little bird - Percy Jackson

chapter thirty one

Wren was tired of water.

Her boyf... Percy's dad would probably smite her for saying it out loud, but gods was it true. She was tired of water, tired of almost drowning, and tired of being drenched.

She was half expecting the aqueducts to come to life as they crawled through the drain pipe and drown them once and for all, but so far there was no taunting sound of dripping water in the distance.

There was however, the sound of crumbling and creaking in the distance, like a machine that Leo hadn't yet oiled.

Percy led the way, thankful when the drainage pipe finally opened into a wider tunnel after about thirty feet of claustrophobic crawling. Several hundred feet after that, the group now walking hunched over instead of crawling on the ground, they reached a turn.

Percy held up his hand, signaling for the other three to stop so he could peek around the edge. Wren turned around, sending a 'mleh' face towards Piper as she mimicked Percy's 'wait a second' hand. The Jackson boy caught her in the act, Wren sending a toothy bashful smile in his direction before looking back to Piper once more with a 'whoops' face.

"Lemme see." Wren tried to peek around the boys shoulder, her view blocked when Percy turned around to face her.

"Can you hold-"

"Scoot, water boy."

Wren maneuver around him, and she wasn't sure she was even able to wrap her head around what she saw.

The tunnel opened into a giant room with twenty-foot high ceilings and multiple rows of support columns. It almost mimicked a parking garage sort of area, if parking garages were jam packed a maze of machines.

A pulley system was raising and lowering different sections of the door. Water ran through open trenches and powered waterwheels that spurred on some of the machines while  others were connected to some mega hamster wheels. Ancient-looking bronze and leather conveyor belts trundled along with piles of weapons and armor, almost like an Amazon warehouse from bell.

Suspended from the ceiling were enough animals to make a zoo - a lion, a few zebras, a pack of hyenas, and even an eight-headed hydra that gave Wren the heebie-jeebies.

"Woof." Wren's eyes were wide.

"What is it?" Piper whispered.

"I don't know, but Leo would love it."

Piper and Jason moved forward to take a look, and almost immediately a life-sized wooden gladiator cutout popped out of the floor about twenty feet away from where they stood. There was some clicking, it was caught by one of the dangling hooks, and it was pulled up to the ceiling.

"What the heck?" Jason murmured.

Her demigodly ADHD had never proved more helpful than it did when Wren stepped into the massive room with the rest of the group. She was noticing everything at once, every single aspect of the chaos filing into her brain as she glanced in each direction, like a camera taking millisecond snapshots without pressing a button.

About a hundred yards away from where the four demigods stood were two oversized praetor chairs sitting empty on a raised dais. Between them was a jar.

A bronze jar big enough to hold a son of Hades.

Nico. We made it.

"Nico-" Wren gasped, immediately moving to bolt across the floors when Piper grabbed ahold of her arm, "It's too easy."

"We have no choice." Jason reminded the girl, "We've got to save Nico."

"Godsdamn right, we do." Percy said, and then he was the first person to start across the room.