by Rick Riordan
‘That’s the second time you’ve agreed with Zoë,’ I muttered, but Thalia ignored me.
We started picking our way through the hills and valleys of junk. The stuff seemed to go on forever, and if it hadn’t been for Ursa Major, we would’ve got lost. All the hills pretty much looked the same.
I’d like to say we left the stuff alone, but there was too much cool junk not to check out some of it. I found an electric guitar shaped like Apollo’s lyre that was so sweet I had to pick it up. Grover found a broken tree made out of metal. It had been chopped to pieces, but some of the branches still had golden birds in them, and they whirred around when Grover picked them up, trying to flap their wings.
Finally, we saw the edge of the junkyard about half a mile ahead of us, the lights of a highway stretching through the desert. But between us and the road…
‘What is that?’ Bianca gasped.
Ahead of us was a hill much bigger and longer than the others. It was like a metal mesa, the length of a football field and as tall as goalposts. At one end of the mesa was a row of ten thick metal columns, wedged tightly together.
Bianca frowned. ‘They look like –’
‘Toes,’ Grover said.
Bianca nodded. ‘Really, really large toes.’
Zoë and Thalia exchanged nervous looks.
‘Let’s go around,’ Thalia said. ‘Far around.’
‘But the road is right over there,’ I protested. ‘Quicker to climb over.’
Ping.
Thalia hefted her spear and Zoë drew her bow, but then I realized it was only Grover. He had thrown a piece of scrap metal at the toes and hit one, making a deep echo, as if the column were hollow.
‘Why did you do that?’ Zoë demanded.
Grover cringed. ‘I don’t know. I, uh, don’t like fake feet?’
‘Come on.’ Thalia looked at me. ‘Around.’
I didn’t argue. The toes were starting to freak me out, too. I mean, who sculpts three-metre-tall metal toes and sticks them in a junkyard?
After several minutes of walking, we finally stepped onto the highway, an abandoned but well-lit stretch of black tarmac.
‘We made it out,’ Zoë said. ‘Thank the gods.’
But apparently the gods didn’t want to be thanked. At that moment I heard a sound like a thousand trash compactors crushing metal.
I whirled round. Behind us, the scrap mountain was boiling, rising up. The ten toes tilted over, and I realized why they looked like toes. They were toes. The thing that rose up from the metal was a bronze giant in full Greek battle armour. He was impossibly tall – a skyscraper with legs and arms. He gleamed wickedly in the moonlight. He looked down at us, and his face was deformed. The left side was partially melted off. His joints creaked with rust, and across his armoured chest, written in thick dust by some giant finger, were the words WASH ME.
‘Talos!’ Zoë gasped.
‘Who… who’s Talos?’ I stuttered.
‘One of Hephaestus’s creations,’ Thalia said. ‘But that can’t be the original. It’s too small. A prototype, maybe. A defective model.’
The metal giant didn’t like the word defective.
He moved one hand to his sword belt and drew his weapon. The sound of it coming out of its sheath was horrible, metal screeching against metal. The blade was thirty metres long, easy. It looked rusty and dull, but I didn’t figure that mattered. Getting hit with that thing would be like getting hit with a battleship.
‘Someone took something,’ Zoë said. ‘Who took something?’
She stared accusingly at me.
I shook my head. ‘I’m a lot of things, but I’m not a thief.’
Bianca didn’t say anything. I could swear she looked guilty, but I didn’t have much time to think about it, because the giant defective Talos took one step towards us, closing half the distance and making the ground shake.
‘Run!’ Grover yelped.
Great advice, except that it was hopeless. At a leisurely stroll, this thing could outdistance us easily.
We split up, the way we’d done with the Nemean Lion. Thalia drew her shield and held it up as she ran down the highway. The giant swung his sword and took out a row of power lines, which exploded in sparks and scattered across Thalia’s path.
Zoë’s arrows whistled towards the creature’s face but shattered harmlessly against the metal. Grover brayed like a baby goat and went climbing up a mountain of metal.
