SANITY; heroes of olympus

03.12

[act three; chapter twelve     -     a shadows power]

Andy couldn't help but feel her stomach curl in on itself as she crawled down the drainage pipe, Percy in the lead. She felt like she was curling around a feeling in her gut—fear, she realised. She was scared, but for what, she wasn't sure.

After thirty feet, it opened into a wider tunnel. To their left, somewhere in the distance, she heard rumbling and creaking, like a huge machine needed oiling. She had absolutely no desire to find out what was making that sound, so she had the feeling they should go that way. Luckily, Percy seemed to feel the same way.

Several hundred feet later, they reached a turn in the tunnel. Percy held up his hand, signalling Andy and the others to wait. He peeked around the corner, his girlfriend squeezing herself beside him to do the same.

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 the daughter of Dionysus had imagined when Percy described it 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 (because they needed more water to deal with right now *eye roll*), powering water wheels that turned some of the machines. Other machines were connected to huge hamster wheels with hellhounds inside. Andy couldn't help thinking of Mrs. O'Leary, and how much she would hate being trapped inside one of those. Gods, she hated even looking at it, she couldn't even begin imagining what it would be like to be stuck 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. Seeing them like that, animals that she had heard so much about in stories from her father, made anger buzz stronger and stronger, like whitewater rapids, through her veins.