Chapter 5 Chapter 5 New Friends in Group B

Something softened Thomas, and the kid wasn't lying—he could say that for sure.Ares's look of fear was familiar to him.Thomas felt that fear himself, and had seen it on the faces of many others.He knew what terrible memory it was that would make a man look that way, and he knew that Ares had no idea what had happened to Teresa. "Maybe you should sit down," Thomas said, "I think we have a lot to talk about." "What do you mean?" Ares asked. "Who are you guys? Where do you come from?" Thomas let out a chuckle. "Maze, Griever, WICKED, you name it." With so much going on, where should he start?Not to mention that worrying about Teresa made him feel dizzy and made him want to run out of the room immediately to find her, but he stayed.

"You're lying," said Ares, his voice fading into a whisper, his face completely pale now. "No, we didn't lie," Newt replied, "Tommy's right. We need to talk, it sounds like we came from a similar place." "Who is that guy?" Thomas turned around to see that Minho had returned, with a bunch of glademen standing behind him, on the other side of the aisle. Their faces were crumpled in disgust at the foul stench outside, and their eyes were still full of terror at the sight of dead bodies in the room behind them. "Minho, come and meet Ares." Thomas said, taking a step aside, and gestured to the boy, "Aris, come and meet Minho."

Minho stammered a few unintelligible words, as if he hadn't decided where to start. "Look," Newt said, "let's take down the upper bunks and move them around the room. Then we can all sit down and figure out what's going on." Thomas shook his head. "No, first, we have to find Teresa, she must be in some other room." "Not one." Minho said. "What do you mean?" "I just checked out the place, the big common area, the room, our dormitory, and some locked doors that lead out - that's where we got off the bus yesterday and went inside Yes. The doors are locked and chained from the inside, which is incredible, but I don't see any other doors or exits."

Thomas shook his head in bewilderment. It felt like a million spiders had spun a tangled web inside his brain. "But... what happened last night? Where did the food come from? Did anyone notice the other rooms? The kitchen, any other rooms?" He looked around for an answer, but no one answered. "Maybe there's a hidden door," Newt said finally. "Look, we can only do one thing at a time. We need to..." "No!" Thomas yelled. "We've been talking to this Ares guy all day. That tag on the door says Teresa is supposed to be here somewhere, and we have to find her!"

Without waiting for the others to reply, he was already walking towards the door, pushing and shoving past the other boys, through the crowd, and back into the common area. The stench hit his face, like a bucket of untreated sewage poured on his head.The bloated and purple corpses hung like hunters waiting to dry their prey, their lifeless eyes staring back at him. There was a familiar, nauseating irritation in his stomach that made him want to vomit again.He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to calm the nausea with willpower.When he finally regained his composure, he began to look for signs of Teresa, focusing as best as he could and not looking at the dead.

But at this moment, a terrible thought hit him, what if she... He ran around the room, searching the faces of the corpses, but she was not among them.The sense of relief dispelled the fear of the moment just now, and he concentrated on observing the room. The walls around this common area look unremarkable: clean lime, painted white, with no ornamentation.And for some reason, there are no windows either.He walked quickly around the whole area, running his left hand along the walls as he went.He came to the door to the boys' dormitory, walked through it, and then came to the same entrance they had entered the house the day before.It was pouring rain at that time, which now seems almost impossible, and he thought of the dazzling sun behind those madmen not long ago.

The entrance - or rather the exit - consisted of two large iron doors, gleaming silver.Just like Minho said, a huge chain - a foot thick - was wound tightly through the door handle, and two huge door locks held the chain tightly.Thomas reached out and tugged at the chains, testing their strength.The metal chain was cold to the touch, motionless. He was expecting to hear the banging on the outside side of the door—there should be a demented person trying to break in, like the demented person outside the window of the dormitory room, but the room was silent.The only sounds, too, were muffled, coming from the two dormitories—the distant shouts and screams of the demented, and the murmurs of the Gladers in discussion.

Frustrated, Thomas continued to trudge along the walls until he was back in what was believed to be Teresa's room.He found nothing, not even a crack or gap that might have been another exit.The huge room wasn't even square—it was a huge oval, in the shape of a ring, without a single corner. He's totally confused, and he thinks back to the night before, when they were all sitting there, gorging on pizza like they used to.They must have seen other doors, the kitchen, something else.But the more he thought about that night, the harder he tried to recall what had happened, the blurrier the picture in his mind became.An idea popped into his mind—their brains had been cleaned of memory in the past.Did the same thing happen again?Have their memories been tampered with or erased?

