The First Glader

25

The Map Room was the only place in the Glade that ever felt truly quiet. Not silent—never silent, not with the low hum of distant walls shifting or the soft hiss of wind squeezing through cracks—but quiet enough that Ada could hear her own breathing.

And tonight, that was too loud.

She lit a single lantern and set it on the table. Shadows stretched long across the walls where countless sheets of parchment were pinned—charcoal lines tracing routes she could run in her sleep. Routes she had run. Again and again. Until her legs shook. Until her lungs burned. Until she could feel the Maze's turns like phantom limbs.

Ada sat slowly, palms flat on the table, staring down at the largest map spread before her.

Every corridor.
Every dead end.
Every open square.
Every possible route.

Every place someone had died.

She should have been numb to it by now.

But the ache was still there. Lying quiet. Coiled. Waiting.

Ada pulled in a shaky breath and began what she always did: not drawing new routes, not adding new information—they hadn't found anything new in over a year—but searching again.

Searching for what she'd missed.

She took a piece of charcoal and began retracing lines. "Left turn here... curve widens here... opens to a dead end here..."

Her voice dropped to a whisper. She wasn't talking to anyone. She just needed to hear it.

"These three sections loop back. It's impossible. No pattern. No system. Nothing."

She flipped through the stack of maps—hundreds of them—each one layered with notes, theories, calculations. Angles of rotation. Movement speeds. Wall displacement timing.

None of it mattered.

Nick had run the numbers.
Minho had run the routes.
Alby had charted distances.
And Ada... Ada had run them all.

Every corridor.
Every variation.
Every crack and crevice, every hidden passage barely wide enough for her to squeeze through, every ledge she'd climbed, every dark hallway she'd crawled through bleeding, shaking, terrified.

They had explored the Maze fully.

And it was still a cage.

Ada pressed her thumb into her temple, forcing down a wave of something hot and sharp in her chest. She flipped to a fresh sheet and began again.

Vertical alignments.
Predicted movement arcs.
Shift cycles.

Her handwriting was too tight, too sharp. But she didn't slow down.

The lantern flickered, casting moving light over the charcoal-stained walls.

"Ada."

She jerked.

Nick stood in the doorway, brows drawn, arms folded loosely. He didn't step inside yet. He knew better.

"You're doing it again," he said softly.

Ada swallowed. "I have to."

"No," Nick said. "You don't."

She ignored him. "There has to be something we missed. A turn we misjudged. A wall that shifted in a pattern we didn't track. There has to be something."

Nick approached slowly.

"Ada," he said again, firmer this time, "we've mapped it. All of it. Every inch."