Page 41 of The Infinite Glade (The Maze Cutter #3)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Doomed

T he Griever sounds echoed down one of the tunnels. It scared Isaac so badly that he’d lost all feeling or thought, felt totally incapable of taking even a single step.

A low hum vibrated through the air, making it feel like the whole inside of the lobby was shaking. Suddenly the air around him got much colder than it had been a few seconds ago. He tried to snap himself out of his immobility.

“Why would Grievers be here?” Isaac asked Frypan. He shifted his weight to his good leg, but he didn’t have faith in himself to run very fast. “Frypan?”

The old man didn’t respond, just stared into the darkness of the tunnel ahead, and that only made Isaac even more frightened. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he said, looking at the others, each in turn. “We’ve got to run! They tricked us!”

“No! Don’t move!” Cian held his arms out. “Don’t move or you’ll make it worse! I swear on my mother’s life!”

Isaac turned to Ximena, Jackie, and Miyoko.

“We need to go that way.” He pointed to the tunnel they’d come through earlier, but the three of them and Frypan just stood there as the clicking and whirring and hissing grew louder.

It was as if the sounds of the Griever had put them in a trance.

“Guys! We’ve got to go. Now!” He limped over and grabbed Jackie by the shoulders, shook her. “Jackie!”

“Running won’t do us any good,” she said sadly.

Erros kicked the desk. “The Senate couldn’t wait for us to get down there and explain? They had to send these things? They just had to?”

“We can’t just sit here.” Isaac’s leg hurt too much to run, and he couldn’t leave Frypan, but Jackie and Miyoko were close to the exit tunnel. “You guys go!” he yelled half-heartedly.

“Stop! Just don’t move!” Erros shouted back at Isaac.

The Griever stepped into view from the farthest tunnel. Slimy skin, a giant slug with metal legs. A walking terror. It cleared the tunnel’s opening, whirring with its mechanical noises.

Ximena hurriedly opened her backpack then turned to Isaac. “Here. Take this.” She shoved a gun into his chest. He also had the axe from earlier, still looped through his belt, but Isaac wasn’t sure any weapon would help against the Griever.

“Just stay still and it won’t hurt you!” Cian shouted. But Isaac couldn’t forget what had happened to Cowan. Or how the Griever had attacked the glass pod holding Old Man Frypan, stabbing it with some hideous metal arm sticking from its flesh. It was still too fresh in his memory.

Isaac felt like they had nothing to lose, now. He steadied his feet below him and aimed the gun at the body of the Griever, clicking and whirling its body, closer and closer. When the Griever crawled close enough for Isaac not to miss, he pulled the trigger.

The bullet ricocheted off the beast and Isaac shot again. Ximena started firing as well.

Bullets flew, the sound of the gunfire echoing in the lobby of tunnels, but the Griever kept moving, now looming over Isaac and Frypan. Ximena walked backward toward Jackie and Miyoko.

“Stop!” Cian ran over, struggled to pull the gun out of Isaac’s hands and a rogue bullet fired, hitting a tank of compressed air. There was a loud pop; the tank turned into a missile that launched toward Frypan and hit his walking stick, breaking the thing clean in half.

“Just stay still!” Cian yelled over the squeal of air rushing from the tank, the metal scrape as it dragged its last bit of life across the tile floor.

The Griever creaked and whirled closer. W hy hadn’t Cian and Erros said anything about these things being under the earth?

Isaac didn’t have many hopes left, but one had been to never see one of these monsters again.

Frypan had a look of lost wonder as the Griever mechanically lifted itself even closer to them.

Isaac held his hands out protectively in front of Ximena and Frypan, as if that would do a damned thing.

“Maybe if we move slowly toward the exit . . .” he whispered.

“It’s got . . .” Frypan looked at the Griever without blinking, without moving, obviously traumatized by his past. “It’s got a mind of its own . . .”

The Griever screeched a tremendous and hideous noise at Erros, who had flattened himself against the wall of the lobby. The monster’s top, slug-like parts formed into a head, lurching out to smell Erros before moving on to Isaac.

Jackie screamed his name.

The mechanical beast seemed to suck up every cubic inch of air in front of Isaac; he held his breath. Somehow he already knew what would happen next—the Griever lifted its metallic arm, pulled back, then shot forward and stabbed him in the neck with a thin needle.

