TWENTY FIVE
「warm-blooded,
fiery eyes」
＊*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚

   IT WAS CHAOS. The Glade was in complete and utter chaos. Boys were yelling, fighting, crying. Newt had finally regained consciousness. Minho had not returned from his endeavor. Sylvia fought the urge to go after him. She needed to help Newt. He was woozy and barely standing on his own. He had lost a lot of blood from Gally's attack. Thomas had told her that Gally smacked Newt over the head with one of the boards right before she'd entered the room.

   Sylvia herself had a nasty gash on her cheek from the glass and a sure forming bruise across her ribs from the Griever. Everytime she turned or moved a certain way, agony rippled beneath her ribs. Her ankle had begun to throb again.

   She ran out of the Homestead, and caught up to Newt and Thomas who had gone out ahead of her. "There he is!" Thomas shouted. Minho had just turned a corner up ahead and was coming straight for them. Thomas cupped his hands. "What were you doing, idiot!"

   Minho waited until he made it back through the Door, then bent over, hands on his knees, and sucked in a few breaths before answering. "I just...wanted to...make sure."

   Sylvia stormed up to him and he rose from his bent over position. She shoved his shoulders. Hard.

"Make sure of what?" She almost yelled. "That you're the biggest fucking moron on the planet!? You're really jacked in the head now, aren't you?"

   Newt nodded wearily behind her, "Lotta good you'd be, taken with Gally."

   Minho held up a hand to the three of them. "Slim it, boys! And sunshine." He grinned at her scowl. "I just wanted to see if they went toward the Cliff. Toward the Griever Hole."

   "And?" Thomas said.

   "Bingo." Minho smiled.

   "I just can't believe it," Newt said, almost whispering. "What a night."

   Sylvia dragged her hands down her face and groaned. "You're such an asshole, Minho."

   Minho scoffed, and they all were silent for a moment. Thomas' expression changed rapidly, as if he'd just remembered something, and he whirled towards Newt. "What were you about to tell me?" he asked. "You said we had worse—"

   "Yeah." Newt pointed his thumb over his shoulder. "You can still see the buggin' smoke." Sylvia spun on her heel to see the Map Room, hidden by a few trees, but smoke trailing out of its burned structure. Sylvia's jaw almost unhinged. "Somebody burned the Map trunks," Newt said. "Every last one of 'em."

   Sylvia, Minho, and Newt ran over to the destroyed building, and Thomas slipped away towards the direction of the Slammer. The dread in Sylvia's chest just about exploded, and was now spilling through the cracks in her demeanor. All she could think was, no no no no no...

   She stopped short just in front of the building. The metal door was deformed and rusted, and the inside was scorched black. Alby was kneeling in the grass a few feet away, nursing a wound on his head. Newt immediately went to help his friend, and shouted for someone to get medical supplies. A few others were gathered around the burning remnants of the building.

   Before she could think, Sylvia moved towards the still smoldering remaints inside of it. A rough hand grabbed her arm and pulled her back. She whirled furiously on Minho, who retracted his hand.

   "We need to go in there! Save the maps!" She exclaimed desperately.

   "Sylvia, no."

   "What do you mean,'no'?" She shouted, eyes glazing over from both the smoke and rage, "That is everything we have! Everything!"

   She was surprised to see that he didn't seem all that worried about the destruction of their life's work. Everything Sylvia and the other Runners had worked towards, hours of studying those fucking maps, all turned to ashes. She was beyond outraged.

   "There's nothing we can do about it now!" Minho exclaimed.

   Her hands shook with fury. She clenched her fingers around the scar in her left palm. Her eyes were on fire. "We need to find who did this!" And she stomped towards Alby, shouting to him, "Who did this!?"

   Newt brushed her away from the injured boy and said, "Calm down, Syl."

   "Calm down?" She laughed harshly. "Newt, we just lost everything we worked for! All the information we had on the Maze was in there!"

