The First Glader

3

She tied it off with her teeth.

The bleeding slowed.

But the trembling didn't.

Ada leaned forward on her knees, breathing through waves of nausea and shock, her hair falling messily around her face, damp with sweat. Her whole body felt like it had been hollowed out and left to fill with trembling. She stayed there for a long moment, letting the shaking run its course.

When she finally lifted her head, the world looked different.

The Glade didn't feel safe.
Didn't feel welcoming.
Didn't feel like a place she had survived.

It felt like a place she had returned to. A prison she had escaped back into.

She looked at the Maze.

The early morning sun couldn't hide its darkness — the deep lines of the walls, the cracks filled with shadow, the vastness of the corridors she never should've gone into. Her heart spasmed.

She turned away.

She walked back to her shelter on stiff legs, every part of her aching. Her bicep throbbed with every heartbeat, warm blood slowly seeping through the makeshift bandage. She reached her lean-to and sank onto the crude platform she called a bed.

Then, finally — the adrenaline broke.

Ada curled onto her side, pulling her knees against her chest, her injured arm pressed carefully across her stomach. A sharp breath escaped her in a trembling gasp. Her vision blurred again — not from the head injury this time, but from something far more quiet, far more dangerous.

She started to cry.

Not loud, not sobbing, not like a child or someone begging for help. The sound that left her was soft, almost silent — a cracked exhale, a shudder of breath trying and failing to stay even. Tears slipped down her nose and soaked into the blanket beneath her. She pressed her face into her arm to hide the sound from no one but herself.

She cried until the shaking eased.
Until her breathing steadied.
Until she remembered she was alone, and crying didn't buy her anything.

Then she stopped.

The wound still burned. Her ribs still ached. Her shoulders throbbed from slamming into walls at speeds her body wasn't built for.

But she got up.

She dragged her crates beneath the shade.
Sorted every item with shaking hands.
Found charcoal and began sketching.

The Maze was fresh in her mind — its twists, its turns, every dark corridor she had sprinted through with death scraping at her heels. She drew them shakily, messy at first, then steadier as the hours passed. She mapped each turn she remembered, marking the narrow passage where she'd been sliced open.

She noted what walls had shifted from earlier days.
Where the creature had chased her fastest.
Where the sounds had echoed strangely.

Her injury wept blood again by midday. She rewrapped it, wincing through clenched teeth.

By evening, a crude outline of the Maze's first section lay across a flat piece of wood.

Ada stared at it long after the sun went down.

She didn't sleep.

Couldn't.

Every time she closed her eyes, she saw glowing eyes in the dark. Metal limbs scraping. The sudden burst of pain as the creature caught her arm.

So she kept moving.

She boiled water to clean the wound again.
She checked on the chickens, the goat.
She strengthened her shelter.
She worked her body until it was too tired to shake.

She didn't trust the walls of her shelter to keep anything out, but the activity gave her a rhythm. And rhythm gave her control. And control kept the fear from swallowing her whole.

By the time the sun rose the next morning, Ada had aged. Not in her face — her features remained the same. But her eyes carried something new. Something hard. Something hollow.

The Maze had taken something from her.

It didn't matter that she'd lived.

She wasn't the same girl who had run inside.
And she would never be again.

She stood at the edge of the clearing, staring at the Maze, the rough bandage around her arm stiff with dried blood.

"I'm not done," she whispered.

The Maze did not answer.

But the air felt heavier, as if listening.

Ada stepped back, letting the early light warm her skin. She swallowed hard, bracing herself for whatever came next.

She was alone.

But she would map it.
She would understand it.
She would survive it.

She did not know that the next time the Box rose, she wouldn't be alone anymore.
That a boy named Nick would climb out and change everything.

For now, she only knew the truth the Maze had carved into her with its claw:

She was alive.

And she would have to prove it again.