The Battle of the Labyrinth - Aftermath

I was feeling good. It was almost like a normal day at camp. Then dinner came, and all the campers lined up by cabin and marched into the dining pavilion. Most of them ignored the sealed fissure in the marble floor at the entrance—a ten-foot-long jagged scar that hadn’t been there last summer—but I was careful to step over it.

“Big crack,” Tyson said when we were at our table. “Earthquake, maybe?”

“No,” I said. “Not an earthquake.”

I wasn’t sure I should tell him. It was a secret only Annabeth and Grover and I knew. But looking in Tyson’s big eye, I knew I couldn’t hide anything from him.

“Nico di Angelo,” I said, lowering my voice. “He’s this half-blood kid we brought to camp last winter. He, uh . . . he asked me to guard his sister on a quest, and I failed. She died. Now he blames me.”

Tyson frowned. “So he put a crack in the floor?”

“These skeletons attacked us,” I said. “Nico told them to go away, and the ground just opened up and swallowed them. Nico . . .” I looked around to make sure no one was listening. “Nico is a son of Hades.”

Tyson nodded thoughtfully. “The god of dead people.”


- The Battle of the Labyrinth, Chapter 2