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︶꒦꒷♡꒷꒦︶
percy took the lead as they crawled down the drainage pipe. After thirty feet, it opened into a wider tunnel. To their left, somewhere in the distance, Katherine heard rumbling and creaking, like a huge machine needed oiling.
Several hundred feet later, they reached a turn in the tunnel. Percy held up his hand, signaling Katherine, Jason and Piper to wait. Then he peeked around the corner.
"What is it?" Katherine whispered a while later.
Percy didn't answer, he just gestured for his friends to come forward and take a look.
The corridor opened into a vast room with twenty-foot ceilings and rows of support columns. It looked like the same parking-garage-type area Katherine had seen in his dreams, but now much more crowded with stuff.
The creaking and rumbling came from huge gears and pulley systems that raised and lowered sections of the floor for no apparent reason. Water flowed through open trenches, powering waterwheels that turned some of the machines. Other machines were connected to huge hamster wheels with hellhounds inside.
Suspended from the ceiling were cages of live animals—a lion, several zebras, a whole pack of hyenas, and even an eight-headed hydra. Ancient-looking bronze and leather conveyor belts trundled along with stacks of weapons and armor.
The whole room was like one massive, scary, unreliable machine.
About twenty feet inside the doorway, a life-size wooden cutout of a gladiator popped up from the floor. It clicked and whirred along a conveyor belt, got hooked on a rope, and ascended through a slot in the roof.
Jason murmured, "What the heck?"
They stepped inside. Katherine scanned the room. There were several thousand things to look at, most of them in motion, but one good aspect of being an ADHD demigod was that Katherine was comfortable with chaos.
About a hundred yards away, she spotted a raised dais with two empty oversized praetor chairs. Standing between them was a bronze jar big enough to hold a person.
"Look." Percy pointed it out to his friends.
Piper frowned. "That's too easy."
"Of course," Percy said.
"But we have no choice," Jason said. "We've got to save Nico."
"Yeah." Then they started across the room, picking his way around conveyor belts and moving platforms.
The hellhounds in the hamster wheels paid them no attention. They were too busy running and panting, their red eyes glowing like headlights. The animals in the other cages gave them bored looks, as if to say, I'd kill you, but it would take too much energy.
