Day Four - Hedged In Part Four

After three hours, I've come to a startling revelation: technology sucks. So I will work on getting a video tomorrow. In the meantime, you can read what I would have read and imagine it in my voice. Enjoy!

Chapter Four: Monomial

Overhead, I placed my one hand on top of the other’s fingertips in the shape of a T. Dead end.

“What?” Jacob exclaimed from behind. “That’s not possible! I marked the trail and everything!” His eyebrows furrowed together. “That’s the second dead end we’ve run into in fifteen minutes,” he grumbled.

We were in the thick of The Maze now. After the opening passage, the area between the enormous hedges opened up into tunnels large enough for two people to fit into. In the beginning, we traveled with and heard other partners nearby, but by mid-morningish (Jacob claimed he could tell the time based on the sun, but I wasn’t sure I believed him) we walked alone.

Our survival packs each contained a change of clothes, a few days worth of food, a bottle of water, and a primitive first aid kit. No journals or whiteboards to save me now. Jacob carried the flare in one of his pockets, locked and loaded; I carried my EpiPen in mine.

After the first couple of laps, Jacob began tearing off strips of gauze and leaving them behind, serving as place markers for where we’ve been. It’s worked out so far. As for traps, they must’ve been along other paths. The only danger for us was heat exhaustion in the middle of this desert.

And maybe the issue of the dead ends. We both stared at the offending hedge for a bit as if we could wish it away. Then I shrugged and turned around. Some other route, then.

Um...what? I tugged on his ragged sleeve, and when he turned around, his jaw opened so wide he must’ve been part snake.

Another dead end on the other side. Only it was the way we came; little wads of broken gauze leading up to the shrub proved my theory correct. And yet a huge mountain of hedge loomed before us, blocking the path we’d come in by. I spun around but couldn’t see another exit in the bathroom sized area. We were trapped in.

The groan of sixty-five-year-old machinery emitted at our backs. We whipped around to watch a massive stone block emerge from the ground, a good two feet taller than me at 5’ 3” and as wide as the hedge behind it. In its center, four holes marked in red were chiseled out of the stone. On a ledge below it rested smaller stone blocks, each with strange symbols on them that looked to be about the same dimensions of the holes.

Our first trial within The Maze, and we’d gotten this. A puzzle. A pattern. As close to a function as I could get within this crazy place.

Jacob and I exchanged a glance. “You any good at word puzzles?” he asked.

My smug smile was the only answer he needed.

Below the four holes was a stone step, for those of us not born seven feet tall. I stepped up to the plate and examined the pieces more closely. They described everything imaginable. Some were easy to recognize, like a rock near the far right, a skull and crossbones next to it, and a picture of a bee in the center. Others were...well, plain confusing, like the parabola looking thing, something that might have been either a T-shirt or a piece of toast, and some strange hand motion where a pointer finger slid across the palm.

My head spun. The only thing I knew consisted of that four of them went into the stone engravings. With so many pictures, each with so many interpreted meanings, how could I possibly know what to put where?

“Hey, Olivia.” Jacob tried to mask the trickle of fear crawling into his tone as he shook my shoulder. “No need to rush, but, um, the bushes are buzzing at us.”

I paused to listen as a bzzzzzz swept throughout the area, coming from every direction. I turned around to find tiny eyes staring at me through the artificial green, like pinpricks of blood spattering the skin. Hundreds of them, enough for the droplets to turn into a tide that could sweep Jacob and me under.

As one, the sound showed their faces. Hundreds of wasps circled the air, flying lazily round and round for now. I imagined them working faster and faster, coming closer and closer until they pounced. Deadly for me.

But Jacob couldn’t know that. To my side, he chuckled. “They promise us ‘harrowing beasts of all kinds’, and we get wasps? Have they cut funding for this place or what.” He turned to face me with a smile. The color must have drained from my face as I stared at the wasps coming toward us, for he stopped laughing fast. “What? Don’t tell me that I’ve become partners with a crazy chick who’s afraid of wasps but desperate enough to enter The Maze.”

I shook my head. With a grim smile, I pulled my EpiPen out from my pant pocket. With one hand I held it up; with the other I pointed to the bees.

