The Forbidden Daughter | PJO Book One

fourteen

THE ARENA

The metal door was half hidden behind a laundry bin full of dirty hotel towels. Ariana didn't see anything strange about it, but Rachel showed them where to look, and she recognized the faint blue symbol etched in the metal.

"It hasn't been used in a long time." Annabeth said.

"I tried to open it once," Rachel said, "just out of curiosity. It's rusted shut."

"No." Annabeth stepped forward. "It just needs the touch of a half-blood."

Sure enough, as soon as Annabeth put her hand on the mark, it glowed blue. The metal door unsealed and creaked open, revealing a dark staircase leading down.

"Wow." Rachel looked calm, but Ariana couldn't tell if she was pretending or not.

She'd changed into a ratty Museum of Modern Art T-shirt and her regular marker-colored jeans, her blue plastic hairbrush sticking out of her pocket.

Her red hair was tied back, but she still had flecks of gold in it, and traces of the gold glitter on her face. "So...after you?"

"You're the guide." Annabeth said with mock politeness. "Lead on."

The stairs led down to a large brick tunnel. It was so dark Ariana couldn't see two feet in front of them, but Annabeth and Ariana had restocked on flashlights.

As soon as they switched them on, Rachel yelped.

A skeleton was grinning at them. It wasn't human. It was huge, for one thing at least ten feet tall.

It had been strung up, chained by its wrists and ankles so it made a kind of giant X over the tunnel.

But what really sent shivers down her spine was the single black eye socket in the center of its skull.

"A Cyclops." Ariana said. "It's very old. It's not. anybody we know."

It wasn't Tyson, she meant.

Rachel swallowed. "You have a friend who's a Cyclops?"

"Tyson." Percy said. "My half brother."

"Your half brother." Rachel repeated, reminding Ariana of a lot of new campers whom she had to explain everything too.

The girl tried to be patient with Rachel, after all she didn't know what world she had suddenly stepped into; she knew nothing.

"Hopefully we'll find him down here." Ariana said. "And Grover. He's a saty, a goat thing."

"Oh." Her voice was small. "Well then, we'd better keep moving."

She stepped under the skeleton's left arm and kept walking. Annabeth and Percy exchanged looks. Annabeth shrugged. They followed Rachel deeper into the maze.

After fifty feet we came to a crossroads. Ahead, the brick tunnel continued. To the right, the walls were made of ancient marble slabs. To the left, the tunnel was dirt and tree roots.

Percy pointed left. "That looks like the tunnel Tyson and Grover took."

Annabeth frowned. "Yeah, but the architecture to the right those old stones that's more likely to lead to an ancient part of the maze, toward Daedalus's workshop."

"We need to go straight." Rachel said.

Annabeth and Percy both looked at her.

"That's the least likely choice." Annabeth said.

"You don't see it?" Rachel asked. "Look at the floor."

Ariana saw nothing except well-worn bricks and mud.