the clatter of the thing's legs closing in, faster this time, as though it had learned from the last. Cass’s heart kicked hard against her ribs, adrenaline flooding her veins like someone opened a faucet. She didn’t have the luxury of panic. Panic was heavy, and she was already carrying nausea, a splitting headache, and the sudden realization that her moral compass was welded to her soul. It took everything left in her to outmaneuver the thing. Ducking, sliding, leaping between shifting walls that seemed determined to crush her alongside it. Several times she thought, very clearly and with surprising calm, This is how I die. Not melodramatically. Not despairing. Just as a practical recognition of probabilities. And every time that thought appeared, another part of her answered back, Nahhh, chill, you've got this, it ain't that bad. It took longer to finally get the timing right and trick the thing into the same position as the last. Dead. God fucking bless.

She collapsed against the wall, sweat stinging her eyes. For a second she just stood there, letting the cold seep into her skin, letting the nausea catch up now that the adrenaline wasn’t dragging her forward by the hair. Blood dripped down her arm in slow, lazy lines. She was bleeding. She pressed her palm to the wound, but her hand came away slick, shining. Not ideal. At some point, because all of us have our moments of extreme stupidity, she’d decided climbing poison ivy could be an advantage. Looked real enough. Green vines clawing their way up the wall. Natural ladder, right? Wrong. She learned very quickly that whoever built this place didn’t give her the courtesy of real vegetation. That ivy was synthetic, brittle as hell, and when it snapped she fell and landed hard on her shoulder. She lay there for a second, panting, staring up at the walls like maybe they’d grow a conscience and stop this shit already, then she gritted her teeth and got back up. When she finally dragged herself back to the edge of this place to go back to the patch of green in the middle, to those guys, her eyes widened. The doors were closed. Sealed tight, a seamless wall where the path to the clearing had once been. She leaned her forehead against the stone. At least she wasn’t still being chased. Then she heard another screech. She'd jinxed this one. “Of course,” she whispered, bitter. “Of fucking course.” She ran again. At some point she stopped, doubled over, and vomited until she thought she’d leave her stomach lining in the sand. Her vision swam. Black edges creeping in. She almost let go. Almost collapsed right there to let it all swallow her. But then the walls shifted again and the sound jolted her back awake. Move or die. She would've gladly accepted death if it wasn't for that thought nagging her. She had to help those kids. She couldn't leave them here. The idea was ridiculous, expensive but completely non-negotiable the second it existed.

She did eventually make it to 7C and found a big dark hole in the wall. Red blinking light at the end of it, just like the damn tail. Oh. That scrap was supposed to go here. The creatures were not just hunters but mobile keys. Miserable little access codes with teeth. A way out, by the feel of it. Or maybe not a way out, but definitely a way to advance in this sick game. She could test that theory. No. Actually, she couldn't. What if it was a one time thing and testing it would get her out but trap those kids in forever? No, that won't do. She had to go back. Right on cue, another screech cracked through the corridors. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck—

After that, everything blurred. Pain and stone, turns and more turns. She couldn’t tell how much time passed, only that her body was running on fumes. The light outside changed. Subtle at first, then stronger. Sun. Bits of it. She lifted her head, eyes blinking through sweat and dust, and passed it—a wall sliding open. Beyond it, green. The sight of grass looked unreal, like her brain had finally snapped and decided to hallucinate a nicer ending. The second her feet hit the grass, every ounce of adrenaline she’d been running on drained out. Her knees buckled, her vision tunneled, and the world went black. She didn’t get to see Chuck’s face go white before he fainted, or Frypan barely catching him before his head hit the dirt. She didn’t see the way Thomas lunged forward on instinct, knees in the grass, hands hovering inches above her as if a touch might shatter the illusion.

Nobody survived the night in there.

That wasn’t Glader superstition. Wasn’t one of those grim little sayings boys repeated because they had nothing better to do with terror. It was fact. Law. The closest thing the Maze had ever given them to certainty. You could count on stone shifting at night. You could count on doors closing at dusk and opening at dawn. You could count on the Box bringing greenies and provisions in monthly installments. And you could count on one thing above all the rest: if you were still inside those walls when night fell, you were dead. So when this girl came stumbling out of the Maze first thing in the morning, very much alive after having spent a night in there, every single brain in the Glade hit the same thought at once. Stung. She had to be stung. It was the only explanation that fit inside the laws of their world without splitting them in half. They all knew what Griever poison did. They had seen boys brought back from it before, seen them shake and sweat and scream, seen rage crawl under their skin like something alive, seen their eyes go wrong, heard their voices twist. They had watched people they knew become strangers in stages, until shoving them back into the Maze and letting the walls do the rest was the only option left, so they panicked. Hard. More than they've felt since they were greenies and just found out about this nightmare. Arguments broke out before anyone could think better of it. “No, no, no, that’s not possible—” “She can’t be real.” “This has to be some trick.” “It’s a trap.”

Alby’s voice cracked over the chaos like a whip. “Med-jacks! Now!” That snapped half the Glade back into themselves by sheer force of habit. “Clint, Jeff—get her inside! Check for stings. Only where it’s decent. Don’t you gawk!” Even he was barely keeping the panic from spilling. Alby had survived alone in the Glade for a month before the others came. He knew terror. Knew isolation. Knew what it was to keep moving while the world made no sense. But this—this was a new kind of crack in the rules. Someone walks out of the Maze after a night inside. Alive. There was no procedure for that. No established order.

Clint dropped to one knee and reached for her with trembling hands. Jeff hovered for one second, staring at the blood, the bruises, the torn fabric, then swallowed hard and helped gather her carefully. She was warm. Real. Thomas followed as they lifted her, his hands twitching like he wanted to carry her himself and didn’t trust anyone else not to drop her. His gut was a knot of dread. If she was stung…If she was stung, they’d have to send her back in and his mind refused to accept that. Refused so hard it made him feel sick. No. His whole body answered the possibility with one simple, furious, unequivocal no.

They carried her to the Med-jacks. Shelves lined the walls, packed with jars, strips of cloth, carefully hoarded supplies, boxes of salvaged odds and ends from the Box. A few cots stood in rows, narrow and practical, each one usually occupied by some variation of idiot who’d thought he was stronger than a hammer or better at ignoring an infection than basic medicine allowed. They laid her down on the cleanest cot and suddenly the whole place seemed to tighten. Every boy who got as far as the doorway had to physically stop and reorient because fuck, this was actually happening. Clint bent over her immediately, fingers at her throat, counting. One beat. Two. Three. His lips moved with the numbers. He started again when he lost his place because his own pulse was too loud in his ears. Sweat stood out along his hairline despite the morning cool. Jeff grabbed the edge of her shirt, hesitated, then pulled it up just enough to check, and the Glade’s collective breath caught. Ugly dark bruises blooming along her ribs and side. Fresh abrasions. Dust ground into cuts. Scrapes. Blood. And under and around all of that, scars. Old scars. A lot of them. Not random little marks of ordinary clumsiness or rough work. Not one or two accidents. Lines and marks like someone had tried to carve something out of her a long time ago. Evidence of violence that didn’t belong to the Maze. Somebody had done damage to this girl long before the Maze got its turn. Her stomach was flat and defined under the bruising. Muscle ran over her frame in lean, hard lines, the kind carved by relentless use. She looked like whatever life she’d had before this had not been gentle for one second. They'd all be lying if they said the sight didn't do things to them. Things they immediately felt guilty about, because she was hurt, unconscious, vulnerable and the correct reaction was fear and concern, not this weird warmth that pooled low in their guts. She was beautiful. Jeff, who was trying very hard to act like a medic and not a teenage boy having a complete crisis happening in his pants, forced his focus back to her wounds. “No sting marks that I can see,” he said. Clint pressed fresh fabric to a deeper one and tried to regulate his breathing like he wasn’t one second away from a breakdown. Jeff cleaned the cut on her arm, the water in the basin Thomas brought them turning red as cloth after cloth came away stained from her skin.

Minho looked like somebody had reached into his skull and twisted. He was very ready to rip his own hair out. The med-hut was too small to contain him, so he wore a path just beyond the doorway instead, spinning tight furious circuits through the yard like movement might somehow shake him loose from the unreality of this. “Not possible,” he muttered, louder each time, “it’s not possible.” He dragged both hands through his hair hard enough to spike it in every direction and started walking tight, furious lines, eyes cutting back to her, away from her, then back again. “I checked the Maze. I fucking checked it. I was in there—” He broke off, laughed once, high and wrong, and shook his head. “Someone’s playing with my head. I’ve lost it, that’s it, I’ve gone insane.” He was still convinced she was a hallucination his brain had conjured from too many runs and too many dead ends. Newt, leaning one shoulder against the wall just inside the hut, rubbed a hand over his mouth. “She's real. She's right in front of us, bleeding on Jeff’s bandages, how could she not be—” but even he didn’t sound convinced. Reality itself felt slippery. Jeff checked her pupils. Clint checked her pulse again. Even with no stings in places they could see, even if she looked untouched by Griever poison so far, the Changing didn’t always announce itself instantly, so Jeff injected her with what antibiotics they had, anything that might ease the poison if it was running through her veins, because if she was stung, it was on them.

They all watched the rise and fall of her chest, unable to pull themselves away. When it finally occured to Alby that none of them had blinked or moved in hours, he forced them back to their jobs, because the Glade couldn’t survive with everyone sitting in a circle and staring at her like she was a damn fairy. “Back to work.” Gally, who had been standing just inside the hut door with his arms folded so tight they looked locked, startled like he’d forgotten he had a job other than staring at her, started shoving boys out by the shoulders. “You heard Alby. Move.” Useless. Hammers missed nails. Trackhoes forgot rows. Frypan burned lunch because he spent more time glancing toward the med-hut than toward the pots. And they all kept finding excuses to drift back. A boy would appear in the doorway carrying a bucket and say, “Just bringing water.” Another: “Jeff, d’you need more cloth?” Another would stand there empty-handed and when challenged said, “I just needed to ask Clint something.” Jeff stared at him. “What?” A long pause. “Medical stuff.” Jeff tilted his head. “What medical stuff?” The boy looked down “…Uh...important medical stuff?” Jeff exhaled. “Get out.” Then ten minutes later he’d be back with apples, eyes already cutting to the cot before he’d crossed the threshold.

The question remained the same. How did she do it? Did she hide? Did she find some safe place no one else knew about?

The day bled into afternoon, then evening, then night again. She didn’t wake. Chuck had dragged a softer blanket from his own cot, tucked it around her, smoothing the edge near her shoulder with freckled little hands that tried very hard not to disturb the bandages, and whispered to her in her sleep that she had to wake up, that she couldn’t be stung, that he’d be sad forever if she was. Then he sat beside her until Frypan had to physically come collect him for dinner. Newt didn't sleep the first night she lay unconscious in there. He told Jeff he’d take first watch in case she woke confused, which was practical enough to pass unquestioned. He also stayed after first watch ended. Then after second. Once, sometime deep in the night, he caught himself brushing a strand of hair back from her face. “You are causing an unbelievable amount of trouble for someone asleep,” he murmured. The ghost of a smile touched his mouth and vanished just as fast. He pulled away afterward and sat very still for a long time, staring at the floor thinking, Oh, that’s bad. That's very, very bad.

They didn't run the Maze these two days. No one wanted to be deep in the corridors while the girl who had survived a night in there lay unconscious in the med-jacks hut maybe dying, maybe about to wake and explain everything, maybe about to start seizing from a hidden sting.

Cass came back to consciousness in fragments. Not all at once and definitely not gracefully. More like her mind was a wreck washed up after a storm, pieces of awareness dragging themselves ashore one by one with all the dignity of half-drowned cats. First there was pressure. Then pain. A thorough, administrative sort of pain. The kind that had gone methodically down a checklist and made sure every limb, joint, bruise, scrape, and muscle had signed in. Her shoulder ached with a deep, ugly pulse. Her arm burned. Her ribs felt like they’d been introduced to stone on a first-name basis and had not enjoyed the interaction. Even breathing came with notes of protest. She blinked her eyes open. Everything was blurry at first, but she could make out a face hovering above hers, dark against the light. She squinted, trying to focus on it. Messy blond hair, brown eyes, freckles, sharp jaw. He didn’t speak. He didn’t even seem to breathe. She shifted her arm with effort, the motion clumsy and lagged, and patted blindly along her side until her fingers brushed cloth wrapped tight around her skin. Bandages. Somebody had cleaned her up. Somebody had wrapped her wounds. Somebody had decided she was worth stitching back together. Okay. Friendlies, just like she expected. She was the asshole here. The one who’d punched one of them straight out of the gate. Figures.

The room swam once then sharpened again into one too many faces. The room was packed. Not just “a few people stopped by to check on the unconscious girl” packed. No. This was a crowd. A genuine, deeply committed gathering of boys crammed into every available inch of space like they came to see the hottest show in town. Their eyes were wide. Their expressions were a cocktail of fear, awe, and the kind of fascination you only got when something you thought was mythical just sat up and breathed. Cass took it all in, letting her eyes drift from face to face while her still-fogged brain started sorting impressions. A voice broke through the silence. “You with us?” It came from somewhere to her left. She turned her head a fraction and immediately regretted that decision because apparently her neck had joined the union against her. She tried to sit up and immediately regretted having bones. Her shoulder throbbed. Her arm burned. Her stomach clenched. She hissed through her teeth and made it halfway upright before another voice cut in, gentler this time. “No, you need rest.” The same blond one from above her, she realized, and a laugh escaped her before she could stop it, hoarse, wrecked, thin from dehydration and pain, but unmistakably a laugh. “C’mon, man,” she rasped, one hand braced against the cot while she fought not to black out from the effort. “I had a whole speech prepared for you guys and you’re hitting me with mother hen behavior?”

Jaws slack. Actual, visible, synchronized slackening of jaws. She was speaking. She... did she just fucking joke? They’d spent two days waiting for her to thrash, to scream, to go feral like the stung always did, and instead she woke up and delivered... freshly baked sarcasm. The relief hit them all so hard it nearly made them dizzy.

Cass took advantage of their collective system crash to drag herself upright in increments, slow and deeply unimpressed by her own body’s objections. The blond boy hovered close enough to catch her if she tipped but still somehow managed not to crowd. She noticed that. Once she was sitting, she looked at them properly, one by one, like she was taking inventory, then her eyes dropped to the bandage on her hand. She flexed her fingers once, looked at the wrapping, then back up. “Who did this?”

Clint and Jeff raised hands. Hesitant, like they weren’t sure whether credit was wanted here or whether she was about to complain about their wrapping technique.

She nodded once. “Thank you.”

Simple. Quiet. Genuine.

Clint’s whole face changed. Just for a second, but enough. The tightness around his eyes loosened. Jeff looked down at the bandage roll in his hands as if he suddenly needed to inspect it. Alby stepped forward, shoulders squared, ready to demand answers but she held up a finger. He stopped like she’d pressed pause on him. The gesture itself had been so calm, so precise, so hold that thought, that his body obeyed before his mind caught up. She rubbed at one temple with her good hand, expression pinching as if her skull remained an active enemy. “Ight,” she said, voice still rough but steadier now, “before you say anything, I’m sorry for decking you.” Her eyes flicked, without missing a beat, to the green-eyed guy to her right. Thomas actually looked stunned for a second, like of all the things he’d expected to happen when she woke, a direct apology had not made the list. Heat crept up the back of his neck before he could stop it. She continued before he could produce language. “In my defense, I didn’t remember shit, my guts were trying to spill everywhere, and I had pounding in my head that made thinking straight damn near impossible.” Newt dropped his gaze briefly, the corner of his mouth twitching before he got it under control again. She let her hand fall and looked at all of them again, more serious now. “I got some takes of my own about what the hell is going on here,” she said, “but they're not pretty, and I was really hoping you could...fill me in? Maybe?”

Alby opened his mouth. What came out was not the speech he’d intended. “How did you survive in there?” No hello. No formal orientation. No careful step-by-step. Just the thing that had been beating at the inside of every skull in the Glade for two days now.

She tilted her head. “It’s better if you tell me what you know first,” she said. “’Cause you probably have more information than I do, and I’d rather not waste your time telling you something you already know.”

They glanced at each other. She was negotiating. Actually negotiating, as if she hadn’t woken up ten seconds ago half-dead and was clearly outnumbered. Who the hell was she even negotiating with? They couldn’t even think straight because she was sitting there. Alive. Speaking. Pretty enough to knock the air out of the room. No, actually, pretty was too small of a word. Alby cleared his throat and went with the script, the speech he’d given all greenies, because right now he couldn't think of anything that wasn't rehearsed. “You’re in the Glade. A Box like the one you came in sends up a new Greenie every month, along with supplies to help us live here. The rest is up to us. We grow our food, build shelters, have a set of rules so it doesn’t all fall apart. We function like a family. We don’t know who put us here. All we know is we woke up sick and confused, just like you did. Blank slates. Only our names came back.”

Cass listened to him, face giving very little away beyond concentration, which was alarming in itself. Most greenies had panic attacks hearing that speech. She just listened. So they were prisoners. Not captors. Not participants. Not some twisted welcoming committee for fresh victims. Kids dumped into a walled square and fed one confused boy at a time. Her earlier theory had been correct, and with that realization came a grim little twist of guilt she did not particularly enjoy. She had, in fact, punched one of them in the stomach and fled into a death maze while they shouted after her. A rough first impression all around. “Okay,” she said slowly when the guy finished speaking. “And you decided to stay because—”

Gally cut in before Alby could answer. “Because our Runners are still mapping the Maze, that's why.” Cass turned her head toward the speaker. Broad shoulders. Short, chestnut-coloured hair. Blue eyes. Built like a wall someone taught to glare. His aggression wavered for half a second because something about her gaze on him did deeply unhelpful things to his insides, made his heart do tiny, stupid somersaults. No fear in it. No challenge either. Just direct assessment. Weight. His own annoyance spiked even harder. “Okay… new term,” she said, tone mild. “Runner. Lemme guess: people who run? Pretty self-explanatory.”

There was a tiny snort from somewhere in the back. Huffs of laughter from a few other boys. Reactions that belonged to people who’d been wound tight for too long and were watching this girl wake up into their worst nightmare with the energy of someone trying to orient herself in a hotel. Minho, who had been biting the inside of his cheek so hard it bled, spoke up before Gally could decide whether to fight her or propose. “I’m Keeper of the Runners.” The words came out clipped and tense, like he was trying to hold together the complete collapse of his worldview with sheer force of jaw. His entire fucking worldview was one sarcastic sentence away from a breakdown. “We go in the Maze every day, map what we can, try to find an exit so we can get out of here. We’re back by sunset because that’s when the four exits close and the Maze starts shifting. And nobody survives the night. And you just—”

“So it does only shift at night.” Cass cut in immediately, as if he’d handed her a puzzle piece and she had no intention of respecting the emotional significance attached to it. The sheer casualness of it nearly made Minho choke. Seriously? That’s what she clung to from all he just said? Not the nobody-survives bit. Not the fact that he’d practically bled his disbelief all over the floor. No, apparently she’d plucked out one operational detail and moved on. She kept going, unaware or uncaring of the carnage. “If you’re only there during the day and the walls only shift at night…” She frowned slightly, chasing the implications. “How do you kill those weird spider things?”

Pure silence. The kind that falls when an entire room gets hit with a sentence so wrong that for a second nobody knows whether they heard it correctly.

“Kill…” Thomas eventually whispered.

Cass tried to clarify, because she’d either stumbled into their biggest taboo like it was a puddle, or they had no idea what she was talking about. “Those things that crawl—”

“Grievers.” Newt’s voice broke on the word, low, terrified. “She means Grievers.”

“Yeah.” She rubbed her temple again. “Makes sense to call them that. Fits the vibe. Those.”

Minho snapped like a wire under too much strain. “We don't. They can’t be—”

“Bullshit,” she cut him off mid-sentence. Not contradiction for the sake of it. Just flat, matter-of-fact refusal, the kind people used when correcting bad directions or a math error. “I killed two last night. When the walls shift, you just trap them in. Mashed potatoes. They're smart, but they ain't that smart.” Her tone stayed casual, matter-of-fact, almost absentminded in the face of what she was saying because to her this was context, not revelation. She said it like she was describing how to crack nuts with a door because she had no idea what Grievers were to them, what weight those creatures carried in the culture of the Glade, how much dread had been built around them and how absolute their invincibility had become. She had no idea that she had just dropped a lit bomb into the center of everything they thought they knew.

The stillness afterward was so thick it might’ve had mass. Minho looked like he might pass out. His face lost color in real time, his mouth opening slightly as every route in his head, every run, every close call, every year of living under one iron rule rearranged itself in a violent, nauseating rush. You can kill them? The thought hit him like a physical strike. All this time. All this fear. All this mapping and running and surviving—Nah, she was lying. She had to be. Newt’s mouth opened, closed, then opened again like he couldn’t decide whether to swear or pray. His brain was racing now, making terrible leaps, if Grievers could be killed, then what else had they gotten wrong? What else had they accepted as law because no one had ever broken it before? How many boys had died in terror of something that could be crushed if only they’d known how to think about it differently? Clint whispered, barely audible, “Two…” Jeff’s hands tightened around the bandage roll he was holding until his knuckles went bone-white, all the blood squeezing from them. Alby rubbed his temples hard, like he was trying to physically massage sense into his skull.

“How long have you been here?” It wasn’t the first thing she asked, though it had been circling the edges of her mind from the moment she understood this place had a system, that the boys had routines, names for things, a structure. She had saved the question for later because some part of her had already guessed the answer would hurt. You didn’t build a functioning little world in the middle of hell overnight. You didn’t hand out titles like Keeper of the Runners because you’d all arrived last Tuesday and decided to get organized. Time lived here.

“Two years,” Alby muttered.

