Y/N walked in the void. His right hand felt a wall as he stepped deeper into the darkness. He was shivering.
Annabeth frowned. Or did she? It was a strange sensation. She wanted to frown, but she felt as if she were outside her body. It could only be a dream, yet she had never had one like this.
She couldn't figure where Y/N was. A tunnel, maybe. He was staring into space, which must mean the light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at the same time was only the dim light of dreams.
A noise echoed; Y/N froze. He turned around, now feeling the wall with his left hand. He seemed scared of losing his hold of the wall. His ring melted into his gold-and-bronze curved sword.
"Who is there?" he called.
A rustle answered him.
He raised the tip of his sword. Annabeth noticed he had closed his eyes to listen more carefully. So he really couldn't see anything in this darkness. Annabeth could see. Yet Y/N attacked the monster before she could even see him in the pale light that allowed her to see only ten feet away.
He slashed horizontally, smashing into a black shape out of her field of vision. A dart came out of nowhere, flying toward his shoulder, but he managed to step aside before it could hit him.
Run! Annabeth wanted to shout, but her voice didn't work in the dream. She tried to grab Y/N's arm, but her hand went through.
He waved his sword blindly before him. A new dart came at him, straight for the eye. He ducked at the last moment, and the dart stuck in the wall.
He leaped forward, and the golden glow of his sword disappeared as the blade sank into the body of the invisible monster.
After a moment, he stepped back, and his sword became a ring again. He felt around for the wall, but it was gone. He cursed something she couldn't catch.
Y/N wiped his face; a dark stream ran down his forehead, nose, and chin. It seemed the monster had managed to hit him, after all.
He started walking into the darkness again, his hands reaching out in front of him. Annabeth wanted to follow him, but something—some kind of invisible wall—stopped her.
The darkness swallowed Y/N.
Annabeth woke up with a start, one hand reaching forward to hold the shoulder of a Y/N who wasn't there.
Inside her cabin, only her brothers and sisters snoring and moving under their blankets disturbed the silence. How could she have dreamed this? No answer to that question. In any case, she needed to calm down; she was drenched in sweat.
Sunlight already poured through the windows. She got out of bed, grabbed her celestial bronze knife, and walked out of the cabin. She had to forget about this; her dreams were just dreams, certainly not premonitions like those of the Big Three's children.
There was a lot of excitement at breakfast.
Apparently, around three in the morning an Aethiopian drakon had been spotted at the borders of camp. The magical boundaries had kept the monster out, but it prowled the hills, looking for weak spots in their defenses, and it didn't seem anxious to go away until Lee Fletcher from Apollo's cabin led a couple of his siblings in pursuit. After a few dozen arrows lodged in the chinks of the drakon's armor, it got the message and withdrew.
Annabeth had beaten a drakon, once. Right in the middle of nowhere, in the Sea of Monsters. Y/N had been there.
"It's still out there," Lee warned during announcements. "Twenty arrows in its hide, and we just made it mad. The thing was thirty feet long and bright green. Its eyes—" He shuddered.
"You did well, Lee." Chiron patted him on the shoulder. "Everyone stay alert, but stay calm. This has happened before."
"Aye," Quintus said from the head table. "And it will happen again. More and more frequently."
The campers murmured among themselves.
Everyone knew the rumors: Luke and his army of monsters were planning an invasion of the camp. Most of them expected it to happen this summer, but no one knew how or when. It didn't help that their attendance was down. They only had about eighty campers. Three years ago, there had been more than a hundred. Some had died. Some had joined Luke. Some had just disappeared.
"This is a good reason for new war games," Quintus continued, a glint in his eyes. "We'll see how you all do with that tonight."
"Yes. . . ." Chiron said. "Well, enough announcements. Let us bless this meal and eat." He raised his goblet. "To the gods!"
They all raised their glasses and repeated the blessing.
Annabeth and her brothers and sisters took their plates to the bronze brazier and scraped a portion of their food into the flames.
