The man tried to speak, but the only thing escaping his lips was that sound again.

  Clank.

  Clank.

  Clank.

  The apparition’s throat bulged with each metallic utterance, as if he’d swallowed a plum and just wanted to cough it out. Isaac remembered more nightmares than he could count on every last finger and toe on the island, but this one chilled him to the core. He awoke with a startled yelp that wasn’t far off from the CLANKs that had seeped into his dreams.

  Worse, the sound still clanged around him.

  Awareness coming back in leaps, he sheepishly got out of bed and zombied his way over to the window, peaking past the curtains sewn by his dad at least a decade ago. It was a gloomy day, the clouds a solid, soupy mass in the sky, the light gray and sad. No rain had fallen, but mist crept along the grass of the yard, gathered in big clumps along the fence, wafted through the air in random groups of thinly stretched cotton. And out beyond the houses on the east side of the island, down near the beach, someone was beating the hell out of hot iron with a very large hammer.

  The Forge.

  Isaac loved the Forge. It had been set by the beach so that the constant, stiff breeze could keep the fires stoked and hot. He didn’t quite understand how they dug crap out of the craggy mountains and then turned it into red molten rock, and he didn’t really care. It was that point in the process—and everything after—that consumed him. He loved the heat and the steam, the deep, glowing reds and the blinding, white-hot brilliance of the sparks. He loved the smell of ozone and burning cinders, the smoke, the constant clanging of metal against metal.

  Yep. He wanted to be a blacksmith, and had been training under Captain Sparks for almost a month, now. No one else joined him in calling Rodrigo that ridiculous name yet, but Isaac had set a goal for the moniker to stick by winter. It was next-level genius and no one could convince him otherwise.

  Today was Isaac’s day off. He had plans. Miyoko, Dominic, Trish, Sadina, a few others—they’d been planning for two weeks to row the kayaks out to Stone Point and swim through the caves and jump off the cliffs. Chances were Dominic would strip naked and belly flop from the edge they called the Dead Man’s Brow, and hilarity would ensue. Isaac couldn’t miss out on such festivities and still feel like a respectable knucklehead. After all, Stone Point had been forbidden after the third drowning in five years, and he himself had never actually been that far. Which just made it all the more appealing. Kind of.

  But none of these thoughts lessened his itch. Hearing the clank-clank-clanks, regular and rhythmic, like the beating of an iron heart, drew him as if a rope had been tied around his waist. He loved to watch Captain Sparks in action, and rowing, swimming, jumping for hours suddenly seemed like a lot of work.

  Like an old sailor succumbing to the lustful call of the sirens—a story his grandpa had told him over the protestations of everyone else around the fire at the time—Isaac quickly got dressed and headed out the door of his yurt. Headed toward the flames and the molten metal.

  His yurt. He still hadn’t gotten used to that. He had his own yurt, the one-room dwelling in which most people of the island lived—except the ones crazy enough to have more than a couple of kids. Isaac had built and moved into his yurt just three months ago and still basked in the sense of accomplishment.

  The day had suddenly popped open with a burst of sunshine, clearing the clouds and mist, the temperature perfect. People milled about everywhere he looked—on their way to the farms, the shops, the mill, the warehouse, the fishery—most of them too busy to take note of a young man on his day off, half-running toward the beach. But Mr. Jerry gave a wave, his giant eyebrows like combed wool, and a few yurts down Ms. Ariana gave a wink—harmless from a woman who was one of the first people born on the island, only a year after the Flat Trans. Her silvery hair and wrinkled eyes always made Isaac think of the grandma in the tale of Red Riding Hood.

  “What’s the rush, boy?” she called out, standing at the edge of her little lawn. She held in her hands the Daily Memo that his friend Sadina passed out every morning. “There a fire I don’t know about?”

  “Got some work to do at the Forge,” Isaac responded, slowing down enough to give her a little smart-ass curtsy and a flourishing wave of the arm. “What’re you up to today? Got another date with Old Man Frypan?”

