Day Twenty Nine

It was nearing sunset, the sky a darker shade of blue than usual that cast shadows across the Glade and heightened the darkness lurking in the corners. Ada watched the areas of black, letting her eyes drift across the shadows, watching them dance and move, twisting and turning, a mirror into her brain projected onto the home they had been forced to forge.

The campfire in front of her only served to amplify those shadows, the brilliant flickers of orange and red sending spasms of light into the air. They danced across her pale face, ran through her copper hair, highlighting the golden flecks in her eyes before popping into nothingness and beginning anew.

The sound of gentle chatter filled her ears, and she could hear Avin's giggles and George's low-bellied laughs in between his bites of food. Ada glanced down at her own bowl, George's honest attempt at cooking something at least half substantial. She felt a single tear slide down her cheek, and watched it drip onto the dewy grass at her feet.

It had been a week since Carson had died.

A week since they had buried his body right next to Luke's plot, matching graves side by side. It hadn't felt right to not do something to remember him, so the campfire was Avin's suggestion, one last remembrance before moving on.

'It's not healthy to dwell. We can't constantly think about them and let it scare us.' She remembered Alby saying. They had been crouched in front of the graves, one of his hands pressed against the wood that made up Carson's headstone, fingers tracing the clumsily carved words etched into the oak. 'It'll only do us harm. Best to move on.'

She didn't dare mention that it was hard to move on when they had nearly halved in number. Whereas before the sheer size of the glade and the mass of the maze beyond it seemed smaller with the six of them banded together, everything seemed to be magnified now they were down to four.

Every meal, every day working, every desperate brainstorm of ideas for escape, seemed shrunken and emptier. Like something imperative was missing.

Movement from beside her snapped Ada out of her reverie, and she reached up a shaking hand to tuck a strand of hair out of her vision and behind her ear. When she glanced up, hastily wiping at the tear on her cheek, she locked eyes with Alby. He was staring at her with a sort of morose understanding marring his strong features.

He hesitated a moment, studying her, and Ada hastily raised the spoon of stew to her lips, wincing as it scalded her tongue. George was determined to make the same stew as Carson had the day that he had died, adamant that it was one of the best ways he could think of to remember him. Since Ada was still very much banned from the kitchen, she had left him to his own devices, watching occasionally as he chopped vegetables and finely sliced meat.

She wouldn't mention to him that she had seen him crying when he had picked up Carson's bowl instead of his accidentally.

The stew wasn't bad either, which was the worst part. It was better than Carson's, but suddenly she longed for the vileness of his cooking again.

When she noticed that Alby hadn't stopped staring at her, her patience snapped, and she raised her eyes to his. "Can I help you with something?" She ground out through gritted teeth, placing the bowl onto the grass with more force than strictly necessary.

Alby remained silent for a moment longer before standing, his powerful body towering over hers. He extended his hand towards her. "Let's walk and talk."

Ada hesitated, eyes flickering to George and Avin, one of who was laughing and counting down from ten at a rapid rate as the other attempted to chug their bowl of stew before the counter ended. They seemed happy, content, and surely wouldn't notice if they slipped away for a while.

Ada nodded, ignoring his hand and rubbing her palms down her thighs as she stood, trying to mask the shaking in her fingers. When they had made it a safe distance from the other two, where the light from the bonfire and the fading day barely touched the thicket of trees on one side of them and the dew on the grass on the other, Alby turned his face down towards her.

"You miss them." He said simply, and it was the most simple statement in the world.

"Don't you?"

There was a beat of silence as Alby stared ahead of them, dark eyes clouded with thought. The grass crunched beneath their feet as they made their way towards the outer walls. "I don't know." He said eventually. "It's difficult to miss someone, to focus on that emotion, when all you can feel is everything else."

"Everything else?"

"Fear. I feel fear." When Ada rose an eyebrow at him, Alby tucked his hands into his pockets and continued. "We've been here for over three weeks. Nearly a month. I know you've been keeping count, I see the tally of days you've drawn on the back wall."

Ada hummed as she recognised her morning tradition, taking her dagger and carving a single line into the stone on the back wall of the glade. Just shy of 30 lines engraved into rock, barely nicks in the colossal structure.

"I guess what I'm trying to say is that with every passing day I'm losing hope of getting out of here."