   She stared at Newt furiously, ready to punch and scream. Everything she had worked on for her entire life had been burnt to the ground. Why were Newt and Minho acting so weird? Why weren't they mad? Sylvia heard commotion behind her and turned to see what was happening.

   "Our Map Room was set on fire and you ran off to talk to your shuck girlfriend? What's wrong with you?" Minho scolded the Greenie, who seemed to have just arrived on the scene.

   Thomas spotted Sylvia's distraught form behind Minho. He looked alarmed, and she was sure it was because she looked insane, ready to spit fire at anyone who dared come near her. Cheeks smeared with blood from the night, deep bags beneath her eyes, knuckles white. He hesitated, "I didn't think it mattered anymore—if you haven't figured out the Maps by now..."

   Sylvia only got angrier at his words.

   Minho looked disgusted, the pale light and fog from all the smoke making his face seem almost sinister. "Yeah, this'd be a great freaking time to give up. What the—"

   "I'm sorry—just tell me what happened." Thomas moved closer to Newt to see what had happened to Alby.

   "I'll tell you what happened, Greenie," She spat. He visibly recoiled. "Some moronic slinthead thought it'd be a good idea to set the Map Room on fucking fire!"

   Newt sighed. "All the trunks are burned to a freaking crisp. I suspected Alby at first, but whoever did it slammed his shuck head against the table—you can see where. It's nasty."

   "Who do you think did it?" Thomas asked.

   "Maybe Gally before he showed up in the Homestead and went psycho? Maybe the Grievers? I don't know, and I don't care. Doesn't matter." Minho responded, seemingly unbothered.

   Sylvia was close to wailing. Doesn't matter?

   "Now who's the one giving up?" Thomas retorted.

   "That's not what I meant, shank."

   "Then what did you fucking mean?" Sylvia scowled harshly at the same time that Thomas said, "What did—"

   "Just shut your hole for now." Minho put his fingers to his lips, his eyes darting around to see if anyone was looking at him. "Just shut your hole. You'll find out soon enough."

   Sylvia's hands went up to strangle him, but before she could wrap her hands around his neck, arms grasped her. Troye's jovial voice sang in her ear, "No killing today, Syl!"

   "I'm going to kill him!" She screeched.

   "I want to let you sooo badly, but then Newt will kill me!" He whined. She broke out of his hold with another shriek and furiously glared at him, then Minho.

   Thomas diffused the situation a bit by speaking, "Minho, I need to tell you, Sylvia, and Newt something. And we need to let Teresa out—she's probably starving and we could use her help."

   "That stupid girl is the last thing I'm worried about."

   Thomas rolled his eyes at the older boy, "Just give us a few minutes—we have an idea. Maybe it'll still work if enough Runners remember their Maps."

   This got Minho's attention, and hers too. There was an odd glint in his eyes, "An idea? What?"

   "Just come over to the Slammer with me. You, Sylvia, and Newt."

   Minho thought for a second. "Newt!" he called out and then pointed down at Alby, "Let the Med-jacks take care of him. We need to talk."

   Newt gave him a questioning look, then handed the rag to the closest Glader. "Go find Clint—tell him we got worse problems than guys with buggin' splinters." When the kid ran off to do as he was told, Newt stepped away from Alby. "Talk about what?"

   Minho only nodded at Thomas. The boy said, "Just come with me," and then turned toward the Slammer without waiting for any of their responses.

   BEGRUDGINGLY, SYLVIA FOLLOWED. Once they got to the Slammer, Thomas said promptly, "Let her out. Let her out, and then we'll talk. Trust me—you wanna hear it."

   Newt seemed particularly annoyed at the moment, covered in blood and soot, "Tommy, this is—"

   "Please. Just open it—let her out. Please."

   "How can we trust her?" Minho asked. "Soon as she woke up, the whole place fell to pieces. She even admitted she triggered something."

   "He's got a point," Newt said.

   "Come on," Thomas insisted. "What's she gonna do, run around and stab every Glader to death? Come on."

