"Good that," Minho replied. "My eyeballs hurt, but I think I'm finally starting to get kind of used to the light."
Thomas opened his own eyes into a squint and looked down at the ground just a couple of feet below his face. Dirt and dust. A few gray-brown rocks. The sheet lay draped completely around him, but it glowed so white it was like some odd piece of futuristic light technology.
"Who you hidin' from?" Minho asked. "Get up, ya shank―I don't see anybody."
Thomas was embarrassed that they thought he was cowering there―he must look like a small child whimpering under his blankets, trying not to be seen. He stood up and very slowly lifted the sheet until he could peek out at their surroundings.
It was a wasteland.
In front of him, a flat pan of dry and lifeless earth stretched as far as he could see. Not a single tree. Not a bush. No hills or valleys. Just an orange-yellow sea of dust and rocks; wavering currents of heated air boiled on the horizon like steam, floating upward, as if any life out there were melting toward the cloudless and pale blue sky.
Thomas turned in a circle, didn't see much change until he faced the opposite direction. A line of jagged and barren mountains rose far in the distance. In front of those mountains, maybe halfway between there and where they now stood, a cluster of buildings sat squatting together like a pile of abandoned boxes. It had to be a town, but it was impossible to tell how big it was from this distance. Hot air shimmered in front of it, blurring everything close to the ground.
The white-hot sun above already lay far to Thomas's left, and seemed to be sinking toward that horizon, which meant that way was west, which meant that the town ahead and the range of black and red rock behind it had to be due north. Where they were supposed to head. His sense of direction surprised him, as if a piece of his past had risen from the ashes.
"How far away do you think those buildings are?" Newt asked. After the echoing, hollow sounds their speaking had made in the long dark tunnel and stairway, his voice was like a dull whisper.
"Could that be a hundred miles?" Thomas asked no one in particular. "That's definitely north. Is that where we have to go?"
Minho shook his head under his sheet-hood. "No way, dude. I mean, we're supposed to go that way, but it's not even close to a hundred miles. Thirty at most. And the mountains might be sixty or seventy."
"Didn't know you could measure distance so well with nothing but your bloody eyeballs," Newt said.
"I'm a Runner, shuck-face. You get a feel for stuff like that in the Maze, even if its scale was a lot smaller."
"The Rat Man wasn't kidding about those sun flares," Thomas said, trying not to let his heart sink too much. "Looks like a nuclear holocaust out here. I wonder if the whole world is like this."
"Let's hope not," Minho responded. "I'd be happy to see one tree right about now. Maybe a creek."
"I'd settle for a patch of grass," Newt said through a sigh.
The more Thomas looked, the closer that town appeared. Thirty miles might even have been too much. He broke his gaze and turned toward the others. "Could this be any more different from what they put us through in the Maze? There, we were trapped inside walls, with everything we need to survive. Now we have nothing holding us in, but no way to survive unless we go where they told us to. Isn't that called irony or something like that?"
"Something like that," Minho agreed. "You're a philosophizing wonder." He nodded back toward the exit from the stairway. "Come on. Let's get those shanks out here and start walking. No time to waste letting the sun suck all the water out of us."
"Maybe we should wait until it goes down," Newt suggested.
"And hang out with those shuck balls of metal? No way."
Thomas agreed that they should get moving. "I think we're okay. Looks like sunset's only a few hours away. We can be tough for a while, take a break, then go as far as possible during the night. I can't stand another minute down there."
Minho nodded firmly.
"Sounds like a plan," Newt said. "For now, let's just make it to that dusty old town and hope it's not full of our Crank buddies."
Thomas's chest hitched at that comment.
Minho walked back to the hole and leaned over it. "Hey, you bunch of sissy, no-good shanks! Grab all the food and get up here!"
Not one Glader complained about the plan.
Thomas watched as each one of them did the same things he'd done when he first exited the stairway. Struggling gasps for breaths, squinty eyes, looks of hopelessness. He bet that each one of them had hoped the Rat Man was lying. That the worst times had been back in the Maze. But he was pretty sure that after the crazy head-eating silver things and then seeing this wasteland, no one would ever have such hopeful thoughts again.
They had to make some adjustments as they readied for the journey―the food and water bags were stuffed more tightly into half of the original packs; then the free bedsheets were used to cover two people as they walked. All in all, it worked surprisingly well―even for Jack and poor Winston―and soon they were marching across the hard, rock-strewn ground. Thomas shared his sheet with Aris, though he didn't know how it had ended up that way. Maybe he was just refusing to admit that he'd wanted to be with the boy, that he might be the only possible connection to figuring out what had happened to Teresa.
Thomas held one end of the sheet up with his left hand and had a pack draped around his right shoulder. Aris was to his right; they'd agreed to trade off the now-much-heavier pack every thirty minutes. Step by dusty step, they made their way toward the town, the heat seeming to suck a full day of their life away every hundred yards.