The Battle of the Labyrinth: Apollo's Daughter

Arena

(Sorry had to reupload this part and the part after it! There was an issue where it was only showing the first draft and not the finished product :( Hopefully, this will fix it!)

Skyler's POV

The metal door was half-hidden behind a laundry bin full of dirty hotel towels. I didn't see anything strange about it, but Rachel showed us where to look, and I 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 I couldn't tell if she was pretending or not. She'd changed into a ratty Museum of Modern Art T-shirt and what I'm pretty sure were the jeans I had met her in. Covered in paint and marker. Her blue plastic hairbrush was sticking out of her back 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."

"Play nice," I whispered through clenched teeth into her ear, nudging her with my shoulder.

The stairs led down to a large brick tunnel. It was so dark I couldn't see two feet in front of us, I held up my wrist, my bracelet glowing with the light of the sun and lighting the tunnel just enough for Annabeth and Percy to fish their flashlights out of their backpacks. As soon as they switched them on, Rachel yelped.

A skeleton was grinning at us. 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 my spine was the single black eye socket in the center of its skull.

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

It wasn't Tyson, she meant. But I could tell that didn't make Percy feel much better. I gently grabbed his free hand, giving it a gentle squeeze.

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

"Tyson," Percy said, his fingers interlacing with mine. "My half-brother."

"Your half-brother."

"Hopefully we'll find him down here," I said. "And Grover. He's a satyr."

"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 I exchanged looks. Annabeth shrugged. We 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, they're old stones, that's more likely to lead to an ancient part of the maze, toward Daedalus's workshop."