Percy glanced up the hill. The gorgons were hard to miss, with their colorful snake hair and their bright green Bargain Mart vests. They were picking their way down the slope, going slower than Percy but with a lot more control. Those chicken feet must've been good for climbing. Percy figured he had maybe five minutes before they reached him.
Next to him, a tall chain-link fence separated the highway from a neighborhood of winding streets, cozy houses, and tall eucalyptus trees. The fence was probably there to keep people from getting onto the highway and doing stupid things-like sledding into the fast lane on snack trays-but the chain-link was full of big holes.
Percy could easily slip through into the neighborhood. Maybe he could find a car and drive west to the ocean. He didn't like stealing cars, but over the past few weeks, in life-and-death situations, he'd "borrowed" several, including a police cruiser. He'd meant to return them, but they never seemed to last very long.
He glanced east. Just as he'd figured, a hundred yards uphill the highway cut through the base of the cliff. Two tunnel entrances, one for each direction of traffic, stared down at him like eye sockets of a giant skull. In the middle, where the nose would have been, a cement wall jutted from the hillside, with a metal door like the entrance to a bunker.
It might have been a maintenance tunnel. That's probably what mortals thought, if they noticed the door at all. But they couldn't see through the Mist. Percy knew the door was more than that.
Two kids in armor flanked the entrance. They wore a bizarre mix of plumed Roman helmets, breastplates, scabbards, blue jeans, purple T-shirts, and white athletic shoes. The guard on the right looked like a girl, though it was hard to tell for sure with all the armor. The one on the left was a stocky guy with a bow and quiver on his back. Both kids held long wooden staffs with iron spear tips, like old-fashioned harpoons.