  She let out a hoot and a holler. “Don’t he wish! That cheap bastard wouldn’t know how to court a melon.”

  Isaac exaggerated a laugh and then revved up to a full jog, offering a last farewell wave.

  “Run, boy!” she yelled. “Run like the wind!”

  He loved that old woman.

  The Orphan stood straight and rigid behind the parapet of the fortress wall, his rifle resting upon his shoulder, its barrel aimed at the cloudy sky. As he had for the last eleven years, he stared at the endless fields that served as a waterless moat around his homeland. It was a dead land, all life and vegetation killed with poison so that nothing might obstruct the view of the Orphans. The waste lay dull and gray, like a cemetery without tombstones, as vast as the ocean.

  The Orphan had no name.

  Thirty feet away, to the north, stood another statue with no name, her shoulders square, her head shaved, her body sheathed in an artillery suit. A literal human missile. To the south, thirty feet away, there was another Orphan. This one didn’t stand, however. This one sat upon a turret of metal, a machine of such firepower that it could destroy the entire wall upon which it rested. That Orphan had no name.

  This was what they’d been told their whole lives, anyway. From the day they were born, taken from mothers who had the Flare. Although he obviously couldn’t remember it, the Orphan knew that he’d been tested over and over, in every way imaginable, to make sure that he, too, was not infected. Even so, he’d been quarantined for five years, along with others like him, growing, learning, training. Then more tests. These, he remembered, although the day the results came in were a bit foggy. Not that it mattered. Those results had come in negative. Otherwise, he wouldn’t exist. He’d have been thrown in the same pits as his mother, burned for one hundred days.

  The Orphan’s name was Minho, even though the Orphan had no name.

  He couldn’t tell anyone, of course. Not once in his lifetime had another person called him Minho. Even now, thinking of it, he felt a chill of fright that someone might know, that someone could read his mind, that the Grief Bearers would be informed that he’d blasphemed his calling in life by giving himself a name. The punishment was not in doubt, and it would be swift. There’d be no trial. So it had to remain a secret. No one could ever know. But his fingers gripped the rifle tightly and his lips pressed together and he breathed a little heavier, holding on to this one thing.

  His name was Minho.

  Despite the best efforts of the Remnant Nation, whispers abounded amongst the Orphans about the days when the Flare spread across the earth and devastated the human race. No one could possibly determine which stories were true and which were mere legends. Like all things, most of them probably lay somewhere in the middle. The tales of WICKED, tales of Cranks, tales of cures, tales of heroism and villainy. Tales about the Maze and those who escaped it. Most of it was a muddy blur on a window, impossible to decipher shapes that made sense. But there was one story that stood above the rest, and from that tale of undaunted bravery, Minho had chosen his secret name.

  In his mind, he looked exactly like Minho of the mythical Gladers, thought like him, talked like him, dreamt like him. Fought like him. In his heart, he was worthy of the title.

  Minho.

  But, courage or not, it had to remain a secret until things changed.

  A horn’s deep, baritone growl sounded from the closest watchtower, sweeping away the silence and making Minho’s jaw tremble from the brassy vibration rumbling through the air. His musings vanished, replaced with the alertness his training had mastered. He shifted his feet, bent his knees, knelt against the low wall of the parapet, his rifle locked into position on the top edge. Taking his breaths according to the litany of calm he’d been taught since the age of five, he peered into the distant, flat fields, waiting for what had prompted the warning from the watchtower.

  Several minutes passed. Nothing but mud and dirt and rotted vegetation for miles.

  Patience. No one had patience like the Orphans.

  A figure appeared on the horizon. It approached rapidly, and it wasn’t long before Minho could see enough to know. A person, on a horse, galloping closer and closer. A man, dressed in rags, unarmed, hair blowing all over the place like a mad pit of skinny snakes. The man rode the horse in a beeline, coming directly toward the spot beneath Minho’s position. When the stranger came within a half kilometer, he slowed his animal to a trot, and then to a walk, and then stopped altogether, about eighty meters away. The man held his hands up, surely knowing the extreme weaponry that was aimed at him, and shouted.

