And then there were, of course, those who had, without a doubt, traveled well past the Gone, that line in the sand that divided humans from animals, people from beasts. A girl, who couldn’t have been older than 15 or 16, lay flat on the ground in the middle of the nearest road, babbling incoherently, chewing on her fingers hard enough that blood dripped back down onto her face. She giggled every time it did so. Not far from her, a man crouched over a chunk of what looked like raw chicken, pale and pink. He didn’t eat it, not yet, but his eyes darted left and right and up and down, empty of sanity, ready to attack any fool who dared try to take his meat away. Farther down that same street, a few Cranks were fighting each other like a pack of wolves, biting and clawing and tearing as if they had been dropped in a gladiator’s coliseum and only one would be allowed to walk away alive.

Newt lowered his eyes, sank onto the pavement. He slipped the backpack from his shoulders and cradled it in his arms, felt the hard edge of the Launcher he’d stolen from Jorge’s weapons stash on the Berg. Newt didn’t know how long the energy-dependent, electric-firing projectile device would last, but he figured it couldn’t hurt to have it. The knife resided in the pocket of his jeans, folded up, a pretty sturdy one, if it ever came to hand-to-hand battle.

But that was the thing. Like he’d thought earlier, everything he saw around him had become the “new normal” of sorts, and for the life of him he couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t terrified. He felt no fear, no apprehension, no stress, no innate desire to run, run, run. How many times had he come across Cranks since escaping the Maze? How many times had he almost soiled his pants from sheer terror? Maybe it was the fact that he was now one of them, quickly descending to their level of madness, that stayed his fear. Or maybe it was the madness itself, destroying his most human of instincts.

And what of that whole winter market thing? Was the Flare finally releasing him from the hold of the Swipe he’d been subjected to by WICKED? Could that perhaps be the ticket to his final journey past the Gone? He already felt the most acute and abject despair he’d ever felt in his life, abandoning his friends forever. If memories of his life before, of his family, began to invade him without mercy, he didn’t know how he could possibly take it.