by Rick Riordan
I told him I’d keep it in mind. Then a group of younger campers came into the stables to start their riding lessons, and I decided it was time to leave. I had a bad feeling I wasn’t going to see Blackjack for a long time.
* * *
That night after dinner, Quintus had us suit up in combat armor like we were getting ready for capture the flag, but the mood among the campers was a lot more serious. Sometime during the day the crates in the arena had disappeared, and I had a feeling whatever was in them had been emptied into the woods.
“Right,” Quintus said, standing on the head dining table. “Gather ’round.”
He was dressed in black leather and bronze. In the torchlight, his gray hair made him look like a ghost. Mrs. O’Leary bounded happily around him, foraging for dinner scraps.
“You will be in teams of two,” Quintus announced. When everybody started talking and trying to grab their friends, he yelled: “Which have already been chosen!”
“AWWWWW!” everybody complained.
“Your goal is simple: collect the gold laurels without dying. The wreath is wrapped in a silk package, tied to the back of one of the monsters. There are six monsters. Each has a silk package. Only one holds the laurels. You must find the wreath before the other teams. And, of course…you will have to slay the monster to get it, and stay alive.”
The crowd started murmuring excitedly. The task sounded pretty straightforward. Hey, we’d all slain monsters before. That’s what we trained for.
“I will now announce your partners,” Quintus said. “There will be no trading. No switching. No complaining.”
“Aroooof!” Mrs. O’Leary buried her face in a plate of pizza. Quintus produced a big scroll and started reading off names. Beckendorf would be with Silena Beauregard, which Beckendorf looked pretty happy about. The Stoll brothers, Travis and Connor, would be together. No surprise. They did everything together. Clarisse was with Lee Fletcher from the Apollo cabin—melee and ranged combat combined, they would be a tough combo to beat. Quintus kept rattling off the names until he said, “Percy Jackson with Annabeth Chase.”
“Nice.” I grinned at Annabeth.
“Your armor is crooked” was her only comment, and she redid my straps for me.
“Grover Underwood,” Quintus said, “with Tyson.”
Grover just about jumped out of his goat fur. “What? B-but—”
“No, no,” Tyson whimpered. “Must be a mistake. Goat boy—”
“No complaining!” Quintus ordered. “Get with your partner. You have two minutes to prepare!”
Tyson and Grover both looked at me pleadingly. I tried to give them an encouraging nod, and gestured that they should move together. Tyson sneezed. Grover started chewing nervously on his wooden club.
“They’ll be fine,” Annabeth said. “Come on. Let’s worry about how we’re going to stay alive.”
* * *
It was still light when we got into the woods, but the shadows from the trees made it feel like midnight. It was cold, too, even in summer. Annabeth and I found tracks almost immediately—scuttling marks made by something with a lot of legs. We began to follow the trail.
We jumped a creek and heard some twigs snapping nearby. We crouched behind a boulder, but it was only the Stoll brothers tripping through the woods and cursing. Their dad was the god of thieves, but they were about as stealthy as buffaloes.
Once the Stolls had passed, we forged deeper into the west woods where the monsters were wilder. We were standing on a ledge overlooking a marshy pond when Annabeth tensed. “This is where we stopped looking.”
It took me a second to realize what she meant. Last winter, when we’d given up hope of finding him, Grover, Annabeth, and I had stood on this rock, and I’d convinced them not to tell Chiron the truth: that Nico was a son of Hades. At the time it seemed the right thing to do. I wanted to protect his identity. I wanted to be the one to find him and make things right for what had happened to his sister. Now, six months later, I hadn’t even come close to finding him. It left a bitter taste in my mouth.
“I saw him last night,” I said.
Annabeth knit her eyebrows. “What do you mean?”
I told her about the Iris-message. When I was done, she stared into the shadows of the woods. “He’s summoning the dead? That’s not good.”
“The ghost was giving him bad advice,” I said. “Telling him to take revenge.”
