Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Demigod Files

Aphrodite uninterested in jewelry.
    We forged on. After twenty more feet, we entered a cavern that smelled so bad my nose shut down completely. The remains of old meals were piled as high as sand dunes—bones, chunks of rancid meat, even old camp meals. I guess the ants had been raiding the camp’s compost heap and stealing our leftovers. At the base of one of the heaps, struggling to pull himself upright, was Beckendorf. He looked awful, partly because his camouflage armor was now the color of garbage.
    “Charlie!” Silena ran to him and tried to help him up.
    “Thank the gods,” he said. “My—my legs are paralyzed!”
    “It’ll wear off,” Annabeth said. “But we have to get you out of here. Percy, take his other side.”
    Silena and I hoisted Beckendorf up, and the four of us started back through the tunnels. I could hear distant sounds of battle—metal creaking, fire roaring, hundreds of ants snapping and spitting.
    “What’s going on out there?” Beckendorf asked. His body tensed. “The dragon! You didn’t—reactivate it?”
    “Afraid so,” I said. “Seemed like the only way.”
    “But you can’t just turn on an automaton! You have to calibrate the motor, run a diagnostic . . . There’s no telling what it’ll do! We’ve got to get out there!”
    As it turned out, we didn’t need to go anywhere, because the dragon came to us. We were trying to remember which tunnel was the exit when the entire hill exploded, showering us in dirt. Suddenly we were staring at open sky. The dragon was right above us, thrashing back and forth, smashing the Ant Hill to bits as it tried to shake off the Myrmekes crawling all over its body.
    “Come on!” I yelled. We dug ourselves out of the dirt and stumbled down the side of the hill, dragging Beckendorf with us.
    Our friend the dragon was in trouble. The Myrmekes were biting at the joints of its armor, spitting acid all over it. The dragon stomped and snapped and blew flames, but it couldn’t last much longer. Steam was rising from its bronze skin.
    Even worse, a few of the ants turned toward us. I guess they didn’t like us stealing their dinner. I slashed at one and lopped off its head. Annabeth stabbed another right between the feelers. As the celestial bronze blade pierced its shell, the whole ant disintegrated.
    “I—I think I can walk now,” Beckendorf said, and immediately fell on his face when we let go of him.
    “Charlie!” Silena helped him up and pulled him along while Annabeth and I cleared a path through the ants. Somehow we managed to reach the edge of the clearing without getting bitten or splashed, though one of my sneakers was smoking from acid.
    Back in the clearing, the dragon stumbled. A great cloud of acid mist was roiling off its hide.
    “We can’t let it die!” Silena said.
    “It’s too dangerous,” Beckendorf said sadly. “Its wiring—”
    “Charlie,” Silena pleaded, “it saved your life! Please, for me.”
    Beckendorf hesitated. His face was still bright red from the ant spit, and he looked as if he were going to faint any minute, but he struggled to his feet. “Get ready to run,” he told us. Then he gazed across the clearing and shouted, “DRAGON! Emergency defense, beta-ACTIVATE!”
    The dragon turned toward the sound of his voice. It stopped struggling against the ants, and its eyes glowed. The air smelled of ozone, like before a thunderstorm.
    ZZZZZAAAAAPPP!
    Arcs of blue electricity shot from the dragon’s skin, rippling up and down its body and connecting with the ants. Some of the ants exploded. Others smoked and blackened, their legs twitching. In a few seconds there were no more ants on the dragon. The ones that were still alive were in full retreat, scuttling back toward their ruined hill as fingers of electricity zapped them in the butt to prod them along.
    The dragon bellowed in triumph, then it turned its glowing eyes toward us.
    “Now,” Beckendorf said, “we run.”
    This time we did not yell, “For Hephaestus!” We yelled, “Heeeeelp!”
    The dragon pounded after us, spewing fire and zapping lightning bolts over our heads like it was having a great time.
    “How do you stop it?” Annabeth yelled.
    Beckendorf, whose legs were now working fine (nothing like being chased by a huge monster to get your body back in order) shook his head and gasped for breath. “You shouldn’t have turned it on! It’s unstable! After a few years, automatons go wild!”
    “Good to know,” I yelled.