LOVE THE WAY YOU LIE . . . hoo

XL.

AFTER BARELY SURVIVING the nymphaeum, Mia wanted to go back to the surface. She wanted to be dry and sit in the warm sunshine for a long time — preferably with Nico and Hazel, even if the former hated the sun.

Unfortunately, Mia had to save Nico — assuming that he wasn't dead, but he was bordering on it. Frank, Hazel, and Leo were missing in action. Annabeth was somewhere, alone, doing probably the most dangerous quest that she'd ever done. And there was that little matter of the giants destroying Rome, waking Gaea, and taking over the world.

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, Mia heard rumbling and creaking, like a huge machine needed oiling. Naturally, he went that way, and she followed him.

Several hundred feet later, they reached a turn in the tunnel. Percy held up his hand, signaling for them to wait. He peeked around the corner.

"What is it?" Piper whispered.

Percy gestured for them 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 Mia had seen in her 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 ( oh, great, more water ), 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, sort of like the Amazons' warehouse in Seattle, except this place was obviously much older and not as well organized.

Leo would love it, Mia thought. 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. Mia 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 she 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.

"Nico," she breathed out.

Piper frowned. "That's too easy."

"Of course," Percy said.

"But we have no choice," Jason said. "We've got to save Nico."

"Mia!" Percy hissed as he realized that she'd already started across the room, picking her way around conveyor belts and moving platforms. She didn't look back, her mind tunneling to her brother, stuck in that jar.

The hellhounds in the hamster wheels paid them no attention, not even Mia. 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.

Mia tried to watch out for traps, but everything here looked like a trap. She remembered how many times she'd almost died in the labyrinth a few years ago. She really wished Hazel were here so she could help with her underground skills ( and of course so she could be reunited with Nico too ).