The Battle of the Labyrinth

that?” I asked.
    Annabeth elbowed me. “Don’t be rude. The Hundred-Handed Ones have fifty different faces.”
    “Must make it hard to get a yearbook picture,” I said.
    Tyson was still entranced. “It will be okay, Briares! We will help you! Can I have your autograph?”
    Briares sniffled. “Do you have one hundred pens?”
    “Guys,” Grover interrupted. “We have to get out of here. Kampê will be back. She’ll sense us sooner or later.”
    “Break the bars,” Annabeth said.
    “Yes!” Tyson said, smiling proudly. “Briares can do it. He is very strong. Stronger than Cyclopes, even! Watch!”
    Briares whimpered. A dozen of his hands started playing patty-cake, but none of them made any attempt to break the bars.
    “If he’s so strong,” I said, “why is he stuck in jail?”
    Annabeth ribbed me again. “He’s terrified,” she whispered. “Kampê imprisoned him in Tartarus for thousands of years. How would you feel?”
    The Hundred-Handed One covered his face again.
    “Briares?” Tyson asked. “What . . . what is wrong? Show us your great strength!”
    “Tyson,” Annabeth said, “I think you’d better break the bars.”
    Tyson’s smile melted slowly.
    “I will break the bars,” he repeated. He grabbed the cell door and ripped it off its hinges like it was made of wet clay.
    “Come on, Briares,” Annabeth said. “Let’s get you out of here.”
    She held out her hand. For a second, Briares’s face morphed to a hopeful expression. Several of his arms reached out, but twice as many slapped them away.
    “I cannot,” he said. “She will punish me.”
    “It’s all right,” Annabeth promised. “You fought the Titans before, and you won, remember?”
    “I remember the war.” Briares’s face morphed again— furrowed brow and a pouting mouth. His brooding face, I guess. “Lightning shook the world. We threw many rocks. The Titans and the monsters almost won. Now they are getting strong again. Kampê said so.”
    “Don’t listen to her,” I said. “Come on!”
    He didn’t move. I knew Grover was right. We didn’t have much time before Kampê returned. But I couldn’t just leave him here. Tyson would cry for weeks.
    “One game of rock, paper, scissors,” I blurted out. “If I win, you come with us. If I lose, we’ll leave you in jail.”
    Annabeth looked at me like I was crazy.
    Briares’s face morphed to doubtful. “I always win rock, paper, scissors.”
    “Then let’s do it!” I pounded my fist in my palm three times.
    Briares did the same with all one hundred hands, which sounded like an army marching three steps forward. He came up with a whole avalanche of rocks, a classroom set of scissors, and enough paper to make a fleet of airplanes.
    “I told you,” he said sadly. “I always—” His face morphed to confusion. “What is that you made?”
    “A gun,” I told him, showing him my finger gun. It was a trick Paul Blofis had pulled on me, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. “A gun beats anything.”
    “That’s not fair.”
    “I didn’t say anything about fair. Kampê’s not going to be fair if we hang around. She’s going to blame you for ripping off the bars. Now come on!”
    Briares sniffled. “Demigods are cheaters.” But he slowly rose to his feet and followed us out of the cell.
    I started to feel hopeful. All we had to do was get downstairs and find the Labyrinth entrance. But then Tyson froze.
    On the ground floor right below, Kampê was snarling at us.
    “The other way,” I said.
    We bolted down the catwalk. This time Briares was happy to follow us. In fact he sprinted out front, a hundred arms waving in panic.
    Behind us, I heard the sound of giant wings as Kampê took to the air. She hissed and growled in her ancient language, but I didn’t need a translation to know she was planning to kill us.
    We scrambled down the stairs, through a corridor, and past a guard’s station—out into another block of prison cells.
    “Left,” Annabeth said. “I remember this from the tour.”
    We burst outside and found ourselves in the prison yard, ringed by security towers and barbed wire. After being inside so long, the daylight almost blinded me. Tourists were milling around, taking pictures. The wind whipped cold off the bay. In the south, San Francisco gleamed all white and beautiful, but in the north, over Mount Tamalpais, huge storm clouds swirled. The whole sky seemed like a black top spinning from the mountain where Atlas was