“Yeah…spirits are never good advisers they’ve got their own agendas. Old grudges. And they resent the living.”
“He’s going to come after me,” I said. “The spirit mentioned a maze.”
She nodded. “That settles it. We have to figure out the Labyrinth.”
“Maybe,” I said uncomfortably. “But who sent the Iris-message? If Nico didn’t know I was there—”
A branch snapped in the woods. Dry leaves rustled. Something large was moving in the trees, just beyond the ridge.
“That’s not the Stoll brothers,” Annabeth whispered.
Together we drew our swords.
* * *
We got to Zeus’s Fist, a huge pile of boulders in the middle of the west woods. It was a natural landmark where campers often rendezvoused on hunting expeditions, but now there was nobody around.
“Over there,” Annabeth whispered.
“No, wait,” I said. “Behind us.”
It was weird. Scuttling noises seemed to be coming from several different directions. We were circling the boulders, our swords drawn, when someone right behind us said, “Hi.”
We whirled around, and the tree nymph Juniper yelped.
“Put those down!” she protested. “Dryads don’t like sharp blades, okay?”
“Juniper,” Annabeth exhaled. “What are you doing here?”
“I live here.”
I lowered my sword. “In the boulders?”
She pointed toward the edge of the clearing. “In the juniper. Duh.”
It made sense, and I felt kind of stupid. I’d been hanging around dryads for years, but I never really talked to them much. I knew they couldn’t go very far away from their tree, which was the source of life. But I didn’t know much else.
“Are you guys busy?” Juniper asked.
“Well,” I said, “we’re in the middle of this game against a bunch of monsters and we’re trying not to die.”
“We’re not busy,” Annabeth said. “What’s wrong, Juniper?”
Junper sniffled. She wiped her silky sleeve under her eyes. “It’s Grover. He seems so distraught. All year he’s been out looking for Pan. And every time he comes back, its worse. I thought maybe, at first, he was seeing another tree.”
“No,” Annabeth said as Juniper started crying. “I’m sure that’s not it.”
“He had a crush on a blueberry bush once,” Juniper said miserably.
“Juniper,” Annabeth said, “Grover would never even look at another tree. He’s just stressed out about his searcher’s license.”
“He can’t go underground!” she protested. “You can’t let him.”
Annabeth looked uncomfortable. “It might be the only way to help him; if we just knew where to start.”
“Ah.” Juniper wiped a green tear off her cheek. “About that…”
Another rustle in the woods, and Juniper yelled, “Hide!”
Before I could ask why, she went poof into green mist. Annabeth and I turned. Coming out of the woods was a glistening amber insect, ten feet long, with jagged pincers, an armored tail, and a stinger as long as my sword. A scorpion. Tied to its back was a red silk package.
“One of us gets behind it,” Annabeth said, as the thing clattered toward us.
“Cuts off its tail while the other distracts it in front.”
“I’ll take point,” I said. “You’ve got the invisibility hat.”
She nodded. We’d fought together so many times we knew each other’s moves. We could do this, easy. But it all went wrong when the other two scorpions appeared
from the woods.
“Three?” Annabeth said. “That’s not possible! The whole woods, and half the monsters come at us?”
I swallowed. One, we could take. Two, with a little luck. Three? Doubtful. The scorpions scurried toward us, whipping their barbed tails like they’d come here just to kill us. Annabeth and I put our backs against the nearest boulder.
“Climb?” I said.
“No time,” she said.
She was right. The scorpions were already surrounding us. They were so close I could see their hideous mouths foaming, anticipating an ice juicy meal of demigods.
“Look out!” Annabeth parried away a stinger with the flat of her blade. I stabbed with Riptide, but the scorpion backed out of range. We clambered sideways along the boulders, but the scorpions followed us. I slashed at another one, but going on the offensive was too dangerous. If I went for the body, the tail stabbed downward. If I went for the tail, the thing’s pincers came from either side and tried to grab me. All we could do was defend, and we wouldn’t be able to keep that up for very long.