"Athena," she said. She glanced around. Nobody sat at the Hera table.
That doesn't mean anything, she forced herself to think. He's just lying in.
Instead of going back with her brothers and sisters to the Athena table, she walked toward the Poseidon table. Percy and Grover were there. Next to them stood Chiron.
"I brought Grover over," Chiron said, "because I thought you two might want to, ah, discuss matters. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some Iris-messages to send. I'll see you later in the day." He gave Grover a meaningful look, then trotted out of the pavilion.
"What's he talking about?" Percy asked Grover.
Annabeth slid next to them on the bench. "I'll tell you what it's about," she said. "The Labyrinth."
Percy blinked. She refrained from rolling her eyes. Most of the time, his slowness was okay, but sometimes it was insufferable.
"You're not supposed to be here," Percy said at last.
Really? Annabeth thought. Okay, campers weren't allowed to switch tables. At least for half-bloods. They had to sit with their cabins. If Mr. D had been here, he probably would've strangled her with magical grapevines or something, but Mr. D wasn't here. Chiron had already left the pavilion. Quintus looked over and raised an eyebrow, but he didn't say anything.
"We need to talk," she insisted.
"But the rules—"
"Look," she interrupted. "Grover is in trouble. There's only one way we can figure to help him. It's the Labyrinth. That's what Clarisse and Y/N have been investigating."
Percy shifted his weight. "You mean the maze where they kept the Minotaur, back in the old days?"
"Exactly," she said.
"So . . . it's not under the king's palace in Crete anymore," he guessed. "The Labyrinth is under some building in America."
She didn't resist rolling her eyes. "Under a building? Please, Percy. The Labyrinth is huge. It wouldn't fit under a single city, much less a single building."
"So . . . is the Labyrinth part of the Underworld?"
"No." She frowned, thinking about how to formulate it to make it easy. "Well, there may be passages from the Labyrinth down into the Underworld. I'm not sure. But the Underworld is way, way down. The Labyrinth is right under the surface of the mortal world, kind of like a second skin. It's been growing for thousands of years, lacing its way under Western cities, connecting everything together underground. You can get anywhere through the Labyrinth."
"If you don't get lost," Grover muttered. "And die a horrible death."
Y/N walking alone in a tunnel, lost in the dark. . . . No, only a dream. He was lying in, as simple as that.
"Grover, there has to be a way," Annabeth said. "Y/N and Clarisse lived."
"Barely!" Grover said. "And the other guy—"
"He was driven insane. He didn't die."
"Oh, joy." Grover's lower lip quivered. "That makes me feel much better."
"Whoa," Percy said. "Back up. What's this about Y/N and Clarisse and a crazy guy?"
Annabeth glanced over toward the Ares table. Clarisse was watching them as if she knew what they were talking about, but then she fixed her eyes on her breakfast plate.
"Last winter," Annabeth said, lowering her voice, "Clarisse went on a mission for Chiron."
"I remember," Percy said. "It was secret."
She nodded. "It was secret because she found Chris Rodriguez."
"The guy from the Hermes cabin who joined Luke?" Percy asked.
"Yeah," she said. "Last summer he appeared in Phoenix, Arizona, near Clarisse's mom's house."
"What do you mean he just appeared?"
"He was wandering around the desert, in a hundred and twenty degrees, in full Greek armor, babbling about string."
"String?" Percy said.
"He'd been driven completely insane. Clarisse brought him back to her mom's house so the mortals wouldn't institutionalize him. She tried to nurse him back to health. Chiron came out and interviewed him, but it wasn't much good. The only thing they got out of him: Luke's men have been exploring the Labyrinth."
Percy shivered. "Why?"
