Disclaimer:

I do not own The Maze Runner. That's all there is.

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"That's not the worst of it," Minho said gravely. He was holding onto the tag of Thomas' shirt so tightly I thought he was going to choke him. "Check out this shank's. Subject A2. To be killed by Group B."

Almost everyone turned their heads to me. They held hostility in their eyes, like they weren't sure of me anymore, like they were seeing me in a whole new light. I might as well have confessed to a murder for how clenched their jaws were.

But before any accusations could be fired, a clanging bell began ringing throughout the room. The sound was so sharp and sudden that I had to cover my ears. It reminded me of the alarm back in the Glade- the one we heard when Teresa arrived.

And then it hit me: it was the Greenie alarm. That would explain the astonished expressions on the Gladers' faces as they moved throughout the room, gawking at walls and ceilings to find the source of the horrible sound. It echoed within our confined space. The sound seemed to be coming from everywhere at once.

Newt grabbed my arm and shouted in my ear, "It's the bloody Newbie alarm!"

"I know!" I responded just as loudly, my voice almost being swept away by the continuous ringing that stabbed at my eardrums and made me wince.

Newt yelled over to Thomas, "Why's it ringing?"

He only shrugged in response as a signal he didn't know. Then again, why should he? Thomas was just as clueless as the rest of us.

Minho returned from the bathroom with Aris, though I didn't remember the Keeper going in there in the first place. The two of them both rubbed the backs of their necks as they searched the room for answers. Frypan was walking toward the door leading to the hallway, about to touch the spot where the broken handle used to be.

"Wait!" Thomas shouted, though it sounded more like he blurted it out on accident. He raced to the door with Newt trailing behind him.

"Why?" Frypan questioned. His hand was hovering just inches above the knob. Thomas said something in reply that I couldn't hear from where I stood. Frypan shouted back, "Yeah! And maybe we need to get out of here!"

Frypan waited no longer to open the door. He first tried pushing the door open; it didn't budge. He pushed harder, then leaned up against it with his full weight. It still didn't seem to have the slightest intention of moving.

"You broke the shuck door handle!" Frypan screamed and slapped his hand against the surface of the door.

I wished everything would go back to quiet. I was tired of shouting, tired of the alarm, and especially tired of chaos. The confusion and panic I constantly felt were beginning to wear me out. It was exhausting to be on my highest alert all the time, and I prayed that the stupid bell would just stop. Maybe that would solve some of our problems.

And it did. By some miracle, the ringing abruptly ceased and all we were met with was silence. I wasn't used to it having a sound. A ferocious buzzing settled in my ears like an angry hive of bees that wouldn't go away. Every breath I took seemed to sound fuzzy and unclear.

Newt was the first to speak, and his voice sounded static-like as well, as if I was watching a video in poor quality. "Don't tell me we're still gonna get bloody Newbies thrown in our laps."

"All we need to do is find the Box," I said halfheartedly. The words didn't sound right to me- maybe because I was so incredibly exhausted that I wasn't up for sarcasm.

A creak caused everyone's heads to turn sharply toward the door. It had swung open several inches and revealed nothing but darkness. A question embedded itself in my mind: who had turned out the lights?

"Guessin' they want us to go out there now," Minho said as he eyed the open door with suspicion.

"Then why don't you go first?" Frypan offered, panting slightly from having beat up the door.

Minho was already moving toward it with a brave expression, like he was trying too hard to show he wasn't scared. "No problem. Maybe we'll have a new little shank to pick up and kick in the butt when we got nothin' else to do." He made it to the door and turned, gaze flickering between Thomas and I. "We could use another Chuck."

It all seemed very wrong to me. Red flags were everywhere, blaring their warning signs right in front of us, and we were still too blind to see them. Maybe the alarm was nothing more than a distraction so someone could bolt the door and turn out the lights. How much of a coincidence was it that the door opened when the ringing stopped?

I decided that if there was something waiting for us behind that door, we might as well face it. Staying in that room would do us no good. Someone was obviously playing with us, and we just had to play right back.

I stepped forward. "I'll go if you're going to take so long."

Minho and Thomas looked momentarily stunned. It was probably because of my tone, which was icy but blank at the same time. It expressed my emotions pretty clearly. I was so full of exasperation that it was almost painful to be filled with such a thing.

Before anyone could protest, I grabbed the side of the door and pulled it open. I stepped into the darkness without a second thought about it. A crease formed between my eyebrows when I looked around using the light from the room. "Something's different."

"Well, all the lights are off," Minho pointed out dryly as he observed the pitch-black hallway from inside the bedroom. "That could be a start."

I turned and glared sharply at him. "Thank you for the intelligent observation, Minho. Just hold on and let me find the light switch."

"It's a little past our door on the left wall," Newt informed as he peeked around the door. "Hard to miss."

I nodded in understanding and walked further into the darkness. It reminded me of when Teresa guided me through the W.I.C.K.E.D facility in the middle of the night; a shiver ran down my spine at the thought of the memory. I tried to shoo it away as best as I could and focus on the task at hand.

As soon as I passed the boys' room, I let my left hand trail along the wall for any sign of a small square. Something had definitely changed about the hallway- I just had yet to figure it out. The air smelled of antiseptic and stung my nose.

My fingers hit a bump. I fumbled around in the pitch-black void and let them close around a column of small knobs. Light switches. "Found them!"

I flicked them all at once with the side of my hand and blinked as bright lights filled the once dark hallway. My eyes took a second to get used to them. I turned toward the others, who were still in the door, and noticed the surprised looks on their faces. It took me a second to realize why.

The bodies were gone. Every single one of them. There was no sign of them at all; the ceiling was devoid of anything they could've been hung with. I felt numb with shock as if the air had been sucked from my lungs.

