Chapter 5 : The Fragments
[Newt]
The new Greenie was wrong.
Not dangerous-wrong. Not the kind of wrong that made Newt's hand drift toward the nearest sharp object. But wrong in the way a puzzle piece is wrong when it fits the hole perfectly but shows the wrong part of the picture. Everything about Walker Bancroft slotted into Glade life with a precision that was, itself, the problem.
Three days. In three days, the kid had named himself faster than anyone Newt could remember, avoided a fight with Gally without looking weak, gotten himself reassigned to gardens through sheer strategic compliance, and somehow known enough field medicine to pull metal fragments from a Griever wound that Clint — the closest thing to a doctor they had — had missed entirely.
Newt sat on the edge of the watchtower platform, his bad leg dangling over the side, and watched Walker cross the Glade below. Dawn was just breaking, pale light pushing through the projected sky, and the Greenie was moving toward the Med-jack hut with the focused stride of someone who had somewhere to be.
Most Greenies spent their first week in a daze. Terrified, confused, crying at night when they thought no one could hear. Some adjusted fast — Thomas would, when he arrived, though Newt didn't know that yet — but even the fast adjusters had a period of raw disorientation that manifested as clumsiness, bad decisions, and the desperate need to attach themselves to anyone willing to explain things.
Walker wasn't clumsy. Walker wasn't desperate. Walker asked questions with the cadence of someone confirming information rather than learning it, and that was the piece that didn't fit.
"You're up early." Alby climbed the last rungs of the ladder and settled beside him. The leader's face was drawn — Ben's screaming had kept half the Glade awake.
"Couldn't sleep." Newt nodded toward the figure below. "The Greenie's heading to the Med-jack station."
Alby followed his gaze. "He was useful last night."
"He was more than useful. He was ready. Like he knew what to look for before he found it."
"Memory fragments. Happens sometimes."
"This fast? This specific?"
Alby was quiet for a moment. Below, Walker disappeared into the Med-jack hut. "Keep an eye on him," Alby said finally. "Not a close one. Just... watch."
Newt intended to do exactly that.
---
[Walker — Med-jack Station, Day 4, 6:30 AM]
Ben's fever had broken sometime before dawn. He lay on the table with a clarity in his eyes that hadn't been there last night — the wild, fractured lucidity of someone who'd been shown something terrible and couldn't stop seeing it.
Clint had stepped out for breakfast. Jeff was asleep in the corner, exhaustion having won the argument with duty. I sat on a stool beside Ben's table with a cup of water I'd brought from the rain barrel and waited for him to focus.
"Hey," I said. Soft. The voice you use for wounded animals and frightened children.
Ben's head turned. His eyes found me, locked on, and a micro-expression crossed his face — recognition, then confusion, then the blankness of someone who'd tried to grab a memory and had it dissolve between his fingers.
"You're the new kid."
"Walker."
"Right. Walker." He swallowed. His throat worked like it was fighting him. "Did I... last night, did I..."
"You were talking in your sleep. Fever does that."
"It wasn't sleep." His voice dropped. He glanced at the door, at the sleeping Jeff, then back to me. "I saw things. When the fever was worst. Like memories, but... wrong. Too bright. Too real."
"What kind of things?"
Silence. Ben's fingers twisted in the blanket covering him, knotting and unknotting the fabric in a rhythm that suggested this wasn't the first time his hands had needed something to do.
"Rooms," he said at last. "White rooms. Bright lights — not like the sun, like... panels. In the ceiling. And people in coats. White coats. They had needles. Big ones, the kind you'd use on cattle, not people. And they were putting them into — into us. Into arms. Into necks. Into..." He trailed off, staring at the canvas ceiling of the hut.
"Go on."
"I could hear them talking. The people in coats. They used words I didn't understand. 'Variables' and 'killzone' and 'enzyme.' One of them — a woman, I think — said something about 'responses exceeding baseline.' Like we were test subjects. Like we were..."
He stopped. The knuckle-twisting intensified.
I leaned forward. Careful. Not too eager. "Do you remember anything about where this was? Before the Glade?"
"No. It's like — like watching a movie through frosted glass. I can see shapes and hear sounds, but the details keep slipping." He looked at me with eyes that were suddenly, terrifyingly present. "We were somewhere else before this. Weren't we."
Not a question. I held his gaze and said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.
"The needles," Ben whispered. "They were taking something out of us. Or putting something in. I can't tell which." His hand shot out and grabbed my wrist. His grip was hot and dry and stronger than a wounded Runner should have been able to manage. "They're watching us. Always watching. Even here."
WCKD. The observation protocols. The cameras hidden in the walls, in the supply deliveries, in the very architecture of the Glade. I knew all of it. Ben was right — they were always watching. Every experiment, every trial, every death was data for WCKD's quest to solve the Flare.
"Get some rest," I said, gently extracting my wrist from his grip. "The fever's gone, but you lost a lot of blood."
"Don't tell the others." His voice was urgent now. "About the rooms. The needles. They'll think I'm losing it."
"I won't."
He relaxed, marginally. His eyes drifted toward the ceiling again, and within minutes his breathing had evened into the shallow rhythm of restless sleep. His mouth moved soundlessly — fire, needles, watching — and then stilled.
I sat with him for another twenty minutes, cataloging every word. White rooms. Bright panel lights. People in white coats with industrial needles. Words like variable and killzone and enzyme. The woman talking about baseline responses.
