Extras

Down And Out

"Moggie," Aya whispered. "You awake?"

Something moved in the darkness. A pile of dorm uniforms rustled, as if a small animal stirred underneath. Then a shape slipped from among the folds of spider silk and cotton. It rose into the air and floated toward Aya's bed. Tiny lenses gazed at her face, curious and alert, reflecting starlight from the open window.

Aya grinned. "Ready to go to work?"

In answer, Moggie flashed its night-lights.

"Ouch!" Aya squeezed her eyes shut. "Don't do that! It's vision-wrecking!"

She lay in bed another moment, waiting for the spots to fade. The hovercam nuzzled against her shoulder apologetically.

"It's okay, Moggle-chan," she whispered. "I just wish I had infrared too."

Lots of people her age had infrared vision, but Aya's parents had this thing about surge. They liked to pretend the world was still stuck in the Prettytime, when everyone had to wait until they turned sixteen to change themselves. Crumblies could be so fashion-missing.

So Aya was stuck with her big nose—definitely ugly— and her normal vision. When she'd moved out of her home and into a dorm, her parents had given her permission to get an eyescreen and skintenna, but that was only so they could ping whenever they wanted. Still, it was better than nothing.

She flexed her finger and the city interface flickered to life, layering across her vision.

"Uh-oh," she said to Moggie. "Almost midnight."

She didn't remember dozing off, but the tech-head bash must have already started. It was probably crowded by now, packed enough with surge-monkeys and manga-heads that nobody would notice one ugly extra snooping around.

Besides, Aya Fuse was an expert at being invisible. Her face rank was proof of that. It sat unmoving in the corner of her vision: 451,396.

She let out a slow sigh. In a city of a million, that was total extra-land. She'd had her own feed for almost two years now, had kicked a great story just a week ago, and was still anonymous.

Well, tonight was finally going to change that.

"Let's go, Moggie," she whispered, and slipped out of bed.

A gray robe lay in a shapeless puddle at her feet. Aya pulled it over her dorm uniform and tied it at the waist, then perched on the windowsill. She turned to face the night sky slowly, easing one leg, then the other, out into the cool air.

She slipped on her crash bracelets, glancing at the ground fifty meters below.

"Okay, that's dizzy-making."

At least no monitors were skulking around down there. That was the kick thing about a thirteenth-story room—no one expected you to sneak out your window.

Thick clouds hung low in the sky, reflecting worklights from the construction site across town.

The cold tasted of pine needles and rain, and Aya wondered if she was going to freeze in her disguise.

But she couldn't exactly throw a dorm jacket over the robe and expect people not to notice.

"Hope you're all charged up, Moggie. It's drop-time."

The hovercam drifted past her shoulder and out the window, settling close against her chest. It was the size of half a soccer ball, sheathed in hard plastic and warm to the touch. As Aya wrapped her arms around Moggie, she felt her bracelets trembling, caught in the magnetic currents of the hovercam's lifters.

She squeezed her eyes shut. "Ready?"

Moggie shivered in her arms.

Clinging to the hovercam with all her strength, Aya pushed herself into the void.

Getting out was much simpler these days.

For Aya's fifteenth birthday, Ren Machino—her big brother's best friend—had modified Moggie.

She'd only asked him to make it quick enough to keep up with her hoverboard. But like most tech-heads, Ren took pride in his mods. The new Moggie was waterproof, shockproof, and powerful enough to carry an Aya-size passenger through the air.

Close enough, anyway. With her arms wrapped around the hovercam, she fell no faster than a cherry blossom twirling toward the ground. It was much easier than stealing a bungee jacket. And except for the nervous-making moment of jumping, it was kind of fun.

She watched the windows flicker past—dreary rooms full of standard-requisition squalor. No one famous lived in Akira Hall, just loads of face-missing extras wearing generic designs. A few ego-kickers sat talking into their cams, watched by no one. The average face rank here was six hundred thousand, despair-making and pathetic.

Obscurity in all its horror.

Back in the Prettytime, Aya vaguely remembered, you just asked for awesome clothes or a new hoverboard and they popped out of the hole in the wall like magic. But these days, the hole wouldn't give you anything decent unless you were famous or had merits to spend. And getting merits meant taking classes or doing chores—whatever the Good Citizen Committee commanded, basically.

Moggie's lifters connected with the metal grid beneath the ground, and Aya bent her knees, rolling as she hit. The wet grass squished beneath her like a sodden sponge, soft but shivery cold.

She let go of Moggie and lay for a moment on the rain-soaked earth, letting her heartbeat slow down. "You okay?"

Moggie flashed its night-lights again.

"Okay…that's still blind-making."

Ren had also modified the hovercam's brain. True AI might still be illegal, but the new Moggie was more than just a wedge of circuitry and lifters. Since Ren's tinkering, it had learned Aya's favorite angles, when to pan and zoom, and even how to track her eyes for cues.

But for some reason, it didn't get the whole night-vision thing.

She kept her eyes closed, listening hard as she watched the spots across her vision fade. No footsteps, no whir of monitor drones. Nothing but the muffled thump of music from the dorm.

Aya rose to her feet and brushed herself off. Not that anyone would notice the wet grass clinging to her; Reputation Bombers dressed to disappear. The robe was hooded and shapeless, the perfect disguise for party-crashing.

With a twist of a crash bracelet, a hoverboard rose from its hiding place in the bushes. Stepping on, Aya faced the glittering lights of Prettyville.

Funny how everyone still called it that, even if most of the residents weren't pretty anymore—not in the old sense, anyway. Prettyville was full of pixel-skins and surge-monkeys, and plenty of other strange new fads and fashions. You could choose among a million kinds of beauty or weirdness, or even keep your natural-born face your whole life. These days "pretty" meant whatever got you noticed.

But one thing about Prettyville was still the same: If you hadn't turned sixteen, you weren't supposed to go there. Not at night, when all the good stuff happened.

Especially if you were an extra, a loser, an unknown.

Gazing at the city, she felt engulfed by her own invisibility Each of its sparkling lights stood for one of the million people who had never heard of Aya Fuse. Who probably never would.

She sighed, urging her hoverboard forward.

The government feeds always said that the Prettytime was gone forever, freeing humanity from centuries of bubbleheadedness. They claimed that the divisions among uglies, pretties, and crumb lies had all been washed away. That the last three years had unleashed a host of new technologies, setting the future in motion again.

But as far as Aya could see, the mind-rain hadn't changed everything It still pretty much sucked, being fifteen.

Tech-Heads

"Are you getting this?" she whispered.

Moggie was already shooting, the shimmer of safety fireworks reflecting from its lenses. Hot-air balloons swayed over the mansion, and revelers screamed down from the rooftops in bungee jackets. It looked like a party back in the old days: self-indulgent and eye-kickingly radiant.

At least, that was how Aya's older brother always described the Prettytime. Back then everyone had gotten one big operation on their sixteenth birthday. It made you beautiful, but secretly changed your personality, leaving you brain-missing and easily controlled.

Hiro hadn't been a bubblehead very long; he'd turned sixteen only a few months before the mind-rain had arrived and cured the pretties. He liked to claim that those months had been awful—as if being shallow and vain was such a stretch for him. But he never denied that the parties had been awesome.

Not that Hiro would be here tonight; he was way too famous. Aya checked her eyescreen: the average face rank inside was about twenty thousand. Compared with her older brother, the people at this bash were total extras.

Compared to an ugly ranked at half a million, though, they were legends.

"Be careful, Moggie," she whispered. "We're not wanted here."

Aya flipped up the hood of her robe, and stepped out of the shadows.

Inside, the air was full of hovercams. From Moggle-size all the way down to paparazzi swarms, each cam no bigger than a champagne cork.

There was always plenty to see at tech-head parties, crazy people and kick new gadgets. Maybe people weren't as beautiful as back during the Pretty time, but parties were a lot more interesting: serious surge-monkeys with snake fingers and medusa hair; smart-matter clothes that rippled like flags in a breeze; safety fireworks skittering along the floor, dodging feet and sizzling incense as they passed.

Tech-heads lived for new technologies—they loved showing off their latest tricks, and kickers loved putting them on their feeds. The endless cycle of invention and publicity bumped everyone's face rank, so everyone was happy.

Everyone who got invited, anyway.

A hovercam buzzed close, almost low enough to peek in at Aya's face. She lowered her head, making her way toward a cluster of Reputation Bombers. Here in public they all kept their hoods up, like a bunch of pre-Rusty Buddhist monks. They were already bombing: chanting the name of some random member of the clique, trying to convince the city interface to bump his face rank.

Aya bowed to the group and joined the blur of name-dropping, keeping her ugly face covered.

The whole point of bombing was to dissect the city's reputation algorithms: How many mentions of your name did it take to crack the top thousand? How quickly did you drop if everyone stopped talking about you? The clique was one big controlled experiment, which was why they all wore the same anonymous outfits.

But Aya figured most Bombers didn't care about the math. They were just cheaters, pathetic extras trying to talk themselves famous. It was like how they'd manufactured celebrities back in Rusty days, a handful of feeds hyping a few bubbleheads and ignoring everybody else.

What was the point of the reputation economy, if someone was telling you who to talk about?

But Aya chanted away like a good little Bomber, keeping her attention on her eyescreen, watching the view from Moggies lenses. The hovercam drifted over the crowd, picking out faces one by one.

The secret clique Aya had discovered had to be here somewhere. Only tech-heads could pull off a trick like that She'd spotted them three nights before, riding on top of one of the new mag-lev trains, traveling at insane speeds through the factory district—so fast that all the shots Moggie had taken were too grainy and blurry to use.

Aya had to find them again. Whoever kicked a crazy trick like mag-lev riding would be instantly famous.

But Moggie was already distracted, watching a gaggle of NeoFoodies underneath a pink blob floating in the air. They were drinking from it with meter-long straws, like astronauts recapturing a spilled cup of tea.

NeoFoodies were old news—Hiro had kicked a story about them last month. They ate extinct mushrooms grown from ancient spores, made ice cream with liquid nitrogen, and injected flavors into weird forms of matter. The floating pink stuff looked like an aerogel, dinner with the density of a soap bubble.

A small blob broke off and floated past. Aya grimaced, smelling rice and salmon. Eating strange substances might be a great way to bump your face rank, but she preferred her sushi heavier than air.

She liked being around tech-heads, though, even if she had to hide. Most of the city was still stuck in the past, trying to rediscover haiku, religion, the tea ceremony—all the things that had been lost in the Prettytime, when everyone had been brain-damaged. But tech-heads were building the future, making up for three centuries of missing progress.

This was the place to find stories.

Something in her eyescreen sent a flicker of recognition through her.

"Hold it, Moggie!" she hissed. "Pan left."

There behind the NeoFoodies, watching with amusement as they chased down stray bloblets, was a familiar face.

"That's one of them! Zoom in."

The girl was about eighteen, classic new-pretty surge with slightly manga eyes. She was wearing a hoverball rig, floating gracefully ten centimeters above the floor. And she had to be famous: A reputation bubble surrounded her, a cohort of friends and groupies to keep extras away.

"Get close enough to hear them," Aya whispered. Moggie eased to the edge of the bubble, and soon its microphones caught the girl's name. Data spilled across Aya's eye-screen Eden Maru was a hoverball player—left wing for the Swallows, who'd been city champions last year. She was also legendary for her lifter mods.

According to all the feeds, Eden had just dumped her boyfriend because of "a difference in ambition." Of course, that was just code for "she got too famous for him." Eden's face rank had hit ten thousand after the championship, and what's-his-name's was stuck at a quarter million. Everyone knew she needed to hook up with someone more face-equal.

But none of the rumors mentioned Eden's new mag-lev riding clique. She must be keeping that a secret, waiting for the right moment to reveal the trick.

Kicking it first would make Aya famous overnight.

"Track her," she told Moggie, then went back to chanting.

Half an hour later, Eden Maru headed out.

Slipping away from the Bombers was bliss-making— Aya had chanted the name "Yoshio Nara" about a million times. She hoped Yoshio enjoyed his pointless face rank bump, because she never wanted to hear his name again.

From Moggies midair view, Eden Maru was slipping through the door—alone, no entourage.

She had to be headed off to meet her secret clique.

"Stay close to her, Moggie," Aya croaked. All that chanting had left her throat dry. She spotted a drinks tray hovering past. "I'll catch up in a minute."

Grabbing a glass at random, Aya guzzled it down. The alcohol sent a shudder through her—not exactly what she needed. She snatched another drink with lots of ice and pushed her way toward the door.

A gaggle of pixel-skins stood in her way, their bodies rippling through colors like drunken chameleons. She slipped among them, recognizing a couple of their faces from the surge-monkey feeds.

A little reputation shiver went through her.

Out on the mansion steps Aya spilled the drink out through her fingers, saving the ice cubes. She tipped the glass back into her mouth and started crunching. After the sweltering party a mouthful of ice was heavenly.

"Interesting surge," someone said.

Aya froze…her hood had fallen back, revealing her ugly face.

"Um, thanks." The words came out muffled, and Aya gulped down cold shards of ice. The breeze hit her sweaty face, and she realized how fashion-missing she must look.

The boy smiled. "Where did you get the idea for that nose?"

Aya managed to shrug, suddenly word-missing. In her eyescreen she could see Eden Maru already flying across town, but tearing her gaze from the boy was impossible. He was a manga-head: eyes huge and glistening, his delicate face inhumanly beautiful. Long, tapered fingers stroked his perfect cheek as he stared at her.

That was the weird thing: He was staring at her.

But he was gorgeous, and she was ugly.

"Let me guess," he said. "From some pre-Rusty painting?"

"Uh, not really" She touched her nose, swallowing the last few shards of ice. "It's more, um…randomly generated?"

"Of course. It's so unique." He bowed. "Frizz Mizuno."

As Aya returned the bow, her eyescreen displayed his face rank: 4,612. A reputation shiver went through her, the realization that she was talking to someone important, connected, meaningful.

He was waiting for Aya to give her own name. And once she did that, he'd know her face rank, and then his wonderful gaze would turn somewhere more interesting. Even if in some logic-missing, mind-rain way he liked her ugly face, being an extra was simply pathetic.

Besides, her nose was way too big.

She twisted a crash bracelet to call her hoverboard. "My name's Aya. But I kind of … have to go now."

He bowed. "Of course. People to see, reputations to bomb."

