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Four years after they make it to the Safe Haven, they start getting their memories back.
It’s Vince, of all people, that ends up explaining how it works. When Mary first joined the Right Arm, she’d taken to writing a WCKD manifesto of sorts, detailing all of their trials and procedures, up until the point she left. Thomas had apparently supplemented that in his correspondences with her, pre-maze.
Like many, neither Mary nor the document survived the attack on camp.
But Vince remembered. So, when Thomas suddenly dropped off midsentence one night during the weekly bonfire and then weakly stuttered out, “I remember,” it was Vince that went pale.
What followed was many looks of confusion and a deep, long-awaited sigh. Luckily, it was a small group that night, so they didn’t draw too much attention as Vince led them down near the water, asking Jorge to gather any of the other WCKD kids he could find. Then, he gave them the rundown:
When each of them “joined” (read: was taken by) WCKD, they all had a small chip implanted in their brain. Then, they had another device implanted in the back of their neck, mainly used for tracking and identification but also as a shortcut of sorts to their brain functions, so that WCKD didn’t have to perform neurosurgery every time they wanted to tweak something. When they each went into the maze, they’d put a block on their memories so that everything before the moment they woke up was wiped.
But technology - especially experimental cerebral nanotech - only lasts so long. He and Mary had expected that the memory blocks would fade eventually, once WCKD was no longer able to access the microchips. After WCKD headquarters had gone up in flames, the gladers getting their memories back was essentially a foregone conclusion. It made sense that it would be the ones who escaped after the attack in the mountains that started getting their memories back first, as the longest time had passed since their brains were tampered with.
From that night on, every second is like walking across a mental minefield.
They try to figure out if there’s anything that triggers it, but so far it’s been seemingly completely random. One morning Minho woke up knowing that he was an only child, and then later that afternoon Frypan realized that he and a long-gone glader from one of the other mazes used to be best friends, back in the early days of the trials. People either announce their newfound memories to the group with dumbfounded glee or their eyes glaze over as their trauma is revealed to them through the curse of hindsight - and there is rarely any in between.
Sonya should have known she wouldn’t have been immune to the latter.
When the first few glimpses into her past start trickling in, she discovers that she is terrified of what she may learn. The first couple of memories are harmless: random, arbitrary tests at WCKD, the feeling of cuddling a large dog, and the fact that she likes cheese. Nowhere near the stuff of nightmares that some of her friends have reported seeing. She knows she’s lucky, but. It can’t possibly keep going like this for much longer.
It’s not so much as the memories she’s afraid of, but of what she’ll do once this period of relative bliss comes grinding to a halt.
Sonya has always been - as far as she has been permitted to remember - in Harriet’s words, a “ray of fucking sunshine”. Back in their maze, she’d always tried to see the best in everyone and everything. Even when the Right Arm had come in and saved them while simultaneously tearing their whole world apart, she’d managed to stay positive and devote herself to getting the rest of her friends back.
But.
But then.
WCKD ripped all that out from under her feet, again.
Something changed in Sonya, during those six months. Something broke, deep inside of her. Where there was once softness, there was anger. Where there was once understanding, there was anger. Where there was once resilience, kindness, and strength - there was more anger. Some days would pass her by in a blur, only present outside the red, hazy cloud of rage for a few moments. She hated - hates - WCKD for what they’d done to her and her friends. For what they’d done to the world . She hated and she hated and she hated until she couldn’t hate anymore, so then she screamed and kicked the walls and spat in guard’s faces - which only got Aris a black eye, so then she spent some time hating herself, for a change. The whole time, she just kept telling herself: they will get out. This is not how they will end. They will get out. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday.
Someday arrived sooner than later. Then came the train ride, and the train-berg hybrid ride, and Vince and the gang and a sun-bleached shipyard. The entire experience can be summed up in a single word: shock. Then Thomas and a few of the others she hadn’t gotten to learn the names of went off to rescue Minho (member two out of two of the WCKD prisoner spitting contest society) and she and Aris were left to recuperate, not quite sure they could believe any of it was real.