Ada's head snapped up as she stopped in her tracks, wide eyes trained directly on Alby's face as he refused to meet her stare. "What?"

"Think about it, Ada." Alby stopped too, turning to face her. They were right next to the far wall now, Avin and George half way across the glade away from them. "You and Luke tried to escape through the maze, and Luke was killed. Carson tried to escape by climbing out, and he was killed. There are four of us left, we can't risk losing anyone else."

Ada hesitated, mouth agape, opening and closing as she fought for a response. "But- but, that- this can't just be it, we can't just be trapped! We have to have been put in here with a way out, we have to have been. Otherwise what was the point? What was the point of us being here, of losing Luke and Carson, what was the point of all of it?"

Alby lowered his gaze to his feet, expression drawn and dark. "Maybe there isn't a point. Maybe we're here for a reason, maybe it's a punishment. Maybe we did something, maybe we deserve to be here, maybe-"

"Maybe I don't want to sit and rot here for the rest of my days-"

"And maybe I don't want to die like Luke and Carson did, Ada!" Alby snapped, lifting his eyes back up to hers. "This place is dangerous, and I don't want to die not remembering who I am. I have three weeks worth of memories in my head, Luke and Carson had less than that. Luke had a day, he had lived for one day before he was butchered. I don't want that to happen to me, damnit!"

A heavy silence fell between them, and a single tear fell down Ada's cheek. Alby sighed and reached forward to wipe it away, but she flinched away from him.

He sighed again. His voice was a lot softer when he spoke again. "I don't want to die not knowing who I am and with no one to remember me."

"But people would remember you, Alby. George, Avin, and I, we would remember you." Ada clenched her teeth as she reached out tentatively, patting Alby's large bicep before quickly retracting her hand. "I know you feel alone here, but you are not. Luke and Carson, they're not here anymore, but we still remember them. I think about them every day, every day, and that's never going to change."

Alby looked at Ada, staring right into her eyes as she fought for him to fight. He waited a moment more, before clenching his teeth. "What if we die trying to get out?"

"Won't it be worse if we don't try? If there is a way out, and those bastards who put us here are waiting for us to find it, don't you think it would be worth fighting for that chance to get out of this? What if there are people out there waiting for us to come back? People who love us?"

A flash of blonde flickered through her mind, but the thought evaporated before it could take shape in her head.

There was a beat of silence, stretching heavily between the two as Alby's eyes flashed with conflict, before he clenched his jaw and nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, you're right." Alby's hand went to his waist as he pulled out the dagger he had gotten from the weapon's shack earlier that day. "But I don't want to be here and be forgotten if things go south."

With that, Alby turned to the wall next to them, lifting the blade to the stone and pressing in roughly.

"What are you doing?" Ada asked, looking up at him with a frown.

"These bastards put me in here, they made me suffer, made me forget who I am, but they let me keep one thing. They let me keep my name." He dug the blade further into the wall, wrenching it downward. It forced a horrible grinding sound from the surface as stone chipped away, but Alby simply gritted his teeth and pushed through until a letter A was clearly visible in the stone. "And I'm gonna make sure that stays, even if I don't."

He worked in silence for minutes, chipping away at stone and wrenching the dagger through rock until he stepped back, panting, swiping a hand over his brow.

There, carved deeply into the surface of the back wall, considerably paler than the rest of the stone, was his name written in big sloppy letters.

Alby

He smiled, before turning to Ada and flipping the dagger in his hand, extending the hilt out to her. "Your turn."

She hesitated for just a moment before smiling and snatching the dagger from his hands. "You're crazy." She laughed, lifting the tip of the blade into the stone and carving out the first letter of her name.

"Hey George, Avin, get over here!" Alby called over his shoulder, cupping one hand around his mouth, and Ada smiled as she lowered her hand and stared at her handiwork.

Just under Alby's and slightly to the right, her name sat at a slight slant, the writing slightly neater and paler than his.

Ada

Footsteps thundered over to them, and George and Avin appeared right next to them. "What, you guys think we're gonna forget our names next?" George joked, reaching out and rubbing his thumb over the letter A in Ada's name.

"Shut up and take the knife, you shank." Alby chuckled, thrusting the blade out towards George and laughing when he dodged it with a mocking gasp.