Cass’s eyes widened before she could stop them. For one small, unguarded second the calm slipped. She looked away for half a second like she couldn’t stand to meet his gaze. She suddenly felt sick. “You said one person comes in every month,” she said slowly, voice quieter in a way that made every boy in the room lean closer without realizing it. “You’ve been here two years. That’s… twenty-four people.” Her gaze swept the room again. The absence became visible even before she was done counting, in the way some expressions tightened because they knew where her mind had gone and had no shield to offer against it. “But there ain’t twenty-four of you—” Her voice broke on the last word. “I’m so sorry.” She said it like she meant it. No performance. No empty reflex. The words came from somewhere deeper. Her voice on those words reached right into them and pulled. She had been conscious for minutes. She still barely knew where she was. And yet she had looked around, counted what was missing, and her first response wasn’t fear for herself. It was sorrow for them. Cass exhaled shakily and then, as if the dam inside her had finally given way, words started tumbling out. Fast. Not messy, exactly, her mind was too structured for true mess, but rushed with urgency, with the force of someone who had finally reached the point where holding her thoughts in had become more painful than speaking them. “At first I thought maybe it’s some televised show I agreed to,” she said, fingers shaking despite how controlled the rest of her looked. “Because the walls kept moving in sequences and I could map them in my brain like it was something I knew already, and I thought, okay, fine, cool, you learned all this then sold your soul for ratings. You absolute fucking idiot. But then I remembered how panicked you all were, like you were trying to warn me—thanks for that, by the way—and I thought, I have to go back. Nobody deserves to be treated like a fucking rat in some sick game, if you're also trapped in here I can't just—”

Newt was processing every word in real time and getting more disarmed by the second. It was clear she wasn’t saying this to impress them. She was saying it as if it were obvious. As if anyone would have done the same. Hell, she looked almost irritated by her own moral compass, like she found it inconvenient and had done the good thing anyway because her soul couldn't accept a different way of doing things.

She was cut off mid-rant by a body flinging itself at her like gravity had issued a personal invitation, arms wrapping around her waist with way too much force for how wounded she was, his face burying against her shirt as if he needed proof she was warm and solid. The impact made half the room flinch. Thomas actually took half a step forward on instinct, ready to pull Chuck off before he hurt her, but stopped when she didn’t cry out. She just froze. Completely. “I’m so glad you’re not dead,” Chuck sobbed. “We were so worried—” There it was, spoken plainly. The truth they had all been carrying around for two days like a live coal in their chests. Chuck, with his complete inability to censor emotion, had simply reached in and said it aloud for everyone. She stared down at the top of his curly head, at the way his small shoulders hitched, at the grip he had on her like if he let go she might dissolve, then she slowly wrapped her arms around him, cradling him against her chest despite the pull it put on her injuries. “You… huh?” she murmured, voice softer without meaning to be. “What reason would you have to worry about a stranger?” The second the sentence left her mouth, she seemed to hear it herself. The hypocrisy of it. She, who had just vomited her whole moral code onto the floor about coming back because it wasn’t fair for them to rot in a nightmare and she couldn't just leave them here, was asking... that. Right. Good one, Cass.

Alby’s voice was thicker now. “You’re not a stranger. Once you come up from that Box, you’re one of our own.” His jaw flexed like it hurt to admit how hard he’d felt that failure. “It was our responsibility to stop you from going in there in the first place—” Thomas looked away. Newt’s jaw tensed. Gally’s shoulders went rigid. Minho cut in before the guilt could eat him alive as well. “I didn’t find you. We searched. We searched all day.” His hands were flexing at his sides, opening and closing like he needed to be doing something with them or he’d start punching the walls. “Where the hell were you?”

Cass lifted her gaze to him. “During the day…” she said, thinking through it. “I was mostly around 8A. I don’t know if that means anything to you.” She paused, then added with maddening calm, “I can draw you a map if you’d like.”

It hit the room like someone dropped a brick into still water. They should've been used to it by now, everything this girl said was clearly designed to eat at their sanity. She had survived the night. She'd claimed to have killed Grievers. She'd just offered to draw a map. Of the Maze. The boys didn’t breathe. Didn’t blink. All of them just stood there, stunned, because the Maze was the one thing they all feared, resented and obsessively studied—and this girl had walked in, survived the night, and came out casually offering a solution like she was handing them directions to the nearest bus stop. Alby watched her with that look he wore when he was trying to fit something massive and impossible into the cramped space of his understanding. “What do you remember? You said you didn’t remember anything. Past tense.”

Cass blinked once, and then—God help them all—a tiny smile appeared on her face. A little upward pull at the corner of her mouth. That smile changed the whole geometry of her face, it lit something, and the room, already hanging by a thread, suffered accordingly. Half the boys forget how lungs worked. “Oh. I remembered my name. I’m Cass. Cassandra. That's all. Rest of’s completely wiped like you said.”

“Alby,” he offered.

Cass nodded like she was storing the information in some internal catalogue. “Hi, Alby.” Her eyes dragged over him. “You the one in charge?” Alby gave her a short nod. “I was the first one here.” Her brows lifted. “That means...” She looked at him more carefully now, and something like horror entered her expression again. The arithmetic happened visibly on her face. “You spent a month alone in this place?” She swallowed. “No speech, no explanations. Just...you.” Alby nodded again. Girl was catching on fast. Most people needed time. Needed the stories. Needed to watch Alby for weeks before they understood what that meant. Cass heard “first one here” and got it immediately. It was all over her face.

Throughout all this, Chuck still hadn’t let go of her. His face pressed into her shirt, his little shoulders shaking until he finally leaned back, red-eyed and snotty. She cupped his face without thinking, thumb brushing one damp cheek, wiping away tears. “What’s your name, kid?”

“Chuck,” he croaked.

“Hey, Chuck.” Cass’s voice warmed noticeably. “I’m Cass.”

And Chuck, poor sweet doomed idiot, broke all over again, crying harder than before, words spilling out with all the restraint of a burst pipe because Chuck did not possess the internal architecture required to keep a thought trapped in his skull once it wanted out. “You’re… you’re the prettiest person I’ve ever seen. Ever.” He gulped air and doubled down because apparently there were no brakes anywhere in him. “Like… ever, ever.” Thomas looked at the ceiling as if appealing for divine extraction. Newt pinched the bridge of his nose. Minho coughed too loud. Gally went completely still. Because yes, all of them had thought it. Chuck had simply chosen to...say it out loud, to her face, while sobbing into her shirt.

Cass blinked, visibly thrown. “Uh,” she said, then cleared her throat like maybe it would summon a better response from somewhere in the machinery. “Thank you.”

Chuck hiccupped through another sob, eyes huge. “I once asked them what girls were like,” he said, voice wobbling, “and they told me they’re gross and mean and they—”

Cass bit her lip to keep from laughing. Meanwhile the boys stared at Chuck with the collective horror of people watching a small child drag every private humiliation in the group out into broad daylight and arrange it on the floor by category. Please shut up, every face in the room said. But Cass just said, “Yeah, well… I did punch someone a second after coming here, so they ain’t entirely wrong—” But Chuck wasn’t done. “That’s okay,” he barreled on, blissfully unaware that he was now creating enough blackmail material to fuel years of suffering. “Newt tried to climb the wall and jump off and Minho cried in the Homestead until he passed out when they first—”

“CHUCK!” two voices exploded at once, loud enough to rattle the walls. Every head snapped toward them. Cass’s did too, instantly, and then she leaned slightly toward Chuck and whispered like she was requesting battlefield intelligence, “Which is which?” Chuck, still hiccupping, pointed with a stubby finger. “Newt. Minho.”

Cass’s eyes darted to them and then widened at Minho. “No way—”

Minho’s throat bobbed. “What?”

“Your name is Minho,” Cass said slowly, like savoring it, like she’d just found a perfect punchline in a tragedy. “And you said… you run. In that maze.” Her face lit with sudden delight. “Like the Minotaur in the myth. That’s fucking cool—”

Minho forgot his shock for a second. Everything inside him boiled over too fast, too hot. His chest constricted, his face flushed red, and his heartbeat slammed like it was trying to dig its way out of his ribs. She’d just smiled at him and said his name was cool. Not even in a flirty way, just genuine, bright delight, and it hit him like being knighted. No joke, no exaggeration. Felt like she’d just crowned him in front of everyone. His brain shorted out and he just stood there, red as hell, staring at her. Nobody managed to tease him, because Cass laughed just then. Her whole face lit up with it, eyes crinkled, shoulders shaking—Yeah, every single one of them was fucked.

And maybe that was why Gally snapped. Because he did not trust any emotion that made his footing feel uncertain and the second her laugh hit his ears, he felt something warm, something that pissed him off more than anything. “You didn’t kill no Griever,” Gally barked, stepping forward like he could shove the miracle back into the Box with sheer volume. “You’re lying—”

Newt rounded on him instantly. “Nobody survived the night in the bloody Maze before. She's here. She's alive. However she pulled it off doesn't even matter—”

“It’s okay,” Cass cut through, voice calmer than it had any right to be. She looked at Gally, head tilted slightly, studying him like one might study an aggressive dog to determine whether it was all bark or if biting was on the menu. “I get it. Small reminder that I didn’t demand your trust, I simply wanted to be more informed about my circumstances.” Her eyes softened fractionally, not for him, but for the tension in the room. “I don’t want to disrupt your peace or—”

“You already fucking did,” Gally snapped. His fists clenched hard enough that the tendons jumped in his forearms. “You broke the rules—”

Alby spun on him fast. “Do you even hear yourself? She doesn’t even know the damn rules—”

“STILL!” Gally barked back, voice rising with the strain of trying to force the world back into shapes he understood. “AND HOW THE HELL IS SHE SO CALM IN ALL OF THIS? WHO COMES BACK FROM A NIGHT WITH THOSE THINGS AND JOKES LIKE THAT? WHO—”

Cass just tilted her head. Looked at him. When his eyes locked on hers again, his temper died mid-breath. The words dried on his tongue. It wasn’t just that she was beautiful, though she was, for the hundredth time, she was, in a way that made it hard to look away without feeling like you were missing something important, it was that her gaze was… completely blank, like she’d been forged to stare down fear and deny it the satisfaction. “I had all my time to panic back there, but that's not productive and won't get us out of this shit.” she said, like explaining a simple math problem to a kid. “Rational thinking will. That’s how I remembered my name. It came on the thought that every maze has an exit because that’s their purpose.”

That landed differently. Even Gally had nothing immediate for it, because she sounded like she really believed that. Not as a comforting phrase. As a structural truth. The sort of thing people built action around. Minho snapped her attention back to him on that thought. He was still stuck on what she’d said earlier, not the compliment, although he was still sort of riding that high, but the map, the casual offer, the impossible ease with which she had treated his life’s work like an afternoon sketch. “I’ve been working for months just to map a single section and you told me you can draw me a map. There's no way that's—”

“Do you have paper?” Cass cut in. “Or anything I can draw it on?” A boy at the back fumbled like his hands had turned to jelly. Another nearly tripped over him trying to help. Something clattered to the floor. Eventually, one of them produced a battered notebook and a blunt crayon, and shoved it forward like he was offering tribute to a god. Cass nodded once and took it. “Thanks.”

Minho stepped closer and watched as she started sketching. Her injured hand shook slightly, but her lines were sure and fast—confident strokes, sharp angles, measured distances despite it. No hesitation once the crayon touched paper. Corridors opened into intersections, turns got marked with the kind of confidence that only came from either total certainty or total insanity. There was no groping, no trial-and-error. The Maze took shape beneath her fingers like she was pulling it up from somewhere already complete and pinning it to paper so it couldn’t escape. “That’s—” Minho breathed, sounding like he was watching someone perform magic. This was not guesswork. There was structure to what she was drawing. Internal consistency. Rhythm.

Gally, furious at being displaced from the center of his own panic and needing somewhere to put the rage, rounded on Minho instead. “She remembers things from before the Box and ain’t telling us. There ain’t no way. She’s—”

Cass didn’t even look up. “I’m just drawing on a piece of paper, the fuck you on?”

The laugh broke like a crack of thunder. One boy, then another, then another. They didn’t even know if it was stress or shock or just their sanity melting into the cracks of the medjack hut, but they laughed until their stomachs hurt, until their eyes watered, until the fear loosened its grip for one stupid, glorious second. Meanwhile, Gally’s blood pressure spiked so hard he thought his veins might burst. And the little shit just kept sketching. Minho was too fixed on her work to even register the exchange. He swallowed hard and tried one more time to force his brain around it. “This can’t—” His voice cracked. He tried again, “You’ve ran all of this?” Cass nodded, eyes still on the page. “Explored. Didn’t really run that much. Only when those things were chasing me and when the walls started to shift.” She paused to add another corridor. “Been trying to keep my guts from spilling, but I was royally unsuccessful.”

Thomas finally spoke again. “How did you kill the Grievers?” He had to hear it again.

Cass answered without looking up. “Trapped them with a moving wall. The walls shift in a certain sequence—"

“It changes every night. Doesn’t shift the same,” Minho corrected automatically.

Cass paused, crayon hovering, then nodded as if tucking the information away neatly into a drawer labeled important. “Thanks. Did not know that. Well—couldn’t possibly have.” She said. “I’ve only been there one night.” Minho actually shook. His hands trembled at his sides. The proof that it hadn't been just a glitch or mere luck was on the paper under her hand, corridor after corridor laid out with terrifying clarity.

Frypan, who had somehow managed to remain the only person in the room still tethered to basic human needs and practical reality, finally piped up from the doorway with the long-suffering air of a man watching everyone collectively lose their minds while he alone remembered that people required food to continue not dying. “Press pause on it, will you?” he said, lifting one hand. “Girl’s gotta eat. She’s been passed out for almost two days—”

Her head snapped up. “I’ve been—WHAT?!”

That was what hit her most? Not the Grievers. Not the moving Maze or the fact that these idiots had apparently been trapped in this hellhole for two years. No, what fully broke through the iron discipline of her face was time. Lost time. Wasted time. A day and then some slipping away while she’d been unconscious. Cass was already swinging her legs off the cot before the sentence had even settled in the room. The motion was abrupt, all instinct and urgency, and would have probably ended badly if Newt hadn’t moved. His hand shot out and landed on her shoulder, stopping her before momentum, weakness and torn stitches could team up to drop her on the floor. “What are you doing?” he demanded. He didn’t realize what he’d done until after he’d done it. Didn’t register the contact until it was already there, warm skin beneath his palm, the shape of her shoulder under borrowed fabric and bandages. The sensation hit him a split second late and in entirely the wrong place. He snatched his hand back a fraction too fast, then hated himself for making it look weird. She looked up at him, truly moved now. “I… need to go back so we can get the fuck out of here,” she said, voice gaining urgency. “I’ve already lost two days over a stupid—”

“She’s insane,” Gally cut in. He hadn’t just been simmering. He’d been boiling the entire time, and now the lid finally blew off. His voice rose with every word until it hit the rafters. “SHE’S FUCKING INSANE. DO YOU EVEN HEAR THIS? THIS IS—”

Cass shot up and went straight to him. “I’VE ALREADY APOLOGIZED FOR PUNCHING THAT GUY, WHY THE HELL ARE YOU SO PRESSED? I’VE DONE NOTHING TO YOU, BUT IF YOU REALLY WANNA SWALLOW YOUR OWN TEETH I CAN DEFINITELY ARRANGE THAT—”

“Woah, woah—” Alby shoved himself between them, trying to block the collision of two tempers that could clearly level buildings, but the fire was already lit and neither of them looked remotely interested in behaving.

“SHE’S INSANE!” Gally bellowed.

“AND YOU’RE A DICK,” she fired back, stepping around Alby like he was a chair mildly obstructing her line of sight. “NOBODY FUCKING ASKED FOR THIS. WHAT ARE YOU EVEN PISSED ABOUT—”

“YOU WERE DEAD!” Gally roared. His voice cracked on the word. “NOBODY GETS OUT OF THERE ALIVE—”

“THEN WHY AM I HERE FUCKING TALKING TO YOU?” Cass shouted back. Her eyes were blazing now, face flushed, body still not recovered enough for this amount of volume and movement but apparently no one had informed her temper that conserving energy was a thing. “DO YOU NEED SUBTITLES? WHAT DO I GAIN OUT OF THIS? YOU THINK I’M IN SOME ACTING CLASS, THEY SENT ME UP TO AUDITION FOR A NEW MOVIE?” She jabbed a finger toward the bandages on her arm. “IF I WAS WITH THE PEOPLE WHO PUT US HERE, I’D HAVE KNOWN WHAT WAITED OUT THERE. I WOULDN’T HAVE WALKED IN DRUGGED OUT OF MY MIND JUST TO LEAVE MY STOMACH LINING IN THE DIRT. GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER!”

Holy fuck. That was the collective thought in the room. Because yes, they all knew Gally had a temper. Gally’s temper was old news. Gally’s temper had a postal code. But hers...hers was something else. Every line she threw hit where it was meant to. She wasn’t just angry. She was articulate inside the anger, which made it even more terrifying. Minho, who usually enjoyed watching Gally get verbally demolished by nature or circumstance, found himself too busy having a second existential crisis. She had woken up from two days unconscious and the first thing she wanted was to go back into the Maze. She had survived a night there and instead of being cowed, she was angry at the lost mapping time. That was not normal behavior. That was not even deranged behavior. That was its own category altogether. Newt, meanwhile, watched the whole thing with split awareness. One part of him registered the practical problem: she was going to pass out, and possibly take Gally’s eye with her. Another part couldn’t stop noticing the sheer force of her. The way she took up space when she was angry. The way the room bent around it. And beneath all of that he heard what Gally had actually said. You were dead. It was fear. Grief that hadn’t had time to rot properly before turning defensive. Newt understood that instantly, which only made this entire thing more exhausting. Gally, bloody idiot, had no other way to say we thought we lost you except by accusing her of being insane and possibly a spy.

Cass was breathing hard by now, chest rising sharp and fast, and she seemed to realize she was reaching the edge of what her body was willing to support. She pinched the bridge of her nose, exhaled through her teeth, tried visibly to haul herself back under control before the whole thing went nuclear. When she lowered her hand again, she caught Chuck staring at her. His eyes were huge. The kid had seen her and Gally nearly rip each other’s throats out, and she figured that kind of thing would scare the life out of someone so young. “Sorry, kid,” she muttered, softening her voice. “Didn’t mean to scare you.” But Chuck didn’t look scared. Not even close. He looked starstruck, as if she had not just nearly punched Gally through a wall but had instead performed some deeply cool and formative act of heroism that would influence his personality forever. She didn’t notice that. She just saw his wide eyes and assumed she’d frightened him. Everyone else noticed, though, and several boys had to look away to stop themselves from laughing at the complete mismatch. She eventually turned back to the notebook and picked up the crayon again, leaning over the sketch. “This part,” she said, pointing to a corner section. “Couldn’t get into it, not even when everything started shifting.”

Minho leaned in instantly, all previous emotional combustion temporarily shoved aside by the sacred pull of maze-related information. “It’s a dead end.”

Her head jerked up. “You’ve been there?” “Yeah. It probably wasn’t open when you were in.” “What about 3B?” Their voices overlapped then, rapid-fire, her questions, his answers, his questions, her guesses, two minds grabbing hold of the same problem and forgetting the rest of the room existed. The others watched in stunned silence, because it was obvious those two were speaking the same language. Everyone else talked about the Maze like it was some abstract monster, but this sounded like a proper fucking dissection of it. Like they had hauled the Maze onto a table and were beginning to pry it open with tools. Clarity. Not full, but just enough to ease their nerves. Frypan bodily slipped into the space between them this time, hoping they won't ignore him again, holding out a piece of bread and a cup of water for her. “Here—”

Cass shook her head on pure instinct, so quickly and automatically it barely even looked conscious. “Don’t waste your resources on me—” It came too fast. Too clean. Not a modest refusal. Not politeness. Something wired. Deep. Immediate. Newt’s head turned sharply toward her. Thomas’s brow furrowed. Frypan looked less offended than saddened for a brief second, because he knew the difference between someone declining food and someone whose first reflex was You eat, I'm not worth the cost. Gally, unfortunately, kept being Gally. “SEE? INSANE, I’M TELLING YOU! SHE’S ONE OF THEM! SHE WASN’T IN THE MAZE, SHE WAS OUT THERE EATING LUNCH WITH THE PEOPLE WHO PUT US HERE—”

Cass dropped the notebook. “That’s it.” And then she was on him. The first punch landed square and clean, splitting his nose open with a wet crack and an immediate spill of blood. Gally reeled back more from shock than force, hands flying to his face. The second hit before he’d fully recovered, snapping his head to the side and sending him stumbling into the wall. “HAVE YOU CALMED THE FUCK DOWN YET?”

A pair of arms hooked around her upper arms and hauled her back. Newt. (fuck fuck fuck fuck he's touching her he's touching her he's touching here he's—) Gally straightened and put a finger on the blood dripping down his lip, then brought it up and stared at it with an expression that suggested the world had become much too vivid all at once. For one second he genuinely looked like he might faint. Cass saw it and laughed. “You gonna faint from a bit of blood? Yeah. The loudest ones are always the biggest pussies.”

Gally’s face went redder than the blood on his fingertip. “What did you say to me?!”

“I said you’re a fucking pussy.” Cass repeated brightly, “What, you deaf too?”

He lunged. Minho and Thomas caught him by the arms before he could get further than half a step, both of them locking on hard. Thomas had one hand clamped around Gally’s bicep, eyes wide with suppressed laughter. Cass twisted in Newt’s grip, trying to go forward again. Newt leaned in, voice soft against the shell of her ear. “Let's all calm down, yeah? You’re gonna rip your stitches.” She ignored him completely. “Let him go,” she hissed. “I wanna see if he can throw a real punch or if he’s just a whiny little bitch.”

“I'll show you a whiny little—” Gally snarled.

