Down the hall in the improvised living room., the old television was unfortunately still stuck on reruns with bursts of static periodically interrupting the picture. Joseph and another boy on the slowly-deteriorating couch engaged in a conversation, while Deana and the twins were at the table nearby, playing a card game. A few of them glanced up at me when I entered, but no one's eyes lingered. A mechanical leg-suit was evidently not the craziest thing they had seen.

I approached the table. Deana was about my height, if she was standing up. She had a stockier build than Hillary, and big eyes, with brown skin two shades lighter than the twins, and black curls in a ponytail. I recognized her only by voice. "You're Shilo, right? The paralyzed kid?"

"Yes. I'm not paralyzed though. I'm just sort of... getting there."

She introduced herself, and I was dealt into a round of Cheat. I couldn't notice, not immediately, what was different about Deana. I didn't see any metal on her. Was she like Kasey, left untouched for reasons unknown?

Kaden was a different story. I couldn't miss what was glaringly different about him as soon as he turned his head to look my direction. The side of his face was no longer covered in bandages and his eye was gone. In its place was a strange, metallic replacement. Part of the area surrounding the new eye had been replaced as well, as he had no eyebrow on that side. Even more off-putting was the way the optic moved. It didn't follow the true eye, and instead seemed to stare lifeless into the abyss, but every now and then, it would twitch to a new position so suddenly that it was hard to know if I had imagined it or not.

I had to say something, something to break the awkward stare I was giving his new deformity. It had the unnatural ability to suck up all of my attention, leaving very little left for determining what I was going to say. I could ask if he was okay... but that would have been a stupid question. He clearly wasn't okay. How is your day going? Nope, it was still in the morning, and there was little to do here to pass the time. And he couldn't say something that ignored the new eye, as that would have been an obvious deflection. "...How are you holding up?"

Kaden's remaining eye turned its gaze towards the table, like he might be looking at his hand of cards, though I could tell he wasn't. "I'm fine."

Kasey volleyed back, "You're not fine."

"Shut up."

I couldn't help my curiosity. Looking back, I could have had more tact. "Can you see out of it?" I asked.

"No." Kaden sounded more dejected than angry. "I wish. At least then it might be a little fun."

The game didn't last long before I got tired of sitting down. These legs were made for walking. Sitting in them didn't just feel strangely uncomfortable, it also felt wrong. I had spent too much of my 15 years in a chair. I stood and circled around the couch, resting my elbows on the back. "Am I interrupting you guys?"

"It wasn't anything important," Joseph said, after him and the other boy shook their heads.

I introduced myself to the other guy, who was a tall, lanky lad named Isaiah. I mentally counted the names; I had met all seven other teenagers. I had heard days ago that there were eight of us currently in the program, which included myself. So, I thought, I finally met everyone.

A whistle blew.

Everybody got to their feet, and began to make their way down the hall towards the main part of the hangar. Kasey looked back at me. "Are you coming?"

"Oh, right!" Before now I had been unable to stand when the whistle blew, and thus, unable to line up with the others. Each day a man named Silas walked the line and asked for a basic progress report. I'd tried to listen in before, but normally, the report was vague at best and encoded at worst. Scientific terms and numbers and projects described what was happening to us. All I knew was that so far, everything was a relative success, and MECH was moving on to the next stage of one of their projects in another day.

I lined up with the others. I was on the far left of the line, arriving last, with Kasey to my right and her brother to hers. I had never seen Silas before, but the man was easy to spot. He was one of the few individuals here who was wearing military apparel, but without his face covered in full tactical garb. He has a strong jawline and his very air carried confidence, rugged determination, and a sense of comradery twenty years past its prime.

One of the soldiers handed Silas a clipboard. "No casualties to report, sir."

"Good." He started to walk down the line, passing first Deana and then Joseph. He looked down at the clipboard, then at the subjects, periodically switching his gaze between the two tasks. "There are still eight of them. No success on the retrieval?"

I expected the soldier to answer, but it was Hillary who spoke up instead. "The boy was accepted into a clinical trial, so he declined."

Silas hadn't been smiling before, but his face was in an even harder line now. "That is unfortunate." He walked right on past Hillary, not even pausing to look her over as he did the others. She just stared straight ahead, emotionless. Beside her, Andrew stared straight ahead too, but there was anger in his eyes. I wouldn't be surprised if he was still angry about being removed from the retrieval team. Though, I didn't understand why anyone would want to be on the team in the first place.

Silas stopped in front of Kaden, no doubt judging the new modifications to the boy's eye. He opened his mouth, and I expected he was going to say something regarding the boy, but he didn't. "You." He suddenly looked up at me. I was not expecting it, and I nearly jolted. But luckily I was able to hold it together; I wasn't going to show weakness in front of this man who held all of my future opportunities in his hands. "Can you perform normally again with this device?"

I mentally stumbled over my words for a moment. " - Yes sir, better than normal, sir."