Newt stepped into the corridor and turned in a slow circle. "This is impossible. Not enough time passed for someone to get them out. And no one else even came into this buggin' hall. We would've heard them!"

Other Gladers and Aris flooded the corridor with equal looks of surprise and curiosity on their faces.

"You're right," Minho responded. "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 from where he still stood in the doorway. I briefly wondered why he hadn't joined us in the hall.

"Well, you shanks are right smart," Frypan huffed. "But take a look around. They're gone. So whatever you think, somehow they got rid of them."

"Hey," Winston said. "Those crazy people quit screaming and yelling."

"What crazy people?" I asked.

"There were these awful-looking shanks outside that were yelling at us," Minho quickly explained. "They called themselves Cranks."

Cranks. That word clicked in my mind like it was one piece of a memory that just needed more to complete the puzzle. Somehow I knew what he was talking about, but needed more detailed information to be certain.

I lightly touched my temple with my hand. "What did they look like?"

"Um." Minho blinked as he tried to think back. "Peeling, sore-covered skin. Shucking scary eyes, mostly bald and rotting teeth. Why?"

Newt's eyes were filled with concern and a speck of interest. "You remembering somethin'?"

I didn't answer and delved deeper into my mind. Peeling skin. Bald. Rotting teeth. One memory clicked. I had seen one before, when Minho was supplying Thomas and I with Runner stuff. The image had scared me so badly that I had fallen off a crate.

It wasn't just a regular Crank I had seen at that moment. It was my dad.

Tears pricked at my eyes at the awful memory, of how my own father had looked right through me as if I wasn't even there. He proclaimed horrid things in an almost detached voice, declaring that we were all damned and there was no stopping the Flare. My mother had rushed me out of the basement before I woke Thomas up with my screaming. I didn't sleep for weeks after that.

"Hey, you alright?" Thomas questioned softly. I opened my eyes to see everyone staring at me like they didn't know what to do. My hand was still at my temple and my eyes watered until the figures became nothing but blurs of color.

"I'm fine," I asserted shakily, which didn't sound convincing at all. Minho knew better than to question it and turned to the boys' room.

His jaw went completely slack. "No way!"

Before anyone would ask him what was the matter, he darted inside the room. The others surged after him. I wiped my eyes and followed, trying to ignore the growing lump in my throat.

At first, I didn't see a problem. The room looked very much like my own, except this one was obviously made for males. The colors were a lot less bright. Bunk beds lined the walls, and there was a bathroom attached as well.

Then I noticed the windows. They were neatly bricked over behind the iron bars. It didn't look sloppy at all, as if whoever had done it had forever to complete the job. It wasn't something that could be done within twenty minutes.

"Even if they were quick with those bodies," Newt breathed, "I'm pretty sure they didn't have time to bloody throw up some brick walls. What's going on here?"

My eyes followed Minho as he approached the barrier and pressed his hand to it. "Solid."

I wasn't sure what he had been expecting.

"It doesn't even look fresh," Thomas murmured as he stepped up closer to get his own feel. "The mortar's dry. Somehow they've tricked us, that's all."

"Tricked us?" Theo questioned, then shook his head with his eyes directed at the floor. "Ay Dios mío. This is too much. How can they do that?"

Thomas shrugged. "I don't know. Remember the Cliff? We jumped into thin air and went through an invisible hole. Who knows with these people can do."

I decided to ponder it. Sitting on one of the bottom bunks, I jotted down some possibilities with a pencil and a small notebook I had found in one of the drawers. I had already filled up five pages with notes, torn them out, and flipped through them countless times as I made theories about what could be happening.

THEORIES

•Maybe we're all on drugs or something. The pizza was a little bit too good, let's be honest.

•We could be dreaming

•^That was stupid never mind

•It's a test

•W.I.C.K.E.D somehow has control of our brains and what we see

•W.I.C.K.E.D is really a group of magicians

Some of them were pointless and had been jotted down just because of how bored I was. My mind was so jumbled that it was hard to think sensibly, but I was trying my best to function in the midst of chaos. People were entering and leaving the room like lost sheep. They really made it difficult to think.

Thomas came by and sat down next to me. "Hey."

"Hey," I sighed, scanning through the list in my lap as I gnawed on the eraser absentmindedly.

Thomas read through it and pointed to the top. "I like this one. Who knows? I could be on drugs right now."

I rolled my eyes and assembled my notes together. I tucked them into the notebook and closed it, sliding the pencil into the metal rings on the side. I decided I should tell him about our dad. He deserved to know.

"I had a memory while I was unconscious," I told him quietly, unable to take my eyes off the cover of the notebook.

"Oh, yeah?" Thomas said as his leg bounced up and down. "What was it about?"

It was suddenly very hard to speak. My mouth felt dry like it had been stuffed with cotton. How did I explain this to him? That our dad had been a nutjob?

"I-It was about our family. You, me, Mom, and Dad. Only Dad was...sick."

Thomas' breath hitched in his throat and his head snapped up to look at me, though I wasn't facing him. "You mean..."

I nodded and swallowed thickly. I finally found the courage to look him in the eyes, the ones that were identical to my own. "Thomas, our dad was a Crank."

gif is newt being cute and confused

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whoop there it is part 2

hahahahaha the disclaimer is a reference to the raven cycle if any of y'all have read it (this is 2017 kristyn sneaking in because i changed the disclaimer and i couldn't think of anything else to put so i just had to reference my boy gansey)

questions:

-do you think dylan has finally figured out how to force memories back?

-would you like to see more memories of hers when she sleeps?

-could someone make an au where nothing in the maze runner is real and they're all just really high?

i'm running out of questions i'm so sorry. i'll try to think of better ones next time!

-kristyn