Chapter 40 Chapter 40 Chaos everywhere

The lights were turned on in the big house, and after the ghost fire beast left, everyone immediately talked with each other.Two boys were crying in a corner, and there was chaos. Thomas ignored it. He ran into the corridor, rushed down the stairs in three steps at a time, squeezed through the crowd in the front hall, ran out of the big room, and ran towards the west door.He stopped at the edge of the maze, his instincts forcing him to think twice before entering the maze.Newt called him after him, delaying his decision. "Minho followed it!" Thomas shouted.Newt came up to him, covering his wounded head with a small towel, the white of which had been soaked by a pool of blood.

"I see," Newt said, pulling off the towel, taking a look, grimacing, and putting it back on his back, "Damn it, the wound hurts. Minho must have burned the last of his brain cells, and more Let alone Gary, we all know he's always been crazy." Thomas was only worried about Minho. "I'm going after him." "Are you going to be a hero again?" Thomas gave Newt a sharp look, hurt by the accusation. "You think I do things to impress people? Come on, all I care about is getting out of here." "Yeah, well, you're pretty tough, but now we've got worse problems to deal with."

"What?" Thomas knew that if he wanted to catch up with Minho, he couldn't waste time. "Someone..." Newt said. "There he is!" Thomas yelled.Minho just turned a corner and came towards them.Thomas put his hands to his mouth and called, "What are you doing, idiot?" Minho persisted in running through the gate, and then he bent down, put his hands on his knees, and took a few breaths before answering, "I just... hope... for confirmation." "Confirm what?" Newt asked. "If only you were taken with Gary." Minho straightened up with his hands on his hips, still out of breath. "Come on, fellas! I just wanted to see if they were headed for the cliff, in the direction of the will-o'-the-wisp."

"And what happened?" Thomas asked. "Confirm." Minho wiped the sweat from his forehead. "Unbelievable," Newt said quietly, "what a night." Thomas was thinking about the will-o'-the-wisp, and what it all meant, but he couldn't forget what Newt had said before Minho came back. "What were you going to tell me just now?" he asked. "You said we had worse..." "That's right," Newt pointed back with his thumb. "You can still see the smoke." Thomas looked in the direction he pointed. The heavy metal door of the map room was slightly open, and a puff of black smoke was coming out of it, drifting into the gray sky.

"Someone burned the map boxes," Newt said. "All the maps." For some reason, Thomas didn't care that much about the maps—they seemed pointless.He stood outside the prison window while Newt and Minho went to investigate the damage in the map room.Thomas noticed that before parting with them, they exchanged a strange look, as if some kind of secret communication with the eyes, but Thomas could only think of one thing at the moment. "Theresa?" he asked. Her face appeared, rubbing her eyes with both hands. "Is anyone dead?" she asked, looking dazed.

"Are you asleep?" Thomas asked.Seeing that she was okay, he breathed a sigh of relief and relaxed. "Yes," she answered, "until I heard something tear the house to pieces. What happened?" Thomas shook his head in disbelief. "I don't understand, with so many ghost fire beasts appearing, you can still fall asleep." "Just wake up from your coma and see how you do." Now answer my question.she said in his head. Thomas blinked, surprised by Teresa's voice, which she hadn't done in a while. "Turn that thing off." "Tell me what happened."

Thomas sighed. It was a long story, and he didn't want to tell the whole thing from beginning to end. "You don't know Gary yet. He's a crazy kid who ran away. He showed up at night, jumped on a Grief, and was led into a maze. It's all too weird." He still couldn't believe what had just happened. matter. "It says a lot," Teresa said. "Yeah." He looked behind him, hoping to find Alby somewhere.Now he will definitely let Teresa go.The Gladers were scattered, but their leader was nowhere to be seen, and he looked back at Teresa. "I just don't understand. Why did the Griever leave after Gary was caught? He said something: They will kill one of us every day until they kill us all. And he said it at least twice."

Teresa stuck her hands over the bars and rested her arms on the concrete window sill. "Only kill one a day? Why?" "I don't know. He also said it had something to do with...experiments, or mutations, or something like that." Thomas had the same strange urge to hold her hand the night before.However, he controlled himself. "Tom, I'm thinking about what I said, what you told me. The maze is a code, and being locked up here does allow the brain to do its best work." "What do you think that would mean?" Thomas was intrigued, and he tried to ignore the shouts and voices coming from the glade—the fact that the map room had burned down was discovered by everyone.

"Well, the walls move every day, don't they?" "That's right." He had a premonition that she was about to say something important. "And Minho said that there is some kind of pattern in it, right?" "That's right." An outline gradually appeared in Thomas's mind, as if the previous memory began to break free. "Well, I can't remember why I mentioned any code to you. I know that when I woke up from the coma, all kinds of thoughts rushed through my head like crazy, and I seemed to feel that someone was Clears my mind, sucks everything out. I feel like I have to mention the code before I forget it. So, there must be something important behind it.”

Thomas barely heard what she was saying—he was thinking hard. "They've been comparing the map of each district with the previous day, and the previous day with the previous day, day after day. Each walker is just analyzing their own area. If they should have compared the map with other areas Comparing..." His voice trailed off, feeling that something was about to come out. Teresa ignored him and continued with her deduction. "The word code first makes me think of letters, letters of the alphabet, and maybe the maze is trying to spell something." All kinds of thoughts quickly gathered in Thomas' mind, and he seemed to hear a clear click, and all the fragments suddenly merged together in an instant. "You're right—you're right! Walkers have been getting it wrong all along, they're analyzing it the wrong way!"

Tereza gripped the iron bars until her knuckles turned white.She pressed her face against the bars. "What? What are you talking about?" Thomas grabbed the iron bar where she was holding it, and leaned in close enough to smell her—an amazing mix of sweat and flowers. "Minho said that the pattern keeps repeating, but they can't understand the meaning. However, they have been analyzing in partitions, comparing day by day. If each day is a part of the code, if they put all How about gathering the eight districts of the city together to see it?" "You mean, maybe revealing a word every day?" Teresa asked, "as the wall moves?" Thomas nodded. "Or a letter a day, I don't know. But they have always thought that the change in the wall would reveal a way of escape, not what was being spelled. They studied it as a map, not as a picture. We Gotta—" He paused at this point, suddenly remembering what Newt had just told him, "Oh, no." Teresa's eyes flickered with concern. "What's wrong?" "No, no, no..." Thomas let go of the bars and took a step back.Reality hit him hard.He looked back to the map room.The smoke had shrunk, but was still wafting from the door, a black cloud of smoke covering the sky. "What's wrong?" Teresa asked again.The map room cannot be seen from her vantage point. Thomas looked back at her. "I don't think it matters anymore..." "What?" she asked. "Someone burned all the maps. If there was any code hidden in there, it's gone."