He glanced down at the clipboard again, seeing that this was true. Despite being disabled mere days ago, I was now faster than a healthy man, and I could probably run farther too once my endurance was built up properly.

Suddenly, an alarm went off on one of the soldier's phones. He read off the message quickly. "Sir, our scouts have spotted three machines at the fourth baiting site."

"Three?" He seemed to contemplate this for a moment or two, and I think I spotted a sudden bit of glee hiding in his hard-set features. "Get a team together. Observe and do not confront." He looked back at the line of children, and his gaze landed on a couple of us, including me. I was not sure whether or not to be worried. "Hillary, Andrew, and Shilo. You'll join them."

That concluded the line-up. Silas left to go handle more important matters. The others ran off to their side of the hangar, but I didn't know what to do or where to go, so I followed Andrew. "What are we supposed to do?"

"Not sure yet." He walked toward the back of the hangar, where there were doors branching off to offices. "This'll be fun though. The only real fun is when they send us places." He followed several of the soldiers through a doorway, to a room full of various types of equipment. I eyed a line of guns along the wall.

"Don't think about it, kid." It was Carters, the agent who I first met, and the man who held onto the remote that controlled the devices we had. "You don't get a gun. Andrew?"

"Here." Andrew handed me a dark green camo-pattern jacket. Then, he pulled off his shirt and tossed it to Carters, exchanging it for a metal cube. He pressed it onto his spine, and the device activated, the whirring metal transforming piece by piece along his spine and stopping just below the base of his skull. Then he grabbed his shirt back and pulled it over top.

I had already finished putting on the jacket. "Is it going to be cold?" I appreciated anything more to wear than the thin, grey, faintly-blood-stained-t-shirt I already had on, but it wasn't appropriate weather for a jacket. It was midday in Nevada.

Andrew just shrugged in response. Everyone else acted like they hadn't heard me.

Soon, the rest of the team was suited up, preparing for whatever it was we were supposed to do. When we existed the hangar, I was immediately hit by the warm sunshine. Last time I had been outside, I was trying to run. Now, I was climbing into a truck with the very people I had tried to get away from. As ironic as it seemed, I knew I had better do as I was told if I ever wanted a chance of getting out of this.

The truck had a bench row on either side, and I was seated at the very end near the opening. Hillary jumped in at the last second and took the seat across from me. The doors at the back of the truck slammed closed, and I felt a jerk as the vehicle accelerated.

We drove for well over an hour. The afternoon came and went. Every bump in the road caused my legs to jolt against the metal that encased them, which, after a while, began to spark faint but increasing pains. Each turn of the vehicle caused me to sway in my seat. At some point we turned off the paved road entirely; out the small slit of a back window, tall trees monopolized the view.

"What are the machines they were talking about?" I asked Andrew, my words barely audible over the noise of the convoy. Between this truck and the three others, it was a cacophony barreling down the backroads.

"What machines?" He shouted back.

"Someone told Silas something about seeing some machines."

"Oh, those machines! It's - it's complicated. You wouldn't believe me unless you saw it."

'Try me', I wanted to say, but I wasn't sure I was ready for a complicated explanation shouted over the road noise. Andrew wasn't ready for one if his annoyed tone told me anything.

The van suddenly rolled to a stop. I don't remember getting to my feet, but since us teens were right by the door, we were practically shoved out first. Whatever light was left in the sky was blotted out by a thick cover of greedy storm clouds. It might as well have been the middle of the night. Lightning flashed in the distance, but no rain fell.

The air was cool, and I zipper up the jacket I was wearing. My legs had gone numb from the constant vibrations of the journey, but I could still feel the cool dirt and pine shavings under my metal boots. Why was it that this metal could feel? As I brushed my hand against the metal where it covered my thigh, it felt normal from my hand's perspective. But, my thigh could still feel it. Faintly, but distinctly present. Would I ever grow used to this?

"Hey!" Someone snapped. I was back in the present. "You two, you need to move the larger pieces of scrap and secure them into the cargo truck."

Andrew gave a faint salute. "Yes, sir! Come on Legs." He started across the convoy, and I rolled my eyes and followed. There weren't just the trucks we had come in with the soldiers they held; there were also two large helicopters hovering overhead. One of them let down two steel cables with clips on the ends, meant to secure something large and heavy.

"So what exactly do we have to m... move...?" The question trailed off into obscurity when we made it through the crowd of people, and I finally saw what MECH had come here for. Shredded and scattered across the rocky ground were the remains of a large robot of some kind. It reminded me of the one MECH was building in the hangar, but this one was more bulky and box-like in shape. Several of its limbs had been torn away from the body and gashes covered every foot of it. Whoever destroyed this thing was overly thorough.

The robotic corpse was lit up by spotlights, and as the soldiers activated the final light, it was aimed upwards, illuminating a giant metal hammer, strung out above the rest of the wreckage with some kind of strange rope.