I wake up with a start. I’m not sure what woke me up, but now that I’m awake, there’s no way I’m going back to sleep. I see huge hedges all around me, swerving in multiple directions. It’s a maze, I realize. A white sign with red letters catches my eye. I look up to see the sign. It reads, “You have one hour. Don’t touch the walls.” 

Somebody yells, and I look behind me. The scream seems to have originated from a boy standing behind me who seems to be 13 or 14, a year or two older than me. He has dark brown hair, brown eyes, and a tall, narrow build. “But I was so careful-” he says, but stops midsentence when he realizes he is not alone. His voice sounds vaguely familiar, but I don’t have a clue why. He waits a few seconds then says, “well, -what’s your name?”

“Grace,” I supply.

“Well, Grace, I’m James,” he says. After his quizical dark eyes study me with an intensity that makes me squirm, his eyes flash with recognition. I’m not sure why he recognizes me, but it must be for the same reason that I recognized his voice. After that, he says, “let’s get a move on. We only have an hour to get out of here.” With that, he takes, off down the Ivy path. For a second, I stand in shock, watching his leather soles pound against the dirt path, occasionally skidding on a pebble until he can regain balance. I glance again at the huge, swerving, hedges. The leaves and branches are such a lush green that I doubt whether they’re real. I smile, thinking about how my mother’s green eyes would flash with annoyance at these fake plants, declaring it a cheat. I think about how my father would grin, and make a joke about the fake plants, making my mother laugh as well . . . 

Suddenly, I come back to my senses, and see James turning a corner and disappearing from sight ahead of me. “Hey!” I call. “Wait! What’s going on?” But he’s already too far down the path to hear, and I am left to simply sprint after him. All thoughts of my parents evaporate as my mind buzzes with my situation and this mysterious boy named James. Why exactly did his voice sound so familiar? Why did he seem to recognize me? It must be a dream, I tell myself, and reach to touch the ivy. That ought to wake me up. But as I make a move to touch the ivy, James reappears down the path and shouts, “Hey! Stop,” and comes charging towards me. A second before my fingers brush the ivy, he barrels, into me sending both of us flying.

“Hey!” I yell. “What are you doing?”

“I told you, did I not,” he says, looking thoroughly annoyed. “That it is imperative that you do not touch the walls?”

When I don’t respond, he jumps up, grabs a pebble of the ground, and throws it at the hedge. For a second nothing happens. Then it explodes. I shield my face, then look up in disbelief.

James glares at me. “The leaves cover and mute a fence charged with more electricity than twelve hundred bolts of lightning per every square foot. Touching it will result in your death. So honestly Grace,” he says, “don’t touch the fence!” Then he’s off again, searching for a way out of the maze.

“Hey!” I yell, sprinting to keep up with him. “How did you know about the fence?”

He rolls his eyes, and for a second I’m sure he won’t answer my questions. But then he says, “I used to work for the government. I was the brightest in my school, so they employed me. We built this place for political enemies of the government. If you don’t make it through in an hour, the walls close in on you until they touch you and you get electrocuted. If you do make it through, they will force you to work for the government. Once I discovered what we were building, I started to try to figure out a way to undermine them. I thought I’d been so careful, but clearly, they found out anyway. Why are you here? What did you do?” He asks me, as if it’s friendly conversation. As if he already knows the answer, but is letting me have the pleasure of telling him myself.

“I-” I stutter, my mind suddenly reverting back to the voices I’d heard in the middle of the night last week. They’d come from downstairs. The only snippet I’d heard before I fell asleep was an unfamiliar voice saying, ‘they have a spy. He isn’t suspicious of us, but we need to be extremely careful.’ No, I think. I’ve heard that voice before. I start. That’s where I’d heard James’s voice before! “You were in my house!” I blurt out. “Last Monday. You were talking to my parents about some sort of spy! That’s why I’m here! The same reason as you.” I wait for a second, then ask, “what exactly is that reason?”

James stops running and studies me. “I suppose you look a bit like your mother. Same bright blond hair, pale skin, and blue eyes. But you’re short and narrow like your father.”

“Yeah,” I say, stopping as well, panting from keeping up with him. I’m very aware that he was carefully avoiding what exactly my parents did, but I decide to let it go for now. “We should get going,” I say. “We only have one hour, right?”

“Right,” he says, looking slightly startled at returning to reality, and we continue running.

Twenty minutes later, I’m exhausted and completely sure that we are lost. “James,” I start to call but scream. Just in front of James, the hedges and dirt have suddenly ended to reveal a two-hundred-foot sheer cliff face. 