As George and Avin each carved their names into the wall, Ada watched in silence, a small smile on her face as she stared at the letters of their names permanently marked into stone. She imagined this remaining even when they didn't, she imagined a group of kids similar to herself exploring the glade and finding their names carved onto the rock, wondering who could have made such a claim, what their lives had been like, where they were now.

Eventually, the four of them stepped back, staring at the wall in silence.

Alby Ada George Avin

All in different spaces on the wall, each in different writing, each different sizes.

A permanent mark from non permanent people.

But it felt wrong, seeing their names side by side without the two people who had been with them when it all began.

Ada frowned and reached forward, taking the dagger out of Avin's hand and moving back towards the wall. She ignored Alby's question of what she was doing and lifted the dagger to the stone, face determined as she carved two more names.

Luke Carson

Just underneath Avin's name and to the left, the two finally rejoined where they belonged. "To make sure we don't forget what they sacrificed." Ada said eventually, handing the blade back to Alby and staring at their names, all six of them, together, side by side, as they had been when the box came up.

Avin smiled sadly to himself. "It's almost like they're still with us."

Alby smiled too, for a moment, but then a sad frown darkened his expression. "But they're not. They died for us. To get us out of here, to keep us safe." Alby turned the knife over in his hand before walking back up to the wall, raising the blade to Luke's name and halting for a moment before chipping a straight line right through the middle, crossing it out. "We can't forget that."

He quickly did the same to Carson's, and Ada stared as the difference became prominent.

Alby Ada George L̶u̶k̶e̶ Avin C̶a̶r̶s̶o̶n̶

Gone, but not forgotten. Their deaths, their sacrifices, highlighted as well as remembered.

Ada felt a sudden surge of anger, a burst of hatred for those who had put them there, for those who had sentenced them to this fresh form of torture. "We're going to get out of here. We're going to escape. For them. And for the people out there who might be missing us, wanting us to come home." She turned to the other three, who were watching her with apprehensive expressions.

Alby's lips pursed. "We fight to get out. If we need to play their game, then that's what we're going to do."

Avin paled. "You don't mean-"

"Oh yes." Ada nodded. She turned to Alby, eyes dancing with newfound vigour. "We're going back into the maze."

—

Ada and Alby were hovering by the entrance of the maze long before the doors even opened the next morning. The sky was still a periwinkle that promised daylight within the hour, and the morning dew on the grass clung to their shoes and crunched beneath their feet as they paced before the wall.

George yawned heavily, leaning against the wall with his arms and legs crossed, head resting on the stone. "Why did you guys insist on doing this so early?"

Avin, who was sitting on the grass and leaning against George's legs, promptly let out a large snore, his head drooping down onto his shoulder. Ada scoffed and moved forward to kick him in the shin.

"Because, doofus, we need to start mapping this place out and that's going to take a long time." She shrugged, running her fingers through her hair to form some semblance of a ponytail. She secured it with the piece of cloth she had torn off one of the shirts that came up with her in the box. The ends brushed her upper back and tickled her shoulders as she hopped from one foot to the other in order to remain awake. Alby, standing beside her, was twitching anxiously and staring intently at the closed doors.

George lifted his head, eyes flickering between the two, shoulders tense. "Look, on a real note, I really don't know if it's a good idea to go back in there." He pushed off the wall, accidentally dislodging Avin from where he was once again sleeping against his leg, sending him falling backwards onto the damp grass with a cry of indignation. "I mean, it's so early, what if those things that killed Luke are still out there? What if you run into one and don't make it back? I mean, call me crazy but I don't exactly think me and Avin are equipped to survive here by ourselves if you two go and get yourselves killed."

Avin nodded nervously. "He makes a good point. We don't have a whole lot of food left, and that farm system we have going isn't exactly a two man job."

Ada and Alby shared a loaded glance before looking back at the others. "We'll make it back. Promise." Alby said, eyes flickering towards the wall with their names carved into the stone. His eyes flashed with determination. "We'll make it back."

George sighed in defeat, turning around and bending over to pick something up from the ground. He turned back to them with two small rucksacks, and Ada found that they were light and likely easy to run with when she opened hers with a questioning frown. "It's food and water." George nodded. "Just enough to keep you going until you get back."

