TEN
「me and
the devil」
＊*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚

   NO SOONER THAN they had been released from their bindings to the old, dead tree, they had been quickly fed and started making their way through the dark pass of the mountains, heading for the supposed safe haven. Sylvia wasn't exactly happy that they were sticking with Group B instead of trying to find the Gladers, but she wouldn't leave Thomas.

   It was odd when some of the girls approached her and talked to her. She had dealt with boys her whole remembered life—their crude jokes, their obnoxiousness, their rambunctiousness. She was hesitant to the new company—both because of their previous actions and never having been around girls before. Being surrounded by a bunch of girls, being treated almost like one of them, was nice.

   Sylvia came to the conclusion that she liked the company of girls, and she wished she'd had another girl with her back for all her years in the Glade. Not to say she trusted them or had forgotten their transgressions against her and Thomas, but she enjoyed talking to someone of like her.

   Still, she kept by Thomas's side until the curiosity was too much for her to bear. She told Thomas she'd be right back and slid in place next to the blonde girl—Sonya. Sylvia noticed that Harriet drifted back to Thomas's side.

   "I've been meaning to ask you something," Sylvia started as they walked. She peeked ahead to see Hayden a hundred or so yards away from them, making sure he was out of hearing range. Sonya glanced at her and gestured for her to continue. "Were you close with Hayden at all, back in your Maze?"

   "I wasn't exactly the best of friends with him, but I knew him well enough. Is this about what I think it's about?" She asked.

   "Yes," Sylvia admitted. "Just...what was he like?"

   "He was well known, considering he was the only boy in our group until Aris came up. He was friendly with pretty much everyone, but he did have a sort of...sketchy past." Sonya explained. It seemed as if she almost didn't know how to put it into words. "He had this...complicated relationship with this one girl. One day they couldn't stand one another and the next they'd be friends. It went back and forth, but she sacrificed herself to a Griever that was about to kill him, and he sort of went a little crazy afterward."

   Sylvia raised a brow, "Crazy, how?"

   "It's hard to explain." Sonya sighed, "But he started to act weird. Started blaming everyone for things in the past. He almost got a couple of us killed once."

   "What..." She trailed off. "What happened afterwards?"

   Sonya seemed to cringe at the memory, but said, "He almost never recovered. It took a long time for any of us to begin trusting him again."

   Sylvia had to hide her surprise. "That's...surprising. He seemed so nice when we first met. Like, overly nice."

   "Yeah, he was better after he recovered but..." Sonya trailed off. "I'm sorry," she said softly after a few moments of silence. "About Hayden. It seemed like you were close to him. And I'm sorry for what we did to you and Thomas. We were just scared, you know?"

   Sylvia glanced at her, judging her expression. She seemed genuine enough. Sylvia said quietly, "I understand."

   As Sonya looked back ahead of her, Sylvia studied her. She had deep brown eyes and long lashes that brushed her cheekbones when she closed her eyes. Her golden blonde hair glowed in the moonlight. There was something about her, some semblance of familiarity that she couldn't put her finger on...

   Sonya looked back at her, and wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands, furrowing her brows. "What? Do I have something on my face?"

   "No, sorry," Sylvia sputtered, stumbling over her words after having been caught staring. "You just... you remind me of someone."

   Sonya let a small, curious smile curl on her lips but she didn't question her further. Though, she did ask, "What was your Glade like? Living with so many boys, I mean. I can't tell if it would be fun or just terrible."

   Sylvia's lips quirked—if only slightly. "It wasn't terrible, though I did want to strangle every one of them at least once."

   IT TOOK LONGER than Sylvia had anticipated for them to reach the end of the pass. It was the middle of the second night of traipsing through the mountainside dense with brittle trees when shouts ahead announced that they'd reached the end of the pass. Both Sylvia and Thomas pushed through the crowd of girls to try and get a glimpse of what awaited them.

   The group of girls had clustered in a wide swath of broken rock that fanned out from the narrow canyon of the pass before dropping in a steep slope to the bottom of the mountain far below. The moon shone on the valley below, creating eerie, dark purple shadows across the flatland. Sylvia's eyes searched, and searched, and searched for the supposed safe haven and she found nothing.

   There was nothing for miles but sparse, dead land. Absolutely nothing. No sign of anything that could be a safe haven. And they were supposed to be within a few miles of it.

   "Maybe we just can't see it." One of the girls said from somewhere in the small crowd. Sylvia knew what she was trying to do: hold onto hope.

   There was no hope. WICKED lied to them, made them traverse a hundred miles through this horrid desert for absolutely nothing.

