Miyoko didn’t have the same problem. “What in the hell? What’s going on, here, Isaac? I’ll tell you what’s going on. This freaking boat came here looking for us. They know about Thomas and everyone that came here with him. After all these years, someone somewhere decided they weren’t done with the brave little Gladers that escaped through their magic machine. Kids, grandkids, great-grandkids, doesn’t matter. Thomas is some kind of god to them and they went on a pilgrimage. Or maybe they came to kill us. Or help us. Or tell us something.”

Isaac finally tore his eyes away from those ghostly words, The Maze Cutter. He looked at Miyoko.

“What did you say?”

She gave him a grim smile, then frowned, then tried to smile again. “Nothing. I have no idea what to say.” Her weight shifted from foot to foot.

“Me, neither,” he replied. “But we’ve gotta get on that boat.”

He expected her to say something like, let’s not be hasty. But she surprised him.

“Should we swim out?”

This broke him a little; he started laughing. She joined in. They were losing it.

“I don’t think we’ll need to,” he finally said. “Look. It’s getting really close now.”

The boat had continued drifting at a slow and steady pace, moving toward the cliff and the beaches to the south at roughly the same speed. Isaac and Miyoko had walked along with it, things moving so incrementally that it felt sudden when they realized the thing was only about twenty meters away, as if it had skipped a beat in time. And now they could really see all the details that had been fuzzy before. The bodies.

“There’s . . . eight of them,” Miyoko whispered, almost as if she worried she might wake those lying on the deck. But there wasn’t much chance of that. Each one had a bullet hole in their head, the wounds crusted with dried blood. “What the . . . Who killed them?”

“Whoever blew that horn, I guess.”

The lifeless people were dressed in warm clothing, most of it still sopping wet—the boat must’ve gone through a storm right before it reached the island. There was a mixture of gender, hair lengths, races, sizes. But they all appeared equally dead. Although the deck itself—made of warped, cracked wood—had no bloodstains he could see, that could be explained away by the storm. The murder spree couldn’t have been too recent because the bodies looked . . . spent. Not fresh.

With every one of these passing thoughts, the boat drifted closer. In a matter of minutes, they could probably leap across the gap and onto the boat if they wanted to.

As if she’d read his mind, Miyoko said, “We promised the others we’d just watch and observe. Shouldn’t we go and hide? If someone comes out of the cabin toting a gun, we’re dead unless we jump into the water.”