Aya laughed, looking down at the robe. "Oh, this. I'm not really…I'm sort of incognito."

"Incognito?" His smile was eye-kicking. "You're very mysterious."

Her board slipped up next to the stairs. Aya stared down at it, hesitating. Moggie was already half a kilometer away, trailing Eden Maru through the darkness at high speed, but part of her was screaming to stay.

Because Frizz was still gazing at her.

"I'm not trying to be mysterious," she said. "It's just working out that way."

He laughed. "I want to know your last name, Aya. But I think you're purposely not telling me."

"Sorry," she squeaked, and stepped onto the board. "But I have to go after someone. She's sort of… getting away."

He bowed, his smile broadening. "Enjoy the chase."

She leaned forward and shot into the darkness, his laughter in her ears.

Underground

Eden Maru knew how to fly.

Full-body lifter rigs were standard gear for hoverball players, but most people never dared to wear them. Each piece had its own lifter: the shin and elbow pads, even the boots in some rigs. One wrong twitch of your fingers could send all those magnets in different directions, which was an excellent way to dislocate a shoulder, or send you spinning headfirst into a wall. Unlike falling off a hoverboard, crash bracelets wouldn't save you from your own clumsiness.

But none of this seemed to worry Eden Maru. In Aya's eyescreen, she was zigzagging through the new construction site, using the half-finished buildings and open storm drains as her private obstacle course.

Even Moggie, who was stuffed with lifters and only twenty centimeters across, was finding it tricky keeping up.

Aya tried to focus on her own hoverboarding, but she was still half-hypnotized by Frizz Mizuno, dazzled by his attention. Since the mind-rain had broken down the boundaries between ages, Aya had talked to plenty of pretties. It wasn't like the old days, when your friends never talked to you after they got the operation. But no pretty had ever looked at her that way.

Or was she kidding herself? Maybe Frizz's intense gaze made everyone feel this way. His eyes were so huge, just like the old Rusty drawings that manga-heads based themselves on.

She was dying to ask the city interface about him. She'd never seen him on the feeds, but with a face rank below five thousand, Frizz had to be known for something besides eye-kicking beauty.

But for now Aya had a story to chase, a reputation to build. If Frizz was ever going to look at her that way again, she couldn't be so face-missing.

Her eyescreen began to flicker. Moggie's signal was fading, falling out of range of the city network as it followed Eden underground.

The signal shimmered with static, then went dark Aya banked to a halt, a shudder passing through her. Losing Moggie was always unnerving, like looking down on a sunny day to find her shadow gone.

She stared at the last image the hovercam had sent: the inside of a storm dram, grainy and distorted by infrared. Eden Maru was curled up tight, a human cannonball zooming through the confines of the tunnel, headed so deep that Moggie's transmitter couldn't reach the surface anymore.

The only way to find Eden again was to follow her down.

Aya leaned forward, urging her hoverboard back into motion. The new construction site rose up around her, dozens of iron skeletons and gaping holes.

After the mind-ram, nobody wanted to live in fashion-missing Prettytime buildings. Nobody famous, anyway. So the city was expanding wildly, plundering nearby Rusty ruins for metal. There were even rumors that the city planned to tear open the ground to look for fresh iron, like the earth-damaging Rusties had three centuries ago.

The unfinished towers flashed past, their steel frames making her board shudder. Hoverboards needed metal below them to fly, but too many magnetic fields made them shivery. Aya eased back her speed, checking for Moggie again.

Nothing. The hovercam was still underground.

A huge excavation came into sight, the foundation of some future skyscraper. Along its raw dirt floor, puddles of afternoon rain reflected the starlit sky, like jagged slivers of mirror.

In a corner of the excavation she spotted a tunnel mouth, an entry to the network of storm drams beneath the city.

A month ago, Aya had kicked a story about a new graffiti clique, uglies who left artwork for future generations. They painted the insides of unfinished tunnels and conduits, letting their work be sealed up like time capsules. No one would see the paintings until long after the city collapsed, when its ruins were rediscovered by some future civilization. It was all very mind-rain, a rumination about how the eternal Prettytime had been more fragile than it seemed.

The story hadn't bumped Aya's face rank—stories about uglies never did—but she and Moggie had spent a week playing hide-and-seek through the construction site. She wasn't afraid of the underground.

Letting her board drop, Aya ducked past idle lifter drones and hoverstruts, diving toward the tunnel mouth. She bent her knees, pulled in her arms, and plunged into absolute blackness Her eyescreen flickered once—the hovercam had to be nearby.

The smell of old rainwater and dirt was strong, trickling drainage the only sound. As the worklights behind her faded to a faint orange glow, Aya slowed her board to a crawl, guiding herself with one hand sliding along the tunnel wall.

Moggies signal flickered back on … and held.

Eden Maru was standing upright, flexing her arms. She was someplace spacious and dead-black in infrared, extending as far as Moggie's cams could see.

What was down there?

More human forms shimmered in the grainy darkness. They floated above the black plain, the lozenge shapes of hoverboards glowing beneath their feet.

Aya smiled. She'd found them, those crazy girls who rode mag-lev trains.

"Move in and listen," she whispered.

As Moggie drifted closer, Aya remembered a place the graffiti uglies had bragged about finding—a huge reservoir where the city stored runoff from the rainy season, an underground lake in absolute darkness.

Through Moggie's microphones, a few echoing words reached her.

"Thanks for getting here so fast."

"I always said your big face would get you into trouble, Eden."

"Well, this shouldn't take long. She's just behind me."

Aya froze.

Who was just behind Eden? She glanced over her shoulder Nothing but the glimmer of water trickling down the tunnel.

Then her eyescreen faded again. Aya swore, flexing her ring finger: off/on…but her vision stayed black.

"Moggie?" she hissed.

No flicker in the eyescreen, no response. She tried to access the hovercam's diagnostics, its audio feed, the remote flying controls. Nothing worked.

But Moggie was so close—at most twenty meters away. Why couldn't she connect?

Aya urged her board forward slowly, listening hard, trying to peer through the darkness. The wall slipped away from her hand, the echoes of a huge space opening around her. Trickles of rainwater chorused from a dozen drains, and the damp presence of the reservoir sent chills across her skin.

She needed to see Then Aya remembered the control panel of her hoverboard. In this absolute darkness, even a few pinpricks of light would make a difference.

She knelt and booted the controls. Their soft blue glow revealed sweeping walls of ancient brick, patched in places with modern ceramics and smart matter. A broad stone ceiling arched overhead, like the vault of some underground cathedral.

But no Moggie.

Aya drifted slowly through the darkness, letting the subtle air currents carry her board, listening hard. A smooth lake of black water spread out a few meters below her board.

Then she heard something nearby, the slightest catch of breath, and turned In the dim blue glow, an ugly face stared back at her. The girl stood on a hoverboard, holding Moggie in her arms. She gave Aya a cold smile.

"We thought you might come after this."

"Hey!" Aya said. "What did you do to my—" A foot kicked out from the darkness and sent Aya's hoverboard rocking.

"Watch it!" Aya shouted.

Strong hands pushed her, and she took two unsteady steps backward. The hoverboard shifted, trying to stay under her feet. Aya stuck her arms out, wobbling like a littlie on ice skates.

"Knock it off! What are you—" From all directions, more hands shoved and prodded her—Aya spun wildly, blind and defenseless. Then her board was kicked away, and she was tumbling through the air.

The water struck her face with a cold, hard slap.

Audition

Blackness boiled around her, its watery roar like thunder stuffed into her ears. The shock of impact stripped away any sense of up and down, leaving only the tumbling, freezing cold. Her arms and legs flailed, the water filling her nostrils and mouth, squeezing her chest Then Aya's head broke the surface. She gasped and sputtered, hands clawing at the water, searching for something solid in the dark.

"Hey! What's your problem?"

Her cry boomed through the vast space, echoing in the blind emptiness. But no answer came.

She paddled water for a moment, catching her breath, trying to listen.

"Hello…?"

A hand grabbed her wrist, and Aya found herself pulled into the air. She hung there, feet dangling, her shivers sending water cascading from her soaking robe.

"What…what's going on?"

A voice answered. "We don't like kickers."

Aya had figured as much: They wanted to kick their own story about how they rode the trains, and keep all the fame for themselves.

Maybe it was time for some truth-slanting. "But I'm not a kicker!"

Someone snorted, then a closer voice said, "You followed me here from that party—or your hovercam did, anyway. You were looking for a story."

"Not a story, I was looking for you."

Aya shivered again, fighting to keep her teeth from chattering. She had to convince them not to drop her into the black lake again. "I saw you guys the other night."

"Saw us where?" the closer voice said, and the grip on her wrist adjusted. That one had to be Eden; nobody could hold her up like this without help from a hoverball rig.

"On top of a mag-lev train. You were riding it. I tried to find out who you were, but there was nothing on the feeds."

"That's the way we like it," the first voice said.

"Okay, I get it!" Aya said. "Um, are you just going dangle me here like this?"

"Would you prefer I drop you?" Eden asked.

"Not really. It's just that this is kind of… wrist-hurting."

"Call your board, then."

"Oh…right." In her panic, Aya had forgotten all about her hoverboard. She reached up with her free hand and twisted her other crash bracelet. A few seconds later the hoverboard nudged her feet, and the iron grip released her.

She wobbled for a moment on the board, rubbing her wrist. "Thanks, I guess."

"Are you telling us you're not a kicker?" It was the first voice again, maybe the ugly woman she'd glimpsed. It echoed through the darkness low and growly, like she'd surged her throat to sound scary.

"Well, I've put a few things on my feed. Same as everyone."

"Pictures of your cat?" someone said, then snickered.

"So do you always go to parties disguised as a Bomber?" Eden asked. "With a hovercam in tow?"

Aya wrapped her arms around herself. The soaked robe was clinging to her skin, and her teeth were going to start chattering any minute. "Look, I wanted to join up with your clique. So I had to track you down. Moggie's good for that."

"Moggie?" the mean voice asked.

"Uh…my hovercam."

"Your hovercam has a name?"

Laughter echoed from every direction. Aya realized that there were more of them than she'd thought. Maybe a dozen hidden in the darkness.

"Hang on a second," Eden's voice said. "How old are you?"

"Um…fifteen?"

A flashlight flicked on, blindingly bright in the total darkness.

"Ouch!" She squeezed her eyes shut.

Whoever was holding the flashlight added, "Thought that nose looked big. Even in infrared."

As Aya's eyes adjusted to the flashlight, she began to make out faces. They looked like Plain Janes, the clique for girls who didn't want to be pretty or exotic, just normal— as if that concept still existed. Except for Eden Maru's padded and muscular form, the hovering figures around Aya all looked the same—generic bodies, designed to disappear in a crowd. All of them were girls, as far as Aya could tell, just like the night she'd seen them hitching a ride on the mag-lev train.

"So you like to sneak around at night?" Eden said.

"I guess so. Beats sitting in my dorm room."

"Easily bored?" The other girl drawled the words in her growling voice. "Then maybe you should have a surf sometimes."

"A surf?" Aya swallowed. "You mean I can ride with you?"

A few grumbles came from the darkness.

"But she's only fifteen," the girl holding the flashlight said.

"Are you still back in the Prettytime?" said the growly-voiced girl. "Who cares how old she is?

She crashed Prettyville and came down here all alone. Got more guts than most of you, probably."

"What about the hovercam?" Eden said. "If she kicks a story, we'll have wardens all over us."

"She could still call the wardens if she wants to." The mean-voiced girl slid closer on her board, until her nose was only a few centimeters from Aya's. "So we either leave her down here for good, or get her on our side."

Aya swallowed, glancing down at the shimmering black lake.

"Um, do I get a vote?"

"No one but me gets a vote," the girl said, then smiled. "But how about this? You do get to make a choice."

"Oh?"

The girl held Moggie at arm's length, and Aya saw the lock-down clamp against its skin. It was frozen, brain-dead until someone removed the clamp.

"You can either take your hovercam and go away. Or I drop it right now, and you get to come surfing with us."

Aya blinked, listening to the cold water still trickling from her robe. Ren claimed he'd made Moggie waterproof, but could she find her way back to this exact spot?

"How important is it to you, getting out of that boring little dorm room?"

Aya swallowed. "Very."

"Then choosing should be easy, right?"

"It's just…that cam cost me a lot of merits."

"It's a toy. Like face ranks and merits, it doesn't mean anything if you don't let it."

Face rank didn't mean anything? This girl was brain-missing. But she was right about one thing: Nothing was more important than getting out of boring, pathetic Akira Hall.

Maybe Ren could help her find the way back here Aya closed her eyes. "Okay. I want to come with you. Drop it."

The splash echoed like a slap.

"Good choice. That toy isn't what you really need."

Aya opened her eyes. They stung with hidden tears.

"I'm Jai," the girl said, bowing low.

"Aya Fuse." She returned the bow, her eyes falling to the widening ripples beneath them. Moggie was really gone.

"Well see you again soon," Jai said.

"See me soon?

But you said—" "I think you've had enough fun for one night, for a fifteen-year-old."

"But you promised!"

"And you said you weren't a kicker. I want to see if you were truth-slanting about that."

Aya started to protest, but the words faded in her mouth. There was no point in arguing now—Moggle was already gone.

"But I don't even know who you are."

Jai smiled. "We're the Sly Girls, and we'll be in touch. Come on, everyone—we've got a train to catch!"

They spun their hoverboards into motion, swirling around Aya, filling the underground chamber with echoing whoops and hollers. The flashlights flickered out, and she heard them shooting away one by one, their cries swallowed by the storm drain mouths.

Aya found herself alone in the dark, swallowing back tears.

She'd given up Moggle for nothing. Once the Sly Girls checked her feed, they'd know all about her stories. And if they realized that her brother was one of the most famous kickers in the city, they'd never trust her again.

"Stupid Hiro," she murmured. If it wasn't for Mr. Big Face, being an extra wouldn't be so hard.

She wouldn't have so much to prove.

And she wouldn't have traded Moggle…for nothing.

Aya squeezed her fists tight, letting her board descend until she heard the light slap of its lifters against the water. Kneeling, she stretched out one hand in the darkness, lowering her palm and resting it gently on the surface. She could still feel the ripples spreading from where Moggle had splashed.

"I'm sorry," Aya whispered. "But I'll be back soon."

