Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
chapter seventy-two. ☄︎. *. ⋆
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
MY INTERNAL MONOLOGUE as my ex-girlfriend led me and the guy who always wants to kiss me to the basement of a random hotel in the middle of Times Square was something along the lines of UGH. OH MY GODS. THIS IS LITERALLY WORSE THAN HELL. But I won't subdue you to having to deal with all that, so I'll just tell you what happened in a quick summary.
Rachel took us down to a dank basement full of dirty towels and bedsheets and things. The door was hidden behind a laundry bin full of dirty comforters. At first, I didn't see anything strange about it, but as I looked closer I could recognize the faint blue symbol etched into the metal.
"It hasn't been used in a while," I mumbled, basically to myself since I was pretty sure Percy and Rachel were making goo-goo eyes to each other behind my back. Suddenly angry, I spun around, hoping to interrupt them. "Has anyone ever opened it?"
"I tried once." Rachel shrugged. "It's rusted shut."
I tried not to look too smug. "No. It just needs the touch of a half-blood."
Sure enough, as soon as I put my 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 jeans covered in paint marks, a blue plastic hairbrush sticking out of her pocket. Her red hair was tied back. "So... after you?"
"You're the guide," I said with mock politeness. "Lead on."
The stairs led down to a large brick tunnel. It was so dark I couldn't see two feet in front of us, but Percy and I had restocked on flashlights. As soon as we 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 a shiver down my back was the single black eye socket in the center of its skull.
"A Cyclops," I said, swallowing. "It's.. really old. It's not—not anybody we know."
It wasn't Tyson, I meant. I felt like it had been put here as a warning. Whatever could kill a grown Cyclops, I didn't want to meet.
Rachel swallowed. "You have a friend who's a Cyclops?"
I shot her a glare. "Got a problem with that?"
"Tyson," Percy said over me. "My half-brother."
"Your half-brother?"
"Hopefully we'll find him down here," Percy said. "And Grover. He's a satyr."
