NEVER BE THE SAME . . . percy jackson

eighty three: the crazy garage.

AFTER BARELY SURVIVING the nymphaeum, Brooklyn wanted to go back to the surface. She wanted to be dry and sit in the warm sunshine for a long time — preferably on an island in the Caribbean or in the Pacific, near a resort on a nice, long vacation.

Unfortunately, she couldn't go because she had shit to do. There was that little matter of the giants destroying Rome, waking Gaea, and taking over the world. And, also, she doesn't have a plane. She could probably get a plane easily, as she's Brooklyn Hayward, she can do whatever she wants.

Brooklyn stumbled behind Percy as they crawled down the drainage pipe. 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. Her boy went toward it, so she groaned and followed him.

Several hundred feet later, they reached a turn in the tunnel. Percy held up his hand, peeking around the corner.

"What is it?" Brooklyn asked after a really awkward silence.

Percy shrugged, gesturing for them to come forward and take a look.

Brooklyn settled next to him, squinting at what she saw. The corridor opened into a vast room with twenty-foot ceilings and rows of support columns. 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, Brooklyn 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. Brooklyn 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.

"Look." Percy pointed it out to them.

Brooklyn snorted. "That's too easy."

"Of course," he said.

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

"Yolo." Brooklyn started across the room, picking her 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.

Brooklyn tried to watch out for traps, but everything here looked like a trap. Also, she didn't care. They jumped over a water trench and ducked under a row of caged wolves. They had made it about halfway to the bronze jar when the ceiling opened over them. A platform lowered. Standing on it like an actor, with one hand raised and his head high, was the purple-haired giant Ephialtes.