Chapter Text
The night pressed in around them like a living thing—restless, shivering, breathing through the cracks in the ruined walls. It crawled and whispered against their skin. The air stank of rust and rot and the faint, metallic tang of Winston’s blood, already drying. Dust settled over everything like a burial shroud. Somewhere in the distance, Cranks still moaned—a symphony of ruin, voices rising and collapsing like waves gnawing at a shore that no longer existed.
Each time the cries faded, Newt’s breath caught. He waited through the silence, counting heartbeats, measuring the quiet like a wound closing too slowly. They never drew nearer. They just refused to end.
Winston whimpered in his sleep, a thin, broken sound. Frypan muttered under his breath—something low, trembling, maybe a prayer. The word itself felt foreign to Newt. Prayers. As if anyone was listening. As if anyone ever had.
He’d never spared much thought for gods. Wouldn’t have known where to begin, even if he’d wanted to.
The Maze had been their only matter, and Newt had never thought of the Creators as anything close to divine. But he knew some—Gally among them—had seen it differently once.
The thought of Gally still hurt, bound to the others by the same quiet ache—Chuck. Alby. Zart. Ben.
Newt silently added Jack to the list.
His gaze found Thomas a few feet away, a darker shadow folded against the concrete. He lay still as death, but not asleep; Newt could feel it, the quiet hum of thought radiating off him like static. Neither spoke. The silence between them felt delicate, as if a single word might make them come apart.
The cold was a strange kind of companion, threading through his clothes, nesting deep in his bones. It wasn’t the kind of cold he’d known in the Maze—the sharp bite of dawn before the Runners left, or the damp chill that clung to corridors where sunlight never reached. This was older, hungrier—a grave-cold that hollowed you from the inside until even your heart longed to hibernate. In the Maze, there had been purpose—motion, direction, something to chase or flee. Now they were stranded, and the wind slipped through the cracks of the world like a ghost still searching for a body to wear.
At some point, his hands moved without him knowing, burrowing into the scavenged jacket for warmth. His fingers brushed something hard. He drew the objects out and held them up to the sickly light bleeding through a fissure in the concrete above.
A ballpoint pen, dented, its silver body dulled by grime. A small pendant—metal cylinder on a leather cord, worn soft from a stranger’s skin.
They caught the light weakly, relics that still remembered the world before it burned.
Newt turned them over in his hands. Someone had owned this jacket. Someone had chosen these things, carried them close. Maybe they’d written with that pen once. Maybe the words had mattered—love, fear, confession. Maybe they’d worn the pendant every day until the world ended. He wondered where they were now. Maybe he’d rather not know.
He closed his eyes and faced the Crank behind the bars again—the sores, the yellow eyes swimming in madness, the smell that clung to memory like oil. The man had screamed for death until his throat tore. Newt had wanted to look away, but couldn’t.
Had the man locked himself in? Or had someone else done it for him—a friend, a brother, a lover—promising to come back? He could almost hear the echo of the lock clicking shut, the brittle kindness of it. Hope turned cruelty. Love turned mercy.
Was it, though?
The man’s screams still lived in Newt’s skull, clawing at the dark; Kill me! Kill me! Kill me!
He stared down at the pen, his grip tightening until his knuckles blanched. Why hadn’t that Crank just done it himself? Why beg for release instead of reaching for it?
Because nothing ever was that simple. And if anyone understood that, it was Newt.
He’d once latched onto the edge, staring into the Maze as dawn bled through the fog. The stones below had been silent, patient, waiting for him to meet the ground. Above, the sky had stretched wide and empty—a pale echo of the hollow within his heart.
And yet, it hadn’t been meant to be. His body had refused. Some cruel, instinctive part of him had clung to life like a parasite. He could still feel the ivy that had broken his fall—its embrace harsh and unrelenting. If only he’d been braver. If only he’d climbed higher. If only he’d let go at the right moment.
But he hadn’t.
His memories of that morning were riddled with gaps, but the guilt was whole.
