Then she sat in the dark looking at the city she'd paid so much to look at, and it didn't look built on purpose. It looked like something that had happened to a lot of people at once.
III.
Room 114 at Genesee Community Middle School had been a woodshop once. You could still see bolt holes in the floor where the table saws used to sit, and one wall still had a faded safety poster of a cartoon beaver in goggles. Now it held long tables, a donated 3D printer that worked about half the time, bins of aluminum and screws, and a twelve-foot practice field of foam tile.
On the field sat Spool.
Spool was roughly the size of a microwave oven and weighed nineteen pounds. It had a four-wheel mecanum drivetrain that let it slide sideways like a crab, a two-stage lift built from aluminum channel and drawer slides, and on top of the lift an arm with a rubber-roller intake that could swallow the season's game piece, a yellow foam hexagon called a cell, and drop it into a scoring tube five feet off the ground. Dez had named it. When Hector asked why, Dez said his grandfather used to make the machines that wound film onto spools at Kodak, and Hector said, "That's kind of a sad name," and Dez said, "No it isn't," and that was that.
"Did she sign?" Hector asked on Tuesday, before Dez had his backpack off.
Hector Quiñones was twelve, half a head taller than Dez, and could do anything with a hex key that Dez could do with a laptop. His family ran a bakery on North Clinton, and he usually smelled faintly of sugar and anise. His own form had been signed the day it came home, in two different colors of pen because his mother and his abuela had both insisted.
"Not yet," Dez said.
"Friday at eight."
"I know when it's due."
"I'm just saying." Hector spun a hex key around his finger. "My mom said if it's the money, the bakery could—"
"It's not the money," Dez said, too fast, and then, because he didn't actually know that, "I don't think it's the money."
Ms. Ingrid Sato looked up from the corner desk, where she was soldering a cable with a magnifier clipped to her glasses. She was in her late thirties, small and exact, with short gray-streaked hair and a cardigan with a scorch mark on one cuff that she refused to retire. She'd been a mechanical engineer at a medical-device company in Henrietta for nine years before deciding, as she put it, that she'd rather build engineers than catheters. When she was really pleased she said nothing and nodded once, and the whole team lived for that nod.
"Desmond. Come here a second."
He went. She set down the iron.
"I want to make sure you understand the rule, because I don't want you thinking I'm being difficult." She tapped the line on her own copy of the form. "District policy. Out-of-state overnight needs a parent or legal guardian. I can't take your grandfather's signature, even though I'd trust it with my life. I tried. I called the district office yesterday and asked for an exception. They said no, and to be fair, they're right. The rule exists because one year a kid's uncle signed and the kid's mother didn't know where he was until Sunday."
"Okay."