The Battle of the Labyrinth

treatment plant to you? My fish will die. I’ll never get the muck out of my plants. I’ll be sick for years. NO THANK YOU!”
    The way she talked reminded me of my mortal friend, Rachel Elizabeth Dare—kind of like she was punching me with words. I couldn’t blame the naiad. Now that I thought about it, I’d be pretty mad if somebody dumped four million pounds of manure in my home. But still . . .
    “My friends are in danger,” I told her.
    “Well, that’s too bad! But it’s not my problem. And you’re not going to ruin my river.”
    She looked like she was ready for a fight. Her fists were balled, but I thought I heard a little quiver in her voice. Suddenly I realized that despite her angry attitude, she was afraid of me. She probably thought I was going to fight her for control of the river, and she was worried she would lose.
    The thought made me sad. I felt like a bully, a son of Poseidon throwing his weight around.
    I sat down on a tree stump. “Okay, you win.”
    The naiad looked surprised. “Really?”
    “I’m not going to fight you. It’s your river.”
    She relaxed her shoulders. “Oh. Oh, good. I mean— good thing for you!”
    “But my friends and I are going to get sold to the Titans if I don’t clean those stables by sunset. And I don’t know how.”
    The river gurgled along cheerfully. A snake slid through the water and ducked its head under. Finally the naiad sighed.
    “I’ll tell you a secret, son of the sea god. Scoop up some dirt.”
    “What?”
    “You heard me.”
    I crouched down and scooped up a handful of Texas dirt. It was dry and black and spotted with tiny clumps of white rock . . . No, something besides rock.
    “Those are shells,” the naiad said. “Petrified seashells. Millions of years ago, even before the time of the gods, when only Gaea and Ouranos reigned, this land was under water. It was part of the sea.”
    Suddenly I saw what she meant. There were little pieces of ancient sea urchins in my hand, mollusk shells. Even the limestone rocks had impressions of seashells embedded in them.
    “Okay,” I said. “What good does that do me?”
    “You’re not so different from me, demigod. Even when I’m out of the water, the water is within me. It is my life source.” She stepped back, put her feet in the river, and smiled. “I hope you find a way to rescue your friends.”
    And with that she turned to liquid and melted into the river.
    * * *
    The sun was touching the hills when I got back to the stables. Somebody must’ve come by and fed the horses, because they were tearing into huge animal carcasses. I couldn’t tell what kind of animal, and I really didn’t want to know. If it was possible for the stables to get more disgusting, fifty horses tearing into raw meat did it.
    Seafood! one thought when he saw me. Come in! We’re still hungry.
    What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t use the river. And the fact that this place had been under water a million years ago didn’t exactly help me now. I looked at the little calcified seashell in my palm, then at the huge mountain of dung.
    Frustrated, I threw the shell into the poop. I was about to turn my back on the horses when I heard a sound.
    PFFFFFFT! Like a balloon with a leak.
    I looked down where I had thrown the shell. A tiny spout of water was shooting out of the muck.
    “No way,” I muttered.
    Hesitantly, I stepped toward the fence. “Get bigger,” I told the waterspout.
    SPOOOOOOOSH!
    Water shot three feet into the air and kept bubbling. It was impossible, but there it was. A couple of horses came over to check it out. One put his mouth to the spring and recoiled.
    Yuck! he said. Salty!
    It was seawater in the middle of a Texas ranch. I scooped up another handful of dirt and picked out the shell fossils. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I ran around the length of the stable, throwing shells into the dung piles. Everywhere a shell hit, a saltwater spring erupted.
    Stop! The horses cried. Meat is good! Baths are bad!
    Then I noticed the water wasn’t running out of the stables or flowing downhill like water normally would. It simply bubbled around each spring and sank into the ground, taking the dung with it. The horse poop dissolved in the saltwater, leaving regular old wet dirt.
    “More!” I yelled.
    There was a tugging sensation in my gut, and the waterspouts exploded like the world’s largest carwash. Salt water shot twenty feet into the air. The horses went crazy, running back