ACT III SCENE LXI
PERSAI

   CASSANDRA LAUGHED in jubilation as the renegade group filtered into the room. She had never felt such a flood of relief running through her veins; it was like some sort of euphoric drug. Teresa bent down over Clark's unconscious—and slightly singed—form to rummage through her coat while Archie freed Cassandra from her bonds.

"Good to see your shuck face again," he greeted mischievously.

"Get me outta these things so I can beat your shuck ass," she replied with a grin.

"Suddenly, I don't feel so guilty about leaving you and the others anymore," Frypan said as he walked over.

When the last restraint was opened, she launched herself at them with tight hugs. "I didn't think I'd see you guys again!" she exclaimed.

"Nah, you're not getting rid of us so easily," Teresa told her as she stood up with Clark's keycard in hand. Cassandra embraced her fiercely, thanking all the stars and pagan gods in the whole wide universe for the girl's existence.

She stepped away before starting, then looked around the group searchingly. "Didn't you get Thomas?" she asked.

Teresa shook her head. "We passed one of the rooms earlier and there were only unconscious guards in there. He probably managed to escape and get away. They told us you guys finally changed your minds so we dropped by to get you out. I knew right away that they were lying; you'd never change your mind unless they'd forced you."

"Damn straight." Cassandra nodded before asking, "Where were you going?"

"There's a weapons depot along the route to the hangar," Sonya said. "We're getting outta this dump."

"We need to get the others first though," Cassandra urged. "They were being brought to the waiting room, it shouldn't be too far from here."

"Yeah, that's if WICKED hasn't sent an army after us," Harriet said from the doorway. "They'd know we've broken out by now."

"Oh, crap," Eve groaned from the corridor outside. "You just had to jinx us, didn't you, Harriet!"

Shouts erupted from further down the hallway, too far for them to make sense of, but the charging of footsteps grew louder with each passing second. Teresa swore underneath her breath before running out to join the others that were toting weapons in their hands. Cassandra quickly grabbed a Launcher from a fallen guard in the room and rushed out to help. There were about a dozen armed soldiers storming towards them from the entrance and Cassandra had to drop to the floor when a grenade came soaring through the air. It cracked against the floor behind her and she whirled around to take aim.

She squeezed the trigger and joined the fray of electrical bombardment. The sizzling blue discharges tore through the air with reckless abandon. Teresa yelled towards Archie, "Take the keycard and open the door on the other end! We need extra weapons right now! Everyone move!"

The boy grabbed the card from her hand and raced to the other end of the hallway. There was a loud beep before the door swished open and Archie waved for the unarmed teens to go through. Frypan had picked up the other Launcher from the room and was throwing electric grenades haphazardly at the guards on the opposite end. He managed to hit one and the man went down with a cry of pain before convulsing violently on the floor.

"Okay, we're clear!" Archie yelled from the doorway.

"Let's go, let's go!" Harriet shouted, her voice sounding harsh above the crackling energy surrounding them.

They backed away down the corridor, slipping through the door before it shut behind them. Teresa repeatedly struck the keypad with the butt of her Launcher before it broke apart. She tore the circuitry out from the wall and said, "That should slow them down for a while."

"Which way do we go now?" Sonya asked as she looked down both corridors of the intersection in front of them.

"This way," Teresa said smoothly, leading them down the path on the left. "We'll grab some more weapons before looking for the others."

They turned down a few more corridors on their way to the weapons depot, twisting through the large labyrinth of the facility complex. Cassandra noticed that not everyone had joined the escape, particularly the ones who had been revealed as non-immunes. The reality of their circumstance sunk heavily in the pit of her stomach and suddenly, she felt guilty for being where she was. But if she stayed, WICKED would kill her and that frightened her too. Teresa halted in front of the group and turned around with a perturbed frown.

"What is it?" Cassandra asked.

"I know this hallway," she murmured, taking a few steps forward to a door on the right. Almost as if in a trance, she reached up with the keycard and pressed it against the pad on the side. The door opened with a soft swish and the girl stepped inside without hesitation.

"Teresa, what are you doing?" Harriet hissed.

Curiously, and with some amount of trepidation, Cassandra walked in after her. She was immediately hit with the frigid temperature of the room, which felt all too familiar, and hugged herself as she passed through the narrow walkway into the room. Teresa was standing next to a bed, its occupant blocked from view by numerous monitoring equipment. Cassandra walked over cautiously and gasped out loud when she finally saw who it was.