   Sylvia jeered, always the pessimist, "Or maybe this was just a suicide mission."

   "No," Harriet rebuted, sounding upbeat. "It might just be another entrance to one of their underground tunnels. I'm sure it's there."

   Thomas had told her about the underground tunnels they'd come out of after going into the Flat Trans. Her and Hayden hadn't experienced anything like that—having been spat right out into the wasteland—and from what she heard of it, she was glad.

   "How many more miles do you think we have left?" Sonya asked.

   "Can't be more than ten, based on where we started and how far the man said we had to go," Harriet answered. "Probably more like seven or eight. I thought we'd come out over here and we'd see a nice big building with a smiley face on it."

   Sylvia rolled her eyes. She couldn't believe they were giving WICKED the benefit of the doubt. They were all going to die out here and no one wanted to admit it.

   "Well," Sonya announced. "Not much choice but to keep heading north. We should've known better than to expect something easy. Maybe we can make it to the bottom of the mountain by sunrise. Sleep on flat ground."

   The others agreed with her and were just about to set off down a barely visible footpath leading from the fan of rock when Thomas spoke up. "Where's Teresa?"

   Sylvia scanned the group and quickly realized the conclusion Thomas had come to. Teresa had disappeared.

   Harriet looked back at Thomas, the moonlight bathing her face in a pale luminescence. "At this point, I don't really care. If she's a big enough girl to go runnin' around when she doesn't get her way, she's big enough to catch up and find us when she gets over it. Come on."

   They started off, heading down the dusty path, the loose soil and rock crunching underfoot. Sylvia noticed Thomas was still looking around the area, as if searching for Teresa.

   "Let's go, Greenie," she called back to him.

   He scanned the area once more, glared at her, and followed.

   They walked side by side down the mountain but Sylvia didn't attempt to make conversation. He clearly wanted some time to think. Sylvia couldn't help how her eyes kept drifting to Hayden's head in the sea of girls. He wasn't the tallest boy she'd ever met but he was still taller than a good amount of his group, and he stood out among the crowd.

   She was tempted to talk to him, to make him confess to her why he'd been so willing to kill her, but she refused to take two steps in his direction. She was sure that if she got close enough to talk to him, she wouldn't be able to resist the urge to knock his teeth out.

   After an hour or so of traveling, her legs starting to burn from the awkward downhill walk, the group came across a pocket of dead trees that arrowed up the mountain in a big swath. Harriet and Sonya opted to stop here for a break and they gestured for her to come over and help them unpack. Sylvia glanced at Thomas quickly—he still looked distracted by his own thoughts so she figured she let him alone for a while.

   She helped Harriet and Sonya distribute food and water out of the packs and set up a small fire for warmth. Once all the work was done, Sylvia found a lone tree and she shuffled over to it, letting her back slide down the trunk as she sat.

   She had closed her eyes for all of three seconds before she heard the last voice she'd wanted to.

   "Sylvia, we need to talk." Hayden said, standing a few feet away from her.

   She quickly stood, her muscles tensing defensively. "Do we now?"

   "Syl, please," he pleaded. "The act is over. Come on, let's take a walk. I'll explain everything. I swear."

   Shaking her head at her own stupidity, Sylvia sneered, "And why should I trust you?"

   "You don't have to. It's over, I swear. Just come with me, please."

   Sylvia could feel the anger simmering in her chest. She spat, "Fine," and followed him into the woods.

   She couldn't resist this. She needed to know. Needed to know why he'd done this, why he'd turned his back on her so easily. She needed to know if any part of the friendship they'd built was actually real.

   The wood shone white in the moonlight, and the streaks and pools of shadow across the ground gave the whole place a haunted feel, reminding her eerily of the Deadheads. Hayden kept walking in silence, floating up the mountainside like an apparition.

   Sylvia was the first to break the silence. "I guess I should be used to backstabbers by now, but clearly, I haven't learned my lesson."

   "I was only doing what WICKED told me to. Don't act like you wouldn't have done the same for your boys." His voice still had an edge to it, but she figured it was because of the tense conversation.

   "I wouldn't have. Not after I'd gotten to know you," she said sincerely. "I would have found another way. I would've figured something out. How could you have been so willing to kill me, after everything?"

   Branches cracked underfoot as Hayden tried to formulate a response. They walked side by side now, a couple feet between them.

   "It was either kill you, or everyone I've ever known and cared about would have died," he stated. "You know what WICKED is capable of. They would've delivered the punishment, one way or another."

   Sylvia's lips twisted cruelly. "Was any of that even—"

   The cool press of a metal pinpoint against her spine made her freeze.