Big Brother

Vast mansions zoomed past Aya, huge and brightly lit with torches. In the early morning light, bonfires burned everywhere: massive carbon allowances on display. Overhead drifted swimming pools, hovering bubbles of water shaped by invisible lines of force. As she flew beneath them, Aya glimpsed the outlines of people lounging on floaters, gazing at the dawn.

Hire's mansion rose three hundred meters into the air, a spindly tower of gleaming glass and steel.

To keep the gorgeous views from getting stale, the entire building rotated at the speed of an hour hand.

Its mass held up by hoverstruts, only a single elevator shaft touched the ground, like an enormous and glacial ballerina spinning on one toe.

In this neighborhood, all the buildings moved. They hovered and transformed and did other flabbergasting things, and everyone who lived here was legendarily bored by it all.

Hire lived in the famous part of town.

As Aya's hoverboard approached the mansion steps, she remembered what her brother had been like in those months during the Prettytime: beautiful, contented, respectful. Sure, he'd gone to all the bashes, but he'd come home for every holiday, always bringing Aya and the crumblies presents.

The mind-rain had changed all that—except for his pretty face.

For the first year after being cured, Hiro had jumped from clique to clique: Extreme Surge, the city hoverball team, even a tour in the wild as a Ranger trainee. He hadn't stuck with anything, shifting aimlessly, unable to make sense of freedom.

Of course, in that logic-missing first year a lot of people were confused. Some actually decided to reverse the mind-rain—not just old crumblies, but new pretties, too. Even Hiro had talked about turning back into a bubblehead.

Then two years ago came the news that the economy was in trouble. Back in the Prettytime, bubbleheads could ask for anything they wanted: Their toys and party clothes popped out of the hole in the wall, no questions asked. But creative, free-minded human beings were more ravenous than bubbleheads, it turned out. Too many resources were going to random hobbies, new buildings, and major projects like the mag-lev trains. And nobody was volunteering for the hard jobs anymore.

Some people wanted to go back to Rusty "money," complete with rents and taxes and starving if you couldn't pay for food. But the City Council didn't go that crazy; they voted for the reputation economy instead. From now on, merits and face ranks would decide who got the best mansions, the most carbon emissions, the biggest wall allowances. Merits were for doctors, teachers, wardens, all they way down to littlies doing schoolwork and their chores—everyone who kept the city going, as determined by the Good Citizen Committee. Face ranks were for the rest of culture, from artists to sports stars to scientists. You could use all the resources you wanted, as long as you captured the city's collective imagination.

And to keep the face ranks fair, every citizen over the age of littlie was given their own feed—a million scattered threads of story to help make sense of the mind-rain.

The word "kicker" hadn't even been invented yet, but somehow Hiro had understood it all instinctively: how to make a clique huge overnight, how to convince everyone to requisition some new gadget, and most of all how to make himself legendary in the process.

As Aya landed outside the mansion's elevator door, she sighed quietly. Hiro had been so smart since they'd fixed his brain If only all that fame hadn't turned him into such a self-centered snob.

"What do you want, Aya-chan?"

"I need to talk to you."

"Way too early."

Aya groaned. Without Moggle to float her back up to her window, she'd had to wait till dawn to get back into her dorm. And Hiro thought he was tired?

He couldn't have had a worse night than she'd had. She kept imagining Moggle at the bottom of the underground lake, lying cold and lifeless.

"Please, Hiro? I just spent a bunch of merits to switch my morning classes, so I could come see you."

A grumbling noise. "Come back in an hour."

Aya glared at the elevator door. She couldn't even go up and pound on his window; the mansions in the famous part of town didn't let you fly close to them.

"Well, can you at least tell me where Ren is? His locator's off."

"Ren?" A chuckle came from the door. "He's on my couch."

Aya breathed a sigh of relief. Hiro was a million times easier to deal with when his best friend was around. "Can I talk to him, then…please?"

The door went silent for so long that Aya wondered if Hiro had gone back to sleep. But finally Ren's voice came on.

"Hey, Aya-chan. Come on in!"

The door opened, and Aya stepped inside.

Hiro's rooms were garlanded with a million cranes.

It was an old custom from pre-Rusty days, one of the few that had survived the Prettytime: When a girl turned thirteen, she made a string of a thousand origami birds with her own two hands. It took weeks of folding little squares of paper into wings and beaks and tails, then stringing them together with an old-fashioned needle and thread.

After the mind-rain, a few girls had started a new trend: sending their finished strings to reputation-crushes, new-pretty boys with big face ranks. Boys like Hiro, in other words.

Just seeing them made Aya's fingers ache from the memory of her own thousand cranes. The chains of paper birds were draped everywhere in the apartment, except for Hiro's sacred feed-watching chair.

He was slumped there, wearing a hoverball sweatshirt and rubbing his eyes. Green tea was swirling from the spigots of the hole in the wall, filling the air with the scents of cut grass and caffeine.

"Could you get those?" he asked.

"Good morning to you, too." She gave him a sarcastic bow and went to fetch the tea. Two cups, of course—for him and Ren, not her. Aya couldn't stand green tea, but still.

"Morning, Aya-chan," Ren called groggily from the couch. He sat up, a flock of squashed cranes unpeeling from his back. Empty bottles were strewn everywhere, and a cleaning drone was vacuuming up the remains of food and spilled bubbly.

She handed Ren his tea. "Were you guys celebrating something, or just reliving bubblehead days?"

"You don't know?" Ren laughed. "Well, you better congratulate Hiro-sensei."

"Hiro-sensei? What?"

"That's right." Ren nodded. "Your brother finally cracked the top thousand."

"The top thousand?" Aya blinked. "Are you kidding?"

"Eight hundred and ninety-six, at the moment," Hiro said, staring at the wallscreen. Aya saw the number on it now: 896 in meter-high numerals. "Of course, my own sister ignores me. Where's my tea?"

"But I didn't …" Aya's exhaustion turned dizzy-making for a moment. This morning was the first in ages that she hadn't checked Hiro's face rank. And he'd hit the top thousand!

If he could stay there, he'd be invited to Nana Love's Thousand Faces Party next month.

Hiro, like most boys, had a major crush on Nana Love.

"I'm sorry…last night was really busy. But that's fantastic!"

He lazily stretched out a finger, pointing at the teacup in her hand.

She brought it to him, offering a real bow. "Congratulations, Hiro."

""Hiro-sensei," he reminded her.

Aya just rolled her eyes. "You don't have to call your own brother 'sensei,' Hiro, no matter how big a face he is. So what was the story?"

"You wouldn't be interested. Apparently."

"Come on, Hiro! I watch all your stories…except for last night."

"It was about this bunch of crumblies." Ren lay back across the couch. "They're like surge-monkeys, except they don't care about beauty or weird body mods. Just life extension: liver refits every six months, new cloned hearts once a year."

"Life extension?" Aya said. "But stories about crumblies never go big."

"This one has a conspiracy angle," Ren said. "These crumblies have a theory that the doctors secretly know how to keep people living forever. They say the only reason anyone dies of old age is to keep the population steady. It's just like the bubblehead operation back in the Prettytime: The doctors are hiding the truth!"

"That's brain-kicking," Aya murmured, a shiver traveling down her spine. It was so easy to believe in conspiracies, after the government had made everyone brain-missing for centuries.

And living forever? Even littlies would pay attention to that.

"You forgot the best part, Ren," Hiro said. "These crumblies are planning to sue the city … for immortality.

Like it's a human right or something. People want an investigation! Check it out."

Hiro waved his hand. On the wallscreen his face rank disappeared, replaced by a web of meme-lines, a huge diagram showing how the story had kicked through the city interface all night. Vast spirals of debate, disagreement, and outright slamming had splintered from Hire's feed, over a quarter-million people joining the conversation.

Was immortality a bogus idea? Could your brain stay bubbly forever? And if nobody died, where on earth would you put everyone? Would the expansion wind up eating the whole planet?

That last question made Aya dizzy again. She remembered that day at school when they'd showed satellite pictures from the Rusty era, back before population control. The sprawling cities had been huge enough to see from space: billions of extras crowding the planet, most of them living in total obscurity.

"Look at that!" Hiro cried. "Everyone's already going off the story My rank just dropped to nine hundred. People can be so shallow!"

"Maybe immortality's getting old," Ren said, grinning at Aya.

"Ha, ha," Hiro said. "I wonder who's stealing my eyeballs."

He flicked his hand again, and the wallscreen broke into a dozen panels. The familiar faces of the city's top twelve tech-kickers appeared. Aya noticed that Hiro had jumped to number four.

He was leaning forward in his chair, devouring the feeds to find out where his ratings had gone.

Aya sighed. Typical Hiro—he'd already forgotten that she'd come up here to talk to him. But she stayed quiet, curling next to Ren on the couch, trying not to crumple too many sad little paper birds. It probably wouldn't hurt, letting Hiro get his feed fix before admitting she'd left her hovercam at the bottom of a lake.

And Aya didn't mind a little feed-time. The familiar voices soothed her nerves, washing over her like a conversation with old friends.

People's faces were so different since the mind-rain, the new fads and cliques and inventions so unpredictable. It made the city sense-missing sometimes. Famous people were the cure for that randomness, like pre-Rusties gathering around their campfires every night, listening to the elders. Humans needed big faces around for comfort and familiarity, even an ego-kicker like Nana Love just talking about what she'd had for breakfast.

In the upper right corner, Gamma Matsui was kicking a new tech religion. Some history clique had applied averaging software to the world's great spiritual books, then programmed it to spit out godlike decrees.

For some reason, the software had told them not to eat pigs.

"Who would do that in the first place?" Aya asked.

"Aren't pigs extinct?" Ren giggled. "They seriously need to update that code."

"Gods are so last year," Hiro said, and Aya smiled.

Resurrecting old religions had been kick right after the mind-rain, when everyone was still trying to figure out what all the new freedoms meant.

But these days so many other things had been rediscovered—family reunions and crime and manga and the cherry blossom festival. Except for a few Youngblood cults, most people were too busy for divine superheroes.

"What's the Nameless One up to?" Hiro said, switching the sound to another feed.

The Nameless One was what the two of them called Toshi Banana—the most brain-missing big face in the city. He was more of a slammer than a real tech-kicker, always attacking some new clique or fashion, stirring up hatred for anything unfamiliar. He thought the mind-rain had been a disaster, just because everyone's new hobbies and obsessions could be unsettling and downright weird.

Ren and Hiro never said his name, and changed his nickname every few weeks, before the city interface could figure out who they meant—even mocking people helped their face stats. In the reputation economy, the only real way to hurt anyone was to ignore them completely. And it was pretty hard to ignore someone who made your blood boil. The Nameless One was hated or loved by almost everybody in the city, which kept his face rank floating around a hundred.

This morning he was slamming the new trend of pet owners and their ghastly breeding experiments. The feed showed a dog, dyed pink and sprouting heart-shaped tufts of fur. Aya thought it was kind of cute.

"It's just a poodle, you truth-slanting bubblehead!" Ren shouted, tossing a cushion at the wallscreen.

Aya giggled. Giving dogs funny hairdos wasn't exactly Rusty, like making fur coats or eating pigs.

"He's a waste of gravity," Ren said. "Blank him!"

"Replace with next highest," Hiro told the room, and the Nameless One's angry face disappeared.

Aya's eyes drifted across the screens. Nothing looked remotely as kick as surfing a mag-lev train. The Sly Girls had to be more famous-making than poodles, pig eating, and rumors of immortality.

Aya just had to make sure that she was the first kicker to put them on her feed.

Then she saw who had supplanted the Nameless One in the top left of the wallscreen, and her eyes widened.

"Hey," she murmured. "Who's that guy?"

But she already knew the gorgeous, manga-eyed boy's name It was Frizz Mizuno.

Frizz

"That bubblehead's the thirteenth-most-popular tech-kicker now?" Hiro groaned. "That was fast."

"Turn his sound on," Aya said.

"No way!" Hiro said. "He's so gag-making."

He waved his hand, and Frizz's face was replaced by yet another feed.

"Hiro!"

Ren leaned closer to her on the couch. "He's the founder of this new clique—Radical Honesty.

Hiro's just mad because Frizz decided to kick the clique himself, instead of letting one of us help out."

She frowned. "Radical what?"

"Honesty." Ren pointed at his temple, his eyescreens— like a true tech-head, he had one in each eye—spinning. "Frizz designed this new brain surge. Like back in the Prettytime, except instead of making you a bubblehead, they change your mind so you can't lie."

"Yeah, it's supposed to be the brave new horizon of human interaction," Hiro muttered from his chair. "But they just babble about their feelings all day."

"Friend of mine tried it for a week," Ren said. "He said it's very boredom-killing. Turns out if you never lie, there's always someone mad at you."

Hiro and Ren laughed, and the two of them went back to analyzing the other feeds, watching the kickers' ranks rise and fall. The software religion was a flop—Gamma-sensei had lost face all morning.

But the poodle was working, as funny-looking animals usually did, sending the Nameless One all the way up to sixty-three, one notch above the mayor.

Aya kept silent, staring at the corner of the screen Frizz had briefly occupied. She was trying to remember every word he'd said to her—that he'd liked her randomly generated nose, thought she was mysterious, and wanted to know her full name.

And he hadn't been lying about any of it.

Of course, when he found out that she didn't have such great taste in randomly generated noses—that she'd just been born with it, because she was an ugly and a party-crashing extra—what would he say then? He wouldn't even be polite about it. The honesty surge would make him show his disappointment about their difference in ambition Unless she wasn't an extra by then.

"Hey, Ren," she asked quietly. "Have you ever snuck footage of anyone?"

"You mean like fashion-slammers? No way. That's totally unkick."

"No, I don't mean shots of famous people. More like going undercover for a story."

"I'm not sure," Ren said, looking uncomfortable. He was a tech-kicker; his feed was filled with more hardware designs and interface mods than people stories. "The City Council keeps changing their minds about it. They don't want to get all Rusty, with people owning information and stuff. But nobody likes all those feeds that just show people cheating on their partners. Or fashion-slammers making fun of clothes and surge."

"Yeah, everyone hates those feeds. Except the zillions of people who watch them."

"Hmm. You should probably ask Hiro. He keeps up with that stuff."

Aya glanced at her brother, who was deep in a feed-trance, absorbing all twelve screens at once, no doubt plotting his big follow-up to immortality. Not the right moment to mention her new story, especially since that would mean bringing up a certain missing hovercam.

