فصل 27

CHAPTER 27

Thomas felt Jorge at his heels as he entered the dark hallway. It smelled of mildew and rot; water dripped from the ceiling, sending out creepy echoes that for some awful reason made him think of blood.

“Just keep going,” Jorge said from behind. “There’s a room at the end with chairs. Make even the slightest move against me, everyone dies.” Thomas wanted to turn and scream at the guy but kept walking. “I’m not an idiot. You can quit the whole tough-guy routine.” The Crank only snickered in response.

After several minutes of quiet, Thomas finally approached a wooden door with a round silver knob. He reached out and opened it without hesitating, trying to show Jorge that he still had some dignity. Once inside, however, he didn’t know what to do. It was pitch-black.

He sensed Jorge stepping around him; then there was the loud flumping sound of heavy cloth being whipped in the air. A hot, blinding light appeared, and Thomas had to shield his eyes with his forearms. He could only squint at first, then eventually dropped his arms and was able to see okay; he realized that the Crank had pulled a large sheet of canvas from a window. An unbroken window. Outside, there was only sunlight and concrete.

“Sit down,” Jorge said, his voice less gruff than Thomas would’ve expected. He hoped it was because the Crank had finally accepted that his new visitor was going to take a rational and calm approach to their situation. That maybe there really was something to this discussion that could end up benefiting the current residents of the dilapidated building. Of course, the guy was a Crank, so Thomas had no idea how he’d react.

The room had no furniture other than two small wooden chairs and a table between them. Thomas pulled out the one closer to him and took a seat. Jorge sat down on the other side, then leaned forward and put his elbows on the table, hands clasped. His face was blank, his eyes glued on Thomas.

“Talk.”

Thomas wished he could take a second to sift through all the ideas that had run through his mind back in the larger room, but he knew there wasn’t any time for that.

“Okay.” He hesitated. One word. So far, not so good. He pulled in a breath. “Look, I heard you mention WICKED back there. We know all about those guys. It’d be really interesting to hear what you have to say about them.” Jorge didn’t budge; his expression didn’t change. “I’m not the one talking right now. You are.” “Yeah, I know.” Thomas scooted his chair a little closer to the table. Then he pushed it back and put a foot up on his knee. He needed to calm down and just let the words flow. “Well, this is hard because I don’t know what you know. So I guess I’ll just pretend like you’re stupid to the whole thing.” “I’d strongly advise you never to use the word stupid with me again.”

Thomas had to force himself to swallow, his throat tight with fear. “Just a figure of speech.” “Get on with it.”

Thomas took another deep breath. “We used to be a group of about fifty guys. And … a girl.” A prick of pain stuck him at that. “Now we’re down to eleven. I don’t know all the details, but WICKED is some kind of organization that’s doing a whole load of nasty things to us for some reason. We started in a place called the Glade, inside a stone maze, surrounded by these creatures called Grievers.” He waited, searching Jorge’s face for any reaction to his burst of strange information. But the Crank showed no signs of confusion or recognition. Nothing at all.

And so Thomas told him everything. What it had been like in the Maze, how they’d escaped, how they thought they were safe, how it ended up being just another layer of the WICKED plan. He told him about the Rat Man, and the mission he’d set them on: to survive long enough to make it one hundred miles to the north, to a place he referred to as the safe haven. He related how they’d gone down the long tunnel, been attacked by the flying silver goop, made the trek across the initial miles of their journey.

He told Jorge the whole story. And the more he talked, the crazier it seemed that he was sharing it. Yet he kept talking because he couldn’t think of anything else to do. He did it with the hope that WICKED was just as much the Cranks’ enemy as it was theirs.

He didn’t mention Teresa, however—she was the only thing he left out.

“So there must be something special about us,” Thomas said, trying to wrap things up. “They can’t be doing this just to be nasty. What’d be the point?” “Speaking of points,” Jorge responded, the first he’d spoken in at least ten minutes, the allotted time already gone. “What’s yours?” Thomas waited. This was it. His only chance.

“Well?” Jorge pushed.

Thomas went for it. “If you … help us … I mean, if you, or maybe just a few of you, go with us and help us make it to the safe haven …” “Yeah?”

“Then maybe you’ll be safe, too. …” And this was what Thomas had planned all along—had been building toward—the hope strung out by the Rat Man. “They told us we have the Flare. And that if we make it to the safe haven, we’ll all be cured. They said they have a cure. If you help us get there, maybe you can get it, too.” Thomas stopped talking and looked at Jorge earnestly.

Something had changed—slightly—in the Crank’s face at that last thing he’d said, and Thomas knew he had won. The look was brief, but it was definitely hope, quickly replaced with a blank indifference. Yet Thomas knew what he’d seen.