“Enough!” Alby’s voice cracked like a whip. Gally stilled, though the fury still burned in his eyes. Cass was breathing hard, fists clenched, shoulders tight as bowstrings. Every line of her body screamed unfinished argument but slowly, she forced herself to stop. Newt felt it happen under his hands: the moment the immediate lunge left her muscles and was replaced by contained fury. He released her carefully, resisting the deeply embarrassing urge to make sure she was steady before stepping back, then he tried a different track. He gestured to the bleeding Gally. “How about some introductions, yeah? That’s Gally. Keeper of the Builders.” Cass tilted her head at him. “And this is Thomas,” Newt continued, nodding toward the boy next to Minho. “He’s a runner along with Minho.” Thomas stepped forward half a pace, green eyes fixed on her like she was the answer to a question he didn’t know how to ask yet. “Hey,” he said quietly. Just that. Soft. Like he’d been saving it. Like he didn’t know what else to offer that wouldn’t sound stupid or too much. Cass nodded once. “Hi, Thomas.” Thomas’s chest tightened at the sound of his name in her mouth. Then Newt, now fully committed to salvaging order by dragging everyone through social convention like half-feral children, jabbed a thumb toward himself. “Trackhoe.”

Her brow shot up. “A what now?”

“Garden.” he clarified. “Crops.”

“I cook,” Frypan chimed in from beside them, lifting a hand with the wounded dignity of a man who had offered food twice and been successfully ignored both times. “And I happen to only like people who don’t refuse my food.”

Cass glanced at the bread in his hand, guilt flashing across her face. “Sorry. I appreciate the effort, I just didn’t—”

“Yeah, I can tell,” Frypan said. “But you’re one of us now. And I made it for you.”

Something shifted in her then. Cass nodded once and took the bread. The second she bit into it, it became obvious even to herself that she was starving. She didn't even register it over... everything else happening. The boys watched her eat like it was the most intimate thing they’d ever seen, which was insane, because it was just bread, but in a world where the only softness they had was routine, watching a girl—a girl—sit there, chewing Frypan’s bread made them feel absurdly warm. The introductions kept coming after that. Once the structure existed, the room seemed to want all of it. Names. Roles. Anchors. Ways to fold her into the reality of the Glade so she stopped feeling like an impossible event and started feeling like one of theirs. Winston, Clint, Jeff, Jackson, Zart, others crowding in, each offering their name and their job, with the desperate hope she would remember their face. Cass nodded to each, filing details away like she was building a mental roster. When they were all done, Alby grabbed the script and tried to nail it back down. “Time to learn the rules,” he said, “Rule number one: do your part.” Cass kept chewing and nodded slightly. “Rule number two is to never harm another Glader.” Gally’s mouth opened, but Alby snapped before he could speak. “You were asking for it.”

Gally sputtered like a machine hitting every error code at once, pointing to her. “YOU’RE TAKING HER SIDE?!”

Alby ignored him. “Rule number three: never go beyond the walls unless you’re a Runner.”

Cass bit her lip. Okay. She’d definitely broken that one. Like… spectacularly. In a way that should’ve come with fireworks and a trophy with Congratulations, you did the exact opposite of what you were supposed to do written on it.

Minho cut in before Gally could re-erupt. “She a Runner, alright.”

That got everyone’s attention. Gally bristled, ready to explode, but Minho’s glare stopped him cold. The stare Minho gave him was pure territorial warning. It said, in no uncertain terms: this is mine. My Maze. My call. Stay the fuck out of it. “You deal with your building, I deal with what happens in my Maze. Don’t wanna hear it.”

Gally’s jaw worked like he was chewing rage and finding it stringy. But he didn’t argue. He just glared at Cass like she had personally set fire to his worldview. Meanwhile Cass simply chewed the last bite of bread, downed another mouthful of water, then set the cup aside. “Thank you.” It was aimed at Frypan, who looked disproportionately pleased by it.

Alby exhaled like he’d been holding that breath since the Box rose. “I’m sorry we scared you the other day. And sorry we let you go in there. Greenies are usually easy to deal with. Everyone throws up, sits in corners, shakes, tries to pick fights. I didn’t think for even a second someone would bolt straight into the Maze.”

Minho snorted. “Thomas almost did—”

“WHEN I FOUND OUT THERE WAS AN EXIT AND YOU WOULDN’T WANNA TELL ME ABOUT IT!” Thomas shot back instantly, scandalized that this was somehow becoming his humiliation now.

“Yeah,” Newt cut in, chuckling. “Cause when he first tried to run, he face-planted in the grass. Had to re-take a few hours later.”

That earned actual laughter. Cass glanced between them, taking in the shift, and her expression softened again, in recognition of the shape of them as a group. Not just frightened boys. Not just trapped kids. A family, exactly how Alby said. Built out of mockery, routine, loyalty, panic, and the sort of affection that usually arrived disguised as insults. Minho was looking right at her, suddenly serious, ike this was official and needed a signature, a contract, a blood oath. “So, do you accept?”

Her brows knit immediately. “I… uh. What?”

“I’m Keeper of the Runners. I’m asking you if you want to be a Runner,” he said.

Cass blinked, thrown for a half-second by the formality. Like she’d expected a trial by combat or a dramatic chant. Not… invitation. Placement. “I mean… I need to go in there to figure it out, so… yeah. Sure.”

Alby stared at her with the weight of two years carved into his bones and thought What the hell just landed in our Glade? He didn't even comment about how she was made Runner without any other discussion. After the shit she pulled out there, discussion would've been insulting. She’d already done the job. She’d done it bleeding and half-drugged and apparently with enough brainpower to make their Map Room look like finger painting. He also didn't comment on the Maze talk, even though they never told Greenies about the Maze on the first day, because panic already made them unpredictable enough without handing them the whole inventory of nightmare up front. You eased them in, let them get used to the walls before you told them the walls moved. Let them puke and sleep and get their bearings before you explained the Grievers and the doors and the dead. But what exactly was left to protect Cassandra from now? She had already gone in. Already seen it. Already survived the night. There was no innocence left to preserve there. The Maze had introduced itself personally. While Alby was lost in thought, Frypan slid a hand onto Cass’s good shoulder, gentler than his big hands looked like they should’ve been, and guided her toward the door of the Med-jacks hut with the care of someone who had decided enough fighting and theory and emotional damage had happened for one morning. The moment she stepped outside, she blinked hard against the sun. The Glade hit her like a slap of color. After the dim, close air of the Med-jacks, wood walls, shadowed corners, the smell of blood and disinfectant and too many boys breathing the same air, the open space felt almost unreal. Bright. Green everywhere. Grass stretched soft and wind-brushed beneath her feet, not in ornamental little polite patches but in living swaths interrupted by worn dirt paths and the rough tracks of daily use. The Gardens spread in orderly lines to one side, crops pushing stubbornly out of the earth in rows that had clearly been fought for and watered and weeded. Sunlight lay warm across everything, catching on leaves, on rough timber, on the dust rising from the packed ground where the paths cut through. Chuck bounced to her side immediately, vibrating with the need to show her everything with all the urgency of a tour guide who had waited his entire life for a customer exactly this cool. He pointed to every landmark, words tumbling so fast he barely stopped for air. “That’s the Homestead—that’s where we sleep—and those are the Gardens, trackhoes work there, and that’s the Blood House—don’t worry, it’s not as scary as it sounds, it’s just where we keep the animals—and that’s the Box, where you came from! And—and—” His curly hair flopped into his eyes every time he turned his head, which was constantly, because he needed to make sure she was looking exactly where he pointed. Every section of the Glade apparently required immediate explanation, commentary, and emotional framing. He gave all of it. And Cass didn’t humor Chuck the way older people sometimes did with kids when they wanted to seem kind without actually giving a damn. She followed his pointing. Looked at each place. Absorbed it. Let him talk. Made space for his speed and excitement without trying to slow him down. It made Chuck glow. It also did something awfully warm to the boys watching from behind. Something that none of them were fully comfortable discussing. When Alby stepped out behind her into the sunlight, Cass turned and looked him over again. “You’ve built it well,” she said, voice low. “Everything here.” She paused, and the words that followed were so honest they made Alby’s throat tighten. “Can’t imagine what you had to go through for all of this.”

The smallest smile tugged at his mouth before he could stop it, and because Alby smiling was a rare event, several boys nearby looked at him like they’d just seen an eclipse. “Welcome to the Glade.” His voice came out rougher than he intended. “Anything you need, you just ask for it. You’re one of us now.” He side-eyed her. “Even if you ran for the hills at first.”

Cass laughed, shaking her head. “Man, I ran faster when I wanted to come back, but the walls shut on me.”

Chuck tugged her sleeve, eyes wide. “But you didn’t get stung! And we were sure you got stung and—”

Her eyebrow arched. “Ah… what now?” She glanced between them. “I appreciate the enthusiasm, but I’m still not up to date with all the words you’ve got for stuff. I think I need a whole-ass dictionary. Runners run the Maze, Grievers are the creepy crawlers, Greenies are the new arrivals…”

“Trackhoes work in the garden, Keepers run their segments...” Newt kept the list going from where he’d come up behind them.

She turned that quick bright smile on him and that made his stomach do several idiotic little flips. Then she looked back to Chuck. “So what’s ‘stung’ mean?” That took some of the light out of the group. No one looked eager to answer. Because to them “stung” was not just a term. It was the beginning of the end. The first move in a chain of events that always ended with screaming, with the Changing, with boys pinning somebody down and eventually sending them back to the Maze. You didn’t casually explain that over a scenic tour if you could avoid it. Eventually Alby spoke. “You dodged a bullet out there. Those things've got stingers in their tails. If you get stung, you go through something we call the Changing.” His expression flattened, but his eyes didn’t. They had gone old again. “You lose your mind fast. Your blood doesn’t stay where it should. You get confused, then rabid, fast. Nothing human left in the end.”

Cass stared at him, eyes widening. Her mind flashed back—her fingers on that blinking tail, her curiosity overriding self-preservation like some cosmic joke. “Uh…” She swallowed. “I… held one of those things’ tails a while. Thought I could do something with it. But then I dropped it.” Her voice lost some of its earlier dry confidence. “Am I—”

Newt catched onto her implication immediately. He reached for her again, one hand settling lightly at her arm, steadying her before the fear could knock her sideways. The contact was natural this time, or at least looked natural. Inside, his thoughts ran quicker. She was pale already. Still not fully steady on her feet. Panic in that state could do stupid things to a person’s knees. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about exactly,” he said, voice soft, “but I know for a fact it has to sting you. And it shows. Dark veins blooming under the skin and all that. You can’t miss it.” He held her gaze long enough to make sure she was hearing him. “You would’ve turned by now if that were the case. You’re okay.”

Cass blew out a breath. “Okay.”

They sat her down. Frypan had set the pit with coals and new tinder, stacking kindling in the practiced little teepee. Winston had handed over chopped wood without being asked. Jackson had brought a bucket of water close by because accidents were common and nobody wanted to explain to Alby how they’d managed to burn yet another pair of pants while trying to make dinner. A spark caught, smoke curled up blue-grey, and soon there was the low living crackle of flame licking through the kindling into sturdier wood. Frypan bustled around it with his pots and tin utensils, trying very hard to focus on seasoning rather than the beautiful girl sitting in his cooking area. Then the stories began. It happened naturally at first. Some small inside joke tossed out to fill the air, then explained with its story so she'd get it. But very quickly it turned into all of them trying to impress her like their dignity was part of the entertainment. They told her about ridiculous accidents. About Ben tripping into a trough once and trying to pretend he had meant to inspect it. About Winston getting chased halfway across the Blood House because he’d underestimated a pig. About Minho once coming back from a run swearing like a sailor and refusing to elaborate. Every boy had a tale, and they all suddenly had the urge to tell it louder, funnier, better than the last one. They threw in unnecessary details. Embellished timing. Added dramatic pauses where no dramatic pauses had ever existed before. One line got a twitch from her mouth and three others immediately tried to top it. Voices piled over voices. Nobody could quite let anyone else finish. It was blatant. Painfully obvious. Minho did most of his talking with sharp one-liners, trying to act like he wasn’t watching her reaction like it mattered more than oxygen. Thomas leaned in every time she spoke, like the sound of her voice was addictive. Even boys who normally had all the social range of fence posts suddenly volunteered stories or comments or little bits of themselves, desperate to be included. Newt just kept watching her. Not in the dumbstruck, over-obvious way some of the others did, but transfixed nonetheless. At one point, in a small lull after somebody's story about Winston and an awfully judgmental goat, Chuck leaned closer and said in a whisper meant to be private and therefore heard by the whole circle: “Maybe it’s good you don’t remember who hurt you.”

Cass tilted her head, brow knitting. “Huh?”

He pointed at her arm.

She glanced down. “Oh, I fell on it—”

“No.” Chuck pointed again, more insistently this time, to a different place entirely.

Her eyes followed. The lines were there once she looked for them, crisscrossing against her skin where the rolled sleeve and shifting fabric left them visible. Some shallow. Some deeper. Some thin, faded almost white. Others thicker. Angrier. Her hand rose and hovered over them before touching down lightly, fingertips tracing one mark, then another. The little circle of boys around her went quiet. She studied them in silence a moment, then said, with unnerving calm, “I didn’t even notice these.” She touched a pale line near her forearm. “This one…looks like a knife one.” Another, lower, rougher. “This one’s a burn…” Her gaze unfocused for a second, as if her mind had reached for the memory behind them and found only static. “Hell if I know who I pissed off,” she said at last. “I must’ve been a real bitch.” A beat. “Or maybe I used to be a convicted criminal and I’m paying for my sins in here—” She caught herself then. You could see it happen. The flinch of maybe that was too dark, definitely not an okay thing to say, but before she could reel it back the boys were already laughing. Okay. Good. Good. She exhaled, tension easing a fraction. After a little while she said, more thoughtfully, “This memory wipe stuff is weird as hell. I know what a gun is but I can’t remember ever using one, meaning they messed with our temporal lobes but left everything else intact. It’s such an eerie feeling.” She looked around at them. “Do you guys ever get flashes? Anything at all?”

Newt shook his head first. “No,” he said. “Not really.” He leaned his forearms on his knees, gaze dropping briefly toward the fire. “Just stupid realizations. Like finding out we like certain things and thinking maybe we liked them before too.” He huffed a faint little laugh. “And one too many hunches.”

She hummed, thoughtful, turning that over.

Chuck, naturally, took the opening and sprinted through it. “I think she was gonna be a police officer!” he announced. “Wouldn’t that be cool?”

“Soldier,” Minho and Newt said at the exact same time.

Cass’s brow arched. “What gives?”

There was a beat. A very specific beat. The kind that happens when two teenage boys realize they have been paying way too much attention to her every move and now have to explain themselves without sounding insane, creepy, or like they’d built a shrine in the Map Room (they did not. yet). Minho scratched at the back of his neck and spoke first. “I mean—look at you,” he said, and then immediately regretted the phrasing because Thomas choked on absolutely nothing, Frypan looked skyward like he was asking patience from forces beyond mortal comprehension, and Newt gave Minho a side glance that clearly said brilliant start, mate, really subtle. Minho rolled his eyes and bulldozed ahead anyway. “I mean how you move. The way you came out of the Box and didn’t waste a second. You were sick, half-conscious, and still—” Newt picked it up, “Most greenies panic messy. Even if they fight, it’s frantic. You weren’t frantic. You were making decisions. Terrible ones, granted, seeing as your first major choice here was to run headfirst into the worst place we had, but decisions nonetheless.”

A few boys snorted. Cass’s mouth twitched.

Minho took that as permission to keep throwing evidence on the pile. “You spent your first night in the Maze with no context and no memories, while on Greenie drugs... and you somehow came back alive. And the first thing you did after you woke up was to apologize for punching Thomas like the questions about this place could wait but the apology couldn't. You also tried to get back in there before you’d even eaten. Panicked more when you heard that you were out for two days and 'wasted time' than when you heard about the Changing...”

There was a small pause in which it became apparent to her, in real time, that these idiots had not simply come to a vague flattering conclusion and left it there. No. They had apparently catalogued her. Every move. Every reaction. Every choice. It was all sitting in their heads, neatly arranged. “You’ve really been taking notes.”

“You've been unconscious for two days,” Newt said. “Then you woke up and kept being concerning in fresh ways. Naturally a few observations were made.”

“A few?” Cass echoed.

Alby chuckled, shaking his head. “That’s their way of welcoming you,” he said, shaking his head at their antics. “We usually try to guess what we used to be or what we wanted to become before all this. Like Frypan, who picked up cooking right away because it felt right, so of course we guessed he either wanted to be a cook otr just cooked a lot for his family.” His gaze drifted to Gally, who was still sulking there with his ego swollen twice the size of his face. “Or Gally, who was surely something around building since he’s a natural at it.”

That actually made Cass smile. Not a huge smile. Smaller. More private. Like she understood exactly what Alby was doing there, naming the boys back into themselves, anchoring them in skills and purpose and the little guesses they had made in place of memory. Her smile had just enough warmth in it to soften the whole line of her face, but then she caught the smell of Frypan’s stew and her nose scrunched. It was an entirely involuntary expression: brief, honest, stupidly endearing, stupidly adorable, stupidly soft. That little reaction was so fucking cute that it made several boys forget what they were talking about mid-sentence. Heat slammed into Minho’s face so fast it was almost violent, neck to ears to cheekbones, and at the exact same time his body chose absolute betrayal. He shifted on the log with painful subtlety, very suddenly aware of the unfortunate biology of being a teenage boy with eyes. He forced himself to angle away, hiding the tent in his pants, hoping, praying that nobody would notice it. Newt, of course, caught it from across the fire in one glance. He didn’t tease, he wasn’t cruel, but the look in his eyes said mate, get a grip, and Minho silently begged the universe to swallow him whole. But he was right, keep your shit together was the thought that mattered most in this scenario, because they wanted her to feel safe here not like some pretty object for them to drool over.

By the time the sky turned darker, the fire in the middle of the Glade had grown. Somebody had added more wood. Somebody else had dragged another log over. The flames licked higher now, throwing sparks into the air and painting everyone in amber. Voices filled the night, overlapping, jabbing, teasing. It was a game now, one they all became players of instinctively: make her laugh, make her look, make her choose to aim that beautiful smile of hers at you. She sometimes joked back, dry little comments that had them doubling over, but she mostly observed. Her eyes moved from person to person, learning the shape of them, the way this group worked, who interrupted whom, who softened when Chuck spoke, who the others deferred to without thinking, who used humor as armor and who used it as genuine release. She didn’t perform, didn’t force closeness just because they were offering it. And to their credit, for all their collective hormonal damage and enthusiasm, they didn’t rush her either. They let her sit in it. Let her listen. Let her be quiet when she went quiet.

Then the walls started groaning. It rolled through the Glade the way it always did. Deep. Ancient. A sound the boys had long ago folded into the background of living. A daily reminder of exactly where they were and what waited on the other side. Stone dragging against stone, echoing like the world clearing its throat. The boys barely even acknowledged it, but Cass went completely still. While the voices around the fire kept moving, some joke Frypan was making, Chuck’s too-loud interruption, Gally muttering something sour, her whole body seemed to tune itself to the noise. Her eyes went distant in concentration so complete it almost looked like trance while her hand found a long stick lying near the edge of the firepit and, without even seeming to notice, began dragging patterns in the dirt. Lines appeared. Angles. Marks. A turn. Another. Parallel paths. One cut off. Another split.She was mapping it by sound alone. Minho saw it first because he lived in the same obsession. He watched the stick move through the dirt and felt something in his chest tighten. “Hey—”

Her head jerked up like she’d surfaced from deep water. “Yeah?”

“You with us?” he asked, nodding at the stick in her hand.

She looked down, surprised to see what she’d been doing, then she dropped it immediately. “Yeah.”

Newt shifted closer. “You’re here now,” he said. “You’re not there anymore.”

“I know—” Cass started, but he cut her off.

“Don't let that place drive you mad. Breathe a bit, yeah?” His eyes held hers over the firelight, steady as a hand braced between someone’s shoulder blades. The message was clear: Stop before this place gets inside your head the way it got inside ours.

Newt was good at reading people. Always had been. It was the emotional intelligence you developed when you spent so much time trapped in a closed system where one person’s bad day could destabilize twenty more if you didn’t catch it early. He knew when someone was lying. Knew when someone was hiding fear under anger or pain under humor or loyalty under insults. He knew who could be trusted with weight and who would buckle under it. And he also knew, 100%, even though it's barely even been a few hours since he met her, that Cassandra was someone you could trust. She hadn’t come back to the Glade because she’d failed to get out and there was no other option. He’d seen her face when she’d said it: I had to come back. Nobody deserves to be treated like this. If you were trapped in here too, I couldn't just leave. That wasn’t the face of someone who did it out of strategy. It wasn’t performance or some charming little line meant to win them over. She'd actually spilled her thoughts out without meaning to, because hearing that some of the boys didn't make it had forced them out of her. That was justice. Heart. Newt had gotten that gut-sense before, with Thomas, with Minho, with Alby: that bone-deep certainty that they were good ones. Reliable. Trustworthy. Someone who carried weight because they couldn’t not. The soldier guess fit like a glove. Too much calm, too much precision in the way she’d leveled Gally with just enough to silence him, enough to make a point. Even the way she walked said trained. But Newt could also see that under all that composure, she was rattled. Deeply. Holding it tight enough that it didn’t show, but it was there.

After he finished seasoning, Frypan started passing bowls of stew around. Tin scraped against tin, spoons clinked, boys shuffled and passed portions down the line with all the casualness of a group who had done this so many times they no longer needed to think about the mechanics. They gave Cass one too and she accepted it with a small smile that landed like a sucker punch in more than one stomach. Then she spoke again. “I wonder which desert we’re in. Can't even remember desert names to guess from, dammit.”

“Huh?” Thomas blinked, caught off guard. This was becoming a thing with her. She’d go quiet just long enough for everyone to think she’d settled, then casually say something that forced all of them to reconstruct reality from the ground up.

Cass glanced up from her food. “Was just thinking how the hell do you get funds for sick shit like this and build it in the middle of nowhere just to trap kids into. What do you even get out of it?”

Minho frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“We’re in the middle of a desert,” Cass said, as if it was obvious and they were just slow. “The air’s dry. There’s sand everywhere. Every time the wind blows, you get that sand feeling on your tongue.”

A few boys exchanged looks. Frypan tried to lighten it with a quick, “You sure you ain’t just thirsty?” but nobody laughed. They were all staring at Cass like she’d just told them the sky was fake.