  “I’m not infected! I’ve been tested, quarantined myself for six months! No symptoms! Please! I swear it! I’ll stay here until you can see that I’m not sick!”

  Minho listened to the man’s words, though they didn’t matter. They didn’t matter in the least. Like most everything else under the reign of the Remnant Nation, the outcome of this scenario had already been determined. The Flare was their devil, the Cure their God. He readied himself, knowing he didn’t have the courage to disobey protocol, not yet, not for a long time to come.

  “Please!” the man pleaded. “I’m as clean—”

  A single shot rang out, its fierce jolt of sound echoing in all directions.

  The stranger, a small wisp of smoke leaking from the new hole in his head, slumped off the horse and fell into the mud with a wet splat. Another shot, and the animal fell as well.

  Minho breathed in the smell of gunpowder, feeling pride at the accuracy of his aim. Feeling regret that it had been needed.

  The Orphan stood back up, came to attention, positioned the rifle on his shoulder, as he had done faithfully for eleven years.

  The Orphan had no name.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Field Trip

  “Oh no you don’t.”

  Isaac was twenty meters from the fence that fronted the Forge when his friend, Sadina, seemingly popped out of nowhere and stepped directly in his path. She didn’t do anything cutesy or pert, like putting her hands on her hips or wagging a finger in chastisement. She just wrinkled her forehead and did the rest with her eyes. Those dark orbs, lost in the largest whites of anyone’s eyes he’d ever seen, had magical powers and no one could possibly disagree.

  He came to a stop or they would’ve smacked foreheads.

  “Hey,” he said, already searching for an excuse in his occupied mind. The smells of ozone and woody smoke were almost enough to make him tear up, and not just from the cindery sting of it all. It was downright unnatural how much he loved this place of making things.

  “There’s no way in hell you’re skipping out on us today,” Sadina said, her voice as hard as the iron bars cooling in the water bins of the Forge. “It’s gonna get colder in the next month or so, and everyone will be too big of a wuss to go out to Stone Point. Today is the day, we’re going today, it’s your first time, and you’re coming with us.” She grinned to take away some of the bossiness, but that didn’t mean she’d back down.

  “I’m going to Stone Point?” he asked.

  “You’re going to Stone Point. Or die. Your choice.”

  Isaac gave an almost panicked glance over her shoulder, peeking at the Forge. It really was unnatural. He had a day off and he should enjoy it like a normal human being. But there were anxieties associated with water that surely the others . . . he swatted the thought away. The Forge had become his only escape from the family tragedy, and he needed another.

  “I just wanted you to beg me to go,” he finally said. “It’s pathetic, really.”

  She barked a fake laugh. “You wish. I just need someone there who’s even more chicken of the cliffs than I am. That way I don’t look as bad.”

  “Thanks for coming to get me,” he said, surprised at his own words. “I mean . . . you know. Thanks.”

  Although he expected an onslaught of sarcasm and eye-rolling, she surprised him right back. “Come on, man. There’s no way we’d have nearly as much fun if you were stuck in the Forge all day. At least, I know I wouldn’t.”

  Isaac went speechless for a moment, finally thinking of the things he’d been avoiding in his mind since the second he woke up to the clanks. His feelings, his swell of emotion had nothing to do with Sadina—she had a serious girlfriend for crying out loud. But her kindness triggered thoughts of the tragedies that had assaulted Isaac’s life over the last few months, the real reason he was so desperate to lose himself in the hard work of the Forge. All that pounding of metal and heat and hissing and steam and sweat, all that hard work, protected his mind from where it wanted to go.

  “You know we all love you,” Sadina said. “We want you with us today. Screw everything else. We’ll go and act stupid and if we wanna cry, we’ll cry. If we wanna laugh, we’ll laugh. But I swear on Old Man Frypan that we will have fun.”