"No one was sure," Annabeth said. "That's why Clarisse, and later Y/N, went on scouting expeditions. Chiron kept things hushed up because he didn't want anyone panicking. Y/N got me involved because . . . well, the Labyrinth has always been one of my favorite subjects. The architecture involved—the builder, Daedalus, was a genius. But the point is, the Labyrinth has entrances everywhere. If Luke could figure out how to navigate it, he could move his army around with incredible speed."
"Except it's a maze, right?" Percy said.
"Full of horrible traps," Grover agreed. "Dead ends. Illusions. Psychotic goat-killing monsters."
"But not if you had Ariadne's string," Annabeth said. "In the old days, Ariadne's string guided Theseus out of the maze. It was a navigation instrument of some kind, invented by Daedalus. And Chris Rodriguez was mumbling about string."
So Luke is trying to find Ariadne's string," Percy said. "Why? What's he planning?"
She shook her head. "I don't know. I thought maybe he wanted to invade camp through the maze, but that doesn't make any sense. The closest entrances Y/N and Clarisse found were in Manhattan, which wouldn't help Luke get past our borders. Y/N and Clarisse explored a little way into the tunnels, but . . . it was very dangerous. They had some close calls. I researched everything I could find about Daedalus. It didn't help much. I don't understand exactly what Luke's planning, but I do know this: the Labyrinth might be the key to Grover's problem."
Percy blinked. "You think Pan is underground."
"It would explain why he's been impossible to find."
Grover shuddered. "Satyrs hate going underground. No searcher would ever try going in that place. No flowers. No sunshine. No coffee shops!"
"But," Annabeth said, "the Labyrinth can lead you almost anywhere. It reads your thoughts. It was designed to fool you, to trick you and kill you; but if you can make the Labyrinth work for you—"
"It could lead you to the wild god," Percy said.
"I can't do it." Grover hugged his stomach. "Just thinking about it makes me want to throw up my silverware."
"Grover, it may be your last chance," Annabeth said. "The council is serious. One week or you learn to tap dance!"
Over at the head table, Quintus cleared his throat. Annabeth knew she was pushing it, sitting at the Poseidon table so long, but she still had things to say—
Suddenly, the sound of his hooves pounding on marble reached their ears. Ethan came trotting into the pavilion. His banana sunhat was nearly falling off his head, a sign more blatant than any other something had happened.
He approached them, very pale, his hands shaking.
"What's going on?" Percy asked.
Annabeth felt her hands clench on the table; she couldn't loosen them. Ethan was Y/N's best friend. He would've gone to get him out of bed, at this hour. But Y/N wasn't there.
Nonsense, she thought. She tried to drive into her mind that she worried over nothing, but it was hard.
"There's a problem." Ethan's mouth seemed to struggle with itself.
"What?" Annabeth's own voice was hesitant.
"Y/N. . . ." Ethan swallowed. "Y/N's disappeared."
The fire pit in the middle of cabin two was empty. The bed in the corner was messy. Overall, everything suggested that Y/N was out to do what anyone might do at camp—like drinking hot chocolate with Chiron in the Big House, for instance. His lion coat was carelessly thrown on the floor; the clothes he'd worn yesterday lay at the foot of the bed.
In a word: lovely.
"I've been looking everywhere for Y/N," Ethan explained, twisting his banana sunhat in his hands. "He's not at the Big House, or the arena, or anywhere else. He wouldn't have gone into the woods without taking his coat. And he would've told me if he was leaving! It's not like him to just vanish into thin air. . . ." He nervously scrapped the ground with his hoof.
"Calm down, dummy." Annabeth talked more to herself than to Ethan. And her dreams didn't mean anything! "You must've missed him when you were looking for him. He has to be somewhere in the camp."
"I've been looking around an hour," Ethan said. "I asked the other satyrs; no one has seen him."
"You said yourself you didn't check the woods. Maybe he went to train against some monsters."
"But the coat—" Ethan started to say.
"Well, maybe today he didn't take it," Annabeth interrupted. "Tonight's Quintus's surprise, right? He's probably scouting the area."
"Wouldn't he be with Nico?" Percy suggested.
