This is us, I thought. I pulled up my hoods, the hood built into my dress nestled inside the hood from my costume top. Protection from any debris.

The many-handed thing had been tall, initially, almost wispy with how drawn out it was, how thin the arms were in comparison to how long they were, then it had flattened out, to cover and guard more ground, and to reach more things it could pull apart and scatter around as debris.

Now it drew in together. Small enough in how each limb folded in or hid others from view, with more of the orange wiring and joints exposed to plain view than any of the hands were. Mere seconds had passed and I was already having trouble tracking just how far those hands had reached when arms were fully extended.

That is… that, I thought to myself. And that’s a deceptively open path to the exit it very much wants to guard.

“Look, near the shoulder bulge,” Sveta said.

The ‘shoulder bulge’ was one extended part of the ‘body’ where all of the hands seemed to reach out from, a lump toward the upper left part of its mass. There, illuminated only by the general orange-yellow glow from the wires connecting arm pieces together, a hand as big around as my upper body was from crotch to throat gripped rebar, bent it neatly to a right angle.

I could see other machinations now. Six hands closer to the core of the body were doing their individual parts, taking components that unseen hands passed to them, each performing specific actions that were methodical, sure, exact in the spacing of everything. Like it was a machine.

My eyes widened. Is it tinkering?

“Go!” I shouted. “Right now! Before it can finish building! Love Lost, Colt, get ready to go!”

It was so big, and it hung there, partially in the darkness, like there could be more behind it that I hadn’t yet seen. It didn’t breathe, didn’t make noise, and only the shuffling of the sleek material of arms and hands against itself was really audible.

“Go!” If I hadn’t been shouting, I might not have had it in me to take that first, involuntary-at-the-outset deep breath. If I hadn’t been able to take the deep breath, I might not have been able to lean forward, when all I wanted to do was step back and hope it wouldn’t do anything until the forty minute timer ran down.

If I hadn’t leaned forward, I wasn’t sure I would have been courageous enough to run forward. And if I hadn’t done that, then the others might not have budged, not when Sveta and Rain were following Tristan and I, and Tristan was distracted.

My foot hit black stone, and I avoided stepping on the almost invisible outcroppings. One step, then another, legs moving to push my weight more forward than up.