𝗖𝗨𝗥𝗜𝗢𝗨𝗦, thomas (tmr)

Chapter Eight

The next few days were strange.

Everyone had become aware of Newt's injury. Not the reason for it, but the extent of the damage. A few boys had gone to visit him - only a select few that Clara knew Newt would actually want to see - and he was slowly improving over time.

And then disaster struck again.

You'd have thought that things couldn't get any worse for the Glade. You'd be wrong.

When Justin came in from the Maze one day after stepping in to Newt's role, he showed all the same signs that George did when he had been stung. Nick approached him gently, asking to see the sting, and then he went berserk.

Frypan managed to knock him out - funnily enough - with a frying pan.

He was the first boy to be Stung since George. They didn't know what they were supposed to do, only that if they didn't do something, one of them could end up dead.

"Do we- you know," Nick muttered to the girl, watching as Gally and Minho dragged Justin into the Slammer, with the boy limp in their arms still unconscious as they did.

Nick didn't have to explicitly say it for the girl to know what he was talking about. He was suggesting that they kill him.

Vividly remembering the trauma brought to them all when Alby killed George, Clara knew that it was not a good suggestion. However, they had to do something.

They were going with the assumption that Justin's crazed state would not pass. They couldn't keep him in the Slammer forever, but they also couldn't release him into the Glade.

And that's when Clara formed an idea in her mind.

"We need to banish him."

"Huh?" Nick asked, cocking his head to the side as the girl's eyes seemed to spark with a plan he wasn't clued into.

"To the Maze."

Nick's eyes widened then, his mind clicking into place. No one survived a night in the Maze. This way, the risk of Justin hurting any of them would be gone, but they wouldn't have directly killed him.

We're just putting him in a place where he'd inevitably die.

"It's the only thing that would work." Nick agreed, just as Clara was beginning to second guess herself.

She couldn't think before she spoke. Now that the suggestion was thrown out there, Nick had latched on and seemed to have run with it. Before she knew it, the Glade was ablaze with the news of Justin's Banishment.

And of course the boys took it to the extreme.

Gally and his Builders got to work immediately. Together they made about ten long wooden poles, complete with a flat rectangular area on the end that would be used to shun Justin away from them and into the Maze.

A few other boys had dropped their own work to aid them. They helped in sharpening more wooden sticks, so that every person in the Glade could have something to fend Justin off with. 

At this point, Clara felt sick to her stomach. 

Justin was doomed. He was a sick, scared boy who didn't deserve what was coming to him. But that friendly Runner who the Gladers had come to know and love had gone. In his place was a shell of an angry person, angry at something the rest of them couldn't understand.

That night, only a few minutes before sundown and the Maze doors closure, the Gladers all gathered around the threshold of the Maze. Like the rest of them, Clara held a wooden pole, but only half heartedly.