Inside of five days, they were on a boat with Thomas in a coma and a corpse to be laid to rest in the ocean. Sonya pushed the anger and the rage and the screaming down deep inside of herself, because it’s over and they won. They’ve lost so much it doesn’t feel like winning, but she has Harriet and she has Aris so she tells herself that she’s alright.
And that is how she begins to heal.
The first two years are the hardest, for no one more so than those of them who had gone through the maze trials.
It is staggering, how few of them are left.
She and Minho have an unspoken kind of thing. At least, Sonya likes to think so. Thomas wakes up, and is appropriately traumatized. There are whispers around camp of him having to witness his best friend dying, though Sonya can infer from the black veins and the hole in the chest of the corpse from the boat that that is not the whole story. Brenda adopts a gaggle of immune children. Aris entertains a possibly mutual crush on Thomas for approximately three months - during which both Sonya and Harriet are absolutely relentless - but then that fizzles out before it can even really begin. Permanent shelters are built and things settle. Sonya feels peace blossoming through the rattling of her ribcage.
And then the memories begin, and - well.
It happens on a Friday morning, by the picnic tables. They’re walking from the kitchen to their usual table, bowls of watery oatmeal in hand. Harriet is telling her about her and Vince’s latest plans to expand the newest chunk of cabins when a series of images are thrust to the forefront of her mind:
She is young, but old enough to know that something feels wrong.
She’s been waiting in this room for what seems like hours. Her feet hang just above the floor, sterile and white like everything else around her. She’d been told to wait her turn, so that is what she is doing. Her parents told her to listen to the people, so she sits there quietly even though she would much rather be running around in the snow outside. If she lets her eyes go blurry, she can pretend that the floor is snow, which is basically the same thing.
Some time later, the door on the other side of the room opens and a kind-looking woman appears. “Elizabeth, you’re up,” she says, reaching out a gentle hand towards her.
But, through the doorway, past the woman, there is a boy.
He is sitting on a small cot, all gangly legs and dark eyes. He looks annoyed, like the way he would when their parents wouldn’t let him leave the table until he’d eaten all his dinner, even if he wasn’t hungry. But when he meets her gaze, a small smile appears instantly on his lips. It doesn’t quite reach his eyes, but she is too young to realize.
She follows the woman past the boy and down the hall, into a separate room.
He is her brother, and she will not see him again for many, many years.
Her bowl clatters to the ground with an unceremonious thud , spilling oatmeal at her feet.
And then, a very peculiar thing happens - across the crowd (mostly uninterested, at this point people suddenly regaining memories is old news) she locks eyes with Thomas, who just stares at her blankly for a second until his entire face pales. For a moment his chest convulses as if he’s about to throw up, but then he turns on his heel and books it directly out of there. This all happens in the span of two seconds, at the end of which Sonya realizes that she is not breathing.
The not-breathing somehow turns into a dry sort of choking, and Harriet swiftly abandons her own bowl and leads Sonya out of the eating area and towards the hammocks, one hand across her shoulders and the other held firmly in Sonya’s.
Another scene flashes in front of her eyes, then, a fleeting image of her and the boy as even younger children, playing with a small pile of mismatched lego bricks on a dirty linoleum floor. Beside them lies a scraggly looking dog, sighing contentedly as he tucks his paws under his chin.
At some point on the journey, somewhere between stacking lego brick number three and nearly tripping over a log, Sonya notices a concerned Aris in her peripherals and Harriet widening her eyes at him in an I don’t know sort of fashion. Then she is sat down in a hammock, wave of nausea raining down on her all at once as she sways back and forth. She hears her own voice in her head, whining: But you said I could see him last week, Mrs. Paige. He’s my brother. There is the beginning of an answer and then, Harriet:
“What did you see?”
Sonya blinks and Harriet and Aris are hovering in front of her, lips pressed tightly together and foreheads creased with worry. She almost laughs at the question - it sounds like she’s the centre of the psychic plot in that crappy thriller she remembered watching, a couple days ago. She opens her mouth to answer and realizes that her cheeks are wet.
