James Dashner: The Blade of Shattered Hope

Sato looked at the wooden door they’d been guarding. “A Rager ought to-”

Heavy thumps from Mothball’s Shurric cut him off, like invisible lightning and soundless thunder-felt, more than heard. On her third shot, the door exploded with a spray of splinters, flying away from them several feet before falling into some kind of abyss. Sato waited and watched, but he never heard the wooden shards hit anything below.

He exchanged a puzzled look with Mothball then warily crept toward the gaping doorway-he didn’t want a sudden uptick in the never-ending quake’s strength to send him over the edge-his Shurric armed and ready. He reached the threshold of the door and saw that the other side had no floor, only a sheer drop-off with no bottom in sight as far as he could tell. He slowly leaned his head out to get a better look.

They’d reached a vast, round chamber, at least one hundred feet in diameter, that tunneled toward the depths below, narrowing into a hole of blackness far, far down. Along the walls of the chamber were countless rectangular compartments, alcoves set deeper into the stone and open-faced. Inside those compartments were filthy mattresses with thin, ratty blankets. And on top of those nasty beds lay the most terrified-looking children Sato had ever seen.

“Oh, no.”

Rutger hadn’t spoken in awhile, and Sofia realized she’d kind of fallen into a daze, worried about Tick and what it meant that his nanolocator had died. And why Master George seemed to think that was okay, or at least expected.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

Rutger turned away from the busy computer screens, scratching his nose as he stared at the floor. “It’s a big one. A really big one.”

“What is?” Sofia insisted, almost reaching out and shaking his shoulders.

Rutger looked at her, the usual sparkle in his eyes gone. “A massive tidal wave. Bigger than anything I’ve ever heard of. It’s completely destroyed several monitoring stations. And I know enough to see it’s gonna hit us dead on!”

Sofia choked on several attempts to ask the obvious questions, but finally managed to speak. “When? How long?”

“Thirty minutes.”

7:32

7:31

7:30

7:29

Tick had given up on the closed-eyes thinking bit. It wasn’t working. Not at all. The lines of the riddle didn’t make any sense whatsoever. None.

Something told him there was a visual aspect to it. Something in the first and last line appeared to be instructional, not part of the riddle itself. He forced himself to pretend he didn’t have it memorized and read it from beginning to end once again.

Look at the following most carefully, as every line counts:

Be gone in times of death’s long passing.

Henry Atwood sliced his neck.

Hath reeds knocked against thee?

If our fathers knew, then winds, they blew.

The sixth of candles burned my eyes.

Horrors even among us.

Leigh tries to eat a stone.

The canine or the cat, it spat.

Pay attention to the ghoul that weeps.

Your number’s up, and it is missing. Wary the word second.

Shout out your answer.

5:47

5:46

5:45

5:44

His mind continued churning, pressing, scrambling, processing. There was definitely something visual about the riddle.

Look carefully.

Every line counts.

Your number’s up. It is missing. The word second.

Look. Line. Counts. Number. Missing. Second.

His thoughts honed in on those six words. Somehow he knew they meant everything.

There were a lot of things Sato didn’t understand as he stood on that dangerous ledge, staring at the curved walls of cubbyholes filled with children. He had questions aplenty. Like why they were kept in such an odd location, why there weren’t any ladders, how the children were used in the first place, where they came from. Plenty of things to wonder and ponder and feel disgust over.

But with the whole Factory shaking and ready to collapse at any second, there was only one thing that mattered: getting the nanolocator patches on every kid in sight.

“Divvy them up,” he told Mothball, holding out his hand. “We don’t have much time.”

“Got no ladders or steps,” she replied as she put a huge handful of the patches into his hand. “Got no rope. Whatcha ruddy thinkin’ we’ll do, fly around like birdies to save ’em?”

Sato slipped the square pieces of paper into his pocket and gave her a glare so hard that she took a full step backward. He was instantly filled with shame, but he said what he felt anyway. “Yes, Mothball. We’ll fly if that’s what we have to do.”

Without waiting for a response, he turned until his back was to the abyss behind him, his toes balanced on the former threshold of the door. He crouched down, then let himself slip over the edge.

Sato put his hands out, letting the pads of his fingers and palms scrape along the surface of the stone wall as he fell. He focused his concentration so he would be ready for the first opportunity to grab onto something. Fighting off the terrifying panic, he felt as if each nanosecond seemed to beat out a long rhythm.

Bumps and cracks and knobs of rock tore at his skin, but his attempts to grip them proved worthless. The dark surface of the wall suddenly lightened, and he found himself staring into one of the rectangle cubbyholes at a small boy curled up into a ball on his ragged mattress, shaking from the earthquake or bodily ills, or both.

Sato threw his arms forward, hitting the lower floor of the compartment with a terrible bite of pain. His downward movement slammed to a momentary stop, but then he was slipping again, desperately grasping with his fingers for anything to hold onto. A curl of loose blanket, a moist wrinkle of mattress-gone as soon as he touched them. He was just about to fall completely away when his right foot landed on a jutting outcrop of rock; a jolt shivered through every nerve.

Crying out from the pain and shock of his sudden stop, he was still able to take advantage of the moment and adjust his grip on the lower flat edge of stone with his arms. Breathing heavily, Sato couldn’t help but pause to make sure it was really true-that he’d really stopped himself from plummeting to his death far below. Hanging there, he looked up to see Mothball looking down on him from twenty feet above.

“A might risky that was,” she called out, though a huge smile draped her homely face. Before he could respond, she reared back and took a giant leap to the side, sliding down the stone face as he had done until she caught the next compartment over-with a lot more grace and fewer bruises and scratches, no doubt.

“You think we can do this?” Sato asked, climbing up into the inset hole. The chamber still shook around him, but he’d almost gotten used to it, his body adapting to its movements.

“Like ya said,” Mothball responded. “We’ll ruddy fly if we have to.”

Sato scooted close to the boy sitting there, his arms wrapped around his knees, his eyes filled with a hope that almost broke Sato’s heart. The boy wore a dirty shirt and shorts, his hair messed and greasy.

“You okay?” Sato asked. “We’re here to take you away. Save you.”

The boy didn’t answer, but the slightest hint of a smile graced his face.

“This is gonna surprise you, but in a few seconds you’ll be far away from here.” Sato took one of the nanolocator patches out of his pocket and slapped it on the boy’s bare leg.

An instant later, the kid disappeared.

1:45

1:44

1:43

1:42

Tick couldn’t help but stare at the dwindling time as it ticked toward the annihilation of the entire universe. His mind wanted him to waste his brain power wondering how all of time and eternity could be dependent on him solving a stupid riddle. He pushed the question away again and again. Pushed away thoughts of what Jane and the Haunce were doing and whether his efforts would matter anyway.