𖡼.𖤣𖥧𖡼.𖤣𖥧

chapter sixty-two. ☄︎. *. ⋆

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WE MADE THE DECISION to go left, because Grover and Tyson agreed that they both heard "something big and in a hurry" coming from the right. So it was a unanimous choice to take a left.

The good news: the left tunnel was straight with no side exits, twists, or turns. The bad news: it was a dead end. After sprinting a hundred yards, we ran into an enormous boulder that completely blocked our path. Behind us, the sounds of dragging footsteps and heavy breathing echoed down the corridor. Something—definitely not human—was on our tail.

"Tyson," Percy said, "can you—"

"Yes!" He slammed his shoulder against the rock so hard the whole tunnel shook. Dust trickled from the stone ceiling.

"Hurry!" Grover said. "Don't bring the roof down, but hurry!"

The boulder finally gave way with a horrible grinding noise. Tyson pushed it into a small room and we dashed through behind it.

"Close the entrance!" I said quickly. We all got on the other side of the boulder and pushed. Whatever was chasing us wailed in frustration as we heaved the rock back into place and sealed the corridor.

"We trapped it," I whispered.

"Or trapped ourselves," Grover said.

I turned. We were in a twenty-foot-square cement room, and the opposite wall was covered with metal bars. We'd tunneled straight into a cell.

"What in Hades?" I tugged on the bars. They didn't budge. Through the bars we could see rows of cells in a ring around a dark courtyard—at least three stories of metal doors and metal catwalks.

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

"Shh," said Grover. "Listen."

Somewhere above us, deep sobbing echoed through the building. There was another sound, too—a raspy voice muttering something that I couldn't make out. The words were strange, like rocks in a tumbler.

"What's that language?" Percy whispered.

Tyson's eye widened. "Can't be."

"What?" I asked.

He grabbed two bars on our cell door and bent them wide enough for even a Cyclops to slip through. Percy, Grover, and I looked to each other in a panic, then scrambled after our Cyclops friend. If Tyson was freaked out, that probably meant bad, bad news.

As we followed Tyson through the dank and dingy prison, I slowly began to piece together the memory of an old field trip I'd taken in elementary school. The more I looked around, the more I remembered it.

"This is Alcatraz," I told Percy. "We've made it all the way to San Francisco?"

Percy shrugged. "You said it yourself: the Labyrinth is fucked up."

     Suddenly, Grover said, "Freeze."

     But Tyson kept going. Grover grabbed his arm and pulled him back with all his strength. "Stop, Tyson!" he whispered. "Can't you see it?"

     I looked where he was pointing, and my stomach did a somersault. On the second-floor balcony, across the courtyard, was a monster more horrible than anything I'd ever seen before.
It was sort of like a centaur, with a woman's body from the waist up. But instead of a horse's lower body, it had the body of a dragon. Her legs were sprouting snakes, hundreds of vipers darting around, constantly looking for something to bite. The woman's hair was also made of snakes, like Medusa's. Weirdest of all, around her waist, where the woman part met the dragon part, her skin bubbled and morphed, occasionally producing the heads of animals, as if she were wearing a belt of the heads of ever-changing creatures.

     "It's her," Tyson whimpered.

     I swallowed. I had a hunch of who this monstrous being might have been, but I didn't want to say it aloud. This was one of the only times in my life when I didn't want to be right.

     "Get down!" Grover said.

     We crouched in the shadows, but the monster wasn't paying us any attention. It seemed to be talking to someone inside a cell on the second floor. That's where the sobbing was coming from. The dragon woman said something in her weird rumbling language.

     "What's she saying?" Percy muttered. "What's that language?"

     "The tongue of the old times." Tyson shivered. "What Mother Earth spoke to Titans and... her other children. Before the gods."

     "You understand it?" I asked. "Can you translate?"

     Tyson closed his eyes and began to speak in a horrible, raspy woman's voice. "You will work for the master or suffer."

     Grover shuddered. "I hate it when he does that."

     Like all Cyclopes, Tyson had superhuman hearing and an uncanny ability to mimic voices. It was almost like he entered a trance when he spoke in other voices. As an onlooker, it was pretty chilling to watch. I had to agree with Grover.

