THE BATTLE OF THE LABYRINTH Percy Jackson ... - No one's invited.
THE BATTLE OF THE LABYRINTH Percy Jackson ... - No one's invited.
THE BATTLE OF THE LABYRINTH Percy Jackson ... - No one's invited.
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“I tried to open it once,” Rachel said, “just out of curiosity. It’s rusted shut.”<br />
“<strong>No</strong>.” Annabeth stepped forward. “It just needs the touch of a half-blood.”<br />
Sure enough, as soon as Annabeth put her hand on the mark, it glowed blue. The metal door unsealed<br />
and creaked open, revealing a dark staircase leading down.<br />
“Wow.” Rachel looked calm, but I couldn’t tell if she was pretending or not. She’d changed into a ratty<br />
Museum of Modern Art T-shirt and her regular marker-colored jeans, her blue plastic hairbrush sticking<br />
out of her pocket. Her red hair was tied back, but she still had flecks of gold in it, and traces of the gold<br />
glitter on her face. “So…after you?”<br />
“You’re the guide,” Annabeth said with mock politeness. “Lead on.”<br />
The stairs led down to a large brick tunnel. It was so dark I couldn’t see two feet in front of us, but<br />
Annabeth and I had restocked on flashlights. As soon as we switched them on, Rachel yelped.<br />
A skeleton was grinning at us. It wasn’t human. It was huge, for one thing—at least ten feet tall. It had<br />
been strung up, chained by its wrists and ankles so it made a kind of giant X over the tunnel. But what<br />
really sent shivers down my spine was the single black eye socket in the center of its skull.<br />
“A Cyclops,” Annabeth said. “It’s very old. It’s not…anybody we know.”<br />
It wasn’t Tyson,she meant. But that didn’t make me feel much better. I still felt like it had been put here<br />
as a warning. Whatever could kill a grown Cyclops, I didn’t want to meet.<br />
Rachel swallowed. “You have a friend who’s a Cyclops?”<br />
“Tyson,” I said.“My half brother.”<br />
“Yourhalf brother. ”<br />
“Hopefully we’ll find him down here,” I said.“And Grover. He’s a satyr.”<br />
“Oh.” Her voice was small. “Well then, we’d better keep moving.”<br />
She stepped under the skeleton’s left arm and kept walking. Annabeth and I exchanged looks.<br />
Annabeth shrugged. We followed Rachel deeper into the maze.<br />
After fifty feet we came to a crossroads. Ahead, the brick tunnel continued. To the right, the walls were<br />
made of ancient marble slabs. To the left, the tunnel was dirt and tree roots.<br />
I pointed left. “That looks like the tunnel Tyson and Grover took.”<br />
Annabeth frowned. “Yeah, but the architecture to the right—those old stones—that’s more likely to lead<br />
to an ancient part of the maze, towardDaedalus’s workshop.”<br />
“We need to go straight,” Rachel said.<br />
Annabeth and I both looked at her.