THE BATTLE OF THE LABYRINTH Percy Jackson ... - No one's invited.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
possible Labyrinth entrance. I was very aware of Rachel’s shoulder pressing against mine. I kept
wondering who she was exactly, and how she could walk up to some random chauffeur and immediately
get a ride.
After about an hour we decided to head north toward Denver, thinking that maybe a bigger city would
be more likely to have a Labyrinth entrance, but we were all getting nervous. We were losing time.
Then right as we were leaving Colorado Springs, Rachel sat bolt upright. “Get off the highway!”
The driver glanced back.“Miss?”
“I saw something, I think. Get off here.”
The driver swerved across traffic and took the exit.
“What did you see?” I asked, because we were pretty much out of the city now. There wasn’t anything
around except hills, grassland, and some scattered farm buildings. Rachel had the driver turn down this
unpromising dirt road. We drove by a sign too fast for me to read it, but Rachel said, “Western Museum
of Mining & Industry.”
For a museum, it didn’t look like much—a little house like an old-fashioned railroad station, some drills
and pumps and old steam shovels on display outside.
“There.” Rachel pointed to a hole in the side of a nearby hill—a tunnel that was boarded up and chained.
“An old mine entrance.”
“A door to the Labyrinth?”Annabeth asked. “How can you be sure?”
“Well, look at it!” Rachel said. “I mean…Ican see it, okay?”
She thanked the driver and we all got out. He didn’t ask for money or anything. “Are you sure you’ll be
all right, Miss Dare? I’d be happy to call your—”
“No!” Rachel said.“No, really. Thanks, Robert. But we’re fine.”
The museum seemed to be closed, so nobody bothered us as we climbed the hill to the mine shaft.
When we got to the entrance, I saw the mark of Daedalus engraved on the padlock, though how Rachel
had seen something so tiny all the way from the highway I had no idea. I touched the padlock and the
chains fell away. We kicked down a few boards and walked inside. For better or worse, we were back
in the Labyrinth.
***
The dirt tunnels turned to stone. They wound around and split off and basically tried to confuse us, but
Rachel had no trouble guiding us. We told her we needed to get back to New York, and she hardly even
paused when the tunnels offered a choice.
To my surprise, Rachel and Annabeth started up a conversation as we walked. Annabeth asked her
more about her background, but Rachel was evasive, so they started talking about architecture. It turned
out that Rachel knew something about it from studying art. They talked about different facades on
buildings around New York—“Have you seen this one,” blah, blah, blah, so I hung back and walked