He straggled across the floor. Clutching the girl, he stumbled over and through the Crack. "Here," a voice said, and he peered down to see Rachel. He passed the unconscious girl into her arms, as she cradled her. "Hand Chloe over, you can type in the code." She tugged the Shades' wings from her belt and handed it to him.
His fingers released the curb, then he landed with a jolt that shot up his spine. Momentarily, he was shivering, as he raised Chloe over. He realized he was in a room with a few screens, along with a keyboard and keypads below, and neared it. "You have all the code?" Rachel nodded and passed the wings over, telling him that, when so many girls were dying, she'd demanded to have to the wings handed over to her.
Thanks, he said, too exhausted to say it verbally. He stumbled through the list. SPRING was the first one, the second was SKATER, the third one was GLADE, and so on, with individual numbers and letters in between. He finally entered everything and tapped a button, Enter, which would supposedly allow the Shades to shut it down.
But it didn't.
"What's going on?" Harriet shouted. "What's going on?!" She was clambering through the Crack, bloodied and bruised from top to bottom, gasping, as she struggled from a claw. Defeated, she drew her knife from her belt, yelling over her shoulder, "You said they'd shut down!"
Fear flared inside Aris, two kinds of it, one was Harriet's threats if the code didn't work effectively; two was that the Shades would be glad to slaughter them all. Why didn't it allow him to enter that last one? It should have at least be authorizing it, but there was nothing at all to indicate it was.
"What was the last letter you entered?" Rachel questioned.
"It was P, " Aris said absently. He peered down at the wings, both of the buttons weren't blinking anymore, indicating there was no other path to go. What could it presumably be? Then, he reconsidered everything again, the P had to represent something, whether it meant the term, peer-pressure, poison, or all the deadly words he could think of. It had to--
Then he realized something. P....there was another term that began with. "Push," he said aloud. Rachel gasped lightly, fingering the scraggly wing, as she nodded, Sonya grinned triumphantly, but their faces fell like a deflated balloon when the access was denied once more. "We have to push something," he said firmly. He knelt down on the floor, but then remembered the blinking light on the button.
"Push!" Aris hissed. With that, he pressed the button. Everything became eerily quiet.
***
Every muscle of his body released the tension it had for the last few hours. Had it really occurred? Shut that all down? He heard coughs and cries emerging from the Crack and remembered the other girls. Dread coursed through him at what he might see.
He walked over to the Shade's Crack and peered in. A few girls were just scaling the wall and pulling themselves to the other side, and he glanced up to see Harriet was alive, but not well--her garments were tattered and filthy and had several wounds on her body.
"You all right?" he questioned.
Harriet coughed incoherently, polishing her knife off with a handkerchief. "You...did it. I never thought you'd do that. But they all shut down," she said between gasps of air. She swallowed hard and glanced around. Aris drew in a sharp breath, ready to inspect the entire room and figure out where the final passageway was, which might be an exit from the Maze.
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