Cover

ALSO BY JAMES DASHNER

The Maze Runner Books

The Maze Runner

The Scorch Trials

The Death Cure

The Kill Order

The Fever Code

Crank Palace

The 13th Reality Books

The Journal of Curious Letters

The Hunt for Dark Infinity

The Blade of Shattered Hope

The Void of Mist and Thunder

The Mortality Doctrine Books

The Eye of Minds

The Rule of Thoughts

The Game of Lives

Adult Books

The House of Tongues

Dedication

This book is dedicated to Marisa Corvisiero.

Agent, friend, and life-saver.

EPIGRAPH

Even as the darkness whispers across my mind, beckoning with smoky tendrils of blackness and rot, even as I breathe in the stench of a dying world, even as the blood within my veins turns purple and hot, I feel the peace of a certain knowledge. I have had friends, and they have had me.

And that is the thing.

That is the only thing.

—The Book of Newt

PROLOGUE

Voices from the Dust

Thomas found the journal three weeks after the world ended. It still baffled him. How? When? When and how? When had his friend written all those pages and how had it gotten inside one of several boxes sent through the Flat Trans before Thomas and his friends made the trip themselves? Ava Paige had done it, of course, as she had done everything. But again. How? When? Those words occupied his mind like two guests refusing to leave, well after the party has wrapped.

He sat upon his favorite ledge on his favorite cliff, looking out at the vastness, the forever, the endless void of the ocean. The air was clean and fresh, bitten with the tang of fish and the sweetness of decomposing life. Small wisps of spray tickled his skin, cool against the heat of the sun directly overhead. He closed his eyes, blanking out the horizons that daunted him, made him feel as if he’d been stranded on the moon. Mars. Another galaxy. Heaven. Hell. What did it matter? He shifted on the jutting edge of rock to get more comfortable, his legs dangling over the roar and splash of depthless water, black-blue, as far away from the world as he could fathom.

Of course, that was a good thing. Right? Yes, it was. But escaping disease, madness, and death did nothing to replace the sadness at what had been lost. Which brought him back to the journal.

He opened his eyes and picked up the warped, tattered, muddied book from where he’d set it earlier, atop a single shelf of sandstone that appeared as if it had been sculpted by time’s chisel to house a sacred artifact. Sacred. Artifact. That sounded about right.