   Sylvia groaned, still fuming. She wasn't in the mood to listen to them bicker about some girl, when someone had just burned down the Map Room. She stormed up to Newt, snatched the set of keys from his belt, and unlocked the door to the Slammer. She swung the door open and said to the girl inside, "Come on."

   Teresa walked out of the small building, glowering at Sylvia and Newt as she passed them. She gave a just-as-unpleasant glance toward Minho, then stopped to stand right next to Thomas.

   "Now start talking before I start taking fingers." Sylvia demanded.

   Thomas glanced at the new girl and she gave him an almost withering look, "What?" she said. "You talk—they obviously think I'm a serial killer."

   "Yeah, you look so dangerous," Thomas muttered, but he turned his attention to Sylvia, Newt, and Minho. "Okay, when Teresa was first coming out of her deep sleep, she had memories flashing through her mind. She, um, she told me later that she remembers that the Maze is a code. That maybe instead of solving it to find a way out, it's trying to send us a message."

   "Is this a joke?" Sylvia asked angrily.

   "A code?" Minho asked. "How's it a code?"

   Thomas shook his head, "I don't know for sure—you two are way more familiar with the Maps than I am. But I have a theory. That's why I was hoping you guys could remember some of them."

   Minho glanced at Newt, his eyebrows raised in question. Newt nodded. Sylvia looked at them with a question burning behind her eyes.

   "What?" Thomas asked, sounding just as angry as she felt. "You guys keep acting like you have a secret."

   Minho rubbed his eyes with both hands, took a deep breath. "We hid the Maps" Sylvia took a step back, almost stumbling. Minho pointed at the Homestead. "We hid the freaking Maps in the weapons room, put dummies in their place. Because of Alby's warning. And because of the so-called Ending your girlfriend triggered."

   Sylvia recoiled harshly, as if she'd been burned. "You hid the maps and you didn't tell me?"

   "Syl," Newt began, "Minho and I were the only ones that knew."

   She shook her head with rage, pressing her fist against her teeth. "Why didn't you tell me?"

   "We needed it to be kept a secret." Newt said simply. He didn't understand.

   "Don't you trust me?" Sylvia snarled, glancing between Newt and Minho fiercely.

   "Of course we—"

   "I'm one of the goddamn Keepers of the Runners!" She shouted incredulously. "The maps are my fucking responsibility! And you didn't tell me!?"

   She felt beyond angry. Beyond enraged. She couldn't explain the feeling of hurt and betrayal throbbing in her chest. Don't they trust me? She thought desperately.

   She scoffed, her voice cold, "Wow. I guess two fucking years means nothing to you." She glared at Newt, then Minho. She made sure the raven haired boy felt her rage, then she stormed past him, knocking his shoulder harshly.

   MINHO WAITED APPROXIMATELY fifteen seconds before running after her. She had made her escape quickly, and Minho had to work to find her. He looked everywhere, and finally found her standing in Nick's old room, staring out of the gaping hole that had been created in the wall.

   Minho could see her tense muscles, items strewn around the room and knocked over from the Griever attack, her fingers smoothing her brow repeatedly.

   "Sylvia." He said softly.

   She said nothing, though her right ear tilted towards him ever so slightly. Her silence made his skin crawl. He wished she would yell at him, or punch him, or something. Anything was better than her silence. Minho looked towards the ceiling and blew out a breath, trying to think of something to say. Sylvia beat him to it.

   "Can you be honest with me?" She asked quietly.

   Minho nodded, and then when he realized she couldn't see it, he said, "About what?"

   Sylvia glanced at him over her shoulder, and began hoarsely. "What happened between us...was that even real? Or were you just messing with my fucking head?"

   Minho dipped his head slightly. After she said the last part of her sentence, she had looked away from him. "It's real if you want it to be."

   She whirled around, looking furious all over again. She threw her hands up. "What does that even mean?"

   "What do you want, Sylvia?"

   "I don't know what I want!" Sylvia exclaimed, edging on desperation, her eyes burning. "I don't even know what to think, Minho! You're telling me all these things about how you don't hate me, and then you lie to me! Like you don't trust me? And I am just so confused on what any of this even means." Her voice was thick with an emotion she couldn't name.

