Each band of leather was attached to a long wooden pole, themselves banded in iron every few inches along its length to make them strong, unbreakable. At the opposite ends of those iron-bound spears of wood, which poked away from him in all directions like the spikes of an injured porcupine, stood a Bearer of Grief, the Orphan’s masters. These Grief Bearers were so named from the Grievers of old, the menacing monstrosities of machine and flesh that had terrorized the people of the Maze. It was symbolic . . . or some such absurdity. The only thing the Orphan knew for certain was that he’d been chosen to wander the wilderness at least three years ahead of schedule, and that he’d be the one bearing all the grief known to this pocket of the world for the foreseeable future. His life was about to become pain-defined, pain-manifested in all its many, dastardly, excruciating, demonic forms. Or maybe that was a bit dramatic.

Wandering. Pain. Hunger. Forty days and forty nights. That was expected of him, though he had different plans in mind.

Was he ready? Was he scared? Did he fear failure? Minho of old would have answered yes to all of these questions, and now he did, too. Yes. I am Minho, and I am ready, I am scared, and I fear failure. So let’s kick some ass, shall we? I am the Orphan. I am the Orphan with no name, named Minho. That’s who I am. Someday, perhaps, Kit would grow up to be proud of him.

“Wrap him tight, for Flare’s sake,” one of the Grief Bearers said in a harsh, spiteful voice that gave something away about the man’s day so far. He’d been the Bearer of Grief to the Orphan for many a year, and Minho knew his moods and peculiarities, his eccentricities, his proclivities. Griever Glane had been denied his sweet delights the prior evening, spurned by those he didn’t think capable of spurning him. He’d be a grouch of sadistic extremity this day. He was always a grouch, but in the hours ahead, he’d take it to new levels of hateful debauchery.

The Orphan was ready. Scared. He feared. Time to go.

Shadows approached, moving shadows mostly obscured by the heavy blizzard that swelled over their imaginary dome of life. Those shadows were acolytes—priests and priestesses to the Cure, cloaked in the sacred weaves of the rough and scraping vines that purportedly descended from the sanctified vines of the Maze itself. It was a cloth, of sort. That was the nicest way the Orphan could bring himself to describe the long, rough-hewn drapes of material in which they intended to wrap him. Wrap him up head to toe, leaving not a centimeter of his parts exposed to the harsh elements of the plains.