The W.I.C.K.E.D Girl

11

"Where is the bloody Greenie?" I asked once again around the Homestead, earning some confused looks from the other Gladers. 

She should have been here by now. Emily wasn't the type to run. Or maybe that was just what I wanted to believe.

One of the seated boys snorted. "Maybe she's in the Maze," he said, and his friends cackled along.

I shot them a glare and turned to Alby, who was interrogating a few of the shanks by the door. "What do you think?" I demanded.

He just sighed. He'd always looked tired, but since Emily's arrival, he appeared to be even more so. "Check in the forest." The blood running down Gally's face trickling into the dark green grass flashed in front of my eyes. "She can't have hidden somewhere else."

I left the Homestead and ambled to the patch of trees, slipping into the darkness of the little forest unnoticed. Despite my thorough search, Emily seemed to have vanished, as though swallowed by the earth. As I prepared to head back, already trying to think of the other places where she could be hiding, I noticed a silhouette curled up against a tree. 

"Emily?" I whispered. No answer came. I didn't feel like repeating myself, the silence too deep, so I approached as quietly as possible. 

It didn't take me long to realise she had been asleep for a while—her eyes were closed, and her chest was slowly rising and falling to the rhythm of her steady breaths, her lips parted. 

As soon as the Gathering ended, I'd gone outside and, though it angered me to say the words, relayed Alby's sentence. A night in the Slammer. Most of the boys had been wary of her since she'd arrived, the only girl among us, and the Griever incident had put them even farther on edge. They thought her dangerous. Nobody besides her and Minho had borne witness to what'd happened in the Maze, and some were even willing to disregard the Keeper of the Runners, whom they'd known for so long—he'd stumbled upon the scene only after the Griever had died. They insisted only she knew the truth, and that she wasn't to be trusted. They claimed W.I.C.K.E.D had planted her with a purpose in our midst, a test, a spy, our undoing.

I crouched in front of Emily and lightly pushed her shoulder. Although she flinched in her slumber, there was no sign of her waking up. I did it again, and again, but to no avail. I was aware the day had taken a great physical toll on her. I sighed, then looped my arm around her shoulders and the other underneath her knees, careful as I picked her up. 

As I carried her towards the Homestead, I could already hear what the other shanks would say when they saw her in my arms. I'd turned against one of us for her, beat Gally nearly to a pulp—and while there were plenty of boys who thought I'd done the right thing, there were also plenty who considered I'd irreversibly switched sides. As if it was her against us, us against them. As though she'd never be one of us. However, I found myself indifferent to their opinions. Most of the Gladers were morons, anyway.

Emily shifted, nuzzling closer to my chest, presumably drawn in by the warmth of my body. I didn't realise I was smiling until my cheeks began to hurt.

What the bloody hell was happening to me?

A couple of the shanks I encountered as I made for the Slammer snickered and sent sickening smirks our way. Most just kept their mouths shut—what had happened between Gally and I was enough to render them silent. 

Fortunately, the makeshift prison of the Glade had separate cells; thus, Gally, who was passed out in his, didn't pose a threat to her. I laid her down on the cold, stone floor, a twinge of guilt scurrying through me. She was thin enough to wake up covered in bruises from sleeping on such a hard, unforgiving surface.

I closed the cell's trapdoor and peered at her through the wooden bars. Her eyes were moving beneath her eyelids as she dreamt, unperturbed. I hoped her dreams granted her some respite. 

"Good night," I whispered to her, even though she couldn't hear me.

My heart hammered in my chest as I left.