# Chapter Two: The Hour Nobody Looked

Lola made it ten steps before Marcus caught up to her.

"Wait," he said. "Wait."

She turned, one eyebrow up. "For what?"

"For a plan."

"I've got a plan. Walk that way." She nodded toward the red-brick buildings at the far end of the quad. "Look for an arm."

"Whose arm?"

That stopped her.

"That's my point," Marcus said. "There are ten of us. Every part out there belongs to somebody standing right here. You find an arm, you've just taken somebody's arm."

"I wasn't going to take it," Lola said. "I was going to find it and tell them where it is."

"And then what? You can't put it on yourself. You'd be handing it to them and making them one part closer to winning. That's the whole game."

Lola opened her mouth. Closed it. "Huh," she said.

Devon had come up behind them, arms folded, the grey plates of his forearms clicking softly against each other. "Old lady's right about one thing, though. Standing on the grass doesn't find anything either."

"Nobody said standing," Marcus said. "I said we don't know anything yet. We don't know the campus. We don't know how the parts are hidden. We don't know each other." He looked around at the nine faces watching him. "Ten minutes. Then we decide."

"Ten minutes," Lola said, and sat down on the grass like a woman lowering herself into a lawn chair.

Tyler dropped next to her, his robotic legs folding under him with a soft whine. "I got nowhere to be."

---

They made a loose ring on the quad, ten strangers with metal bodies and their own faces, and did the thing people do when the world stops making sense. They introduced themselves.

Marcus went first. Architect. Thirty-four. Then Priya, a nurse, still standing, arms crossed, jaw set. Lola, retired, sixty-one, six years into a garden she was already missing. Tyler, twenty-two, a runner with a meet on Saturday. Ana, ballet teacher, forty-one, back straight even sitting down. Kwame, cab driver, eleven years, forty-six. Bree, twenty-one, coffee shop, hungover, delighted about her earrings. Hana, fifty-five, ramen, twenty-nine years behind the same counter. Devon, plumber, forty-five, hands like shovels. Zainab, thirty-one, software engineer, still crouched, still studying the grass like it owed her an explanation.

"Okay," Marcus said. "What time did it happen to you?"

They went around. …