   "What are you doing?" The words came out in a harsh whisper.

   "I never said I wasn't going to kill you," he said, his breath against the shell of her good ear. "I'm finishing the job. You can make this easy, or you can make this very hard."

   SYLVIA DIDN'T THINK that Hayden would take to her calling him a backstabber literally, seeing as he had a knife positioned against her spine. There are a couple defining moments in her life that she could remember as clear as day, moments when her anger became something bigger than herself—an all-consuming, breath-taking, dizzying sort of thing.

   This was one of those moments.

   Sylvia couldn't exactly describe her anger using words, but she had wrath pumping in her veins. She had violence whispering in her ear, telling her to do terrible things to Hayden, to make him pay for what he was about to do. Her anger was like the death of a star—cataclysmic.

   But upon approaching a secluded cave emitting an eerie green light and seeing three figures stand out against the light—Teresa, Thomas, and that weird kid, Aris. Teresa cracked her spear against Thomas's skull and he dropped to the ground—her anger became a black hole.

   Her anger reached out with greedy fingers, dragging in both the deserving and undeserving, and devouring them whole. Her anger fed on everything in sight, growing bigger and bigger until it blotted out her vision. Until she could feel her own rage pulsing in the veins beneath her skin. Until all she could see was that black hole.

   She turned her wrathful gaze over her shoulder to look back at Hayden, her face shrouded in shadows, accentuating all the sharp points. She said, her voice calm and steady, "I swear on every morsel of blood in my body, that you will be dead by the time the sun touches the sky."

   That was when she struck.

  With all her might, Sylvia spun and swung down on Hayden's wrist, forcing him to drop the knife from the pain. She punched him not once, but three times before he went down. She swiftly grabbed the fallen knife and ran towards the eerie green light.

   She and Hayden had been far enough away that Teresa and Aris hadn't heard their tussle. They were so focused on Thomas's barely conscious form before them that they didn't notice Sylvia coming up behind them until she gripped the hair at the back of Aris's head and pulled him roughly towards her, quickly positioning the knife at his throat with her other hand.

   Teresa's head whipped towards her, eyes widened and face illuminated in the sickly green light.

   "Teresa," Sylvia said lowly, her voice almost a growl. "What the hell have you done?"

   Teresa put her hands up and said, "Sylvia, listen to me—"

   "What did you do to him?" She shouted, the knife coming dangerously close to slicing Aris's skin.

   "Just put the knife down and we can talk."

   "I'm past talking," Sylvia sneered. "I am going to slit each and every one of your throats. That, I promise."

   "So confident?" Teresa asked.

   "You—"

   Sylvia's sentence was cut short by a small, pained gasp slipping from her lips. She looked down, her hold on Aris loosening. There was a blade protruding from her stomach, blood beginning to pool around it and drip down her torso. She yelped as it was ripped from her flesh and she crumpled to the ground.

   "You were never going to win this, Sylvia," Hayden's cold voice met her ears. "Don't you see? You were meant to die."

   Sylvia tried to spit out a remark, tried to form words between her suddenly dry lips, tried to breathe, but it was all too harrowing. The sheer pain rearing through her abdomen was debilitating. All she could do was gasp for breath on her hands and knees, blood pooling on the ground beneath her.

   Hayden had stabbed her.

   Everything was blurry. Nothing made sense. Hands wrapped around her arms and she let out a scream between gritted teeth as she was dragged further into the green light. They dropped her on smooth ground, surrounded by green light, and all she could do was gasp.

   Her face was pressed against the cold ground and she could feel her own warm blood coating her shirt and neck and arms. All she could feel was the flaming pain in her abdomen, igniting every nerve in her body.

   Her hearing had left her behind and she was deaf to the world, the only exception being the incessant ringing that droned around her. Her eyes focused on something a few feet away from her—a face.

   Thomas. There was blood trailing down his brow, gathering in a puddle on the floor. His brown eyes were watching her, his eyelids fluttering, fighting to stay open. His finger twitched against the ground, almost like he was itching to reach out.

   Sylvia knew, inexplicably, that this was the last thing she'd see before she died. This was the final image of her life—Thomas fighting to stay awake in a pool of his own blood.

   Though her vision was blurry, she could see a strange mist start to descend upon their foreign enclosure. She could hardly breathe on her own, and the fog was no help. She was going to suffocate.

   Hayden.

   Could he really have done this to her?

   Thomas.

   His lips were moving, but she couldn't hear him.

   Her friends.

   Were they okay?

   Minho.

   I'm sorry.

.