Ada looked at him a bit closer and saw the fear swirling inside his eyes. "George," she smiled, "we're gonna be okay. We'll be gone for a matter of hours, we'll be back before the sky gets dark again."

"I know, but-"

"I understand why you're worried, but we're gonna be fine. We're taking as many precautions as possible and we need to do this."

"Okay. Yeah, I know, I just- look, just don't forget to stay hydrated. And don't forget to take the time to stop and rest if you get too tired. And don't forget to eat either, you need to keep your energy up. And-"

Alby rolled his eyes and Ada let out a barking laugh, smiling as she swung her rucksack onto her shoulders. "Yes, mom."

George frowned and opened his mouth to argue, but before he could a horrible sound split their ears, a deafening crunching and grinding of stone against stone as the doors forcibly pulled themselves apart, the movement shaking the ground at the their feet and sending a strong gust of stale air thundering through the entrance. It lifted the hair at her back, her ponytail whipping behind her, and made the hairs on her arms stand on end as the first corridor to the maze was revealed, dark and threatening, like a gaping mouth eagerly awaiting the sweetness of their demise.

Alby stood up straighter, tilting his chin upwards and facing the entrance to the maze as if he were facing a firing squad instead of a deserted corridor. "Okay, you ready?"

Ada nodded, bouncing anxiously on the balls of her feet. "Yeah. Let's do this."

With one last glance back at the glade and the two boys hovering anxiously at its exit, they headed into the maze.

—

Ada's feet pounded against the concrete, a steady rhythm that pulsed through her blood and echoed in every nerve ending. The walls were nothing more than grey blurs with splashes of green as her and Alby made another left turn, then a right, then left again, left, right, left, right. She paused momentarily to grasp at the pencil and paper they had brought with them, mapping out the twists and turns that she and Alby had taken since their departure from the glade.

Alby skidded to a stop beside her, panting slightly, clothes sticking to sweat-slicked skin as he reached into his bag and withdrew his water. He took a long gulp, a trickle of water sliding down his chin. Ada chuckled as she leant against the wall, stretching out her right leg. "Easy, champ, or you'll run out before we get back."

Alby lowered his bottle, glaring at her good-naturedly. "Speaking of, we should probably be heading back soon."

Ada looked down at her map, tracing the long line she had made across the page with her finger, mapping the sharp twists and turns that it made. They had gone the opposite direction of what they had when they last ran the maze searching for Luke, but it was hard to keep track with the maze changing every night. She grabbed the pencil and scribbled the date Day 30 on the top of the page, and then turned the map upside down so they could follow the route back to the glade without getting lost.

"How long have we been running for?" She asked, reaching into her own bag to remove the sandwich George had made them. She smiled when she saw that it was cut perfectly down the middle, as if George had taken great care in making sure each side was even. She knew that he felt powerless and that this was his own way of showing effort, and it warmed her heart instantly.

"Around five hours. I reckon it's about midday now. If we head back in about ten minutes we'll be able to make it back before the doors close." Alby responded.

Ada nodded and tucked into her food, relishing the taste of cheese and chopped tomato from the vegetable patch that George and Avin attended to each day. She stared idly up at the maze walls, mapping the colossal towers of stone and ivy with her mind. "So, how exactly are we planning on keeping track of what's what if the maze changes every day?"

Alby shrugged. "I figured maybe there's a pattern to it. Surely it's not just random movements each night. With machinery this size there has to be a pattern." He reached for the paper, tapping the date at the top. "Every day we'll come in here, map a route that's similar to the one we did the day before, and see how big the change is. Over time we might see a pattern."

"That's gonna take a long time." Ada huffed.

Alby's face tightened in a painful grimace. "Yeah, well, time is the one thing we aren't exactly short of."

Ada nodded ruefully and turned her face to the side when her eyes caught on something in the distance. The corridor they were in opened up to a sort of wider section, with a gigantic wall stretching slightly higher than the others right in the middle. What had attracted her attention was the large red 4 sprayed onto the wall in chipped spray paint.

"Alby." She kicked his foot, standing quickly and jerking her head towards the number. "Look." It was easily as large as her body, clearly significant. Meant to be seen.

But what did it mean?

"Four?" Alby echoed, brow furrowed. "Did any of the other walls have numbers on it?"