All of it aligned perfectly with what the source material described: WCKD's laboratory complex, where immune teenagers had been subjected to brain scans, blood draws, and cognitive stress tests before having their memories wiped and being deposited in the Maze. Ben's fever-induced fragments were genuine — partial memories breaking through the wipe.
This confirmed two things. First, the memory suppression wasn't permanent. Trauma, fever, and the Griever sting could crack it open. Second, the Gladers had all been WCKD subjects before the Maze. Every one of them had experienced the white rooms and the needles and the people in coats.
Including Walker Bancroft. Whoever he'd been before I arrived in this body.
---
[The Glade — Outside the Council Hall, 11:00 AM]
"Got a minute, Walker?"
Alby leaned against the Council Hall doorway with the casual posture of someone who'd been waiting rather than passing by. His arms were folded, his expression neutral in the way that authority figures learn to make neutral when they have something specific to discuss.
"Sure."
"You've been spending a lot of time in the Med-jack station."
"Ben needed help. Clint was down a pair of hands."
"Clint says you're good. Better than good — he says you've got instincts."
I waited. There was a but coming.
"You're also a three-day Greenie who should be rotating through job trials, not camping at a wounded Runner's bedside." Alby's tone was level, careful. The voice of a leader who'd learned that direct confrontation created more problems than strategic conversation. "People talk, Walker. A new kid who's too interested in a specific thing — any thing — gets noticed."
"I'm just trying to help."
"And I believe that." He straightened from the doorway. "But help where you're assigned. You're with Zart today. Garden work. Let Clint handle Ben."
"Understood."
Alby held my gaze for a beat — the same evaluative look he'd given in the Box, the same one from the job assignment circle. Then he moved on, crossing toward the Map Room where the morning Runner briefing was underway.
I watched him go and recalibrated. Alby wasn't suspicious — not yet. He was managing. A leader protecting the social equilibrium of a fragile community by making sure the newest member didn't attach himself to a single purpose before proving reliable across many. It was smart management. In my previous life, I'd worked under logistics directors who operated the same way: give the new hire variety before letting them specialize.
But it meant my window with Ben was closing. Whatever else he might remember during his recovery, I wouldn't be the one sitting beside him to hear it.
---
[The Deadheads — 11:30 PM]
Nobody came to the Deadheads at night. The wooded section at the Glade's northeastern edge served as both cemetery and quiet zone — the place where the graves of Gladers who hadn't survived their first weeks were marked with simple wooden crosses, and where the living went when they needed solitude that the communal Homestead couldn't provide.
I knelt between two trees, twenty feet from the nearest grave marker, and worked by moonlight.
The iron-rich soil from the gardens came out of the torn leaf wrapping in a compressed clump. I broke it apart on a flat stone, grinding it with the heel of my palm until it formed a coarse powder. Beside it, I laid out the yarrow stems — three of them, dried since yesterday by being pressed flat inside my hammock's canvas fold. I stripped the leaves from the stems, crushed them between my fingers until the plant matter released its oil, and mixed the result into the soil powder.
Copper residue was the missing piece. I'd scraped a pinch from the irrigation channel joints during my garden shift, working the green oxidation off the pipe fittings with my thumbnail while Zart's attention was on the potato beds. The amount was tiny — barely enough to cover my little fingernail — but for a Tier One array, trace amounts would suffice.
I added the copper to the mixture. Stirred with a twig. The result was a dark, gritty paste with a faint metallic smell and a texture like wet sand. Not elegant. Not refined. But potentially functional.
One ingredient remained. I pressed my thumbnail into the pad of my index finger until the skin broke and a bead of blood welled up. Three drops fell into the paste — dark, quick, absorbed instantly by the iron-rich base.
My blood. The transmigrator's blood. According to the array theory sitting in my skull, the creator's biological material served as the primary energy source for basic inscriptions. More complex arrays would need stronger catalysts, but for a simple detection pattern, blood was sufficient.
I sealed the paste in a folded leaf, wrapped it tight with a strip of cloth torn from the hem of my shirt, and buried it six inches deep between the tree roots. Tomorrow — pre-dawn, before the Glade woke — I'd test it.
My hands were stained. Herbs and iron and copper and blood, ground into the creases of my palms and the beds of my fingernails. I scrubbed them in the stream that ran along the Deadheads' southern edge, but the discoloration persisted — a map of the evening's work written on my skin.
The walk back to the Homestead took five minutes. Most of the Glade was asleep. The bonfire had burned down to embers, and the only sounds were the distant mechanical howling from the Maze and the breathing of thirty teenagers packed into a structure that was never meant to house this many.
I climbed into my hammock. Closed my eyes. Sleep didn't come.
Behind my eyelids, at the very edge of awareness, something flickered. A translucent shimmer, like heat distortion over asphalt. Text that wasn't quite text — more like the impression of text, a watermark on the inside of my skull. It vanished when I tried to focus on it, reappeared when I relaxed.
The Shop System. Dormant but present. Waiting for a trigger — a significant action, an achievement that would prove I was more than passive potential. The first array inscription would be that trigger, if it worked.
If it worked.
Fifty percent success rate for a first attempt. Those odds weren't comforting. But they were better than zero, and zero was what I had right now.
I turned over in the hammock, pressing my stained hands against the canvas. Tomorrow. Everything hinged on tomorrow.
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