| chapter 20: the sun and the rock |

DAWN

The screams woke me up, not the usual light of the sun. I rubbed my eyes, then frowned. It was still dark outside. Quickly I put my clothes on, and ran out of the Homestead. As soon as I came outside I stopped running. Fear took over me as I stared up at the sky. It should be orange, there should be a beautiful painting with all kind of colours. But all I saw was a gray, lifeless sky. 

The sun was just...gone.

I blinked rapidly, hoping I was dreaming but the confused screams of the boys told me it was real. Feeling totally dazed I went searching for a familiar face. Everyone was staring up at the sky. Their faces filled with panic or fear. It made me nervous.

The first person I found was Lisa. I breathed out with relief and ran towards her. 

She noticed me and looked away from the sky. 'Dawn!' She yelped and pointed at the sky. 

I nodded and couldn't help it to glare at the weird gray sky again. It wasn't cloudy, not twilight, not the early minutes of dawn. Just gray. 

'What happened?' Lisa whispered as soon as I reached her, panic was on the edge of her voice.

I shrugged and looked at the sky again. 'I have no idea. It's...Gone. The sun is just gone.'

The sun couldn't just be gone. That was impossible.

'This is not good,' Lisa mumbled, wringing her hands.

No sun, meant no food, no food meant starving, starving meant death. She was right, this wasn't good. Movement on my left caught my eye and I turned to see Minho waving at me.

'Come on shank! We gotta run!' He yelled at me.

Lisa nudged me, trying to explain his reason for going out there now. 'Maybe something has changed in the Maze.' 

I frowned at her. 'You think?' 

She shrugged. 'This has to mean something.'

'Coming?' Minho yelled at me.

'Yeah,' I called towards him. I offered Lisa a quick smile before taking a deep breath and running towards him.

After we found Thomas, we quickly ate our breakfast, made lunch and then we went into the Maze. Right before we ran through the door I threw one last look over my shoulder at the mess in the Glade. And my eyes caught Newt standing next to the Box, staring at me with his brown eyes. He gave me a curt nod before looking away.

Biting my lip, I looked away and ran after the boys, into the Maze.

I was faster out of breath than yesterday and it didn't take long for the stab in my stomach to return as well. I was running behind the guys, trying to count the corners we took as means to distract myself. 

We hadn't even passed ten corners when Minho suddenly stopped running and pushed me and Thomas against the wall. 'What?' I hissed at him.

He gestured for me to carefully look around the corner.

Taking a step forwards I carefully peeked around the corner, my eyes scanning the corridor before us. Immediately I took a step back, adrenaline racing through my veins.

'There's a freaking Griever out there,' Minho whispered. 

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes to calm myself. What was that thing doing out here? Did it somehow think that because it was still dark, it was night? Could it work like that?

Minho peeked around the corner and jerked his head back. 'It's just sitting up there-almost like that dead one we saw.'

'Well?' Thomas raised his hands in frustration. 'What do we do?'

Minho thought about that before he answered. 'We have to go to the section. Let's just watch it for a while. And if it comes after us we ran back to the Glade.' Minho looked around the corner again. 'Crap, it's gone! Come on.' He didn't wait for a response and ran away. 

I took a deep breath and followed, with Thomas right behind me. 

We sprinted down a long corridor, turned left and then right. Each time Minho told us he could see the tail of the Griever disappearing around the corner. The idea of following a Griever didn't calm me, at all, but I knew it necessary.

This went on for ten minutes, until we came to the long hallway that ended in nothing. The Cliff. And the Griever was charging right towards that nothing.

Minho stopped so abruptly that Thomas and I almost ran him over. 

But I didn't look at the guys. With wide eyes and a nervous beating heart I stared at the Griever.

As if it was nothing the monsterous beast jumped of the Cliff and disappeared into thin air. A shadow swallowed by other shadows.

My breath seemed to have caught in my throat as I stared at the sight before me. I just couldn't make sense of what I was seeing.

'That's settles it.' Minho said. 