“I… Newt’s my brother,” she says, rolling over each word carefully as if just trying them out, seeing how it sounds. Then, even less sure, “ Was ? My brother?” It’s then that it hits her, all at once: he was her brother . But WCKD had taken him away from her the second she was sent up to the maze. He was her brother. They’d met in the Scorch and she’d barely given him a second thought - he was just this quiet dude that was with Thomas, Mary’s source.
The next time she’d seen him, it was as Minho and Frypan were lowering his corpse into the ocean.
Somewhere deep beneath the shock and the sadness and the unimaginable loss, there is anger, coming to a boil in the hollows of her chest.
The next day, she wants answers.
She wants to know why WCKD took them in the first place, and why they decided to erase them from each other’s minds. She wants to know why he had to die and how to reconcile the Newt from her memories with the one she barely knew.
She knows she will probably never get to know all of this, not fully, but-
“Where’s Thomas?” The sun is dragging itself across the sky as she marches up to Minho, who is sweaty and confused.
He squints down at her, wiping a hand across his forehead. “What?”
She resists the urge to roll her eyes, and takes a deep breath to quell the tingling in her fingertips. “Do you know where I can find your friend Thomas?” Her voice is sickly sweet and she hates it, because she just sounds so fake . This used to come easy to her, but now she can feel that older version of herself - the one she thought she’d gotten rid of after all these years - creeping back to the forefront.
Minho blinks. “Oh, yeah, uh. I think he went somewhere down that way,” he says, pointing up the beach. “He likes to sit on rocks, sometimes,” he finishes, tone matching the slightly apprehensive look on his face.
“Thanks,” Sonya says, Idiot , she adds mentally, immediately feeling awful as the word echoes in her brain. A memory - not blocked by WCKD but perhaps her subconscious - enters her mind then: the sharp, painful satisfaction of headbutting a scientist as a needle hangs halfway out of her arm.
Minho gives her one last look before she shakes it off, heading down the beach towards a larger outcropping of rocks. The closer she gets, the clearer she can make out the outline of someone sitting on top. Something tells her it has to be Thomas, so she picks up the pace. She soon realizes that she doesn’t actually have, well, a plan, for any of this. She’s not even really sure what she wants to get out of Thomas. She knows they were close - that thought nearly sends a wave of jealousy through her but she stops it, practiced after four years on the island. There was always going to be someone better off than her, and that wasn’t something she could ever change. But the fact that Thomas got to spend god knows how long with her brother while she was off somewhere else, dumb and oblivious, while she could have been fighting to get to him?
Yeah, that one hurt. Sonya’s pretty sure she has the right to be at least a little jealous about that one. But she’s overcoming her traumas and she’s letting her heart heal and she’s creating her own bliss or whatever hippie bullshit one of the munie medics used to croon over at her, so she pushes it down and pushes forward, one footprint in the sand at a time.
When she arrives, he does not notice her at first. The tide brushes at her toes as she hoists herself up onto the first rock, navigating carefully over barnacles and tidepools. The rock she selects as her own is wide with a flat top, and leaves her sitting cross-legged a metre or so away from Thomas. The only way she can describe the look on his face is deeply troubled. He sits with one knee up to his chest, the other leg dangling down off the side of the rock, water ebbing and flowing gently below his foot. He broods down at the object in his hand: a small grey vial, filled with what looks like some sort of blue liquid. It’s not visible from this angle, but Sonya somehow knows that WCKD is inscribed on the side of it.
“Hey,” she says finally, trying to make her voice as soft and nonoffending as possible. Still, Thomas startles, entire body shuddering as he recoils away from the sound. It would be hilarious if she hadn’t seen him do it so many times before. She resists the urge to wince. Off to a great start already.
Thomas blinks, recovering already. “Oh, hey, Sonya,” he says, perking up his voice in a way that she recognizes instantly as entirely fake. “Didn’t realize you were there, sorry.” It’s then that Sonya realizes this is probably going to be a lot worse than she’d anticipated, because he’s already giving up the act, voice growing small on the sorry as he folds back into his shoulders.
