Newt chased after Keisha, calling for her to stop. She came to a stop in front of a home that looked in much better shape than its neighbors. There were even lights shining from within, the cough of a generator disrupting the still air of the coming night.

Newt reached Keisha and, gasping for breath, had to put Dante down for a second.

"What did you see on the phone?" he managed to ask.

She looked at him. 'It just said, WICKED is here."

"WICKED?"

It was so unexpected and his chest hurt so much from sprinting that he felt nothing when he heard the word. "What the hell? Why would they be here?"

"We’re about to find out." She picked up Dante and moved toward the front door, which was wide open.

Newt grabbed her arm. "What? No. We… Let’s just think for a second."

"They have my daughter, Newt. And my brother. There’s nothing to think about. If they had Evelyn, you wouldn't hesitate! Where is she by the way? You left her and chased after me?"

"You left your shucken kid behind Keisha!" Newt growled at her.

She glared down at his fingers, gripped tightly around her wrist. He let go; his hand flopped to the side as if it had lost its bones.

"What’s there to lose? Though, maybe you should leave, though. Seriously. You kinda have a past with them...and Evelyn needs you."

Newt shook his head, trying to clear the cobwebs. "I was just a control subject. They shouldn’t care about me anymore. I'm buggen' dying. Why would it matter? Why are they here?"

Keisha sighed. "That’s a lot of questions. I’m going in."

"So am I." When she made to push back, he stopped her. "I’ve got nothing to lose, either. The only good thing in my shucked miserable life is probably already dead. Because I chased after you, because you left your shucken kid! So. I'm coming in to finish what I bloody started because my Evey can't."

"Hard to argue with that one."

____________________________

Evelyn watched in her hazy clouded vision as Keisha, the person she came to view as a sister sprint away down the dark shadows. Just as she turned her spinning and pounding head, she heard Newt yell for her and he took off.

She froze in fear and shock. She watched as Newt, his arms full with Dante, sprinted after her, yelling for her.

"He left." She whispered.

His tall frame was swallowed up by the shadows, she heard one last faint yell from Newt for Keisha to stop but then it was quiet.

"He left." She whispered again. "He left me. Again."

A roar of white noise filled her ears, kept to the beat of her thumping heart; her pulse took on a life of its own, thumping almost unnaturally in her temples, in her neck, in her wrists, in her chest. She could hear it. She swore she could hear it.

The world tilted right before Evelyn's s eyes, but it was only focused on where Newt's body was swallowed by the night. Her last grip on reality just left her behind like the burden she was.

Then her vision clouded, a white fog pouring into her eyes, and the storm of noise returned. The buzzing. The roar. The thump, thump, thump of her impossible pulse. She screamed, although it seemed to be within a long tunnel, forever echoing.

The emotional pain of Newt leaving her, again. The physical pain of the Flare as it ate away her mind and the Swipe, in addition to the freezing frost bite that was now covering most of her one side. Evelyn screamed in pain. It ripped from her throat, making it raw.

"Evelyn?" A deep voice rumbled beside her.

She ignored it. All she wanted was her Newt back. Keisha took him. She wanted him back. She leapt to her feet, feeling a strength in her legs that wasn’t there seconds before.
Ignoring everything and everyone around her she staggered down the street, seething in a cloud of rage.

__________________________

Keisha marched across the lawn toward the open door, which stood above three wooden steps and a rickety porch. Newt fell into line right next to her. Up the steps, which creaked with every footfall. She didn’t pause at the threshold, walked right in, showing a bravery that reminded Newt of some of the things he’d seen in the Maze. Although terrified out of his wits, he followed her.

I'm sorry Evelyn. I'm so sorry!

They stepped into a wide living room, the kitchen behind it. Two lamps warmly lit the air on either side of a couch that had seen better days, lumpy, torn, collapsed in the middle. In that sunken part sat a man and a pre-teen girl. Behind them, dressed in black and shiny armor similar to the people who’d taken them to the Crank Palace, stood two representatives of WICKED, that fine establishment that had stolen Newt from his parents and treated him like crap ever since.
And who locked Evelyn away in a stone tower when she was only 4. To alleviate any doubt, they wore WICKED insignia on their chests.

"Mom!" the little girl cried, leaping from the couch.

"Jackie," Keisha said almost under her breath; she then rushed forward to meet the girl halfway, pulling her daughter into her arms. The brother then joined them, all four family members squeezing each other in one giant hug. The two guards did nothing to stop the reunion, and they appeared to be staring at Newt through their protective visors.

