One of them had a silver plate bolted to his face where his mouth should have been; another was round and squat with huge copper ears the size of his entire head. The third was a girl, probably about my age, with a glinting sword in place of an arm. But it was the last one who was the creepiest: He was just a disembodied head grafted to the body of a bicycle, with two robotic arms where the handlebars should have been, the knuckles of his mechanized hands scraping the bricks on the road. “Run,” I said. It came out as

