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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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Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html<br />

“Wait!” Grover called.<br />

But Tyson wasn’t about to wait. We ran after him. The prison was dark, only a few dim fluorescent<br />

lights flickering above.<br />

“I know this place,” Annabeth told me. “This is Alcatraz.”<br />

“You mean that island is near San Francisco?”<br />

She nodded. “My school took a field trip here. It’s like a museum.”<br />

It didn’t seem possible that we could’ve popped out of the Labyrinth on the other side of the country,<br />

but Annabeth had been living in San Francisco all year, keeping an eye on MountTamalpais just across<br />

the bay. She probably knew what she was talking about.<br />

“Freeze,” Grover warned.<br />

But Tyson kept going. Grover grabbed his arm and pulled him back with all his strength. “Stop, Tyson!”<br />

he whispered. “Can’t you see it?”<br />

I looked where he was pointing, and my stomach did a somersault. On the second-floor balcony, across<br />

the courtyard, was a monster more horrible than anything I’d ever seen before.<br />

It was sort of like a centaur, with a woman’s body from the waist up. But instead of a horse’s lower<br />

body, it had the body of a dragon—at least twenty feet long, black and scaly with enormous claws and a<br />

barbed tail. Her legs looked like they were tangled in vines, but then I realized they were sprouting<br />

snakes, hundreds of vipers darting around, constantly looking for something to bite. The woman’s hair<br />

was also made of snakes, like Medusa’s. weirdest of all, around her waist, where the woman part met<br />

the dragon part, her skin bubbled and morphed, occasionally producing the heads of animals—a vicious<br />

wolf, a bear, a lion, as if she were wearing a belt of ever-changing creatures. I got the feeling I was<br />

looking at something half formed, a monster so old it was from the beginning of time, before shapes had<br />

been fully defined.<br />

“It’s her,” Tyson whimpered.<br />

“Get down!” Grover said.<br />

We crouched in the shadows, but the monster wasn’t paying us any attention. It seemed to be talking to<br />

someone inside a cell on the second floor. That’s where the sobbing was coming from. The dragon<br />

woman said something in her weird rumbling language.<br />

“What’s she saying?” I muttered. “What’s that language?”<br />

“The tongue of the old times.”Tyson shivered. “What Mother Earth spoke to Titans and…her other<br />

children.Before the gods.”<br />

“You understand it?” I asked. “Can you translate?”<br />

Tyson closed his eyes and began to speak in a horrible, raspy woman’s voice. “You will work for the<br />

master or suffer.”

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