ACT I SCENE IX
IPHIGENIA

   THE BOY was only a year or so younger than her but he had already managed to outgrow her in height. He sat across from her at the table and ruffled his short dark brown hair. There was a scan of her brain on the table, showing a cluster of the virus in her prefrontal cortex.

"The Swipe doesn't seem compatible with you," he told her. "So we had to make some modifications to sync with your Point Zero."

She leaned her elbow against the thin metal arm of the chair and rested her face on her hand in a bored manner. Her dark-rimmed eyes bore into him with a haunted intensity, hollow and furious. The veins in her eyelids were bruised and purplish from constant rubbing, creating a stark contrast against her pale skin.

Three straight weeks with hardly any sleep would do that to a person. There were scratches along the sides of her forehead and arms from where she had raked her nails across her skin. Her dark hair hung limply like a heavy curtain framing her sunken face.

"I haven't seen you in so long," she spoke, her voice low and raspy. "I thought you'd forgotten all about me."

The boy buried his face in his hands, ignoring her. She stuck her tongue in her cheek before continuing, eyes boring into the top of his head. "I heard screaming last night. And it wasn't me."

He sighed heavily and finally looked up. Her heated glare made him avert his gaze again. He could never look her in the eye. It always consumed him with guilt; the way she looked at them with such fervent hatred.

"If I had to guess," she went on, examining her chipped nails. "It sounded like people were dying..."

His jaw tensed, teeth grinding in silence. She had always been clever, would always be able to deduce their variables and infer their hypotheses. But circumstance forced them to draw the lots they had.

"They were already Gone," he said bitterly. "We didn't have a choice—it was the only thing we could do..."

His voice faltered and her gaze was unsympathetic. She didn't give a single damn about what happened to them, not after the things they had put her through, all in the name of finding a Cure. It was because she was the only one and they had been so certain that she was the key to mapping the virus' pathway in the Killzone. It was the data that she had given them that they were able to come up with a plan. The Trials.

"Boohoo." She leaned forwards and rested her arms on the table instead. "Did you want a sympathetic shoulder to cry on? Someone to rub your back and tell you what a good boy you've been? Thomas, the Golden Boy, our top candidate. Oh, and what have you done now?"

He knew her far too long to give in to her mocking, knew that he probably deserved it anyway. "All of us agreed to this, Cass, you know that," he said softly. "You, me, Teresa, the other kids... even Minho."

"Don't you dare justify what you've done," she hissed venomously at him. "After stealing him from me, after stealing everyone from me."

"Cassandra..." he tried to reason with her. "What other choice do we have? You've seen it first-hand out there. We need this. It's the only way we can save the world."

"Save the world," she scoffed. "There's nothing left to save. Stop buying into their bullshit when they were the ones who destroyed everything!"

Her voice raised to a piercing shriek and he winced at the ringing in his eardrums. He could see her chest heaving with heated emotion. Cassandra looked away, as if she felt sorry for lashing out, then her eyes flicked up to meet his face again.

"Did you know that it's been exactly nine years since the Sun Flares?" she asked him. "Do you know how I know that? Ask me how I know that."

Thomas looked at her, gritting his teeth, and humoured her. She chuckled and there was a mad light in her eyes. For a moment, his heart sputtered with a stab of fear. He imagined that's how she looked at people right before she killed them. The look of a girl driven mad by anger, fear and sorrow. She probably didn't have an ounce of mercy left in her entire soul.

"Because it's my birthday," Cassandra told him in a singsong voice.

He stood up and headed towards the door. Sleep deprivation or not, he didn't want to risk having his eyes clawed out by the crazy angry girl. "I'm sorry, Cass," he said, pausing with his hand on the handle. "I really am."

"Sorry won't fix anything, Thomas," she spat back.

He felt the void in his heart grow deeper. She was right. She was irrevocably right.

   Cassandra woke up to screaming. Her initial thought was that she was still dreaming, but the screams got louder and louder until they were right outside her room. She could hear Alby and Newt's voices participating in a chorus of yelling and curses of bloody hells. Someone was bounding up the stairs with quick heavy footsteps, and Minho's voice joined in. He sounded angry too. Cassandra buried her face in the pillow, wondering if she could will herself to ignore it all and slip back into sleep.

But whoever it was that was screaming let out a terrifically wounded howl.

She tore the covers off herself and pulled herself out of bed, reaching the door in limping strides to wrench it open. The corridor was empty. Cassandra's eyes flicked to her right, towards the room at the farthest end of the floor and made her way to the open door. The instant she crossed the threshold, regret washed over her.

It was Gally. He was screaming and thrashing his limbs violently. Dark green and black veins protruded from his skin and spittle flew from his mouth. Zart, Alby, Minho and Newt were struggling to keep his body under control, each one pinning a limb down to the bed.

Clint rushed across the room to grab a wooden box from a drawer. He opened it and there was a row of metal encased syringes inside. The boy quickly grabbed one and headed back towards Gally, jabbing the injection into his thick arm. Cassandra waited but it didn't seem to have any effect, Gally looked as deranged as before. His face was flushed purple from all his screaming. Minho finally noticed her, as did Newt, and she stared at them with her mouth hanging open.

"What are you doing?!" the Runner yelled at her. "Don't just stand there gawking!"

"Cass, whatever it is you need," Newt grunted. "Now isn't the bloody time."

"I need him to bloody shut up, that's what I need him to do," she grumbled and gestured at Gally. "What happened to him anyway?"

"What do you bloody think happened?!" Newt snapped, and then lost his grip on the Builder's arm. It hit Clint in the jaw and sent the Med-jack sprawling against the cupboards behind them. He blacked out.