  Isaac nodded, so full of gratitude that he still couldn’t speak. Sadina pulled him into a hug, probably having decided that more words couldn’t help at this point. She took him by the hand, gave him one of the sweetest smiles he’d ever seen, and then pulled him away from the Forge, its black pillar of smoke leaking all the way to the sky.

  The hum of the ocean grew louder as they approached the north side of the island, where the waves hit heavier and higher, the beachhead packed with rocky cliffs. When those waves crashed against those cliffs, the roar of it filled the air, along with billions of spray droplets and sheets of white rain. Hundreds of tiny waterfalls appeared and disappeared on the black rock with each cycle, little pools scattered across the low places. The whole area was beautiful, and it never grew old, and Isaac’s heart broke at the sight of it. This had been his mom’s favorite spot on the whole island, or in the world for that matter.

  He was still holding Sadina’s hand when they reached the path that wound its way from the top of the cliff to the many places of adventure below. Their friend Trish had just reached the first switchback but when Sadina called her name, she turned and sprinted back up to them. The longtime couple embraced, kissed, but then immediately showered their attention on Isaac. He joined their hug, felt their kisses on his cheeks. Not a word was spoken for a full minute.

  Finally, Dominic appeared, from which direction Isaac didn’t know.

  “What’s with the lovefest?” he asked. “Should I avert my eyes?”

  Dominic always said things that, in theory, would make him unlikable, but his delivery somehow softened the blow every time. It was a gift Isaac wished he could learn. Everyone loved Dominic, no matter how many insults he rained upon them.

  “Oh, hello, Dom-a-prick,” Trish said flatly. The nickname was terrible, and never came out of the mouth smoothly, but she used it every time the opportunity presented itself. Isaac figured it had about as much chance of sticking as his Captain Sparks moniker for the blacksmith.

  As for Dominic, he’d chosen the wise route of pretending he never heard it. “Howdy, Trish. Howdy, Sadina. Isaac.” He nodded with each name, but couldn’t stop the glimpse of sobriety that flashed across his face when he came to Isaac. To his credit, he wiped it away quickly. The thing Isaac needed most in this world was for the pity parties to cease, forever.

  “Always a pleasure to see you,” Isaac said, who sucked at trying to match his friend’s sarcasm.

  “That it is, that it is.” Dominic rolled his eyes with exaggeration, as if this had become the most awkward conversation ever. It kinda had.

  “Who brought the kayaks?” Sadina asked.

  Trish answered. “Miyoko just dragged them down the path. I was supposed to help her, so . . . I hope she didn’t fall and break her neck.”

  “Yikes,” Sadina replied. “Let’s go.”

  They went.

  Miyoko had made it about halfway down then given up. Five kayaks were lashed together with thick twine, and she’d been going downhill as she dragged them, but it still seemed a big job for one person to do alone.

  “You guys were hoping I’d done all the work, huh.” It came out as a statement, not a question.

  “Dammit, yes,” Trish replied. “We should’ve waited ten more minutes. Live and learn.”

  “Where’s everyone else?” Miyoko asked. Sadina had told Isaac that Carson and a few others from the west side were supposed to meet them as well. Ten in all, two per kayak.

  “They might be down there, already,” Sadina answered. “Or late as usual. Who cares. Let’s just get these boats moved. It’s not gonna be daylight forever.”

  “Plus, I got a toothache,” Dominic added.

  “What does that have to do . . .” Trish was so perplexed that she couldn’t even finish.

  “And I have to pee.”

  To his credit, he was the first one to grab the lead twine and start pulling.

  An hour passed. Isaac had recovered from the jolt of Sadina rescuing him from the Forge, when the truth of his running away had hit him hard and fast, along with all the memories that caused it. The work of getting the kayaks down to the ocean, untying them, getting them ready to launch, all the laughs and conversation—he felt as well as he had in weeks.

  “Dude,” Trish said, “I thought you had to pee.” Dominic had positioned himself at the front of one of the kayaks, sitting like a schoolboy waiting for Teacher.