ENTRAPPED ₂

69

PERCY TOOK THE LEAD AS THEY CRAWLED THROUGH THE DRAINAGE PIPE―THEY WERE FORCED TO GO SINGLE FILE, SO MADELEINE WAS RIGHT BEHIND HIM. Piper and Jason followed. After about thirty feet, it opened into a wider tunnel. To their left, somewhere in the distance, Madeleine heard rumbling and creaking. Leo would have said that it sounded like a huge machine needed oiling.

Oh, gods, Madeleine thought. Why am I thinking of Leo? Had she really grown fond of that idiot boy? Was she... was it possible that she was worried for him?

Several hundred feet later, they reached a turn in the tunnel. Madeleine's knees ached. The others didn't look much happier. Percy held up a hand, signaling them to wait. Then he peeked around the corner.

Madeleine had her knives in her hands in seconds. She crouched against the wall, ready to decapitate something before it could bite Percy's head off. Thankfully, though, nothing happened.

"What is it?" Piper whispered.

Percy didn't reply. Instead, he just beckoned them forward.

The corridor opened into a vast room with twenty-foot ceilings and rows of support columns. It was very crowded with all means of things.

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, powering waterwheels that turned some of the machines. Other machines were connected to huge hamster wheels with hellhounds inside. Madeleine was reminded of Percy's dog, Mrs. O'Leary, and how much she would hate being trapped like that.

Suspended from the ceiling were cages of live animals―a lion, several zebras, a pack of hyenas, and an eight-headed hydra. (Madeleine hated hydras.) 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.

Madeleine glanced at Jason and Piper. They were both staring at the room with strangely wistful expressions.

"What's wrong with you two?" she asked.

"Leo," Piper sighed.

"He would love it here," Jason said.

Madeleine ached for them, for all of them. The people they cared about most―Annabeth, Ethan, Leo. They could all be dead right now, and the four of them wouldn't be any the wiser.

Focus, Madeleine, she scolded herself. She would know if Ethan had died. The world would end. What she knew for certain was that Nico di Angelo was going to die if they didn't reach him, and so that had to be her ending at the moment.

About twenty feet inside the doorway, a life-size wooden cutout of a gladiator popped up from the floor. Luke would have been amused by it―he had always been looking for something to fight. The gladiator 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. Madeleine scanned the room. There were several thousand things to look at, most of them in motion, but Madeleine had never cared less than she did right now. She had one thing she was looking for, and it was this: standing on a raised dais between two oversized praetors' chairs was a bronze jar. A bronze jar big enough to hold a person.

"Look," Percy said, but Madeleine was way ahead of him. She had already started forward, her knives trembling in her hands.

Percy grabbed her arm. Very few people could have done that―if it had been Jason and Piper, it wouldn't have mattered how fond of them Madeleine had grown. She would have slashed at them without a second thought. It was animal instinct―Nico was right there. He was so close.