"Maybe not right now," she said. "So what are you working on?"

"Nothing huge," he said. "This middle-pretty science clique asked me for a kick. They've got some merits but no face. They're trying to recreate all those species the Rusties erased, you know? From old scraps of DNA and junk genes."

"Really?" Aya said. "That sounds totally kickable!"

"Yeah, till it turned out they're starting with worms and slugs and insects. I was like, 'Worms? Let me know when you get to tigers!'" He laughed. "I saw your underground graffiti story, by the way. Good work."

"Really?" Aya felt herself blush. "You thought those guys were interesting?"

"They will be," Hiro murmured from his chair, "in about a thousand years, when their work gets unburied."

Ren smiled, whispering, "See? Hiro watches your feed too."

"Not that she returns the favor," Hiro said, his eyes never leaving the wallscreen.

"So what are you kicking next, Aya-chan?" Ren asked.

"Well, it's kind of a secret right now."

"A secret?" Hiro said. "Ooh, mysterious."

Aya sighed. She'd come here to ask for Hiro's help, but he obviously wasn't in a help-giving mood. He was going to be insufferable now that he'd reached the top thousand.

Maybe it was pointless anyway. She wasn't even sure that the Sly Girls would keep their promise and contact her, or how to find them again if they didn't.

"Don't worry, Aya-chan," Ren said. "We won't tell anybody."

"Well…okay. Have you guys ever heard of the Sly Girls?"

Ren glanced at Hiro, who turned slowly in his chair to face her. A strange expression had appeared on both their faces.

"I've heard of them," Hiro said. "But they're not real."

Aya laughed. "Not real? Like, they're robots or something?"

"More like a rumor," he said. "The Sly Girls don't exist."

"What do you know about them?" she asked.

"Nothing. There's nothing to know about them, because they aren't real!"

"Come on, Hiro," she said. "Unicorns aren't real, and I know stuff about them. Like…they have horns on their foreheads. And they can fly!"

Hiro groaned. "No, that's Pegasus that flies. Unicorns just have a horn, which makes them a lot more real than the Sly Girls, who I can't tell you anything about. It's just a random phrase kickers use.

Like last year when someone was jumping off bridges wearing homemade parachutes, and no one ever figured out who. Everyone just said, The Sly Girls did it.' Because sly in English means clever or sneaky."

Aya rolled her eyes. "My English is a lot better than yours, Hiro-sensei. But what if they really exist?"

"Then they wouldn't be secret, would they? I mean, some cliques start off underground, and a lot of people pull tricks on the sly, but nobody stays anonymous forever." He swept his gaze around the apartment—the huge wallscreen, the garlands of paper cranes, the floor-to-ceiling window with its slowly shifting view. "Thanks to the reputation economy, they'd rather be famous. Did you know that every real criminal since the mind-ram has wound up confessing?"

Aya nodded.

Everyone knew that, and how they'd all hit the top one thousand for at least a few days. "But what if—?"

"It's not real, Aya. Whatever it is."

"So if I bring you some shots of the Sly Girls?" she said. "What are you going to say then?"

Hiro turned back toward the wallscreen. "The same thing I'd say if you stuck a plastic horn on a horse and started kicking unicorns: Quit wasting my time."

Aya clenched her fists, her eyes stinging. The doubts she'd had about sneaking footage of the Girls were gone now. She was going to make Hiro eat his words.

She turned to Ren. "What's a good cam to requisition? One that's small enough to hide." She fingered a button on her dorm uniform. "This big."

"That's easy," Ren said, then frowned. "Where's your hovercam, anyway? You never used to go anywhere without Moggle."

"Oh…well, that's sort of why I was looking for you, Ren."

He grinned. "What, did you break another lens? You've got to stop jumping out your window" "Um, it's kind of worse than that," Aya said softly, but she could see that Hiro was listening. Why was she always invisible to him, until she made a mistake? "You see, I kind of… lost Moggle."

Ren's eyes widened. "But how…?"

"You lost it?" Hiro turned to them, a glare set on his pretty face. "How do you lose a hovercam?

They just fly home when you leave them behind!"

"It's not like I left it somewhere," she said. "I mean, I would never—" "Do you know how long Ren spent on those mods?"

"Look, Hiro, I know where Moggle is, sort of," Aya said, a lump rising in her throat. "I just need a little help finding it and…getting it back to the surface."

"The surface of what?" Hiro cried.

"There's this sort of underground lake, and …" Her throat closed up around the words, and Aya shut her eyes. If Hiro kept yelling at her, she'd burst into tears.

She felt Ren's hand on her shoulder. "It's okay, Aya-chan."

"I'm sorry," she managed.

"Well, it sounds like a pretty famous-making story." He exhaled slowly. "I think I've got some time tomorrow. Maybe I can help you dredge up Moggle from this…underground lake?"

She nodded, eyes still closed. "Thanks, Ren-chan."

"She'll just lose it again," Hiro said.

"No I won't!" she shouted. "And I'm going to prove that you're wrong about the Sly Girls, too!"

But Hiro didn't answer…he just shook his head.

Aya made her way home, still trying not to cry.

She was exhausted, Ren hated her, and her stupid brother was getting more famous and horrible every second. If Ren couldn't find Moggle, there was no way she could scrape together enough merits for a new hovercam.

All Aya wanted to do was sleep until tomorrow morning, when Ren had promised to meet her at the new construction site. But this afternoon was already stuffed with classes—the ones she'd rescheduled from this morning on top of the dreaded Advanced English. She couldn't skip: Schoolwork was the quickest way to build up merits when you were an ugly—all the good jobs went to pretties and crumblies.

When she reached Akira Hall, she went down to the basement and found an empty wallscreen.

"Aya Fuse," she told it.

It popped to life, listing her pings and assignments, and displaying her miserable face rank of

451,441.

She was dying to look up Frizz Mizuno and Radical Honesty, but not until schoolwork was out of the way. As she scanned the list for any new assignments, her eyes froze on one It was anonymous and spitting animations, like the fluttering hearts that littlies decorated their pings with. But these weren't hearts, or exclamation points, or smilies.

They were eyes—dull, unsurged, Plain Jane eyes—and they kept winking at her.

Aya opened the ping Saw your story about the graffiti. Not bad, for a kicker. Meet us at midnight, where the mag-lev line leaves Uglyville.

But don't bring a cam, or we won't let you play

—your new friends

Sly Girls

"Can't I use my own hoverboard?"

Jai snorted. "That toy? Too slow. The train will be doing a hundred and fifty by the time you jump on."

"Oh." Aya stared down at the long, shimmering curve of the mag-lev line. It cut through the low industrial buildings, an arc of white through dull orange worklights. The Sly Girls had brought her to the city's edge, where the greenbelt faded into factories and new expansions. "I just assumed you guys got on the train while it was standing still."

"The wardens would be expecting that, wouldn't they?" Jai swung her feet casually, as if there weren't a hundred-meter drop below them. "They have monitors all over the train yards."

"But isn't a hundred and fifty kind of fast?" Most boards were safety-capped at sixty kilometers an hour.

"That's nothing for a mag-lev," Eden Maru said. "We're catching it when it slows down on the bend." She pointed toward the wild. "The trains do three hundred once they hit the straightaway outside town."

"Three hundred klicks? And we'll still be riding it?"

"Let's hope so." Jai smiled. "Considering the alternative."

Aya glanced down at the magnetic bracelets strapped to her wrists. They were like the crash bracelets everyone wore for hoverboard falls, just much bigger. But were they really powerful enough to fight a three-hundred-kilometer headwind?

She wrapped her arms around herself, trying not to look down at the nervous-making drop. The three of them were balanced atop a tall transmission tower, high enough to see darkness on the horizon, the place where the city stopped.

Aya had never glimpsed the wild before tonight, except on nature feeds. Somehow the thought of venturing out into that lightless, barren expanse was even scarier than jumping on a speeding train.

Moggle's absence made her doubly uneasy. It was eerie knowing that none of this was being recorded. Like a dream, whatever happened would all be gone tomorrow morning. Aya felt cut off from the world, unreal.

"The next tram passes in three minutes," Jai said. "So what's the most important thing to remember once we're surfing?"

A cold trickle squirmed down Aya's spine. "The decapitation signals."

"Which work how?"

"When anyone in front of me flashes a yellow light, that means duck. Red means a tunnel's coming, so lie flat against the train."

"Just don't get too excited." Jai giggled. "Or you'll lose your head."

Aya wondered if the Sly Girls had ever considered lying flat for the whole ride, which would make decapitation much less of an issue. Or realized that not surfing mag-levs at all would keep head-losing safely in the realm of the unimaginable, where it belonged.

"Sounds like you've got it down," Jai said.

Eden snorted. "Yeah, she's practically an expert."

"Relax, face-queen," Jai said. "Not all of us are hoverball stars."

"Not all of us are fifteen, either. Or kickers."

"She doesn't even have a cam anymore."

Aya listened to them argue, wondering how high Jai's face rank was. Lots of people who avoided the feeds were famous, of course. In fact, the most famous person in the city—in the whole world—didn't have a feed of her own. But people talked about her every time they mentioned the mind-rain.

"You don't have to worry about me," Aya said. "Just because I'm an ugly doesn't mean I'm stupid."

"Of course not," Jai said. "In fact, I find your ugliness enchanting."

"I've been getting a lot of that lately," Aya said, thinking of Frizz Mizuno.

"One minute to go!" Eden called, and jumped from the tower. Her hoverball rig caught her fall, and she pirouetted in midair to face them. "Just be careful, Aya."

"She will be." Jai pushed off, stepping onto her waiting board. "They're always careful the first time!"

She laughed and spun away, the two of them sweeping down toward the tracks together.

Aya stepped gingerly onto the high-speed board they'd given her. It gave a little under her weight, like a diving board, but she could feel the power surging beneath her feet.

The approaching train was visible now, just crawling out from the yards, loaded with trade bound for other cities. She couldn't hear its rumble yet, but Aya knew that three hundred tons of speeding metal would shake the earth like a suborbital launch as it passed.

She followed Jai and Eden across the factory belt, down to the hiding place where the others waited—the rooftop of a low industrial building next to the tracks. A few driverless trucks rumbled along the streets below, tending the factories and building sites. No people anywhere.

As Aya swept in for a landing, loose gravel crunched under her hoverboard. She slid to a hiding spot behind a ventilation tower spitting exhaust from the underground depths of the factory. A smell like sulfur and hot glue tinged the air.

Crouching there, listening to the train rumbling in the distance, Aya found herself thinking of Frizz Mizuno again. He seemed to cross her mind every few minutes—how had one random conversation been so brain-rattling?

The teachers always warned about getting too involved with pretties. Since the mind-rain, they weren't as innocent as they looked. They could mess with your head so easily, just by gazing at you with those huge, gorgeous eyes.

Of course, Frizz wasn't like that. She'd checked the city interface after classes, and Ren had been right about Radical Honesty: They couldn't lie, or even imply a falsehood. The whole truth-slanting part of their brain had been switched off, just like bubbleheads were missing willpower, creativity, and despair.

But the fact that Frizz had been truthful just made him more nerve-jangling. As did the fact that his face rank was going up every hour. He'd only been pretty a few months, and he was headed for the top thousand.

"Nervous?" a voice came from the darkness.

It was one of the other Sly Girls, crouching beside the next air vent. She looked younger than Jai and Eden—with the same Plain Jane surge and hole-in-the-wall rejects they all wore.

"No, I'm okay."

"But surfing's more fun if you're scared."

Aya laughed. With her mousy brown hair, the girl looked almost like an ugly. Her eyes were so lusterless and dull that Aya wondered if she'd surged them that way.

"This should be plenty of fun, then."

"Good." The girl grinned. "It's supposed to be!"

She certainly looked like she was having fun. As the rumble of the train built, her smile gleamed like a pretty's in the darkness. Aya wondered what made her so thrilled to be risking her life like this.

How many people even knew that she was a Sly Girl?

"Hey aren't you in my dorm?" Aya asked. "What's your name?"

The girl laughed. "You going to check my face rank later?"

"Oh." Aya looked away. "Is it that obvious?"

"Fame's always obvious—that's the point of it." She glanced back toward where Jai was hiding.

"I know you kick stories once in a while. We'll have to break you of that habit."

"Sorry I asked."

"No problem. Listen, if it makes you feel better, my first name's Miki. And my face rank's about nine hundred and ninety-seven thousand."

"You're kidding…right?"

"Pretty sly, huh?" Miki said with a grin.

Aya shook her head, trying to think through the building rumble of the train. It didn't make sense.

Anyone who pulled tricks like this should have cracked a hundred thousand, whether they'd been kicked or not. The city interface picked up any mention of your name, especially gossip, tall tales, and rumors.

And 997,000 was almost a million!

That was the land of extreme extras, like newborn littlies and crumblies who'd never taken the mind-rain pills. Non-people, practically.

Miki just laughed at her dumbfounded expression. "Of course, Jai's even slyer. That's why she's the boss."

"You mean slyer … as in less famous?"

Miki winked. "As in kissing a million."

"Get ready!" Eden Maru called, barely audible above the growing roar of the train.

"Surf's up!" Miki yelled, kneeling.

Aya grabbed her hoverboard's forward edge, trying to focus. This story was suddenly much stranger than just surfing a mag-lev. For some reason, the Sly Girls had turned the reputation economy upside down.

They wanted to disappear. But why?

Her crash bracelets snapped against the board, locking her down tight. The factory roof itself was shuddering now, the gravel strewn across it dancing like hailstones hitting grass.

She could finally kick a story like one of Hire's: long, dizzy-making interviews, a dozen background layers tracing the Girls' histories, wild footage of tram rides and underground meetings. If she could just shoot it without them finding out…and with her hovercam at the bottom of a lake.

Aya glanced over her shoulder at Jai, feeling a cold smile creep onto her face. Finally she knew how to take the perfect revenge for Moggle's watery burial. She was going to kick this story big, and make the Sly Girls famous beyond their wildest nightmares.

She'd make sure everyone knew their names.

"Hey, you look a little funny," Miki called above the roar. "Not finally getting scared, are you?"

Aya laughed. "No. Just getting ready!"