   "Would you have told me about the maps?" He asked genuinely, his brows knitted together.

   "Yes." She replied, without hesitation.

   "So you trust me?"

   "I was starting to," her voice broke. "Why do you think I defended Thomas at the Gathering?"

   Minho answered honestly. "I don't know."

   "Because I trusted your word, Minho. Because I trusted what you thought about him." Sylvia swallowed the aching in her throat, and it settled in her chest. "Why didn't you trust me?"

   "I do trust you. I just—trying not to hate you is still new to me too. I'm working on it." His eyes stayed on her. The hurt in her eyes made him want to pull her closer to him, but he knew he couldn't do that. He wanted to rub soothing circles into her back, feel her hands against his ribs again. He couldn't explain why.

   "So, is that what we're doing?" She asked in a hushed voice. "Trying not to hate each other?"

   Minho nodded, "If that's what you want."

   "Is that what you want?" Sylvia asked hesitantly.

   "Yeah," He breathed. "Yes."

   Sylvia was silent for several moments. Staring at Minho, then at her shoes. Minho was so scared she would tell him to get lost, that she never wanted to see him again. He didn't know why he wanted this so badly. Why he wanted her company, her laugh, her smile. But he was tired of pushing it down.

   She looked back up to him again, and gave a brief nod. "I think...I would like to try."

   Minho gave the barest twitch of his lips, "Okay."

   "Shuckface." She whispered.

   When he smiled wider, she dipped her head to hide the curl of her mouth.

   SYLVIA AND MINHO met Newt, Thomas, and Teresa in the basement. The room was an attachment to one of the storage rooms inside the Homestead. Only a select few Gladers knew about it, considering that they kept weapons down there, and they didn't need unwanted hands on them. Each of them looked at her warily as she entered the room, but she refused to be embarrassed at her anger. Her head held high, she looked each of them in the eye. Admittedly, she was still upset with Minho and Newt, but she could shove that down in order to test Thomas's idea.

   They had already started opening the trunks, papers strewn about on the table near the center of the room. Thomas had papers laid in front of him, as if he'd been examining them. He looked at the two Keepers questioningly, then Newt.

   "Come on, Tommy," Newt insisted, "You wanted to bloody wait for them. Get talking."

   Thomas let out a breath, and then started, "Well, what if all the wall movements had nothing to do with a map or a maze or anything like that? What if instead the pattern spelled words? Some kind of clue that'll help us escape."

   Minho threw his hands up frustratedly, "Dude, you have any idea how much we've studied these things? Don't you think we would've noticed if it were spelling out freaking words?"

   "Maybe it's too hard to see with the naked eye, just comparing one day to the next. And maybe you weren't supposed to compare one day to the next, but look at it one day at a time?" This time Thomas looked at Sylvia, trying to see if he was gaining any support on her side. Sylvia stared at him with an unamused expression, which made the answer pretty clear to him.

   Newt laughed. "Tommy, I might not be the sharpest guy in the Glade, but sounds like you're talkin' straight out your butt to me."

   Sylvia sighed when Thomas's eyes landed back on her again. "Look, Greenie, we've tried everything. Trust me. I've probably spent half my remembered life studying those stupid things."

   "Okay, okay," he said, starting over. "You've always had two Runners assigned to one section, right?"

   "Right." Minho answered, looking interested in what Thomas was trying to get at.

   "And those Runners make a Map every day, and then compare it to Maps from previous days, for that section. What if, instead, you were supposed to compare the eight sections to each other, every day? Each day being a separate clue or code? Did you ever compare sections to other sections?"

   Minho glanced at Sylvia, knowing she did the most with the maps. She was the one who came up with the idea for them after all, the early days being Mappers and Scouters instead of Runners as a whole. Sylvia began spinning the twine around her wrist, her mind whirring as she replied. "Yeah, kind of. We tried to see if they made something when put together—of course we did that. We've tried that, comparing it in different orders and based on different patterns. Anything you can think of, we've tried."