His heart sank. They were taking him back, weren’t they? Of course they were. But why all the fuss over Keisha and her family? They could’ve taken him at any point. He didn’t know what to say so he only looked at the floor, ashamed that he was thinking of himself when this sweet reunion had just happened right in front of his eyes. And then guilt hit him like a Griever; he left Evelyn. He broke another promise. He left her behind. His chest felt tight and heavy.

After a minute or so, Keisha pulled back a little from her family and looked up at the strangers in their strange gear.

"Why are you in my grandma’s house?" she asked them. "What were you planning to do with my daughter and my brother?"

For the first time, one of the unwanted visitors spoke.

"His friends are up to no good, that’s why," he said in that filtered, slightly mechanical voice.

The other one pointed at Newt. "We’re here for a little collateral." A woman, her voice as hard as the walls of the Maze. "And because the boss said so...where he goes...She will follow. And if we have you." She pointed to Newt again. "The boss gets back what was taken."

"No. Evey is too past gone to be helpful. Why does he want her back?" Newt somehow managed to choke out. He shook his head. He looked up sharply, "Wait... What’s going on with my friends?"

The woman answered. "You know very well what they’ve been up to. And we might’ve looked the other way until they started messing with the Right Arm. That's a no-no, Newt. Chancellor Paige has had enough, especially when they pulled the trick with getting their implants taken out. Good thing you still have yours, right?"

The WICKED woman paused and her shiny helmeted head turned to look at Keisha.

"Also...you have a plan set up to meet with an outpost, don't you. You and some crank who calls himself a Mafia king. You've been in cahoots with each other."

"What? Keisha, what's she bloody talking about?" Newt's voice was shaking. He was trying to keep his frustration and anger and fear shoved down.

Newt didn’t need the virus to make the rage boil in his veins. "Why do you people always talk like that? What is so wrong with you that it makes you enjoy this stuff?"

"Enjoy?" the woman replied, throwing all the disgust she could into the single word. "You think we like wasting the precious little time we have left in this world dealing with the Munies? Munies who are too selfish to make a few sacrifices to save the whole damn human race?"

It was Newt’s turn to repeat her words. "A few sacrifices? Easy for you to say."

He didn’t know how he said the words so calmly- he wanted to scream them...he lost the battle.

"You killed Evelyn's parents and kicked her away in a stone tower since she was 4! You kidnapped a bloody child!" He screamed, ha took a step forward, the white hot anger started to swirl around inside his mind. "And you wanna know how we found her? After you claimed you were helping?"

The two WICKED employees took a step back, one of them had a hand hovering over a slick black gun. He almost wished he would use it on him. His anger erupted again. He spat the anger out at the workers.

"I found her chained to a wall, arms spread wide out, her knees bruised and bloodied, her ankles chained, the skin around the shackles raw. You hadn't fed her in a month! She hardly slept, you kept her barley alive so you could pump her full of serums and poison!"

"What the hell?" Keisha whispered.

"Yeah. All in the buggen' name of science. A few sacrifices my bloody ass!"

"Just sit down nice and easy. We're going to record a message for your frie-"

A sharp hollering sound cut her off, coming from the front yard, a mocking, yoo-hoo type of catcall. It was followed by another, and then another, this time from the backyard, evident through a broken window in the kitchen. Whoever it was kept it up, shouting and whistling and screaming out things that made no sense, just noise, all of it. Until there was one voice that he recognized. And it made his blood drain from his face.

"I'm a witch! Witch witch witch! A murderous little witch!" She sang it in a loud shriek, it was wild and laced with manic laughter.

Evelyn had pushed past the Gone.

"You gotta be kidding me," the female WICKED guard said. "Are those your Crank friends out there? The group who calls them a Mafia Gang? The ones who came with you from the Palace?"

"I have no idea," Newt said, honestly. He hoped it was Goose and the others, but who knew?

"I think that one is Subject X." The woman with the robot voice said.

"She follows where he goes."

Newt was now visibly shaking. He knew it was Evelyn, she had whispered that little sing song before. Now she was screaming it. His hand twitched, he wanted to turn and dive out the window for her. He needed to bring her back. He had promised to he wouldn't let her get to past the Gone. He had to keep that promise.

A booming crash like the end of the world shattered his line of thoughts; he yelled and spun around to see the source of it. A truck, a big beast of a thing with a grill on the front end, had busted through the windows at the front of the house, broken glass and chunks of wood flying in all directions. Even as Newt looked, even as he gaped at the explosive intrusion, a bed plummeted from the ruined ceiling in a rain of plaster, bounced off the top of the truck’s cabin, and slid off to the side.