Bianca and I ended up next to each other, hiding behind a broken chariot.
‘You took something,’ I said. ‘That bow.’
‘No!’ she said, but her voice was quivering.
‘Give it back!’ I said. ‘Throw it down!’
‘I… I didn’t take the bow! Besides, it’s too late.’
‘What did you take?’
Before she could answer, I heard a massive creaking noise, and a shadow blotted out the sky.
‘Move!’ I tore down the hill, Bianca right behind me, as the giant’s foot smashed a crater in the ground where we’d been hiding.
‘Hey, Talos!’ Grover yelled, but the monster raised his sword, looking down at Bianca and me.
Grover played a quick melody on his pipes. Over at the highway, the downed power lines began to dance. I understood what Grover was going to do a split second before it happened. One of the poles with power lines still attached flew towards Talos’s back leg and wrapped around his calf. The lines sparked and sent a jolt of electricity up the giant’s backside.
Talos whirled around, creaking and sparking. Grover had bought us a few seconds.
‘Come on!’ I told Bianca. But she stayed frozen. From her pocket, she brought out a small metal figurine, a statue of a god. ‘It… it was for Nico. It was the only statue he didn’t have.’
‘How can you think of Mythomagic at a time like this?’ I said.
There were tears in her eyes.
‘Throw it down,’ I said. ‘Maybe the giant will leave us alone.’
She dropped it reluctantly, but nothing happened.
The giant kept coming after Grover. It stabbed its sword into a junk hill, missing Grover by a metre or so, but scrap metal made an avalanche over him, and then I couldn’t see him any more.
‘No!’ Thalia yelled. She pointed her spear, and a blue arc of lightning shot out, hitting the monster in his rusty knee, which buckled. The giant collapsed, but immediately started to rise again. It was hard to tell if it could feel anything. There weren’t any emotions in its half-melted face, but I got the sense that it was about as ticked off as a twenty-storey-tall metal warrior could be.
He raised his foot to stomp and I saw that his sole was treaded like the bottom of a trainer. There was a hole in his heel, like a large manhole, and there were red words painted around it, which I deciphered only after the foot came down: FOR MAINTENANCE ONLY.
‘Crazy-idea time,’ I said.
Bianca looked at me nervously. ‘Anything.’
I told her about the maintenance hatch. ‘There may be a way to control the thing. Switches or something. I’m going to get inside.’
‘How? You’ll have to stand under its foot! You’ll be crushed.’
‘Distract it,’ I said. ‘I’ll just have to time it right.’
Bianca’s jaw tightened. ‘No. I’ll go.’
‘You can’t. You’re new at this! You’ll die.’
‘It’s my fault the monster came after us,’ she said. ‘It’s my responsibility. Here.’ She picked up the little god statue and pressed it into my hand. ‘If anything happens, give that to Nico. Tell him… tell him I’m sorry.’
‘Bianca, no!’
But she wasn’t waiting for me. She charged at the monster’s left foot.
Thalia had its attention for the moment. She’d learned that the giant was big but slow. If you could stay close to it and not get smashed, you could run around it and stay alive. At least, it was working so far.
Bianca got right next to the giant’s foot, tryi
ng to balance herself on the metal scraps that swayed and shifted with his weight.
Zoë yelled, ‘What are you doing?’
‘Get it to raise its foot!’ she said.
Zoë shot an arrow towards the monster’s face and it flew straight into one nostril. The giant straightened and shook its head.
‘Hey, Junk Boy!’ I yelled. ‘Down here.’
I ran up to its big toe and stabbed it with Riptide. The magic blade cut a gash in the bronze.
Unfortunately, my plan worked. Talos looked down at me and raised his foot to squash me like a bug. I didn’t see what Bianca was doing. I had to turn and run. The foot came down right behind me and I was knocked into the air. I hit something hard and sat up, dazed. I’d been thrown into an Olympus-Air refrigerator.