“It sure as hell doesn’t match the nature you’ve got here,” she went on, gesturing vaguely at the grass, the trees, the gardens, like they were props somebody had forgotten to blend into the background, then back toward those towering stone walls like she was comparing two puzzle pieces that didn’t belong in the same box. “You ever get rain?”

“Rarely,” Alby admitted.

“See? That’s what I’m saying.” The firelight caught in her hair, pulling pale gold through the strands as she leaned forward over her bowl, brow knitted, eyes distant in thought. Then her expression tightened. “I hope I'm wrong. A desert’s a bitch to survive in—”

Newt cut her off by handing her a jar. The liquid inside was cloudy. Suspicious. It looked like it could dissolve a spoon. “Moonshine. Gally's homemade rocket fuel. You don’t have to try it if you don’t want to, it’s pretty strong.” He was obviously trying to distract her, to knock her off the desert line of thought before she worried herself straight back into the Maze.

Gally leaned forward, smirking like a man who desperately needed a win in any category available. “Go on,” he said. “Try it.”

Cass tipped the jar back and drank without breaking eye contact with him. The boys all leaned forward, eyes locked on her face, waiting for the choke, the gag, the tears, the coughing fit, the proof that she was human after all. Nothing. She simply swallowed, handed the jar back to Newt, and said, deadpan. “It’s awful. I love it.”

Silence.

Gally’s smirk shattered so thoroughly it ought to have made a sound. “What the—” Minho started laughing. Chuck gasped like she’d just produced a rabbit from thin air. Frypan shook his head, “Insane.” Newt took the jar back and stared at it, as if checking whether he had, in fact, accidentally handed her water instead of Gally's poison, then he looked at Cass again. No emotion.

Yeah, on the surface, she must've looked calm, relaxed even, listening to their stories and drinking their stupid battery acid. Her mind was anything but calm. These boys looked at her like she’d done the impossible. Like she was some kind of miracle dropped out of the sky. Like surviving a night in there was a reason to gloat. It wasn't. She hadn’t felt powerful in the Maze, she’d felt one step away from death, and she would've accepted it with no issue whatsoever if it wasn't for the nagging thought that someone needed her help. Then there was the other thought that kept coming back no matter how much she tried to get rid of it. What if Gally was right? Not that she was lying now. She knew she wasn’t. But what if she had indeed worked with the people who built this place before she got here? The Maze had not scared her enough. Not in the way it should have. Not in the way these boys spoke about it. What if that strange click of understanding came from training? From involvement? A role in this sick game? The thought crawled under her skin like an insect. “I… uh—” Alby clocked her expression instantly. He’d led too long not to recognize when somebody was slipping. He didn’t call attention to it. Didn’t ask what was wrong in front of everyone. He just offered a rope. “You must be tired, I can show you to the Homestead.”

Relief flooded her face the second the words left his mouth and she nodded. “Yeah. Thanks.”

Newt and Minho were already getting up to follow, bodies moving on instinct like escorting her was just… what you did, but Alby stopped them with one small motion of his hand. Stay. He didn’t need to say the rest. She needed time. Space. Not a parade. Not more eyes. Not more pressure. Just somewhere quiet to lie down and be alone with herself for a minute. They sank back reluctantly. The goodnights came in a messy little chorus as Cass stood and brushed her palms against her pants. Some louder than necessary, some trying to sound casual and failing spectacularly, some so quick they tripped over themselves. Chuck waved like his arm was about to detach. She gave them all a small smile and a “’Night,” and then she walked away with Alby.

Every eye followed. Every single one.

Winston didn’t even bother to hide his stare at her ass, hand adjusting his pants like subtlety was a myth he didn't believe in. The movement was so obvious it was almost impressive in its audacity. Newt slapped him on the back of the head so hard the crack echoed. “Show some bloody respect, you absolute tosser.” Winston swore under his breath and rubbed the spot, cheeks red as a few nearby boys choked on laughter.

Alby glanced sideways at Cass while they walked. He caught the tremble in her hands. Saw the carefulness in her steps now that adrenaline and social momentum weren’t carrying her. Saw the fatigue settling into her shoulders like a physical weight. He didn't say anything. Didn’t ask if she was alright, because she clearly wasn’t. He just kept his pace steady, giving her a rhythm to match. When they reached the Homestead, he pushed open the door, wood creaking. Inside, rows of cots, personal scraps and salvaged bits tucked wherever boys had claimed tiny pockets of self in a shared room, blankets folded or kicked half off, boots shoved under beds, the smell of worn cotton, woodsmoke, and the night-cool drift from the cracks in the walls. Alby showed her to an empty cot, clean blankets stacked there along with a folded shirt and thin pants for sleeping. Practical kindness arranged in advance by boys who had wanted to be ready if she woke and made it this far. “Take it easy, alright?” he said, lingering at the doorway. “If you need anything—”

“Yeah.” Her eyes flicked to him. “Thank you, Alby. Really.”

Something in his face softened, then he nodded once and left. Cass changed into the clothes they'd left for her, movements careful around all the bruises and bandages. When she finally lay down, the cot dipped beneath her weight and the beams above her came into view, dark wood crossing the ceiling in simple lines. She stared up at them, thoughts scattered like broken glass. The Homestead felt too quiet after the Maze. Too still. Too human.

Back at the fire, they were all still staring after where she’d gone, minds too full, lungs too tight. back up if they looked hard enough. Nobody said anything right away. The Glade had gone into one of those strange, suspended silences that only happened when something massive moved through it and left everybody’s insides lagging behind. The fire popped and settled. A log shifted in the flames with a soft hiss of sap. Somewhere off by the Blood House an animal rustled in its pen. Eventually, Minho exhaled sharply and dragged a hand down his face like he could wipe the whole day off with his palm. “Well,” he said, voice hollow with disbelief. “That’s it. We’re screwed.”

Thomas, who was still sitting forward on the log like some part of him hadn’t realized the scene had ended, frowned over at him. “What do you mean?”

Minho pointed toward the Homestead like it was a holy site now. “You saw her.” he said. “You think I can go back to being Keeper of the Runners after...that? Nah, I’m retiring.”

A few of the boys barked out short laughs at that, more from nerves than humor, because the truth under it was too sharp not to laugh around. Minho was joking. He was also absolutely not joking. He had spent so much time in the Maze by now that it had become the shape of his days, the center of his pride, the place where he knew himself best, and then this girl had arrived and did what he did, but better, in a single night, one that also happened to be her first one here. While on drugs.

Newt snorted and shook his head, though his eyes were still on the path where she’d gone with Alby. “Don’t be daft. You ain’t retiring. She’s bloody brilliant, yeah, but you’re still Keeper. The lot of you will figure it out together.”

Minho leaned forward, elbows braced on his knees, firelight catching the sharper angles of his face. “She doesn't need us.” He shook his head again, staring into the fire. “I’ve been running that Maze every day for so long, and she did more in a night than I have in months. That’s...” He trailed off because there was no word for it that didn’t sound like worship.

Alby’s voice cut through from where he stood a few feet back, having returned from the Homestead with the particular edge of a man who’d checked a door twice and still wasn’t sure leaving it closed was the right call. “She’ll help you out plenty, then.”

Gally barked a harsh laugh and gestured into the dark, broad hand cutting through the air like Cassandra herself was too big and ridiculous a concept to fit in ordinary language. “Help? You think she’ll help?”

He had not recovered. Not from her punches. Not from her proving things he didn’t want proved. Not from the fact that every time he looked at her, even furious, some part of him kept noticing she was the prettiest thing he’d ever seen and he hated that almost as much as he hated the Maze.

Thomas turned to him, frowning. “You still think she’s lying?”

Gally met his eyes. “I think she’s fucking dangerous, that’s what I think.” Dangerous because she changed things. Dangerous because every boy in the Glade had gone soft in her orbit (including him, dammit) and Gally distrusted soft the way other people distrusted cliffs with no rails. Dangerous because she had walked into their world, hit him twice, made Alby bend rules, and sat there by the fire with blood in her past and enough calm in her to look a night in the Maze in the eye and say she wants back in tomorrow. Dangerous because he had eyes, and because his eye-dick connection was currently in its prime.

Chuck turned scarlet with outrage before anyone else could answer. “She’s not lying!” His voice cracked around the force of it, and for a second he looked so furious and that Frypan actually shifted a little closer, as if ready to catch him if he launched himself bodily at Gally’s face and needed to be peeled back off afterward. “She came back for us,” Chuck said, like that should be the end of it. Like that one fact ought to shame everyone else into silence.

Newt nodded. “I'm with Chuck on this one.”

Alby rubbed at his temples with two fingers, the gestured he used when stress was clawing through his skull faster than he could contain it. He had heard what Newt said. He was hearing everything. Sorting it. Weighing it. Leadership in the Glade had always been equal parts logistics and hope management, and hope was the most dangerous substance by far. Cassandra had given the Glade a fresh dose of it just by walking back through the doors. Already he could feel the boys reshaping themselves around that fact. Already he knew that if something happened to her now, the crash afterward would level them.

Frypan cleared his throat, trying to ease the tension before it curdled into another argument. “She didn’t spit my stew back out. That's good enough for me.”

That got a few laughs. Short-lived but real. Enough to break the pressure for a second. Even Gally’s mouth twitched before he caught himself and smothered it in a scowl.

Thomas spoke again, and it sounded like the thought had been pacing around inside his skull for a while and had only now settled into words. “I think she was supposed to be here.” He couldn't explain how or why.

Minho leaned back and stared at the sparks popping up from the fire, watching them vanish into the dark. “Supposed to be here or not,” he muttered, “she’s one of us now.” Then he glanced sideways at Gally, eyes narrowing. “Even if Gally keeps being a jackass about it.”

Gally muttered something under his breath that sounded rude and self-defensive and entirely inadequate to the size of what he was actually feeling, but he didn’t argue again. He couldn’t. His thoughts were too tangled for clean anger right now. Because he was suspicious, but all of that kept getting knotted up with... other things. The image of her standing over him after she’d split his nose, eyes lit and furious and entirely too sure she could take him any second, even with a messed up arm. The fact that she kept provoking and poking and looking at him like he was easy to deal with. The fact that when she did it, a part of him sat up and paid attention before his temper could drown it. Newt caught the look on Gally’s face and shook his head, amused. He knew everyone was feeling it. The pull. The sheer magnetism of her. But there was more to her than that, and he’d be damned if he let hormones ruin it, so he cleared his throat and said, “Right then. Enough of that. She’s alive, she’s breathing, and we've got ourselves another Runner. That’s more than we had yesterday. Let’s not waste the night arguing about it.”

Minho raised his jar. “To Cass.”

Thomas echoed him at once, raising his bowl. “To Cass.”

Chuck, because God had built him from pure sincerity and zero internal brakes, piped up immediately: “To the prettiest person I’ve ever seen!” Half the boys groaned, the others laughed, and Newt cuffed Chuck on the back of the head, not hard, more like a warning tap, muttering, “Keep that in your head next time, Chuck.”

But the toast stuck. One by one, bowls or jars lifted around the fire. Even Gally, eventually. “To Cass.”

Later, much later, the fire had burned down to a lower red bed of embers with only the occasional tongue of flame licking up through shifted wood. Boys sprawled half-sideways on logs, leaned back on their hands, slouched against each other, bowls empty at their feet. Conversation had thinned into lower murmurs and the occasional burst of laughter. Chuck had fallen asleep against somebody’s arm at some point, curls mashed to one side, mouth open slightly, snoring. It felt, for a brief stretch, like they were almost ready to drift off. Then Winston had to open his mouth. “Fine, sure,” he said, his voice carrying just enough to grab the whole circle, “but you’re liars if you try to tell me you haven’t seen that perfect ass—”

A sharp crack followed as Newt’s hand smacked the back of his head. Again.

“Ow! Would you quit that already?!” Winston yelped, glaring over his shoulder.

“I reckon you’ve had more than enough to drink,” Newt muttered.

But Winston wasn’t done. He leaned forward, eyes a little glassy from the moonshine. “Come on. She’s built like a model, has the face of a porcelain doll, survives the Maze, comes here all wit and jokes and punches Gally in the nose and you’re tryina tell me you ain’t into her?”

The circle tightened instantly. Because yes, they had all noticed. Of course they had. They had been tragically, hilariously doomed from the second the Box opened. But saying it like that, reducing her to something to be appreciated aloud with your mouth hanging open like an idiot crossed into a different territory. And every decent instinct in the Glade turned toward him at once. “You wanna make her feel like she’d be better out there with the Grievers?” Minho bit. “’Cause you sound exactly like—”

“Like what?” Winston snapped back, defensive, too stupid to feel the cliff under his own feet. “I didn’t fucking say I was gonna jump her, I was just appreciating a nice pair of tits—”

The punch landed before he finished the word. Thomas had surged up from his seat so fast nobody stopped him in time. One second he was seated, jaw tight, green eyes darker, the next he was there, fist connecting clean across Winston’s jaw. Winston went stumbling backward off the log, feet tangling under him, cursing as he hit the dirt and clutched at his face. He spat blood and glared. “What the fuck is wrong with you people?!”

Alby exhaled long and slow, rubbing his temples again like the headache had finally arrived in its full, screaming glory and chosen to move in permanently.

Minho looked satisfied. “She's not some poster on a wall. You don't treat her like that. Hell, you don't treat anyone like that.”

Winston pushed himself up, blood glistening at his lip. “You’re all acting like saints, but don’t tell me you haven’t thought it too. She’s the first damn girl we’ve—”

“Thinking it and saying it are two different things,” Newt shot back. “You think we’re blind? Course we saw.” He spread one hand, disgusted with the whole conversation. “But there’s a line. You don’t cross it.”

Alby straightened at last, and when he spoke his voice boomed enough to shut the whole circle down. “She’s trapped here just like the rest of us.” His gaze swept over all of them, hard enough to pin. “You want to stay in the Glade, you treat her with respect. You hear me?”

Nobody argued. Thomas was still standing there over Winston, breathing hard, fists clenched, chest rising and falling too fast. He looked as surprised as anyone else that he’d moved. He hadn’t thought. Hadn’t weighed consequences. Hadn’t decided. He’d just heard Winston talk about her like that and something in him had gone hot. Newt noticed. He also noticed Minho, who had not stopped glaring at Winston for a single second, jaw set so hard it looked painful, like he was privately picturing dragging the idiot into the Maze and letting the walls educate him. And Gally—God help them—who, despite still nursing his own ruined nose from earlier, looked half ready to stand up and add a few punches of his own to Winston’s correction. Newt looked from one to the other and almost laughed. So raw and obvious, all of it. Almost cute, if it wasn't for the monsters in the walls and the impending doom. But oh, well. Don't we all love a little bit of doom?

Cassandra’s brain certainly did.

Sleep should’ve come easy after a night in a murder labyrinth and two days of being medically resurrected like a half-broken doll, but her brain apparently had not received the memo. It kept buzzing like someone had left the lights on inside her skull and had forgotten where the switch was. She lay on her back on the cot in the Homestead, staring at the beams above until they blurred and doubled, and still she couldn’t shut it off. Every scrape and shift of the walls outside hit her nerves like a fingertip on a bruise. So she swung her legs over the cot, shoved her feet into her boots, laced them tight, and slipped out.

The Glade was quieter now. The Homestead creaked behind her as wood settled into cooler night air. Fire burned low at the Pit, embers breathing orange into the darkness. The air was cool enough to prickle her skin where the loose shirt left it bare, and the scent of smoke lingered over the square with that dry sand-threaded smell everything here seemed to carry. The moon hung somewhere above the walls she couldn’t fully see from this angle, leaving the whole place washed in low silver. She headed toward the trees without really deciding to. Movement felt necessary. Her mind was running faster than her body, chewing through numbers and routes with a speed that left her feeling like she was being dragged behind her own thoughts. She needed to catch up to herself. Needed some kind of rhythm to absorb the excess charge in her nerves. Something repetitive. Controlled. Physical. Something that didn’t require thought. She eventually reached a patch of dirt near the trees at the edge of the Glade, a place where the shadows were deeper, and she dropped into the dirt there. One hand flat under her shoulder. The other tucked behind her back because it still hurt and she wasn’t stupid enough to test how generous her healing was willing to be tonight. Push-ups. Sharp, straight form. Clean line through her body despite the bruises and stitches and fatigue. Down. Up. Down. Up. One. Two. Three. Her muscles knew what to do before thought got involved. That was the strange part. Not the movement itself, but the complete absence of hesitation inside it. Her body fell into the rhythm with the ease of repetition older than memory. The ground under her palm. The tightening of her core. The measured push through shoulder and chest. Even one-armed, even half-held together with bandages and spite, the movement felt familiar enough to be comforting. Each push gave her brain one narrow channel to run through instead of a thousand sharp little splinters. Her breathing settled. The static in her head smoothed out, not gone but organized. Pain moved from chaotic to useful. Her shoulder burned, but it was a clean burn. Honest. And she noticed that she wasn’t getting tired the way she should’ve been. That was what really sealed it. A normal body after a night like that, after blood loss and no food and two days unconscious and fresh bruises everywhere, should have folded fast. Hers did not. It complained, certainly. The shoulder protested. Her ribs made themselves known. The bandaged arm ached where it hung behind her. But the rest of her kept going with a deep reserve that did not belong to a life of polite routines and yoga twice a week. This was taining. Whatever she had been before the Box, her body had been made to work through discomfort, through injury, through fatigue. Maybe Minho and Newt weren’t that far off with the soldier guess. Maybe they were onto something. When her breathing finally steadied enough, after more repetitions than she should’ve reasonably been doing in her condition and yet somehow still not enough to leave her properly tired, she pushed back to her feet. That was when she saw a thin glow spilling out from one of the structures. Chuck had pointed this place out earlier while verbally sprinting through his tour. Map Room, he’d called it, with the kind of tone people reserved for mildly haunted sheds. Cass approached it slowly, because she didn’t want to startle anyone in a place where people lived with constant threat in their bones.

She stepped into the doorway and looked in. Rough wooden walls. Shelves lined with scraps of paper, crude tools, salvaged odds and ends from the Box, bits of string and charcoal, pieces of flattened cardboard and old supply packing. Maps were pinned or stacked or weighted down with stones wherever there was room, some neat, some frantic, all of them carrying the strain of too many attempts at solving the same impossible thing. A lantern burned low on the table at the center, throwing yellow light over a spread of cardboard sections fitted together into a raised model of the Maze. Tiny makeshift walls. Marked corridors. Notes in blunt pencil. The whole thing was crude in material but meticulous in thought, and hunched over it, all lean edges and too much focus in his shoulders, was the Runner Keeper guy. Minho. She knocked twice against the open doorframe. Minho jumped like she’d fired a gun next to his ear, shoulders snapping up, head whipping around, but then he saw her, and the panic drained just enough to stop being visible while the rest of him went stiff for entirely different reasons.

“Hey,” she said.

Minho blinked once, gave her an involuntary up-down in the doorway before good sense returned and he looked away too quickly, and said, “Hey.”

“May I?” she asked, nodding toward the table as she stepped closer.

“All yours.” He tried to sound casual. He did not sound casual. He sounded like a guy whose brain had been hijacked by a girl existing within speaking distance. His pulse had kicked hard enough to be rude about it, and now he was standing there trying to look like this sort of thing happened all the time. It did not. Cassandra's eyes locked on the model of the Maze spread across the table. Cardboard sections pieced together, corridors cut and slotted, walls folded up into place, marks and labels and additions made where they’d learned something and revisions where the Maze had laughed at them and changed again. It hit Cass right in that part of her that loved puzzles and one's efforts to solve it. “You made this?” The question came out with actual admiration in it. Minho nodded, then swallowed, chest feeling stupidly hot all of a sudden. No one said it like that. Like it was worth being impressed by. Most days it felt like he was building sandcastles in a hurricane—hours of work for a place that changed anyway, a model doomed to become wrong the second tomorrow arrived. But her face wore only the keen interest of someone who recognized exactly what kind of mind had made this and respected it. Her eyes narrowed as she scanned the model, then she tilted her head. Minho clocked the expression instantly because he wore the same one himself every time some detail in the Maze sat half an inch wrong. Something on the table had offended her internal map. Something didn’t line up.

“You… wanna add to it?” he asked.

“Subtract, actually,” Cass said, eyes still moving over the sections. “That okay or you holding onto your pretty art project?”

He smirked before he could stop himself. “Go ahead. Definitely not the kind of art I’d want in my living room.”

Cass smiled at that and he looked away immediately, pretending to fuss with scraps of cardboard and a stub of pencil like they were suddenly very important, because his ears were going red and he refused to let her see it. He was Keeper of the Runners. He did not get flustered because a girl smiled at his cardboard maze and called it pretty. He was absolutely getting flustered because a girl smiled at his cardboard maze and called it pretty. Cass moved a piece. Then another. Her fingers were precise. No hesitation. No hovering. She adjusted the sections like the Maze really was written under her skin somewhere, like she was not working from memory so much as correcting a mistranslation. Minho watched her work and told himself very sternly not to stare. Haha, as if. He first looked at her hands, because he thought he'd be safer, then realized he thought wrong. Long fingers. Small scars across the knuckles and backs. Bandaging on one arm making her movements slightly uneven but not enough to cost her precision. Then she leaned over the table, pale hair slipping forward over one shoulder so the lantern light caught in it and turned parts of it almost white and his gaze tracked higher before he could stop it. She looked tired. Not just physically, though yes, there were shadows under her eyes and a slight thinness to her expression that the two-day unconsciousness hadn’t erased. More like someone operating at the edge of what sheer will could continue to carry. Even concentrating, there was a drag to her.

“Couldn’t sleep?” he asked before he could think better of it.

Cass didn’t look up. “I guess it’s either a two-day pass out or nothing for me, huh…”

He laughed under his breath.

She nudged another section into place and said after a pause, “You neither.”

Minho shrugged one shoulder. “Yeah, well.” He leaned a hip against the table. “You don’t get people who claim to have killed Grievers here every day. Gotta up my game.”