The driver’s side door opened and another black-clad WICKED soldier leaned out, most of his body still in the cabin.

"Get in!" he yelled. "There’s a whole horde of Cranks out here and more coming!"

Something hit Newt in the middle of his back, sharp and strong. He fell to his knees, looked up at a black visor that reflected a distorted view of his face.

"You have one chance of doing this without being killed," the female guard said. "All of you, in the back seat of the truck, now. Now!"

Her companion had run to the passenger side of the vehicle and opened the back door, shooing them toward it like they were his children.

"Just do it," Keisha said, seeming to anticipate Newt going off the wall again.

"But... Evelyn's out there!" He protested.

"Just get in the damn truck." She was already ushering her brother and daughter toward the open door. "Sounds like there’s a lot more out there than Goose and his gang, anyway. Come on."

Newt couldn’t feel his hands or feet, felt numb all over. The guard took care of things for him. She grabbed him by the arm and lifted him with surprising strength, then dragged him to follow Keisha and the others to the truck.

Once they were all crammed into the backseat, the soldier slammed the door. She and the other guard quickly got into the front of the cabin. Even before their door was closed, the driver had revved the engine, trying to reverse the vehicle back through all the destruction and debris and into the front yard. The tires spun and all kinds of things crunched, and Newt got a queasy look at faces and arms and hair and wild eyes out in the yard.

He tried to find Evelyn. He knew he had heard her. But Newt couldn't see her. Or Goose or Ruffio or Rex or Spider or Jonsey or Hatter.

What in the world just happened? Newt thought to himself. Couldn’t just one thing go right in my life?

_____________________________

Evelyn had somehow found the house. She had a gut feeling this was Keisha's grandma's house. The lights were on in the front room. She could make out human shaped shadows. She was hanging on by a thread. It was thin, but she still had a small grip of reality. The tiny sliver of her brain latched onto the wild idea of meeting Jackie. Evelyn needed to see if Jackie was just like her mama.

Goose and Ruffio were right beside her. They hadn't left her side, but they hadn't tried to stop her. She didn't notice Rex, Jonsey, Spider and Hatter and the rest slip away into the shadows. Evelyn was standing on the front lawn. Slightly tilted, trying to keep her infected arm and side protected a little. She was shacking, the coughing was almost constant now. The wild waves of feverish heat and freezing frost bite was making her shiver shack, her teeth chatter and sweat.

The crank in her head was cackling again. Encouraging her to go and get her Newt back. Keisha took him.

"No! She didn't. He left on his own." She muttered back to herself.

Your right. It wasn't Keisha. He left you on his own. Your a murderous little witch. He left you!

"No! He had Dante... trying to get him to his sister." She argued with herself.

They made Newt leave you. He left you behind. Again. He broke a promise. Again. He promised to end it before this. Your past the Gone. And he's not here to end it.

"No!" She screamed. "No! No! No! No!"

All alone. My murderous little witch.

"I'm a Murderous little Witch! Witch witch witch. I'm a Murderous little witch!"

Yes! Yes you are. And it's beautiful.go make them pay! Punish them all!

Evelyn smiled. She turned her head and with her eyes frosted over, she saw Goose and Ruffio beside her.

"We're the distraction, Kitten. We'll get them back."

"...what?" She forced the small sliver of sanity to clear the fog. Her eyes melted slightly.

"Kitten...WICKED has them in there!"

"WICKED?" The word came out as a whispered strangled scream.

"Yeah Kitten..." Goose nodded, the anger in his eyes was evident.

"We'll get them back, Princess. The others went for backup."

As he said it there was a wild hollering sound, coming from the back yard, a mocking, yoo-hoo type of catcall. It was followed by another, and then another, this time from behind her. Whoever it was kept it up, shouting and whistling and screaming out things that made no sense, just noise, all of it.

"Back up is here." Goose growled, he was a wild smile twisting his dark featured face. His eyes sparkled psychotically.

Evelyn grinned and picked up a rock from the ground. With a wild scream she threw the rock through the broken window.

There was a loud roar of an engine behind her. She twisted around in time for Ruffio to slam into her and tackle her to the ground. The huge black armoured trucks sped past them and slammed into the side of the house.

Evelyn scrambled to her feet. It was now that the house was starting to crumble did she see Newt in the grasp of a WICKED worker. All Evelyn saw was red. All she felt was rage.

She wanted to end them.