Newt Imagines

Recognition

YOUR POV

My fingers glide over the illuminated screen in front of me, swiping the touch-pad instinctively to supervise the glade. My eyes flit between the smaller screens surrounding me, each labeled for the numbered Beetle Blade carrying the camera. I've been working in this control room for longer than I can remember... And I mean that literally. 

Janson had explained how I had gone into shock after witnessing a terrible accident through the cameras in the glade, and suffered severe amnesia as a result. He refused to tell me what the incident was, nor why I had reacted so dramatically. I wasn't able to ask anyone else, because I worked alone. Considering I had no memory, maybe I just had no friends. 

Since then, I've been noticing things. Things that don't add up. I obsessed over them at night, trying to decipher the real reason that I am here. 

How they'd allowed me to go back to work without any memory, relying completely on muscle memory to control the complicated monitors... How I was always made to work the shifts when everyone else was on their dinner break, leaving me to be separated from the rest of WICKED... How a note I'd found under my pillow read I love you, in a handwriting that wasn't my own... How on that same piece of paper was an unfinished tally, marking a meaningless number that I had lost count of at 370... But most of all how my stomach lurched when I saw that limping blonde on the screen. 

None of it made sense to me, and the more I watched the ever-expanding group of memory-less boys in the glade, the more questions I devised. Of course, I didn't ask any of them. I no longer trusted the organisation I worked for, and I wondered if I ever had. 

It has been a year since my memory disappeared, and I haven't wasted a minute of it. I've taken advantage of my lonely shifts at the surveillance desk, manipulating the Beetle Blades to wander where I want them to. I scribble notes on a sheet of paper, searching for the answers to my questions, any sign to validate my suspicions. 

Of course, I would've been much more productive if it wasn't for that damned smile. Or even that frown... A flash of blonde hair catches my eye in the corner of one of the smaller screens, labeled BB37. After quickly checking around the room to make sure no one is watching, I expand it to fill my desktop. I feel my shoulders relax, just looking at him. His eyes are on A2, the new glader, sparkling with laughter as he nibbles on some of A4's food. 

"Thomas..." I whisper, the name sounding foreign but feeling familiar on my lips. "Fry-Pan..." That name doesn't have the same familiarity, but it still feels good to say. 

I'd been studying them so carefully I'd learnt to read their lips, forming words and even recognizing names. I hesitate, stopping my lips from forming the name I have murmured too much. My fingers race over the controls, eagerly zooming until the blonde's face fills my screen. A5.

"Newt..." I allow myself to whisper, sending a shiver down my spine. 

Looking at him made me feel something that I didn't understand. It made the corners of my mouth curl up into a smile that I rarely see in this dreary compound, and filled my body with a desperation I couldn't comprehend. The connection I felt with him was stronger than all the other gladers. It spanned beyond the similarity of missing memory, something I had long since decided was much more than a coincidence. No, this connection was much bigger. All I knew, and all that I'd been working on, was that I had to get them free. That I had to see him. 

That's why, the very next month when they sent in A1, I sent them a clue. "Section 7", I scrawled on a note in Teresa's pocket, hoping they'd find the griever hole. And they did.