Thomas chases the bug into the forest until he loses sight of it.

It had disappeared deep within the foliage—almost as if it had never existed.

Almost as if…it’s the size of a bug and in a forest.  I thought you were supposed to be smart?

“Shuck it,” Thomas whispered, almost as a joke. Almost. As strange as it seemed, the word felt natural on his lips, like he was already morphing into a Glader.

No.

No.

No.

Book, stop it.  Curse words have meaning and history and connotations and cultural context.  We didn’t just decide that sounds felt mean and therefore we’d call them curses.  You have none of that for your made-up curse words, so there’s only two options here: either it’s part of the brain muckage, or Thomas didn’t know any real cuss words already and therefore he’d figure the first ones he hears are normal.

And bringing attention to this – repeatedly – is not helping your cause.  Insisting that you’ve circumvented the laws of language does not mean that you actually have.

Thomas hears a noise in the woods.

Without really thinking it through, Thomas headed toward the noise he’d heard.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this, and it never fails to irritate me.  I think authors do this “without thinking” or “he didn’t understand why, but” thing because they can’t think of a logical reason to do it.  But you know what?  “THOMAS IS CURIOUS” IS A LEGIT REASON TO GO TOWARDS THE NOISE!  It’s a valid personality trait that some people have.  If you can’t think of a logical, compelling reason then at least make it part of his personality instead of turning him into a fucking puppet.

wishing he had a flashlight. He thought about flashlights and his memory. Once again, he remembered a tangible thing from his past, but couldn’t assign it to any specific time or place, couldn’t associate it with any other person or event. Frustrating.

You know what else is frustrating?  Seeing this bullshit at least once a chapter.  Yes, we get it.  We haven’t forgotten it.  We’re not going to cry foul every time he identifies an object without comment. 

He doesn’t find whatever made the noise, but he does find the graveyard.  He looks around, and one of the graves has a window into it so everyone can see, because this is the kid that tried to get out through the elevator shaft.  Supposedly his coffin is see-through so as to be a warning?  But that’s stupid, because the fact that he’s dead is warning enough.  The only reason to have a visible warning is if it’s for someone who wasn’t there at the time, but all the kids that were there for the attempt are still there and remember perfectly well.  Also, how many people are coming by to hang out in the graveyard to see this?

And the fact that they’ve got graves at all suggests that they’ve got some sense of bodies being sacred, even if it’s just cultural leftovers.  We have a lot of hang-ups over dead bodies, which is why the funeral industry is such a racket.  We hang importance and symbolism on them and feel they’re important enough that they should get caskets and go through the effort of burying them and placing headstones.  If the kids still have the kind of feelings toward dead bodies that leads to burials and markers, then why is this one kid getting a fucking window like it’s no big deal?

Let this half-shank be a warning to all:

You can’t escape through the Box Hole.

Also, this seems quite accusatory, when Chuck’s take on the incident made it sound like the kid went down there by mutual agreement of the whole group.

The noise starts up again, and this time it’s because we actually get to see who’s causing it!  Ben literally jumps out of the woods and starts attacking Thomas.  Alby’s coming up right behind him, which makes the ‘weird noise in the woods’ thing from before stupid.  If he was hearing Ben in the woods before, and Alby was chasing Ben, then why didn’t Thomas hear both of them?  Or why didn’t Alby hear Thomas crying “who’s there?”

Alby has a bow and arrow and he’s pointing it at Ben, but Ben keeps insisting that they have to kill Thomas instead because he’s “bad.”

“He’ll wanna take us home,” Ben said. “He’ll wanna get us out of the Maze. Better we all jumped off the Cliff! Better we tore each other’s guts out!”

…isn’t that what all of you are trying to do?  Ben is/was a runner, and the entire point of runners is to get out of the maze, because they sure as fuck aren’t contributing to anyone’s survival in the glade.

Ben won’t stop running on about how Thomas is “bad,” but he just keeps repeating that.  For once, I’m forgiving, because he is still sick and disoriented. When he tries to attack Thomas again, Alby shoots him.

The narration then kind of staggers around until we get to that night, so presumably Thomas never confronted Alby about the whole ‘leaving is bad’ story that Ben was spewing.  Seriously, this “curious, smart” character didn’t pick up on that?  Or did he but it amounted to nothing because of all the not talking going on around here?

That night Chuck mentions that Ben isn’t the first to go off his head and attack someone. 

But then we skip to the next day because this book has no fucking clue what it’s doing and can’t stay still for five fucking seconds.  It’s like the author had one idea per scene and then instead of following up on any consequences or transitions he’s just like “yup, that’s the end of that, here’s an awkward couple of lines about how some time passed.”

Thomas is all out of sorts after seeing Ben get killed, I think.  Or it could be Thomas’s business as usual, just with more morose words.  It’s not like Thomas was terribly interesting or proactive before.

Today, Newt is showing Thomas the slaughterhouse because it’s his first day of trying out stuff.

“You’re as smart as you look, Tommy.

Well, considering he’s spent most of the book standing still and moping, that’s probably true.

Side note: the girl is still basically an inanimate object.  Fuck you, book.

Back to working in the slaughterhouse.

“Too bad I can’t remember my whole life. Maybe I love killing animals.” He was just joking, but Newt didn’t seem to get it.

I don’t think Newt’s the one with the problem.

And then we get to go through Thomas’s whole day of training!  It’s told entirely in summary, but that annoying summary where there’s not enough details to be interesting and yet it’s still too long to be a proper skipage of time.  At lunch, something finally interesting happens as a runner comes back in from the maze and promptly collapses. 

This guy’s name is Minho, and apparently he’s fine but exhausted.

“I can barely talk, shuck-face!” Minho yelled, his voice raw. “Get me some water!”

…sounds like you’re talking just fine to me.

Minho is amused that Thomas thinks Alby is the leader of the place, but refuses to clarify.  Because of course.

“So who is the leader if he isn’t?”

“Greenie, just shut it before you confuse yourself more.”

Book, you just keep digging that hole deeper, don’t you?

And wasn’t Minho claiming he couldn’t talk earlier?  He’s sure chatty now, but only just chatty enough to be superior and not enough to actually fucking tell us stuff.

They posture and banter and maybe the whole thing about Alby was joke?  But who knows because this whole book is just so fucking random.  Then they get to talking about the girl and how she’s attractive, because yeah, that’s really the most important thing to note, amiright?  Apparently they have no inclination to talk about her coma, her note, or the fact that she’s the only girl, nope, they’re going to default to hotness instead.  Because reasons.

No, I know the reason.  Because that’s what the author wants to talk about, and the author is safe and in an environment where talking about hotness would be more normal.  Girls and guys talk about the hotness of the opposite gender all the time, but they do it when they’re sitting around shooting the breeze.  In books like this, it feels like authors are defaulting to what they feel while they are writing and assuming that’s normal, all without taking into context what their characters should be feeling or thinking about at the moment.

Alby comes back with the water that Minho just had to have before talking (I guess plot-talking takes more out of a person?) and Minho finally tells them what sent him home early: they found a dead Griever out in the maze.