Page 11 of The Infinite Glade (The Maze Cutter #3)

He should have spat on his stiff body.

But instead, he leaned over and shut the man’s eyelids, hoping the birds wouldn’t peck them out. Then he hurried back to the Maze Cutter with an old war chant rising up in his mind:

Kill the Godhead.

Kill the Godhead.

Kill the Godhead.

What’s done is done, but Cian and Erros stared at Ximena with disbelief.

“It’s the truth. Annie Kletter’s dead.” She said it again in case the brothers didn’t hear her over the crackling of the flour cake in the fire.

It felt good to say it out loud. Annie Kletter is dead.

Murdered. El Día de los Muertos, the holiday for celebrating the dead, used to be Ximena’s favorite time of year—but not anymore.

Not with her mother gone to the afterlife.

If she ever did make it back to her Village, she promised herself that she’d never tell the Villagers Annie Kletter died.

Absent-minded Annie didn’t deserve to be celebrated. Or mourned. Or ever spoken about again.

“Kletter’s dead?” Erros hung his head. “Red Seas and Remnants of Russia, I didn’t think Annie Kletter could die.”

“Of course she can die . . .” Cian stood up and started pacing fireside. “Now we’re all dead!” He threw up his hands. Ximena held her annoyance at bay by biting the inside of her cheek.

“I just mean, of all the people, she . . . she . . .” Erros stumbled over his words until Cian gave him an accusatory look.

“Dead is dead,” Old Man Frypan chimed in.

Ximena couldn’t bite her cheek any longer. No amount of pain could hold back the truth. “Annie Kletter wasn’t a hero . . .” she said to Erros unapologetically. “And she shouldn’t be mourned. She deserved everything that happened to her.”

Erros squinted at Ximena. “How could you say that?”

She had more than one reason to hate Annie Kletter, but she said the one thing that hurt her the most. “Because she killed my mom. Point-blank with a gun. Do you know what kind of worthless human being you have to be to do that to someone?”

Erros looked at her as if she were holding a gun to his head right then, but she only had the knife. Kletter’s stupid knife. Cian stopped pacing and looked at Ximena the same way everyone did when they thought they recognized her mother’s features in her own face. Confusion. Acceptance. Sadness.

“What? You don’t believe me?” She grew more annoyed with every single second she spent around this fireside chat that she never wanted to be a part of in the first place.

“Your mother . . . ?” Erros asked as if there was more to say.

“Erros, don’t.” Cian walked to put his arm in front of his brother. “Just don’t.”

Did he want proof Kletter wasn’t a good person?

Ximena was happy to oblige. “Annie Kletter lied every chance she got. She turned my ancestors’ Village into a cemetery, and I’m not going to sit here while you memorialize her and .

. . and . . .” She didn’t know what else to say. She just needed to leave.

“Ximena, wait.” Isaac reached for her arm, but their reaction about Annie Kletter was a sign to move on. These weren’t her people. She’d rather travel alone in the darkness than sit with anyone who idolized that ruthless woman.

“Ximena, maybe—” Isaac tried to fix things as if Kletter’s existence could be undone.

“No.” Ximena shrugged him off. “It’s the truth. Annie Kletter deserved to die.” She said it with righteous anger.

Old Man Frypan nodded and whispered. “Let her go, Isaac . . .”

“Do . . . you want to know how she died?” Jackie asked Cian, surprising everyone.

What a stupid question , thought Ximena. As if how Kletter died made her a victim and by being a victim she’d be somehow innocent from everything else she’d done to hurt others. That woman was a monster. A murderer. A thief of futures.

Jackie continued. “She died after we were waiting beside this house, and these two?—”

“Doesn’t matter,” Erros said abruptly. “We’ll never find it now. The whole thing. Done. Gone.” His words went from anxious to erratic. “Going to be long forgotten.” He threw his hands up at his brother, a common gesture of these guys.

Ximena glared from just outside the light of the fire. They seemed to care about something else even more than Kletter, but Annie wasn’t that important.

“Relax,” Cian said. “We’ll figure it out.”

“How are we going to figure it out ?” Erros snapped a fish bone in half and threw it into the fire. “All the trials, everything—for it to end like this ?”

Old Man Frypan leaned forward. “Sorry about your friend . . .”

Cian scoffed, “She wasn’t a friend . The girl’s right. She was a thief, a liar, and a murderer. But we needed her. Everyone in the sequence from the highest to the lowest levels needed her.” He started pacing again, throwing those arms up and down, but this time he was practically stomping.

Ximena’s face flushed as she stepped back into the light of the fire. “She was a liar for sure.” She moved her head with Cian’s movements, back and forth. “But I doubt anyone needed her.”

Erros brushed hair from his forehead. “She did everything she could to protect generations and generations of families . . .”

The heat from Ximena’s head flushed down her body and into her gut, the place where Abuela taught her all her power and intuition lives.

“She destroyed families. Prevented generations. You obviously didn’t know her that well.

” She couldn’t sit or stand still with all the anger she felt moving inside of her, she needed to walk it out.

She’d hike up the coast and sleep in the daylight.

Anything to get Kletter out of her mind.

“Ximena, please don’t leave . . .” Isaac said.

He was too soft, too kind, and the world didn’t deserve someone like him.

He would have been better off back in the safety of the Villa’s glass pod or better yet, the island he grew up on.

Those islanders should never have believed anything Annie Kletter said, and they of all people should be more upset about how she upended all of their lives.

“Ximena, stay. Please.” Isaac was practically begging, but she already stayed longer than she should have. “I’m not going to sit here and listen to these two tell you a story as if she were some hero for the world.”

“Travel safe . . .” Jackie said with snark. “Might want to have your knife out in case you run into any Cranks . . .”