     "I will not serve," Tyson said in a deep, wounded voice.

     He switched to the monster's voice: "Then I shall enjoy your pain, Briares." Tyson faltered when he said that name. I'd never heard him break character when he was mimicking somebody, but he let out a strangled gulp. Then he continued in the monster's voice. "If you thought your first imprisonment was unbearable, you have yet to feel true torment. Think on this until I return."

     The dragon lady tromped toward the stairwell, vipers hissing around her legs like grass skirts. She spread wings that I hadn't noticed before—huge bat wings she kept folded against her dragon back. She leaped off the catwalk and soared across the courtyard. We crouched lower in the shadows. A hot sulfurous wind blasted my face as the monster flew over. Then she disappeared around the corner.

     "H-h-horrible," Grover said. "I've never smelled any monster that strong."

     "Who is that?" Percy asked, gazing at the sky where she'd just flown.

     "Kampê," I answered. "Kronos's jailer. She kept the Hundred-Handed Ones in captivity, under Kronos's orders. She tortured them day in and day out, until—"

     "Until Zeus came," Tyson said, nodding. "He killed Kampê and freed Cyclopes and Hundred-Handed Ones to help fight against the Titans in the big war."

     "And now Kampê is back," I finished.

     "Bad," Tyson summed up.

     "So who's in that cell?" Percy asked. "You said a name—"

     "Briares!" Tyson perked up. "He is a Hundred-Handed One. They are as tall as the sky and strong enough to break mountains."

     All of us looked up to the cell Kampê had been speaking to. I was pretty sure Grover and Percy were wondering the same thing as me; How could something as tall as the sky could fit in such a tiny cell, and why he was crying. "I guess we should check it out," I said. "At least before Kampê comes back."

As we approached the cell, the weeping got louder. When I first saw the creature inside, I wasn't sure what I was looking at. He was human-size and his skin was very pale, the color of milk. He wore a loincloth like a big diaper. His feet seemed too big for his body, with cracked dirty toenails, eight toes on each foot. But the top half of his body was the weird part. He made Janus look downright normal. His chest sprouted more arms than I could count, in rows, all around his body. The arms looked like normal arms, but there were so many of them, all tangled together, that his chest looked kind of like a forkful of spaghetti somebody had twirled together. Several of his hands were covering his face as he sobbed.

"Either the sky isn't as tall as it used to be," I muttered, "or he's short."

Tyson didn't pay any attention. He fell to his knees. "Briares! Great Hundred-Handed One!" he said. "Help us!"

The sobbing stopped. Briares looked up. His face was long and sad, with a crooked nose and bad teeth. He had deep brown eyes—I mean completely brown with no whites or black pupils, like eyes formed out of clay.

"Run while you can, Cyclops," Briares said miserably. "I cannot even help myself."

"You are a Hundred-Handed One!" Tyson insisted. "You can do anything!"

Briares wiped his nose with five or six hands. Several others were fidgeting with little pieces of metal and wood from a broken bed, the way Tyson always played with spare parts. Other hands were scratching at the cement floor for no apparent reason. Others were playing rock, paper, scissors. A few others were making ducky and doggie shadow puppets against the wall.

"I cannot," Briares moaned. "Kampê is back! The Titans will rise and throw us back into Tartarus."

"Put on your brave face!" Tyson said.

Immediately Briares's face morphed into something else. Same brown eyes, but otherwise totally different features. He had an upturned nose, arched eyebrows, and a weird smile, like he was trying to act brave. But then his face turned back to what it had been before.

"No good," he said. "My scared face keeps coming back."

"How did you do that?" Percy asked.

I elbowed him. "Dude, don't be rude. Hundred-Handed Ones have fifty different faces."

"Must make it hard to get a yearbook picture," he muttered.

"Guys," Grover interrupted. "We have to get out of here. Kampê will be back. She'll sense us sooner or later."

"Break the bars," I suggested. "We can work from there."

"Yes!" Tyson said, smiling proudly. "Briares can do it. He is very strong. Stronger than Cyclopes, even! Watch!"

Briares whimpered. A dozen of his hands started playing patty-cake, but none of them made any attempt to break the bars.

