The Veiled Legacy | PJO - Book Two

fourteen

EMO BOY

Ariana was tired of water.

If she said that aloud, her own mother would resurrect from the dead and probably would murder her.

After barely surviving the nymphaeum, she wanted to go back to the surface. She wanted to be dry and sit in the warm sunshine for a long time - preferably with Leo but she would've settled for Annabeth or Percy.

Unfortunately, she didn't know where Annabeth was. Frank, Hazel and Leo were missing in action.

She still had to save her brother, assuming the guy wasn't already dead. And there was that little matter of the giants destroying Rome, waking Gaia and taking over the world.

Seriously, these monsters and gods were thousands of years old. Couldn't they take a few decades off and let Ariana live her life?

Apparently not.

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, Ariana 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 figured that must be the way to go.

Several hundred feet later, they reached a turn in the tunnel. Percy held up his hand, signalling Ariana Jason and Piper to wait. He peeked around the corner.

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.

Ariana couldn't help thinking of Skye and Mrs O'Leary and how much they would hate being trapped inside one of those.

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 armour, sort of like the Amazons' warehouse in Seattle, except this place was obviously much older and not as well organized.

Leo would love it, Ariana thought. The whole room was like one massive, scary, unreliable machine.

"What is it?" Piper whispered.

Ariana wasn't even sure how to answer. She couldn't see the giants, so her and Percy gestured for his friends to come forward and take a look.

About twenty feet inside the doorway, a life-size wooden cut-out 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. Ariana 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 Ariana 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." She pointed it out to his friends.

Piper frowned. "That's too easy!"

"Of course." Percy said.