“A cure,” the Crank repeated.

“A cure.” Thomas was determined to say as little as possible from here on out—he’d done his best.

Jorge leaned back in his chair, the wood creaking as if about to break, and folded his arms. He lowered his eyebrows in a look of contemplation. “What’s your name?” Thomas was surprised by the question. Felt sure, in fact, that he’d already told him. Or at least it seemed like he should have told him at some point. But then again, this whole scenario wasn’t exactly your typical get-acquainted affair.

“Your name?” Jorge repeated. “I’m assuming you have one, hermano.”

“Oh. Yeah. Sorry. It’s Thomas.”

Another flash across Jorge’s face—this time something like … recognition. Mixed with surprise. “Thomas, huh. You go by Tommy? Tom, maybe?” That last one hurt, made him think of his dream about Teresa. “No,” he said, probably a little too quickly. “Just … Thomas.” “Okay, Thomas. Let me ask you something. Do you have the slightest clue in that squishy brain of yours what the Flare does to people? Do I look like someone who has a hideous disease to you?” That seemed an impossible question to answer without getting your face beaten in, but Thomas went with the safest bet. “No.” “No? No to both questions?”

“Yes. I mean, no. I mean … yes, the answer to both questions is no.”

Jorge smiled—nothing but an uptick of the right corner of his mouth—and Thomas thought he must be enjoying every second of this. “The Flare works in stages, muchacho. Every person in this city has it, and I’m not shocked to hear that you and your sissy friends do, too. Someone like me is in the beginning, a Crank in name only. I caught it just a few weeks ago, tested positive at the quarantine checkpoint—government’s trying their damnedest to keep the sick and the well separate. Ain’t working. Saw my whole world go straight in the crap hole. Was sent here. Fought to capture this building with a bunch of other newbies.” At that word, Thomas’s breath caught in his throat like a mote of dust. It brought back too many memories of the Glade.

“My friends out there with the weapons are all in the same boat as me. But you go and take a nice stroll around the city and you’ll see what happens as time goes by. You’ll see the stages, see what it’s like to be past the Gone, though you might not live to remember it for very long. And we don’t even have any of the numbing agent here. The Bliss. None.” “Who sent you here?” Thomas asked, saving his curiosity about this numbing agent for later.

“WICKED—same as you. Only we’re not special like you say you are. WICKED was set up by the surviving governments to fight the disease, and they claim that this city has something to do with it. Don’t know much else.” Thomas felt a mixture of surprise and confusion, then a hope for answers. “Who is WICKED? What is WICKED?” Jorge looked just about as confused as Thomas felt. “I told you all I know. Why’re you asking me that, anyway? I thought the whole point here was that you were special to them, that they were behind this whole story you told me.” “Look, everything I told you is the honest truth. We’ve been promised things, but we still don’t know much about them. They don’t give us any details. Like they’re testing us to see if we can make it through all this klunk even though we have no idea what’s happening.” “And what makes you think they have a cure?”

Now Thomas had to keep his voice steady, think back to what he’d heard from the Rat Man. “The guy in the white suit I told you about. He told us it’s why we have to make it to the safe haven.” “Mmm-hmm,” Jorge said, one of those noises that sounded like a yes but meant exactly the opposite. “And what in the world makes you think they’ll let us just ride in on a horse with you and get the cure, too?” Thomas had to keep playing it nice and calm. “Obviously I don’t know that at all. But why not at least try? If you help us get there, you have a small chance. If you kill us, you have zero chance. Only a full-gone Crank would choose the second option.” Jorge gave that pathetic smile again, then let out a small bark of a laugh. “There’s something about you, Thomas. Few minutes ago I wanted to stab your friend in the eyeballs and then do the same to the rest of ya. But I’ll be licked if you haven’t half convinced me.” Thomas shrugged, trying to keep his face calm. “All I care about is surviving one more day. All I want is to make it through this city, and then I’ll worry about what comes next. And you know what else?” He braced himself to act tougher than he felt.

Jorge raised his eyebrows. “What’s that?”

“If stabbing you in the eyeballs could get me to tomorrow, I’d do it right now. But I need you. We all need you.” Thomas wondered if he could ever actually do such a thing even as he said it.

But it worked.

The Crank eyed Thomas for a drawn-out moment, then stuck out a hand across the table. “I believe we have ourselves a deal, hermano. For many reasons.” Thomas reached out and shook. And even though he was filled with relief, it took everything he had not to show it.

But then Jorge brought it all crashing down. “I just have one condition. That ratty kid who junked me on the ground? Think I heard you call him Minho?” “Yeah?” Thomas asked in a weak voice, his heart thumping all over again.

“He dies.”