“Yeah anyway, you’re the one with her knife,” Erros said, insinuating that Ximena was either close with Annie, or killed her. Ximena didn’t think the anger inside of her could move any faster, but Erros’ comment had her feet marching over to him before she even knew what she was doing.

Within seconds Ximena stood face-to-face with a seated Erros and placed one hand on her holstered knife.

Kletter’s knife. “I lifted it from her dead, decomposing body, and I’ll lift your weapon from yours one day too, if I have to.

” She took only a moment to look at Erros’ crossbow and back at him again to make her point clear.

“And saying she protected generations?” She pointed back to Isaac, Frypan, and even Jackie.

“Kletter single-handedly messed up their generation and ended all future generations in my Village.” That righteous anger boiled inside Ximena, and her second-sight grew louder and louder.

La verdad quedará enterrada. Extranos nos enterraran.

The truth will remain buried and strangers will put us in the ground.

Ximena was a seed that not even Kletter could bury, and she wouldn’t let Cian and Erros put her in the ground either.

“Those people aren’t buried . . .” Cian said.

Ximena froze as she turned to leave. What?

She turned around so fast she could have started a fire with the twigs and leaves under her feet.

“Why did you use that word?” She had only ever known her Abuela to perceive what she was thinking, but it was based on her grandmother knowing her so well, knowing the small movements of Ximena’s eyebrows when she was excited or how her chin tightened when she was nervous. “Why did you say that? Buried.”

“It’s not your mind I’m reading. It’s your frequency.” Erros took a deep breath.

“What’re you talking about?” Jackie asked, but Ximena wouldn’t waste time explaining things to Jackie who was bent on misunderstanding her.

If Abuela were there with her, she would have tried to remind Ximena that not everyone has an inner guidance like she does, and that Isaac, Frypan, and even Jackie would have their own knowing to follow at their own time.

“The thing, her knowing about being buried . . . she said about strangers putting us in the ground . . .” Isaac whispered over to Jackie. “Some kind of curse or something, I think?”

“You’re practiced in this?” Ximena demanded of Cian and in that moment in front of the fire, she felt everyone’s eyes on her, even the eyes of her ancestors who were long gone.

Erros shrugged. “It’s not a practice. All thoughts have frequency.”

“You’re gonna have to say more than that.” Old Man Frypan leaned forward.

Cian took a deep breath. He motioned for Ximena to come back and sit by the fire, an invitation she only accepted because her legs felt like empanada dough.

Also, despite the anger burning inside of her and feeling like she wanted to run far away, her inner-knowing was telling her to hear what Cian and Erros had to say.

“The Flares didn’t just affect the earth.

For obvious reasons, yes, everything changed. But . . .”

Erros picked up where Cian paused. “Didn’t you ever wonder why WICKED had set up such elaborate trials, all about the brains?—”

Cian broke in. “Don’t say it like that—their brains. It was their minds. Big difference.”

“Okay.” Erros tried again, “. . . the minds . . . of the Gladers?”

The word Glader caused Jackie, Isaac, and Ximena to look at Frypan one by one.

Frypan cleared his throat. “Every day.” There was silence among the group, just the fire crackling and popping. Ximena knew more than most what Frypan had been through.

“Sorry . . .” Cian said. “We didn’t realize . . .”

“Hey. I’ve got nothing to hide,” Frypan said. “I may be old, but I’m not senile. Not yet, anyhow.”

Cian tossed more wood onto the fire. “The very first Gladers, some of them had telepathy . . .”

“Thomas.” Frypan nodded. “He had an implant. Never found out for sure, but I think we all did.”

Cian ignored his comment completely. “WICKED took credit when they could, but the truth was, everything WICKED did was to map the changes to the brain, I mean mind, and understand how the Flare changed a person’s thoughts into frequency.”

“Thoughts into frequency?” Ximena couldn’t help but repeat the phrase.

It rolled off her tongue without her even trying to speak.

It felt truer than an eagle landing on a tree.

Solid. Perched. A clear view of everything.

Thoughts were frequency. Why had she never realized that before?

A snake-shape of truth-shivers slithered down her back.

“Frequency?” Jackie repeated the word as if it were new to her language.

“Sound. Vibration. Feeling.” Ximena humored Jackie. “It actually makes sense.” She had no sooner just learned of it herself, but the time spent with the thought in her mind didn’t equate to her understanding of it. Her ability to see it. Defend it. Her inner-knowing identified it.

The fire crackled its own frequency.

Understanding was a frequency.

Anger, another.

Erros spoke next. “The ones from WICKED, they thought the Flare had changed thoughts into frequency, but the Flare didn’t change it . . . thoughts have always been frequency.”

“The Flare only made the frequency easier to receive,” Cian added. “To understand.”

Ximena looked down. The hairs on her left arm stood straight, the kind of truth-antenna confirmation that her inner-knowing did when something proved true.

But despite that, she didn’t want to believe what they were saying about WICKED.

She didn’t trust the tales of WICKED any more than she trusted Annie Kletter or anyone at the Villa.

The two strangers around the fire seemed desperate, and Ximena knew that desperate people would say anything to get what they wanted.

She just didn’t know what it was that Cian and Erros wanted. Not yet.

“How do you know so much about WICKED?” Old Man Frypan asked the question they all should have been thinking. Her whole life, all the adults from Annie to her Abuela talked about WICKED often. But most of it was a mystery.

“We know . . .” Cian lifted the fish pan to wipe it clean. “Because we helped destroy the World in Catastrophe, Killzone Experiment Department.”

He paused. The fire crackled and hissed. Darkness hung in the sky like a storm.

“Yep. We destroyed WICKED.”