They decide to start the tour at the elevator shaft where Thomas came in.  Alby repeats the book’s summary by telling us that they get a new kid once a month, without fail, which just hammers the nails harder into the “why weren’t you prepared for this?” coffin.  Also they get supplies weekly, so there’s that at least.  I guess anything they have going forward that can’t be made by “vague farming” can be explained that way.  Kind of a lazy way to go about things, though. 

He felt such a mixture of emotions—curiosity, frustration, wonder—all laced with the lingering horror of seeing the Griever that morning.

…yeah, I can really feel how curious and frustrated he is as he…stands there quietly.  Wow, the emotion is just leaping off the page, isn’t it?

Alby gives him a quick rundown of the major areas of the glade and informs him that the kids are all split up in different jobs and he’ll be working at least one day in each to see where he fits best.

And he couldn’t have been told all this yesterday because…chores would have scared him too bad?  It’s pretty tame stuff so far, so their repeated insistence that he would have lost his mind to hear it makes less and less sense.  They refused to tell him stuff then, but now that…time has passed (seriously, there’s nothing else different) they’re letting it all out freely.

Which means it couldn’t be any clearer that they held back before simply for the sake of padding out this beast to 54 fucking chapters and god damnit why didn’t I check that when I made the poll this time we’ll never get done in time for NaNo!

Why do they need a graveyard in a place full of teenagers?

You saw a spiny monster that made you nearly wet yourself and some kid yesterday was bloated and sick to the point of being inhuman and you’re really questioning the need for a graveyard?  Come on, “smart boy,” put it together.

Workers bustled about the area, looking as if they’d spent their whole lives on a farm.

I wonder if the kids ever try and figure out where they came from based on their baseline knowledge.  Do some of them actually know how to work on a farm?  That shit isn’t intuitive.  Do they all have different skills they bring to the table based on their pre-glade lives, or are they all coming in with the same set of mental pictures, because that would actually be really informative if the book would bother to ever think to ask it.

They walk around for a while, looking at stuff, while Thomas thinks about how odd his memory loss is and yet still doesn’t seem to be figuring anything out.  He literally just keeps repeating the same thing over and over again: he knows stuff but he can’t remember why or how he knows what he does and gee isn’t that just so strange hey I think I’ll mention that this is strange like 354584657545465 fucking more times.  Yes, book, it is odd, so how about running some experiments or something new?  Have him look for gaps in his knowledge to see if that could tell him anything or compare what he thinks he knows to other boys or literally anything besides repeating the blatantly obvious yet again.

Alby then talks about the maze and says that he’s been there two years and in all that time no one has solved the maze.  Also, it’s really dangerous, so if anyone besides runners try to go in there the rest of the kids will…kill them?  You can’t go in the maze because it’s dangerous, but the only reason it’s dangerous is because the kids will kill you if you go in.  That is textbook circular thinking.

I can sort of get why they would say that, because there’s clearly tasks to be done inside the glade in order for the group to keep functioning.  You don’t want to lose your ability to eat because there’s no one left to farm.  And while a few kids could be killed and not affect things, you don’t want to set the precedent of letting them because then how do you know when and where to stop?

But if you’re willing to kill kids anyway, then why not just let them run around in the maze for you?

Thomas still wants to be a runner, still for no reason.

Alby starts to talk to him about the weird spy bugs that are around when an alarm goes off.  The alarm means that a new person is coming up in the box, and that confuses everyone because they’re not due for a new kid for a whole ‘nother month.

The kids all gather around the elevator, and Chuck makes an awkward joke about how maybe the PTBs (the book calls whoever is running the show “the Creators” but at least capitalizing an acronym makes grammatical sense so there) are sending a replacement for Thomas.

“You’re annoying. Seriously.”

“Yeah, but we’re buddies, now, right?” Chuck fully laughed this time, a squeaky sort of snort.

“Looks like you’re not giving me much choice on that one.” But truth was, he needed a friend, and Chuck would do just fine.