"I couldn't find Nico either," Ethan said. "He wasn't with the Hermes kids when they went to the pavilion for breakfast, so at first I thought maybe he'd gone with Y/N. But Y/N wasn't at the pavilion. . . ."
They all exchanged looks.
"Y/N and Nico would be missing?" Percy asked.
"That can't be," Annabeth said stubbornly. "There's just no reason. They have no quest. No mission. No monster can come near the cabins. The only possibility is that they're somewhere Ethan didn't check. The pine tree?"
"No," Ethan muttered. "I—I know you're not going to believe me—it doesn't happen to satyrs, stuff like that—but I had a dream and . . . it was about Y/N."
"You mean, like with an empathy link?" Grover asked.
"No, not like that," Ethan said. "It was weird. I could see him, but he couldn't me. When I tried to talk to him, he didn't hear anything. He was in a tunnel, I think, but I couldn't see well. It—it can't be a coincidence, that I have this dream and he disappears, of course, but satyrs don't typically have dreams like that. It must mean something."
Annabeth swallowed. She had trouble keeping her breathing even. Only a coincidence. No. That was silly at this point. Too many things pointed in the same direction. Y/N had disappeared somewhere.
"You're okay, Annabeth?" Percy asked. "You look like you're going to throw up."
She felt her cheeks flush. She must look like a complete idiot.
"Everything's fine, Seaweed Brain," she said. "But we need to talk to Chiron about it."
Chiron was in his apartment, inside the Big House. His boom box was playing some particularly awful type of country music.
When he saw them coming, his mouth broadened into a smile. Then he noticed their expression, and a mask of worry fell over his face. "I don't like when you come toward me looking like this. It always means something terrible happened."
"Y/N and Nico disappeared." Thankfully Annabeth's voice didn't waver.
Chiron opened his mouth, but it worked soundlessly. Ethan explained everything that had happened from the moment he had discovered cabin two empty.
"We must organize a search," Chiron said at last. "He can't be very far away." Even as he said this, Chiron was dark and his eyebrows furrowed with concern. He mumbled something Annabeth didn't catch, like a prayer.
That night after dinner, Quintus had them suit up in combat armor as if they were getting ready for Capture the Flag, but the mood among the campers was a lot more serious. Sometime during the day the crates in the arena had disappeared, and Annabeth had no doubt whatever was in them had been emptied into the woods. Moreover, everyone now knew about Y/N. Nobody believed he'd joined Luke's side—everyone knew how much they hated each other—but a camper gone without anyone noticing . . . it made everyone feel uncomfortable. And about Nico . . . he'd always been standing apart from everyone else. Nobody knew what to think about him.
"Right," Quintus said, standing on the head dining table. "Gather 'round."
He was dressed in black leather and bronze. In the torchlight, his gray hair made him look like a ghost. Mrs. O'Leary bounded happily around him, foraging for dinner scraps.
"You will be in teams of two," Quintus announced. When everybody started talking and trying to grab their friends, he yelled: "Which have already been chosen!"
"AWWWWW!" everybody complained.
"Your goal is simple: collect the gold laurels without dying. The wreath is wrapped in a silk package, tied to the back of one of the monsters. There are six monsters. Each has a silk package. Only one holds the laurels. You must find the wreath before the other teams. And, of course . . . you will have to slay the monster to get it, and stay alive."
The crowd started murmuring excitedly. The task sounded pretty straightforward. They had all slain monsters before. That's what they trained for.
"I will now announce your partners," Quintus said. "There will be no trading. No switching. No complaining."
"Aroooof!" Mrs. O'Leary buried her face in a plate of pizza.
Quintus produced a big scroll and started reading off names. Beckendorf would be with Silena Beauregard, which Silena looked pretty happy about. The Stoll brothers, Travis and Connor, would be together. No surprise. They did everything together. Clarisse was with Lee Fletcher from the Apollo cabin—melee and ranged combat combined, they would be a tough combo to beat. Quintus kept rattling off the names until he said, "Annabeth Chase with Ethan Moore."