The monster was about to finish me off, but Grover somehow dug himself out of the junk pile. He played his pipes frantically, and his music sent another power line pole whacking against Talos’s thigh. The monster turned. Grover should’ve run, but he must’ve been too exhausted from the effort of so much magic. He took two steps, fell and didn’t get back up.
‘Grover!’ Thalia and I both ran towards him, but I knew we’d be too late.
The monster raised his sword to smash Grover. Then he froze.
Talos cocked his head to one side, like he was hearing strange new music. He started moving his arms and legs in weird ways, doing the Funky Chicken. Then he made a fist and punched himself in the face.
‘Go, Bianca!’ I yelled.
Zoë looked horrified. ‘She is inside?’
The monster staggered around, and I realized we were still in danger. Thalia and I grabbed Grover and ran with him towards the highway. Zoë was already ahead of us. She yelled, ‘How will Bianca get out?’
The giant hit itself in the head again and dropped his sword. A shudder ran through his whole body and he staggered towards the power lines.
‘Look out!’ I yelled, but it was too late.
The giant’s ankle snared the lines, and blue flickers of electricity shot up his body. I hoped the inside was insulated. I had no idea what was going on in there. The giant careened back into the junkyard, and his right hand fell off, landing in the scrap metal with a horrible CLANG!
His left arm came loose, too. He was falling apart at the joints.
Talos began to run.
‘Wait!’ Zoë yelled. We ran after him, but there was no way we could keep up. Pieces of the robot kept falling off, getting in our way.
The giant crumbled from the top down: his head, pieces of his chest, and finally his torso and legs collapsed. When we reached the wreckage we searched frantically, yelling Bianca’s name. We crawled around in the vast hollow chest pieces and the legs and the torso. We searched until the sun started to rise, but no luck.
Zoë sat down and wept. I was stunned to see her cry.
Thalia yelled in rage and impaled her sword in the giant’s smashed face.
‘We can keep searching,’ I said. ‘It’s light now. We’ll find her.’
‘No we won’t,’ Grover said miserably. ‘It happened just as it was supposed to.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I demanded.
He looked up at me with big watery eyes. ‘The prophecy. One shall be lost in the land without rain.’
Why hadn’t I seen it? Why had I let her go instead of me?
Here we were in the desert. And Bianca di Angelo was gone.
14 I Have A Dam Problem
At the edge of the dump, we found a tow truck so old it might’ve been thrown away itself. But the engine started, and it had a full tank of fuel, so we decided to borrow it.
Thalia drove. She didn’t seem as stunned as Zoë or Grover or me.
‘The skeletons are still out there,’ she reminded us. ‘We need to keep moving.’
She navigated us through the desert, under clear blue skies, the sand so bright it hurt to look at it. Zoë sat up front with Thalia. Grover and I sat in the back, leaning against the tow winch. The air was cool and dry, but the nice weather just seemed like an insult after losing Bianca.
My hand closed around the little figurine that had cost Bianca her life. I still couldn’t even tell what god it was supposed to be. Nico would know.
Oh, gods… what was I going to tell Nico?
I wanted to believe that Bianca was still alive somewhere. But I had a bad feeling that she was gone for good.
‘It should’ve been me,’ I said. ‘I should’ve gone into the giant.’
‘Don’t say that!’ Grover panicked. ‘It’s bad enough Annabeth is gone, and now Bianca. Do you think I could stand it if…’ He sniffled. ‘Do you think anybody else would be my best friend?’
‘Ah, Grover…’
He wiped under his eyes with an oily cloth that left his face grimy like he had war paint on. ‘I’m… I’m okay.’
But he wasn’t okay. Ever since the encounter in New Mexico – whatever had happened when that wild wind blew through – he seemed really fragile, even more emotional than usual. I was afraid to talk to him about it, because he might start bawling.
At least there’s one good thing about having a friend who gets freaked out more than you do. I realized I couldn’t stay depressed. I had to set aside thinking about Bianca and keep us going forward, the way Thalia was doing. I wondered what she and Zoë were talking about in the front of the truck.
The tow truck ran out of fuel at the edge of a river canyon. That was just as well, because the road dead-ended.
