The Mark of Athena

She felt exhausted and out of tricks, but her mind was clear. Her panic seemed to have burned up along with that woven bridge.

The weaver, she thought. I must be close. At least I know what’s ahead.

She made her way down the next corridor, hopping to keep the weight off her bad foot.

She didn’t have far to go.

After twenty feet, the tunnel opened into a cavern as large as a cathedral, so majestic that Annabeth had trouble processing everything she saw. She guessed that this was the room from Percy’s dream, but it wasn’t dark. Bronze braziers of magical light, like the gods used on Mount Olympus, glowed around the circumference of the room, interspersed with gorgeous tapestries. The stone floor was webbed with fissures like a sheet of ice. The ceiling was so high, it was lost in the gloom and layers upon layers of spiderwebs.

Strands of silk as thick as pillars ran from the ceiling all over the room, anchoring the walls and the floor like the cables of a suspension bridge.

Webs also surrounded the centerpiece of the shrine, which was so intimidating that Annabeth had trouble raising her eyes to look at it. Looming over her was a forty-foot-tall statue of Athena, with luminous ivory skin and a dress of gold. In her outstretched hand, Athena held a statue of Nike, the winged victory goddess—a statue that looked tiny from here, but was probably as tall as a real person. Athena’s other hand rested on a shield as big as a billboard, with a sculpted snake peeking out from behind, as if Athena was protecting it.

The goddess’s face was serene and kindly…and it looked like Athena. Annabeth had seen many statues that didn’t resemble her mom at all, but this giant version, made thousands of years ago, made her think that the artist must have met Athena in person. He had captured her perfectly.

“Athena Parthenos,” Annabeth murmured. “It’s really here.”

All her life, she had wanted to visit the Parthenon. Now she was seeing the main attraction that used to be there—and she was the first child of Athena to do so in millennia.

She realized her mouth was hanging open. She forced herself to swallow. Annabeth could have stood there all day looking at the statue, but she had only accomplished half her mission. She had found the Athena Parthenos. Now, how could she rescue it from this cavern?

Strands of web covered it like a gauze pavilion. Annabeth suspected that without those webs, the statue would have fallen through the weakened floor long ago. As she stepped into the room, she could see that the cracks below were so wide, she could have lost her foot in them. Beneath the cracks, she saw nothing but empty darkness.

A chill washed over her. Where was the guardian? How could Annabeth free the statue without collapsing the floor? She couldn’t very well shove the Athena Parthenos down the corridor that she’d come from.

She scanned the chamber, hoping to see something that might help. Her eyes wandered over the tapestries, which were heart-wrenchingly beautiful. One showed a pastoral scene so three-dimensional, it could’ve been a window. Another tapestry showed the gods battling the giants. Annabeth saw a landscape of the Underworld. Next to it was the skyline of modern Rome. And in the tapestry to her left…

She caught her breath. It was a portrait of two demigods kissing underwater: Annabeth and Percy, the day their friends had thrown them into the canoe lake at camp. It was so lifelike that she wondered if the weaver had been there, lurking in the lake with a waterproof camera.

“How is that possible?” she murmured.

Above her in the gloom, a voice spoke. “For ages I have known that you would come, my sweet.”

Annabeth shuddered. Suddenly she was seven years old again, hiding under her covers, waiting for the spiders to attack her in the night. The voice sounded just as Percy had described: an angry buzz in multiple tones, female but not human.

In the webs above the statue, something moved—something dark and large.

“I have seen you in my dreams,” the voice said, sickly sweet and evil, like the smell in the corridors. “I had to make sure you were worthy, the only child of Athena clever enough to pass my tests and reach this place alive. Indeed, you are her most talented child. This will make your death so much more painful to my old enemy when you fail utterly.”

The pain in Annabeth’s ankle was nothing compared to the icy acid now filling her veins. She wanted to run. She wanted to plead for mercy. But she couldn’t show weakness—not now.

“You’re Arachne,” she called out. “The weaver who was turned into a spider.”

The figure descended, becoming clearer and more horrible. “Cursed by your mother,” she said. “Scorned by all and made into a hideous thing…because I was the better weaver.”

“But you lost the contest,” Annabeth said.

“That’s the story written by the winner!” cried Arachne. “Look on my work! See for yourself!”

Annabeth didn’t have to. The tapestries were the best she’d ever seen—better than the witch Circe’s work, and, yes, even better than some weavings she’d seen on Mount Olympus. She wondered if her mother truly had lost—if she’d hidden Arachne away and rewritten the truth. But right now, it didn’t matter.

“You’ve been guarding this statue since the ancient times,” Annabeth guessed. “But it doesn’t belong here. I’m taking it back.”

“Ha,” Arachne said.

Even Annabeth had to admit her threat sounded ridiculous. How could one girl in a Bubble Wrap ankle cast remove this huge statue from its underground chamber?

“I’m afraid you would have to defeat me first, my sweet,” Arachne said. “And alas, that is impossible.”

The creature appeared from the curtains of webbing, and Annabeth realized that her quest was hopeless. She was about to die.