We stood at the edge of the Cliff and stared into the empty nothingness under us. There was no sight of the Griever, but it couldn't just disappear.

'Settles what?' Thomas asked. 

'We've seen it three times now. Something's up,' the keeper answered. 

I turned to look at Minho, waiting for an explanation.

'That dead Griever I found, it ran this way, and we never saw it come back or go deeper in the Maze. Then those shuck Grievers we tricked to jump passed us.'

'Tricked? Maybe not such a trick,' Thomas suggested. 

'Anyway,' Minho said and pointed to the abyss. 'Not much doubt anymore. Somehow the Grievers can leave the Maze this way. Looks like magic, but so does the sun disappearing.'

I chewed on my lip while staring at the Cliff. Lisa had been right, we did find something this time. Only I couldn't exactly say what we found. It seemed like another question without an answer.

'If they can leave this way,' Thomas said. 'So can we.' 

Minho laughed. 'There is your dead wish again. Wanna hang out with Grievers? Eating a sandwich maybe?'

I didn't laugh, because Thomas had a point. 'Got any better ideas?' I asked Minho. 

'One thing at the time, gorgeous. Let's go get some rocks and test this place out. There has to be some kind of hidden exit.'

Taking a deep breath I tried to shake the feeling of dread that had been plaguing me since I had woken up this morning. I turned around, scanning the ground for anything we could use. 

We started to gather every rock we could find and after a few minutes of searching we had formed a small pile. 

Minho took his pad and pencil. 'Alright we gotta make notes. So try to remember everything with those shuckheads of yours.'

Thomas and I rolled our eyes at each other. 

Minho picked a rock from the pile. 'Okay, let's take turns tossing them, zigzagging back and forth out there. If there's some kind of magical exit, hopefully it will work with rocks too-make them disappear.'

We started throwing rocks in patterns. First Thomas, then Minho and me last. We threw in lines, always a few inches away from were the other just threw a rock.

I honestly felt stupid as time went on. All that happened was that they fell into the abyss below. They didn't magically disappear into thin air like the Griever had. I exhaled sharply as I watched another rock fall down into the darkness. This was getting annoying. Maybe we'd just imagined it and maybe there wasn't any magical exit at all.

Then I frowned, startled as I watched Minho's rock disappeared.

It was the strangest, most hard-to-believe thing I'd ever seen. Minho had thrown a huge rock, with a lot of force. And it just...disappeared, like the Griever had before. So we did see it right.

The Runner picked up another rock and threw it only a few inches to the right from where he'd thrown earlier and again it vanished into thin air.

'We've thrown stuff off the Cliff before,' Minho said. 'How could we have ever missed that. I never saw anything disappear. Never.'

Thomas coughed. 'Do it again. Maybe we blinked weird or something.' 

Minho did, throwing it at the same spot and again it disappeared. 

On his orders we started to throw around the spot, testing how big the vanishing spot was. It wasn't big at all. Only a few feet square but still it was there, really there and not some messed up fragment of our imagination.

'No wonder we missed it,' Minho said, furiously writing down notes and dimensions, his best attempt at a diagram. 'It's kind of small.'

'The Grievers must barely fit through that thing,' Thomas was staring at the square, as if he was trying to to mark the spot with his naked eye. 

'Dawn, what's your opinion?' Minho suddenly asked. 

I frowned, also staring at the exact spot and almost couldn't believe I was about to say this but when I did. It felt good. 'I think this could be a chance for us to escape this place.'

Minho nodded slowly at me before finishing his drawing and closing his notepad. 'How is this possible, dude? What are we looking at?'

'Like you said, it's not magic. Must be something like our sky turning gray. Some kind of optical illusion or hologram, hiding a doorway. This place is all jacked up,' Thomas answered.

'Yeah, all jacked up.' I repeated softly, narrowing into the empty sky as my head was starting to ache from everything that had happened.

'Jacked up is right. Come on.' Minho said, already turning around to run back to the Glade.

I threw one last glare at the vanishing spot before running after him, my thoughts burning in my mind.