"No." Ada shook her head. The walls they had passed earlier were nothing more than blurs of grey and green. "We would have seen a giant red number if we'd passed one. Kind of hard to miss."

"What do you think it means?"

"No idea." She shrugged. "Pass me that." Taking the paper off Alby, she scribbled the number 4 at the end of the line that marked their route. "So this route leads to number four. Good to know. Do you think other areas of the maze have different numbers or something?"

"Possibly." Alby frowned. "I guess it makes sense... sort of."

A phantom wind blew through the maze, lifting the hairs on her arms and sending goosebumps spiralling across her flesh. She looked up at the sky, a pale blue that symbolised the colour was at its lightest and would only grow darker. "We should head back. Tell George and Avin what we found."

Alby nodded, and Ada spared one last calculating look at the strange number before turning her back to the wall, sprinting back in the direction that they came.

—

The glade was in chaos.

There truly was no other word for it.

Before they had even reached the exit to the maze, the sound of a blaring siren pierced their ears. It was deafening, the sound stretching the length of the glade and rattling off the walls that encircled it. George and Avin were hovering anxiously in the centre, hands clamped over their ears, mouths moving frantically as they argued.

Ada couldn't make out what they were saying over the racket.

"What the hell?" Alby asked aimlessly, breaking into a sprint as he made his way over to the other two. Ada hastened to catch up with him. "What's going on?"

"No idea!" George yelled over the noise. He removed one hand from his ears and gestured to the hole where the box had transported them to their hell. "This red light just started flashing and the siren went off! Hasn't shut up for about twenty minutes now!"

"We didn't know whether to come find you or what, but the doors are locked!"

Ada, brow furrowed, moved towards the box hole and grabbed at the handles in the centre. They had been opened many times in the last month to reveal the box, taking the supplies one by one from inside, but never before had the doors been locked. She tugged aimlessly at the handles, face washed in the red light of the flashing bulb next to the doors.

"He's right, they won't open."

"What the hell? Have they ever done that before?"

"If they'd done this before we wouldn't be panicking this much!" George rolled his eyes, clamping one hand on Avin's shoulder and using the other to gesture at the light, his pale face screwed up with discomfort.

"Okay, okay," Ada straightened, raising her hands in surrender. "Let's all calm down. I mean surely there's a reason this is happening, we just need to figure out --"

The siren abruptly cut off, and a silence more deafening than the alarm descended over the glade, as if someone had smothered the sound with a blanket and drowned out any sign of life. Ada's bones rattled with the force of it.

"Okay I'm seriously starting to freak out now." Avin whispered, the sound breaking the silence like a bullet through glass.

There was a moment of hesitation before Ada reached down to pat his head, withdrawing her hand quickly. "It'll be fine, I'm sure everything is fine. They clearly wanted our attention for something, and now that the doors to the box are locked-"

"They're not locked."

Ada turned around, a frown on her face, only to see Alby leaning over the doors, wiggling one of the handles.

"They're unlocked. Same as usual."

"What? That's not possible, I literally just checked." Ada left Avin's side to join Alby, reaching down to wiggle the handle the same way he had. Whereas before it was unmovable, now the handle gave free to the pressure of her grip easily. "How the-"

"Open it." George said, and three pairs of eyes landed on him. "Whoever put us here clearly did something with the box. The siren, locking the doors, unlocking them when the siren went off," he listed, "clearly something's changed with it."

Ada and Alby locked eyes, and there was a moment of brief hesitation before she nodded jerkily, tightening her grip on the handle. Alby did the same, and the doors gave way, opening as usual as if nothing had changed.

"What the-"

Whereas before the box was empty, void of anything for the past month, now boxes and crates lined the sides of it, stacked on top of one another, mirroring the ones that had initially come up with them when they first arrived.

But there, huddled together in the middle of the box, hands raised to shield their eyes from the harsh glare of fresh light, were four teenage boys.

George staggered backwards, face pale, and Alby abruptly dropped the door he was holding open. It clattered to the stone with a sickening crunch, but Ada couldn't focus on anything other than the four pairs of terrified eyes flickering between her and the gladers.

"Who the hell are you guys?" One of the boys asked, his voice shaking with fear.

Ada and Alby shared a heavy glance before the latter crouched down in front of the box, extending a hand to the nearest kid.

"Hey there newbies. Welcome to the glade."