Page 12 of The Infinite Glade (The Maze Cutter #3)

CHAPTER SIX

Coyote’s Curse

C ommitment to the mission was a soldier’s duty.

Minho boarded the Maze Cutter and joined the others on deck.

“So we’re good?” Dominic practically stepped on the heels of Minho’s boots.

The soldier ignored Dominic and nodded just once to Orange as he passed, a greeting only used in the Remnant Nation among Orphans if they were alerting others of danger ahead. Orange pulled her gun in front of her and signaled her eyes quickly to Alexandra and back.

“Good?” she asked.

Minho nodded. “Yeah. The rudder’s fine. Not great, but it’ll get us there.”

“Really?” Dominic whispered to Minho. “But what about the Ber?—”

Minho cut him off. “We’re ready.” He needed to know whatever Alexandra knew about the Great Master.

Then, and once everyone was ready to ditch their mission, Minho could fly everyone out.

He couldn’t tell Dominic what he found in the Berg.

It was too much to explain, and Minho wasn’t even sure if Orange would believe him if he told her the so-called Godhead had killed a man.

A man who appeared to be the Master of the Golden Room of Grief, the leader of the Remnant Nation.

At the same time, he fought the urge to tell her everything right there, out in the open and in front of the islanders.

“Good, we’ll be on our way then.” Alexandra turned around on the deck to face Minho as effortlessly as she turned around after killing the Great Master.

“The sooner the better,” Roxy added, pointing over the bend where the fires from the city looked like they were spreading farther.

The smell of the apocalyptic scene reminded Minho of the incinerator at the south end of the Remnant Nation.

They never buried bodies of trespassers, not like Isaac talked about doing on the island with Kletter’s crew.

The Remnant Nation burned the dead and their belongings .

. . at least the belongings that weren’t of any value.

Minho had dragged so many bodies into the south incinerator during his time in the Nation that the smell of burnt flesh felt stronger than a memory.

It was like a permanent taste in his mouth.

Despite the distance and time that had passed since Minho last stepped foot in the Nation and its mighty fortress, he was still trying to escape.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said to Dominic. “Pull up anchor?”

“Yessir.” The boy saluted like an idiot.

Alexandra coughed and coughed until phlegm came up the back of her throat. She must have breathed in more smoke from the fires than she thought. She swallowed the phlegm back down, not the most pleasant thing in the world.

“Oh no, dear, you’ve got to spit that right out,” Roxy said.

“Excuse me?” No one told the Godhead what to do. Alexandra lifted her chin up enough to look down her nose at Roxy.

“The smoke, you probably breathed in quite a bit of it when you were fleeing.” Roxy finished helping the other boy with the anchor. “You’ve got to spit that right out or it’ll clog up your system.”

“I will not.” Alexandra couldn’t believe she actually had to mutter those words.

If Flint were there he would have gotten her hot tea to soothe her cough hours ago.

He would have handed her a napkin or the shirt off his back to cough into before he’d suggest she do something so common as spit like a Pilgrim.

“Suit yourself.”

“Here I’ll show you . . .” Dominic walked up to Alexandra, scrunched his nose, elongated his neck, and sounded like he was calling in the wild hogs from the fields.

“You just pull it from the back of your throat like that, then—out.” He spat, and a white foamy pile of DNA landed right beside Alexandra’s muddy shoe.

Disgust curled around her lips. She looked over to Sadina, who watched the exchange with a smile.

The Goddess recited the digits and reminded herself why she needed these ignorant children.

The loud, stupid, messy children would be the key to the Evolution.

Nothing could stop that now. Not Nicholas, not Mikhail, and not a pile of spit.

“Fetch me some tea,” Alexandra said to no one in particular, never having missed Flint more.

Roxy ran her tongue in front of her teeth. “We don’t have tea. It’s not exactly fit for a Goddess on this ship.” She looked around. “I can get you water and I can put a drop of lard in it to soothe your throat?”

The Goddess nearly gagged in her mouth. Lard, in water.

“No, thank you. I’ll just wait until we get to the Villa.

” Every need inside Alexandra revolved around the Villa.

Safe from war. Safe with the Cure. The scientists would know exactly what to do with Sadina and the Immunes.

Nicholas always said, things fell into place as they should .

A shame he wasn’t there to see it. The ship pushed off the shore and she looked back in the direction of the woods with even more disgust. Mikhail and Nicholas would have never even believed the Evolution, even if they’d lived to see it.