Chuck may be awkward and annoying, but Thomas just gets dickier every time he has a thought.  Nothing says true friendship like “eh, you’ll fill my needs adequately.”

We do get a conversation about how they’ve tried to get out through the elevator shaft several different ways, all of which failed.  Yay, good for you boys!  You’re trying and exploring and experimenting!  Mayonnaise for all!

Gally is also in the crowd and glaring at Thomas, so Chuck suggests he go and pick a confrontation with the other kid.

“Well, for one, he has a lot more allies than I do. Not a good person to pick a fight with.”

“Yeah, but you’re smarter. And I bet you’re quicker. You could take him and all his buddies.”

First of all, Chuck literally just said to ‘ask him what his problem is,’ not pick a fight with him.   Second, we have exactly zero evidence that Thomas is smart at all, let alone smarter than anyone else.

When the elevator finally arrives and Alby and Newt open it, they find it’s got a girl inside.  This causes quiet an uproar.

“A girl?”

“I got dibs!”

“What’s she look like?”

Uhg.

I know they’re only teenage boys, but you ever think teenage boys act like this because we reinforce for them that this stuff is “natural”?

The girl also appears to be dead, and Newt and Alby go down to get her ‘body.’  Wonderful, she’s been in the book for two pages and already she’s been ‘claimed’ by one anonymous person and viewed as literally nothing more than her body.

But the thing that had really stood out to him was her skin: pale, white as pearls.

Anybody shows up near me looking like that, I’m going to assume they’re a robot.

despite her paleness, she was really pretty.

Considering pale skin has long been considered a beauty standard (and still is) that ‘despite’ has no business being in there.

They call Thomas forward to see if he recognizes her, because they can’t think of anything else, but he doesn’t.

And then…I can’t even.

Before Newt could finish, the girl shot up into a sitting position. As she sucked in a huge breath, her eyes snapped open and she blinked, looking around at the crowd surrounding her. Alby cried out and fell backward. Newt gasped and jumped up, stumbling away from her. Thomas didn’t move, his gaze locked on the girl, frozen in fear.

Burning blue eyes darted back and forth as she took deep breaths. Her pink lips trembled as she mumbled something over and over, indecipherable. Then she spoke one sentence—her voice hollow and haunted, but clear.

“Everything is going to change.”

Thomas stared in wonder as her eyes rolled up into her head and she fell back to the ground. Her right fist shot into the air as she landed, staying rigid after she grew still, pointing toward the sky. Clutched in her hand was a wadded piece of paper.

She’s not a girl.  She’s not a female character. She’s a fucking marionette.  She is straight-up just a thing being manipulated in unnatural ways.

Please, please, please can she be a robot?

The paper says “She’s the last one. Ever.” Dun Dun Dun.

but instead of erupting in confusion, the Gladers all stood dumbfounded.

So…instead of being confused, they’re confused?  I get that he’s trying to contrast ‘erupting’ and ‘stood around’ but it’s still some very poor word choice.

A couple of kids that are as near as they’ve got to medics come up.  If you expect the book to tell you why or even IF they remember medical stuff when the others don’t, you’ve clearly been reading the wrong book.  They’re medics, end of story. 

“Who said Clint had first shot at her?” someone yelled from the crowd. There were several barks of laughter. “I’m next!”

Just because you’re not using the words “I’m going to rape the unconscious girl” does not mean you haven’t said it.  Because that’s literally what that ‘joke’ means.  Congratulations, book, you won’t say the word “shit” but you’ll make a rape joke.

THIS IS WHY OUR SOCIETY IS FUCKED UP.  THIS.  YOU, BOOK, YOU ARE THE PROBLEM.  YOU RATE CUSS WORDS AS MORE SENSITIVE THAN RAPE JOKES.  YOU ARE THE PROBLEM AND I HATE YOU.

