Death and Madness|| Nico di Angelo

The one in which everything goes wonderfully wrong

As soon as Annabeth put her hand on the mark, it glowed blue. The metal door unsealed and creaked open, revealing a dark staircase leading down.

"Wow." Rachel looked calm, but I couldn't tell if she was pretending or not. She'd changed into a ratty Museum of Modern Art T-shirt and her regular marker-colored jeans, her blue plastic hairbrush sticking out of her pocket. Her red hair was tied back, but she still had flecks of gold in it, and traces of the gold glitter on her face, she was beautiful. And I didn't blame Percy for liking her. "So...after you?"

"You're the guide," Annabeth said with mock politeness. "Lead on."

The stairs led down to a large brick tunnel. It was so dark I couldn't see two feet in front of us, but Annabeth and I had restocked on flashlights. As soon as we switched them on, Rachel yelped.

A skeleton was grinning at us. It wasn't human. It was huge, for one thing—at least ten feet tall. It had been strung up, chained by its wrists and ankles so it made a kind of giant X over the tunnel. But what really sent shivers down my spine was the single black eye socket in the center of its skull.

"A Cyclops," Annabeth said. "It's very old. It's not...anybody we know."

It wasn't Tyson, she meant. But that didn't make me feel much better. I still felt like it had been put here as a warning. Whatever could kill a grown Cyclops, I didn't want to meet.

Rachel swallowed. "You have a friend who's a Cyclops?"

"Tyson," Percy said. "My half brother."

"Your half brother."

"Hopefully we'll find him down here," I said. "And Grover. He's a satyr."

"Oh." Her voice was small. "Well then, we'd better keep moving."

She stepped under the skeleton's left arm and kept walking. We followed Rachel deeper into the maze.

After fifty feet we came to a crossroads. Ahead, the brick tunnel continued. To the right, the walls were made of ancient marble slabs. To the left, the tunnel was dirt and tree roots.

Percy pointed left. "That looks like the tunnel Tyson and Grover took."

Annabeth frowned. "Yeah, but the architecture to the right—those old stones—that's more likely to lead to an ancient part of the maze, toward Daedalus's workshop."

"We need to go straight," Rachel voiced my thoughts.

Annabeth and Percy both looked at her.

"That's the least likely choice," Annabeth said.

"You don't see it?" Rachel asked. "Look at the floor."

I saw nothing except well-worn bricks and mud, but I had a feeling that straight was the right way. 

"We have to go straight, as much as I hate to say it- straight is the way" I said.

Annabeth looked at me mockingly, "I don't think I've heard you say anything like that before" 

"That's because I'm gay as fuck" I smiled, "Well, Pan... but who's asking"

"There's a brightness there," Rachel insisted. "Very faint. But forward is the correct way. To the left, farther down the tunnel, those tree roots are moving like feelers. I don't like that. To the right, there's a trap about twenty feet down. Holes in the walls, maybe for spikes. I don't think we should risk it."

I didn't see anything like she was describing, but Percy nodded. "Okay. Forward."

"You believe her?" Annabeth asked.