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.

He opened the book in his lap, casually but with care, and flipped through its many pages, every last one of them filled top to bottom with the scrawling penmanship of a child. The slant of the words, the urgency of the ink—pressed and dark with increasingly thicker strokes—the size of the letters . . . Each passing page visually represented what the actual content revealed in heartbreaking starkness—his best friend descending into utter, complete, savage madness. The journal ended with about thirty empty pages. The last one to contain writing had only one word, its letters filling the entire space, scrawled with violence: PLEASE.

Man, Newt, Thomas thought. Wasn’t it bad enough? Wasn’t the end the peak of our awfulness? Why in the hell did you have to let this book exist, let it get into the hands of Ava Paige? Why?

But even as those harsh considerations stomped across his mind, Thomas knew they were empty of meaning. He loved this journal. This book. These words of his friend’s. Any pain they brought back only served to frame the bigger picture—the canvas upon which a piece of Newt’s life had been painted, for them to have forever. For their kids to have. For posterity. A museum piece of memories, the good and the bad.

Thomas thumbed through the pages of the journal and chose one at random, though he cheated and erred toward the front, when Newt’s symptoms had only begun to blossom. No one knew exactly when he’d started writing because there were no dates and not a lot of references to specific events. But the passage that Thomas read now had to be the day they’d left their friend behind, in the Berg, while they stole their way into the city of Denver.

Thomas breathed in each word, savored it, pondered it:

I feel like a dick saying this, but I gotta get out of here. Can’t take it anymore. I love these people. I love them more than I could’ve possibly ever loved anyone. And I obviously say that because I can’t remember my mum and dad. But I imagine it would be like this. Family. That’s what they are. Thomas. Minho. Everyone. But I can’t be with them one more day. It’s killing me, and that ain’t some bloody joke. I’m done. For them, I’m done. Gone. And that ain’t a joke, either. I guess these words just come naturally. Killing. Gone. Gotta put this diary down, now. I have another note to write.

Thomas closed the book and placed it back on the shelf above his head. Then he lay down on his side, legs curled up to his body, head on forearm. And he stared at the wet fields of ocean that stretched to every limit of thought and sight. Beneath that rough, wavy, sketched-icing surface, he knew that billions of creatures lived, oblivious to things like Cranks and deserts and mazes. They swam and they ate, their world probably hurt by the sun flares that had ravaged the lands above, but just as likely healing all the faster. Someday, surely, the order of things in the natural world would do just fine.

But what about us? he thought. What about the humans?

And then, despite his eyes being wide open, staring at the fathomless reach of the ocean, all he could see were images of people. Newt. Teresa. Alby. Chuck. So many lives, lost.

Man, you’re depressing, he chided himself. Somehow—for today, at least—he had to stop thinking about all this crap. He got up, grabbed Newt’s journal, and headed down the path that wound its way along the cliff and through the sandy grasses, finally leading to the new Glade. It wasn’t much as of yet, but someday it might be. Give the humans a chance, right?

“Hey!” someone shouted from up ahead. Frypan. “I figured out a new way to cook these damn fish!”

Thomas could already smell it.

PART ONE

73 Years Later

It’s a funny thing, losing what you love. When able, I think often about loss. If I could go back in time, to my earliest youth, and some godly, magical being had shown me the future and given me a choice, what would I have chosen? If this god had revealed to me the two major losses of my life, and allowed me to prevent only one, which would I have selected?

Newt, this heavenly creature might have said. Your mind, or your friends?

I now know my answer:

What’s the difference?

—The Book of Newt

CHAPTER ONE

Trinity of Terror

In a place called Alaska, Alexandra Romanov stood on the balcony of her home and gazed upon the city, shrouded in darkness, sprinkled with the bright yellow winks of gas flames in windows and on street corners. Not a cloud blotted the stars in the sky, which shone down with perfect clarity, each one an almost perfect spear tip of light. The clean air hugged her like invisible fog, warm and moist, dampening her hair, her clothes, her skin. She breathed in, deeply, relishing this bird’s-eye view of the quiet world below.

Her world. Alaska. There were others out there, other . . . worlds. The Remnant Nation, somewhere in the plains of Nebraska. There were the mad doctors down in California, doing things no sane people should. But they were far as things go and went. Alaska was hers.

Never mind that she shared it with two others. Nicholas. Mikhail. Nicholas and Mikhail. But she felt the ownership, felt the power, as if it were all her own. And someday, perhaps, it would be. Until that day, she’d refine her enhancements of the Evolution, perhaps sabotage the others bit by bit, while still letting the weight of their terrible purpose rest on them from time to time. Fight terror with terror. End tragedy with tragedy.

Didn’t they say that all tragic things occurred in groups of three? Deaths, earthquakes, tornadoes. She’d only known one set of triplets in her life, but those kids had been hell on tiny feet, their piercing cries during the night of the Evolution still a memory that rattled her. She had not been the one to put an abrupt end to those cries, but it would be the greatest of untruths to say she hadn’t been minutes away from finishing them off, herself. And, oh, what immense relief she breathed in at the sweet silence that followed.

