1. FIGHTER - the maze runner, newt

Chapter 53

Bullet - Riot Child
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Please reread Chapter 52 if you have not read it recently! I have added a small scene into the last chapter which foreshadows a really important aspect to this chapter! :)
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Our moment. This was our moment.

Ever since we woke up in darkness and entered Glade, we have dreamed of this moment. We have dreamed of escaping the Maze and finding our way out. Our dream is freedom. It always has been. Freedom from the Box, freedom from Glade, freedom from the Maze, freedom from the Creators.

Freedom. That's all we want.

And the exit is right there. Right in front of us.

Then, our moment was taken.

No.

That was all it took to ruin our moment and fracture what little hope we had left.

My head spun around quickly, twisting towards the haunted voice. The moment my scared gaze landed on the taut figure, my knees immediately went weak.

Behind the small group of Gladers, our tiny army, stood someone who I thought was dead—the bully and patriot of Glade.

"Gally?" Thomas's voice wavered.

Gally—the boy who flung himself onto a Griever and was physically pried from the confines of Glade—stood before us like a ghost in a shattered mirror.

His face was sickly pale, blue and black veins pulsating from beneath his very skin. A sheen of thick sweat coated his glossy forehead, scrapes and bruises scattered along his face and body. He was dressed in all white—everything from his shoes to his shirt.

His face, the most harrowed and sunken I've ever seen it, was contorting and twisting into something of desperate rage.

But what caught my eyes first was the gun clutched in his trembling fingers.

"G-Gally...I thought—" I breathed, stepping forwards only to feel Teresa's hand grasp my shoulder, sharply.

"Don't. He's been stung." She says, her wary eyes glued to him.

She was right. Looking at him again, Gally's eyes were not the blue they used to be.

His pupils stretched across his irises, red and blue nerves nearly enveloping what was left of his sclera as tears of despair trailed down his sunken cheeks.

Gally is experiencing the Changing. Again.

Releasing an unsteady breath, thoughts consume my every sense.

What happened to him? How did he survive? How is he not dead? He's in new clothes so the Creators must've found him, right? They must've helped him? But how is he still stung—how is he still experiencing the Changing?

How is he not dead?!

Yet, my thoughts went silent when I looked at the gun.

Why does he have a gun?

A horrible feeling crawled over me, my chest tense with anxiety and dread as I watched the gun quiver in the unstable boy's hand.

Why does he have a gun?

The room instantly grew thick with confusion and cautious terror. The hopeful sensation which rippled through all of us, not even a moment before, was now washed away—all because of the boy with the gun.

Then, from the silence of the sick boy, came a saddened, "We can't leave."

Gally's feeble voice echoed throughout the stiff room as he slowly shook his head, the quivering gun ticking oh-so quietly with each tremor.