I launch myself forward and grab James’s arm as he starts to slide off of the cliff. Only, his momentum carries me forward, and before I know it, we are both sliding off the side of the cliff, which is so smooth and slippery that I’m sure that it cannot be natural. I hold onto James with one hand, and claw at the cliff face with the other, desperately trying to find something to grab onto, but I can’t find any purchase. We’re going to die!

James must have found something to grab onto because he stops and my arm holding onto his is nearly wrenched out of its socket as he forces me to a stop as well. James has managed to stop us on an outcropping tree. It looks too small to bear our weight, and sure enough, it is bending under us as James hauls me up to sit next to him.

“Grace,” he says. “Your parents and I worked to smuggle the government’s political prisoners out of the country. This included creating escapes out of this maze. This maze is where the government puts a lot of its political prisoners. One thing we’ve found is that their cameras do not follow you off of the cliff. If you fall off, they figure you die. So we managed to transport a tree onto the side. Unfortunately, that’s all we’ve managed to do so far. The government now thinks we’re falling to our deaths, yet here we are”

I look down and have to agree with our government. Even if our government has stayed hidden from our population so I don’t know anything about them, the sheer cliff leaves me inclined to agree that we are probably going to die. “Why,” I ask James. “Is the government wrong? To me, it seems that it would be pretty hard to get down from here alive.”

“Pretty hard, yes,” James smiles. “But not impossible. You see, this cliff is not sheer rock. Nothing can remain absolutely smooth when exposed to the sun, rain, and wind as this wall has been. There are divots everywhere!”

I look down and see what he is talking about. There are divots everywhere, but each divot is less than a centimeter in depth and diameter. I look at James. “There is no way-”

But James cuts me off. “If you want to live, this is the only way. You will have to make it work,” and James starts to lower himself out of the tree and places his foot in a tiny divot. He then starts to slowly, painstakingly, move down the cliff.

I can’t follow him. I just can’t. There is absolutely no way that I can climb down with basically nothing to hang onto. I took a rock-climbing class last year, but not even the most advanced pupils could ever conquer anything like this. Probably not even to save their life. Well, I think, smiling a little, this is to save my life. Hopefully, that will help me. Even if I can’t do this, it’s my only choice.

 I take a deep breath and lower my foot into the divot that James had used. After a few tries, my foot gets a hold there. Now I have to take my hands off of the tree and grab onto the wall. Slowly, I remove a hand and grab onto a small hole on the surface of the cliff only as deep as the nail on my pinkie and no wider than my thumb. My hands instantly ache from holding my body weight in such a small area, but I’m able to hold on. Slowly, I move my other hand into a similar hole. Just like this, I tell myself. I need to continue just like this.

An hour later, with my arms shaking and my hands stuck in the fist-like position I’ve been keeping them in while climbing, I look down to see the ground barely fifteen feet below me. I start to sigh in relief, but the relief had come too soon. As I relaxed my fingers a little bit, they lost their hold on the wall and before I know it, I’m reaching for nonexistent handholds as a speed down the side of the cliff.

I hear James, who’d already made it down the cliff, yell in alarm. James then runs towards me, arms outstretched to catch me. 

When I land in James’s arms, I fall straight through them and land hard on my back, the air whistling as it is forced out of my lungs.

I just lay there for a minute, completely stunned, until I am able to regain my breath. As I breathe, I become aware of James shaking my shoulder, calling my name. “Grace!” He says. “Grace! Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I say moving my limbs to make sure nothing’s broken. “I’m fine,” I repeat when James looks dubious.

“Okay,” James says, looking relieved. He takes a steadying breath, then says, “we have to keep moving. Just because the government thinks we’re dead doesn’t mean we won’t be in danger if we’re spotted. We have to dig a hole in the ground.”

“What?” I ask. “Why?”

But James just shakes his head. “The less you know if we get caught, the better.”

“Okay,” I say. But how on earth are we going to dig? We don’t have a shovel. My question is answered when James kneels and starts clawing at the dirt with his bare hands. I kneel down next to him and start clawing at the ground as well. As I dig, I think about how weird life is. Yesterday, I was a regular kid, worrying about school and shopping with my friends. The only irregular thing in my life was that I had absolutely no idea who was in my government, nor the roles they played. All I knew was that when people got too curious, they disappeared, so I made sure not to think about our government.

But now I’m the one who disappeared. I went to bed in my room last night, but this morning I woke up in a maze because of my parent’s work - of which I had no idea. Then after finding out more about our government than I’d learned in the first 12 years of my life combined, I escaped from the government via a cliff face, and am now digging like a dog looking for their bone, simply because a boy I had just met told me it’s a good idea. 

I am interrupted from my thoughts when I hear James exclaim, “Found it! Help me dig here.”

