Page 74 of The Infinite Glade
“The other one.”
The soldier looked at that wrist. Alexandra waited impatiently for her to say something but there was no reaction. None.Had Minho lied to her about the Godhead’s symbol being on the walls of his buildings?“You see now?” she asked. No response.Mindless soldiers.Her patience thinned to nothing. “If you untie my hands, I’ll show you properly.”
A cloaked Grief Bearer entered the Glade from the corridors of the Maze, itself—where they’d taken any Orphan traitors—with a soldier on either side of them. Someone must have told him what was going on. Alexandra’s heart sank a little.
“The Great Master does have that tattoo.” The cloaked man spoke slowly and chopped almost all his words in half. “But so does the Godhead.” The Grief Bearer slowly raised his right arm and pointed straight at Alexandra. “She wears the cloak of a Pilgrim, but there stands the one and only remaining member of the Godhead.” A very long pause, then a silence settling over the Glade that would’ve seemed impossible a minute earlier. “And she killed the Great Master.”
Panic now bounced within Alexandra’s body, throttling her spirit.The digits escaped her.The hood of her cloak tightened against her throat as the soldier behind her pulled her head back. A cold knife rested just above her collar bone. Her skull pounded at the top of her spine. The Evolution was doomed.How, she thought with terror.How had it all fallen apart?
“No. NO!” She had no time to think. “It’s true, I killed Mikhail, but . . . but doesn’t that makemeyour master now? Isn’t that how it works? Who better to lead you than the one who’s defeated the greatest?” Someone pushed her down; she landed with a thump, temporarily lost her breath. She struggled against the ground—the ground of this hallowed Glade. “And Nicholas, his head is here, here in the Maze!” She could show them. She could convince them all.She could?—
The Grief Bearer spoke one last time. “The Great Master has no face and no name.” He turned away, as if condemning her by the action, and then it seemed as if everyone in the Glade shouted at once.
“It’s time for her to die!”
“Kill the Godhead!”
“Kill the Godhead!”
“Kill the Godhead!” The chant grew from there, grew until even the most faithful of Pilgrims watching nearby began to mouth the words, themselves.Kill the Godhead.
All had been lost. Alexandra struggled pitifully against her restraints, writhed in the dirt. The movement made her hood fall from her head, and Pilgrims and Remnants alike stared at her beauty.
“It’s really her . . . Alexandra Romanov!” a Pilgrim screamed with bloodlust in her eyes.
“She admitted to killing Mikhail and Nicholas. Traitor!” More chaotic shouts and screams, words, countless words, filling the air like toxic fumes. But eventually they bled together, came fully in sync. And the chant rose like a prayer to the stone heaven above.
Kill the Godhead. Kill the Godhead. Kill the Godhead.
Groggy and confused on the floor of the cave, Ximena rubbed her neck where the Griever had stabbed her. She checked for blood. None. Her mind raced even while her entire body relaxed. The half-animal, half-machine hovered over her with its arms and legs planted around her. A cage she couldn’t escape. She couldthinkabout moving away from the mechanical beast, but her body wouldn’t move. The Griever tilted its bulbous, head-like thing as if to question Ximena, then scuttled away to rejoin the other monsters.
The islanders were just as stunned as she was.
She breathed deeply, forced her body to catch up with her mind. “What did those things do to us?”
“The Grievers . . .” Old Man Frypan rubbed his hip and sat up. “Alby . . . Zart. . . . What they did in the Villa with Cowan. The Grievers in the Maze always had some other plan, like a mind of their own. Some hidden purpose.”
“Yeah. Exactly.” Erros rubbed his arm—where the Griever had stabbedhim—but didn’t say any more.
“What was in the sting?” Isaac yelled, grabbing his leg, where apparently the knife wound still hurt him more than the needle had.
“A basic anxiolytic,” Cian pronounced, as if every human walking the earth learned the word while still in cloth diapers. He climbed back to his feet, seemingly unafraid of the machines still hovering in the far corner of the lobby. “It’s merely a calming agent.” He picked up his box of supplies, while Ximena could barely hold her own head up.
“More like a tranquilizer,” Erros said.
“Why . . .” was all Ximena could ask.
An unknown voice answered her.
“The Sequencers don’t let anyone into their levels without testing them first.” A tall man with dark hair, dressed in blue, walked out of the farthest tunnel. The Grievers clustered together, then assembled one-by-one into a line. “And treating them.”
“Senator Tove.” Cian lowered his head.
“Cian. Erros. So glad you two could find your way home, but you know the rules . . .” The man held an instrumental pad in front of him, just like the one Professor Morgan had at the Villa.
“These aren’t other-worlders, sir. They’re part of the Sequence.” Cian rushed the box of supplies to the Senator and motioned to the islanders, but Tove held his hand up.
“Stop. Don’t embarrass yourself. Wait until the processing is done.” The blue-suited man wouldn’t even look at Cian, as if the man and his brother were beneath him.