“That’s okay,” she replies, giving him a small smile. The two of them spend an awkward moment looking anywhere but each other and then Sonya takes a breath. “I, uh, noticed you seemed kinda - uh, kinda spooked, yesterday.”
Thomas meets her gaze, calculating. She raises her eyebrows and tilts her chin down, imperceptibly, and then he caves, caught. He loses the innocent look and breathes out a short, humourless laugh and looks out into the ocean for a long couple of seconds. Sonya does not repeat her statement.
“What did you remember?” he asks suddenly, eyes back on her. There’s something about it that almost seems desperate, pleading, through the determination of the question. It catches her off guard, because: she thought everyone knew already. Even before nightfall, she’d had people - some pretty fucking ballsy people - come up to her and say that they’d known him, and that they were sorry. It was mostly munies, ones from the Right Arm that had survived the attack on the camp.
It’s a small island, and there’s really not that many of them. News travels fast.
Or, maybe not.
Or, perhaps: for whatever reason, Thomas is pretending he doesn’t know, trying to catch her in a lie.
But that look in his eyes - the one like he almost doesn’t want to know, but still desperately needs to, anyway. That look tells her that he really hasn’t heard, yet, and it makes her wonder exactly where he’d gone after he’d practically bolted away from the scene, yesterday. Regardless, she takes a breath and swallows her speculations.
“Newt is-” she stops herself before she even begins, because, no, actually, “-was. Newt was my brother.” Thomas looks up at her then with wide, watery eyes, and Sonya briefly wonders why she is consoling him before she offers, softly, “I’m sorry. I know the two of you were close.”
He chokes back a sob and says something that sounds a lot like, “I’m sorry,” and Sonya tries very hard to ignore the creeping suspicion in her chest. It feels like this is not an entirely appropriate reaction, but then again, trauma does weird things to people.
She waits patiently for him to calm down a bit, and then she asks, “For what, Thomas?”
He stops mid-hiccup, breath caught in his throat, and looks at her with this fear in his eyes - a fear that Sonya hasn’t seen for a long, long time - and then he opens and closes his mouth about six different times as if he’s trying to decide between sins to confess. And then, finally, quietly and ashamed: “I knew.”
Her eyelids flutter. “You - you knew? That he was-” Her voice leaves her body as Thomas nods, not meeting her gaze. “Wait, when - why wouldn’t you tell me?” She feels the anger rising up in her, filling in the cracks in her soul. It expands, constricting every part of her, contorting her back into that awful version of herself, the person she needed to be to survive.
The ocean turns red and a million thoughts fly through her head: did he know the whole time? Did he sit by watch as WCKD sent them into separate mazes, bond completely erased from their minds? Did he even care? Did he know, when the two groups met in the mountains? Did he knowingly steal her brother from her all over again back in the shipyards, when everyone from his maze went off on their death mission to save Minho?
It always astounded her, how many of them made it back from that alive.
Now, the thought of it just makes her sick, because of the one that didn’t .
She comes back to the real world to hear Thomas’ voice cracking. “I only - I only remembered last month. I’ve been - God, I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you, but.” He shows no intentions of finishing his thought, reaching up to grasp the pendant hanging from his neck on a fraying leather cord. He holds it close to his chest, staccato breaths going in and out.
Much to Sonya’s surprise, she says, “It’s okay, Thomas.” She takes a breath and then the ocean fades back to an endless dark blue. She unfolds her leg from underneath herself and reaches it down to dip her toe in the water. They are both silent, no sound except for the gentle flush of the waves hitting the shore. Sonya looks over her shoulder and sees that the tide has stretched up the beach a fair bit, the first rock she’d used to climb up on the larger ones now completely submerged.
She spends a minute or two dwelling on other things she’s seen slowly submerged and then, a question finds its way to her tongue. “So he never knew, then?”