The thunder built louder and louder, finally exploding as the train arrived, a solid blur of lights and noise shooting past. A dozen whirlwinds of dust swirled to life across the rooftop.

Then the train leaned into the curve, and Aya heard a chorus of humming slowly build, like an orchestra of wineglasses tuning up. Three hundred tons of levitating metal and smart matter were bending into a new shape, slowing down just a little bit.

"Now!" Eden screamed.

And they rose into the air.

Surfing

The board shot forward, dragging Aya along by her wrists.

It wrenched and twisted like a bad spinout, when crash bracelets could almost jerk a rider's arms from their sockets. But spinouts never lasted this long. Aya's hoverboard was still accelerating, faster and faster along the slow curve of the mag-lev line.

She squeezed as flat as she could against the board, her feet dangling off the back end, her dorm jacket snapping like a flag in a gale.

Squinting against the wind, Aya could hardly see anything. Only a few meters ahead, Miki was nothing but a teary blur. Luckily, the board was programmed to fly itself until it matched the speed of the train.

Sneaking out the night before to look for Eden and her friends, Aya had never expected to wind up riding the train herself.

She'd imagined zooming along at a safe distance, with Moggle closer in, capturing images for her feed.

Yet here she was, taking the most brain-kicking ride of her life, and it wasn't even being recorded!

The ground flashed by below, but the train beside her seemed to be gradually slowing down. The hoverboard was really catching up.

Soon she'd have to climb aboard.

For a second, she thought about veering off, shooting away into the night. She could still kick a secret clique bent on wild tricks and avoiding fame.

Of course, she'd have nothing to prove her story but two crash bracelets, a high-speed board, and a waterlogged hovercam. Except for Eden Mara, she didn't even know any full names. No one would believe her—especially not Hiro.

To get the footage she needed, she had to make the Sly Girls think that Aya Fuse was one of them. And to do that, she had to surf this train.

In the howling wind, she could feel the awesome physical forces all around her, waiting for any mistake. The mag-lev seemed to drift into place beside Aya as her board matched its speed.

The hoverboard's autopilot flashed once—it had done its job.

Now Aya was in control.

Jai had warned her about this part. Any sudden shift of weight could send the board crashing against the tram, or spinning away into a passing building.

Ahead of her, Miki was swaying back and forth, testing her control.

Aya held her breath…and lifted the fingers of her right hand. The wind bent them back painfully, and her board shuddered, veering away from the train.

She dragged her fingers back into a fist, and the stabilizers kicked in, steadying the hoverboard.

Her whole hand throbbed.

This was fast. … If only Moggle were watching.

Ahead, Miki was only a meter from the train—another girl farther on was already reaching out a hand toward the roof. Aya had to get onboard before the mag-lev line straightened out.

"Here goes," she said through gritted teeth.

She crooked her left thumb, barely lifting it from the hoverboard's front edge. The board responded more evenly this time, angling toward the steady expanse of the mag-lev's roof. She drifted closer in cautious stages, like handling a kite with minute tugs on its strings.

A few meters from the train, her board began to jump and shudder again. Jai had warned her about this, too: the shock wave, an invisible boundary of turbulence stirred up by the train's passage.

Aya fought the tumult with twitches and gestures, every muscle straining. Her ears popped with pressure changes, and her eyes streamed tears into the wind.

Suddenly she pulled free of the turbulence, sweeping across the remaining space to bump softly against the metal flank of the train. Aya felt the mag-lev's vibrations buzzing in the board beneath her as its magnets firmed up the connection.

The wind was muted now—she was inside a thin bubble of calm surrounding the train, like the eye of a hurricane.

Aya demagnetized her left crash bracelet, then slowly slid her hand across the board's grippy surface to the roof of the train.

It smacked down hard and secure.

But it was nervous-making, disconnecting her other crash bracelet. The hoverboard was Aya-size, the mag-lev inhumanly huge and powerful. She was like a rat hitching a ride on a stampeding dinosaur.

Shutting her eyes, she pulled her right hand free, then hauled herself up onto the roof and slapped her wrist down.

She'd done it! The tram rumbled below her like an unsettled volcano, and the half-muted wind still tore at her hair and clothes. But Aya was onboard.

The humming rose up around her—the train's smart-matter joints pulling it back straight. She'd made it just in time.

The train's roof stretched out dead straight ahead of her, dotted with nine Sly Girls along its length. Glancing back, the wind whipping handfuls of hair into her mouth, she saw the other three—everyone had made it.

The wind built as the train accelerated, and most of them were already surfing, standing with their arms out to catch the wind. Just like flying, Eden had said.

Aya sighed—as if riding on top of a mag-lev wasn't risky enough without standing up!

But if the Girls were going to accept her, she'd have to be as crazy as they were. And it wasn't really surfing if you were lying down.

She unthreaded the straps on her right bracelet, pulled it off, and curled up to wrestle it over her foot. It was all very clumsy, but after a minute's fumbling, she had the bracelet strapped tightly around her ankle.

She magnetized it, and felt her shoe plant hard against the metal roof.

Gingerly she released her other wrist…the wind didn't whip her away.

Time for the scary part.

Aya pushed herself up gradually, feet planted wide apart and arms out, like a littlie standing on a hoverboard for the first time. Up ahead, Miki's body was angled sideways into the wind, like a fencer presenting the smallest possible target. Aya imitated her as she stood up.

The higher she got, the fiercer the wind grew. Invisible, chaotic whirlwinds buffeted her body, twisting her hair into knots.

But finally Aya was fully upright, every muscle straining.

All around her, the world was a wild blur.

The train had reached the outer edge of the new expansion, where the city grew every day.

Banks of work-lights shot past like bright orange comets, earthmovers the size of mansions flitting by.

The wild lay just ahead, its dark mass the only steady shape in the maelstrom of lights and noise and rushing wind.

Then the last glow of construction streaked past, and the train plunged into a sea of darkness. As the city network fell behind, Aya's skintenna lost its connection with the city interface. The world was quickly emptied: no feeds, no face ranks, no fame.

As if the screaming wind had stripped everything away.

But somehow Aya didn't miss it all—she was laughing. She felt huge and unstoppable, like a littlie on horseback galloping at breakneck speed.

The train's awesome power flowed across her hands. Angling her palms flat, she felt the airstream lift her up, pulling her against the straps around her ankle, like a bird straining to fly. Every gesture whipped her body into a new stance, as if the wind was an extension of her will.

But just ahead, Miki's dark outline was crouching. Something was in her hand A yellow light.

"Crap!" Aya angled her palms down and bent her knees.

As she crumpled to the train's roof, something huge and invisible sliced the air overhead, hissing like the blade of a sword whipping past. Its shock wave rang through her body like a blow.

Then it was gone. Aya hadn't even seen what it was.

She swallowed, squinting into the wind. Ahead, a string of yellow lights stretched away toward the front of the train. They flicked off one by one, the danger past.

How had she missed them?

"Don't get too excited," Jai had warned.

"Or you'll lose your head."

Trembling, she rose slowly from her crouch, her momentary sense of giddy power vanished. The darkness stretched out ahead as far as she could see.

Suddenly Aya Fuse felt very small.

Tunnel

There were four things Aya was realizing about the wild.

It was formless. The forest rushing by on either side blurred into one impenetrable mass, a roiling void of speed.

It was endless, or maybe time had broken. Whether she'd been surfing for minutes or hours, she had no idea.

Third, the wild had a huge sky, which didn't make sense—it seemed like the sky would be the same size everywhere. But the blackness overhead sprawled out—unmarked by the city's jagged skyline, unstained by reflected light— starlit and vast.

And lastly, it was cold. Though that was probably thanks to the three-hundred-klick wind in Aya's face.

Next time, she was bringing two jackets.

Some time later, Aya saw Miki's outline drop into a crouch. She looked worriedly at the other girls ahead, but no decapitation warning lights were showing.

Miki seemed to be playing with the bracelet around her ankle—then suddenly she was untethered, sliding backward across the train's roof on the seat of her pants, carried by the fierce headwind.

"Miki!" Aya screamed, kneeling and sticking out a hand.

As she slid within Aya's reach, Miki slammed a crash bracelet down, spinning to a halt. She was laughing, the wind whipping her hair in a frenzy around her head.

"Hey, Aya-chan!" she shouted. "How's it going?"

Aya pulled her hand back. "You scared me!"

"Sorry." Miki shrugged. "The wind always carries you straight down the train. Enjoying yourself?"

Aya took a deep breath. "Sure. But it's kind of icicle-making."

"No kidding." Miki pulled her standard-requisition shirt up, revealing Rangers' silks. "These work, though."

Aya rubbed her hands together, wishing Jai had warned her about the cold.

"I came back because we're almost in the mountains," Miki shouted, rising to one knee. "That's where the train slows down again."

"And we jump off?"

"Yeah. But the tunnel comes first."

"Oh, right." Aya shivered. "The red-light warning. I almost missed that first yellow."

"Don't worry. It's hard for a mountain to sneak up on you." Miki put her arm around Aya. "And it's not as windy in there."

Aya shivered, huddling closer. "Can't wait."

The mountain range rose slowly from the horizon, black outlines against the starlit sky.

As they grew nearer, Aya realized how big the mountains were. The one straight ahead looked wider across than the city's soccer stadium, and much taller than the central tower in town. It ate the sky as they approached, like a wall of blackness rolling toward them.

By now Aya was getting used to the unexpected size of everything out here. She wondered how anyone had managed to cross the wild back in pre-Rusty days, before mag-levs or hoverboards or even groundcars. The scale was enough to drive anyone crazy.

No wonder the Rusties had tried to pave it over.

"Here we go," Miki said, pointing.

At the front of the train, a red light was flickering. Another appeared behind it, a string of seven more igniting like a chain of sparklers.

Miki pulled a flashlight from her pocket and flicked it on. She twisted it to red, then waved it toward the tail of the train.

Aya was already unlacing the bracelet from her ankle. She wanted both wrists magnetized by the time they reached the tunnel.

"You okay?" Miki asked. "You look funny."

"I'm fine." Aya shivered. Suddenly she felt small again, the way she had after the train had first plunged into the wild.

"It's okay if you're not sure yet," Miki said. "I don't just surf because it's fun, you know? It also changes me. And that part takes a while to settle in."

Aya shook her head. She hadn't meant to sound unenthusiastic. The Sly Girls had to believe she was one of them, that she'd embraced their insanity keenly enough to give up kicking for good.

But it was true—something had shifted inside Aya, something she didn't quite understand yet.

The ride had whipped her so quickly from terror to elation, then just as suddenly to insignificance She stared out across the dark landscape, trying to untangle her emotions. This feeling was nothing like the obscurity-panic that consumed her when she saw the lights of the city, the horrible certainty that she would never be famous, that all those people would never care about her at all.

Somehow, staring into the darkness, she felt contented that the world was so much bigger than her. Overwhelmed, but calm.

"I know what you mean…it's sort of brain-shifting, being out here."

"Good." Miki smiled. "Now get your head down."

"Oh, right. Tunnel."

They lay flat on the train, snapping their crash bracelets down hard. The mountain grew closer and closer, until it towered over them like a huge wave rolling out of a black sea.

Squinting ahead, Aya watched the red warning lights disappearing one by one, gobbled by the tunnel's maw along with the front half of the train.

Then, with a vast shudder of the air, darkness swallowed them. The roar of the train redoubled with echoes and reverberations. Aya's whole body felt the difference in the train's vibrations.

The tunnel's blackness was a hundred times heavier than the starlight outside, but Aya could feel the tunnel roof sliding past—close enough to reach up and touch, if she wanted to lose a hand.

She felt the megatons of rock overhead pressing down, an infinite mass, as if the sky had turned to stone. Seconds ago the mag-lev had seemed huge, but instantly the mountain had dwarfed it, squashing her into the narrow sliver of space between the two.

"Do you feel that?" Miki called.

Aya turned her head. "What?"

"I think we're slowing down."

"Already?" Aya frowned. "Isn't the bend on the other side of the tunnel?"

"It is. But listen."

Aya focused on the tumultuous roar around them. Gradually her ears began to tease apart the sounds. The rumble of the train had a rhythm inside it, the steady beat of some imperfection in the track.

And that beat was slowing down.

"You're right. Does the train ever stop in here?"

"Not that I ever heard. Whoa! Feel that?"

"Um, yeah." Aya's body was sliding forward; the train was braking faster now. Her feet spun in a half circle around the bracelets, carried by her own momentum.

The roar and rumble died slowly around them, the train gliding to a graceful, silent stop. The stillness sent tremors across Aya's wind-burned skin.

"Something must have gone wrong with the train," Miki said softly. "Hope they get it fixed fast."

"I thought cargo trains didn't have crews."

"Some do." Miki let out a slow breath. "I guess we wait and—" A light glimmered across the tunnel roof. It came from the right side of the train, flickering unsteadily, like a carried flashlight. For the first time, Aya saw the inside of the tunnel, a smooth cylinder of stone wrapped around the train. The roof was perhaps twenty centimeters from her head. She reached up and touched the cold stone.

"Crap!" Miki hissed. "Our boards!"

Aya swallowed. The hoverboards were still clinging to the right side of the tram, a few meters above head height. If whoever was out there looked up and saw one, they'd definitely wonder what it was.

"Let's see what's going on," Miki whispered. She unlocked her wrists and pulled herself toward the roof's edge.

Aya released her bracelets and crawled after Miki. If the hoverboards had been spotted, they had to warn the others right away.

At the edge of the roof, she and Miki peered over. A group of three figures had crowded into the narrow space between train and stone, flashlights lengthening their shadows into distorted shapes. Aya realized that they were floating, wearing hoverball rigs like Eden's.

But they hadn't seen the boards. They weren't looking at the train at all. All of them stared at the tunnel wall It was moving.

The stone of the mountain was transforming, undulating softly and changing colors, like oil floating on top of rippling water. A sound like a humming wineglass filled the tunnel. The air suddenly tasted different in Aya's mouth, like in the wet season when a downpour was about to start.

One by one, thin layers of the liquid stone peeled away, until a wide door had opened in the tunnel wall.

The figures' flashlights lanced into its depths, but from atop the train Aya couldn't see inside. She heard echoes from a large space, and saw an orange glow from the doorway playing among the flashlight shadows.

A panel in the train slid open, matching the gap in the tunnel wall. The tram settled slightly on its levitation magnets, descending until the two openings were aligned.