"Hey." Ethan grinned at her, even though he seemed preoccupied with something else. She understood. She herself was preoccupied.
"Percy Jackson," Quintus said, "with Grover Underwood."
"Nice," they both said.
It was still light when they got into the woods, but the shadows from the trees made it feel like midnight. It was cold, too, even in the summer. Annabeth and Ethan found tracks almost immediately—scuttling marks made by something with a lot of legs. They began to follow.
They jumped a creek and heard some twigs snapping nearby. They crouched behind a boulder, but it was only the Stoll brothers tripping through the woods and cursing. Their dad was the god of thieves, but they were about as stealthy as water buffaloes.
Once the Stolls had passed, they went deeper into the west woods where the monsters were wilder.
"I saw him last night, too," Annabeth said.
Ethan knit his eyebrows. "What do you mean?"
She told him about her dream. When she was done, Ethan stared into the shadows of the woods. "Y/N's really in trouble, isn't he? We've got to help him."
She nodded. "But we have to find where he is first."
"Maybe—" Ethan said uncomfortably. "Maybe he's in the Labyrinth. I mean, he was in a tunnel, right? And he's gone in there before. He could've done it again. . . ." Ethan stopped. "Never mind, I'm talking nonsense."
"Maybe not," she said. "Everything leads to the Labyrinth. We have to figure it out. And if we come across Y/N on the way—"
A branch snapped in the woods. Something large was moving in the trees.
"That's not the Stoll brothers," Annabeth whispered.
She drew her knife as Ethan hefted his spear.
They ran to Zeus's Fist, but now there was nobody around.
"Over there," Annabeth whispered.
"No, wait," Ethan said. "Behind us."
Annabeth listened carefully. It was weird. Scuttling noises seemed to be coming from several different directions. They were circling the boulders, their weapons drawn, when someone right behind them said, "Hi."
They whirled around, and Juniper yelped.
"Put those down!" she protested. "Dryads don't like sharp blades, okay?"
"Juniper," Annabeth exhaled. "What are you doing here?"
"I live here."
Ethan lowered his spear. "You can't be living in the boulders."
Juniper pointed toward the edge of the clearing. "In the juniper. Duh. Are you guys busy?"
"Well," Ethan said, "we're in the middle of this game against a bunch of monsters and we're trying not to die."
"We're not busy," Annabeth said. "What's wrong, Juniper?"
Juniper sniffled. She wiped her silky sleeve under her eyes. "It's Grover. He seems so distraught. All year he's been out looking for Pan. And every time he comes back, it's worse. I thought maybe, at first, he was seeing another tree."
"No," Annabeth said as Juniper started crying. "I'm sure that's not it."
"He had a crush on a blueberry bush once," Juniper said miserably.
"Juniper," Annabeth went on, "Grover would never even look at another tree. He's just stressed out about his searcher's license."
"He can't go underground!" Juniper protested. "You can't let him."
"It might be the only way to help him; if we just knew where to start."
"Ah." Juniper wiped a green tear off her cheek. "About that—"
Another rustle in the woods, and Juniper yelled, "Hide!" before going poof into green mist.
Annabeth and Ethan turned. Coming out of the woods was a glistening amber insect, ten feet long, with jagged pincers, an armored tail, and a stinger twice as long as Annabeth's knife. A scorpion. Tied to its back was a red silk package.
"One of us gets behind it," Annabeth said as the thing clattered toward them. "Cuts off its tail while the other distracts it in front."
"I'll take point," Ethan said. "You've got the invisibility hat."
She nodded. They could do this, easy. But it all went wrong when the other two scorpions appeared from the woods.
"Three?" she said. "That's not possible! The whole woods, and half the monsters come at us?"
One, they could take. Two, with a little luck. Three? Doubtful.