And now here he was—still breathing. Still waiting. Still cold.
The pendant winked faintly in his palm, a glimmer of some stranger’s faith. He closed his fingers around it, pressing until the edges bit into his skin. Then he shoved both objects back into his pocket, as if burying them might bury the thoughts that came with them.
In the distance, the Cranks wailed again—a sound that peeled the air open, raw and unending. It swept across the ruins, over the sleeping boys, a warning and a vow entwined.
Newt wondered how long it would be before he joined them in screaming.
He sank sideways, shoulder pressed against the rocky surface, eyes following the fracture in the ceiling that framed the starless canopy beyond. The sky looked diseased—pale light gnawing at the edges of shadow, clouds driven before the moon by the abating storm.
Sleep didn’t come for him that night.
He sat there until the dark thinned and drained into grey, watching the shadows shrink, watching the light grow too sharp to bear. The day promised heat and dust and more running—but for now, there was only that quiet, the in-between moment before the world remembered how to hurt again.
The sun crowned the ruins, a fierce white wound in the sky. Newt squinted into the glare, his eyes bleary, when a flicker of black caught his gaze through the swirling dust.
A bird—or something that wore the shape of one—picked its way through the rubble, feathers slick and coal-dark. It paused often, tilting its head as if weighing them, eyes too bright, glinting with a knowing that unsettled Newt. Each time Newt blinked, it seemed closer—its claws ticking faintly against stone, its head jerking in restless motions, as though trying to shed the weight of the dead world around it.
There had never been birds like this in the Glade. Only the chickens the Gladers raised—dull-eyed creatures too docile to sense the blade. But this one—this little scrap of life—carried something different.
A shiver ran the length of Newt’s spine. He stayed still, lacking the strength to chase it off. What was the point? The bird wasn’t dangerous. Not like everything else out here.
The creature inched closer, emboldened by their stillness. Its wings twitched once, a sound like dry leaves in the wind. Then it began to peck at one of the backpacks, sharp beak rattling against a metal buckle.
The noise startled Thomas awake.
“Hey—hey!” he barked, jerking upright. “Get out of here!”
The bird flared its wings and darted back, landing lightly on a broken pillar. It stared at them for a long moment—one eye fixed on Thomas—then gave a single, deliberate caw. It sounded almost like mockery.
Thomas stood, squinting toward the horizon. Newt watched him as Minho, Teresa, and the others began to stir, groaning softly, faces pale and drawn.
“They’re gone,” Thomas said after a moment, his voice rough.
Frypan blinked up at them, eyes red and swollen. “Who?”
“The Cranks,” Newt said. “Haven’t heard them for a while.”
“Yeah,” Thomas murmured. “Think we’re safe… for now.”
Newt’s gaze drifted over the ruins—the splintered concrete, shattered glass, the open expanse strewn with debris. The silence offered no comfort. Silence meant something else was listening. Still, he nodded. No use cutting Thomas down for trying. They all needed their whisper of hope, however frail.
The others rose slowly, peeling themselves off the cold floor, groaning as if twenty years had been added to their bones overnight. Winston tried to sit up and hissed with pain. The makeshift bandage around his middle had soaked through again, edges dark and crusted with blood.
Frypan reached for him. “Hey, man. You okay?”
“Yeah,” Winston lied, voice paper-thin. He took the hand anyway and let Frypan haul him upright.
It was still early—the sun far from its zenith—but after last night’s storm, the air in their hideout felt unnervingly still, as though the world itself were holding its breath. Morning carried an eldritch, dreamlike quality, as though reality had slipped its leash. It felt liminal, something that didn’t quite belong to the living or the dead. The storm had passed, yet the air still tasted metallic, dry as powdered bone.
The black bird let out a throaty croak that echoed down through the hollow skeleton of the building.
Thomas shouldered his pack. “Let’s move. Minho, take point. Aris, Fry—get Winston steady.”
They climbed. The ascent was slow, boots scuffing against cracked concrete, breath rasping in the heat. When they reached the top deck of the ruined parking structure, the city unfurled before them—if it could still be called that.