Jacob swore.

He ambled up on the step with me, and together we glanced at the symbols again. Well, the bee made more sense, at least. If The Maze proctors had any sense of humor, we’d be using that piece in the puzzle. That’s one down. But the other three….

The wasps circled closer to the step. With my EpiPen, I could survive one or two stings. At this rate, I’d be dead within minutes.

None of them looked like normal wasps, though, with those red eyes the same color as the four tile slots. If these weren’t wasps especially designed for The Maze, I’d dump my water bottle into the sand. Synthesized or real, they’d be here soon.

Meanwhile, Jacob examined a tile of a closed fist with the thumb in between the middle and ring finger. “Isn’t this some sort of sign language thingy?” he asked, holding it up.

I glanced at it again, then opened my mouth in a silent gasp. Of course! Back when Kayla first realized my silence wasn’t a phase, she attempted to teach me sign language. Every morning she’d find a new word and drill it into my head. I didn’t mind, but Tessa--oh Tess, what am I supposed to think about you now?--didn’t have the patience to learn a new language. Then, one morning, when Kayla came out I pushed my palm out forward, signaling for her to stop. At that moment, my weird mixture of hand gestures and journal writing was born.

Jacob held the sign language letter ‘N’ in his hand. Which meant that weird finger sliding across the other palm was a sign for ‘kill’. Add that to the picture of the bee and we had ‘be kill’. Ok, not bad. I scanned the line-up again, and my gaze rested on the skull and crossbones. A pirate thing, but maybe it meant ‘kill’ in this situation, too? Not bad for two minutes of work. Now we had two ‘kill’s and a ‘be’.

And a bunch of real, living wasps. Their drone turned into an angry hissing as they circled closer and closer. The nearest ones rested a foot or two from the step. We had a minute at most. Jacob, for his part, placed himself between me and them with his arms splayed out. Useless if they attacked, but a sweet gesture all the same.

Feeling my heart flutter faster and faster within my chest, I stared at the pieces once again. There had to be something I was missing. The heart? No. The letter N? No! The rock? Wait. Not rock. Ore.

“Olivia?” Jacob asked, not bothering to disguise the tremor in his voice. “Any thoughts?”

I nodded. Of course! The red color--not red, but crimson--and the wasps and the four tiles! This was it. With bated breath, I placed the skull and crossbones, the ore, the bee, and the sign language kill into the markings. Kill or be killed.

Jacob yelped as a stray wasp stung his hand. The sting bloomed into a bright red bump. For me, however, it would shine black and blue down both arms.

What? Why hadn’t it worked? I’d been so sure...but we were out of time. I closed my eyes and tensed, expecting to feel the stab of pain that would send me into unconsciousness. With a little luck, Jacob would send up the flare in time, and I would live. If not...Kayla would know the answer to her probability question.

“Switch it!” Jacob shouted more than told me over the shrieks of the wasps. My eyes popped back open as that same realization spread through me. Faster than lightning itself, I swapped out the places of the skull and crossbones and sign language kill.

The buzz stopped like a heart monitor whose plug had been pulled. All at once, every wasp fell out of the sky. Every single one, dead in the sand by my command.

Jacob grabbed my hands, his own speckled with wasp stings, but much less than there could have been. “Did they get you?” he demanded, his eyes watering for me.

I shook my head, my hands shaking now that adrenaline left them. Jacob hugged me, his shoulders trembling in what could have been sobbing. Considering I felt like crying myself, I let him slide with it.

A massive creeeek from beneath us interrupted our giddiness. The step we stood on as well as the stone structure and hedge began to sink back into the earth. We hurriedly stepped off. I winced when I heard the crunch of hundreds of dead wasps underfoot, but there wasn’t much I could do. That message had been right: in order to survive and win The Maze, we had to be prepared to kill.

We watched as the sand swallowed up the last bit of the hedge, eating up the dead end from before. The way back was still blocked by a hedge; it seemed we had to go forward.

I gestured to our now clear path. Ready, Jacob?

He nodded. “Let’s go get what we came here for.”