Isaac yelped, flinched, fell to the ground—more in shock than from the quick and sharp pain.

The machine clicked in rapid succession before moving several feet away from him.

The pain stung, getting worse, like a burn from hot metal in the forge back home.

He struggled to stand up, but worried that if he collapsed or moved too much, the Griever might attack him again for good measure.

Dizziness swept through his body. He fell to his knees, completely unaware that he’d ever actually made it to his feet.

“Isaac . . .” Ximena pulled on his arm to help him up. “Isaac, come on. Please. You can do this. We’ve got to get out of here . . .”

“Glory to the Gladers of Old, forever and forever.” The words fell from Old Man Frypan’s lips like a prayer. Isaac’s heart raced just as quickly as his spinning mind. Metal twisted and clanked from all around them, the whirring of machinery filled the air.

Five more Grievers walked out, one from each of the connecting tunnels.

Isaac blinked but he couldn’t trust his eyes.

“Get up! We’ve got to go!” Ximena pulled him to his feet, then back toward Jackie and Miyoko. The five Grievers moved in some kind of horrific synchronicity, in a militant march toward the islanders.

Isaac knew they’d never outrun these things. Pure fear paralyzed him, swallowed his will to survive. The others seemed to have given up as well. Isaac could only stare as one Griever’s arms and legs rolled and tumbled forward, stabbing Cian and Erros in their necks as it moved.

Then its hideous, bulbous, slimy head turned its attention on Frypan.

The Griever moved toward him. All of them did.

“Yes, the Godhead sits among you, but so does the Great Master!” Alexandra was stretching now, thinking of anything and everything she could say to save her skin. “It’s me.”

“The Great Master?” Roxy muttered, but the soldiers behind her fell still.

They had probably never, not once, ever heard something so blasphemous to their ears.

Alexandra had them right where she wanted them. They would be under her power, soon—falling in line and taking orders within a matter of moments. She could make Mikhail’s entire army her Evolutionary Guard. Brilliance. The Evolution would always provide the way, the path, for her.

“The Great Master has no face,” an Orphan soldier spoke up, his face almost comically stern.

“And that is the very reason I never showed my face in the Golden Room of Grief.” Alexandra paused, proud of the immense training she had poured into her voice.

But had she said it correctly? Golden Room of .

. . something. “Because your eyes betray your training. You look at me, now, and think that I can’t possibly be the one ruling the Nation?

” She glared at the soldier to his left. “What should I do with this denier?”

The soldier appeared wary as she looked Alexandra up and down. “The Great Master would never wear a Pilgrim’s cloak.”

“What better way to know the enemy than to blend in with them?” Alexandra stared deep into the young orphan’s eyes.

21, 34, 55, 89 . . . “If you lift my cloak and check my wrists you’ll see the Remnant symbol tattooed there.

The exact symbol that’s etched into the walls of the Remnant Nation and the Golden Room.

” She waited while the soldier hesitated.

She finally loosed the tie on Alexandra’s wrist and pulled her sleeve up.

“There’s nothing there.” The orphan flushed, worried that she had screwed up somehow. It was working, indeed.

“The other one.”

The soldier looked at that wrist. Alexandra waited impatiently for her to say something but there was no reaction.

None. Had Minho lied to her about the Godhead’s symbol being on the walls of his buildings?

“You see now?” she asked. No response. Mindless soldiers.

Her patience thinned to nothing. “If you untie my hands, I’ll show you properly. ”

A cloaked Grief Bearer entered the Glade from the corridors of the Maze, itself—where they’d taken any Orphan traitors—with a soldier on either side of them. Someone must have told him what was going on. Alexandra’s heart sank a little.

“The Great Master does have that tattoo.” The cloaked man spoke slowly and chopped almost all his words in half.

“But so does the Godhead.” The Grief Bearer slowly raised his right arm and pointed straight at Alexandra.

“She wears the cloak of a Pilgrim, but there stands the one and only remaining member of the Godhead.” A very long pause, then a silence settling over the Glade that would’ve seemed impossible a minute earlier. “And she killed the Great Master.”

Panic now bounced within Alexandra’s body, throttling her spirit.

The digits escaped her. The hood of her cloak tightened against her throat as the soldier behind her pulled her head back.

A cold knife rested just above her collar bone.

Her skull pounded at the top of her spine.

The Evolution was doomed. How , she thought with terror. How had it all fallen apart?