That was how they all thought of it, whether they admitted it or not. “Claim to,” “said she” “supposedly” killed Grievers. Not that they didn't believe her...Oh, who were they even kidding? Most of them didn't. It was easier to believe she survived the night somehow than to accept she killed two Grievers like they were just… inconvenient. Minho didn’t voice that thought. Part of him wanted to believe it so badly it hurt.

“Good strategy,” she said dryly. “Pass out from exhaustion out there so I have something to carry back here. You’ll be a proper damsel in distress. I’ll add a bowtie. Sure to find one around. Maybe that guy Gally has one. Seems like the bowtie type.”

The laugh that tore out of him was too loud for how quiet everything was at this hour. It echoed off the wood. Minho clamped his mouth shut, shoulders tensing at the sound of it, then looked and found her glancing sideways at him, amused. “Just joking,” she said. “I don’t hold grudges. I mean…” She shifted another wall piece with one finger. “He’s probably the only one sane here.”

Minho wiped at his face with one hand like he could erase how stupidly pleased her humor made him feel, then his brain caught up to the actual words. “What d'you mean?”

Cass exhaled through her nose. “I think it’s weird, that’s all.” Her voice dipped lower. “Maybe he’s right about me.”

There it is, he thought. Finally some Greenie talk. Some self-doubt. Something he knew how to deal with. Minho leaned back onto the edge of the table, watching her. The words steadied as he found them. “You didn’t know the limitations. You didn’t know anything about the Maze. So what you did out there—it wasn’t soaked in all the fear we’ve had jammed into us since day one. Since Alby sat us down and told us the rules and all the ways this place kills you.” He spread one hand. “You just… did it. Pure instinct. And that instinct is a damn gold mine if you ask me. You—”

“Don’t.”

Her voice cut sharper than he’d expected.

Minho froze like he’d stepped on a landmine. He had accidentally put pressure on something already bruised and she had reacted before deciding whether or not he deserved the blade. Cass held his gaze for a beat longer, then her expression softened a fraction, enough to show she regretted the edge but not enough to take the boundary back. “Yeah okay,” she exhaled, “Came out a tad more dramatic than it should've.” She looked down at the model again. “But don’t treat me like I did something big and awesome. How the hell do I even know these things? It’s fucking plausible that I was working with them. Maybe they gave me a cheat sheet or—”

“Be real with me,” Minho cut in fast. He’d been sitting on this since the Med-jacks, since her first explanations, since the second she’d mentioned certain details that made it clear without her saying it outright. “Did you figure how to get out or not?”

Cass stilled.

Minho pushed off the table and came a little closer, not enough to crowd her, just enough to pressure an answer. “When you told me about section 7C, back at the hut,” he said, voice lower now, “you said—”

“I know what I said.”

“Then that just proves you’re not working with them.” That made her look at him again. “You’re still here. Trying to help a bunch of strangers you've only heard for a minute before bolting.”

“I—”

“You know how to get out of here.” Just say it. Just say it. Just say it. Just say it. Just say it. Just say it. “You know a way out.”

Her jaw tightened. “I think I do,” she said at last, and then her eyes dropped to the cardboard like she didn’t want to see the hope on his face and be responsible for it.

Minho smiled. That's all he needed to hear. Come on, Minho. Think of a way to tell her you trust her with it without sounding like a moron. “These guys are my family,” he said after a longer pause. “And I’ve been doing everything in my power to keep them safe.” He looked at her. “You knew they’d rush into it if you said you knew a way out, so you decided to keep that to yourself until everyone was ready.” He shook his head. “I have no idea who the hell you are or where you come from, but I know a good person when I see one.” His gaze didn’t leave hers. “So this’ll stay between the two of us until you wanna… broadcast it.”

Cass looked at him for a long second, then turned toward the door. “Get some sleep, Minho. You'll need it.”

And then she was gone.

The Glade was too quiet. That was the first thing Minho clocked when he rolled out of the Map Room at dawn, rubbing sleep from his eyes with the heel of one hand and feeling like he’d been folded badly, stored on a shelf, and reopened by an amateur. Normally, the place woke up in waves—Zart shouting at track-hoes before the sun even committed to being up, Frypan banging pots, random shoves and curses as people fought over chores. The Glade had a rhythm to it, messy and loud and utterly alive. A rough little orchestra played by boys with too much attitude and too little space for it. But now? Complete utter silence. No shouting. No clatter. No argument. Just the low morning light stretching over empty paths and still rows and a silence so complete it made the whole square feel wrong. Abandoned. Like everyone had been scooped out of it while he was asleep and only the shell remained. Minho frowned, stretched once, shoulders clicking, and stepped outside. Empty path. Empty garden rows. No one by the fire pit. No one moving between the Homestead and the Blood House. “What the…” Minho muttered, picking up his pace. The hair on the back of his neck was up now. Not fear exactly. More the offense of a person who had woken up to find reality behaving like a bad prank. “Hey!” he shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Where is everyone?” He barely had time to hear his own echo before a hand clamped down over his mouth and yanked him sideways into the bushes. He thrashed immediately, elbow driving back, body twisting, one foot digging for leverage. For one hot second he was fully prepared to bite whoever had grabbed him and sort out apologies later. Then a sharp hiss hit his ear. “Bloody shut it, you idiot!”

Newt.

Minho froze mid-struggle, panting hard through his nose, and blinked as his eyes adjusted. Thomas was crouched there too. Behind him—hell, it looked like half the Glade. Winston. Jeff. Clint. Frypan. Jackson. Zart. Gally. Alby. Ben. Minho stared at them. “What's going on?” he whispered, when Newt’s hand came off his face. Newt didn't answer. He just pointed. Past the treeline. Toward the lake. Minho followed the line of his finger and his eyes went wide.

The lake sat under the early light like a sheet of silver, still wrapped in morning haze. The trees around it filtered the sun into gold bands that striped the sand and grass in light. Mist hung low over the surface. Birdsong had only just started in tentative little bursts. And the centerpiece of that soft dreamy scene was Cass. Not just Cass. Cass balanced upside-down on her forearms like gravity was a suggestion. Her body held the balance with frightening steadiness. Muscles taut, core locked, abs flexing with every subtle correction, legs aligned in a way that made the whole thing look less like effort and more like architecture. She’d stripped down to a sports bra and sweats rolled low on her hips and had also given up on the bandages, because her arms and shoulders and all the scars crossing her back were fully visible now. Minho clamped a hand over his own mouth and exhaled into it in disbelief, turning just enough to meet Newt’s gaze. All that righteous talk last night, and now here they were, stalking her while she did ...whatever this was. Newt’s expression said he knew exactly how bad it looked. Also that he was too far gone to fully correct course yet. Somewhere behind the dry older-brother judgment in his face was the simple miserable truth of it: he’d seen movement by the lake and then made the catastrophic error of checking it out. What was he still doing here after almost half an hour? He was still... checking it out, obviously.

Cass shifted fluidly, like the forearm stand was only a pause in a longer sequence. She lowered herself out of it, one leg descending, then the other, body folding through the motion with way too much elegance for how hurt she still was. She stretched long through her shoulders, back opening in a line that made several Glader's breaths hitch, then dropped down and into push-ups. The movement was clean. Sharp. No wasted effort. Her body lowered and rose in perfect rhythm, sweat already catching at the edge of her ribs and running down over the hard lines of her stomach. Her shoulder flexed. Her back tightened and released. The rolled waistband sat low enough to be deeply offensive to peace of mind everywhere. Nobody dared breathe. “Holy sh—” Gally started, but Alby’s hand cracked across his arm. “Shush.”

Then the spell broke.

“MORNING CASS!” Chuck’s voice rang out bright and clear across the entire lakeside. Every single boy in the bushes flinched like they’d been shot. Minho actually jerked so hard he nearly kneed Thomas in the thigh. Winston bit his own fist. Newt closed his eyes for one brief prayerful second, as if appealing to any available higher power to explain why Chuck existed like this.

Cass didn’t even stop her pushups. “Morning, kid.” she called back.

Chuck barreled toward her, waving like he was greeting the sun itself, completely oblivious to the fact that half the Glade was trying to enjoy the show. “What are you doing?” he asked, dropping to his knees beside her.

“Push-ups.”

“Woah.” Chuck’s little face tilted up, eager to talk to her. “You woke up early just to do this?”

She finally pushed up to her feet, brushing sand from her palms. “Couldn’t really sleep.”

“I told them!”

Cass blinked. “Huh?”

“I told them you’d feel lonely,” he said, entirely serious, “and that we should all sleep in the Homestead with you, but they didn’t listen!”

God, Chuck, for the love of all that's holy, stop talking. Gally swore under his breath. Thomas shut his eyes. Minho folded forward against his own knees to stop himself from making a sound. Newt stared at the dirt with the expression of a man whose soul had just left his body to avoid embarrassment on his behalf.

Cass’s head tilted, honestly confused.

“We usually all sleep in the Homestead—”

“Wait, hold up.” She held up a hand, eyebrows climbing. “You guys didn’t sleep where you were supposed to just because I was here?”

Chuck, to his credit, tried to reassure her. Emphasis on tried. “Nooo, not like that. We slept fine, it’s just that we—”

“Answer the question, Chuck.”

He looked down. “Uh… yeah.”

Cass exhaled and shook her head. “That’s stupid.”

Chuck forged on, unburdened by shame, and clearly the ability to read a fucking room, or better said, a bush. “I told them that too! You felt lonely, right? I told them that you'd get lonely!”

“No,” Cass said, and her voice didn’t carry cruelty, just blunt clarity. “Not that.” She gestured vaguely at the Glade, the walls, the sky, this whole stupid impossible cage. “Look around you. Does this look like a scenario in which we can afford to act like children and catch colds sleeping fuck knows where when there's plenty of empty beds back in the Homestead?”

Minho bit the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste blood because if he laughed out loud right now he was done for.

Cass’s next words landed right below the belt. Literally. “Where do y'all bathe?”

Every boy behind the treeline went rigid. Shoulders locking. Throats tightening. Breaths stopping. Winston actually made a tiny choking noise.

Chuck simply pointed to the water.

“Okay.” She nodded, calm as if she hadn’t just detonated every hormone within earshot. “What time do people usually get up around here?”

“Everyone’s already working, I think.” Chuck shrugged. “Haven’t seen them.”

“Mm.” She scratched absently at her arm, then glanced toward the lake. “Uh… I kinda wanna—” She pointed at the water.

“Oh. OH. Okay sure!” And miracle of miracles, Chuck bolted. Cass smiled while watching him go and then turned toward the lake.

Alby’s voice came out low. “We should go.”

But his feet didn’t move. Neither did theirs.

Cass tugged her sweats down. A collective groan moved through the treeline. She stepped out of them, leaving only black boxers beneath. The early light caught the shape of her legs, the firm lines of her thighs flexing as she moved, calves tightening under skin still golded by dawn. She had the kind of body teenage boys invented lies about having seen in magazines and then got mocked for exaggerating. All the blood in the Glade relocated south in unison. She didn't take everything off, just walked into the lake like that, sports bra and black boxers on, very much aware that someone might still stumble upon her. The water climbed her ankles, shins and knees, cold enough that she shivered once the lake reached higher, goosebumps rising along her arms. Her boxers plastered to her, black stretched over all those perfect curves and lines of her body, leaving almost nothing to the imagination. She waded deeper, then ducked low once, and when she straightened again water streamed down over her shoulders, down her chest, down the hard line of her stomach. She pushed both hands back through her hair, blonde gone darker now, heavy and slick and streaked gold where the sun touched it. Water ran off her elbows in shining lines. Off the point of her chin. Off every bit of visible skin like the droplets had agreed to collaborate in making this try not to cum in your pants challenge even harder than it already was. They'd imagined women before, but imagination had never done this. Detail, high definition, 4K type of stuff. Imagination didn’t duck under water and come up pushing wet hair from its face while dawn lit every line of it like the world itself had fallen briefly in love with what it had made. After a long, way too long moment, Newt ripped his eyes away and said, “Back to work.”

Nobody moved.

“I’ll shout it next,” he warned.

One by one, red-faced and panting, they began peeling themselves away from the bushes, walks strained, pupils still dilated like they've witnessed an eclipse.

Her hair was still wet when she showed up at the Pit, clinging in damp strands to the back of her neck and the collar of the shirt she’d pulled on after the lake. Every now and then a tiny droplet would slide down, slow, glinting in the morning sun before vanishing into the fabric at her shoulder or along the hollow of her throat. She smiled when she saw them, and for one terrifying second, every single one of the boys had the same thought: she knows. She knows they were there, knows they watched, knows they all had to sneak off afterwards to... take care of stuff before they exploded. They lit up when they saw her, yes, that couldn't be helped. It happened to all of them before pride had time to get involved, heads lifting, posture shifting, some involuntary brightening in the face and the eyes that said there she is before the more other part of their brains could start shouting about dignity. But that still didn't change the fact that they were red and suddenly unable to maintain eye contact. Nobody seemed to know what to do with their hands. Winston nearly dropped his spoon. Thomas looked like he’d forgotten how sitting worked.

“Mornin’.” Newt said, because someone had to remind these bastards how to human and he took that upon himself.

“Hey,” she answered, and she stepped into the loose circle around the fire. They adjusted around her, brains finally staggering back into their skulls. Distance made her unreal, abstract, too beautiful and too strange and too easy to turn into spectacle. But close, she became solid again. Someone to pass a bowl to. Someone to talk over and with. It grounded them a bit. Frypan came over with a bowl and handed it to her. “Taste,” he said. “Is it good?” Cass took a bite, chewed, swallowed, then looked down into the bowl like she was conducting a fair trial. “Could use a little salt, but the texture’s perfect.” That's all he needed to hear. He grinned like she’d just pinned a medal to his chest and named him The Best Cook On Planet Earth. He actually puffed up a little before catching himself and returning to his pot with exaggerated seriousness, muttering about salt. Minho dropped down next to her, casual, like he had simply selected a place to sit and she happened to be in the radius. His shoulder even bumped hers lightly, the sort of contact that might’ve passed as friendly if his leg hadn’t immediately started bouncing with enough notice-me nervousness to power a mill. “You ready, little Miss Runner?”

Cass glanced sideways at him and smirked. “You’ve kept me waiting.”

Minho smiled, enjoying the jab more than he should’ve. “We go in pairs,” he said, forcing some structure back into his tone. “Thomas runs with Ben.” He tilted his bowl toward the other side of the fire where Thomas immediately looked up, as if hearing his name in connection with her was enough to trigger full-body attention. “You run with me.”

And that's when Newt’s head snapped up, eyes widening immediately. Not in some theatrical way. In a very practical, absolutely the hell not, kind of way. “Excuse me?”

Minho blinked. “What?”

“She’s still healing,” Newt said, gesturing vaguely with his spoon like he'd completely forgotten he’d seen her upside down on her forearms at dawn. “Maybe give her five bloody minutes to breathe before you drag her back into—”

Cass cut in before Minho could answer. “I appreciate the concern, Mom, but if I sit around much longer I’m gonna start chewing through the damn walls.”

A couple boys snorted into their breakfasts. Newt did not. He turned his head slowly and fixed her with a look that was all disapproval. Cass met his gaze head-on, and because she was apparently determined to make self-control difficult for him, the corner of her mouth twitched. His chest tightened. His whole stomach gave one ridiculous little drop. The urge to smile back at her had to be physically managed. He looked away first and rubbed at the back of his neck in a gesture that didn’t fool anyone who knew him.

That's when Alby joined the circle, suspiciously late for... reasons.

“Hey, man,” Cass said, tilting her head toward him. “Wanted to talk to you.”

He arched a brow. “Morning to you too.”

“Chuck told me you people usually sleep in the Homestead,” she said. “And last night you were anywhere but there. I mean, I get it, I’m objectively terrifying, but for the record, I can kill you in your sleep even if you’re not right next to me.”

Laughter cracked through the circle immediately. Even Alby chuckled, shaking his head as if he had expected exactly that sort of phrasing and still found himself unprepared for it in practice. They had all known this was coming the second they heard her and Chuck talking by the lake. “Thought you might need a bit of space,” Alby said, because he had genuinely thought that a freshly returned from hell girl maybe did not need twenty boys in the same room while she tried to sleep.

Cass pointed her spoon at him. “That’s real thoughtful, sacrificing the rest of so many for a single person’s 'fragile, rapidly deteriorating and space-needing mental health.'” She even did the air quotes. Then, more serious. “Imagine inviting someone to your place for the night and instead of getting them a spare blanket and showing them to your couch while you go sleep in your bedroom, you simply tell them 'Nah, it's cool, you can have all of it,' and leave the house to sleep outside. Your house.”

Gally snorted from where he sat. “I think she just wants to sleep with you.”

Cass turned, eyes finding Gally’s like she was lining up a shot, then her voice dropped lower and took on a teasing edge. “Maybe it’s you I wanna sleep with.” Thomas inhaled stew wrong and coughed into his fist. Minho made a strangled sound and had to put his bowl down before he spilled it over himself. Winston absolutely did spit into the dirt. Jeff choked on air. Clint’s brain blanked so hard he had to physically stop chewing for a second. Gally went red so fast it started at his neck and climbed all the way to the tips of his ears in one catastrophic sweep. He looked like his body had no protocol for surviving being flirted with. Cass laughed. Gally drew in breath to bark something back, something defensive, likely stupid, certainly loud, but Cass cut in first. “Look,” she said. “I’m sorry about rearranging your face yesterday.” That pulled the circle up short again. Her tone was serious now. “Even though you were an ass and deserved it.” she added, which made Minho choke on a laugh and Gally’s eyes flash with renewed offense. “But I get it. You’ve got all the reasons in the world to be paranoid.” She tipped her head slightly. “So how about a truce?” An actual offering. No mockery in it. No baiting. Gally stared at her, jaw tight, pride and suspicion and some less useful feelings all fighting for room in his face. He didn't say anything. Cass read the silence for exactly what it was and let it go. Okay. Message received. Keep being an ass, then.

The moment broke when Chuck came barreling in from the side at top speed, both hands cupped around something. “Cass! Look!” He skidded to a stop beside her and opened his palms. A tiny yellow fluff blinked up at her. Her whole face softened instantly. One second she was all measured social navigation, the next she was looking at a chick like the world still had things pure enough to make her forget the walls. “What’s his name?”

“Mr. Clucks,” Chuck announced proudly.

“Oh, very elegant,” she said, taking the chick carefully into her hands. Her fingers curved around the tiny thing with surprising gentleness. “I imagine him in a tux.” Then she glanced at Gally, dead serious. “And if you were to ask Gally, he’s also a spy sent by the people who built this place, just like me.” Gally, who had only just begun recovering circulation in his face, scowled at her.

Chuck’s mouth dropped open. “A SPY?”

“Yeah. Look at him.” Cass held the chick up a little and narrowed her eyes as if inspecting his criminal potential. The little chick made an offended peeping sound and tried to climb one of her fingers. “It’s all over his face. That bird is up to no good, kid. He’s gonna overthrow our country and then some. He’ll rule the world one day.” She glanced toward Frypan’s pots. “That is, if Frypan doesn’t save us from his tyranny.”

Chuck doubled over laughing, wheezing like his lungs were too small for his joy.

Minho smirked into his bowl. “Bet I could train an army of those to fight the Grievers. Death by pecking.”

Cass looked at him, eyes bright. “They wouldn’t know what hit them.”

Newt snorted. “Imagine you’re hunting people down in the Maze and then suddenly you’re surrounded by hundreds of little tuxedoed bastards.” He tipped his spoon in thought. “One climbs your leg, one goes for the eyes, one just judges you from a corridor while the rest close in.”

Thomas leaned forward. “We'd train them to be silent about it, too.”

Frypan stirred his pot and didn’t even look up. “Only if Winston feeds ’em. Otherwise they’d unionize and peck us first.”

Cass was laughing now, shoulders shaking, one hand still cradling Mr. Clucks as carefully as if the thing were made of breath and thread. Newt watched her over the rim of his bowl. She looked steadier today, less pulled apart by the internal static he’d seen in her the night before. He was glad.

When they were ready to go in, after bowls had been scraped clean and Frypan had barked at three separate boys for trying to leave without eating enough, it was Chuck who came barreling across the square with the backpacks. He had straps sliding off his shoulders, boots kicking up dirt as he ran. “Got your packs!” he puffed, holding one up toward Cass like he was presenting treasure excavated from a dragon’s nest. Cass took it and peeked inside. Canteen. Cloth. Strips of bread. A bandage roll. A tiny little survival sermon in canvas form. Her expression softened. “Thanks, kid. Lifesaver.” She reached out and ruffled his curls, and Chuck lit up so hard he looked like he might simply evaporate into joy, then he scampered off, knife from earlier still tucked at his waist like a badge of office. Newt watched him go, then looked sideways at Minho. He didn’t say it loudly. Didn’t need to. “I don’t like this.” Minho, tightening the strap across his chest, knew exactly who he meant. Cass was standing a few feet away adjusting her own pack. She looked steadier this morning, yes. Less pale, more anchored. Which did not change the fact that she had nearly bled out yesterday, survived a night in the Maze, and now apparently intended to stroll back into it as if it was no big. “You never like anything,” Minho muttered.

“That’s not true,” Newt said. “I like not sending half-healed girls into death corridors because they smiled at us until we stopped objecting.”

Minho smirked despite the knot already building in his gut. “She's not half-healed. She's a-little-more-than-half-healed.”

Newt gave him a look. “Comforting distinction.”

They gathered at the Door, packs on backs, laces checked. The stone entrance loomed there in the wall, sunlight pouring through the opening onto the packed dirt of the Glade and then vanishing into shadow farther in. Alby came up behind them. “Be careful out there,” he said. The words carried more weight than they would have on an ordinary morning. Everybody felt it. Minho gave Alby one short nod, then he turned to his Runners, pointing down the split. “Left,” toward Thomas and Ben. Then he turned again and his eyes landed on Cass. She didn’t need the gesture. Still gave him one short nod in acknowledgement.

