Lights blazed throughout the Homestead. Gladers ran about, everyone talking at once. A couple
of boys cried in a corner. Chaos ruled.
Thomas ignored all of it.
He ran into the hallway, then leaped down the stairs three at a time. He pushed his way
through a crowd in the foyer, tore out of the Homestead and toward the West Door, sprinting. He
pulled up just short of the threshold of the Maze, his instincts forcing him to think twice about
entering. Newt called to him from behind, delaying the decision.
“Minho followed it out there!” Thomas yelled when Newt caught up to him, a small towel
pressed against the wound on his head. A patchy spot of blood had already seeped through the
white material.
“I saw,” Newt said, pulling the towel away to look at it; he grimaced and put it back. “Shuck
it, that hurts like a mother. Minho must’ve finally fried his last bit of brain cells—not to mention
Gally. Always knew he was crazy.”
Thomas could only worry about Minho. “I’m going after him.”
“Time to be a bloody hero again?”
Thomas looked at Newt sharply, hurt by the rebuke. “You think I do things to impress you
shanks? Please. All I care about is getting out of here.”
“Yeah, well, you’re a regular toughie. But right now we’ve got worse problems.”
“What?” Thomas knew if he wanted to catch up with Minho he had no time for this.
“Somebody—” Newt began.
“There he is!” Thomas shouted. Minho had just turned a corner up ahead and was coming
straight for them. Thomas cupped his hands. “What were you doing, idiot!”
Minho waited until he made it back through the Door, then bent over, hands on his knees, and
sucked in a few breaths before answering. “I just … wanted to … make sure.”
“Make sure of what?” Newt asked. “Lotta good you’d be, taken with Gally.”
Minho straightened and put his hands on his hips, still breathing heavily. “Slim it, boys! I just
wanted to see if they went toward the Cliff. Toward the Griever Hole.”
“And?” Thomas said.
“Bingo.” Minho wiped sweat from his forehead.
“I just can’t believe it,” Newt said, almost whispering. “What a night.”
Thomas’s thoughts tried to drift toward the Hole and what it all meant, but he couldn’t shake
the thought of what Newt had been about to say before they saw Minho return. “What were you
about to tell me?” he asked. “You said we had worse—”
“Yeah.” Newt pointed his thumb over his shoulder. “You can still see the buggin’ smoke.”
Thomas looked in that direction. The heavy metal door of the Map Room was slightly ajar, a
wispy trail of black smoke drifting out and into the gray sky.
“Somebody burned the Map trunks,” Newt said. “Every last one of ’em.”
For some reason, Thomas didn’t care about the Maps that much—they seemed pointless anyway.
He stood outside the window of the Slammer, having left Newt and Minho when they went to
investigate the sabotage of the Map Room. Thomas had noticed them exchange an odd look
before they split up, almost as if communicating some secret with their eyes. But Thomas could
think of only one thing.
“Teresa?” he asked.
Her face appeared, hands rubbing her eyes. “Was anybody killed?” she asked, somewhat
groggy.
“Were you sleeping?” Thomas asked. He was relieved to see that she appeared okay, felt
himself relax.
“I was,” she responded. “Until I heard something shred the Homestead to bits. What
happened?”
Thomas shook his head in disbelief. “I don’t know how you could’ve slept through the sound
of all those Grievers out here.”
“You try coming out of a coma sometime. See how you do.” Now answer my question, she
said inside his head.
Thomas blinked, momentarily surprised by the voice since she hadn’t done it in a while. “Cut
that junk out.”
“Just tell me what happened.”
Thomas sighed; it was such a long story, and he didn’t feel like telling the whole thing. “You
don’t know Gally, but he’s a psycho kid who ran away. He showed up, jumped on a Griever, and
they all took off into the Maze. It was really weird.” He still couldn’t believe it had actually
happened.
“Which is saying a lot,” Teresa said.
“Yeah.” He looked behind him, hoping to see Alby somewhere. Surely he’d let Teresa out
now. Gladers were scattered all over the complex, but there was no sign of their leader. He
turned back to Teresa. “I just don’t get it. Why would the Grievers have left after getting Gally?
He said something about them killing us one a night until we were all dead—he said it at least
twice.”
Teresa put her hands through the bars, rested her forearms against the concrete sill. “Just one a
night? Why?”
“I don’t know. He also said it had to do with … trials. Or variables. Something like that.”
Thomas had the same strange urge he’d had the night before—to reach out and take one of her
hands. He stopped himself, though.
“Tom, I was thinking about what you told me I said. That the Maze is a code. Being holed up
in here does wonders for making the brain do what it was made for.”
“What do you think it means?” Intensely interested, he tried to block out the shouts and chatter
rumbling through the Glade as others found out about the Map Room being burned.
“Well, the walls move every day, right?”
“Yeah.” He could tell she was really on to something.
“And Minho said they think there’s a pattern, right?”
“Right.” Gears were starting to shift into place inside Thomas’s head as well, almost as if a
prior memory was beginning to break loose.
“Well, I can’t remember why I said that to you about the code. I know when I was coming out
of the coma all sorts of thoughts and memories swirled through my head like crazy, almost as if I
could feel someone emptying my mind, sucking them out. And I felt like I needed to say that
thing about the code before I lost it. So there must be an important reason.”
Thomas almost didn’t hear her—he was thinking harder than he had in a while. “They always
compare each section’s Map to the one from the day before, and the day before that, and the day
before that, day by day, each Runner just analyzing their own Section. What if they’re supposed
to compare the Maps to other sections …” He trailed off, feeling like he was on the cusp of
something.
Teresa seemed to ignore him, doing her own theorizing. “The first thing the word code makes
me think of is letters. Letters in the alphabet. Maybe the Maze is trying to spell something.”
Everything came together so quickly in Thomas’s mind, he almost heard an audible click, as if
the pieces all snapped into place at once. “You’re right—you’re right! But the Runners have
been looking at it wrong this whole time. They’ve been analyzing it the wrong way!”
Teresa gripped the bars now, her knuckles white, her face pressed against the iron rods.
“What? What’re you talking about?”
Thomas grabbed the two bars outside of where she held on, moved close enough to smell
her—a surprisingly pleasant scent of sweat and flowers. “Minho said the patterns repeat
themselves, only they can’t figure out what it means. But they’ve always studied them section by
section, comparing one day to the next. What if each day is a separate piece of the code, and
they’re supposed to use all eight sections together somehow?”
“You think maybe each day is trying to reveal a word?” Teresa asked. “With the wall
movements?”
Thomas nodded. “Or maybe a letter a day, I don’t know. But they’ve always thought the
movements would reveal how to escape, not spell something. They’ve been studying it like a
map, not like a picture of something. We’ve gotta—” Then he stopped, remembering what he’d
just been told by Newt. “Oh, no.”
Teresa’s eyes flared with worry. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh no oh no oh no …” Thomas let go of the bars and stumbled back a step as the realization
hit him. He turned to look at the Map Room. The smoke had lessened, but it still wafted out the
door, a dark, hazy cloud covering the entire area.
“What’s wrong?” Teresa repeated. She couldn’t see the Map Room from her angle.
Thomas faced her again. “I didn’t think it mattered….”
“What!” she demanded.
“Someone burned all the Maps. If there was a code, it’s gone.”
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