One of the figures moved, and Aya jerked her head back into the shadows. When she peeked out again, all three of them had stepped aside to watch a massive object drift from the opening in the train.

It looked like a cylinder of solid metal, taller than Aya and a meter across. It must have been heavy: The four lifter drones clamped to its base trembled unsteadily, carrying it across the gap with the measured pace of a funeral transport.

Before the object had disappeared into the mountainside, another followed, exactly the same.

Then a third emerged.

"Do you see them?" came Miki's soft whisper.

"Yeah. But what are they?"

"Not human.'' "Not what?"

Aya glanced at Miki's face and realized that she wasn't watching the metal objects floating past.

She was staring wide-eyed at the people down below.

Aya peered through the darkness, and finally saw that the flashlights weren't distorting the figures' shapes as she'd thought. The people hovering in the gloom were simply wrong—t heir legs absurdly stretched and gangly, arms bending in too many places, fingers as long as calligraphy brushes. And their faces…the large eyes were set too wide, the skin hairless and pale.

As Miki had said: not human.

Aya let out a shallow gasp, and Miki pulled her back from the edge. They lay there side by side, Aya's eyes squeezed shut, her heart pounding as she imagined one of those spindly hands reaching up onto the top of the train and grasping her.

She forced herself to breathe slowly, clenching her fists until the panic subsided.

Finally she slid to the edge of the train once more and looked down, wishing for the hundredth time tonight that Moggle was hovering at her shoulder. But she had only her own eyes and brain.

The inhuman figures still floated there, watching a procession of lifter drones glide from the tunnel door into the train. They carried chairs and wallscreens, food synthesizers and industrial water recyclers, countless garbage canisters. Even a full aquarium balanced between two lifters, the bubbler still rumbling, fish darting around unhappily inside.

Someone was obviously moving out of the hidden tunnel space…but what were those metal things they'd moved in?

At last, the train slid shut, and the air began to hum again. Dark strands wove across the opening in the tunnel wall, like a time-lapse of a spider building a web. Then rippling layers began to roll across them, until the gap was completely covered.

"Smart matter," whispered Miki beside her.

As Aya nodded, the surface shivered one last time, then turned into a perfect imitation of stone.

The flashlights flickered off, dropping the tunnel back into absolute darkness.

"Come on," Miki whispered, pulling her back toward the centerline of the train. Soon it shuddered into motion, and the wind began to swirl around them again. "We'll be jumping off soon, and we can tell the others."

"But who were those people, Miki?" Aya said.

"I think you mean, what were they?"

"Yeah." Aya lay there exhausted in the rumbling darkness, trying to replay in her mind what she'd seen. She needed time to think; she needed the city interface. And most of all, she needed Moggle.

This story had just gotten much more complicated.

Rescue

"You know, when I waterproofed Moggle, I didn't think you'd ever need it."

"Sorry," Aya sighed. She'd said "sorry" about a thousand times since meeting up with Ren this morning; even she had to admit it was getting old. "Um, I mean, it won't happen again."

Ren dropped his gaze back to the motionless black water. "You still haven't told me how it happened in the first place."

"They must have snuck up on Moggle. They used a lock-down clamp, I'm pretty sure." Aya stepped to the front edge of her hoverboard, peering down. She wasn't even certain if she had the right spot. Her memories of that night were all shadows and chaos, and now Ren's hoverlamps were illuminating the underground reservoir with a cheery glow. Nothing matched the images in her mind.

"They dropped it here, I think."

"They…the Sly Girls, you mean?"

"Yes, Ren, they're real. You just haven't seen them because they don't like kickers very much."

She pointed at the black surface. "Hence my hovercam under water."

He snorted, thumbs twiddling with the instrument in his hands, his eyescreens spinning. Ren made his own trick-boxes, gadgets that could talk to any machine in the city. "Well, they used a serious clamp.

Moggle isn't showing up at all: no city signal, no private feed, not even battery flicker."

Aya groaned, and the sound glanced across the still surface of the water, echoed off the ancient brick walls in a chorus of defeat. The reservoir was even bigger than she remembered, vast enough to store the whole rainy season. Finding one little hovercam down here would be impossible.

"What are we going to do?"

"Well, us tech-heads have a saying: If you can't use the kickest new technology, just use your eyes." He fiddled with his gadget's controls, and one of the little hoverlamps focused into a blinding spotlight straight down into the water. The hoverlamp flew toward Aya, sliding to a stop beside her, illuminating the depths of the reservoir.

Aya eased her hoverboard down to the water's surface and knelt to peer into its depths.

"Whoa … we actually drink this stuff?"

"They filter it first, Aya-chan."

The water was murky, speckled with suspended dirt and debris carried down by the storm drains. It smelled like damp earth and rotten leaves.

"Does this light get any stronger?"

"Maybe this will help." He flicked his hand, and the hoverlamp descended until its nose broke the surface.

The spotlight grew in intensity, and a half sphere of luminous water bloomed beneath Aya, as if she was hovering above an upside-down sunset in shades of green and brown.

She could finally see the bottom of the reservoir: a fine layer of silt, twigs, and construction rubbish with a few spots of ancient brickwork showing through.

But no Moggle.

"Hmm, this might be the wrong spot."

"Too bad." Ren lay back and stretched out on his hoverboard, staring at the arched ceiling. He raised his arms out in front of him, gesturing through the start-up sequence of some thumb-twitch game.

"Let me know when you find the right one."

"But Ren-chan—" "See you later, cam-loser."

She started to protest again, but Ren's eyescreens started blinking a full immersion pattern, his fingers flexing and twitching—he was deep in the game.

Aya let out a sigh, stretching out facedown on her board, her chin resting on the front end. She let herself drift slowly across the water, peering down through the luminous muck.

Ren had been right about one thing: This was definitely boring. Every time the hoverlamp obediently followed her, its nose rippled the surface, and Aya had to wait for the water to settle before she could see again. She spotted a few surprising bits of rubbish—a boomerang, the remains of a crumpled box kite, a broken warbody sword—but still no Moggle. She could see why Ren would rather play games than stare into the bottom of a garbage-filled lake.

At least all her test scores yesterday had been aces, and her littlie-watching duty after lunch would build up the last few merits she needed for some black camo paint for Moggle.

When this story finally kicked, she'd be famous enough to never worry about merit-grubbing again.

As Aya peered into the underground lake's mysterious depths, her thoughts returned to what she and Miki had seen last night. What was so secret that you had to hide it in a mountain? And why had those people looked so strange? Even the most serious surge-monkeys never bent their bodies that far out of shape.

The Sly Girls were headed out again tonight to look for clues. Ren had given Aya a spy-cam the size of a shirt button, but it was only good for grainy close-ups. To capture the Girls in all their eye-kicking glory, Moggle had to be sneaking along behind.

Down in the depths, a small silt-covered bump rose from the reservoir floor.

"Moggle?" she murmured, rubbing her eyes.

It was the perfect shape and size, like a soccer ball cut in half.

"Hey, Ren," she cried.

"Ren!"

His immersion blinker sputtered to a halt, the eye-screen glaze slipping from his face.

"Moggle's down there!"

He stretched his arms, swinging his legs over the side of his hoverboard. "Great. Time for stage two, which is much more kick."

"Good. I was kind of getting bored."

He smiled. "Believe me, you won't find this boring."

Stage two turned out to involve a tank of compressed helium the size of a fire extinguisher, with a limp weather balloon hanging from its nozzle.

Aya stared at the contraption. "I don't get it."

Ren tossed her the tank, and Aya grunted under its weight. Her board dipped for a moment before the lifters compensated, smacking flat against the water.

"Feel how heavy that is?" he said.

"Um, yes." Water trickled across the board's riding surface, getting her grippy shoes wet.

"That's to solve your floating problem," he explained.

"I have a floating problem?"

"Yes, Aya-chan: Like most people, you float," he said. "It's all that pesky air in your lungs. That tank's heavy enough to carry you straight to the bottom."

She blinked. "Ren, wait a second … I like my floating problem. I like the air in my lungs! I'm not going down there!"

He laughed. "How else are you going to get Moggle?"

"I don't know," she said. "I thought maybe you'd make some sort of… little submarine?"

"Like I don't have better things to spend my merits on?" He pointed at the helium tank. "There's a magnet on the bottom. Just balance the tank upright on top of Moggle, and it should stick."

"But how do I get back up? This thing weighs a ton!"

"That's the clever part: Just turn this." He drifted closer and gave a valve on the tank a turn. It hissed for a second before he twisted it back. "The balloon fills up, and that carries you and Moggle back to the surface! Pretty kick, huh?"

"Okay. But I can't breathe helium. Where's my underwater mask?" She looked at the open cargo compartment on his hoverboard.

"Just hold your breath."

"Hold my breath?"

Aya cried. "That's your awesome tech-head solution?"

Ren rolled his eyes. "The bottom's only five or six meters down—like the deep end of a high-diving pool."

"Oh, thanks for bringing up high-diving, Ren. My favorite panic-making activity." She frowned.

"And it's cold down there!"

"Good." He nodded. "Maybe next time you'll think about that before you lose your hovercam."

Aya stared at Ren, realizing that Hiro must have put him up to this. If the two of them only knew how kick this story was, they'd understand why sacrificing Moggle had been worth it. But she couldn't explain yet, not until she found out what was hidden in that mountain.

"Fine." She clutched the helium tank closer to herself, glaring down into the luminous water until she spotted Moggle again. "Anything else I need to know?"

He smiled. "Just be careful, Aya-chan."

"Whatever."

She sucked in a deep breath…and jumped.

The splash rumbled in her ears for a moment, but the weight of the tank carried her swiftly through the turbulence to the still waters deeper down. The hoverlamps glowed through her closed eyelids, and it was freezing cold.

Her feet bumped against the reservoir floor, grippy shoes skidding for a moment on loose dirt.

The heavy tank threatened to drag Aya to her knees, but she managed to stay upright.

She opened her eyes Rotten leaves and twigs swirled around her head, a mini whirlwind thrown up by her landing.

Depth had turned the light dull green, and spinning shadows danced across the reservoir floor.

A flash caught her eye—one of the shiny stickers on Moggle's cover, shimmering in the lamplight like the eye of some bottom-dwelling beast.

She walked in slow motion toward the hovercam, feet skidding on the slippery bricks. Every step stirred up whirligigs of silt and slime, dark clouds billowing around her. Moggle almost disappeared among them.

But there was no time to let the muck settle. Her heart was beginning to hammer against her rib cage, demanding more oxygen, and her fingers and toes were going numb in the freezing cold. The pressure of the water was dizzy-making, like two hands squeezed around her head.

Squinting through the murk, she maneuvered the helium tank over Moggle and let it drop. The clank carried straight to Aya's eardrums, a certain and final sound.

She fumbled for the nozzle of the air tank, lungs screaming, heart pounding, but her frozen fingers managed to give it a twist. A rumbling filled the water, and the weather balloon began to expand.

Aya let go and pushed away, shooting up from the reservoir floor. She kicked hard, propelling herself toward the blinding suns of the hoverlamps.

With one last glance down, she saw the balloon growing, straining against the tank's weight as it gained buoyancy. Slowly the whole contraption began to rise.

Aya broke the surface gasping, sucking in welcome lungfuls of air.

"You okay?" Ren was kneeling on his hoverboard.

"It's right behind me!" she sputtered, paddling water.

The weather balloon exploded from the water, sending hoverlamps scattering in all directions.

Momentum carried it up into the air, cascading water like the head of a breaching whale. Then it crashed back against the surface, splashing them once more before coming to a bobbing halt.

"You actually did it!" Ren said.

"What did you think?" she asked, twisting a crash bracelet with cold-numbed fingers. "That I was going to drown?"

He shrugged. "I was expecting it to take a couple of tries."

The weather balloon was rising again, carried by its helium into the air. Moggle still clung to the bottom of the tank, dripping like a wet dog.

Ren slid his board closer, reached out, and shut off the flow of helium.

Aya pulled herself onto her hoverboard, shivering with cold.

"I still can't believe that worked," Ren murmured.

Aya coughed water into a fist. "Rope would have been simpler."

"Simpler?"

Ren said. "That word's not in the tech-head language."

"Just check if Moggle's okay."

He chuckled, detaching the hovercam. As it fell into his hands, the balloon shot up to bounce against the ceiling. "Hey, did you know your lips are turning blue?"

"Great." Aya wrapped her arms around herself, trying to squeeze the water from her dorm uniform. She sat there shivering and watching Ren.

He pulled the lock-down clamp from Moggle, his eye-screens flickering to life. "My waterproofing held! I'm a genius!"

Aya let out a sigh of relief, which turned into a full-body shudder; her teeth were chattering now.

She held herself tighter, promising never to sacrifice Moggle to a watery grave again.

But she had a hovercam. This story was going to kick.

Radical Honesty

Flying home to Akira Hall, Aya wondered if she was catching a bug.

The sun was shining, but shivers kept rolling through her body. Last night had been so exhausting, and it didn't help that her uniform was wet and covered with reservoir gunk.

"Remind me to drink some meds when we get home."

Moggle flashed its night-lights, and Aya smiled. Even slimy and shivery cold, the world felt better with a hovercam flying beside her. All she needed now was a hot shower and things would be back to normal. Well, as normal as they could be after her midnight ride through the huge and brain-shifting wild.

Everything looked so sedate here in the city.

In the perfect weather, the parklands were crowded— parents out with littlies, an ugly baseball team playing against crumblies. The soccer fields beside Akira Hall were roped off for a bunch of littlies fighting a mech battle. They clanked around in robot warbodies, clobbering each other with plastic swords, shooting foam missiles and safety fireworks. It was all very silly—even the best mech players never got famous—but it still looked like fun.

As she and Moggle skirted the soccer fields, a spinning war wheel escaped from the roped-off battle zone, bouncing past them into the trees. Moggle went after the trail of safety sparks, and Aya followed, laughing, descending to where it had rolled to a stop in the grass.

Stepping from her board, she hefted the war wheel in her hands. It was sizzling harmlessly, the fireworks not yet expended.

Aya grinned, turning back toward the battle and taking aim.

"Watch this!"

Her throw was clumsy, but as it flew through the air the war wheel sputtered back to life, gaining speed from its spinning jets of safety fire.

