Spider killer

We’d almost made it to the rim when the row of mirrors opened like hatches and thousands of tiny metallic...things poured out.
Annabeth screamed.
It was an army of wind-up creepy-crawlies: bronze-gear bodies, spindly legs, little pincer mouths, all scuttling toward us in a wave of clacking, whirring metal.
“Spiders!” Annabeth said. “Sp—sp—aaaah!”

She fell backward in terror and almost got overwhelmed by the spider robots before I pulled her up and dragged her back toward the boat.
The things were coming out from all around the rim now, millions of them, flooding toward the center of the pool, completely surrounding us. I told myself they probably weren’t programmed to kill, just corral us and bite us and make us look stupid. Then again, this was a trap meant for gods. And we weren’t gods… The spiders started spitting out strands of metal thread, trying to tie us down. The strands were easy enough to break at first, but there were so many of them, and the spiders just kept coming. I kicked one away from Annabeth’s leg and its pincers took a chunk out of my new surf shoe… The Tunnel of Love entrance was under the net. We could use it as an exit, except that it was blocked by a million robot spiders.


know that he’d pushed every button, but still nothing was happening.
I closed my eyes and thought about waves, rushing water, the Mississippi River. I felt a familiar tug in my gut. I tried to imagine that I was dragging the ocean all the way to Denver.
“Two, one, zero!”

Water exploded out of the pipes. It roared into the pool, sweeping away the spiders. I pulled Annabeth into the seat next to me and fastened her seat belt just as the tidal wave slammed into our boat, over the top, whisking the spiders away and dousing us completely, but not capsizing us. The boat turned, lifted in the flood, and spun in circles around the whirlpool.The water was full of short-circuiting spiders, some of them smashing against the pool’s concrete wall with such force they burst

TLT ch.15