The scorpions scurried toward them, whipping their barbed tails as if they'd come here just to kill them. Annabeth and Ethan put their backs against the nearest boulder.
"Climb?" Ethan said.
"No time," she said.
The scorpions were already surrounding them. They were so close she could see their hideous mouths foaming, anticipating a nice juicy meal of demigods.
"Look out!" Ethan parried away a stinger with the metal of his spear. Annabeth stabbed with her knife, but the scorpion backed out of range. They clambered sideways along the boulders, but the scorpions followed them. She slashed at another one, but going on the offensive was too dangerous. If she went for the body, the tail stabbed downward. If she went for the tail, the thing's pincers came from either side and tried to grab her. All they could do was defend, and they wouldn't be able to keep that up for very long.
"In here," Ethan said.
Annabeth sliced at a scorpion then looked at him. Was he crazy? "In there?" she said, looking at the space between two boulders he pointed at. "It's too narrow."
"I'll cover you. Go!"
She ducked behind Ethan and started squeezing between the two boulders. Suddenly solid ground was simply not there anymore. She yelped and grabbed the first thing she could: Ethan's armor straps. She could see the scorpions above them and the purple evening sky, and then the hole shut like a whirlwind, and they were in complete darkness.
Their breathing echoed against stone. Wet and cold air pressed against Annabeth's skin. Her heart tried to break free of her chest.
"Wh-where are we?" she said, even though she thought she already knew.
"Safe from scorpions, anyway." Ethan's voice showed how freaked out he was. "It's a long room," he muttered.
"It's not a room. It's a corridor." She stopped Ethan before he could start forward. "Don't take another step. We need to find an exit."
She must've sounded really scared, because Ethan said, "It's okay."
"Help me examine the walls," she told him.
"What for?"
"The mark of Daedalus."
"Uh, okay. What kind of—"
"Got it!" Never before had she felt so relieved. She set her hand on the wall and pressed against a tiny fissure, which began to glow blue. A Greek symbol appeared: Δ, the Ancient Greek Delta.
The roof slid open and they saw night sky, stars blazing. It was a lot darker than it should've been. Metal ladder rungs appeared in the side of the wall, leading up, and Annabeth could hear people yelling her and Ethan's names.
"Annabeth! Ethan!" Tyson's voice bellowed the loudest, but others were calling out too.
They began to climb.
They made their way around the rocks and ran into Clarisse and a bunch of other campers carrying torches.
"Where have you two been?" Clarisse demanded. "We've been looking forever."
"But we were only gone a few minutes," Ethan said.
Chiron trotted up, followed by Percy, Grover, and Tyson.
"Ethan!" Grover said. "You're okay?"
"We're fine," Ethan said. "We fell in a hole."
The others looked at him skeptically.
"Honest!" he said. "There were three scorpions after us, so we ran and hid in the rocks. But we were only gone a minute."
"You've been missing for almost an hour," Chiron said. "The game is over."
"Yeah," Percy said. "Grover and I won."
Indeed, Grover was wearing the gold laurels, but he didn't brag about it. "A hole?" he said.
Annabeth took a deep breath. "Chiron . . . maybe we should talk about this at the Big House."
Clarisse gasped. "You found it, didn't you?"
Annabeth bit her lips. "Yeah. Yeah, we did."
A bunch of campers started asking questions, looking confused, but Chiron raised his hand for silence. "Tonight is not the right time, and this is not the right place." He stared at the boulders as if he'd just noticed how dangerous they were. "All of you, back to your cabins. Get some sleep. A game well played, but curfew is past!"
There was a lot of mumbling and complaints, but the campers drifted off, talking among themselves.
"This explains a lot," Clarisse said. "It explains what Luke is after."
"Wait a second," Ethan said. "What do you mean? What did we find?"
Annabeth turned toward him. "An entrance to the Labyrinth. An invasion route straight into the heart of the camp."
The hole in which Y/N disappeared, she thought.