The Battle of the Labyrinth

“If I fail, you get all of us. Trade us all to Luke for gold.”
    “Assuming the horses don’t eat you,” Geryon observed.
    “Either way, you get my friends,” I said. “But if I succeed, you’ve got to let all of us go, including Nico.”
    “No!” Nico screamed. “Don’t do me any favors, Percy. I don’t want your help!”
    Geryon chuckled. “Percy Jackson, those stables haven’t been cleaned in a thousand years . . . though it’s true I might be able to sell more stable space if all that poop was cleared away.”
    “So what have you got to lose?”
    The rancher hesitated. “All right, I’ll accept your offer, but you have to get it done by sunset. If you fail, your friends get sold, and I get rich.”
    “Deal.”
    He nodded. “I’m going to take your friends with me, back to the lodge. We’ll wait for you there.”
    Eurytion gave me a funny look. It might have been sympathy. He whistled, and the dog jumped off me and onto Annabeth’s lap. She yelped. I knew Tyson and Grover would never try anything as long as Annabeth was a hostage.
    I got out of the car and locked eyes with her.
    “I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said quietly.
    “I hope so, too.”
    Geryon got behind the driver’s wheel. Eurytion hauled Nico into the backseat.
    “Sunset,” Geryon reminded me. “No later.”
    He laughed at me once more, sounded his cowbell horn, and the moo-mobile rumbled off down the trail.

NINE

I SCOOP POOP
    I lost hope when I saw the horses’ teeth.
    As I got closer to the fence I held my shirt over my nose to block the smell. One stallion waded through the muck and whinnied angrily at me. He bared his teeth, which were pointed like a bear’s.
    I tried to talk to him in my mind. I can do that with most horses.
    Hi , I told him. I’m going to clean your stables. Won’t that be great?
    Yes! The horse said. Come inside! Eat you! Tasty half-blood!
    But I’m Poseidon’s son , I protested. He created horses.
    Usually this gets me VIP treatment in the equestrian world, but not this time.
    Yes! The horse agreed enthusiastically. Poseidon can come in, too! We will eat you both! Seafood!
    Seafood! The other horses chimed in as they waded through the field. Flies were buzzing everywhere, and the heat of the day didn’t make the smell any better. I’d had some idea that I could do this challenge, because I remembered how Hercules had done it. He’d channeled a river into the stables and cleaned them out that way. I figured I could maybe control the water. But if I couldn’t get close to the horses without getting eaten, that was a problem. And the river was downhill from the stables, a lot farther away than I’d realized, almost half a mile. The problem of the poop looked a lot bigger up close. I picked up a rusted shovel and experimentally scooped some away from the fence line. Great. Only four billion shovelfuls to go.
    The sun was already sinking. I had a few hours at best. I decided the river was my only hope. At least it would be easier to think at the riverside than it was here. I set off downhill.
    When I got to the river, I found a girl waiting for me. She was wearing jeans and a green T-shirt and her long brown hair was braided with river grass. She had a stern look on her face. Her arms were crossed.
    “Oh no you don’t,” she said.
    I stared at her. “Are you a naiad?”
    She rolled her eyes. “Of course!”
    “But you speak English. And you’re out of the water.”
    “What, you don’t think we can act human if we want to?”
    I’d never thought about it. I kind of felt stupid, though, because I’d seen plenty of naiads at camp, and they’d never done much more than giggle and wave at me from the bottom of the canoe lake.
    “Look,” I said, “I just came to ask—”
    “I know who you are,” she said. “And I know what you want. And the answer is no! I’m not to going have my river used again to clean that filthy stable.”
    “But—”
    “Oh, save it, sea boy. You ocean-god types always think you’re soooo much more important than some little river, don’t you? Well let me tell you, this naiad is not going to be pushed around just because your daddy is Poseidon. This is freshwater territory, mister. The last guy who asked me this favor—oh, he was way better-looking than you, by the way—he convinced me, and that was the worst mistake I’ve ever made! Do you have any idea what all that horse manure does to my ecosystem? Do I look like a sewage