Rat Man rolled his eyes and sighed. “First of all, each of you has been warned of the consequences should you try to harm me. And rest assured, you’re all still being watched. Second, I’m sorry for those you’ve lost-but in the end it’ll have been worth it. What concerns me, though, is that it seems that nothing I say is going to wake you people up to the stakes here. We’re talking about the survival of the human race.”

Minho sucked in a breath as if to begin a rant, but he stopped short, closed his mouth.

Thomas knew that no matter how sincere Rat Man sounded, it had to be a trick. Everything was a trick. Yet nothing good could come of their fighting him at this point-with words or with fists. The thing they needed most for the time being was patience.

“Let’s all just slim it,” Thomas spoke evenly. “Let’s hear him out.”

Frypan spoke up just as Rat Man was about to continue. “Why should we trust you people to… What was it called? The Swipe? After everything you’ve done to us, to our friends-you want to remove the Swipe? I don’t think so. I’d rather stay stupid about my past, thank you very kindly.”

“WICKED is good,” Teresa said out of the blue, as if talking to herself.

“What?” Frypan asked. Everyone turned to look at her.

“WICKED is good,” she repeated, much louder, turning in her seat to meet the others’ gazes. “Of all the things I could’ve written on my arm when I first woke up from my coma, I chose those three words. I keep thinking about it, and there has to be a reason for that. I say we just shut up and do what the man says. We can only understand this with our memories back.”

“I agree!” Aris shouted, much louder than seemed necessary.

Thomas was quiet as the room broke into arguments. Mostly between the Gladers, who sided with Frypan, and the members of Group B, who sided with Teresa. There couldn’t possibly be a worse time for a battle of wills.

“Silence!” Rat Man roared, pounding his fist on the lectern. He waited for everyone to quiet down before he continued. “Look, no one’s going to blame you for the mistrust you feel. You’ve been pushed to your physical limits, watched people die, experienced terror in its purest form. But I promise you, when all is said and done, none of you will look back-”

“What if we don’t want to?” Frypan called out. “What if we don’t want our memories back?”

Thomas turned to look at his friend, relieved. It was exactly what he’d been thinking himself.

Rat Man sighed. “Is it because you really have no interest in remembering, or is it because you don’t trust us?”

“Oh, I can’t imagine why we wouldn’t trust you,” Frypan replied.

“Don’t you realize by now that if we wanted to do something to harm you, we’d just do it?” The man looked down at the lectern, then back up again. “If you don’t want to remove the Swipe, don’t do it. You can stand by and watch the others.”

A choice or a bluff? Thomas couldn’t tell by the man’s tone but nonetheless was surprised by his response.

Again the room was silent, and before anyone else could speak, Rat Man had stepped away off the stage and was walking toward the door at the back of the room. When he reached it, he turned to face them again. “You really want to spend the rest of your lives having no memory of your parents? Your family and friends? You really want to lose the chance to hold on to at least the few good memories you may have had before all this began? Fine with me. But you might never have this opportunity again.”

Thomas considered his decision. It was true that he longed to remember his family. He’d thought about it so many times. But he did know WICKED. And he wasn’t going to let himself fall into another trap. He’d fight to the death before letting those people tinker with his brain again. How could he believe any memory they replaced anyway?

And there was something else bothering him-the flash he’d felt when the Rat Man had first announced that WICKED would remove the Swipe. Besides knowing that he couldn’t just accept anything WICKED called his memories, he was scared. If everything they’d been insisting was true was in fact true, he didn’t want to face his past even if he could. He didn’t understand the person they said he was before. And more, he didn’t like him.

He watched as the Rat Man opened the door and left the room. As soon as he was gone, Thomas leaned in close to Minho and Newt so only his friends could hear him. “There’s no way we do this. No way.”

Minho squeezed Thomas’s shoulder. “Amen. Even if I did trust those shanks, why would I want to remember? Look what it did to Ben and Alby.”

Newt nodded. “We need to make a bloody move soon. And when we do, I’m going to knock a few heads to make myself feel better.”

Thomas agreed but knew they had to be careful. “Not too soon, though,” he said. “We can’t screw this up-we need to look for our best chance.” It had been so long since Thomas had felt it, he was surprised when a sense of strength began to trickle through him. He was reunited with his friends and this was the end of the Trials-for good. One way or another, they were done doing what WICKED wanted.

They stood up and, as a group, made their way to the door. But as Thomas put his hand on the knob to pull it open, he stopped. What he was hearing made his heart sink. The rest of the group was still talking, and most of the others had decided to get their memories back.***

Rat Man was waiting outside the auditorium. He led them down several turns of the windowless hallway until they finally reached a large steel door. It was heavily bolted and looked to be sealed against outside air. Their white-clad leader placed a key card next to a square recess in the steel, and after a few clicks, the large slab of metal slid open with a grinding sound that reminded Thomas of the Doors in the Glade.

Then there was another door; once the group had filed into a small vestibule, the Rat Man closed the first door and, with the same card, unlocked the second. On the other side was a big room that looked like nothing special-same tile floors and beige walls as the hallway. Lots of cabinets and counters. And several beds lined the back wall, each with a menacing, foreign-looking contraption of shiny metal and plastic tubes in the shape of a mask hanging over it. Thomas couldn’t imagine letting someone place that thing on his face.

Rat Man gestured toward the beds. “This is how we’re going to remove the Swipe from your brains,” Rat Man announced. “Don’t worry, I know these devices look frightening, but the procedure won’t hurt nearly as much as you might think.”

“Nearly as much?” Frypan repeated. “I don’t like the sound of that. So it does hurt, is what you’re really saying.”

“Of course you’ll experience minor discomfort-it is a surgery,” Rat Man said as he walked over to a large machine to the left of the beds. It had dozens of blinking lights and buttons and screens. “We’ll be removing a small device from the part of your brain devoted to long-term memory. But it’s not as bad as it might sound, I promise.” He started pressing buttons and a buzzing hum filled the room.

“Wait a second,” Teresa said. “Is this going to take away whatever’s in there that lets you control us, too?”

The image of Teresa inside that shed in the Scorch came to Thomas. And of Alby writhing in bed back at the Homestead. Of Gally killing Chuck. They were all under WICKED’s control. For the slightest moment Thomas doubted his decision-could he really allow himself to remain at their mercy? Should he just let them do the operation? But then the doubt vanished-this was about mistrust. He refused to give in.

Teresa continued. “And what about…” She faltered, looked at Thomas.

He knew what she was thinking. Their ability to talk telepathically. Not to mention what came with it-that odd sense of each other when things were working, almost as if they were sharing brains somehow. Thomas suddenly loved the idea of losing that forever. Maybe the emptiness of having Teresa not there would disappear too.