WORLDS BEYOND ( pjo )

𝐢𝐱: primordial

It was very irritating to have 'I Want It That Way' by The Backstreet Boys playing on repeat in Kia's head while they were stuck in a metal prison cell that was way too small for five people.

"What in Hades?" Annabeth grumbled, pulling uselessly at the bars as the little voice in Kia's head hit the chorus. Beyond the cell bars, a bunch of other cells were arranged in a ring around a dark courtyard—three stories of chunks of metal over chunks of metal. This was great.

"A prison," said Percy. "Maybe Tyson can break—"

"Shh," said Grover. "Listen."

At first, Kia thought Grover was about to start singing Jailhouse Rock to get them some motivation for the jailbreak, but that was before Kia heard it: deep and masculine sobbing and a raspy voice muttering angrily. The voice was like rocks being thrown at a metal container.

Kia's face twisted in confusion. "Is that some sort of language?"

Tyson's eyes—well, eye—it'd take a while for Kia to adjust properly to using the correct terms—widened. "Can't be."

"What?" Percy asked.

Tyson took hold on two of the bars in the cell and pulled them apart with his brute strength, leaving a nice cyclops-shaped opening for them all to crawl through.

"Wait!"

But Tyson wasn't about to listen to Grover, running beneath the dim fluorescent lights of the prison.

"Why didn't we do this before?" Kia muttered as they all climbed out. Annabeth, who was right behind her, hit her lightly on the back of the head. Right, focus.

They all chased Tyson, Kia looking back at the wide open cell bars. She felt bad for the poor, unassuming mortal who would look at the cell and wonder who in the damn normal-people-hell was able to pry the bars open.

"I know this place," Annabeth told the three of them. This is Alcatraz."

"You mean that island near San Francisco?" Percy said.

She nodded. "My school took a field trip here. It's like a museum."

"Just curious, are all American field trips to weird, dark jails where little boys definitely went to die?"

Neither of them answered Kia, so she blew a strand of hair out of her face, accepting she wouldn't get an answer.

Another thing to consider was that this was San Francisco. This was on, like, the whole other side of America. It seemed impossible that they'd all have gotten here in the span of only fifteen minutes. This was proof that the Labyrinth didn't obey the normal workings and laws of the real world. Whatever the real world was, anyway.

"Freeze," Grover warned.

But Tyson kept moving. Grover grabbed his arm in an attempt to stop him.

"Stop, Tyson!" he whispered in a panicked manner. "Can't you see it?"

Kia followed the direction of Grover's extended finger, and her stomach twisted into knots, organs rearranging themselves in a fright. There, about ten feet away from all of them, was, possibly, the most horrible monster Kia had ever seen.

She might have been kind of a newbie to all of this real-life Cirque du Freak stuff, but this monster was, without a doubt, absolutely terrifying. To start, her upper body was that of a venomous woman's, almost as venomous as the snakes slithering by her feet and in her hair. Medusa? No, because her lower body, just above the spaghetti nightmare of snakes, was a dragon's, with blazing red scales glinting carefully in the dim light. Where her woman's body met the dragon, an odd sort of blur cane together, bubbling and oozing, shifting rapidly from the bust of a bear, a wolf, a lion—it was like the belt of the Amazons if they could change to form the heads of animals rich folk had mounted on their walls.