Bad things come in threes. That was a philosophy as old as time. And they were three, the Godhead—Evolved; thoughts faster than a lifetime of words spoken at once; machine-like control of the senses, the physiology, the chemicals, the endorphins, all of it; the mental capacity of a universe to suck in all light and knowledge. They had Evolved, of that there could be no doubt. But she—yes, she—was beyond them, beyond the both of them combined. This, Alexandra knew. But for now, they were three.

Her mind flashed, memories upon memories, all in an instant. The Flare and its many variants, building minds to fix the unfixable. Maybe it had all served a purpose, millennia of terrifying trinities, preparing the human race for what had arisen, what had come into being to eradicate terror itself, by any means necessary.

The Godhead.

Hell, it worked for her.

“Goddess Romanov?”

Dammit. She’d hoped for more time, more time-wasting. She turned away from the beauties of her city and faced the man who’d spoken her name. A tall, gangly fellow, he always reminded her of a walking tree branch, the fact that his joints didn’t crack and pop and splinter with every step a small shock to her subconscious.

“What’s going on, Flint?” The man’s name wasn’t Flint, but she called him that for the sole reason that she wanted to. He seemed . . . lessened by it, and that was okay. Ideal, even.

“There’s a kink in the rotation of pilgrims.” His voice was like the spill of raw ore from a wheelbarrow. “I have the exact numbers here, but by morning we’ll be off by at least eight percent in every part of the city. Everything will be thrown off.”

Alexandra studied him, used the training she’d received in the Flaring discipline. Every tick of his muscles, every shift of his eyes, every movement, no matter how subtle, fed into the hyper-function of her thought processes. He was avoiding what he really came here to say.

“Spit it out, Flint. What the hell happened?”

He drooped a slow blink, let out a sigh of resignation, realizing how futile it was to hide his emotions behind what was—to her—a see-through mask. “Seven pilgrims were killed at the dye pools. It was done with . . . violence.”

“Violence?”

“Immense violence.” He’d been slowly raising his clipboard and charts, readying to share data. But now he dropped it to his side. “Four men. Two women. One child. A boy. They were—”

“Hollowed,” she said. “They were hollowed, weren’t they?”

His face had paled a bit. “Yes, Goddess. Done quite professionally, I might add. Cleaned out. The, uh, refuse was nowhere to be found. Only the ribs remained.”

“Damn that man,” she whispered, fury threatening to overcome her Flare sensibilities. She counted through the digits, that precise mathematical sequence she’d learned as an acolyte that brought peace, calmness, the brain having no choice but to release the appropriate chemicals. “Do you know where he is?”

Flint knew exactly who she was talking about—she read his eyes as easily as the charts and tables he carried with him at all times. As evident as sunlight, she knew he envisioned those poor victims in the dye pools, how they’d been sliced from aft to stern, their every essence of life removed with violent but precise efficiency. The blood, the stench, the horror of such a thing . . . only a certain type could do it and remain hinged. And the both of them standing there had already arrived at the correct conclusion.

“Uh, I believe that he’s gone to the . . .” Flint cleared his throat, clearly uncomfortable sharing such personal information from one member of the Godhead to another.

Alexandra stepped close to him, controlled herself until she stood rigid as a corpse. Then she locked her eyes with his, utilizing the optic hypnosis techniques of her discipline. “Tell me where he is.” The proper inflection in her voice sealed the deal.

Flint nodded in submission, then spoke, almost trance-like.

“Mikhail has gone to the Glade.”

Alexandra tried to suppress her shock, but for the first time in an age, her training in the ways of the Flare completely abandoned her. A blinding flash of anger exploded within her mind, erasing the world around her for the briefest of moments. Why? Why did Mikhail do this now? She wanted to scream but snatched it back—literally snapping an arm out as if her voice were a physical thing. Her rage subsided; her vision returned. Flint had a red gash across his cheek, the skin sliced by her very own fingers, her painted nails. A petulant act; she needed better control.

She looked at the poor man, those eyes soaked with fear. “Bandage that, quickly. If Mikhail’s in the Glade, we need to hurry.”

Clank.

Clank.

Clank.

Isaac had been dreaming that sound for quite a while, now. Constant, incessant, annoying-as-hell CLANKs that found all kinds of ways to audibly haunt his nightmares. First it was a bird, a black, furry-looking thing, perched atop the wooden fence that surrounded Old Man Frypan’s acre on the northern side of the island. The creature’s sharp beak hinged open and closed, open and closed, letting out that CLANK of a noise each time, like the bark of a mechanical dog.

Then it segued into a giant machine, a thing Isaac had been told about in the campfire stories of the old world, a thing he imagined now, as inaccurate as it may be. It was called a bulldozer, and for some inexplicable reason it was fruitlessly trying to plow over a mountain of metal trees, glistening silver and immovable. Clank, clank, clank it went, as the bulldozer rammed its way forward relentlessly, its giant scoop dinged and dented.

Then there was a man, standing in front of him, nothing but a dark sky as the backdrop, full of stars. The man had no hair and no eyes. He had half a nose. He had one ear. And although it was hard to tell for sure in the bare light, the man’s skin glistened in rivulets that had to be blood, seeping from a dozen wounds. That is one ugly son of a bitch, Isaac thought.

