Page 36 of The Infinite Glade (The Maze Cutter #3)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Deadheads

B rute soldiers did their best to intimidate Alexandra by taunting her with the hallowed ground, but the Maze wasn’t a punishment to the Goddess. No. It was her solace. Especially this place, where some of the original Gladers had been buried so long ago.

“They’re going to kill him . . .” Dominic exhaled the words, barely above a whisper.

“No,” Sadina said with her head in her hands.

“Shhh . . .” Roxy shushed the others through her teeth.

The Goddess observed them and the other Remnant soldiers and Pilgrims all around her.

Seeing so many moving bodies in the Glade was very foreign to her eyes.

And the sound of so many voices, foreign to her ears.

Beatings. Screaming. Death. She tightened the hood of her cloak over her face.

The entire Remnant Nation brought a madness born from Mikhail.

A madness she didn’t yet know the depths of.

“Where are we?” Dominic covered his mouth as he spoke. The guard to their left was busy commanding others in the cemetery to get back.

“Is this the Glade?” Sadina asked Alexandra.

The Goddess nodded. The Deadheads to be exact.

And Nicholas’ dead head was buried around there somewhere, a hilarious detail for her at the time.

Her fingers found moss below her and she clutched it and dug her knuckles into the dirt as deep as they would go.

She had to stay in control of this situation.

Alaska was her home. Her sacred ground. She wouldn’t let any remnants of society take it from her.

She looked around for a sense of what the soldiers would do to them and rubbed the back of her neck.

She recited the digits and then used the tools of her mind.

She imagined releasing the Remnants’ hold over her.

With every digit she imagined herself escaping the Glade.

One . The probability of her escaping the Glade doubled.

Two. Then multiplied again. Two steps back for one step forward.

Three . And again. Five . The Sequence empowered her vision.

Eight . Escape was inevitable. Thirteen .

A shot echoed in the Glade and Alexandra jumped. A body under a Pilgrim’s cloak fell to the ground with a thud. Remnants kicked the corpse. Another shot it again.

Sadina whimpered, but she wasn’t the one wearing a Pilgrim’s cloak. Alexandra tightened her hood around her again and watched as boots covered in ashes kicked the murdered body. That was her Pilgrim. And her ashes. Her sacred ground. Her city. Her Maze.

Enough with this already. She was the Goddess of this city, the Goddess of all. She stood up and lowered her cloak’s hood, and walked away from the cries of Sadina.

“Hey, where are you going?”

Alexandra ignored the lowly soldier. She would walk right up to a man standing nearby, wearing a cloak similar to the one Mikhail had worn.

She would tell this man something he didn’t know.

She would tell him something that no one knew— who the Master of the Golden Room was.

Mikhail had given her one gift before he died, the greatest gift of all.

Knowledge.

Hell, maybe the man had planned it all from the very beginning.

Jackie and Miyoko sat in the Berg together, ready for takeoff with the dead body—decorated with pine-tree limbs—between them.

Ximena’s Village respected their dead and treated each burial with respect, and it was important to her that the islanders got to do the same.

The tree branches around the body looked silly to her but at least it would keep the growing decay from smelling too bad, worse with every passing hour.

Soon enough the sun would rise, the Berg would heat up, and that body would start to stink.

Really, Ximena . What a terrible thing to think.

At least she hadn’t shared the thought out loud.

“How long will it take to get there?” Jackie asked. The islanders had no patience.

Cian had punched the coordinates into a fancy device on the dashboard of the Berg and now looked up, surprised.

“Not long at all.” He rubbed his forehead with the red scarf then turned his attention to his brother.

“Makes sense it’d be close to the site of the first Mazes.

Lots of giant caves and caverns around there. ”

“WICKED was nothing if not efficient.” Erros fastened his seat belt, and Ximena braced for takeoff.

She sat near Isaac and Old Man Frypan, and after the launch, she opened Kletter’s logbook.

Most of the pages had unimportant notes, scribbled about the weather or wind speed.

Some of the pages in the back held questions about the Cure.

Questions Annie Kletter didn’t have answers to.

Ximena half-expected to find some big confession about all the worst things Annie did, but she hadn’t found any pages like that yet.

And by not finding anything remotely honest from Annie, it confirmed to Ximena that her Village’s hero really was the absent-minded person she and her Abuela always thought she was.

Ximena had sympathy for any Sequencers who thought Annie Kletter was their only hope.

“Why even bring the Sequencers back to the surface,” she asked. “It sounds like they have everything for a perfect utopia. No Flare. No WICKED. No Experiments . . . for them .” She scanned more pages with the word secuenciadores.

“ Perfect is a perspective,” Cian said.

That may be true , Ximena thought, but she couldn’t stretch to imagine their lives being any tougher than the outside world she’d lived in her whole life.

Erros expounded on the matter. “They have their own hurdles, things that’ll make them take one look at you and think your life is perfect.

” He acted as if he could read her frequency of confusion.

“Your lungs for example.” He paused. “Sequencers can’t go even a few hours without smoking a coltsfoot cigar to help their respiratory system. ”

“I thought they had perfect genetics?” Isaac asked, his eyes still sad, filled with grief.

“A hundred years ago—they did.” Cian looked over at Erros and shrugged. “What’s your plan?”

Erros didn’t look back. “No plan.”

“That confident?” Cian scoffed.

Old Man Frypan and Ximena both noticed the exchange.

