“Yeah,” he finally said. “You going through or you need me to go first?”
“What did your tattoo say?” Minho responded quietly, ignoring Thomas’s question.
“Doesn’t matter. Let’s go out there.”
Minho nodded, still not looking directly at him. Then he smiled, and whatever had been troubling him so deeply appeared to vanish, replaced by his usual laid-back attitude. “Good that. If some zombie starts eating my leg, save me.”
“Deal.” Thomas wanted him to hurry and get on with it. He knew they were on the edge of yet another great change in their ridiculous journey, and he didn’t want to draw it out any longer.
Minho pushed open the door. The single bar of blackness became a wide swath of it, the common area now as dark as it had been when they’d first left the boys’ dorm. Minho stepped through the doorway, and Thomas followed right on his heels.
“Wait here,” Minho whispered. “No need playing bumper cars with the dead folks again. Let me find the light switches first.”
“Why would they have turned them off?” Thomas asked. “I mean, who turned them off?”
Minho looked back at him; the light from Aris’s room spilled across his face, illuminating the smirk set firmly there. “Why do you even bother asking questions, dude? Nothing has ever made sense and it probably never will. Now slim it and sit still.”
Minho was quickly swallowed by the darkness. Thomas heard his soft footsteps on the carpet and the swish sound of his hand running along the wall as he walked.
“Here they are!” he shouted from the spot that seemed about right to Thomas.
A few clicks sounded and then lights blazed throughout the room. For the tiniest fraction of a second, Thomas didn’t realize what was so starkly different about the place. But then it hit him, and as if that awakened his other senses as well, he realized that the horrible smell of rotting corpses had vanished.
And now he knew why.
The bodies were gone, with no sign that they’d ever been there in the first place.
CHAPTER 8
Several seconds passed before Thomas realized he’d stopped breathing. Sucking in a deep pull of air, he gaped at the now-empty room. No bloated, purpled-skinned bodies. No stink.
Newt nudged past him, walking forward with his slight limp until he stood in the very center of the room’s carpeted floor. “This is impossible,” he said, turning in a slow circle, gazing up at the ceiling where the corpses had hung from ropes only minutes earlier. “Not enough time passed for someone to get them out. And no one else even came into this buggin’ room. We would’ve heard them!”
Thomas stepped to the side and leaned against the wall as the other Gladers and Aris came out of the small dorm room. A hushed sense of awe spread across the group as one by one, each person noticed the missing dead. As for Thomas, he once again felt a numbness, like he just might be done feeling surprised at anything.
“You’re right,” Minho said to Newt. “We were in there with the door closed for, what, twenty minutes? No way anyone could’ve moved all those bodies that quickly. Plus, this place is locked from the inside.”
“Not to mention getting rid of the smell,” Thomas added.
Minho nodded.
“Well, you shanks are right smart,” Frypan said through a huff. “But take a look around. They’re gone. So whatever you think, somehow they got rid of them.”
Thomas didn’t feel like arguing about it-or even talking about it. So the dead bodies were gone. They’d seen stranger stuff.
“Hey,” Winston said. “Those crazy people quit screaming and yelling.”
Thomas put his weight back on his feet, listened. Silence. “I thought we just couldn’t hear them from Aris’s room. But you’re right-they stopped.”
Soon everyone was running for the larger dorm room on the far side of the common area. Thomas followed, intensely curious to look out the windows and see the world outside. Before, with the Cranks screaming and pressing their faces against the iron bars, he’d been too horrified to get a good view.
“No way!” Minho yelled from up ahead, then, without further explanation, disappeared inside the room.
As Thomas moved in that direction, he noticed that every boy hesitated a second, wide-eyed at the threshold of the door, then went ahead and entered the dorm. He waited as each Glader and then Aris funneled their way inside, then followed.
He felt the same shock he’d sensed from the other boys. As a whole, the room looked much like it had when they’d walked out of it earlier. But there was one monumental difference: at each window, without exception, a red brick wall had been erected just outside the iron bars, completely blocking every inch of open space. The only light in the room came from the panels on the ceiling.
“Even if they were quick with those bodies,” Newt said, “I’m pretty sure they didn’t have time to bloody throw up some brick walls. What’s going on here?”
Thomas watched as Minho walked over to one of the windows and reached through the bars, pressing his hand against the red bricks. “Solid,” he said, then slapped at it.
“It doesn’t even look fresh,” Thomas murmured, stepping up to one himself to get a feel. Hard and cool. “The mortar’s dry. Somehow they’ve tricked us, that’s all.”
“Tricked us?” Frypan asked. “How?”
Thomas shrugged, that numbness returning. Still wishing desperately that he could talk to Teresa. “I don’t know. Remember the Cliff? We jumped into thin air and went through an invisible hole. Who knows what these people can do.”
The next half hour passed in a haze. Thomas wandered about, as did everyone else, inspecting the brick walls, looking for signs of anything else that had changed. Several things had, each one just as strange as the next. All the beds in the Gladers’ dorm room were made, and there was no sign of the grungy clothes they’d all worn before changing into the pajamas provided the night before. The dressers had been rearranged, though the difference was subtle and some people disagreed that they’d been moved at all. Either way, each one had been stocked with fresh clothes and shoes, and new digital watches for each boy.
But the biggest change of all-discovered by Minho-was the sign outside the room where they’d found Aris. Instead of saying Teresa Agnes, Group A, Subject A1, The Betrayer, it now said:
Aris Jones, Group B, Subject B1
The Partner
Everyone observed the new plaque, then wandered away, but Thomas found himself standing in front of it, unable to remove his eyes. To Thomas it felt like the new label made it official-Teresa had been taken from him, replaced by Aris. None of it made sense, and none of it mattered anymore. He went back to the boys’ dorm, found the cot he’d slept on during the night-or at least, the one he thought he’d slept on-and lay down, putting the pillow over his head, as if that would make everyone else go away.
What had happened to her? What had happened to them? Where were they? What were they supposed to do? And the tattoos…
Turning his head to the side, then his whole body, he squeezed his eyes shut and folded his arms tightly, pulling his legs up until he lay in the fetal position. Then, determined to keep trying until he heard back from her, he called out with his thoughts.
Teresa? A pause. Teresa? A longer pause. Teresa! He shouted it mentally, his whole body tensing with the effort. Teresa! Where are you? Please answer me! Why aren’t you trying to contact me? Ter Get out of my head!
The words exploded inside his mind, so vivid and so strangely audible within his skull that he felt lances of pain behind his eyes and in his ears. He sat up in bed, then stood. It was her. It was definitely her.
Teresa? He pressed the first two fingers of both hands against his temples. Teresa?
Whoever you are, get out of my shuck head!