Chapter Three: Who's Going Where

"Who's going where?" Devon asked again.

Nobody had answered the first time. The ten of them stood in a loose ring on the quad, in hoodies that fit none of them, under a sky that looked like any other Tuesday morning. Somewhere out past the dorms a clock was ticking that none of them could see.

Tyler spoke first. "I'm not going anywhere until I get my torso back."

"That's not happening," Lola said.

"It's my torso."

"And it's holding my spine up." Lola turned to face him. She was sixty-one years old with a twenty-two-year-old's chest and shoulders under her borrowed hoodie, and she didn't look embarrassed about it at all. "You want to know what I did this morning? I bent over and picked up a stick off the ground. No noise. No catching. Twenty years I haven't done that without making a sound like a chair folding up. So no, kid. You're not getting it back today."

Devon let that sit for a second, then said his piece.

"I'm going to win."

Everyone looked at him.

"One of us walks out of here whole," he said. "The other nine get put back together out of whatever's left, like a box of spare screws. That's the deal we were given. I'd rather be the one."

"We don't even know what 'put back together' means," Priya said. "It might be fine. It might be nothing."

"Then I'd rather not find out."

Zainab raised her hand like she was in a lecture hall. "Question. For the voice."

The pleasant nothing-voice arrived immediately, warm as a radio host. "Yes, Zainab?"

"If I find all six of my own parts and put them back on, do I win?"

A pause. Just long enough to feel deliberate.

"The winner is the player wearing a complete set of parts from a single original owner," the voice said. "The rules do not say the owner has to be someone else."

Bree's mouth came open. "Wait. I said it was impossible. Back at the start, I said nobody could wear their own parts."

"You said it," the voice agreed, cheerfully, and left it there.

Zainab looked down at herself. Marcus's torso was on her, broader through the chest than her own, and she'd been holding her arms a little away from her sides all morning without realizing it. She'd been planning …