It careened through the battle, hopping like a flat stone across water, and finally hit one of the mech warriors smack in the middle of his back. It was a clean kill, and his war-body went into wild death throes, flailing its arms and gushing sparks before crumpling to the ground. The littlie inside crawled out and looked around in annoyance, trying to figure out who'd made the kill.

Aya giggled at the lucky throw, stepping back onto her board. It felt as though fate was finally taking her side, and fame couldn't be far away.

"Good shot," a voice said. "But not entirely rule-abiding."

She turned and finally saw a boy sitting cross-legged on a hoverboard, his shape concealed by the dappled shadows of the trees. He smiled a radiant smile.

Frizz Mizuno, appearing out of nowhere again.

"What are you…doing here?" she said softly.

"I came to see you," he said, bowing. "And when you weren't home, I thought I'd watch the battle. I haven't seen any mech combat since I turned sixteen. Which is very Prettytime of me—I used to love mechs."

Aya returned his bow, trying to imagine Frizz doing anything as face-missing as wearing a warbody Sometimes it was hard to remember he was only a year older than she was.

"Plus, I was hoping you'd come home," he said. "It's rather mysterious, turning off your locator. It makes you hard to find."

"Oh, I didn't turn off my locator. I was just sort of… underground."

He frowned. "You don't feel stalked, do you? I'd go away if you did."

"Um, no. I don't feel stalked. Just sort of…" "Damp?" Frizz asked. "And covered with muck?"

Her arms wrapped around her shoulders, as if that would hide her wet, bedraggled uniform.

"Um, yes. Muck-covered."

"As looks go, it's even more mysterious than your Reputation Bomber robe."

She stood there, trying to think of something to say, but it seemed as though the cold of the reservoir had leaked into her brain and frozen it. It didn't help that Frizz's eye-kicking gaze was raining down on her, tangling her tongue in her mouth. The bigness of her nose suddenly loomed in the bottom of her vision.

"I was doing some…underwater rescue."

"Underwater and underground?" He nodded again. "That would explain wetness. And yet I'm still mystified."

Another shiver went through her; her head felt hot now. "Me too. I didn't tell you my last name.

How did you find me?"

Frizz smiled. "Now that's an interesting story. But I think you should change."

"Change?" Her hand went to her nose.

"Into dry clothes—you keep shivering. Maybe some meds?"

Moggle's night-lights flashed.

He waited outside, watching the battle while Aya went upstairs.

She stood under a hot shower for a solid minute, dizzy from watching twigs and slime swirl down the drain, wondering how he'd found her. This was all so shaming. Frizz had figured out her last name, which meant he knew she was an ugly and a party-crashing extra.

And yet he'd come to see her anyway What was wrong with him? Had the honesty surge broken his brain? His face rank had been steadily climbing—it was under three thousand now—and Aya was practically invisible!

Clean and dry, she faced the hole in the wall. Nothing but dorm uniforms, and no merits to waste on disposable clothing. Of course, Frizz had already seen her covered with slime—a clean uniform wouldn't be that much worse.

She dressed quickly and turned toward the door.

Moggle barred her way, flashing its lights once.

"Oh, right," she said, and told the room, "Meds, please. I was underwater and I'm all shivery and hot."

The wall's hand-plate flashed, wanting to feel her temperature and taste her sweat. Aya lay her palm on it, and soon the hole was coughing up something murky into her favorite teacup. Drinking down its orangey sourness, she stared at her standard-requisition furniture and face-missing clothes, the smallness of the room, the obscurity of everything about her.

At least medicine didn't cost any merits. And there must have been nanos in the drink—by the time the elevator reached the ground floor, her dizziness had mostly gone.

"Finding you was easy," Frizz said. "I knew your first name, after all."

She frowned. "But the city must have a thousand girls named Aya."

"More like twelve hundred." Frizz chuckled as another warbody exploded into death throes. The battle was gathering intensity, littering the soccer field with casualties. Moggle was flitting along the edges, practicing tracking shots on rubber missiles and looking completely recovered from being submerged in ice-cold water.

Aya couldn't say as much. Sitting next to Frizz in the dappled shade, she still felt tremors playing on the surface of her skin, as if the medicine had transformed her fever into reputation shivers. At least his tongue-tying manga gaze was focused on the battle instead of her.

"But I knew you'd been reputation bombing," he continued. "So I checked the face rankings for that night. Someone named Yoshio Nara became Yoshio-sensei out of nowhere."

Aya flinched. Even hearing Yoshio's name again sent a sharp little ping through her brain. "But how did you get from him to me?"

"I went through his meme-lines, looking for the name Aya."

"You can do that? I thought conversations were private! Not that it was a real conversation, just me saying the same name for an hour. But still!"

"No, you're right. The city interface won't reveal what you say." He shrugged. "But our city isn't designed for privacy; it's designed for publicity, to spawn connections and debates and buzz. So you're allowed to trace face-hits back to the source, especially if it's a lot of hits. And you were the only Aya to mention Yoshio Nara three thousand times that night."

"Ouch. Quit saying that name," Aya said, then sighed. "I guess I didn't know that. My brother studies his meme-lines for hours, but my stories never get enough feedback to bother with."

"He's famous, isn't he?"

Aya nodded. "Very. That's probably why he's such a snob. He thinks my stories are stupid."

"They're not. That underground graffiti you kicked was beautiful."

"Oh, um, thanks." Aya felt a blush spill across her cheeks, astonished that Frizz had actually looked at her feed. "But that's just kid stuff. I'm working on something much bigger. Totally famous-making! It's about this secret clique, and they—" Frizz held up his hand. "If it's a secret, you'd better not tell me. I'm not very good at keeping secrets."

"Right, because of your…" She resisted the urge to point at his head. It was strange—bubbleheads were the only brain surgers Aya had ever known, and Frizz didn't seem like a bubblehead at all. "But what does honesty have to do with keeping secrets?"

"Radical Honesty gets rid of all deception," Frizz recited, like he'd explained this a million times before. "I can't lie, truth-slant, or pretend not to know something. You can't even invite me to surprise parties, or I'll give it all away."

A laugh bubbled up in Aya. "But doesn't that make everything less…surprising?"

"You'd be surprised how often it makes things more surprising."

"Huh." She stared at the battle, wondering how many things she kept secret every day. "You can't hide yourself at all. That must be scary-making."

He turned to her. "Scary-making for me? Or everyone else?"

His gaze sent Aya's shivers scattering across her skin, and she felt a flush returning to her cheeks and a tingle in her spine. His honesty was scary-making! Her head spun with all the questions she was dying to ask, but wasn't sure she could stand the answers to. About why he was here, and what he thought of their difference in ambition.

"You like me, don't you?" she said.

He laughed. "Was I being too subtle?"

"No, I guess not. But it doesn't make sense…because you're so famous and I'm an extra! Plus I'm an ugly and you keep seeing me wearing stupid robes or covered in slime and when we met I lied about my nose!"

Aya sputtered to a halt, wondering where all those words had come from. They'd just gushed out of her, like bubbly from a shaken bottle, fizzing and undrinkable.

"Wow," she said. "Is Radical Honesty contagious or something?"

"Sometimes." Frizz was grinning. "It's an unexpected benefit."

Aya felt herself blushing and tore her eyes from him, staring out at the soccer fields. Only a handful of warbodies remained standing, battering each other with plastic swords and battle-axes. "But why do you like me?"

He reached out and took her hand, and the reputation shivers became a tightness in Aya's chest, as if she were underwater again, holding her breath.

"When I first saw you outside that party, you were on a mission—very intense. And then your hood fell back, and I thought, 'Wow, she's pretty brave to wear that awesome nose.'" Aya groaned. "But I'm not brave—I was just born with it. So it was a kind of truth-slanting for me to say it was randomly generated."

"True. But by the time I realized that, I knew other things about you."

"Like I'm an extra and live in an ugly dorm?" she said. "And mislead people about my huge nose?"

"That you sneak into tech-head parties and go on underwater rescue missions. And that you kick great stories, even though they don't bump your face rank."

She sighed. "Yeah, my stories are really good at doing that."

"Of course they are." He shrugged. "They're too interesting."

"That doesn't even make sense." She looked at him. "If they're so interesting, why isn't anyone interested?"

His eyescreen flickered. "Have you seen Nana Love's feed lately? She's been picking her outfit for the Thousand Faces Party. Today it's: 'This hat? Or this hat?' Seventy thousand votes so far, and there's a hundred other feeds running commentary."

Aya rolled her eyes. Nana was a natural-born pretty, one of the vanishingly rare people who wouldn't have needed surgery even back in the Pretty time. Which was why she was the second-most-famous person in the whole city. "That doesn't count. Nana-chan can be interesting without trying."

He smiled. "And you can't?"

She stared into his huge eyes, and for once they didn't tangle up her brain, as if some barrier between them had disappeared.

Suddenly Aya knew what she really wanted to ask him.

"What's it like, being famous?"

Frizz shrugged. "Pretty much the same, except a lot more people joining my clique—and then leaving after a week."

"But before Radical Honesty got so big, didn't you ever feel like something was missing? Like looking at the city and feeling invisible? Or watching the feeds and almost crying, because you know all their names and they don't know yours? Feeling like you might disappear, because no one's heard of you?"

"Um, not really. Do you feel that way?"

"Of course! It's like that koan they tell in littlie school. If a tree falls and nobody's watching, then it doesn't make a sound, like one hand clapping. You have to be seen before you really exist!"

"Um, I think that's two koans, actually. And I'm not sure that's the point of either."

"But come on, Frizz! You haven't been famous that long, you must remember how horrible it was to …" Aya stammered to a halt, trying to read the look on his face. His radiant smile was gone.

"This is an odd conversation," he said.

Aya blinked. Ten minutes of Radical Honesty and already she'd been too honest.

"I'm being a total extra, aren't I?" She sighed. "Just sign me up for Radical Stupidity."

He laughed. "You're not stupid, Aya. And you're not invisible to me."

She tried to smile. "Just mysterious?"

"Well, not so much anymore. Verging on obvious."

"Obvious?"

"You know, about fame, and the way it makes you feel."

Aya swallowed.

Obvious.

That's what she was, in his radically honest opinion. Way too late, she remembered another thing they taught in littlie school: Complaining about your face rank to other extras was okay, but you didn't talk this way in front of anyone famous.

She turned away, staring out at the soccer fields, knowing that if she looked into Frizz's eyes again she'd say something else stupid. Or he'd blurt out more about what he was thinking, which would probably be worse. Maybe the feeds were right about differences in ambition, that big faces and extras should never get too close. There was too much opportunity for embarrassment.

The mech battle was over, and lifter drones were carting off the last few warbodies. Littlies were lining up in front of Akira Hall for their next activity.

"Oh, crap," she said. "What time is it?"

"Almost noon."

"I have to go!" She jumped up. "Littlie-watching duty. I'd skip it, but…" í need the merits, she thought.

Frizz still sat cross-legged on the hoverboard, his face clouded. "It's okay. You shouldn't break promises."

Aya bowed good-bye, wondering if this time he was glad to see her running away. She tried to think of something to say, but it all sounded too embarrassing in her head.

So she called for Moggle and dashed toward the dorm, hoping she wasn't late.

Initiation

Something was pinging Aya emerged from a deep and sticky sleep, fighting dizzy-making waves of exhaustion. A noise was poking at her ears again and again, demanding her attention.

Even with her eyes closed, she could see a wake-up signal flashing in her eyescreen. It was blinking and making an earsplitting sound, warning her that it was almost midnight.

Aya squeezed a fist to silence the alarm, groaning. She'd meant to nap this afternoon, but thanks to her brain-damaging conversation with Frizz, the littlie-watching shift, and an hour spent spraying Moggle with black camo paint, she hadn't crawled into bed till ten.

Less than two hours' sleep.

But she forced herself to sit up, remembering how famous tonight could make her. For a reminder, she glanced at her pathetic face rank of 451,611 in the corner of her vision.

Moggle rose from the floor, and the hovercam's point of view delicately overlaid her vision, a ghostly second sight perfectly balanced with her own.

Aya smiled. She wouldn't miss any eye-kicking shots tonight.

"Ready to go?" she whispered.

Moggle flashed its lights, and Aya winced. Thirty-six hours underwater hadn't cured the hovercam's bad habits.

She felt her way to the window, blinking away spots, and climbed onto the sill. Her eyes adjusted slowly, until the city lights made her throat tighten—the usual obscurity-panic, much worse now that she'd embarrassed herself in front of Frizz. All she'd meant to say was he didn't have to worry, because she was going to be famous too. But she'd wound up sounding as face-missing as a new ugly with her first feed.

Obvious, he'd said.

It was pointless getting depressed about it, though. Fame wasn't like beauty, where you had to wait till you were sixteen, or get lucky like Nana Love and be born with it. Fame you could make yourself.

Once this story kicked, face rank wouldn't be an issue between her and Frizz anymore. She was certain of it.

Moggle drifted out the window, brushing against her shoulder, and Aya smiled as she wrapped her arms around the hovercam. She was glad to be headed somewhere away from the city lights.

Someplace mysterious enough that Frizz would go back to being amazed at her, once he found out all the things she'd done.

She pushed out herself out into the cold night air.

"Before we get started," Jai said, "we have some business. First item is my name; someone's been talking about me where the city interface can hear."

A few of the Sly Girls looked down sheepishly.

Jai clicked at them with her tongue. "That's right. I woke up this morning and my face rank was almost out of the bottom thousand. That means the city's starting to track my nickname again. Time to change it."

Aya raised an eyebrow. So that was how they kept their face ranks down, by changing nicknames—the same way Ren and Hiro concealed their obsessive hatred of the Nameless One.

"From now on, my name is Kai. Everybody got that? Good. And now for item number two."

Kai turned toward Aya, who felt a tingle roll down her spine.

"Our new friend is with us again," Kai said. "Anybody got a problem with that?"

A nervous-making silence fell, and Aya heard the distant rumble of a train on its way. On either side of her, the rails glowed a soft warning, looking hot to the touch, like the elements inside the hole in the wall after it fabricated something big. But none of the Sly Girls seemed to notice, as if the middle of the mag-lev tracks was where they always held their business meetings.

Aya couldn't even use Moggle to keep watch for the train. The hovercam was somewhere out among the industrial buildings, stalking her, but she had its point of view turned off to keep telltale flickers from her eye.

"Isn't she a kicker?" someone muttered.

