The Battle of the Labyrinth

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. Hey, we’d all slain monsters before. That’s what we 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 Beckendorf 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, “Percy Jackson with Annabeth Chase.”
    “Nice.” I grinned at Annabeth.
    “Your armor is crooked” was her only comment, and she redid my straps for me.
    “Grover Underwood,” Quintus said, “with Tyson.”
    Grover just about jumped out of his goat fur. “What? B-but—”
    “No, no,” Tyson whimpered. “Must be a mistake. Goat boy—”
    “No complaining!” Quintus ordered. “Get with your partner. You have two minutes to prepare!”
    Tyson and Grover both looked at me pleadingly. I tried to give them an encouraging nod, and gestured that they should move together. Tyson sneezed. Grover started chewing nervously on his wooden club.
    “They’ll be fine,” Annabeth said. “Come on. Let’s worry about how we’re going to stay alive.”
    It was still light when we got into the woods, but the shadows from the trees made it feel like midnight. It was cold, too, even in summer. Annabeth and I found tracks almost immediately—scuttling marks made by something with a lot of legs. We began to follow the trail.
    We jumped a creek and heard some twigs snapping nearby. We 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, we forged deeper into the west woods where the monsters were wilder. We were standing on a ledge overlooking a marshy pond when Annabeth tensed. “This is where we stopped looking.”
    It took me a second to realize what she meant. Last winter, when we’d been searching for Nico di Angelo, this is where we’d given up hope of finding him. Grover, Annabeth, and I had stood on this rock, and I’d convinced them not to tell Chiron the truth: that Nico was a son of Hades. At the time it seemed the right thing to do. I wanted to protect his identity. I wanted to be the one to find him and make things right for what had happened to his sister. Now, six months later, I hadn’t even come close to finding him. It left a bitter taste in my mouth.
    “I saw him last night,” I said.
    Annabeth knit her eyebrows. “What do you mean?”
    I told her about the Iris-message. When I was done, she stared into the shadows of the woods. “He’s summoning the dead? That’s not good.”
    “The ghost was giving him bad advice,” I said. “Telling him to take revenge.”
    “Yeah . . . spirits are never good advisers. They’ve got their own agendas. Old grudges. And they resent the living.”
    “He’s going to come after me,” I said. “The spirit mentioned a maze.”
    She nodded. “That settles it. We have to figure out the Labyrinth.”
    “Maybe,” I said uncomfortably. “But who sent the Iris-message? If Nico didn’t know I was there—”
    A branch snapped in the woods. Dry leaves rustled. Something large was moving in the trees, just beyond the ridge.
    “That’s not the Stoll brothers,” Annabeth whispered.
    Together we drew our swords.
    We got to Zeus’s Fist, a huge pile of boulders in the middle of the west woods. It was a natural landmark where campers often rendezvoused on hunting expeditions, but now there was nobody