A 1

Several hundred feet later, they reached a turn in the tunnel. Percy held up his hand, signaling
Jason and Piper to wait. He peeked around the corner.
The corridor opened into a vast room with twenty-foot ceilings and rows of support columns. It
looked like the same parking-garage-type area Percy had seen in his dreams, but now much more
crowded with stuff.
The creaking and rumbling came from huge gears and pulley systems that raised and lowered
sections of the floor for no apparent reason. Water flowed through open trenches (oh, great, more
water), powering waterwheels that turned some of the machines. Other machines were connected to
huge hamster wheels with hellhounds inside. Percy couldn’t help thinking of Mrs. O’Leary, and how
much she would hate being trapped inside one of those.
Suspended from the ceiling were cages of live animals—a lion, several zebras, a whole pack of
hyenas, and even an eight-headed hydra. Ancient-looking bronze and leather conveyor belts trundled
along with stacks of weapons and armor, sort of like the Amazons’ warehouse in Seattle, except this
place was obviously much older and not as well organized.
Leo would love it, Percy thought. The whole room was like one massive, scary, unreliable
machine.
“What is it?” Piper whispered.
Percy wasn’t even sure how to answer. He didn’t see the giants, so he gestured for his friends to
come forward and take a look.
About twenty feet inside the doorway, a life-size wooden cutout of a gladiator popped up from the
floor. It clicked and whirred along a conveyor belt, got hooked on a rope, and ascended through a slot
in the roof.
Jason murmured, “What the heck?”
They stepped inside. Percy scanned the room. There were several thousand things to look at, most
of them in motion, but one good aspect of being an ADHD demigod was that Percy was comfortable