Thalia got out and slammed the door. Immediately, one of the tyres blew. ‘Great. What now?’
I scanned the horizon. There wasn’t much to see. Desert in all directions, occasional clumps of barren mountains plopped here and there. The canyon was the only thing interesting. The river itself wasn’t very big, maybe fifty metres across, green water with a few rapids, but it carved a huge scar out of the desert. The rock cliffs dropped away below us.
‘There’s a path,’ Grover said. ‘We could get to the river.’
I tried to see what he was talking about, and finally noticed a tiny ledge winding down the cliff face. ‘That’s a goat path,’ I said.
‘So?’ he asked.
‘The rest of us aren’t goats.’
‘We can make it,’ Grover said. ‘I think.’
I thought about that. I’d done cliffs before, but I didn’t like them. Then I looked over at Thalia and saw how pale she’d got. Her problem with heights… she’d never be able to do it.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I, uh, think we should go further upstream.’
Grover said, ‘But –’
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘A walk won’t hurt us.’
I glanced at Thalia. Her eyes said a quick Thank you.
We followed the river for about half a mile before coming to an easier slope that led down to the water. On the shore was a canoe rental operation that was closed for the season, but I left a stack of golden drachma on the counter and a note saying I.O.U. two canoes.
‘We need to go upstream,’ Zoë said. It was the first time I’d heard her speak since the junkyard, and I was worried about how bad she sounded, like somebody with the flu.
‘The rapids are too swift.’
‘Leave that to me,’ I said. We put the canoes in the water.
Thalia pulled me aside as we were getting the oars. ‘Thanks for back there.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
‘Can you really…’ She nodded to the rapids. ‘You know.’
‘I think so. Usually I’m good with water.’
‘Would you take Zoë?’ she asked. ‘I think, ah, maybe you can talk to her.’
‘She’s not going to like that.’
‘Please? I don’t know if I can stand being in the same boat with her. She’s… she’s starting to worry me.’
It was about the last thing I wanted to do, but I nodded.
Thalia’s shoulders relaxed. ‘I owe you one.’
‘Two.’
> ‘One and a half,’ Thalia said.
She smiled and, for a second, I remembered that I actually liked her when she wasn’t yelling at me. She turned and helped Grover get their canoe into the water.
As it turned out, I didn’t even need to control the currents. As soon as we got in the river, I looked over the edge of the boat and found a couple of naiads staring at me.
They looked like regular teenage girls, the kind you’d see in any mall, except for the fact that they were underwater.
Hey, I said.
They made a bubbling sound that may have been giggling. I wasn’t sure. I had a hard time understanding naiads.
We’re heading upstream, I told them. Do you think you could –
Before I could even finish, the naiads each chose a canoe and began pushing us up the river. We started so fast Grover fell into his canoe with his hooves sticking up in the air.
‘I hate naiads,’ Zoë grumbled.
A stream of water squirted up from the back of the boat and hit Zoë in the face.
‘She-devils!’ Zoë went for her bow.
‘Whoa,’ I said. ‘They’re just playing.’
‘Cursed water spirits. They’ve never forgiven me.’
‘Forgiven you for what?’
She slung her bow back over her shoulder. ‘It was a long time ago. Never mind.’
We sped up the river, the cliffs looming up on either side of us.
‘What happened to Bianca wasn’t your fault,’ I told her. ‘It was my fault. I let her go.’
I figured this would give Zoë an excuse to start yelling at me. At least that might shake her out of feeling depressed.
Instead, her shoulders slumped. ‘No, Percy. I pushed her into going on the quest. I was too anxious. She was a powerful half-blood. She had a kind heart, as well. I… I thought she would be the next lieutenant.’
‘But you’re the lieutenant.’
She gripped the strap of her quiver. She looked more tired than I’d ever seen her. ‘Nothing can last forever, Percy. Over two thousand years I have led the Hunt, and my wisdom has not improved. Now Artemis herself is in danger.’
‘Look, you can’t blame yourself for that.’
‘If I had insisted on going with her –’