The Doors swallowed them. One second sunlight spread warm across their backs, the next the air turned cooler, dust hanging in the shafts of light that cut down from above in long strips. Ahead, the corridors split and stretched and folded into their usual impossible promise of getting lost. They ran, side by side through the first corridor, boots striking stone in paired percussion. Cass knew right away why Minho had paired with her. He wanted answers. Wanted proof she wasn’t just spitballing shit about exits. “It’s too trial-and-error for my taste,” she said between breaths, feet pounding stone in rhythm with his. “You’re probably not gonna like it.”

“Hit me.” Minho said, breath controlled, eyes snapping to turns and markings. He had been waiting for this conversation.

She took a turn with him, shoulder barely missing the wall. “Those things have red lights in their tails,” she said. “Under the lights, there’s a section. I had 7C and then saw 4A in those two shits I fucked over. When I went to 7C, I saw this… tunnel in the wall. At the end, a blinking red light, same as their tails. And there was a slot.”

Minho’s eyes widened so hard he nearly missed a corner. “You’re not saying—”

“Told you you weren’t gonna like it.”

“That’s—”

“Only logical,” she cut in. “Everyone knows being trapped in here for the night is suicide, so nobody tries it. That’s why no exit’s been found. Because there isn’t one yet. It’s a puzzle that makes one on the spot. So if that tail really goes into that slot like I imagined it should, we might get something. Or...” she gave a breathless laugh, “it might be a trap and we all die.”

Minho’s mind was racing faster than his legs now. A dynamic exit system. Every run he’d ever made and every rule he’d ever learned were rearranging themselves around what she was saying. Not breaking apart exactly. Reframing. Like the Maze had always been one move ahead because nobody had ever stood in the right place to see the move it was making. Then one detail slammed into place for him. “Was this tunnel… perfectly round? Pitch black?”

“Yeah, why?”

He swore under his breath. “That’s where Grievers come from.”

Cass let out a long exhale through her nose. “Awesome turn of events.” She glanced sideways at him, mouth twitching. “Love that for us.”

They cut another turn, both their heads spinning faster than their feet.

“But that would mean...” Minho started.

She finished it for him. “I can stay another night. Go try it. See if it works. Time things so I know the exact—”

“What if it’s a one-time shot?” Minho snapped, fear spiking because the idea of her staying the night again made his stomach twist. “What if you open it, it stays open for a minute and then closes forever? Or more Grievers pour out and it’s a trap?” He shook his head hard. “You ain’t doing that. We’ll figure something out.”

Cass’s eyes flicked to him. Surprise, then amusement at the fact that he was trying to protect her from herself as if they weren't merely strangers suffering together. Minho noticed the look and decided with great wisdom not to unpack any of that while running through a kill maze.

They kept moving. Mapping with their feet. Letting the corridors and air shifts and tiny changes in stone talk to them. After a while, Minho spoke again. The question had been scratching at him all morning. “You remember where you killed that thing?”

“It ain’t there anymore,” she said. “I went to that place afterwards and only found blood on the floor. The Maze shifted overnight too...but I think I might be able to figure out where it could have moved if you wanna—”

“Take me.” Minho said immediately.

Cass nodded once and changed direction so smoothly it was like she’d been waiting for him to ask. Thirty minutes later she slowed and raised a hand. “There.”

Minho skidded to a halt, eyes going wide. Black splatter scarred the wall in a wide fan, thick and dried. The floor was sticky with it where it had pooled and clotted between the grit. Bits of tissue or something like tissue had fused to the dirt and stone in little dark clumps. He crouched without even meaning to, fingers hovering over the splatter. Holy shit. Tangible. Real. Proof. That. She. Is. An. Absolute. Fucking. Legend. The Maze itself testifying on her behalf. Griever death. With texture. With color. With visible aftermath. “The other one?” he breathed.

Cass nodded and was already moving.

They ran again. Longer this time. Deeper. Another hour through turns and corridors and sections Minho knew poorly enough to resent and Cass seemed to track by internal compass and bastard instinct alone. The light shifted overhead as the sun climbed. Heat gathered in the stone. The air went drier. Their shirts stuck between shoulder blades. Ben and Thomas crossed their route once in the distance and called something about clearing a side branch before vanishing again. When they reached the second, Cass pointed at the wall with a grim little grin. “My stomach lining is there!” Minho shook his head. “Damn, you really were busy.” This one was worse. More violent. The splatter reached higher. Black streaks painted the wall and pooled thick along the edge where the corridor bent. A jagged shard of metal was twisted into the dirt as if the thing had exploded inward on itself. The goo pooled like tar in the little uneven pockets of stone. Even the air felt wrong around it, carrying some weird burn smell that made the back of Minho’s throat tighten. He crouched again and picked up the metal shard. It was heavier than it looked. The edge was bent and slick with dried black residue. “You actually fucking did that.” Cass shrugged, baffled he was still phrasing it like a revelation. “Yeah. You thought I said it to mess with you?”

Minho stared up at her. “It’s just…” He ran out of better language. “It’s insane.”

They kept moving after that, searching for the tail she’d dropped. Hours passed in measured bursts of running, scanning, doubling back, arguing quietly about where shifting might have dragged debris and what sections corresponded to which routes. Cass occasionally stopped dead and looked around, then she’d point them another way. Minho followed because what else was he supposed to do? Distrust the woman currently rewriting his understanding of reality AND proving herself right about everything every twenty minutes? They found nothing. No tail. Just corridors, dry wind threading through narrow turns, and that slow afternoon thickening that always started to creep into the Maze a few hours before the Doors closed. It wasn’t a sound exactly. More a pressure. A hum under everything. Like the whole place had begun thinking about night and wanted them to know it. Minho felt his instincts tighten around that change. Time pressed differently after noon. Every Runner knew it. The Maze always seemed to lean in closer then. Meanwhile, Cass was thinking about staying. Just to check. To see if the slot fit. Not to use it, just to... confirm her theory. Like that would settle the buzzing in her skull for one blessed second.

“RUN!”

Ben and Thomas tore around the corner, eyes wild, shirts soaked through, panic coming off them in sheets. Behind them—

The scrape of metal legs. A screech that split the air like bone breaking.

Griever.

Minho’s stomach dropped so hard it felt like stepping off a cliff. His body moved before his mind finished catching up. “Fuck! GO! GO!” he bellowed.

They sprinted. There was no thought in the first seconds. Just speed. Corners whipping by. Stone underfoot striking too hard. The Griever’s screech ricocheting through the passage until it felt like it was inside his teeth. Minho tried to orient them, tried to place the section by wall cracks and intersections and that particular set of ivy scars on the left, but panic surged too fast and this was not one of his strong routes. He didn’t have to call the uncertainty.

“THIS WAY!” Cass screamed, bolting ahead.

Minho followed without hesitation, because he’d seen enough to know that yes, whatever the fuck she said, follow that. Thomas and Ben hit the turn with them. The Griever screamed again behind, close enough now that Minho heard the metallic clatter of its limbs against stone even closer and knew exactly how little ground existed between them and being ripped open, or worse, stung. They tore through one corridor, another, then a narrowing passage where the walls seemed to squeeze in close enough to scrape shoulders if you weren’t careful. Then Ben tripped. One stupid edge of uneven stone, and he went down hard to one knee with a shout that cracked into a real scream when momentum took the rest of him with it. Thomas and Minho shot three strides farther before the sound and instinct together yanked them around. Cass had already turned. She didn’t think of it. Didn’t weigh it. It was wiring. The Griever lunged. Its tail came down in a gleaming jab, driving for Ben where he was scrambling in the dirt. Cass ducked under it. She dropped under the arc of the tail, breath ripping out of her chest, one hand scraping the floor for balance. And from that impossible angle, she saw it—A blue crystal thing embedded in its stomach. Glowing. Not large, but bright enough to catch immediately once she saw it. A cold inner light under membranes and mechanical ribs, half shielded by the thing’s motion. Something important. Something vulnerable. The sort of design flaw only luck ever gets you to notice up close. Ben was still scrambling backward, crying now, knife out in one fist. The Griever’s tail twitched, reset, ready to drive down again and pierce him. Cass grabbed the nearest rock and slammed it into the crystal. Hard. The sound that came out of the Griever was not a screech so much as a system failure given lungs. Its whole body convulsed, limbs jerking wildly, the tail spasming sideways instead of down. “SOMETHING SHARPER???” she screamed. Ben’s hand shot out, tossing her his knife. She caught it, pivoted, came up under the Griever’s body and rammed the blade straight into the seam around the crystal. The thing went berserk. Metal legs flailed. One slammed into her side hard enough to launch her off her feet. She hit stone, all air driven from her in one blow, but was moving again before the pain had even finished arriving. The crystal had cracked. Blue light spiderwebbed through it in shattered veins. Thomas came back just in time to see her climb onto the thrashing monster. The whole scene looked unreal: Cass on top of a Griever, knife raised, black blood already spraying up her arms and across her face in wet ugly streaks. Then she drove the blade down again. And again. And again. Into its head. Into seams. Into whatever would give. Sparks burst. Screeches turned ragged. Metal ground. Black blood sprayed across her cheek, dripping down her jaw and soaking her shirt. The Griever bucked and slammed and shrieked, but she did not stop. Her arm kept at it. She was somewhere else entirely.

Then the tail moved. It whipped behind her with a violent snap, the stinger gleaming wet and sharp, driving for the exposed line of her back like it wanted the last word.

“CASS!”

Thomas’s voice tore itself raw on it, his legs sprinting before his brain could catch up. He lunged and got both hands around the tail just under the stinger as it drove down. The force of it yanked him sideways so hard his boots left the ground for half a beat. Pain shot through his palms where metal edges bit skin. His whole body slammed left, then right, spine rattling as he held on with everything he had and the dead thing’s final convulsion dragged him across the dirt.

Cass froze mid-stab, knife buried to the hilt in the Griever’s head, chest heaving so hard she thought her ribs would split. She tried to pull air into her lungs but it wouldn’t come, tried to still her trembling hands but they wouldn’t listen. Ben sat collapsed against the wall, tears streaking through the dust on his face, sobbing openly now because adrenaline had turned to aftermath and his body did not know what to do with it. Thomas let go of the tail in one jerking motion and stumbled back, both hands trembling, one palm curled around something sharp he’d ripped loose from the creature in the struggle. A shard. Blue and glasslike. Griever stomach.

Cass slid off the body. The motion looked wrong, disconnected, as if she had to remember step by step that she was inhabiting a human form and that it was meant to stand on the ground instead of kneel over enemies until they became pieces. Her boots hit stone. She swayed once. Her face was streaked black. Her eyes locked on the still-twitching tail in the dirt. She was going to take it. Going to prove her theory right here and now. Going to jam it into that slot and see if the Maze flinched.

That's exactly when the walls groaned. Deep. Close. The sound rolled through the corridors like the voice of something huge clearing its throat. The Maze was closing for the night. Minho saw where her eyes were fixed, closed the distance in two strides and grabbed her wrist before she could do something stupid. “No time.” She blinked at him like she had forgotten he was there. Forgotten all of them, maybe. Forgotten everything except the need to finish what she’d started. But Minho didn’t let go. His grip was iron, the kind of hold that said: I’m not losing you to this place. Not to curiosity. Not to rage. He yanked her forward and forced her to run.

By the time they burst out the Doors, the Glade was already in chaos. The walls had started to move before they reached the threshold, and that sent panic ricocheting through the square. Everybody had been waiting, watching, listening for their voices, praying they made it out in time, so when the four of them came tearing out of the Maze half a breath ahead of the closing slabs, the whole Glade erupted. Shouts rose immediately, overlapping, incoherent, boys calling names and swearing. The walls slammed shut behind them with a groan, and for one brutal second it felt like the Maze itself had spat them back out only because it wasn’t finished laughing. Cass’s legs gave out the instant the last slab sealed. She stumbled forward, dropped hard to her knees in the grass, and caught herself with both hands planted in the dirt. Her palms sank into the ground. Her lungs burned like she’d swallowed fire. Her ribs screamed every time she dragged air in. Minho collapsed beside her, bent double and wheezing like he had personally outrun the devil and found the devil annoyingly fast. His chest heaved so violently it looked painful. Sweat ran down the sides of his face. Dust streaked his shins. He had enough air for disbelief and not much else. Thomas hit the ground too, though less from exhaustion than from everything else hitting him all at once now that motion had stopped. He half-fell, half-dropped into a crouch that turned into kneeling, chest dragging for breath, hands shaking so hard it looked like his body still thought it was wrestling that Griever tail and hadn’t yet gotten the message that the fight was over. One palm was sliced and raw from the metal, dirt and blood ground deep into the lines of it. His whole nervous system looked lit up wrong. Ben just crumpled where the grass began and folded in on himself, sobbing so hard he could barely drag words through it. Cass was...she was a sight. Black blood slicked her from head to toe. It was everywhere, sprayed and smeared and dripping. In her hair. Across her jaw. Down her throat. Soaking her shirt. Splashed across her arms. Running in ugly dark trails over her hands and the knife hilt and the backs of her wrists. It fell from her in slow heavy drops into the grass, leaving a little trail of black wet marks between where she’d stumbled and where she’d fallen. Thomas was streaked too, though not like her. Black blood spattered his shirt and forearms, dirt ground into his knees, hands trembling as he opened one palm and held up a metal chunk and the blue crystal shard.

Newt was on them instantly. He dropped to his knees beside Thomas first because he was the closest. “Are you stung?” he demanded. His hand was already on Thomas’s arm before the question fully left his mouth, eyes darting over exposed skin, the torn palm, the scrapes, the fabric darkened by sweat and black blood, then his gaze snapped to Minho, then Ben, then Cass, looking for the one thing none of them could afford. “Any of you stung?” And then his eyes landed fully on Cass. For one sick, terrifying second, his brain did what brains do when confronted by too much blood at once: it refused to distinguish between on her and from her. He saw the black slick all over her face and throat and hands, saw the dark wetness across her shirt, and every possible worst-case scenario hit him in a single violent rush.

“She—” Minho tried, then bent farther over and let out something that was half-laugh, half-wheeze, all disbelief. “This crazy bitch just killed a fucking Griever.”

Thomas tried to speak too. It came out broken around his own breathing. “She—she smashed—” He held the shard up higher, as if the object itself might do the explaining his mouth couldn’t. “She—”

“Bloody hell,” Newt breathed, eyes flicking from the shard to Cass’s bloodied face.

Bloody hell indeed.

All around them the Gladers started pressing in despite Alby barking at them to back up and give them room. Faces pale. Mouths hanging open. Eyes skipping from Cass to the shard to Ben’s sobbing collapse to Thomas’s hand to the black blood still dripping into the grass. “Did it sting anyone?” “What happened in there?” “What's that?” “What do you mean?”

The noise swelled. Everyone talked over everyone else, words stacking until meaning got buried under volume. Cass didn’t hear any of it. She was staring at her trembling hands, at the blood dripping from the knife she still hadn’t let go of. Her ears were ringing. The grass under her knees felt unreal. Thomas crouched in front of her. He had no idea what to do with his own body right then, let alone hers, but some part of him knew her face had gone too far away. His voice came gentler than his shaking hands. “Cass—hey.” Nothing. Her eyes stayed down on the blood. Newt reached her a second later, one hand settling on her shoulder. She flinched like he’d burned her, eyes snapping up to his. Newt held her gaze. “You’re okay,” he said, voice dropping low. “Just breathe, yeah? In and out.” He demonstrated it because he knew enough about shock and the way terror took the body hostage not to trust language alone. Slow breath in. Slower out. Cass mirrored him. Shaky first. Ragged. Her inhale catching halfway like her ribs wanted to fight him for it. Then again. And again. The tremble in her shoulders eased a fraction. “Better?” Newt asked.

Her jaw clenched, but she nodded.

She hadn’t even straightened up properly when Ben stumbled forward and threw his arms around her, sobbing into her shoulder. “You—” he choked out. “You—” There was a thank you somewhere in there.

She peeled Ben off of her, pushed to her feet in one abrupt motion and was already walking away before the circle around her even registered she’d stood up. “Cass, wait!” Minho called after her, stumbling to catch up. She didn’t. Didn’t even look back. “I need to get this shit off me,” she threw over one shoulder. “We’ll talk later.” Minho halted after three strides, letting her go because the force of her don’t hit him hard even from there. The whole Glade was behind him asking questions, and all he wanted in that second was to go after her and make sure she didn’t break.

Newt did not seem to give a single fuck about the force of her don't. The force of his do was way stronger. His feet carried him after her before the thought of should I? existed. He recognized the particular way she was leaving, too fast, too rigid, too full of something that would turn inward if left alone with no place to go, and by the time his mind caught up, he was already following the line of black drops she’d left in the grass. He found her in the lake. The contrast of it hit him so hard he actually stopped at the edge for a moment. This morning the lake had looked like some soft impossible dream. Mist and silver water and early light and her body moving like the world had briefly become kind. The same place, same water, same strip of reeds at the edge, same stretch of sky above the walls, and yet now the image made him sick. She stood there completely still, fully clothed, thigh-deep in the water and trembling so hard the surface rippled around her legs. The black blood was coming off in dark ribbons, clouding the water near her knees and then drifting out. She was staring at the wall like she could will it to split and show her the throats of the people who had built this whole nightmare.

“Cass?” Newt said quietly.

She didn’t turn.

He stepped closer over the damp bank, mud sucking lightly at his boots. “Cass—”

“They’re dead,” she hissed, voice shaking with it. “Every last one of them. Whoever did this to you. Whoever thought they could play God, make monsters and fuck kids up like this—” Her breath hitched hard enough to cut the sentence in half. “They’re fucking dead. I’ll burn them alive. I'll—” Her voice shattered into sobs because her body had to get it all out somehow. It was one of the rawest things Newt had ever seen. It wasn’t fear for herself spilling out. It was fury on behalf of everyone else. Fury for boys she’d met yesterday. Fury for Chuck and Ben and Thomas and all the dead that she never got to know. Newt reached her in two strides and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her tight against his chest. The cold water stabbed through his boots and straight up his legs like punishment. Black blood smeared across his shirt, soaked into his sleeves and pressed cold and sticky between them. Cass clutched his shirt in both fists, sobbing into him with so much fury it would’ve been terrifying if it wasn’t aimed at the right target. “I’LL FUCKING KILL THEM!” she cried. “I’LL KILL THEM—CHUCK IS JUST A KID! CHUCK IS—” She broke hard on that one. “HOW CAN YOU BE SO FUCKING—” Cruel, probably. The word drowned before it fully formed.

Newt’s hand moved up into her hair. He stroked it back from the nape of her neck, fingers catching in strands matted with water and black blood, and pressed his chin to the crown of her head like he could shield her from the whole world by holding on hard enough. “It’s okay,” he whispered. Over and over. “It’s okay. We’re okay. You’re here. You’re safe. We’re here.” He had already liked her. Admired her. Been drawn to her in all the inconvenient ways every fool in the Glade seemed to be drawn to her. But this was something else. This was the center of her. Not the beauty, not the competence, not the brilliance. This. The heart. The image breaking her open wasn’t her own life in danger, but Chuck being young in a place like this. Ben's sobbing. The awful idea of kids being dropped into an engineered hell and told to survive. Newt held her even tighter. The shaking slowly ebbed, easing from violent convulsion into smaller tremors. Her sobs hitched and thinned into those awful little breaths the body takes when the emotion is still there but the force of it has burned low enough to leave you wrung out. When the worst of it had passed, he shifted to look at her and pushed wet hair back from her face. “Alright,” he murmured, thumb brushing over a black stain on her cheek. “Let’s get this off you before you freeze.” He crouched in the water, scooped it in both hands, and started washing her hair as quickly and gently as he could manage. Cold water ran through his fingers. The black diluted and streamed away, breaking apart across the lake’s surface. Cass didn’t flinch. Didn’t even seem particularly aware of the cold beyond the shiver running through her every now and then. She leaned into his hands instead, just enough to completely fucking melt his heart and all his defenses along with it. When he finished rinsing her hair, he straightened and offered his hand. “Come on.” Her fingers were cold and still shaking, but they closed around his. He helped her out of the water, boots squelching in the mud at the edge, and walked her to the Homestead at a pace that asked nothing more of her than the next step. When they got there, he set everything in order. Dry shirt. Dry pants. The softest blankets they had, opened enough that she wouldn’t have to fumble. “Warm up,” he said, turning to leave. “We’ll be waiting for you at the Pit if you feel like coming. No pressure.”

