The Battle of the Labyrinth

far as I could tell, they were identical. “That way,” she said.
    “How do you know?” I asked.
    “Deductive reasoning.”
    “So . . . you’re guessing.”
    “Just come on,” she said.
    The tunnel she’d chosen narrowed quickly. The walls turned to gray cement, and the ceiling got so low that pretty soon we were hunching over. Tyson was forced to crawl.
    Grover’s hyperventilating was the loudest noise in the maze. “I can’t stand it anymore,” he whispered. “Are we there yet?”
    “We’ve been down here maybe five minutes,” Annabeth told him.
    “It’s been longer than that,” Grover insisted. “And why would Pan be down here? This is the opposite of the wild!”
    We kept shuffling forward. Just when I was sure the tunnel would get so narrow it would squish us, it opened into a huge room. I shined my light around the walls and said, “Whoa.”
    The whole room was covered in mosaic tiles. The pictures were grimy and faded, but I could still make out the colors—red, blue, green, gold. The frieze showed the Olympian gods at a feast. There was my dad, Poseidon, with his trident, holding out grapes for Dionysus to turn into wine. Zeus was partying with satyrs, and Hermes was flying through the air on his winged sandals. The pictures were beautiful, but they weren’t very accurate. I’d seen the gods. Dionysus was not that handsome, and Hermes’s nose wasn’t that big.
    In the middle of the room was a three-tiered fountain. It looked like it hadn’t held water in a long time.
    “What is this place?” I muttered. “It looks—”
    “Roman,” Annabeth said. “Those mosaics are about two thousand years old.”
    “But how can they be Roman?” I wasn’t that great on ancient history, but I was pretty sure the Roman Empire never made it as far as Long Island.
    “The Labyrinth is a patchwork,” Annabeth said. “I told you, it’s always expanding, adding pieces. It’s the only work of architecture that grows by itself.”
    “You make it sound like it’s alive.”
    A groaning noise echoed from the tunnel in front of us.
    “Let’s not talk about it being alive,” Grover whimpered. “Please?”
    “All right,” Annabeth said. “Forward.”
    “Down the hall with the bad sounds?” Tyson said. Even he looked nervous.
    “Yeah,” Annabeth said. “The architecture is getting older. That’s a good sign. Daedalus’s workshop would be in the oldest part.”
    That made sense. But soon the maze was toying with us—we went fifty feet and the tunnel turned back to cement, with brass pipes running down the sides. The walls were spray-painted with graffiti. A neon tagger sign read MOZ RULZ.
    “I’m thinking this is not Roman,” I said helpfully.
    Annabeth took a deep breath, then forged ahead.
    Every few feet the tunnels twisted and turned and branched off. The floor beneath us changed from cement to mud to bricks and back again. There was no sense to any of it. We stumbled into a wine cellar—a bunch of dusty bottles in wooden racks—like we were walking through somebody’s basement, only there was no exit above us, just more tunnels leading on.
    Later the ceiling turned to wooden planks, and I could hear voices above us and the creaking of footsteps, as if we were walking under some kind of bar. It was reassuring to hear people, but then again, we couldn’t get to them. We were stuck down here with no way out. Then we found our first skeleton.
    He was dressed in white clothes, like some kind of uniform. A wooden crate of glass bottles sat next to him.
    “A milkman,” Annabeth said.
    “What?” I asked.
    “They used to deliver milk.”
    “Yeah, I know what they are, but . . . that was when my mom was little, like a million years ago. What’s he doing here?”
    “Some people wander in by mistake,” Annabeth said. “Some come exploring on purpose and never make it back. A long time ago, the Cretans even sent people in here as human sacrifices.”
    Grover gulped. “He’s been down here a long time.” He pointed to the skeleton’s bottles, which were coated with white dust. The skeleton’s fingers were clawing at the brick wall, like he had died trying to get out.
    “Only bones,” Tyson said. “Don’t worry, goat boy. The milkman is dead.”
    “The milkman doesn’t bother me,” Grover said. “It’s the smell. Monsters. Can’t you smell it?”
    Tyson nodded. “Lots of monsters. But underground smells like that. Monsters and dead milk people.”
    “Oh,