The Battle of the Labyrinth

shoulder against the rock so hard the whole tunnel shook. Dust trickled from the stone ceiling.
    “Hurry!” Grover said. “Don’t bring the roof down, but hurry!”
    The boulder finally gave way with a horrible grinding noise. Tyson pushed it into a small room and we dashed through behind it.
    “Close the entrance!” Annabeth said.
    We all got on the other side of the boulder and pushed. Whatever was chasing us wailed in frustration as we heaved the rock back into place and sealed the corridor.
    “We trapped it,” I said.
    “Or trapped ourselves,” Grover said.
    I turned. We were in a twenty-foot-square cement room, and the opposite wall was covered with metal bars. We’d tunneled straight into a cell.
    “What in Hades?” Annabeth tugged on the bars. They didn’t budge. Through the bars we could see rows of cells in a ring around a dark courtyard—at least three stories of metal doors and metal catwalks.
    “A prison,” I said. “Maybe Tyson can break—”
    “Shh,” said Grover. “Listen.”
    Somewhere above us, deep sobbing echoed through the building. There was another sound, too—a raspy voice muttering something that I couldn’t make out. The words were strange, like rocks in a tumbler.
    “What’s that language?” I whispered.
    Tyson’s eye widened. “Can’t be.”
    “What?” I asked.
    He grabbed two bars on our cell door and bent them wide enough for even a Cyclops to slip through.
    “Wait!” Grover called.
    But Tyson wasn’t about to wait. We ran after him. The prison was dark, only a few dim fluorescent lights flickering above.
    “I know this place,” Annabeth told me. “This is Alcatraz.”
    “You mean that island near San Francisco?”
    She nodded. “My school took a field trip here. It’s like a museum.”
    It didn’t seem possible that we could’ve popped out of the Labyrinth on the other side of the country, but Annabeth had been living in San Francisco all year, keeping an eye on Mount Tamalpais just across the bay. She probably knew what she was talking about.
    “Freeze,” Grover warned.
    But Tyson kept going. Grover grabbed his arm and pulled him back with all his strength. “Stop, Tyson!” he whispered. “Can’t you see it?”
    I looked where he was pointing, and my stomach did a somersault. On the second-floor balcony, across the courtyard, was a monster more horrible than anything I’d ever seen before.
    It was sort of like a centaur, with a woman’s body from the waist up. But instead of a horse’s lower body, it had the body of a dragon—at least twenty feet long, black and scaly with enormous claws and a barbed tail. Her legs looked like they were tangled in vines, but then I realized they were sprouting snakes, hundreds of vipers darting around, constantly looking for something to bite. The woman’s hair was also made of snakes, like Medusa’s. Weirdest of all, around her waist, where the woman part met the dragon part, her skin bubbled and morphed, occasionally producing the heads of animals—a vicious wolf, a bear, a lion, as if she were wearing a belt of ever-changing creatures. I got the feeling I was looking at something half formed, a monster so old it was from the beginning of time, before shapes had been fully defined.
    “It’s her,” Tyson whimpered.
    “Get down!” Grover said.
    We crouched in the shadows, but the monster wasn’t paying us any attention. It seemed to be talking to someone inside a cell on the second floor. That’s where the sobbing was coming from. The dragon woman said something in her weird rumbling language.
    “What’s she saying?” I muttered. “What’s that language?”
    “The tongue of the old times.” Tyson shivered. “What Mother Earth spoke to Titans and . . . her other children. Before the gods.”
    “You understand it?” I asked. “Can you translate?”
    Tyson closed his eyes and began to speak in a horrible, raspy woman’s voice. “You will work for the master or suffer.”
    Annabeth shuddered. “I hate it when he does that.”
    Like all Cyclopes, Tyson had superhuman hearing and an uncanny ability to mimic voices. It was almost like he entered a trance when he spoke in other voices.
    “I will not serve,” Tyson said in a deep, wounded voice.
    He switched to the monster’s voice: “Then I shall enjoy your pain, Briares.” Tyson faltered when he said that name. I’d never heard him break character when he was mimicking somebody, but he let out a strangled gulp. Then he continued