It was a graveyard of towers. Blackened spires rising out of the dust, windows punched out, faces streaked with soot. Some buildings had slumped sideways, leaning into each other like drunk giants. The streets below were fossilised rivers of wreckage—cars welded together by rust and time, half-buried in dunes of glittering sand. A metal tide, frozen mid-collapse.
No grass. No trees. Only the wind, whispering through glassless windows, threading the ribs of a dead civilisation.
Minho didn’t slow to look. He just kept walking, jaw set, eyes scanning for a path forward. The others followed without a word. Newt lingered for a heartbeat longer, looking down at the endless sprawl.
“What the hell happened to this place?” Frypan asked, voice low, reverent in its way.
Newt’s answer came quiet, barely a ripple in the deadened air. “I don’t know. Doesn’t look like anyone’s been here in a long time.”
Aris gave a small, brittle laugh. “You think the whole world’s like this?”
No one replied.
Newt’s mind drifted back to the Glade—to the fantasy of what they’d believed waited beyond its walls. He’d only ever had fragments, hazy images stitched together from the scraps of understanding WICKED had left him. No memories. Not really. With nothing real to hold onto, he’d clung to the idea that the world outside was still whole, that freedom would mean something once they found it.
Turns out, he’d been wrong.
What they’d found out here wasn’t freedom. Just another kind of cage—hotter, harsher, without walls to blame.
Could sun flares alone have done this? Or had the world finished the job itself, in the years that came after?
He glanced up at the sky again, so deep in his own thoughts that he almost missed them at first—the shapes stirring in the distance.
They rose from the dust like statues washed ashore, two tall, rag-wrapped figures moving with the slow, deliberate certainty of tide-worn driftwood. Their garments hung in tatters—a patchwork of beige and darker scraps, denim and leather stitched together by desperate hands.
Where faces should have been, the cloth was split into narrow slits—their eyes hidden, yet Newt could still feel their gaze on him. Where skin showed, it was raw and red, the colour of old wounds that had given up on healing. Their hands were cracked and scabbed, fingers gnarled and brittle as dead twigs.
“Who are you?” Minho called out, his stance carved from that same reckless bravado that had carried him through a dozen close calls—the kind that never quite knew the line between courage and provocation. Less courage, Newt decided then, and more a death wish masquerading as defiance.
The figures answered with silence. Their chests rose and fell like tired bellows, the fabric over their mouths fluttering as if words were a burden too heavy to summon. One drew away in a slow, deliberate arc; the other mirrored the movement, and together they began to circle the Gladers with the quiet, inevitable patience of vultures at a carcass. Veiled hollows, where eyes seemed to dwell, followed them with steady intent, measuring without haste, as though the world had become a slow, meticulous ledger of what remained.
Newt hated the narrowness of it—his vision funnelled to a single pivot point, trying to keep both figures in sight and failing. When they met again behind the group, they stopped—motionless, waiting.
“There are a whole lot more of us than there are of you,” Minho said, his voice steady, hard as the baked dust underfoot. The words hit the air like a wager. Newt winced at the edge beneath them. Desperation had a sound, and it never carried well in daylight.
“Start talking. Tell us who you are.”
A dry rasp came from the left figure, words ground from a throat that sounded long unused to gentleness. “We’re Cranks.”
“Cranks? Like those in the mall?” Minho stepped forward, putting himself closest to the strangers. He laughed, but it had the wrong shape—nervous, thin.
Beside him, Newt felt Thomas shift—a small, instinctive movement that brought him half a step ahead. A barrier. Newt understood it, even appreciated it in some quiet, bitter corner of himself, but the gesture burned all the same. That unconscious protection, that unspoken assumption of fragility. He didn’t want Thomas thinking he needed saving—didn’t want to be the burden that made Thomas stop short.
Still, he said nothing. Didn’t move. Couldn’t. The air felt brittle enough to shatter if he so much as breathed wrong.
