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“Sounds like they’re on the other side of this wall,” Harley said. “Is there a turn up there?”

“Purple!” Bowie announced.

“It’s still green over here. How’d you get to purple?”

“I don’t know, I followed the wall,” Bowie replied.

“Which wall?”

“Umm…well shit, I turned around so wait…the left, I think?” Bowie said, sounding further away now. “It’s the one that spirals. The other one led to a dead end.”

“You think?”

It sounded like he was talking to Hound, one of my roadies. I snickered the whole time, while Hound just sounded exasperated.

“There are no turns up here, just blue lights and darkness,” Tibby declared, drawing my attention back to my own corridor. “Maybe Claude was right and we should have gone left. Want me to turn around?”

“No, keep going a bit further and see if the color of the floor changes,” Harley said, so we started inching along the path again.

“I found a red floor,” Tibby announced, “and a yellow one.”

“Red?” I muttered, while Harley grumbled about no one else having mentioned a yellow floor.

“What if it’s like the color wheel?” Claude asked. “Like, we’re on blue now, if we take the red path it should lead to the purple one, but if we take the yellow floor it would lead to the green one.”

“Sounds like you’re overthinking it,” Harley said, “if we’re already on the wrong path, neither turn is going to lead us out of here.”

“We don’t even know how many exits there are,” Tibby pointed out.

“What if there are none, just doors to other rooms with puzzles we have to solve to get the opposite door to open into another part of the maze?” Claude asked.

“Has anyone noticed any doors besides the one we came out?” I asked.

“I’ve been too busy paying attention to the floor to notice the walls,” Claude admitted.

“I haven’t seen any and I’ve been looking,” Harley said. “Someone pick a color and let’s see where it leads.”

“Pick one, Claude,” Tibby said.

“Uhhh…red, I guess,” Claude replied, so we veered right and followed a spiral that led to a corridor with…a purple floor.

I heard Harley behind me, muttering about the fucking color wheel, but at least Claude didn’t turn around and gloat.

“We figured out where Bowie was,” Tibby said, “but I don’t hear those guys anymore. Shit, get a load of this sign.”

He held his phone flashlight up to a slightly battered sign that looked like something had tried to take a bite out of it.

“If you become lost or confused don’t worry, we send a rescue team through to evacuate the maze every Sunday. They are highly skilled and find almost two-thirds of those who get lost. If you are part of the unfortunate one third, we are terribly sorry. Self-rescue is your only option,” Claude read.

“In other words, don’t expect any help getting the fuck out of here,” I said, “so I guess we’d better keep following this path.”

We got out eventually, two escape rooms and dozens of twists and turns later. The part that still baffled me was the way Claude had figured out the layout of the place. The purple path ended at a door. Solving the room’s mystery opened a second one, right into another portion of the maze. By the time we saw daylight again, the only ones outside were Bowie, Hound, Scythe and Zack, another of my roadies.

We were missing crew, we were missing our manager, and my boy was nowhere to be seen. That last room had been a tricky one, with clues that had to be decoded and put in the right order before they made sense. We’d suffered as many missteps as we had successes, but that might have been the point of the exercises. Watching Claude and Tibby not only interact but work as a team had been enlightening. I’d have to mention it to Pressley, just to balance some of Claude’s bullshit. He was a damn fine drummer and worked just as hard on polishing the music as the rest of the guys. Sometimes harder, when he was being hyper critical of one of his drum tracks.

I’d noticed something while we’d been working our way through those escape rooms. Our arrogant drummer was a people pleaser. He didn’t scramble around looking for clues because he wanted to solve the puzzles before the rest of us, he craved our reactions and the celebration that followed. He never crowed about it, just moved along to the next step. By the time we reached the third room, Claude was having fun without bullshit or pretense. That was worth mentioning to Pressley too.

“That was awesome,” Bowie said as we leaned against the bus. “Did anyone else start to feel like they were inside a video game?”