“I guess that’s a no,” Grover said.
“Hebe’s holy day,” Annabeth mused. “Baby chicks . . .”
I frowned. “What are you thinking? Some kind of distraction? I don’t have any roosters handy.”
“No, but there were chicks in that coop. . . .”
“So?” I yelled as another beak almost gave me a thigh piercing.
“So we need to get back to the coop. And grab a chick.”
“Killer hens are chasing us,” Grover said, “and you want to run to their coop and steal their babies?”
“Yes. And then run again.” She raised her hands defensively. “Percy, I know you’re going to say this is a terrible idea—”
“This is a terrible idea.”
“—but you have to trust me. Let’s go.”
She crawled deeper into the play tube. I grumbled under my breath and followed. As much as I hated her idea, I had none of my own—and I did trust her.
The tunnel angled upward until we were crawling just below the ceiling. I glanced out one of the Plexiglas bubble windows and saw most of the flock still running around on the floor, squawking angrily. A few of the smarter birds had figured out that, hey, they had wings! Some flapped up and body-checked the play tube. Others ran along the top, pecking at the plastic, but so far they hadn’t figured out how to get to us.
We stopped at a T.
“Grover, go left,” Annabeth said. “Distract the flock while Percy and I go right and make a break for the coop. We’ll rendezvous back at the karaoke bar.”
“Do I get to say this is a terrible idea, too?” Grover asked.
“Just do your best,” Annabeth said. “You’re the fastest runner. You’re also the only one who speaks Chicken.”
“Technically Chicken isn’t a distinct language,” he said, “though many animal dialects sound just like Chicken. . . .”
“Dude, just yell at them,” I suggested. “Do you know any fowl insults?”
“This is a family amusement center!”
“Where they are trying to kill us for complaining.”
“Good point,” Grover said. “I will insult the chickens.” He shouldered past me and crawled down the left-hand tunnel, his hooves moving like cloven pistons.
“Let’s go,” Annabeth said in her best squad-leader voice. And off we went down the right-hand tube.
We slid down a bendy-straw chute and plunged into a ball pit, which wasn’t great for making a quick escape. Fortunately, the chickens were preoccupied. At the opposite end of the play structure, Grover had emerged in all his insult-flinging glory and was bounding across the Skee-Ball machines, throwing the wooden balls behind him, making the hens trip and weave. I remembered some myth about a woman throwing gold apples behind her to slow down guys who were chasing her. Skee-Balls seemed to work pretty well, too.
“SQUAWK!” Grover yelled. “CLUCK! CLUCK!”
Judging by how much this enraged the flock, it must have been a scathing comment about chicks’ mothers. Grover disappeared into the arcade, followed by most of the poultry mob.
“Keep up.” Annabeth waded through the ball pit, holding her hands above her head like she didn’t want her nonexistent rifle to get wet. Meanwhile, I kept my ballpoint pen handy, which I guess would’ve been super useful if the chickens had decided they wanted an autograph.
“Whatever you do,” Annabeth warned, “don’t hurt the hens. They’re still Hebe’s sacred animals.”
“That’s my top priority,” I muttered. “Not hurting the chickens.”
“I’m serious,” she said. “This will only work if we don’t make Hebe even angrier.”
I didn’t know what Annabeth’s plan was, or how it would work, but you can file that under I Had No Better Ideas, which was already a pretty thick folder.
Annabeth climbed out of the ball pit and offered me a hand. I’d like to say I got out gracefully. I didn’t. I shook about a dozen plastic balls out of my big pant cuffs and scraped a half-chewed cheeseburger off the bottom of my shoe. I wondered what else might be slowly turning into fossil fuel at the bottom of that ball pit . . . probably a bunch of demigods who had dared to lodge age-based complaints.
“Coop,” Annabeth said, and took off running.
Even as an eight-year-old, she had more single-mindedness than I ever would, which might have bothered me if I’d had the bandwidth to focus on it.
We found the chicks in the coop, right where we’d left them. They didn’t look happy about missing out on the chase. When Sparky had unleashed the predators, she’d apparently triggered a control that rolled the chicken-wire fence down exactly halfway—low enough for the adult hens to jump over, but too high for the baby chicks to clear. I guess this was Hebe’s version of an amusement-ride sign: YOU HAVE TO BE THIS TALL TO MURDER OUR CUSTOMERS!