Thomas stood rigid, shoulders drawn tight. The pulse in his throat fluttered, a small, frantic thing barely contained beneath his skin. For a moment, Newt thought he’d break—thought he’d let fly the words that would ignite this standoff into violence. But Thomas only stared, jaw locked, eyes hard with the effort of restraint.
The other Crank spoke then, voice higher, almost conversational—and that made it worse. “Came to see if you’re our kind. Came to see if you’ve got the Flare.” The fabric over his mouth shivered with each word, as though the syllables were insects seeking to crawl out.
Minho turned a look on them both, Thomas first, then Newt, brows rising in a gesture pointed enough to pass for speech.
“What difference would that make?” Newt heard himself ask before thought could intervene.
The man laughed, dry, ragged, and the cloth over his face shifted, taut against the bones beneath. “Don’t matter,” he said. “You got it, you’ll know soon enough.” He tilted his head, and the air around him carried the faint, sick tang of old metal and rotting fruit. It made Newt’s stomach turn.
“Well, what do you bloody want?” Newt stepped from behind Thomas, planting himself beside Minho. He felt ridiculous. Exposed. Like a child trying on the shape of a man. “What’s it matter to you if we’re Cranks or not?”
The voice that answered was slow, like gravel grinding in a jar—feminine in cadence, if not in sound. Newt decided it must be a woman. “You look too clean. Too fresh to be children of the Scorch. Where’d you come from? Where do your paths lead?” There was a ritual in her questions, a terrible etiquette. Hunger lurked in it. Rules. As if the questions themselves were a sieve, sorting the living from the doomed.
Minho glanced at Thomas. “What do we tell them?”
Thomas searched Newt’s eyes before answering. “I don’t know. The truth?”
Minho let out a dry laugh, sharp with sarcasm. “The truth? Nice one, Thomas. Brilliant as always.” He turned back to the Cranks. “We’re looking for an organisation that calls itself the Right Arm. Ever heard of ‘em? Supposed to be somewhere in the mountains. Mean anything to you?”
The left figure answered as if Minho’s words were nothing but a breeze on a tombstone. “Not all Cranks are gone. Not all past the Gone.” He said the last word heavy and final, like a place-name you could fall into. “Different ones, different levels. Learn quick who to befriend, who to burn, who to kill. Better learn real quick if you’re coming our way.”
Minho’s jaw tightened. “What’s your way?” he asked.
The Cranks stood motionless, patient and terrible beneath the merciless sun. When the woman spoke again, her voice was low, threaded with something ancient and foreboding.
“If you don’t have it yet,” she said, “you’ll have it soon. In these spheres, only the infected live.”
Newt forced his voice out, though his tongue felt like sandpaper. “So what? You want to mark us? Trade us? Take our things?”
The left figure spat. “We take what we need. We mark what we can’t eat. We sing to our sick. We teach them to howl, so the others remember how to fear.”
Thomas shifted, tension rippling off him in silent waves. The Cranks tilted their heads, and though Newt couldn’t be sure, he felt their unseen eyes fixed on him. Their attention wasn’t hungry—not animal, not wild—but deliberate, calculating, as if they were keeping a ledger and had just found a place for his name.
A small, cold voice stirred in the back of his mind, whispering the truth he’d never been able to bury: you can hide from many things, but not from what’s inside you. Disease. Grief. The quiet, treacherous wish for the world to stop.
And in that instant, Newt understood—the Cranks weren’t aimless. They were only further down the same road. Whatever world these creatures belonged to, the Gladers were already trespassing in it.
The woman’s voice came again, almost kind. “Come with us,” she coaxed. “Or move on. The sun burns. The sand will take what you leave.”
Newt tasted dust and copper, the memory of the Maze sharp at the back of his throat. Somewhere inside, a part of him began to tally the options like a man counting coins in the dark: run, fight, bargain, die. None of them felt like winning.
He met her eye-slit and found no promise there—only a future he had been moving toward without knowing it.
