The Titan's Curse(49)

"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. "Zoe 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 Zoe," 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."

Zoe 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 Zoe 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?" Zoe 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," Zoe 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 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!" Zoe 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," Zoe 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.

Zoe'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.