"Oh, for the love of..." Minho shook his head. "Cassie, wake the shuck up! He's been stung!"

"Oh..." She continued to stare at them before blinking in realisation. "Oh!"

She spun anxiously in place, totally unprepared for this sudden situation. "What do I do?!" she yelled, stumbling back, hands tangled in her hair.

"Find something to shut him up with!" Alby yelled back.

Cassandra went to the nearest counter and started randomly throwing things around. She found a piece of cloth in a drawer and grabbed it to stuff Gally's mouth with. His screaming became less intolerable but he was still kicking up a huge fuss. She took a step back out of harm's way when a limb came dangerously close to her head and left the heavy muscling to the boys.

"D-Didn't Clint give him a serum?" she asked. "Why's he still like that?"

"It takes time," Newt said with a strained voice. "A couple of days at least."

"Days?!" Gally let out a long drawn out muffled scream, his eyes flying open to reveal the blood vessels inside had burst. Cassandra pointed and screeched, "What the hell?"

As if reacting to her voice, Gally started struggling harder and it took all their combined efforts to keep him down on the bed. Somehow he managed to spit the rag out and was now yelling at the top of his voice. "I saw her!" He looked at Cassandra with bulging blood stained eyes. "They had her trapped in the room!"

She was starting to feel sick. The boy's greenish black veins seemed to pulsate all along his body. It looked like things were crawling inside his veins, polluting his nervous system. Newt stuffed the rag back into Gally's mouth but he kept screaming incoherently and straining against their holds. He looked like he was on the verge of breaking his own body. Cassandra took a step backwards, towards the door.

"He... saw me...?" she mumbled to herself.

"I've had enough of you." Alby glared at her. "Get out!"

She didn't have to be told twice. Cassandra turned and fled the scene. She hobbled down the stairs and out of the Homestead until she reached the Gardens but Gally's screams could still be heard throughout the Glade. Her foot almost tripped over an abandoned hoe and she bumped into a younger boy with sandy blonde hair. The poor boy looked up at her, startled, and started sputtering apologies.

"Aren't you supposed to be in bed?" Archie asked standing near the boy. He seemed to have come back early from the Maze. "Where's your crutch?"

"I couldn't stand being inside..." she replied faintly. "What happened?"

"Minho and I found him near the Cliff," Archie explained. "He was already stung, the shuck idiot."

"Why did he even go in?" she questioned incredulously.

The Runner shrugged. "Beats me."

Cassandra looked around the Glade, feeling her skin rise at a slight breeze, and rubbed her arms as she scanned the faces of the boys working in the Gardens. Gally's words still resounded in her mind and all she could think about was how she hadn't seen Nick in a while.

Then, as if she had summoned him with her mind, she spotted his familiar figure returning from the Maze with Lee in tow. She hadn't realised that it was already getting that late, she had only meant to take a nap earlier after lunch. Cassandra hobbled over the fields in his direction, cursing her inconvenient injury under her breath. The boys noticed her approach while they were taking a moment to catch their breath.

"Miss us already?" Lee asked with a crooked grin. "Thought you weren't supposed to be walking around."

"Hot off the press, Gally got stung," she told them with a wave of her hand. "My ears were bleeding in there."

"How in the shuck—"

As if to prove her point, the boy's scream echoed throughout the Glade once more from the Homestead. Lee turned to look across the field with a concerned frown. Nick, however, didn't seem fazed by the news.

"Hey, Lee, can you grab Cass' crutch for her?" he asked.

"Huh? Oh, sure," Lee obliged with a curious glance. He then jogged off to the Homestead.

Cassandra watched him leave before turning back to Nick. She shifted her weight uncomfortably on her good ankle, and he held a hand out to her. There was no hesitation when she grabbed hold of him to steady herself. A flash of familiarity shot through her fingertips to her bones. She turned her eyes to his, and that same wistful feeling sprouted from fractures in her heart.

As if there was something he wasn't telling her, as if there was something she should have remembered.

"Gally said he saw me... in the Changing," she told him, her voice almost a whisper. "Whatever he saw—he saw me."

He merely stared at her with an unreadable expression on his features, something she couldn't quite recognise flashing across his green eyes. A breeze whispered across her neck, raising bumps along her arms. There was an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of her stomach. He then turned his gaze to the distance, to the copse of trees on the far side of the Glade.

"Have you been to the Deadheads?" he asked.

"Uh... once..." she replied. That was during her first week on duty with the Baggers. They went there once a month whenever a new Greenie arrived to clean the graves. It had been the most harrowing experience of her life by far, especially with Jackson's beady eyes constantly on the back of her neck.

"Half of the boys we lost..." Nick said. "It was because of the Grievers. Some of those graves are empty, we never found the bodies."

She listened to him quietly, hanging on to every word he was saying. Minho had told her about the Runners who didn't make it back to the Glade in time, and those who did that had run into a Griever on the way. Those who ended up like Nick and Gally.

"The shanks that got stung," he continued, "they all told me the same thing."

His gaze slid back to hers, his olive eyes haunted with ghosts that only he could see. She shivered slightly, but it wasn't from the breeze. Her breaths were uneven and she wasn't sure she wanted to know the answers to her questions.

"What did they say?" she asked, her voice faint.

He held her gaze as he spoke, "The cure is in Point Zero."

Her lips parted wordlessly, brows furrowing with confusion. Without realising, her fingers clenched around his as her chest tightened. Flashes of memories dissolved into a vague summary of feelings. Pain, sorrow, loneliness... anger. Each shard of recollection revolved around one pivotal figure. A tall, pale boy with dark hair. A name that left a bitter, ashen taste on her tongue.

Thomas.

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