The Titan's Curse

impossibly tall—a skyscraper with legs and arms. He gleamed wickedly in the moonlight. He looked down at us, and his face was deformed. The left side was partially melted off. His joints creaked with rust, and across his armored chest, written in thick dust by some giant finger, were the words WASH ME.
    “Talos!” Zoë gasped.
    “Who—who’s Talos?” I stuttered.
    “One of Hephaestus’s creations,” Thalia said. “But that can’t be the original. It’s too small. A prototype, maybe. A defective model.”
    The metal giant didn’t like the word defective .
    He moved one hand to his sword belt and drew his weapon. The sound of it coming out of its sheath was horrible, metal screeching against metal. The blade was a hundred feet long, easy. It looked rusty and dull, but I didn’t figure that mattered. Getting hit with that thing would be like getting hit with a battleship.
    “Someone took something,” Zoë said. “Who took something?”
    She stared accusingly at me.
    I shook my head. “I’m a lot of things, but I’m not a thief.”
    Bianca didn’t say anything. I could swear she looked guilty, but I didn’t have much time to think about it, because the giant defective Talos took one step toward us, closing half the distance and making the ground shake.
    “Run!” Grover yelped.
    Great advice, except that it was hopeless. At a leisurely stroll, this thing could outdistance us easily.
    We split up, the way we’d done with the Nemean Lion. Thalia drew her shield and held it up as she ran down the highway. The giant swung his sword and took out a row of power lines, which exploded in sparks and scattered across Thalia’s path.
    Zoë’s arrows whistled toward the creature’s face but shattered harmlessly against the metal. Grover brayed like a baby goat and went climbing up a mountain of metal.
    Bianca and I ended up next to each other, hiding behind a broken chariot.
    “You took something,” I said. “That bow.”
    “No!” she said, but her voice was quivering.
    “Give it back!” I said. “Throw it down!”
    “I . . . I didn’t take the bow! Besides, it’s too late.”
    “What did you take?”
    Before she could answer, I heard a massive creaking noise, and a shadow blotted out the sky.
    “Move!” I tore down the hill, Bianca right behind me, as the giant’s foot smashed a crater in the ground where we’d been hiding.
    “Hey, Talos!” Grover yelled, but the monster raised his sword, looking down at Bianca and me.
    Grover played a quick melody on his pipes. Over at the highway, the downed power lines began to dance. I understood what Grover was going to do a split second before it happened. One of the poles with power lines still attached flew toward Talos’s back leg and wrapped around his calf. The lines sparked and sent a jolt of electricity up the giant’s backside.
    Talos whirled around, creaking and sparking. Grover had bought us a few seconds.
    “Come on!” I told Bianca. But she stayed frozen. From her pocket, she brought out a small metal figurine, a statue of a god. “It . . . it was for Nico. It was the only statue he didn’t have.”
    “How can you think of Mythomagic at a time like this?” I said.
    There were tears in her eyes.
    “Throw it down,” I said. “Maybe the giant will leave us alone.”
    She dropped it reluctantly, but nothing happened.
    The giant kept coming after Grover. It stabbed its sword into a junk hill, missing Grover by a few feet, but scrap metal made an avalanche over him, and then I couldn’t see him anymore.
    “No!” Thalia yelled. She pointed her spear, and a blue arc of lightning shot out, hitting the monster in his rusty knee, which buckled. The giant collapsed, but immediately started to rise again. It was hard to tell if it could feel anything. There weren’t any emotions in its half-melted face, but I got the sense that it was about as ticked off as a twenty-story-tall metal warrior could be.
    He raised his foot to stomp and I saw that his sole was treaded like the bottom of a sneaker. There was a hole in his heel, like a large manhole, and there were red words painted around it, which I deciphered only after the foot came down: FOR MAINTENANCE ONLY.
    “Crazy-idea time,” I said.
    Bianca looked at me nervously. “Anything.”
    I told her about the maintenance hatch. “There may be a way to control the thing. Switches or something. I’m going to get inside.”
    “How? You’ll have to stand under its foot! You’ll be