“Then run.”
The maze entrance is thirty seconds away at full sprint and we cover it in twenty, Ryan’s hand still at my arm and Tristan’s footsteps right behind mine. The carnival blurs at the edges of my vision, the lights and the noise and the crowd parting around three people moving with urgent purpose.
Behind us: shouting. We’ve been confirmed and the chase is active.
We run into the maze entrance.
The canvas walls close around us and the outside noise drops. The lighting shifts to the dim interior version and I take exactly one second to orient. Just one second, my spatial memory doing its work, the layout resolving in my mind like a map I’ve been carrying all week.
We run down tunnel after tunnel in an endless row of corridors until we’re close to my destination.
“Left,” I say.
“Left eventually ends in a dead end,” Ryan says, already breathing harder.
“I know. Left.”
He doesn’t argue. We go left.
The maze at full run is a different experience from the maze at leisure. The canvas walls brush our shoulders in the narrow turns and the dim lighting makes the corners come fast. I’m running the layout in my head like a countdown—left at the T, straight through the S-bend, left again at the junction, don’t slow down at the—
“They’re in,” Tristan says, behind me.
I hear it. The entrance, the voices, the radio crackle echoing weirdly in the canvas interior.
“How far?” Ryan asks.
“Thirty seconds,” I say. “Maybe twenty. Keep moving.”
The S-bend. The junction. The narrowing of the corridor that means we’re here.
“This is the dead end,” Ryan says, and I can hear the tension in his voice from trusting my directions and now standing in a dead end with law enforcement behind us.
“I know,” I say.
I go straight to the east wall. Two inches of misalignment. Shoulder-width. The gap that I found on day one walking the exterior, that I’ve kept for myself, that Jack swore to secrecy about, that has been my private exit route in a town full of men who think they know all the exits.
I find it in the dark by memory alone.
“Here,” I say. I get my fingers into the overlap and pull. The panel shifts, the canvas giving at the misaligned join, and the gap opens. The exterior corridor is on the other side, dark and empty.
Ryan stares at it. “You knew about this?”
“Since day one. Go!”
He goes.
Tristan goes.
I go last, pulling the canvas back into position behind me. It’s not perfect, not seamless, but close enough that in the dark of the dead end with a flashlight they’ll spend thirty seconds looking for the mechanism before they find it.
Thirty seconds is enough.
The exterior corridor is narrow and runs along the outside of the maze structure, invisible from the carnival ground. I turn immediately toward the north end where it opens onto the service road.
“Run,” I urge.
We run. Behind us, muffled by canvas and distance, I hear the officers reach the dead end. I hear the confusion of it, the voices, the flashlight, the thirty seconds of looking for an exit that isn’t where exits are supposed to be.