“Not yet,” he said. Not defiance, not hope—just a small, unvarnished sound.
Thomas turned to him, irritation flickering across his face, but said nothing. The silence that followed was heavier than any argument.
Then, in eerie unison, the Cranks began to laugh. A laughter torn from their own bowels, raw and ragged, spilling from their throats. The sound rolled and fractured through the street until its source dissolved, bouncing across the ruins like a thing unmoored. It made Newt think of rusted hinges forced open after decades of silence. A flock of black birds startled into the air, beating frantic wings against the heat.
And then, just as suddenly, it stopped.
The taller Crank tilted his head, listening to something distant. The other followed. Without a word, they turned and stalked away—slow, deliberate, as if, to them, the Gladers had already ceased to exist. Their wrapped forms faded into the haze, swallowed by dust and the pale glare of morning.
Minho spat into the sand, a curse slipping between clenched teeth.
“Well—that was odd,” Frypan muttered, brow creased in bewilderment.
No one disagreed.
The Gladers lingered a few seconds longer, staring after the vanishing shapes until the heat thickened, pressing heavy against their skin. The tension still sat under Newt’s ribs, a tremor that wouldn’t settle; that laughter clung to him with the nagging tickle of a fly he couldn’t swat away.
Thomas looked at him then—a fleeting glance, unreadable—before turning away to help Winston with his pack.
Minho gave a sharp whistle, the kind that always meant move. “We’re burning daylight,” he said, already walking.
“No,” Frypan muttered, “daylight’s burning us.”
But they followed anyway—listless at first, then steadier as motion dulled their thoughts. Step after step, until walking itself became a kind of numbness.
Thomas suddenly slowed. His head lifted, brow furrowed. “Hang on. Stop.”
Everyone froze.
“Do you hear that?”
For a moment, there was only the hiss of sand shifting at their feet, the faint rattle of wind through wreckage. Then Newt heard it—distant, wrong. Not thunder. Not wind. Mechanical. The low hum of engines.
It came from above.
Realisation hit him low and sure, spreading through his back like a vein of ice.
“Get down!” Thomas shouted. “Everybody—hide! Hide!”
“Over here!” Minho yelled, pointing toward a fractured structure where shadow pooled deep. “In here—move!”
They scrambled, tripping over broken concrete, crowding into the shelter of what had once been a stairwell.
A heartbeat later, the air split with the roar of rotors. Two helicopters tore overhead—black shapes flanking something larger, a transport craft bristling with sensors that gleamed like cold eyes. The machines swept low, their shadows dragging over the ruins like nets cast to catch the living.
Newt’s pulse hammered in his throat.
WICKED. There was no doubt.
“Oh, shit,” he breathed.
“They’re never gonna stop looking for us, are they?” Minho said, voice flat.
No one answered.
They stayed low until the sound faded, until the last echo of engines dissolved into the horizon. Then Thomas lifted his head, scanning the sky.
“Come on,” he said.
They emerged one by one, squinting into the light. The air shimmered, thick and metallic, tasting of rust and decay.
They climbed over debris, boots scraping against jagged metal and melted stone. They kept close to the ruins, where scraps of shade clung like ghosts—but the sun found them anyway, unforgiving and endless.
After a while, they wrapped whatever they had—scarves, sleeves, torn shirts—around their faces and hands. Even breathing hurt.
The city fell away behind them, its skeletal towers shrinking into a mirage. Ahead stretched the wasteland—sun-blasted and bone-white, a graveyard of what the world had been.
Newt brought up the rear, his shadow long and wavering across the cracked earth.
He didn’t look back. There was nothing behind them worth seeing.
The horizon rippled with heat. Far off, the mountains crouched—pale blue phantoms trembling against the glare. Salvation, maybe. Or just another cruel trick hope plays on fools.
Newt adjusted his pack, swallowed the dryness in his throat, and kept walking.
Above, a single black bird circled once—a dark fleck against the white blaze of the sun. Then it tilted its wings and vanished into the light, leaving the sky empty once more.