The Scorch Trials - James Dashner [65]
The sounds of destruction behind them faded as they ran down this new path, and panic lit up inside Thomas. “What about my friends? What if—”
“Just keep going! Better for everyone to split up anyway.”
The air cooled as they moved farther down the long hallway. The darkness deepened. Thomas felt his strength slowly returning and he caught his breath quickly. Behind them, the noises had almost stopped. He worried about the Gladers, but instinct told him it was okay to stay with Brenda—that his friends would be able to fend for themselves if they’d gotten out. But what if some of them had been captured by whoever had set off the explosion? Or killed? And who had attacked them? Concern seemed to bleed his heart dry as they ran along.
Brenda took three more turns; Thomas had no idea how she could know where she was going. He was just about to ask when she stopped, putting a hand to his chest to hold him back.
“You hear anything?” she said through huffs.
Thomas listened, but all he heard was their own breathing. Everything else was silence and darkness. “No,” he told her. “Where are we?”
“A bunch of tunnels and secret passages connect the buildings on this side of town, maybe across the whole city—we haven’t explored that far yet. They call it the Underneath.”
Thomas couldn’t see her face, but she was close enough that he felt and smelled her breath. It didn’t reek, which surprised him, considering her living conditions. It kind of had a nonscent, somehow pleasant.
“The Underneath?” he repeated. “Sounds stupid.”
“Well, I didn’t name it.”
“How much of it have you explored?” He didn’t like the idea of running around down there without knowing what was ahead.
“Not much. We usually run into Cranks. The really bad ones. Way past Gone.”
This made Thomas turn in a circle, searching the darkness for he didn’t know what. His whole body tensed with fear as if he’d just jumped into ice water. “Well … are we safe? What happened with that explosion, anyway? We need to go back and find my friends.”
“What about Jorge?”
“Huh?”
“Shouldn’t we go find Jorge, too?”
Thomas hadn’t meant to offend her. “Yeah, Jorge, my friends, all those shanks. We can’t leave them behind.”
“What’s a shank?”
“Never mind. Just … what do you think happened back there?”
She sighed and stepped even closer to him, pressing her chest against his. He felt her lips brushing his ear as she spoke. “I want you to promise me something.” She said it softly, in barely more than a whisper.
Chills broke out all over Thomas’s body. “Um … what?”
She didn’t pull back, just kept speaking into his ear. “No matter what happens, even if we have to go alone, you’ll take me all the way back. All the way to WICKED, to that cure you promised Jorge—he told me about it in the storage room. I can’t stay here and slowly go insane. I can’t do it. I’d rather die.”
She grabbed both of his hands in hers, squeezed. Then she rested her head on his shoulder, her nose nestled against his neck—she had to be standing on the tips of her toes. Each breath from her sent a new wave of chills across his skin.
Thomas was enjoying her being so close, but it seemed so bizarre and out of the blue. Then he had a surge of guilt, thinking of Teresa. All this was stupid. He was in the middle of a brutal and ruthless attempt to make it across a wasteland, his life on the line, his friends maybe dead. Teresa could even be dead. To sit here and cuddle with some strange girl in the dark was about the most absurd thing he could think of.
“Hey,” he said. He wiggled his hands from her grip and grabbed her upper arms, pushed her away. He still couldn’t see anything, but he imagined her there, looking at him. “Don’t you think we need to figure things out?”
“You still haven’t promised me,” she replied.
Thomas wanted to scream, couldn’t believe how strange she was acting. “Fine, I promise. Did Jorge tell you everything?”
“Mostly, I think. Though I’d already guessed