“Something’s cooking, isn’t it?” he whispered to her, and for a moment she felt as seen and as safe as she did with her Abuela.

“So what happened to their genes, then?” Isaac leaned forward but stayed seated—as promised to avoid Cian throwing him out like garbage.

“Mold spores. Ventilation systems failing. Humidity—plus the colder air makes breathing harder to begin with. Human genetics can adjust, and the Sequencers’ lungs have grown larger to accommodate, but failing infrastructure puts a clock on things.

They were never meant to live under-earth for this many generations. ”

“So why did they?” Ximena asked. “If they were the smartest people, the top scientists and everything, then wouldn’t they realize they’d screwed up?”

Cian chuckled, either annoyed with all the questions or at the Sequencers themselves.

“The Senate of Sequencers held on to the experiments of living within the earth that showed promise. The Senate only understood the negative effects of the solar storms. The damage. But that’s like removing water from the surface of the Earth because of a flood that happened once. ”

Ximena looked at Frypan. His hands sat poised in his lap, his face relaxed. How could he not feel completely betrayed by his family, by WICKED, by the entire world?

He raised his eyebrows at her. “They should’ve had some of that second-sight you’ve got.”

“You’re so calm about this. How?” She wasn’t sure what to think about the Sequencers, but if she were Frypan she’d probably feel pretty upset. “You have no righteous anger? It’s kind of like a double whammy to you—your family hidden away, yourself sent to the Maze and the Trials.”

“When you’ve lived long enough like me, and through enough bad stuff .

. . you learn what’s needed to survive.” He held his hands up, palms open.

Empty. Through the window, a beautiful sunrise grew on the horizon, just past his shoulder.

Ximena didn’t really understand what he might have been referring to.

“Peace,” he answered her.

Peace? Sitting back and folding her hands wasn’t going to save her Village or anyone else. “You’re just accepting all of this?”

“ Observing ,” he stressed. “I don’t have the energy, inside or out, to fight against people and ideas like I used to. Peace is my only resistance to chaos now.” Frypan stretched out his arm to Isaac. “But you kids . . . you’re going to shake this up. I know you will.”

Isaac didn’t look sure of anything. “It’s just been one big struggle after another. I can’t imagine it ever ending. At least not in a good way.”

Donde hay lucha, hay esperanza. Ximena always hated hearing Abuela say that when she grew angry at the way things were.

It seemed like such a silly answer to the Village’s biggest problems. Where there is struggle, there is hope.

But Ximena hoped her anger in destroying the Villa, taking the Cure, and finding the Sequencers might actually lead to something important.

It wasn’t what she’d envisioned her actions leading to, but she owed it to everyone in her Village, the living and the dead, to unearth the long-hidden truth.

She would accomplish this task, she told herself, and Death itself would just have to be patient and wait for her to finish.

Soldiers could pin his hands behind his back, take away his ability to fight, but the Remnant Nation could never take away the Orphan’s name.

My name is Minho.

Separated from the others, far from the sounds of Pilgrims shouting and soldiers stomping, a Junior Grief Bearer threw Minho into the shadowed depths of the Maze.

At least the size of the structure would block out the noise from Roxy.

He couldn’t stand the thought of her hearing the sounds of pain as they escaped him.

The Orphan had taken all his previous beatings and wounds in silence, but he knew what they were about to do to him would be different, animalistic.

He himself dreaded hearing his own primal wails to come.

“Here.” The Junior Grief Bearer pointed in a circular motion. “Hell awaits.”

On his knees, Minho watched soldiers step forward in a line, standing only a few feet from him, and one-by-one assemble a makeshift Hell, far from the real one in Nebraska.

A soldier dumped a bucket of ash in a circle.

Another stepped up and threw an arm full of stones and debris.

And another. The debris smelled of the fires of war, and the next soldier stepped forward with what smelled like gasoline. Which meant only one thing. Fire.

Someone lit a match, and flames whooshed up in front of Minho. A hellish fire pit formed, just big and bright enough for him to see Orange slumped over on the other side of the flaming debris.

“The Godhead . . .” Minho tried to speak up but broken ribs made it hard.

“The Godhead is here . . .” He said it as loud as he could, but the Remnant soldiers in charge of torture couldn’t care less about killing the Godhead.

Their motto might have been Kill the Godhead , but most Orphan soldiers, who’d been robbed of every human emotion, only cared about the first part: Kill. Kill. Kill.

“Silent, now!” The Junior Bearer-in-training sprayed the remaining gasoline across Minho’s face.

His eyes stung and watered; he coughed and spit out what he could, his lungs already fighting to keep each breath moving in and out of his body.

“These are traitors to the Nation! There can be no worse crime. Torture them as you will.”

Blinded by the sting of gasoline and the earlier punches to his eyes, Minho listened for footsteps, trying to count how many soldiers gathered in line to beat the remaining life out of him.

He knew most of them would lack the slightest creativity in their torture, stick with simple things they knew best— like stomping his head, or stabbing him between the ribs to separate the muscle away from his bone.

He coughed and coughed to clear his lungs, but if he’d spit up any blood, he couldn’t taste it or see it anymore. He rubbed his eyes with his broken shoulder and tried to peek across the flames, but he could only see swirls of colors. “Orange . . .” he sputtered through a cough.

“Orange?” repeated a random soldier. He spit in Minho’s face—such a childish, simpleton thing to do. “You’ll be seeing red , traitor.”

And then Minho received his first punch, right in the temple. It had begun.