The more I think about this, the more enraged I get.  Because, really, you can argue with a good case that the kids aren’t really thinking sex and that any readers wouldn’t be either.  After all, this Clint fellow just put his head to her chest to listen.  And there’s a sense that this stuff is being said just because it’s “what people say.”  But that makes it worse!  Just look at it!  These kids (and the readers) are being taught that it’s okay and even EXPECTED to say this sort of stuff before they even know what it means!  They’re taught that this is simply what happens.  And when they learn what it does mean, there’s no resistance to the idea, because they’ve already absorbed and normalized comments like this before confrontational words like rape got included.  After that point, it’s hard to shake them of the notion that this isn’t normal and natural.  BOOKS LIKE THIS ARE LITERALLY TEACHING BOYS THAT IT’S OKAY TO RAPE BEFORE THEY EVEN KNOW WHAT RAPE IS.

Alby does, at least, put out the command that no one gets to touch the unconscious person without having medical intent.

The medics declare her comatose because they don’t know what else to say and carry her off to the shack, while Thomas stands around mutely and decides he feels a “strange connection” to her.

That’s about all Thomas does in this book so far.  Stand around mutely while the narration declares that stuff is happening.

Alby calls a meeting of all the in-charge kids, but stuff might actually be said in that meeting!  Quick, get our viewpoint character away from it!  Um…he’s hungry, yeah, that’ll work.

Thomas and Chuck go to the kitchen where once again Chuck acts like his fucking valet or something and serves him food.

“So where does the electricity come from?”

“Who cares? I’ll take it.”

What a surprise, Thomas thought. No answer.

So…any followup on that, Thomas?  You managed to get a detailed account of all the ways they’d tried to get out through the elevator shaft, but not this?  They haven’t, I don’t know, dug up the wiring to try and follow it back to a grid or something?  ASK FOLLOW-UP QUESTIONS, DAMNIT, YOU DON’T GET TO TOSS OFF EASY QUESTIONS AND THEN DECLARE YOURSELF SMART AND CURIOUS.

The bread was thick and white

Please tell me that comes in with the other supplies, then, because white bread is bleached, not natural. They’re not growing white wheat in those fields of theirs.

This is verging on absurd.  Here we have this great set-up for some interesting survival-type stuff, because homesteading like this isn’t actually easy.  It takes a lot of work.  It could be part of the puzzle: it takes every hour of the day to keep the place running, so you have to find time to do that and explore the maze or else figure out which things to give up.  Kids would have to figure out how to make all this stuff work and how to jerry-rig solutions to problems that most of us never think about.  The mere act of survival would be a puzzle that has to be solved before escape. 

But no, all of that gets dumped in the trash and replaced with the easy and the familiar.  Outside of a few lines about how there’s fields out there growing…something, everything is perfectly suburban right down to the fucking white bread.

Thomas asks about the runners again (no I will NOT capitalize that either) and he’s told that they get back every night and make maps of the maze from memory.  At night.  Right exactly when the maze completely changes.  So their maps are worth fuck-all.

Thomas has a sudden thought out of nowhere and wonders if the kids are all criminals.

“Think about it. Our memories are wiped. We live inside a place that seems to have no way out, surrounded by bloodthirsty monster-guards. Doesn’t that sound like a prison to you?”

No.  You know what sounds like a prison to me?  NOT A FUCKING MAZE!  Having the glade but no doors in the walls would be a prison.  This is more like a psychological experiment done by giant aliens.  “Rats in a maze” aren’t put there because people want to keep them in place.

But for some reason this “smart” kid continues to think that’s a plausible reason. 

I guess maybe the aliens could have picked their test subjects from among prisoners, but they could just as well have picked up anyone.  So it’s more “that is technically among the things that are possible” than “that makes sense.”

Thomas flounces out of there to go exploring on his own.

As he approached, he figured he must’ve dealt with animals in his life before the Glade. Their smell, their sound—they seemed very familiar to him.

Hey, finally some sense that these kids actually do have individual experiences.

As he’s out walking, he sees one of those metal bugs that’s set to keep an eye on the kids (or at least, so far as anyone knows) and he decides to follow it.  Maybe we’ll actually get to see something proactive from our main character tomorrow!