"If he's so strong," Percy said, "why is he stuck in jail?"

I ribbed him again. "He's terrified," I whispered. "Kampê imprisoned him in Tartarus for thousands of years. How would you feel, Perce?"

"Briares?" Tyson asked. "What... what is wrong? Show us your great strength!"

"Tyson," I said, "I think you'd better break the bars."

Tyson's smile melted slowly. "I will break the bars," he repeated. He grabbed the cell door and ripped it off its hinges like it was made of wet clay.

"Come on, Briares," I said, extending a hand. "Let's get you out of here."

For a second, Briares's face morphed to a hopeful expression. Several of his arms reached out, but twice as many slapped them away. I pulled my own hand back, unsure of what to do.

"I cannot," he said. "She will punish me."

"It's fine, Briares," I promised. "You fought the Titans before, and you won, remember?"

"I remember the war." Briares's face morphed again— furrowed brow and a pouting mouth. His brooding face, I guess. "Lightning shook the world. We threw many rocks. The Titans and the monsters almost won. Now they are getting strong again. Kampê said so."

"Don't listen to her," Percy said. "She's lying. Come on!"

He didn't move. I knew Grover was right. We didn't have much time before Kampê returned. But I couldn't just leave him here; Tyson would cry for weeks. I was brainstorming a plan to convince Briares to leave with us when Percy stepped forward and threw out his hand, saying, "One game of rock, paper, scissors."

I thought he was crazy. When I looked at Grover, he was hiding a smile, like he knew what Percy was up to. I wish I had a clue.

Briares's face morphed to doubtful. "I always win rock, paper, scissors."

"Then let's do it!" Percy pounded his fist in his palm three times.

Briares did the same with all one hundred hands, which sounded like an army marching three steps forward. He came up with a whole avalanche of rocks, a classroom set of scissors, and enough paper to make a fleet of airplanes.

"I told you," he said sadly. "I always—" His face morphed to confusion. "What is that you made?"

I scoffed, impressed. "It's a gun," I said. I was perhaps as dumbfounded as Briares himself. "Gun always wins. Beats anything."

Briares frowned at Percy. "That's not fair."

Percy shrugged. "I didn't say anything about fair. Kampê's not going to be fair if we hang around. She's going to blame you for ripping off the bars. Now come on!"

Briares sniffled. "Demigods are cheaters." But he slowly rose to his feet and followed us out of the cell.

I started to feel hopeful. All we had to do was get downstairs and find the Labyrinth entrance. But then Tyson froze.

On the ground floor right below, Kampê was snarling at us.

"The other way," I decided.

We bolted down the catwalk. This time Briares was happy to follow us. In fact he sprinted out front, a hundred arms waving in panic.

Behind us, I heard the sound of giant wings as Kampê took to the air. She hissed and growled in her ancient language, but I didn't need a translation to know she was planning to kill us.

We scrambled down the stairs, through a corridor, and past a guard's station—out into another block of prison cells. "Left," I said. "I remember this from my field trip."

We burst outside and found ourselves in the prison yard, ringed by security towers and barbed wire. After being inside so long, the daylight almost blinded me. Tourists were milling around, taking pictures. The wind whipped cold off the bay. In the south, San Francisco gleamed all white and beautiful, but in the north, over Mount Tamalpais, huge storm clouds swirled. The whole sky seemed like a black top spinning from the mountain where Atlas was imprisoned, and where the Titan palace of Mount Othrys was rising anew. It was hard to believe the tourists couldn't see the supernatural storm brewing, but they didn't give any hint that anything was wrong.

"It's even worse," I said, momentarily forgetting about Kampê and slowing to a stop, gazing to the north. "The storms have been bad all year, but that—"

"Keep moving," Briares wailed. "She is behind us!"

We ran to the far end of the yard, as far from the cell-block as possible. I saw the kiosk where my school field trip had started, and knew we were getting close to the exit.

"Kampê's too big to get through the doors," Percy said hopefully.

Then the wall exploded.

Tourists screamed as Kampê appeared from the dust and rubble, her wings spread out as wide as the yard. She was holding two swords—long bronze scimitars that glowed with a weird greenish aura, boiling wisps of vapor that smelled sour and hot even across the yard.