I took another step sideways, and suddenly there was nothing behind me. It was a crack between two of the largest boulders, something I’d passed by a million times, but…
“In here,” I said.
Annabeth sliced at a scorpion then looked at me like I was crazy. “In there? It’s too narrow.”
“I’ll cover you. Go!”
She ducked behind me and started squeezing between the two boulders. Then she yelped and grabbed my armor straps, and suddenly I was tumbling into a pit that hadn’t been there a moment before. I could see the scorpions above us, the purple evening sky and the trees, and then the hole shut like the lens of a camera, and we were in complete darkness.
Our breathing echoed against stone. It was wet and cold. I was sitting on a bumpy floor that seemed to be made of bricks.
I lifted Riptide. The faint glow of the blade was just enough to illuminate Annabeth’s frightened face and the mossy stone walls on either side of us.
“Wh-where are we?” Annabeth said.
“Safe from the scorpions, anyway,” I tried to sound calm, but I was freaking out. The crack between the boulders couldn’t have led into a cave. I would’ve known if there was a cave here; I was sure of it. It was like the ground had opened up and swallowed us. All I could think of was the fissure in the dining room pavilion, where those skeletons had been consumed last summer. I wondered if the same thing had happened to us.
I lifted my sword again for light.
“It’s a long room,” I muttered.
Annabeth gripped my arm. “It’s not a room. It’s a corridor.”
She was right the darkness felt…emptier in front of us. There was a warm breeze, like in subway tunnels, only it felt older, more dangerous somehow. I started forward, but Annabeth stopped me. “Don’t take another step,”
she warned. “We need to find the exit.”
She sounded really scared now.
“It’s okay,” I promised. “It’s right—”
I looked up and realized I couldn’t see where we’d fallen in. The ceiling was solid stone. The corridor seemed to stretch endlessly in both directions. Annabeth’s hand slipped into mine. Under different circumstances I would’ve been embarrassed, but here in the dark I was glad to know where she was. It was about the only thing I was sure of.
“Two steps back,” she advised.
We stepped backward together like we were in a minefield.
“Okay,” she said. “Help me examine the walls.”
“What for?”
“The mark of Daedalus,” she said, as if that was supposed to make sense.
“Uh, okay. What kind of—”
“Got it!” she said with relief. She set her hand on the wall and pressed against a tiny fissure, which began to glow blue. A Greek symbol appeared:
∆, the Ancient Greek Delta.
The roof slid open and we saw night sky, stars blazing. It was a lot darker than it should’ve been. Metal ladder rungs appeared in the side of the wall, leading up, and I could hear people yelling our names.
“Percy! Annabeth!” Tyson’s voice bellowed the loudest, but others were calling out too.
I looked nervously at Annabeth. Then we began to climb.
* * *
We made our way around the rocks and ran into Clarisse and a bunch of other campers carrying torches.
“Where have you two been?” Clarisse demanded.
“We’ve been looking forever.”
“But we were gone only a few minutes,” I said.
Chiron trotted up, followed by Tyson and Grover.
“Percy!” Tyson said. “You are okay?”
“We’re fine,” I said. “We fell in a hole.”
The others looked at me skeptically, then at Annabeth.
“Honest!” I said. “There were three scorpions after us, so we ran and hid in the rocks. But we were only gone a minute.”
“You’ve been missing for almost an hour,” Chiron said. “The game is over.”
“Yeah,” Grover muttered. “We would’ve won, but a Cyclops sat on me.”
“Was an accident!” Tyson protested, and then he sneezed.
Clarisse was wearing the gold laurels, but she didn’t even brag about winning them, which wasn’t like her. “A hole?” she said suspiciously. Annabeth took a deep breath. She looked around at the other campers.
“Chiron…maybe we should talk about this at the Big House.”
Clarisse gasped. “You found it, didn’t you?”
Annabeth bit her lip. “I—Yeah. Yeah, we did.”