It takes Thomas a blank staring second to realize what she means and then his face softens a bit and he almost whispers, “No.”
She absorbs his answer, nodding wordlessly into the breeze. Newt never knew that she was his sister. He spent two years in his maze, probably thinking that he was utterly alone in the world - God knows Sonya did. And in the Scorch, he never even knew that his own family was waiting, as oblivious as he was, in the very mountains he spent weeks fighting to get to. And then when he died, he most likely died thinking there would be no one left to mourn him.
(Maybe, just maybe - if WCKD had let them know each other, he would’ve had just a little more fight left in him. It might have been all he needed.)
Harriet had called it a Viking funeral.
She remembers overhearing Vince and Jorge quietly arguing on the third day on the boat. It was obvious that they were trying to be discreet. Minho was leant on the wall, too, eavesdropping just as blatantly as Sonya. He had kept his eyes trained on the ground, frown permanent on his face. After a couple minutes he’d all but barged into the room.
An hour later, they took Newt’s body down to the balcony level and slowly lowered his corpse down into the water.
The sea was calm, that day. Sonya remembers it being strangely so. It’s like it knew.
But she still didn’t. She was sad, of course, but by that point she’d seen so many of their friends die that it was more of a numbness, an absence of feeling, than anything else. She’d seen him maybe three times altogether, and had never even directly interacted with him. He was one of the least notable of Thomas’ group, though not a hard title to earn when you had Thomas, Brenda, and Jorge in the mix. You’d think that maybe there’d be some part of her brain that felt some sort of connection with the boy in the sheet, some sort of inherent link or longing that ached when he sank below the surface, activating those primal memories hidden deep below WCKD’s tampering - but there was nothing.
It makes her heart split in two, just thinking about it now. How can you only begin to mourn someone an entire four years after they died? Someone you both intimately knew in another lifetime but had never even spoken to in this version of your life? Her memories - unfolding by the second - feel like daydreams, or stories told to her by someone else that was there, moments she can’t personally remember happening.
It’s during this revelation that Thomas cuts in with a faraway statement, eyes glazed over: “He was begging me to kill him.”
Her mouth hangs open and she recalls that she never even asked how he died, not wanting to upset Minho or anyone in their group. But, now-
Thomas gasps quietly, turning then to look at Sonya and clasping a hand over his mouth as he realizes what he just said, and to whom. Sonya is frozen, Thomas growing blurry in her vision as her eyes well up with horrified tears.
He clues in quickly. “You never - I just, I just assumed , that everyone knew how - knew, knew why-” His sentence stutters along in fragments as he surely realizes that no one ever talked about how Newt died. The only people that were presumably there were Minho, Frypan, Brenda, Jorge, and Vince - and Thomas, apparently - and none of them had ever breathed a word of that night.
His face contorts painfully for a few seconds before he deflates, evidently resigned. To what , Sonya fears she is about to find out. “What - what do you know?”
Her head swims. “Nothing,” she says, “I don’t - I don’t know anything, nobody ever - they didn’t talk about what happened in the city,” she admits, tears distorting her voice.
“Do you - do you want to know?”
She’s pretty sure she doesn’t, but she nods anyway.
Thomas now has tears streaming down his own face, matching Sonya’s. He takes a long, slightly wheezing breath. “He wasn’t immune.” He opens with this and Sonya knows that she is not going to leave this rock the same person she was that morning. They lock eyes and it’s as if this one simple fact reveals everything, but Thomas continues on. “It kind of started around when we got you and Aris off that train. I found out after we’d left the shipyards. It got really bad, really fast. A lot faster than when Brenda had it, back in the Scorch. I don’t - I don’t know why. I don’t know why.” He repeats it to himself, quietly, a few times and Sonya feels her heart shatter a little bit more. She realizes that she’s probably making him relive the worst few days of his life - which is saying a lot considering the lives they’ve all led - but she doesn’t stop him as he begins again.
