Chapter Four: Seven and Three

The voice came at the end of the hour, same as before. Pleasant. Brisk. Like a receptionist apologizing for a delayed flight.

"No parts were found in the past hour. As promised, one part will be assigned to each player."

Devon was in the maintenance corridor east of the quad with one hand on a boiler valve when the light took him. It didn't hurt. It felt like a large warm hand closing around his middle, and then his hips were not his hips.

He looked down. His robotic legs hung from a different set of sockets, wider apart, canted slightly outward. His center of gravity dropped. When he took a step his pelvis rolled like a boat taking a wave, and he grabbed the pipe to steady himself.

Lola, he thought. Sixty-one years old. Two kids. Forty years of kneeling in flowerbeds.

He hated how solid it felt.

Marcus got it on the path outside the science building. A narrowing, a quickness, like someone had cinched a belt around his lower half. Zainab's hips. He'd watched her walk all morning, that fast economical stride, and now it was his, and his legs were walking it.

Priya took inventory in the east stairwell the way she'd been trained to. Tyler's. Twenty-two. Male. The weight sat low and forward and changed how she stood. She filed it and kept moving.

Tyler got Devon's and had to sit down on a bench. Forty-five years of plumbing, of crouching under sinks. His legs felt like they belonged to a man twice his age.

Ana got Hana's. She stood in the library stacks with both hands flat on her own hips, feeling the width of them, the softness, the place where a body had carried two children. She had spent her whole life keeping her hips narrow. Now she was wearing someone's history.

Lola got Kwame's and laughed out loud in the middle of the west quad, one hand on her new hip like she was testing a melon. Kwame got Marcus's and stood in an empty lecture hall doorway, tugging his waistband. Zainab got Priya's. Bree got Ana's, and knew it immediately, because Ana walked turned out, toes always a little wide, and now so did she.

And Hana, alone in the dining hall with one hand on a stainless counter, got Bree's.

She knew before she looked. …