Around the pit the boys were all a little too animated, voices climbing over one another, words tripping in their rush to retell and reinterpret what had happened out there. The boys were louder tonight because hope had a pulse again. Because the Maze looked fractionally less immortal. Gally, for his part, was pulling jars of moonshine from wherever the hell Gally kept his moonshine like his life depended on it. Newt dropped down beside Ben on one of the lower logs. The guy looked wrecked. Pale in that ugly papery way, blotchy-faced from crying, eyes too wide, too bright, too unfocused. He kept glancing around like he was surrounded by strangers. “You okay?” Newt asked. He knew he wasn’t, but his question wasn’t really about getting a truthful yes or no. It was an opening. A way of letting Ben decide whether he wanted to talk or not. Ben shook his head, then nodded, then shook it again. He swallowed hard and stared into the fire long enough that Newt thought maybe that was all he had in him. Then the words came out in pieces. “I wanted to thank her,” he said. His voice sounded thin, scraped hollow. “She saved my life. She should’ve left—she almost died.” His mouth pulled wrong around the memory. “I think I upset her. She pushed me off like I upset her—”

Newt sighed through his nose and looked down into the fire. “She’s not upset with you, mate.” Ben blinked at him. Newt watched one of the logs settle inward with a hiss of sparks and searched for the best way to put it into words. “There are people who help because they like being perceived as heroes, because they like being needed and thanked and showered with praise afterwards.” He said at last. “Then there are people who do it because it's in their bones. Because doing what's right matters more than anything. So acting like they've done some grand heroic act feels wrong to them, like you’re clapping because they remembered to breathe.” Ben still looked like he was only catching every third word. The poor boy still looked like he was trying to reassemble himself around the fact of almost dying. Gratitude had probably been the only thing in his hands to offer, and having it not land neatly had wounded him almost as much as the terror. Newt kept going. “Take Alby for example,” he said and nodded toward the far edge of the fire where Alby stood with his arms folded, pretending he wasn’t listening to every conversation at once. “You thank him for doing something and he looks like you’ve insulted his boots.” Newt’s mouth twitched. “Because in his head it was never optional. It’s just his job. Hold the place together. Keep people alive. Carry what needs carrying.” That's when Ben nodded, looking like Newt’s words finally made it through the static. Good. Newt clapped one hand briefly against the back of his shoulder, then got up and made his way toward Frypan for food, letting the noise of the Glade wash over him as he crossed back through it. Minho had ended up in the middle of one cluster near the fire, surrounded by boys, now priest to the Church of Cass. He was trying to explain what had happened and the truth still sounded made up every time it left his mouth. His hands kept sketching the thing in the air, because Minho, when keyed up enough, started speaking with his whole body. Frypan handed Newt a bowl without even looking up from his pot. Newt murmured thanks and took it, trying to listen to Minho's sermon, but his thoughts kept dragging him back to the lake. Back to the cold water around his boots and the trembling in her hands. He could still feel the shape of her against him. The way her hair had felt under his hand when he’d pushed it back from her face—What the hell was wrong with him? He’d known her two days. Two. That was nothing. Less than nothing. Time enough for a Greenie to learn where not to piss and what time Frypan yelled for food. Not enough to be thinking about the feel of her hair under his hand or the shape of her leaning into him. And yet... She’d known them two days. She’d known Ben two days and had thrown herself between him and a Griever without thinking. How was time supposed to behave normally around her? How was Newt supposed to behave normally around her? He looked toward the Homestead without meaning to, then immediately looked back at the fire and told himself to get a bloody grip.

When Cass finally walked to the Pit, the whole Glade started cheering, boys turning from the fire and the food and the half-dozen ongoing arguments to look at her as she came down from the Homestead. The noise rose quick and messy. A few whistles, a few whoops, somebody yelling, “There she is, our Griever killer!” as if they’d just watched a gladiator come back from a match and not a girl who’d had a breakdown in a freezing lake earlier because the cruelty of the world had hit her hard. Their relief was all over it. Relief and awe and the kind of stupid, unfiltered pride people feel when one of their own does something impossible and comes back breathing. The Pit, already loud, swelled around her. Firelight jumped across faces gone bright with it, across bowls lifted mid-bite, across jars of moonshine flashing in raised hands. Cass ignored the chorus completely. She crossed straight through the noise like she had a destination in mind and no intention of getting derailed by their hero worship, went directly to the log where Ben was sitting, and dropped down beside him. Ben startled. Not because he didn’t want her there—God, no—but because he clearly hadn’t expected the first thing she’d do after returning was come to him. Cass set one hand on his shoulder. “Hey, man,” she said. “Sorry about being a bitch earlier.” An exhale. “I was pissed, and I didn’t want you to be…” She made a vague little gesture with her free hand, searching for the word and landing on the one that felt right enough. “Collateral.” A beat passed, then she jerked her chin toward the Maze, toward the black shape of the walls beyond the firelight. “And about that thing—” She smiled. “You’d have done the same for me, so no more yapping about it,” she said. “Okay?” Ben nodded, then he exhaled all in one rush, relief visibly leaving him in pieces, like the whole evening he’d been bracing for a completely different outcome. Instead she had sat down beside him and handed him the clean brutal math of we protect our own and then shut up about it before it turns weird. He pushed a bowl of food into her hands, nearly dropping it in his eagerness to do something, anything, with the gratitude still crowding his throat. Cass stared at the bowl. Her stomach was tied too tight for hunger to get through cleanly. “Not hungry.” But she didn’t hand it back. She kept it in her lap, fingers curled around the warm rim, because accepting the gesture mattered. Ben’s shoulders loosened another fraction. Across the fire, Newt watched the exchange and lifted his eyes to Ben’s for one short second. Didn’t smile. Didn’t need to. The look said enough on its own. “See? Told you.” Ben gave him a small nod, still a bit dazed from the whole thing.

Newt watched her drift away from Ben then, because she had apparently decided that was enough emotional intimacy for the next several hours. She moved around the fire until she reached Minho, because Minho had been itching to talk to her since the Maze, and she’d cut him off to wash. “You were saying...?” Minho looked at her, then, in a move so immediate and unguarded it stole the breath from half the circle, he just folded her into a hug. One clean motion, like his body had gotten tired of waiting for his brain to pick a socially acceptable sentence and taken charge itself. His arms came around her shoulders and back and he pulled her in close. Cass froze for a second, then her arms came up too, tightening around him. He felt a strange, hot pressure bubble up in his chest at the simple fact of holding her there. He wanted to hold her longer. Instead he laughed once, quiet and disbelieving against her hair. “You are fucking crazy,” he said. The sentence came out threaded through a chuckle. “And I’m sorry I suspected you or made you prove it like—” He reached for an insult. “Sorry I was a dick and questioned your honesty. Even if I only did it in my mind.” He pulled back just enough to look at her. “I know you know, so… yeah. Sorry.” That got a laugh out of a few boys. Because yes, Minho absolutely looked like the kind of man who had conducted entire suspicious little courtroom dramas in his head. The fact that he was apologizing for thoughts she had never even heard was so fucking him.

Cass leaned back from Minho with her hands still resting briefly on his arms, then let them drop and said, “I need a drink.”

Minho grinned like the sun came out. “GALLY! YOU HEARD THE GIRL!”

Gally, who had a jar halfway to his mouth, froze like he’d just been personally addressed by God and wasn’t sure whether to look honored or suspicious. The jar got to Cass almost immediately. Somebody passed it. Somebody else nearly dropped it in the transfer because too many eyes were on her. Cass took it without ceremony and tipped it back. The firelight caught on the jar as she lifted it, on the line of her throat when she swallowed, on the tiny shine of it left at the corner of her mouth when she brought it down. She drank like her mind had one command now—please stop spinning for five minutes—and this was the best way to make that happen.

Thomas noticed she was shivering so he disappeared into the Homestead without announcing it and came back a minute later with a blanket folded over one arm. Worn but soft, one of the better ones. He stepped up beside her and tucked it around her shoulders with a care that was almost endearing, trying not to touch more of her than necessary and absolutely failing to keep the tenderness from showing in the way he draped it. Cass glanced up at him. “What a gentleman,” she said, tilting her head with a grin. Thomas went red immediately. Full visible bloom of heat up his throat and into his face. He mumbled something that might have been “it's cold” and backed off half a step before his own nerves made him trip over himself.

Minho, not to be outdone, slid one arm around her waist over the blanket and pulled her a little closer against his side. The move was shamelessly possessive in appearance and entirely, maddeningly easy in execution. “Now that’s a gentleman,” he announced. Nobody laughed. They were all fixed on the sight. Cass leaning into Minho’s side by simple adjustment and gravity. Minho’s hand spread against the line of her waist. Newt watched it all and felt an odd, slow pressure build in his chest. He squashed it down with logic. Jealousy is stupid, he told himself. You can’t be jealous. You don’t get to claim people. She’s not a prize. She hugged Minho because he needed it. She's leaning into him because she's too wrung out to argue. Grow up. Still, every time Minho’s hand edged even slightly over the curve of Cass’s hip, Newt’s stomach flipped. The callous part of him wanted to go over and push Minho off with a foot to the shoulder, and plant himself exactly where he was. The sensible part of him made a face and folded his arms. Deal with it. But then he looked around and saw the same stares on half the pit. Thomas, Gally, Frypan, hell, even Alby. Yeah. They were all screwed.

Gally had a better way to get her out of that position, even if he'd never admit it to anyone that it's the reason he'd said it. “If you need a warm-up,” he said, leaning forward with that shit-eating grin of his, “you can try to outdrink me.” He tipped his jar slightly in her direction. “That is, if you ain’t a pussy,” he said, tossing yesterday's words back at her.

Cass scoffed. “Could do that in my sleep.”

Gally leaned in farther. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Prove it then.”

“Bring it on.”

Everyone cheered. Frypan clapped his hands together so hard it sounded like a starter pistol. “Ohhh, this I gotta see.” “Gally’s winning it,” Winston shouted immediately, already slapping his palm against Zart’s. “You’re mad,” Zart shot back. “Have you seen her last night? Took a sip like it was water!” “Or,” Jeff piped up, “they’ll both get shitfaced and end up hugging it out. Moonshine brings people together, folks.” “Or we’ll have another fight before sunrise,” Clint muttered, exhausted in advance. “Either way,” Minho said, “I’m getting front row seats. Miss Griever killer versus our biggest jerk.” Cass just smirked at Gally across the fire. He smirked right back. But under the joking and betting and laughter, every one of the boys present was having some version of the same thought. She was gonna get drunk. The idea sank into the pit and spread through it in warm humiliating little waves. Not because they meant anything ugly by it, but because they were twenty kinds of emotionally damaged and the thought of her drunk did things to the imagination. Glassy eyes. Flushed cheeks. Softness. Maybe she’d say something stupid. Maybe something honest. Maybe she’d let slip what she thought of them when her guard dropped. Maybe she’d laugh too hard and tip into someone else's shoulder and just stay there. None of them had any real memories of parties or girls or what drunk affection was supposed to look like, but their minds filled in blanks with the sort of feverish hopeful stupidity available only to people who had been deprived too long and too thoroughly. Maybe she’d even lean in and kiss someone. I mean, they formed attachments quickly here in the Glade. Fear and lack of memories did that to a person. They all became family in no time, and she clearly fit right into that pattern. She saved Ben’s life like she hadn't met him yesterday. One near-death experience and now she's leaning against Minho like they've known eachother forever. So her kissing one of them was on the table, right?...Right?

Cass and Gally lifted jars at the same time. Minho tightened his arm around her when she shivered again without a thought. Cass didn’t seem to read anything into it beyond simple warmth. Friendly contact. Nothing more. Which was probably for the best, because Minho’s brain had already skidded several exits past reason. Somewhere in the chaos of the last twenty-four hours he had apparently begun developing future retirement plans and way too many domestic fantasies. If left unchecked for another ten minutes he might have started wondering whether she’d like to get a dog after they're out of here and moved in together in their own house, and if naming it Maze would be funny or deeply cursed. A loose strand of her blonde hair slipped across her face exactly on that thought. Minho reached up and tucked it behind her ear before he could stop himself. Cass’s eyes lifted to his. The noise around the pit went fuzzy. Fire crackled and popped. Somebody laughed at something on the far side of the circle and it sounded like it was happening in another county. Minho’s stomach flipped hard enough that for one insane, glorious second it felt like the ground itself had tilted under him. He dipped his gaze to her lips without meaning to. He was gonna—

“Gally’s getting ahead.” Newt and Thomas both said right in that moment. The sync was so perfect it would have been funny if Minho hadn’t wanted to murder them for the interruption. Cass blinked, broke the stare, and tipped the jar again with a tiny huff of laughter like she had no idea how close half the Glade had just come to emotional collapse. Minho shot daggers at both of them. They only shrugged at him with smug little smiles. Bastards.

Across from them, Gally leaned back and squinted at Cass through the firelight. His face was more open than he’d probably intended, the moonshine-induced flush sitting high under his bruised nose, his blue eyes narrowed with suspicion. “They taught you how to kill Grievers, huh.”

Cass lowered the jar from her mouth and exhaled through her nose. “This again? You fucking serious?”

“Nah,” he said. “Just kidding. You get a pass ’cause you killed one of ’em today.” He jabbed the jar vaguely in her direction. “But that don’t mean we’re friends.”

She scoffed. “Like I'd wanna be friends with you.” Then, tilting her head, “Like anyone'd wanna be friends with you.”

His eyes snapped up so fast it was almost comical. He looked genuinely offended. “And why wouldn't someone wanna be friends with me?”

“You're trying too hard to pretend you're something you're not, that's why.” Gally’s mouth opened, but she kept going before he could jump in. “Every sentence out of your mouth comes with either a challenge or a shove in it, but that ain't actually you, is it?” She pointed vaguely at him. “You’re reliable, and loyal, and competent, and you care way too damn much to ever be the kind of person you’re trying to sound like.” She wasn’t just dragging him open. She was saying she saw the good in him clearly enough to call the rest of it performance. “You're afraid of losing them. Of letting them down.” A few boys glanced at each other. Because yes. That was… yes. Gally’s jaw tightened. Cass didn’t stop. “So you make yourself the asshole, you throw your shoulders back, get mean, pick fights before people can even think about whether they actually disagree with you, because you don't care how they see you as long as they're safe.” She clicked her tongue. “You look up to Alby because he doesn’t have to do any of that.” Her eyes flicked toward Alby for one beat, then back. “He doesn’t need the extra volume. He doesn’t need to turn every disagreement into a damn border dispute for people to listen to him.” Alby went very still. Gally’s stare sharpened to a blade. Cass leaned forward a little, elbows on her knees now, voice still maddeningly level. “Neither do you. You live under the impression that you do, but you don't. They'd all still listen even without the cheap asshole act. Who knows, maybe even more.” She shrugged one shoulder. “But I guess that’s something you’ll have to figure out on your own.”

The pit sat in stunned silence. Every boy around that fire looked somewhere between scandalized and fascinated. She had just laid Gally open with the calmest damn tone imaginable, peeled apart his entire personality like she was solving a puzzle, and somehow in the middle of it had handed him a rough brutal little bundle of praise too. Reliable. Loyal. Competent. She’d insulted him and complimented him in the same breath. Gally stared at her as if language had become unreliable, then he said, with all the wounded outrage he could gather back into one shape, “You come here a few days ago and think you know shit?”

Cass didn’t even blink. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

That did it. He got up off the log, muscles tight in his arms and shoulders, jaw set hard enough to crack teeth. Alby shifted immediately, ready to step between them if this turned into another physical disaster. Cass dropped the blanket off her shoulders and stood up too. “How about a real challenge then?” she said. “If I win, you drop the dick act for good. You start acting like a man, not a fucking child.” That got noise. Sharp involuntary noise. Gally’s eyes narrowed. “And if I win,” he said, voice dropping lower too, something hot and reckless waking up in him under the insult, “you’ll be all sweet and honey to me from now on. Since I’m so… awful and disgusting to be friends with.”

Cass held out her hand immediately.

He clasped it.

The pit exploded. “HOLY SHIT!” “LET’S GO!” “That’s what I’m talking about!” The shouting and jeering hit all at once, boys surging up off their logs, slapping shoulders, howling like they’d just been granted the exact right kind of public entertainment after a day that had gone far too close to death. Nobody in their right mind would have wanted to lose this. Not with Gally and Cass staring each other down over a handshake like two natural disasters discovering they had compatible schedules.

Newt just leaned back, smirk tugging his lips. Oh, she was good. Hook, line and sinker. If she won, Gally had to drop the act, had to quit trying to be the loudest bastard alive and start behaving like the man she had just accused him, almost kindly, of already being under all the nonsense. And if he won? Then she’d be sweet to him. Which, judging by the color still lingering up his neck and the way her flirting had scrambled his entire internal operating system earlier today, would probably destroy him faster than any insult ever could. Either way, she would force him out of his usual shape. Either way, she’d break his habit of being a dick. Alby’s lips twitched. He glanced over at Newt and saw the exact same realization there. “Smart girl,” Alby muttered.

“She is, ain’t she?” Newt murmured, not bothering to hide the warmth in his voice from Alby. He wasn’t ashamed of admiring her, no, not in the slightest. What he was ashamed of, though, were the other things his body kept doing in her orbit, the stupid treachery of blood and breath and eyes and thoughts that wandered too far when she smiled a certain way or held eye contact half a second too long. All things that, sadly for Newt, were as obvious as the trees were green. He could only count on Alby’s... discretion on the matter.

“What counts as winning, anyway?” Frypan called over the noise (and Newt's thoughts).

Cass never looked away from Gally. “If you don’t throw up your guts or pass out.”

Gally tipped his chin, jar already to his lips again. “Then I’ll see you in the morning.”

“After I absolutely humiliate you,” she shot back, lifting hers. “Sure.”

They drank, and then they kept drinking. The first few rounds still looked like strategy. Gally matched her evenly, eyes narrowed over the rim of his jar like this was some sacred test of pride and liver. Cass gave him nothing. No cough, no flinch, no watery-eyed surrender, just that same dangerous calm while she took each pull and handed the challenge back with a stare. The boys around them fed off it shamelessly. Bets got made and remade. Winston loudly switched sides twice in under ten minutes and still insisted he’d been tactically consistent. Jeff began taking “medical odds” nobody had asked for. Clint muttered that they were all going to regret this and somehow never left the circle anyway. Chuck kept inching closer and getting yanked back by Frypan. They were both flushed and laughing at the idiots around them in no time. They also both stopped trusting their legs, so they dropped back onto the same log, shoulder to shoulder and still drinking. At some point later in the night, after the stars started twinkling over the walls, Gally leaned too far, Cass laughed at something Winston shouted, the log edge ceased to function as a trustworthy piece of architecture, and down they went into the grass. Cass landed on her back and laughed, hair spilling across the grass around her, one arm flung out. “It’s colder here,” she mumbled to the sky. Gally fell down beside her and nodded. “Mhm. ’S better.” The boys gathered around, tightening the circle, some still on logs, some crouched now, all of them elbowing each other because it looked like the two of them were gone enough to start spilling state secrets. And, right on cue... “If we get out of here,” Gally said, words thick and slurred, “I wanna…” He waved one hand vaguely at the stars, as if the future were stored up there and he could grab it if he aimed right. “Full neighborhood. And we’d all be neighbors.” He turned his head toward Cass. “And you’ll be there too, Griever girl. I’ll allow it.” Laughter broke over the boys in waves because the phrasing was pure Gally: invitation disguised as permission, affection wrapped in authority. Cass snorted and rolled her head toward him. “You’d build our houses, oh, mighty Keeper of the Builders?”

“Obviously,” Gally mumbled, already halfway to sleep. “And I’d make a nice treehouse for Chuck.”

“I GET A TREEHOUSE?!” Chuck practically exploded, hopping up and down.

“Yeah, kid,” Gally muttered, eyes closed now. “Best treehouse ever.” Then, he went on. “And we’d have grill days... with way better drinks than this shit.”

“Don’t hate on your own moonshine, man,” she whispered, “It’s actually decent.”

“Mhm,” Gally hummed, and then both him and Cass reached that sweet spot where your body thinks it’s asleep but your mind still floats just close enough to the surface to hear people talking around you like they're on the other side of water.

The fire was all low embers and occasional bright tongues of flame licking up when a log shifted. Around the circle, their voices had dropped too. The laughter still came, but quieter, more careful, the kind that rolled out of tired chests and then settled into fond little hums. It felt like the Glade itself had exhaled and gone boneless with them. Cass lay in the grass on her back with one arm folded over her stomach and the other flung out near Gally’s shoulder.

“Hey, Cass?” Minho called eventually, grin tugging at his mouth.

“Mmm,” she answered, eyes still closed.

“You sleepy?”

“Naaah…” Her voice came out soft and sticky, the syllable stretching itself thin with how gone she already was. She didn’t move. Didn’t even open her eyes. Just lay there in the grass and lied with serene confidence.

The boys chuckled and glanced at each other over the flames with the exact same thought written all over their stupid tired faces: So fucking cute.

“You sure?” Newt asked with a fond little smile on his face.

“Mmmhm…” she breathed. “Gotta… put Gally in his place…”

The whole pit broke. Laughter rolled out loud and warm, boys folding forward over their knees, some of them slapping hands against their thighs or each other, because Gally was no longer in this competition.

“Gally’s already snoring.” Thomas pointed out around a chuckle of his own.

“…yeah?” Cass cracked one eye open with all the labor of someone trying to manually lift a door that had been shut for hours. She rolled just enough to reach out and nudge Gally’s shoulder with two fingers. The man didn’t budge. Didn’t even make a sound. She let her hand fall back into the grass and laughed a soft, loose little laugh that sounded unlike any of the ones they’d heard from her so far. Less sharp. Less controlled. More wonder at her own joke than performance of it. “Haaa…” she sighed. “Cassandra is undefeated.”

Newt smiled, warmth flooding him low and easy, not the sharp gut-flip from before, not the ugly little jealous twist that had shown up when Minho’s hands were on her, but something gentler and much harder to fight because it asked for nothing. It just sat in him and glowed. “She is. But how about we get her to bed at the Homestead, yeah?”

“Mm… yeah…” Cass murmured, then, eyes still closed, she added, “But… take this moron tooo…” A lazy little wave toward Gally. “…he’ll… get cold… then probably… complain…” Her mouth twitched. “Don’t wanna hear him complain.”

The Pit broke all over again. Laughter rippled around the fire in fresh waves, boys leaning into each other with the loose-limbed joy. Even Alby’s mouth gave in and twitched properly this time. Frypan had to set his spoon down because he was laughing too hard to trust his hands with food. Gally, oblivious, snored once and shifted his head deeper into the grass. Minho glanced up at Alby with a silent can I do the honors? written all over his face. Alby nodded once, still smiling. That was all Minho needed. He pushed himself to his feet and bent down to scoop her up. “Up we go.” Cass stirred immediately at the movement, head lolling toward his shoulder. “Mnnoo…” she mumbled. “Put me down, I can walk—”

“You are walking,” Minho said, trying his absolute best not to laugh.

Her brow furrowed harder against his chest. “Huh…”

“Yeah, see?” he said, taking a few exaggerated steps just to prove the point. “You’re moving forward.”

“…oh…” she sighed, then melted into him, cheek settling against his chest, her body giving up the last of its arguments and choosing warmth instead. Her voice dropped to a softer little murmur that nearly stopped his heart. “You’re warm.”