What happened to Teresa? In desperation, he thought about lying on the ground looking for traps or other mechanisms—the clues left by those things that happened, but he couldn't stay in the decaying corpses for another minute, the only clue left was The new boy.He sighed and turned back to the little room where they had found him. Ares must know something that would help them. According to Newt's order, the upper bunk has been removed from the lower bunk and placed around the room against the wall, leaving enough space for the other nineteen Gladiators to sit in a circle with Ares, each Individuals are face to face with other human beings.

When Minho saw Thomas, he patted an empty seat beside him. "Told you, buddy. Sit down and let's talk, we're all waiting for you. But close that damn door as fast as you can—it smells worse than Gary's rotten feet. " Thomas didn't answer, closed the door silently, then walked over and sat down.He wanted to put his head in his hands, but he didn't, there was no sign of Teresa being in any danger yet. Things were weird, but there could be a million explanations, and there's a good chance she's all right. Newt was sitting on a bed to the right, leaning forward so far that only the edge of his hip was touching the mattress. "Okay, let's start the story from the beginning so we can find the real problem - get something to eat."

At this prompt, Thomas felt a pang of hunger and heard his stomach growling.He hadn't thought about it before.There is no problem with water - they have bathrooms - but there is no food in sight. "Okay, let's do that." Minho said, "Speak up, Ares, and tell us everything." The new boy was sitting directly across from Thomas—and the people in the open space on either side of the strange boy were squatting at either end of the bed, away from him.Ares shook his head: "No, you guys talk first." "What?" Minho replied, "How about we all take turns beating you up the bloody bastard first? Then we'll ask you to talk." "Minho," Newt said seriously, "there's no reason..." Minho pointed at Ares angrily. "Okay, buddy. We all know this guy could be one of the Creators, sent by WICKED to spy on us. He's probably the one who killed the guys out there—only he's unknown to us, And those doors and windows are all locked! I am very disgusted with his arrogance, there are twenty of us, but he is only one, and he dares to be so arrogant, he should speak first. " Thomas sighed internally, one thing he knew very well, that was if Minho threatened the kid, he would never speak up. Newt sighed, looked at Ares, and said, "He's right, tell us what you mean when you say you came out of that horrible labyrinth. That's where we got out, and We obviously haven't met you." Ares wiped his eyes, then met Newt's gaze. "Okay, listen. I was thrown into that great labyrinth made of huge stone walls - but all my memories of before that were wiped. I don't remember anything about my previous life, I only know my first name. I live there with a group of girls. There must be fifty of them, and I'm the only boy. We escaped a few days ago - those who helped us put us in Hidden in a gymnasium for days, then moved us here last night - but no one has any explanation for that. What's the matter with you in the maze too?" Thomas only heard the last few words of Ares amidst the surprised voices of other Gladiators, and his mind was in a mess.Ares described what he had experienced succinctly and quickly, as if describing a trip to the sea, but it sounded a little crazy.If true, it's very monumental, and luckily someone said exactly what Thomas was trying to figure out. "Wait a minute," Newt said, "you live in a giant maze, on a farm, where the walls close every night, don't you? Just you and a few dozen girls? Are you a Griever' creature? Were you the last one to arrive? Did everything mess up when you arrived? Were you sent in unconscious? You had a note with you that said You're the last one, right?" "Whoa, whoa, whoa," Ares said before Newt could finish. "How did you know all this? How..." "It's the exact same experiment," Minho said, the animosity in his voice gone before, "or the same... whatever it is. But they're set up as a group of girls and a boy, and we're a group of boys and a Girl. WICKED must have built two mazes like that, running two different experiments." Thomas's mind had accepted this, and he was finally calm enough to speak.He looked at Ares: "Did they call you the trigger?" Ares nodded, clearly as bewildered as everyone else in the room. "Then can you..." Thomas began, but hesitated. He felt like entering a world that was driving him crazy every time he brought up the subject. "Can you talk to one of those girls in your head? You know, like telepathy?" Ares' eyes widened, staring deeply at Thomas, like he knew a dark secret that only another person who also knew the secret could understand. can you hear me? The words came to Thomas so clearly that at first he thought it was Ares speaking loudly to him.But no, his lips didn't move at all. can you hear me?the boy repeated. Thomas hesitated, then swallowed.Yes. They killed her, Ares answered him, They killed my best friend.