"So when did you- you know- fall in love with her?" Thomas smirked, knowing he had him right where I wanted him, with his head in Fionaland.
"Woah," Newt defeated with his hands up, "What?"
"I may be slow to getting to know things around here, but...
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Ending the day with a meeting as the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted to be laid out on a hammock, with my leg elevated to the point of numbness. It had grown more annoying as the virus infected deeper. I'd graduated from an achy teenager to a crippled old man in a month.
"There, that's it. It's a few hundred miles. Based on the railways, everything that Aris told us, that's gotta be where they're headed." Thomas dragged his finger across the large map "That's where they're taking Minho. We take everyone who can fight. Follow the roads where we can. We can make it back within a week."
"A week?" Vince questioned. "It took us four months to get here, it would have taken us more without Little Miss Einstein."
"Thank you." Fi bowed, slightly. Immediately going back to a notebook filled with Mary's writings.
Vince continued, "We got over a hundred kids here now. We can't just hang out here forever after what we just pulled. You wanna wander off to some random point on the map. You don't even know what's there."
"I do. It's been a few years, but I've been there. The Last City." Jorge spoke of it as a dream. "That's what WCKD called it. It was their whole base of operations. If that city is still standing, that's the last place you wanna go, hermano. That's the lion's den."
"Yeah, with months of planning, and reliable information, the element of surprise, none of which we have now." Vince tried to talk sense into him. But I could see it in his eyes that Thomas was going, with or without permission. Which naturally meant I would be rubbish of a friend if I didn't tag along to make sure he doesn't die.
Fiona was still writing in the book, missing the entire interaction. She would stay here and I would go. At my core, a selfish part of me wished to never leave her side. I fear that my limited time would force me to choose between saving Minho or with her. Expecting a gruesome prolonged death had become a crueler punishment than I ever imagined.
"Vince, I've thought this through." Thomas pushed for additional resources, "Would you just hear me out?"
"The last time we went off half-cocked... I lost everything. You remember that?" Vince's voice dampened in the reflection. He lost Mary that day, and as much as she tried to hide his feelings. We could see the impact her death had on him. "Look, I know it's Minho. All right? But you can't ask me to put those kids on the line for one man. I won't do it."
"It's not one man, it's at least twenty other immunes. Twenty souls that we can save." Fiona wrote some numbers in the margins of her book.
Aris's friends. Fiona had asked me to do my best to help ease Aris into the camp here. Apparently, his girlfriend fell victim to WCKD for the last time. Now Aris struggled to find a path in the sea of immunes. I did as she asked, hoping he would return the favor for her when my time came.