“He was doing pretty bad when we got to Minho. We were going to - we were going to get him out , we had a plan, but then the city just fucking collapsed. Everything was on fire, and there were people everywhere. There were - there were bodies, flying through the air. Minho and Gally went to meet up with Brenda so we could grab the serum for Newt, and then he just. He just switched. ”
Sonya has seen enough flare patients in the WCKD facilities to know what Thomas means when he says his, and it makes her go cold in the blistering sun.
“He just started swinging at me. He was - he was there, but it was like he had to fight to control his own body. He started yelling at me to kill him.” His voice wavers on each word of the last sentence, finally cracking on kill . Sonya’s heart drops to the pit of her stomach and starts disintegrating in the acid. Thomas buries his face in his hands. “It all happened so fast. One second he was coming at me, and then - and then the knife was in his chest.” At this he finally breaks down in earnest, shoulders shaking violently.
Sonya can only sit there, shell-shocked into unmoving silence. She vaguely feels the warm sensation of tears on her face, but she can’t be sure. Somehow, she can see it perfectly: Newt with black veins spider-crawling up his neck, Thomas with that awful, desperate look. The fight, dancing on the edge of apocalypse.
She wants to be able to scream at Thomas. She wants to want to hate him. She wants to have the will to take one of their boats and paddle across the ocean herself, back to WCKD, back to the people that let everyone she ever loved die, and spit and stomp on the remains of their twisted empire. She wants to want these things, but-
She is tired. She has lived a thousand cruel fates in the puny span of fifteen years. And:
“It’s not your fault, Thomas.” As she says it, she really does believe it.
He shakes his head, and pulls the vial he had earlier from his pocket. “I could have saved him,” he says, “I could have saved him the whole time, before it even began. I should have known.”
It takes a second, but the pieces start to fall into place: how the serum Mary prepared from his blood had worked on Brenda, and how she’d never needed another treatment. How the flare patients back at WCKD had always regressed, sometimes only hours after their treatments. And how Vince said they’d found him that night, on top of WCKD headquarters with Teresa forcing him to survive over her.
He wasn’t just their source - he was the cure .
“You couldn’t have known,” Sonya says, really hoping that Thomas doesn’t seriously believe it’s his fault he didn’t know the exact properties of his own blood chemistry. He laughs bitterly and she repeats herself more sternly. “Thomas. There was no way you could have possibly known that.”
He sighs very, very deeply. “Still.”
“I know.”
“I just-” he starts but stops shortly after, another sigh billowing out of him, defeated. There is an unbearable sadness lingering in the air between them, filling Sonya to the brim. It feels like there’s a part of her missing, a cavity in her chest that will never be filled with anything but a deep, indescribable sensation of loss.
But then, another memory.
The ghost of a smile graces her lips. “Oh, now quit your whining,” she says, fake British accent surprisingly accurate. She feels almost delirious, laughter bubbling in her throat.
Thomas looks up, jaw gone slack.
“He used to say that to me all the time,” she explains, “I think he picked it up from our dad, or something. Bit weird for a kid to talk like that on their own.”
Sonya has never seen Thomas smile before, but in that moment he gets very, very close. “He said that to us, too,” he says, breathless. “In the glade. It was, like, one of his top used phrases. I think - I was only there for like, a week before everything went down, but I think I heard him say that at least once a day.”
“Really?!”
“Yeah. Oh my god.”
They share a silent moment of almost-happiness and Sonya thinks that maybe, WCKD didn’t take everything from them. They have this. And they have each other. And while that can never replace what’s been lost, maybe it’s enough to start building something new.
“Thank you, Thomas.” She reaches over and puts her hand on his.
He doesn’t flinch away this time.
Later, when they’ve dried their eyes and waded through the high tide back to dry sands, Sonya tries to imagine a future where the gaping chasm in her chest is healed over and the thought of her brother can come to mind accompanied by fondness instead of this aching. It’s hard to believe, but she knows it’s out there - not today, not tomorrow, but someday. This is what she tells herself - but this time, she really does believe it.
So, she walks on, bleeding heart raw and exposed, toward her someday.