   Thomas didn't let the fact deter him. He looked back down to the maps on the table, his eyes gaining that far away look. Sylvia had the sudden strange thought that Thomas looked a lot like Nick right then. The messy brown hair, the determined eyes, the look of concentration. It was too much. Sylvia looked away from the boy, fingers dropping away from the twine bracelet at her wrist.

   Thomas's head snapped up without any warning, and he blurted, "Wax paper."

   "Huh?" Minho asked. "What the—"

   "Just trust me. We need wax paper and scissors. And every black marker and pencil you can find."

   Thomas, Newt, and Teresa had gone off to convince Frypan to give over his wax paper. Minho and Sylvia were sent to search for a multitude of pencils and markers. Considering most of the pencils had been kept in the Map Room, which was now burnt to the ground and lay in a pile of ashes, finding the supplies needed was a bit harder than expected. Sylvia took the initiative to raid Nick's room. When the boy was alive, he was always planning things, writing things down in a notepad, and if he didn't have paper, on his arms. She found three pencils and a marker. Hopefully Minho had found more around the Homestead.

  Once they'd brought everything back down to the Homestead's basement, they began. Thomas had instructed her and Minho to begin cutting rectangles out of the wax paper that resembled the size of the maps. Since they didn't have any scissors, they had to use knives. Sylvia raised her brows at the boy's authoritative tone, and was once again reminded of Nick. Thomas told Teresa and Newt to help him organize the maps into their days and sections.

   Once he was done giving out orders, Minho spoke up, "What is this, kiddie craft time?" Minho held up the knife and looked at it with disgust. "Why don't you just tell us what the klunk we're doing this for?"

   "I'm done explaining," Thomas said. "It'll be easier to show you. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, and we can go back to running around the Maze like mice."

   Sylvia heard Minho mutter his annoyance faintly under his breath, her right ear facing him. Sylvia ignored him and started working. She cut the sheets of wax paper with a sharpened knife she'd plucked from one of the boxes. Sylvia wondered if she was wasting her time. If this all amounted to nothing, Sylvia thought she might strangle the Greenie.

   After they had made a stack of about twenty sheets, Thomas held one up to the light, looking satisfied. "All right, everybody trace the last ten or so days onto a piece of this stuff. Make sure you write the info on top so we can keep track of what's what. When we're done, I think we might see something."

   Both Minho and Sylvia were about to protest when Newt cut in, "Just bloody keep cutting. I think I know where he's going with this."

   They got to work, tracing from original maps to wax paper, one by one, trying to keep it clean and correct while hurrying as fast as possible. Minho and Sylvia kept cutting sheets of wax paper. After a while, her hands had started to cramp. She dropped the knife on the table, shaking out her hand.

   As more maps were traced, Sylvia felt a small hope that maybe they were onto something here. She really hoped she wasn't wasting her time doing this all day when the Maze could be changing. Box by box, section by section, they continued on.

   "I've had enough," Newt finally announced, breaking the quiet. "My fingers are bloody burning like a mother. See if it's working."

   Thomas let go of the marker he'd been holding and flexed his fingers. "Okay, give me the last few days of each section—make piles along the table, in order from Section One to Section Eight. One here"—he pointed at an end—"to Eight here." He pointed at the other end.

   They all did as he asked, sorting the maps into piles. Then Thomas picked up a paper from each pile, all of them from the same day, and stacked them on top of each other. All of the papers lined up so that they were looking at eight different sections of the Maze at once. It was almost like a blurry camera lens coming into focus. The image so sudden and shocking it silenced every one of them. All of the lines aligned with each other, creating an image in the middle of the page.

   Sitting clear as day in the middle of the page, was undeniably a large and messily scrawled letter F.

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

blessing you all today with my maze runner (fic specific) demigod hcs!

-sylvia is DEFINITELY an ares child
-thomas is a child of athena (got the brains + the good looks)
-minho has to be either child of zeus (struck by lightning and survived) or poseidon dont ask me why
-newt is 100% apollo child