In the morning when she woke up on the forest floor, she had a killer headache, a sore on her tongue where her teeth had cut open the flesh, a bump on the side of her temple, and discovered that the elevator had gone down while she was sleeping.

When she saw that the gates to the platform were closed, she jogged from her small base over to the elevator shaft. Sure enough, the lift was gone. Her slender fingers wrapped around the fence-like making of the gates and she pulled. The muscles in her arms and lower back shrieked out in agony from the work she'd done yesterday, but the doors didn't budge. They were locked in place. Unmovable.

"Damn it..." She murmured under her breath and rubbed the tip of her fingers against her forehead as she thought. So, there was no escape. At least no escape that way. May- yeah, she'd decided that that was her name because she needed to call herself something- looked along the gigantic wall the contained the meadow, forest, and everything in between. At first glance, there wasn't much hope of getting away from this place. The walls were way too high to scale with her rope and the vines that grew up along the sides didn't even come close to reaching the top.

But then her eyes caught sight of a large gap in the massive stone walls.

May didn't know how she'd missed it before, it had to have been right there the entire time. Maybe she'd been too preoccupied with the barrels and getting settled in to notice, or it was the panic-attack that made her miss it entirely. Anyway, it was there now and that's all that mattered at the time.

She didn't think twice. Didn't even hesitate.

May started sprinting. She didn't care that her legs still ached from everything she'd done the day before. All the dragging, lifting, rolling. She didn't care that her ankle was a little tight from tripping while getting firewood. All she cared about was the exit that was staring her right in the face. Heart slamming, lungs burning, arms and legs pumping at the same constant pace. One thought raced through her mind. Escape. Escape. Escape.

Her reaction was almost animalistic. The way her sight became tunnel-vision, seeing only what she desired most. It almost frightened her, if she didn't have more important things to worry about. The door was right there. The walls were open, a pair of arms welcoming her like a lost friend. She was almost there, she could literally see through the exit...

...at the other stone walls.

She slammed on the breaks so quickly that her balanced faltered. Her pale arms flew out to either side of her and she pin-wheeled them in circles, trying not to fall on her face. But she fell forward right on her stomach, chest heaving and adrenaline pumping at a million miles an hour at the mouth of the wall. And suddenly her hope was gone as soon as it arrived. It wasn't an exit. Now that she saw it for what it really was, her gut told her this wasn't it. This wasn't her way out. She was stuck here. She let her head fall against the ground and let out a loud sob. May didn't have anything lose, her pride wouldn't be damaged by this act.

No one would hear her anyway.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Each swing of the ax came down harder, one after the other, just a constant thump of mindless task. With each wack, a small chip of wood would fall to the ground at the base of the tree's trunk. Within minutes, a tiny pile had started to build up. A mini-mountain of the dying tree's remains. May shook the image from her mind as a slight pang of guilt stabbed at her chest.

Was that the kind of person she was in her life before?

The question scratched at the inside of her skull, but she continued to swing the ax. Had she been some innocent little girl at one point, who carefully scooped the bug crawling up the wall into her tiny hands and released it into the wild instead of squishing it like anyone else would? Who cried for peace and love and harmony when others argued and fought?

May didn't have much time to think on the subject, because moments later, the tree let out a groaning cry and fell backwards with a bone-shaking THUNK! The vibrations rattled the forest all around it and a flock of frightened birds took off, cawing their displeasure as they flew off into the horizon. A luxury May didn't have. She hacked away at the stray branches along the log's upper area, until she was left with one single chunk of wood.

Cheek full of moist sunflower seeds, as if she were a chipmunk, May used what strength she had to try and roll the log in the direction of her camp. But, unfortunately for her, the log was way more heavy than the barrels had been. And ever harder to roll. A sigh escaped her stuffed mouth and she spat out a glob of sunflower seed shells onto the ground beside her in an act of frustration.

Building a shelter was going to be way harder than she originally thought it would be.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Four Weeks Later...

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The stone chattered lightly as its surface ran across the blade of the machete, sharpening it to a deadly finish. Rays of light dribbled through the canopy of leaves above her small platform among the tree branches, camouflaging her dirt-slathered body and messy braided hair. To anyone outside the forest, she would've been invisible.

May was cautious to make her little home above the forest floor as hidden as possible, due to all the dangers through the doors of the Maze. Within the four weeks she'd been alone, she'd taken some time to venture out a little through the large stone walls, and realized that she was right before when her gut told her the doors weren't an exit. They just led to more doors, more trails and paths that lead you no where. No escape. And the screaming monsters inside made it so much worse. She hadn't seen one up close, and she had no intention to. All she did was hear them.

So that's what motivated her to move her base on the ground into the large branches above. May didn't waste the tree she'd chopped down earlier in her stay, though. After two of the plastic barrels of water ran empty, she pressed them against a tree even bigger than the one she'd chopped down and used them as support. May chopped large crevices in the log that ran all the way along the cylindrical piece of wood and, with the help of her strong rope and a few metal nails, secured the log over the barrels at an angle vertically leaning against the trunk of the tree. She'd created a latter.

Soon after that, a platform was created around the size of the elevator shaft in the middle of the field for her to sleep in and survive during the night. On that platform closest to the trunk of the tree was her blanket- her bed, next to that being her two knives and bags of seeds. On another corner a few feet away were the wooden crates of gross liquid she still didn't know what to do with, resting beside her ax and hammer and cans of nails. May had made a lantern of sorts by dumping out one of the glass jars and placing a flame inside, that way she could still see even in the dark.

She was pretty proud of how well she'd been doing on her own.

At least, until the elevator came up a second time.