Annabeth crept to the edge. Even with the glow cast by her dagger, it was too dark to see below. She rested her hand on the wall and found a light switch.
She flipped it. Glaring white fluorescent bulbs illuminated the stairs. Below, she saw a mosaic floor decorated with deer and fauns—maybe a room from an Ancient Roman villa, just stashed away under this modern basement along with the crates of string and plastic swords.
She climbed down. The room was about twenty feet square. The walls had once been brightly painted, but most of the frescoes had peeled or faded. The only exit was a hole dug in one corner of the floor where the mosaic had been pulled up. Annabeth crouched next to the opening. It dropped straight down into a larger cavern, but Annabeth couldn’t see the bottom.
She heard running water maybe thirty or forty feet below. The air didn’t smell like a sewer—just old and musty, and slightly sweet, like moldering flowers. Perhaps it was an old water line from the aqueducts. There was no way down.
“I’m not jumping,” she muttered to herself.
As if in reply, something glowed in the darkness. The Mark of Athena blazed to life at the bottom of the cavern, revealing glistening brickwork along a subterranean canal forty feet below. The fiery owl seemed to be taunting her:
Annabeth considered her options. Too dangerous to jump. No ladders or ropes. She thought about borrowing some metal scaffolding from above to use as a fire pole, but it was all bolted in place. Besides, she didn’t want to cause the building to collapse on top of her.
Frustration crawled through her like an army of termites. She had spent her life watching other demigods gain amazing powers. Percy could control water. If he were here, he could raise the water level and simply float down. Hazel, from what she had said, could find her way underground with flawless accuracy and even create or change the course of tunnels. She could easily make a new path. Leo would pull just the right tools from his belt and build something to do the job. Frank could turn into a bird. Jason could simply control the wind and float down. Even Piper with her charmspeak…she could have convinced Tiberinus and Rhea Silvia to be a little more helpful.
What did Annabeth have? A bronze dagger that did nothing special, and a cursed silver coin. She had her backpack with Daedalus’s laptop, a water bottle, a few pieces of ambrosia for emergencies, and a box of matches —probably useless, but her dad had drilled into her head that she should always have a way to make fire.
She had no amazing powers. Even her one true magic item, her New York Yankees cap of invisibility, had stopped working, and was still back in her cabin on the
Intelligence…like Athena’s favorite hero, Odysseus. He’d won the Trojan War with cleverness, not strength. He had overcome all sorts of monsters and hardships with his quick wits. That’s what Athena valued.
That didn’t mean just without other people, Annabeth realized. It meant without any special powers.
Okay…so how to get down there safely and make sure she had a way to get out again if necessary?
She climbed back to the basement and stared at the open crates. Kite string and plastic swords. The idea that came to her was so ridiculous, she almost had to laugh; but it was better than nothing.
She set to work. Her hands seemed to know exactly what to do. Sometimes that happened, like when she was helping Leo with the ship’s machinery or drawing architectural plans on the computer. She’d never made anything out of kite string and plastic swords, but it seemed easy, natural. Within minutes she’d used a dozen balls of string and a crateful of swords to create a makeshift rope ladder—a braided line, woven for strength yet not too thick, with swords tied at two-foot intervals to serve as hand-and footholds.
As a test, she tied one end around a support column and leaned on the rope with all her weight. The plastic swords bent under her, but they provided some extra bulk to the knots in the cord, so at least she could keep a better grip.
The ladder wouldn’t win any design awards, but it might get her to the bottom of the cavern safely. First, she stuffed her backpack with the leftover spools of string. She wasn’t sure why, but they were one more resource, and not too heavy.
She headed back to the hole in the mosaic floor. She secured one end of her ladder to the nearest piece of scaffolding, lowered the rope into the cavern, and shinnied down.
AS ANNABETH HUNG IN THE AIR, descending hand over hand with the ladder swinging wildly, she thanked Chiron for all those years of training on the climbing course at Camp Half-Blood. She’d complained loudly and often that rope climbing would never help her defeat a monster. Chiron had just smiled, like he knew this day would come.
Finally Annabeth made it to the bottom. She missed the brickwork edge and landed in the canal, but it turned out to be only a few inches deep. Freezing water soaked into her running shoes.
She held up her glowing dagger. The shallow channel ran down the middle of a brickwork tunnel. Every few yards, ceramic pipes jutted from the walls. She guessed that the pipes were drains, part of the ancient Roman plumbing system, though it was amazing to her that a tunnel like this had survived, crowded underground with all the other centuries’ worth of pipes, basements, and sewers.
A sudden thought chilled her even more than the water. A few years ago, Percy and she had gone on a quest in Daedalus’s labyrinth—a secret network of tunnels and rooms, heavily enchanted and trapped, which ran under all the cities of America.
When Daedalus died in the Battle of the Labyrinth, the entire maze had collapsed—or so Annabeth believed. But what if that was only in America? What if this was an older version of the labyrinth? Daedalus once told her that his maze had a life of its own. It was constantly growing and changing. Maybe the labyrinth could regenerate, like monsters. That would make sense. It was an archetypal force, as Chiron would say—something that could never really die.
If this was part of the labyrinth…
Annabeth decided not to dwell on that, but she also decided not to assume her directions were accurate. The
