Minho and Thomas run through the maze, and Minho points out various memory and map-making tricks.  I care about none of them, because all of this has been rendered moot by the fact that the maze repeats itself monthly and they know that.  Why are you making new maps of a repeat pattern?

They stop for a break and talk about the griever that stung Alby.  It was acting weird and ran off after it woke up.

“I just wonder where it went. Where they always go. Don’t you?” He was quiet for a second, then, “Haven’t you ever thought of following them?”

“Man, you do have a death wish, don’t you? Come on, we gotta go.”

Book.  Really.  Look at yourself.  Now look at humanity.  We are the species that said “hey, space is deadly in like a million possible ways and only through the greatest amount of effort can we barely eke out a survival and even then we can only last a couple of months. …Let’s try and go there.”  Something being a death-wish would not stop us from doing it so long as we’re properly motivated, and you keep claiming that these boys are properly motivated.

They run around the maze and nothing is different from last month.  Thomas asks questions to which Minho repeatedly says he doesn’t know the answer.  They finish early in the day and when Thomas suggests staying to explore more thoroughly, Minho shoots that down too, especially the idea that there might be a door hidden somewhere.

“Because people willing to send Grievers after us aren’t gonna give us an easy way out.”

Wait.  So.  You think that a hidden door is too easy, but you’ll continue running around the maze willy-nilly in the hopes that an exit just appears some day?

The next day, the whole group is in a tizzy because the sun disappeared.  The sky is just a dull, uniform grey.

So…Truman Show?  The kids come to the same conclusion: they must have been looking at a fake sky this whole time and now it’s broken.  Thomas remembers that Theresa telepathically spoke to him the previous night saying “I triggered the Ending.”

Dun dun dun.

Thomas thinks about telling people about hearing Theresa, but then decides not to, because really, what did you expect?

Thomas and Minho go into the maze, because not even the sun falling from the sky will stop these boys from mindlessly repeating the same action over and over.  At least this time, they see a griever!  Oh noes!  But it’s not chasing them, so they follow it and watch it run right off the edge of the cliff.

Minho figures that there must be an exit from the maze somehow off that cliff.

WOW, REALLY?  YOU THINK THERE MIGHT BE AN EXIT OFF THE ONE SPOT IN THE MAZE THAT FUCKING LOOKS LIKE AN EXIT?  GOSH, AREN’T YOU SO SMART, ONLY TOOK YOU TWO FUCKING YEARS TO FIGURE THAT OUT.

The boys gather a bunch of rocks and chuck them over the side in a pattern, until the find the optical illusion/magic door that “disappears” their rocks instead of letting them fall all the way to the ground.

“Better get as much of the Maze run as we can. With our new decorated sky, maybe other weird things have happened out there.

You dumb sack of shit, this exit now isn’t because of the sky turning, it was always there!  You were just too lazy to experiment and explore until you found it!

Instead of telling everyone about the very thing they’ve been looking for their whole time, the very being of their existence…they run the maze the rest of the day and then go to the map room.

When they tell Alby about the exit, he says that the supplies that were due that day didn’t arrive.  Then Theresa wakes up and starts telepathically calling for Thomas because she’s forgetting stuff and she wants to tell it to him first.  And also that the maze is a code.

Why can’t she tell the people around her?  Why couldn’t she have shouted it at him telepathically like she’s doing with all this other stuff?

Thomas, being the wonderful protagonist that he is, says “nah,” and goes off elsewhere instead.

I could be fucking DONE with this book already if only people would sit down and talk to each other.

Theresa finds him anyway, and she starts going on for several pages about her memory loss because the book isn’t done thinking that’s cool.  Also, she’s still telepathic, and she thinks Thomas is, too.  And when she woke up, she wrote “WICKED is good” on her arm but doesn’t remember why.

Alby and Newt and some others catch up to them, and Alby goes into a full panic while yelling at the girl, demanding to know what she did, because it’s time for the doors to close but they’re not closing.

Alby pointed at the girl. “I want her locked up. Now. Billy! Jackson! Put her in the Slammer, and ignore every word that comes out of her shuck mouth.”

I don’t even care anymore.  You guys are too stupid to live.

The kids get to fortifying their homestead building in the hopes it’ll stand up to a griever attack, when Thomas gets in the way and starts yapping about how this all an experiment that needs to end.  He wants to let Theresa go and stay out in the maze overnight, but neither suggestion is really helpful in the “about to be vulnerable to deadly monsters” department.  Newt says they’ll talk about it tomorrow supposing they last through today.