Still unsure what we’re looking for, I kneel back down and reach to scoop dirt out from around the area James instructed me to help him dig. We’ve dug about four feet, so I decide to jump into the hole and lift the dirt up. 

As I land on the dirt I thought was the bottom of the hole, I land on a large piece of metal with an unceremonious bang. Something about the sound struck me as odd. “James - is it hollow?” I ask.

But James just instructs me to, “remove the dirt on top of the door.”

“So it’s a door?” I ask. Then a terrible thought strikes me. “You’re not going to leave me in a mettle box, are you?”

“Yes,” James says, then laughs at my expression. “It’s a tunnel You know, to get out of here without getting caught?”

“Of course, I knew that,” I say embarrassed. I’m about to tell James how aware I usually am of my surroundings when I think about my parents. They were working against the government, and I didn’t even know. That is such a huge thing not to notice. Such a huge thing not to tell your kid. I take a deep breath and remind myself that my parents kept me in the dark for my own protection. No, I correct myself. Keeping me in the dark is not the right word for it. They shielded me. In an attempt to keep me safe, they didn’t tell me anything. Only it didn’t work. Despite the fact that I didn’t know anything about their work against the government, I was the one suffering the punishment. I was the one who was put in this maze. Catching myself again, I remind myself that my parents didn’t want this. They took precautions to try to keep me safe. It wasn’t their fault that the precautions didn’t work. I could not have done any better. That’s when I realize what I am doing. I am leaving this country, abandoning my parents here alone. If I got into this tunnel and left with James, I would be abandoning my parents here. They would never know what became of me, and the government would probably go after them. They would be anything but safe, yet here I was, abandoning them for my own safety.

I had to go back for them, yet if I did, I would almost certainly lose my own life. I had to either submit all of us to deadly circumstances or abandon my parents to certain death. An impossible choice, yet one that I had somehow found myself in. I let out a strangled sob, wanting my mother’s guidance, yet realizing that no matter the decision I made, I would probably never get it again.

“Hey!” I hear James’s muffled voice shout. “Let’s get going!” I don’t have much time to make my decision. Save myself or attempt to save my parents? It is sensible to save myself instead of attempting a crazy rescue mission, but will I ever be able to live with myself if I abandon my parents?

No, I decide. I need to at least try to save them. I take off, back towards the wall, not sure how I’m going to climb it, but knowing that I have to try. I start scrambling frantically at the base of the cliff. Trying to find any way to rescue my parents.

“Grace,” James yells from behind me. “Stop!” He grabs me around my waist and starts carrying me back to the tunnel. “You need to focus on staying safe yourself.” How does he know what I was about to do? “I don’t know how your parents are doing, but I do know that they value your safety more than anything in the world. You need to stay safe, even if your parents aren’t.”

“No!” I spit. I can’t let my parents get hurt by our government. I cringe to think about what the government might have done to them if they locked me, who knew nothing, in that deadly maze. I can’t leave my gentle father, who has never said an unkind word in his life. Or my mother, whose green eyes flashed before she yelled. My mother, who had defended me so fiercely needed me now. Yet here I was, upside down on a boy's shoulder, carrying me away from her. “No!” I scream again, lashing out with my foot. It connects with James’s face. James drops me with a startled shout, and I start to try to climb the cliff again when I hear a reprimanding voice say my name. It almost sounds like my mother, but it can’t be.

“Apologize to this young man,” the voice continues. As it does, my mother steps out from apparently thin air, closely followed by my dad.

“You saved us,” my mother says as I hug my parents tight, promising myself that I will never let us get separated again. “We got put in a cloud of toxic fog. One that we hadn’t yet found an escape for. But we were able to follow your voice and get out of the fog before it poisoned us.” 

James is standing awkwardly to the side. My dad walks over and shakes his hand. “Thanks for keeping Grace safe for us,” he says.

James nods then leads us into the tunnel and towards safety.

Hours later, when we were out of the tunnel and into the safety of the neighboring country, I would learn that our government sought to control its people completely to create a super army to take over the world. Any sort of opposition had to be crushed, and nothing could be leaked out. As James and my parents used to work for the government, they were able to release information about it to neighboring countries who were able to invade and free everybody. My parents were heroes, and we were a happy family. James visits our house often, and we rarely mention the maze and their previous work. I had to realize that while keeping their work from me resulted in my being naive in the face of danger, they had done it for my safety. It was an attempt to keep me away from danger at all, even if it did end up with my being unprepared for the danger that I faced. Nobody is perfect, I remind myself. This error my parents made was not due to a lack of concern, but rather a miscalculation. Just as their survival was of utmost importance to me, my survival was of utmost importance to them.