That was it. Minho’s brain fully short-circuited. No reboot setting. No troubleshooting. Just lights out, system failure, please contact your administrator. His knees felt weak. Heat shot straight up the back of his neck and across his face. His stomach did that same ridiculous swooping thing it kept doing around her, as if every organ south of his lungs had mistaken affection for freefall. He looked down and saw soft pink lips, flushed cheeks, dark lashes resting against skin that looked too pale in the firelight even now, and loose strands of blonde hair spilled over his arm and down the front of his shirt. There was a bruise shadowing the side of her neck. A little scrape near her jaw. She looked smaller like this, not actually fragile but gentled by unconsciousness into something his entire body reacted to with an almost violent instinct to hold more carefully. Thomas’s face softened, tightened, then went blank in the middle, which was Thomas in emotional distress attempting to appear normal. Winston mouthed something obscene at Zart and got elbowed in the ribs for it. Frypan looked like he had just decided he was feeding Cass double portions forever or dying in the attempt. Newt stepped closer and muttered under his breath, for Minho’s ears alone. “Smitten.”

“As if,” Minho snapped, way too quick. Newt smirked, but the weird twist in his gut didn’t ease. He could logic his way around jealousy all he liked, but logic had precious little power over instinctive physical reactions when a person was tired and overfull of too many unspoken things, so he forced the smirk stand in for the rest of the way hoping nobody'd study his face too long. Behind him, the others started heading to the Homestead as well. They carried Gally too, because yes, she was right, the guy was a complainer and no one in the Glade wished to hear him whining tomorrow about stiff muscles and damp ground and the injustice of being abandoned outdoors like common livestock.

Inside the Homestead, the wood held the day’s warmth. Cots lined the room in dim rows, blankets turned down, lantern light low and honey-colored against the beams. Minho crossed straight to the bed they’d made up for Cass and laid her down with a care he could not have hidden if his life depended on it. He eased her onto the mattress, and when her head hit the pillow she made a soft little sound in her throat and curled just slightly toward the blanket. Minho crouched to tug her boots off. They thudded softly to the floor beside the bed. He pulled the blanket up around her and tucked it at her shoulders, fingers lingering for one stupid second at the edge of the fabric. She stirred once and said, soft, barely a whisper, “I’ll get you out.” Minho leaned closer. “Sure you will,” he murmured, then he backed away, quiet, retreating to his bed with his heart slamming like he’d just run the Maze twice over. She had saved Ben’s life today. Killed three Grievers in the span of four days. Corrected his maps. Possibly found a way out of this nightmare. Yeah. It was admiration. Respect. Professional awe. Definitely. Nothing more. But still, even with him only admiring her, for sure, nothing more, his eyes never left her. She looked so fragile...so damn soft like this. He wanted to hold her—No. Admiration. Nothing more.

Meanwhile, Newt knew he was done for. He did not need to question it anymore. Didn’t need to keep circling it in careful language and hoping it would rename itself into something less troublesome. Whatever this was, whatever was buzzing in his chest whenever she smiled, it had him. He sat there in the warmth of the Homestead and thought about the lake. About the way she had flinched from his hand earlier, all raw nerve and blood and shock, and then later, in the freezing water, leaned into his hands while he washed blood from her hair because somewhere in the space between those two moments she had decided he was safe to break in front of. Safe to hand the ugly parts to. Safe enough to help clean blood from her hair while her heart was still tearing itself open. He didn’t know what to do with that trust except guard it like it was breakable and precious and not his to misuse. He thought about the shape of her against him in the water, about her fists in his shirt, about the way her rage had been so bright and righteous it had turned into tears because her body could only carry so much fire before it had to become grief. He thought about how quickly she attached to what was good and how violently she answered what was cruel. About her pretty smile at breakfast. The softness in her eyes when she looked at Chuck. The way she said every “thank you” like she meant it. The moonshine flush in her cheeks. The fact that she had looked beautiful even while crying.

Cass had drowned herself in enough moonshine to disinfect a wound from across the room and then let half the Glade drag her to bed like she was some overworked saint with bruises. Any reasonable body would have shut down. Any reasonable brain would’ve looked at the last four days, decided it had participated enough, and mercy-killed itself for eight straight hours. Nope. She blinked awake just before dawn to a sound that was... wrong. At first everything was one giant wrong noise. The walls groaning outside, that old stone thunder rolling through the dark. The low creak of wood in the Homestead. Somebody snoring. Her own skull pounding like it had a heartbeat independent from the rest of her body. But under all that, there was something muffled. Broken. Wet. Crying. Her head throbbed so hard it felt like her brain was trying to escape through one temple. The moonshine had left her mouth dry as sandpaper and her stomach sour and offended. For one weak, deeply human moment, she almost let it slide. Almost rolled over. Almost told the universe it could go to hell without her for ten minutes and maybe come back when she had less of a hangover and more of a soul. Almost. But then she heard it again, so she slid off the bed, bare feet hitting the cold floorboards with a little shock that shot clean up her spine. The room swam when she stood, the lantern light from somewhere down the Homestead turning everything double, and she had to brace one hand against a post and wait for the world to pick a shape and stick to it. It did. Barely. She put her boots on and walked out. The pre-dawn dark in the Glade looked wrong with a hangover in it. Too dim and too bright at once, the shapes of things blurred by the ache behind her eyes. The fire at the Pit had burned down to red coals and a few low tongues of flame. The air bit colder than she expected, sharp against her skin where her sleeves had ridden up. And somewhere near the treeline, half-shadowed by brush and the weak spill of light...Ben. He was crouched there, one hand in the dirt, the other clutching at his stomach like he was trying to prevent his guts from abandoning ship. His shoulders were jerking violently with each gag. His breathing came in horrible wet bursts between them, and even from a few yards away Cass could hear the wrongness in it. Thick, like every inhale had to drag through sludge before it found any air worth using. “Hey,” she said softly, walking toward him. “Had too much to drink? I'll ask Newt for some mint leaves, I'm sure they'll help—”

She didn’t get another word out.

Ben snapped up like a trap springing. One second he was folded in on himself and retching, the next he was moving with a speed that made no sense for how wrecked he'd looked. He lunged at her with that terrible all-at-once violence of something that had already crossed too far and was now only wearing Ben’s body because it fit. The impact slammed her flat. Her back hit the dirt first, then the back of her skull cracked against the hard-packed ground with enough force to explode her vision into white. The whole world flashed. Pain shot through her head, immediate and nauseating. She was still drunk, which meant her body was half a second too slow and her mind two miles behind in processing what the actual fuck was on top of her. Horror arrived in pieces. Black spilled from his mouth as he snarled. Not blood. Something darker, thicker, bubbling at the corners of his lips and streaking down his chin. His eyes were glassy and wild, skin too pale, too gray at the edges, like whatever was inside him had started bleaching him hollow and filling the gaps with poison. He hit her temple. Then her ribs. Then her shoulder. Cass got her forearms up too late. Every strike rattled through her chest and arms and skull, too hard, too frantic, too full of strength he should not have had in this state. Her head rang so hard she could barely hear him at first. “IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT!” The words came cracked and jagged, slipping in and out of themselves. “YOU KILLED THEM AND NOW THEY'RE COMING FOR US! THEY'RE COMING—”

Then, voices. Shouting. Swearing. Boots hammering dirt. Somebody yelling her name. Somebody else yelling Ben’s. Then hands were on him, one set, then two, then three, tearing him off her by force while he kicked and screamed and spit black onto the grass. Cass rolled onto one side and coughed, sucking air into lungs that felt lined with nails, vision swinging and wobbling so hard the trees seemed to tilt. Hands caught her shoulders. Warm fingers pressed to her temple, then checked her jaw, her neck, the side of her head. “Cass—” Newt. He was pale. Not just worried pale. The kind of pale people went when they had been launched from sleep into violence, fear and grief too fast and had not yet found a way to hide either. His hair was a mess. His eyes were wide and fixed too hard on her face, searching for damage faster than words could. Minho’s voice cut in from somewhere too close and too angry, breath still rough from running over. “He's stung.” he said. “Must’ve gotten nicked today in all that chaos.” His voice cracked right down the middle of the statement. “God fucking dammit, Ben.”

That landed in her like another blow. Stung. Ben's stung. She could hear him screaming somewhere behind them. The sound kept slipping. Sometimes it was his voice. Sometimes not. Sometimes it went high and thin and desperate enough to cut the whole Glade open. Sometimes it dropped into these rough broken snarls that sounded like the poison itself was speaking. Winston and Zart on one side, Jeff on the other, all of them straining because stung boys fought like they were trying to tear themselves free of their own skin. Ben kicked so hard Winston nearly lost his footing. Black spit hit the dirt. Clint came running with rope. Frypan was shouting for space. Cass looked at Newt. “Where are they taking him?”

Newt looked away. “The Slammer.”

The word meant nothing to her for half a second, then she realized that she'd heard it during Chuck’s little Glade tour the other day. It was basically a cage. Chuck had told her that's where they hold the panicked Greenies until they calm down. She stared at Newt, waiting for him to say “I meant the Med-jack hut,” and when he didn't, the anger began. Not a clean flare. A rising thing. Hotter because her body was hungover and bruised and already running on damage. It moved through her in stages, each one sharper than the last as she watched them hauling Ben toward the treeline while he screamed and twisted and begged and snarled in turns. “You're caging him? He needs help. He's one of you—”

“Not anymore. Not after they get stung,” Minho said, voice wrecked with grief and helplessness. “They don’t come back from it,” he added, jaw tight. “They just get worse.” His voice dipped lower. “We’ve tried waiting before.” That sounded too much like history. Someone had bled for that rule. Probably more than one someone. Minho looked at Cass like he could already feel the argument gathering. “We have to send him back into the Maze.”

Her head snapped up fast enough to make her dizzy again. “You can’t be serio—”

“He is.” Newt’s tone stayed steady, but his eyes were a different story entirely. Haunted, tired, too old for his face. He had said these words before. She could see that instantly. Said them and hated them every time. “If the Maze wants him—”

“THE MAZE IS NOT AN ENTITY!” Her voice tore itself up on the way out. She lurched to her feet too fast, swayed, nearly lost the ground and caught it again by pure fury. “THE MAZE IS NOT A GOD! IT’S A FUCKING STONE ASSEMBLY MADE BY PSYCHOPATHS TO FUCK KIDS UP, DON’T YOU SEE? HOW CAN YOU—”

“THOSE ARE THE DAMN RULES!” Minho shot back, anger spilling over because her refusal hit the exact nerve this place had exposed in all of them: the fact that sometimes you followed rules not because they were right, but because they were the only thing between you and complete collapse. He wasn’t defending the ritual because he liked it. He was defending it because he had seen what happened when stung boys stayed too long and the whole Glade paid for that mercy. His hands were shaking. “The rules are what keep us alive,” he snapped. “You think we made that one for fun? You think we're enjoying it?”

“FUCK THE RULES!” Cass shouted. “THAT’S INHUMAN. IT’S SICK. WHY WOULD YOU ACT LIKE THEM? HOW COULD YOU DO SOMETHING LIKE THIS?”

“Cass—” Minho tried, but it was no use. Her rage was boiling over.

“No!” she snapped. “No, don’t—” Her voice broke. “He needs help. He—You can't do this to him.” A pause. “I need to talk to Alby.”

“You’re not gonna change his mind,” Minho said, softer now, almost pleading.

Newt put a hand on her arm. “Let’s—”

“No.” She shook him off immediately. “Fuck all of you. I’m not letting something like that happen to a person.” Her chest heaved. “And he was right.” She swallowed hard. “It was my fault. I should’ve been quicker—”

Minho’s hands landed on her shoulders before he thought better of it. He shook her hard. “STOP!”

Her eyes went wide.

Minho saw the split-second freeze in her face, and realization punched straight through the anger. He stepped back immediately, hands gone at once as if the contact itself had burned him. “I didn’t—” His throat closed on the rest of it. “I didn’t mean—” Cass didn’t wait for the apology to fully form. She staggered past both of them toward the commotion where Ben was still screaming. Minho stood there breathing hard, pulse loud and ugly in his ears. “Alby’ll have another thing coming if she thinks this ain’t right.” The thought hadn’t even finished settling when Gally emerged out of the shadows with Cass slung over his shoulder like a sack of angry knives. She was fighting him with everything she had left. Her fists pounded at his back. Her feet kicked wild arcs through the air. She was screaming herself ragged at him, at Alby, at all of them, every word hitting like thrown glass. “PUT ME DOWN! LEAVE HIM ALONE! HE NEEDS HELP, NOT TO DIE IN THERE SICK AND ALONE!” Gally grunted and tightened his hold around the backs of her thighs to keep her from twisting free. “We gotta tie her up,” he said. “She ain’t sane right now.”

Newt exhaled, long and heavy, then nodded. Cass fought them the whole way there. Not with the clean precise violence she’d used in the Maze. This was all fury and grief and the full-body desperation of a person trying to physically stop something their soul rejected on sight. Gally got the worst of the kicking. Winston nearly lost a tooth to an elbow. Thomas looked like every knot in him had turned inside out the second he understood what they were about to do. By the time they tied her wrists to the bedposts with strips of cloth and rope, her voice was hoarse. “You fucking cowards—he’s not a fucking sacrifice—”

Newt’s thoughts burned inside his skull. She was gonna get herself killed. Too selfless. Too stubborn. Too unwilling to draw a line between herself and everyone else. And maybe that was noble in stories, but here, in the Glade, it was the sort of trait that got you buried. He wanted to tell her: I get it. I feel it too. I know what this looks like from your eyes and I know it’s monstrous. But this is just how things are. You can't save everyone. But none of it would have landed. Not while Ben was still screaming from outside. Not while guilt had its teeth in her and outrage was the only thing holding her upright. Not while she was looking at all of them like they had personally chosen cruelty over mercy.

Eventually, she stopped cursing. Not because she had given in. Not because anything in her had softened toward what they were doing. If anything, the silence that came after was worse. The fury didn’t go anywhere. It just got pulled inward, banked down behind her teeth, turned from wildfire into something more...deliberate. Her voice had shredded itself enough already. Every scream had messed up her throat and had also done exactly nothing to the boys outside except make some of them flinch and some of them look away and all of them hurt in that guilty, rigid way of people doing something they hate because they can’t imagine another route through it. So she stopped spending herself on noise. She lay there breathing hard through her nose, wrists burning where the rope had rubbed them, ribs aching every time she shifted, and stared at the ceiling with murder in her eyes. Outside, from the direction of the Slammer, a sound came every now and then that scraped straight across the nerves of every person in earshot, a snarl, a howl, something hitting wood hard enough to rattle the frame. Every time it came, the whole room stiffened. You could feel the fear. The grief. But what hurt more was the familiarity. The way the Glade had learned to keep functioning while part of itself was being torn off in the next room over. Chuck sat on the floor beside her cot with his knees tucked up and his arms wrapped around them, trying very hard to be brave and failing in the most heartbreaking way possible. His curls were a mess. His face was wet. He had cried enough earlier that the skin under his eyes had gone swollen and pink. He kept rubbing his nose with the heel of his hand and then looking embarrassed about it, but even through all of that, through the fear and the grief, he still leaned toward her. “One time, Adam got stung,” he said in a voice that kept wobbling on the edges. “And he tried to kill me. They really go bad. We’re not lying to you.” Cass turned her head just enough to look at him, and for a second something softer moved through her face. Chuck didn’t know how to hold things back. Everything in him lived right at the surface, bright and sincere. If he was sitting here trying to explain this through his own crying, it was because some part of him needed her to know they weren’t monsters. Needed that almost as badly as he needed Ben to somehow not be going where everyone knew he was going. “What happened to Adam?” she asked. Chuck swallowed hard. “He—” The word got stuck. He looked down at his hands. “That wasn’t Adam. He said stuff that didn’t make sense and then he—” His voice cracked. “It's really bad.” She said nothing after that. What they didn’t see, because no one was looking at her hands now that she’d gone still, were her fingers working. The rope around her right wrist had been tight enough that at first it seemed impossible to do anything but irritate the skin further, but Cass had long ago learned that impossible was a word made up by idiots. The cot frame was old wood and old metal bolted together, and one of the lower metal edges where the frame met the side support had a little burr to it. Not much. Barely harp enough if you got the angle right. She had found it the way people like her found exits, with irritation first, then attention, then use. So while the room thought she’d gone quiet with exhaustion, she twisted her wrist a fraction at a time and fed the rope against that edge. Back. Forth. Back. Forth. The fibers had started to fray already. Tiny threads snapping one by one. She worked slowly enough not to draw attention, quick enough that she could feel the give beginning. Eventually, she sighed and said, in a calmer voice, big warning sign, “Can you at least give your prisoner some water?”

Gally, standing not far from the foot of the bed on unofficial guard duty, rolled his eyes. “You’re not our prisoner.”

Cass gave him a flat look. “Yeah, sure. Then why am I tied up? ’Cause it’s sure as hell not kinky.” Under any other circumstances, he would have laughed. Might even have choked on one. Now he just muttered something profane under his breath and pushed off the wall to go get the water.

The second his back turned, Cass bolted. For one split second the room didn’t understand what it was seeing. Gally was still bent toward the table where the water sat. Chuck’s head jerked up. Thomas only had time to go “oh, shit—” before she was already gone. Minho lunged. Too late. The path to the Slammer was too short for anyone to stop her before she got there. Boys shouted behind her, boots pounding, but she reached the cage first and stopped dead so abruptly she nearly slipped on the packed dirt. Ben wasn’t Ben anymore. Not in any way that the human heart could make peace with on first sight. His skin stretched too thin over his face, veins black and jagged under it like cracks in glass spreading from inside. The black at his mouth had thickened, bubbling when he snarled, dripping in ropy strings to the dirt below. His fingers were clenched hard enough his nails had split skin and left grooves in the floor where he had clawed through the dirt and straw. His eyes weren’t even eyes anymore. They were pits. He snarled when he saw movement. Cass’s hand flew to her mouth. All her arguments, all her fury, all her certainty that rules were evil and ritual was cowardice and mercy could always be found if people just stopped being obedient for one second, everything faltered against the brutal reality in that cage. Because yes, she had imagined a sick person. A poisoned one. A delirious one. But what stood there was… farther gone than that. Minho caught up behind her, chest heaving, having spent the whole sprint expecting to drag her bodily away from a principle and into another fight, but then he saw her face and everything he'd been feeling dissolved instantly. He wrapped both arms around her shoulders from behind, turning her away from the cage and pressing her face against his chest. “Don’t look.” He tightened his hold. “It’s not your fault,” he said. “You hear me? Not yours. Not his. The people who put us here did this to him.” He shifted to look at her. “We’re gonna get out,” he said. “We’ll get out and this’ll end and we'll finally be safe.” He swallowed hard, trying to make the promise sound less like prayer. “And we'll stick together. That's all that matters.”

Cass didn’t fight him when he pulled her back toward the Pit where everyone else had gathered now, all in different stages of wrecked. Chuck was wrapped into Winston’s side now, face hidden against his arm. Thomas stood a little apart from everyone else, every line in him pulled too tight. Alby had the Slammer in his peripheral vision at all times. Newt was there by then too, having followed the sound of her breaking free. She sat down on a log with a wince she didn’t bother hiding this time. Her whole body had begun remembering in sequence how much it disliked the last forty-eight hours. “She really has a talent for running, huh?” Gally muttered, arms crossed. Cass shot him a glare sharp enough to shave bark off a tree, then her eyes locked on Alby across the Pit. Daggers. Alby felt it and met her stare with one of his own, not willing to pretend this could be solved by looking away. “My hands are tied,” he said quietly.

“I won’t question your authority,” she said. “Your Glade, your rules. But I’ll tell you right now, I’d rather take a bullet to the head and make it quick than spend hours spiraling, hoping for an exit, knowing I’m losing more of my sanity every second.”

Every eye flicked between them.

Alby’s jaw worked. Finally, he said, “The first one who got stung in here…” His gaze drifted, not to the Slammer, not to the Maze, but somewhere inward. Older. “He bit one of us.” His eyes darkened. “I lost two brothers that day.”

Cass froze. “Hold up,” she said. “It’s viral?” There it was. The turn her mind always took, even in grief. Pattern. Mechanism.

Alby nodded once. “Spreads by blood. Bites. Scratches. We learned that early. Not early enough, but we did.” He rubbed a thumb over his brow like the memory still itched there. “I can’t risk everyone here.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. For not catching on fast enough. For throwing the whole Pit into this fight on top of what they were already carrying. For being impulsive.

Newt slid onto the log beside her then, near enough that she could feel the heat of another person at her side if she wanted to lean into it. His hand ghosted to the small of her back as he settled. For one second his fingers hovered, not touching so much as waiting to see what her body would do with the idea of touch now, after the rope and the shouting and being hauled off over Gally’s shoulder like something feral they had to secure before it hurt itself. She made no move to avoid him, so his hand stayed there another second, then, without making a thing of it, it shifted and found hers where it rested on the log. Cass let him hold it. She didn’t even seem to register the decision. It was just there, done, her fingers folding around his in one instinctive clasp. Across the pit, three separate male nervous systems took that personally. The reaction moved so fast it was almost funny if the atmosphere hadn’t still been soaked through with grief and dread. Minho's eyes cut down to their joined hands and stopped there a fraction too long, his whole body going still in the very specific way people do when they are trying not to react. Thomas lifted his head and let his gaze snag there before dragging it away with the sort of discipline that looked almost painful. Gally’s stare hit last, blue eyes narrowing with a look that had too many things in it to sort cleanly—annoyance, some unreasonable possessive instinct he’d deny under torture, irritation with himself for feeling it, irritation with Newt for being there, irritation with the whole universe for making him feel like this while Ben was dying twenty yards away. Around them, the pit had gone silent, everyone too wrung out for chatter but too raw to go back to sleep. Ben’s screaming had gone intermittent now, worse for that, every moment between sounds filling the Glade with a waiting so tense it seemed to hum. Cass eventually rose and left. Alby let out a long breath after she disappeared into the direction of the Map Room. “That sort of heart will get her killed if we ain't careful,” he said, as if reading Newt's thoughts.

Newt looked toward the darkness where Cass had gone. “We'll be careful, then.”

SECOND CHAPTER

THIRD CHAPTER