A bunch of campers started asking questions, looking about as confused as I was, but Chiron raised his hand for silence. “Tonight is not the right time, and this is not the right place.” He stared at boulders as if he’d just noticed how dangerous they were. “All of you, back to your cabins. Get some sleep. A game well played, but curfew is past!”
There was a lot of mumbling and complaints, but the campers drifted off, talking among themselves and giving me suspicious looks.
“This explains a lot,” Clarisse said. “It explains what Luke is after.”
“Wait a second,” I said. “What do you mean? What did we find?”
Annabeth turned toward me, her eyes dark with worry. “An entrance to the Labyrinth. An invasion route straight into the heart of the camp.”
FOUR
ANNABETH BREAKS THE RULES
Chiron had insisted we talk about it in the morning, which was kind of like, Hey, your life’s in mortal danger. Sleep tight! It was hard to fall asleep, but when I finally did, I dreamed of a prison.
I saw a goy in a Greek tunic and sandals crouching alone in a massive stone room. The ceiling was open to the night sky, but the walls were twenty feet high and polished marble, completely smooth. Scattered around the room were wooden crates. Some were cracked and tipped over, as if they’d been flung in there. Bronze tools spilled out of one—a compass, a saw, and a bunch of other things I didn’t recognize.
The boy huddled in the corner, shivering from cold, or maybe fear. He was spattered in mud. His legs, arms, and face, were scraped up as if he’d been dragged here along with the boxes.
Then the double oak doors moaned open. Two guards in bronze armor marched in, holding an old man between them. They flung him to the floor in a battered heap.
“Father!” The boy ran to him. The man’s robes were in tatters. His hair was streaked with gray, and his beard was long and curly. His nose had been broken. His lips were bloody.
The boy took the old man’s head in his arms. “What did they do to you?”
then he yelled at the guards. “I’ll kill you!”
“There will be no killing today,” a voice said.
The guards moved aside. Behind them stood a tall man in white robes. He wore a thin circlet of gold on his head. His beard was pointed like a spear blade. His eyes glittered cruelly. “You helped the Athenian kill my Minota
ur, Daedalus. You turned my won daughter against me.”
“You did that yourself, Your Majesty,” the old man croaked. A guard planted a kick in the old man’s ribs. He groaned in agony. The young boy cried, “Stop!”
“You love your maze so much,” the king said, “I have decided to let you stay here. This will be your workshop. Make me new wonders. Amuse me. Every maze needs a monster. You will be mine!”
“I don’t fear you,” the old man groaned.
The king smiled coldly. He locked his eyes on the boy. “But a man cares about his son, eh? Displease me, old man, and the next time my guards inflict a punishment, it will be on him!”
The king swept out of the room with his guards, and the doors slammed shut, leaving the boy and his father alone in the darkness.
“What shall we do?” the boy moaned. “Father, they will kill you!”
The old man swallowed with difficulty. He tried to smile, but it was a gruesome sight with his bloody mouth.
“Take heart, my son.” He gazed up at the stars. “I—I will find a way.”
A bar lowered across the doors with a fatal BOOM, and I woke in a cold sweat.
* * *
I was still feeling shaky the next morning when Chiron called a war council. We met in the sword arena, which I thought was pretty strange—
trying to discuss the fate of the camp while Mrs. O’Leary chewed on a lifesize squeaky pink rubber yak. Chiron and Quintus stood at the front by the weapon racks. Clarisse and Annabeth sat next to each other and led the briefing. Tyson and Grover sat as far away from each other as possible. Also present around the table: Juniper the tree nymph, Silena Beauregard, Travis and Connor Stoll, Beckendorf, Lee Fletcher, even Argus, our hundred-eyed security chief. That’s how I knew it was serious. Argus hardly ever shows up unless something really major is going on. The whole time Annabeth spoke, he kept his hundred blue eyes trained on her so hard his whole body turned bloodshot.
“Luke must have known about the Labyrinth entrance,” Annabeth said.