Nicholas believed the dead could see.

But he could barely see when he lived. He used people’s own thoughts to manipulate them.

Alexandra doubted that Nicholas ever held a bigger picture of the Evolution.

He only knew how to control people. Pilgrims were easy to manipulate if you know where to pull the strings.

For some, it was heartstrings. For others it was the strings of their pockets, financial rewards.

For the remaining group of people, they were only influenced by the strings of power.

And for the hardest people to manipulate—you had to use all three.

That became Alexandra’s plan for dealing with Minho.

She needed to know more about Mikhail’s Golden Room of Grief and the Great Master.

She would pull the strings that mattered most to Minho to get what she wanted.

Roxy threw the chains of the anchor on top of each other and wiped her hands on her side.

“The Nation you come from, what’s it like there?” Alexandra asked Roxy.

“Oh, I’m not from the Remnant Nation. Just the two kids here are.” She pointed at the two soldiers. “I don’t think I would have been tough enough for all that mess.” She let out a rather pitiful Pilgrim’s laugh.

“Sure you would have.” Orange tossed a canteen to Roxy which she caught in the air. “See. Natural reflexes.”

“Couldn’t have killed many people though.” Roxy shrugged.

Alexandra once thought the same thing, but now she’d gladly kill someone on the boat for a hot tea. Or even a cold tea.

“Some must die so that others can thrive,” Alexandra said aloud. Every advancement of humankind since the beginning of time had required sacrifice of lives in order for the population as a whole to advance. It’s the ebb and flow, the give and take of the world.

The Godhead had no time for empathy or sentimental nonsense.

She needed to be ruthless.

“What? Why destroy WICKED?” Jackie practically screamed at Cian. “I thought the decades had taught us that WICKED is good? Misunderstood. Frypan?”

The old man grunted, as if he didn’t quite know what he believed.

Ximena sat back down, but didn’t look at Isaac.

Instead, she stared at the bushes like she was ready to run at the very next mention of WICKED.

Isaac had never joined a Senate meeting back on the island, but even he knew from the most basic of politics on their island that without WICKED, none of them would even exist.

Cian wasn’t having it. “WICKED is bad . The very word ‘wicked’ means bad, terrible, no good . . .” He laughed across the fire at Jackie. “How people ever thought WICKED was good . . . is evil in itself.”

Isaac felt stupid. WICKED had ended up being good, right? He looked to Old Man Frypan who had just thrown his fish bones into the fire.

“WICKED is good . They saved your ancestors.” The fire sparked, and Old Man Frypan said it again, the same way that some of the elders on the Island of Immunes still mumbled it during feast days.

“WICKED is good enough, I reckon. Although as boys, we certainly didn’t think so. They did what they had to do.”

Cian and Erros looked at each other with wide-eyed expressions, like how Dominic feigned surprise when he let out a burp.

Isaac couldn’t stand the uncertainty, now inserted into his beliefs. “WICKED saved the whole human race when they made a Safe Haven for Frypan and those other Gladers. All the bad stuff they did was because they were desperate to find a cure for the Flare.”

“Oh . . . wow.” Cian suddenly got very serious.

“No crap?” Erros asked his brother.

“What?” Jackie practically pushed Cian. “What?”

“Look, if you really are a Glader . . .” Erros shook his head at Cian as if he were pleading with his brother about something.

Cian nodded.

“He is,” Isaac said. “Frypan, himself.” What were they getting at?

He looked at Ximena but she still had her gaze set on the bushes beyond the fire with the pokey prickly things on it.

Cian took a deep breath. “WICKED’s biggest lie was that it was good.

. . . Their second biggest lie was Ava Paige justifying the deaths of a few to save thousands.

” Cian opened his arms up wide. “Look around. Do you see any other humans out here? There’s not even half-Cranks wandering about.

It was never about saving the human race. ”

“Never,” Erros said so surely that his earnest belief annoyed Isaac.

“They tried,” Jackie snapped at him. The teachers must’ve been more diligent in their defense of WICKED over on the west side of the island.

“It didn’t work. Not everything works out.

” Jackie threw her hands in the air to mimic Cian’s arm waving.

“At least they got the Immunes to a safe place so that our ancestors could rebuild. . . . And we’re here to help the Godhead with a Cure now . ”

Isaac couldn’t tell if it was the word Godhead or the word Cure that made Erros laugh.

Maybe both.