Echoes ~ (Book Two of The Elite Series)

Chapter 8

Waking with a start, Emma  blinked away her blurred vision, rubbing the crustyness from her eyes.

Somehow, at some point during the night she had actually managed to pass out, though she didn't remember when.
At first when she would try to fall asleep, it was only to gasp and force herself awake minutes later from the dreams, or nightmare. Emma couldn't remember anything about then when she awoke, only how they had made her feel.

Jaw clenching as she tried to keep herself from crying, Jack's scream of terror and Winston's screams of pain were still fresh in her mind.

Emma had actually started running to go back and rescue Jack, but Frypan and Newt had needed to drag her away, before she'd finally started running with them.

She understood that it may have been fruitless, but it was Jack. The quiet, sweet one in the glade.
He didn't deserve to die like that.

And they'd nearly lost Winston too, but had managed to pull him away just in time.

A cold pit grew in her chest, a hardening ball of anger, grief. Her mind was a whirlwind of complicated emotions, while on the outside she appeared calm.

Arms tightened around Emma then, bringing her back to reality.

A sleepy sigh escaped from Newt's lips, ruffling her hair a bit.
Laying her head back down on his chest, Emma thought that even if she couldn't fall back asleep, she could at least enjoy these last few minutes with him before they had to get up.

"Hey! Get out of here!"
The crow cawed its displeasure as Thomas shooed it away from the bag of old food it had jerked out of Minho's backpack.

Then everyone was awake.

"You doing alright love?" was the first thing she heard Newt say.

Giving him a tight nod, Emma could tell he didn't really believe her.
She didn't believe herself either.

How could she be alright, after losing Jack like that, and almost losing Winston to those horrible creatures too?
Tugging on the hem of her jacket, Emma absently fingered the pale reddish scarf she'd tied around her neck, also wearing one on her left wrist.
It reminded her of the leather cuff Newt had always worn, back in the Glade.

"Are they gone?" Newt glanced up at Thomas.

"Yeah, I think we're safe, for now."

"They don't usually come out in daylight. They're more active at it's dark," Kyra said, distantly. The girl was so quiet they all kind of kept forgetting she was there, and Emma half wondered how long WCKD had been holding her, before Winston and Aris had rescued them both.

"Okay then, but we should still get moving. Let's pack it up. Aris, come on. Fry, Winston. Let's go," Thomas encouraged them, the boys grunting as they got to their feet.

Winston groaned as he tried to get up. The gouges on his abdomen were clearly still bothering him, even though Emma had done her best to clean and wrap them with the small first aid kits they had managed to find the night before.

"Hey, man. You okay?" Frypan offered him his hand, and Winston took it, both following after the others as they climbed up and over the piles of broken up concrete and twisted metal.

Stopping at the peak, the gladers took in the sight before them.
What once might've been a bustling, powerful city was now in ruins, only bare concrete and metal skeletons sticking up out of sand. A few even still had glass windows, albeit most of them were broken, or barely hanging on.

"What the hell happened to this place?"
Minho looked around at the creepy, empty buildings as they passed them.

"I don't know. It doesn't look like anyone's been here in a long time," Newt remarked, holding Emma's left hand as they walked.