woke up, the whole place fell to pieces. She even admitted she triggered something.”
“He’s got a point,” Newt said.
Thomas gestured through the door at Teresa. “We can trust her. Every time I’ve talked to her, it’s something about trying to get out of here. She was sent here just like the rest of us-it’s stupid to think she’s responsible for any of this.”
Newt grunted. “Then what the bloody shuck did she mean by sayin’ she triggered something?”
Thomas shrugged, refusing to admit that Newt had a good point. There had to be an explanation. “Who knows-her mind was doing all kinds of weird stuff when she woke up. Maybe we all went through that in the Box, talking gibberish before we came totally awake. Just let her out.”
Newt and Minho exchanged a long look.
“Come on,” Thomas insisted. “What’s she gonna do, run around and stab every Glader to death? Come on.”
Minho sighed. “Fine. Just let the stupid girl out.”
“I’m not stupid!” Teresa shouted, her voice muffled by the walls. “And I can hear every word you morons are saying!”
Newt’s eyes widened. “Real sweet girl you picked up, Tommy.”
“Just hurry,” Thomas said. “I’m sure we have a lot to do before the Grievers come back tonight-if they don’t come during the day.”
Newt grunted and stepped up to the Slammer, pulling his keys out as he did so. A few clinks later the door swung wide open. “Come on.”
Teresa walked out of the small building, glowering at Newt as she passed him. She gave a just-as-unpleasant glance toward Minho, then stopped to stand right next to Thomas. Her arm brushed against his; tingles shot across his skin, and he felt mortally embarrassed.
“All right, talk,” Minho said. “What’s so important?”
Thomas looked at Teresa, wondering how to say it.
“What?” she said. “You talk-they obviously think I’m a serial killer.”
“Yeah, you look so dangerous,” Thomas muttered, but he turned his attention to Newt and Minho. “Okay, when Teresa was first coming out of her deep sleep, she had memories flashing through her mind. She, um”-he just barely stopped himself from saying she’d said it inside his mind-”she told me later that she remembers that the Maze is a code . That maybe instead of solving it to find a way out, it’s trying to send us a message.”
“A code?” Minho asked. “How’s it a code?”
Thomas shook his head, wishing he could answer. “I don’t know for sure-you’re way more familiar with the Maps than I am. But I have a theory. That’s why I was hoping you guys could remember some of them.”
Minho glanced at Newt, his eyebrows raised in question. Newt nodded.
“What?” Thomas asked, fed up with them keeping information from him. “You guys keep acting like you have a secret.”
Minho rubbed his eyes with both hands, took a deep breath. “We hid the Maps, Thomas.”
At first it didn’t compute. “Huh?”
Minho pointed at the Homestead. “We hid the freaking Maps in the weapons room, put dummies in their place. Because of Alby’s warning. And because of the so-called Ending your girlfriend triggered.”
Thomas was so excited to hear this news he temporarily forgot how awful things had become. He remembered Minho acting suspicious the day before, saying he had a special assignment. Thomas looked over at Newt, who nodded.
“They’re all safe and sound,” Minho said. “Every last one of those suckers. So if you have a theory, get talking.”
“Take me to them,” Thomas said, itching to have a look.
“Okay, let’s go.”
CHAPTER 42
Minho switched on the light, making Thomas squint for a second until his eyes got used to it. Menacing shadows clung to the boxes of weapons scattered across the table and floor, blades and sticks and other nasty- looking devices seeming to wait there, ready to take on a life of their own and kill the first person stupid enough to come close. The dank, musty smell only added to the creepy feel of the room.
“There’s a hidden storage closet back here,” Minho explained, walking past some shelves into a dark corner. “Only a couple of us know about it.”
Thomas heard the creak of an old wooden door, and then Minho was dragging a cardboard box across the floor; the scrape of it sounded like a knife on bone. “I put each trunk’s worth in its own box, eight boxes total. They’re all in there.”
“Which one is this?” Thomas asked; he knelt down next to it, eager to get started.
“Just open it and see-each page is marked, remember?”
Thomas pulled on the crisscrossed lid flaps until they popped open. The Maps for Section Two lay in a messy heap. Thomas reached in and pulled out a stack.
“Okay,” he said. “The Runners have always compared these day to day, looking to see if there was a pattern that would somehow help figure out a way to an exit. You even said you didn’t really know what you were looking for, but you kept studying them anyway. Right?”
Minho nodded, arms folded. He looked as if someone were about to reveal the secret of immortal life.
“Well,” Thomas continued, “what if all the wall movements had nothing to do with a map or a maze or anything like that? What if instead the pattern spelled words? Some kind of clue that’ll help us escape.”
Minho pointed at the Maps in Thomas’s hand, letting out a frustrated sigh. “Dude, you have any idea how much we’ve studied these things? Don’t you think we would’ve noticed if it were spelling out freaking words?”
“Maybe it’s too hard to see with the naked eye, just comparing one day to the next. And maybe you weren’t supposed to compare one day to the next, but look at it one day at a time?”
Newt laughed. “Tommy, I might not be the sharpest guy in the Glade, but sounds like you’re talkin’ straight out your butt to me.”
While he’d been talking, Thomas’s mind had been spinning even faster. The answer was within his grasp-he knew he was almost there. It was just so hard to put into words.
“Okay, okay,” he said, starting over. “You’ve always had one Runner assigned to one section, right?”
“Right,” Minho replied. He seemed genuinely interested and ready to understand.
“And that Runner makes a Map every day, and then compares it to Maps from previous days, for that section. What if, instead, you were supposed to compare the eight sections to each other, every day? Each day being a separate clue or code? Did you ever compare sections to other sections?”
Minho rubbed his chin, nodding. “Yeah, kind of. We tried to see if they made something when put together-of course we did that. We’ve tried everything.”
Thomas pulled his legs up underneath him, studying the Maps in his lap. He could just barely see the lines of the Maze written on the second page through the page resting on top. In that instant, he knew what they had to do. He looked up at the others.
“Wax paper.”
“Huh?” Minho asked. “What the-”
“Just trust me. We need wax paper and scissors. And every black marker and pencil you can find.”
Frypan wasn’t too happy having a whole box of his wax paper rolls taken away from him, especially with their supplies being cut off. He argued that it was one of the things he always requested, that he used it for baking. They finally had to tell him what they needed it for to convince him to give it up.
After ten minutes of hunting down pencils and markers-most had been in the Map Room and were destroyed in the fire-Thomas sat around the worktable in the weapons basement with Newt, Minho and Teresa. They hadn’t found any scissors, so Thomas had grabbed the sharpest knife he could find.
“This better be good,” Minho said. Warning laced his voice, but his eyes showed some interest.