"Helenus!" she cried out, dropping onto the bed and taking his icy cold hands. The boy merely looked back at her with a vacant expression before smiling languidly.

"They put him on the Bliss when he gets too rowdy," Teresa explained, her voice thick with emotion as tears pricked her eyes. "Like how Tom looked after you, I was responsible for Helenus. When we first saw each other in the Glade, you couldn't remember me because they didn't want you to remember him."

Cassandra looked at her earnestly. "Is there anything we can do for him?"

Teresa wiped a tear that had tumbled down her cheek and shook her head. "Only time can tell if he'll get better, but he'll never be normal. We managed to increase his lucidity but his episodes still happen too often, too violent."

"We can't leave him here," Cassandra said. "Teresa, we can't leave him with them."

The other girl looked at her with glistening blue eyes and nodded. "There should be some Bliss in that cupboard, grab a box and help me get him on his feet."

Cassandra hurriedly did as she was instructed, hastily opening the cupboard doors and grabbing a bag from its top shelf. She stuffed as many metal cylinders of the drug treatment as she could fit into the bag before slinging it over her shoulder and moving back to them. Teresa had managed to get Helenus to sit upright on the bed. They placed his arms over their shoulders and hauled him up to a stand, then pulled him towards the door. Fortunately, he was able to walk fine on his own albeit with some needed guidance.

"Who the heck is that?" Sonya asked in alarm when they emerged from the room.

"Helenus, Subject C2," Cassandra told them. "He's my partner..."

"Minho isn't going to like that," Frypan commented with a snicker.

"Is he, uh...okay?" Harriet asked with a frown as her sharp eyes scrutinized the boy. "He looks like he's high on drugs."

"He's fine," Teresa said shortly, grabbing the boy's hand. "Let's go."

They ran quickly down the remaining corridors before finally reaching the weapons depot. The room was coated in a fine layer of dust, leaving displaced sections on the wall and shelves. Each member of the Gladers and Group B quickly armed themselves, as if they were preparing for battle.

Cassandra had grabbed an extra Launcher, strapping it over her back and stuffed her pockets with two pistols. Everyone else had done the same, and they looked like a small army as they filtered back out of the storage room, totting their hefty guns. Teresa decided that it wouldn't be safe to give Helenus a weapon, but they had clipped a smoke grenade to his belt just in case. It was doubtful that he would even think to use it in the state that he was in.

"Alright, what's the plan?" Aris asked, turning to Teresa.

"We need to look for Thomas, Minho and Newt," she responded. "They should be somewhere nearby. We can circle down the corridors leading up here and back down to the operation rooms."

"If we can't find them?" Frypan asked.

"Then we kidnap and interrogate whoever we can find," Sonya said with an adamant resolve in her dark eyes.

"Sounds like a plan," Cassandra said with a nod. "Let's get rolling."

The moment she took a step forward, a shrill alarm started to ring overhead and the lights throughout the entire corridor went out. Everyone gasped in shock and fear, their confused voices melding into one giant question: what was happening?

"Shuck," Archie said loudly over the bursts of clamor. "Somebody hold my hand."

"Everyone stay on your guard!" Teresa called, and Cassandra could feel her shuffling about as she brought Helenus to the side out of harm's way.

Then from beneath the ringing alarm that surrounded them on all sides, they heard electricity charging. "Get down!!" Cassandra yelled, throwing herself to the floor. She felt a couple of people land on her hip and arm before there was a sharp pop. An electric blue grenade soared over their heads and crashed onto the ground behind them with an explosive crackle.

Cassandra looked up to find shadowy figures of more than two dozen guards down the hallway from them. Then they disappeared after the fizzling charges dissipated, plunging them back into an inky sea of darkness.

"Did you guys see that?" Eve whispered.

"Yup," Harriet replied.

"We're shucked," Frypan said.

"Everyone get into a line and fire when the lights get back on," Teresa told them with a hushed whisper. "Hurry!"

There was a mad scramble as they blindly aligned themselves into a defensive formation. Cassandra knelt on the ground, feeling two bodies pressed against both her sides and held her Launcher up at the ready. The moment the hallway lit up with the dim red hazard lights, they opened fire with merciless vigor.