"Poison!" Grover yelped. "Don't let those things touch you or—"

"Or we'll die?" Percy and I finished together.

"Well... after you shrivel slowly to dust, yes."

"Let's avoid the swords," I decided.

"Briares, fight!" Tyson urged. "Grow to full size!"

Instead, Briares looked like he was trying to shrink even smaller. He appeared to be wearing his absolutely terrified face.

Kampê thundered toward us on her dragon legs, hundreds of snakes slithering around her body. For a second I saw Percy glance over his shoulder and reach for his sword, and my heart crawled into my throat.

I grabbed him by the shoulder and said, "Don't even think about it, Seaweed Brain. Run!"

That was the end of the debate. There was no fighting this thing. We ran through the jail yard and out the gates of the prison, the monster right behind us. Mortals screamed and ran. Sirens began to blare.

We hit the wharf just as a tour boat was unloading. The new group of visitors froze as they saw us charging toward them, followed by a mob of frightened tourists, followed by... I don't know what they saw through the Mist, but it could not have been good.

"To the boat?" Grover asked.

"Too slow," I said, clutching the growing stitch in my side. "Back into the maze. Only chance."

"We need a diversion," Percy said.

Tyson ripped a metal lamppost out of the ground. "I will distract Kampê. You run ahead."

"I'll help you," Percy said.

"No," Tyson said. "You go. Poison will hurt Cyclopes. A lot of pain. But it won't kill."

"Are you sure?"

"Go, brother. I will meet you inside."

I'm pretty sure all of us hated the idea, but it was the only one we had. We had no time to argue. Percy, Grover, and I each took one of Briares's hands and dragged him toward the concession stands while Tyson bellowed, lowered his pole, and charged Kampê like a jousting knight.

She'd been glaring at Briares, but Tyson got her attention as soon as he nailed her in the chest with the pole, pushing her back into the wall. She shrieked and slashed with her swords, slicing the pole to shreds. Poison dripped in pools all around her, sizzling into the cement.

Tyson jumped back as Kampê's hair lashed and hissed, and the vipers around her legs darted their tongues in every direction. A lion popped out of the weird half-formed faces around her waist and roared.

As we sprinted for the cellblocks, the last thing I saw was Tyson picking up a Dippin' Dots stand and throwing it at Kampê. Ice cream and poison exploded everywhere, all the little snakes in Kampê's hair dotted with tutti-frutti. We dashed back into the jail yard.

"Can't make it," Briares huffed.

"Tyson is risking his life to help you!" Percy yelled at him. "You will make it."

As we reached the door of the cellblock, I heard an angry roar. I glanced back and saw Tyson running toward us at full speed, Kampê right behind him. She was plastered in ice cream and T-shirts. One of the bear heads on her waist was now wearing a pair of crooked plastic Alcatraz sunglasses.

"Hurry!" Grover said, like I needed to be told that.

We finally found the cell we'd come in from, but the back wall was completely smooth — no boulder, no hole, nothing.

"Find the mark!" I said, skimming my hands across the wall at top speed.

"There!" Grover touched a tiny scratch, and it became a Greek L. The mark of Daedalus glowed blue, and the stone wall grinded open.

Too slowly. Tyson was coming through the cellblock, Kampê's swords lashing out behind him, slicing indiscriminately through cell bars and stone walls.

Percy pushed Briares inside the maze, then me and Grover.

"You can do it!" he told Tyson. But immediately I knew he couldn't. Kampê was gaining. She raised her swords. Tyson needed a distraction—something big. Suddenly, Percy slapped his wristwatch and it spiraled into a bronze shield. The shield Tyson had made for him a few summers ago. Desperately, he threw it at the monster's face.

SMACK! The shield hit her in the face and she faltered just long enough for Tyson to dive into the maze. Percy was right behind him.

Kampê charged, but she was too late. The stone door closed and its magic sealed us in. I could feel the whole tunnel shake as Kampê pounded against it, roaring furiously. We didn't stick around to play knock, knock with her, though. We raced into the darkness, and for the first time (and the last) I was glad to be back in the Labyrinth.