The Titan's Curse

which was hard to make out because there were so many other stars.
    “Oh, yeah,” I said. “The bear thing.”
    Zoë looked offended. “Show some respect. It was a fine bear. A worthy opponent.”
    “You act like it was real.”
    “Guys,” Grover broke in. “Look!”
    We’d reached the crest of a junk mountain. Piles of metal objects glinted in the moonlight: broken heads of bronze horses, metal legs from human statues, smashed chariots, tons of shields and swords and other weapons, along with more modern stuff, like cars that gleamed gold and silver, refrigerators, washing machines, and computer monitors.
    “Whoa,” Bianca said. “That stuff . . . some of it looks like real gold.”
    “It is,” Thalia said grimly. “Like Percy said, don’t touch anything. This is the junkyard of the gods.”
    “Junk?” Grover picked up a beautiful crown made of gold, silver, and jewels. It was broken on one side, as if it had been split by an axe. “You call this junk?”
    He bit off a point and began to chew. “It’s delicious!”
    Thalia swatted the crown out of his hands. “I’m serious!”
    “Look!” Bianca said. She raced down the hill, tripping over bronze coils and golden plates. She picked up a bow that glowed silver in moonlight. “A Hunter’s bow!”
    She yelped in surprise as the bow began to shrink, and became a hair clip shaped like a crescent moon. “It’s just like Percy’s sword!”
    Zoë’s face was grim. “Leave it, Bianca.”
    “But—”
    “It is here for a reason. Anything thrown away in this junkyard must stay in this yard. It is defective. Or cursed.”
    Bianca reluctantly set the hair clip down.
    “I don’t like this place,” Thalia said. She gripped the shaft of her spear.
    “You think we’re going to get attacked by killer refrigerators?” I asked.
    She gave me a hard look. “Zoë is right, Percy. Things get thrown away here for a reason. Now come on, let’s get across the yard.”
    “That’s the second time you’ve agreed with Zoë,” I muttered, but Thalia ignored me.
    We started picking our way through the hills and valleys of junk. The stuff seemed to go on forever, and if it hadn’t been for Ursa Major, we would’ve gotten lost. All the hills pretty much looked the same.
    I’d like to say we left the stuff alone, but there was too much cool junk not to check out some of it. I found an electric guitar shaped like Apollo’s lyre that was so sweet I had to pick it up. Grover found a broken tree made out of metal. It had been chopped to pieces, but some of the branches still had golden birds in them, and they whirred around when Grover picked them up, trying to flap their wings.
    Finally, we saw the edge of the junkyard about half a mile ahead of us, the lights of a highway stretching through the desert. But between us and the road . . .
    “What is that?” Bianca gasped.
    Ahead of us was a hill much bigger and longer than the others. It was like a metal mesa, the length of a football field and as tall as goalposts. At one end of the mesa was a row of ten thick metal columns, wedged tightly together.
    Bianca frowned. “They look like—”
    “Toes,” Grover said.
    Bianca nodded. “Really, really large toes.”
    Zoë and Thalia exchanged nervous looks.
    “Let’s go around,” Thalia said. “ Far around.”
    “But the road is right over there,” I protested. “Quicker to climb over.”
    Ping.
    Thalia hefted her spear and Zoë drew her bow, but then I realized it was only Grover. He had thrown a piece of scrap metal at the toes and hit one, making a deep echo, as if the column were hollow.
    “Why did you do that?” Zoë demanded.
    Grover cringed. “I don’t know. I, uh, don’t like fake feet?”
    “Come on.” Thalia looked at me. “Around.”
    I didn’t argue. The toes were starting to freak me out, too. I mean, who sculpts ten-foot-tall metal toes and sticks them in a junkyard?
    After several minutes of walking, we finally stepped onto the highway, an abandoned but well-lit stretch of black asphalt.
    “We made it out,” Zoë said. “Thank the gods.”
    But apparently the gods didn’t want to be thanked. At that moment, I heard a sound like a thousand trash compactors crushing metal.
    I whirled around. Behind us, the scrap mountain was boiling, rising up. The ten toes tilted over, and I realized why they looked like toes. They were toes. The thing that rose up from the metal was a bronze giant in full Greek battle armor. He was