The man tried to speak, but the only thing escaping his lips was that sound again.

Clank.

Clank.

Clank.

The apparition’s throat bulged with each metallic utterance, as if he’d swallowed a plum and just wanted to cough it out. Isaac remembered more nightmares than he could count on every last finger and toe on the island, but this one chilled him to the core. He awoke with a startled yelp that wasn’t far off from the CLANKs that had seeped into his dreams.

Worse, the sound still clanged around him.

Awareness coming back in leaps, he sheepishly got out of bed and zombied his way over to the window, peaking past the curtains sewn by his dad at least a decade ago. It was a gloomy day, the clouds a solid, soupy mass in the sky, the light gray and sad. No rain had fallen, but mist crept along the grass of the yard, gathered in big clumps along the fence, wafted through the air in random groups of thinly stretched cotton. And out beyond the houses on the east side of the island, down near the beach, someone was beating the hell out of hot iron with a very large hammer.

The Forge.

Isaac loved the Forge. It had been set by the beach so that the constant, stiff breeze could keep the fires stoked and hot. He didn’t quite understand how they dug crap out of the craggy mountains and then turned it into red molten rock, and he didn’t really care. It was that point in the process—and everything after—that consumed him. He loved the heat and the steam, the deep, glowing reds and the blinding, white-hot brilliance of the sparks. He loved the smell of ozone and burning cinders, the smoke, the constant clanging of metal against metal.

Yep. He wanted to be a blacksmith, and had been training under Captain Sparks for almost a month, now. No one else joined him in calling Rodrigo that ridiculous name yet, but Isaac had set a goal for the moniker to stick by winter. It was next-level genius and no one could convince him otherwise.

Today was Isaac’s day off. He had plans. Miyoko, Dominic, Trish, Sadina, a few others—they’d been planning for two weeks to row the kayaks out to Stone Point and swim through the caves and jump off the cliffs. Chances were Dominic would strip naked and belly flop from the edge they called the Dead Man’s Brow, and hilarity would ensue. Isaac couldn’t miss out on such festivities and still feel like a respectable knucklehead. After all, Stone Point had been forbidden after the third drowning in five years, and he himself had never actually been that far. Which just made it all the more appealing. Kind of.

But none of these thoughts lessened his itch. Hearing the clank-clank-clanks, regular and rhythmic, like the beating of an iron heart, drew him as if a rope had been tied around his waist. He loved to watch Captain Sparks in action, and rowing, swimming, jumping for hours suddenly seemed like a lot of work.

Like an old sailor succumbing to the lustful call of the sirens—a story his grandpa had told him over the protestations of everyone else around the fire at the time—Isaac quickly got dressed and headed out the door of his yurt. Headed toward the flames and the molten metal.

His yurt. He still hadn’t gotten used to that. He had his own yurt, the one-room dwelling in which most people of the island lived—except the ones crazy enough to have more than a couple of kids. Isaac had built and moved into his yurt just three months ago and still basked in the sense of accomplishment.

The day had suddenly popped open with a burst of sunshine, clearing the clouds and mist, the temperature perfect. People milled about everywhere he looked—on their way to the farms, the shops, the mill, the warehouse, the fishery—most of them too busy to take note of a young man on his day off, half-running toward the beach. But Mr. Jerry gave a wave, his giant eyebrows like combed wool, and a few yurts down Ms. Ariana gave a wink—harmless from a woman who was one of the first people born on the island, only a year after the Flat Trans. Her silvery hair and wrinkled eyes always made Isaac think of the grandma in the tale of Red Riding Hood.

“What’s the rush, boy?” she called out, standing at the edge of her little lawn. She held in her hands the Daily Memo that his friend Sadina passed out every morning. “There a fire I don’t know about?”

“Got some work to do at the Forge,” Isaac responded, slowing down enough to give her a little smart-ass curtsy and a flourishing wave of the arm. “What’re you up to today? Got another date with Old Man Frypan?”

She let out a hoot and a holler. “Don’t he wish! That cheap bastard wouldn’t know how to court a melon.”

Isaac exaggerated a laugh and then revved up to a full jog, offering a last farewell wave.

“Run, boy!” she yelled. “Run like the wind!”

He loved that old woman.

The Orphan stood straight and rigid behind the parapet of the fortress wall, his rifle resting upon his shoulder, its barrel aimed at the cloudy sky. As he had for the last eleven years, he stared at the endless fields that served as a waterless moat around his homeland. It was a dead land, all life and vegetation killed with poison so that nothing might obstruct the view of the Orphans. The waste lay dull and gray, like a cemetery without tombstones, as vast as the ocean.

The Orphan had no name.

Thirty feet away, to the north, stood another statue with no name, her shoulders square, her head shaved, her body sheathed in an artillery suit. A literal human missile. To the south, thirty feet away, there was another Orphan. This one didn’t stand, however. This one sat upon a turret of metal, a machine of such firepower that it could destroy the entire wall upon which it rested. That Orphan had no name.

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