Kai looked at Aya, waiting for an answer.

She cleared her throat. "I used to be. But I was never a big face. I didn't feel like kicking what Nana Love was wearing." A few of them laughed.

"But you still go around with a hovercam?" someone else said. Her name was Pana, Aya remembered. With their generic faces, she had trouble telling the Sly Girls apart— but Pana was taller than the rest of them, nearly Eden's height.

"I let you drop it in a lake—you all saw that. Had some pretty awesome lifters on it, too."

"No cams tonight?" Kai said.

Aya shook her head. She was wearing the dorm uniform from the underwater rescue, which looked as scruffy as the Girls' reject clothing. She hoped its shabbiness made the spy-cam in its top button less obvious.

Moggle was more likely to give her away. She wasn't certain the hovercam's tiny brain understood the whole staying-hidden concept. Moggle could only track Aya's skintenna signal up to a kilometer, and it had never operated independently for hours at a time before, especially while chasing speeding mag-levs.

The distant rumble was audible now, the train a few minutes away.

"Aya-chan was pretty brave when we saw the freaks," Miki said. "And you all saw her surf. I trust her."

When Miki smiled, Aya felt her first unpleasant ping of deceitfulness. When she kicked this story, Frizz would know she'd lied to them all. She wondered if he'd understand.

"How about we hear from you, Aya-chan?" Kai asked. "Tell us why you want to be a Sly Girl."

Aya cleared her throat, nervous under Kai's plain-Jane stare, as brain-freezing as the train's rumble growing under her feet. What did they want her to say, anyway?

Suddenly, the words she'd said to Frizz that morning came back to her.

"Like you said, I was a kicker. Since I was a littlie, I wanted to be famous. I didn't want to watch other people on the feeds—I wanted them watching me. Because if they didn't, I was invisible."

A murmur went through the group, and Aya saw cold expressions everywhere. She kept talking, trying to ignore the tremors underfoot and the trickle of sweat rolling down her back.

"Don't get me wrong. I wasn't some ego-kicker, sitting in my room with a cam pointed at myself, talking about what my cat ate for breakfast." Someone laughed at that, and Aya managed a smile. "I was trying to find stories that mattered. People who were using the mind-rain to do something really kick … I mean, really interesting. That's how I found you."

Aya was looking back at them now, meeting their stares one by one.

"And here's what I realized: You Sly Girls don't cry when you watch the big-face parties on the feeds, just because you weren't invited. You don't stay friends with people you hate, just to bump your face rank. And even though nobody knows what you're doing out here, you don't feel invisible at all. Do you?"

No one answered, but they were listening.

"Fame is radically stupid, that's all. So I want to try something else."

There was a silent, nervous-making moment… and then the tension broke. A few girls clapped, only half-sarcastically and Miki was grinning, nodding slowly. Aya had somehow found the right words.

The strange thing was, it hadn't even felt like lying.

They didn't bother with a vote, and no one congratulated her. Kai just slapped Aya on the back and jumped onto her hoverboard, shouting, "Surf's up! Let's go find out what those freaks are hiding!"

Then the thirteen of them were spinning into the air, rushing to reach their hiding places before the train thundered into view.

Just like that, Aya Fuse was a Sly Girl.

She wondered if Moggle had gotten the shot.

Turbulence

Catching the mag-lev was easier the second time.

She slipped through its shock wave like a needle, as if her body had learned to roll with the bumps and shudders of the air. Once inside the calm slipstream, she was on the roof and standing before the mag-lev line began to straighten.

The city fell behind, and as the darkness of the wild wrapped itself around the train, Aya began to realize how many sights she'd missed on her first panicked ride. Huge old trees shot past, as gnarled as some immortal crumbly Silhouetted flocks of birds rose up against the sky, scattered by the train's thundering passage. Once Aya recognized a snow monkey's scream in the roar of the wind—hardly dangerous and person-eating, but the thought of untamed animals out here sent a nervous shudder through her. Or maybe that was just the cold. Even wrapped inside two dorm jackets, a three-hundred-klick wind was shiver-making.

The ride was all contrasts: the dead-straight mag-lev line bisecting the knotted shapes of the forest; her fierce speed under the stillness of the sky; the mountains rising at a stately pace, punctuated by the nervous-making glimmer of decapitation warnings. But Aya felt the strange contentment again, as if her own troubles were an afterthought in the vastness of the wild.

The only worrying thing was Moggle. Even tracking her skintenna signal, the hovercam had to be falling farther behind with every minute. Ren's lifters couldn't fly more than a hundred klicks an hour—a third of the train's speed. Moggle would catch up once they jumped off, but Aya wasn't sure how long its little brain could function without her instructions. If it got confused enough, the hovercam might forget all about staying out of sight, and that would end Aya Fuse's career as a Sly Girl.

Of course, there was nothing she could do about that now—she was stuck with deception. She wondered if that was why Frizz had come up with Radical Honesty. If you never lied, you'd never feel this trickle of dread in your stomach, the worry of being unmasked.

The mountains grew closer, until Aya could see that their black peaks were marbled with snow, like slivers of pearl glistening in the moonlight. A red flicker came from the front of the train, then a string of decapitation warnings. Aya pulled out her own flashlight and twisted it red, waving to the Girls behind her.

She knelt to strap a crash bracelet around her ankle, then lay flat, waiting for the sudden darkness of the tunnel to swallow her.

This time there were no unscheduled stops.

The train shot straight through the mountain, in and out in a roaring fury that made Aya's ears pop like a quick hovercar descent. The hidden doorway must have flashed past in a fraction of a second, utterly invisible.

She remembered from her first ride that the next bend came up quickly. Ahead of her, Miki was already crawling toward the side of the train, readying to dismount. Aya headed toward where her hoverboard was stuck.

Getting off the train was trickier than getting on. In the city the grid was everywhere, but out here you had to stay close to the tracks. Too far out and magnetic lifters lost their grip on the metal, making boards and crash bracelets useless.

At two hundred klicks an hour, that would be deadly.

The train was slowing, a hum filling the air as it angled into the turn. Aya pulled her right wrist free, reaching out to slap it against her hoverboard.

The night before, she'd dismounted too cautiously, winding up much farther down the track than the rest of the Girls. This time she'd decided to be the first one to a dead stop.

Aya tugged at her board, and it released itself from the train, slowly turning from sideways to level. It fought the wind, steadying as the mag-lev slowed into the bend, and she slid Tier weight across onto the riding surface.

As the humming reached its crescendo, Aya angled gently away from the train, staying within arm's reach, inside the bubble of relative calm that flowed around it. Two meters out was the deadly shock wave zone.

The rushing wind thrashed at her hair, whipping the jackets into a frenzy, but Aya didn't lie flat—she let her body slow her down. The Sly Girl who'd been surfing just behind her shot past on her board, then another went by, then a third.

She was braking faster than all of them!

To her left the train's flank was thundering past now, its magnetic field sending shudders through the hoverboard. Aya fought to keep steady keeping close to the flashing metal wall of the train.

But maybe she was braking too quickly The rear of the train shot past, its wake yanking Aya into the suddenly empty space over the tracks now. Her board spun, earth and sky whirling around her.

She tried to pull herself flat, but the board bucked and twisted in her grip, like a kite in a gale.

"Let go!" someone shouted.

Aya obeyed—the board tumbled away from her. She fell toward the blur of metal tracks The magnets in her crash bracelets kicked in, yanking her up by both wrists. She flipped once head over heels, like a gymnast swinging from two rings, her feet barely missing the ground. She hover-bounced down the mag-lev tracks that way until her momentum was expended.

The bracelets set her down gently, facing the receding lights of the train. She rubbed her wrists, dizzy from spinning.

"You okay?"

Aya looked up to find Eden Maru floating beside her, an amused expression on her face.

"I think so," Aya said.

"You shouldn't brake that fast."

"I noticed." Aya sighed. The night before, she'd watched Eden dismount from the tram. In her full hoverball rig she made it look easy, like rolling off a building in a bungee jacket. "Thanks for telling me to let go, I guess."

"You're welcome, I guess." Eden glanced down the tracks toward the receding train. "Your board will be back soon, along with the others. Slowing down takes longer if you don't wipe out."

Aya glared back at Eden's smile. She was so beautiful, and the only one of the Sly Girls with a big face rank. What did someone so famous get out of skulking around with a secret clique?

Maybe now was the time to find out. Aya straightened her uniform, angling the spy-cam toward Eden. "Can I ask you a question?"

"If it's not too nosey."

"You're not like the rest of them … I mean, the rest of us.

You're a big face in the city."

Eden did a slow midair spin. "That's not a question."

"I guess not." Aya remembered the rumors about Eden's ex-boyfriend. "But don't you and the Sly Girls have sort of a … difference in ambition? You're a hoverball star, and they work so hard to be extras."

Eden snorted. "You would ask something lame like that. I bet you don't even know where that word comes from."

"Extras?" Aya shrugged. "It just means extra people, like superfluous."

"That's what they teach at littlie school. But it had a different meaning back in Rusty times."

"Well, sure," Aya said. "They had billions of extras back then."

Eden shook her head. "It had nothing to do with overpopulation, Aya-chan. You've seen old wallscreen movies, right?"

"Of course. That was how Rusties got famous."

"Yeah, but here's a weird thing: Rusty software wasn't smart enough to make backgrounds, so they had to build everything in the movie. They had whole fake cities for the actors to walk around in."

"Fake cities

?"Aya said. "Wow, talk about waste."

"And to fill these fake cities, they hired hundreds of real people to walk around. But they weren't in the story at all.

Just in the background. And they were called extras."

Aya raised an eyebrow, not sure if she believed any of this. It all sounded so crazy and out of proportion…which was, of course, very Rusty.

"Isn't that how you feel sometimes, Aya-chan?" Eden said. "Like there's a big story going on, and you're stuck in the background?"

"Everyone feels that way sometimes, I guess."

"And you'd do anything to make yourself feel bigger, wouldn't you? Even betray your friends?"

Aya set her jaw. "I'm a Sly Girl now, Eden. Didn't you hear?"

"Yeah, I head your little speech." Eden floated higher, looming over her like a giant. "I just hope you were telling the truth, because real life's not like some Rusty movie, Aya-chan. There's not just one big story that makes the rest of us disappear."

Aya narrowed her eyes. "But you're not in the background. You're famous!"

"You can disappear in front of a crowd, too, you know. Once they start telling you what to do, who to be friends with." Eden spun head over heels, a graceful version of Aya in her crash bracelets.

"Out here with the Sly Girls, I get to keep something for myself."

Aya heard a burst of laughter—the other Sly Girls were gliding toward them down the tracks.

She only had time for one more question.

"So if you don't care about face rank, why did you break up with your boyfriend?"

"Who says I broke up with him?"

"A hundred or so feeds, last time I looked."

"Don't always believe the feeds, Aya. He's the one who couldn't stand people talking about our

'difference in ambition.' So the little moron ran away."

Eden floated a few centimeters lower, reaching out one finger till it was almost touching Aya's nose.

"And that, my Nosey-chan, is what being an extra really means."

The Mountain

As they approached the tunnel mouth, a few of the Sly Girls pulled out flashlights. Beams of red played across the opening, barely piercing the darkness within.

At least Aya wasn't the only one without infrared.

"What happens if a train comes while we're in there?" Pana asked.

Kai shrugged. "Just lie flat on your board, up by the ceiling."

Eden shook her head. "That won't work. The train's wake would pull you down." She hooked her thumb at Aya. "Sort of like what happened to Nosey-chan here."

A few of them laughed. On the way back to the mountain, Eden had demonstrated Aya's hover-bounce down the tracks. Several times.

"Well, it doesn't matter anyway," Kai said. "There aren't any more trains scheduled tonight."

"Don't they run unscheduled trains sometimes?" Pana said.

Kai rolled her eyes. "Maybe once a month. Hardly nervous-making, compared to what we do most nights. Come on!"

She and Eden shot forward into the tunnel mouth. A few of the other Sly Girls stood motionless for a moment, staring after them unhappily.

Aya twisted her flashlight on and urged her board forward. Eden Maru was suspicious of her already; she wasn't about to give the rest of them any reason for doubt.

A one-in-thirty chance wasn't that bad.

In the red light of her beam, dust swirled across the tracks, still unsettled from the train's passage.

A low moan filled the blackness, and her skin prickled. A steady breeze moved through the tunnel, as if the stone walls themselves were breathing.

Aya wondered how they were supposed to find the hidden door. Last night it had looked exactly like the tunnel wall. Maybe surged eyes or Moggle's fancy lenses could tell smart matter and stone apart, but Aya doubted that her normal human vision would be much help.

Miki was already drifting down the tunnel, a flashlight in one hand. She slid her fingers across the wall's surface, peering closely at the stone.

Aya brought her hoverboard alongside. "No infrared, huh?"

"No," Miki sighed. "How about you?"

Aya shook her head. "My crumblies won't let me. But you're sixteen, aren't you?"

"Yeah, but I like my eyeballs."

"They can make them look exactly the same, you know."

"But I like my eyeballs, not an imitation of them. I know that's sort of pre-Rusty."

Aya shrugged. "My brother kicked this natural-body clique who never surge. Some of them have to wear these things like sunglasses just to see, even when they're not out in the sun!"

Miki narrowed her eyes. "Your brother's famous, isn't he?"

"I guess," Aya said, suddenly wishing she hadn't brought up kicking.

"That's why you became a kicker, isn't it? Because of him?"

"That's what Hiro thinks, like I worship him or something. But he's actually an advertisement for not being famous. It turned him into a big snob."

Miki laughed. "You don't have to run your brother down, Aya-chan, just because he's a big face.

We don't hate kickers—we just don't want anyone kicking us."

"Yeah, I get it." Aya shifted on her board, aligning the button camera again. "But a lot of people would love to see us surf, wouldn't they?"

"Yeah, but then everyone would start mag-lev surfing, and the wardens would get involved."

Miki shook her head. "We have to keep this trick ours. You understand that, right?"

"Of course!" Aya insisted, but Miki was still frowning. Maybe it was time to switch gears. "By the way, thanks for sticking up for me."

"No problem. Like I said, I trust you."

Aya turned to study the wall closely, the nervous trickle starting in her stomach again. "Yeah. But I still owe you one."

A tapping sound came from ahead, and they both looked up.

It was Kai, striking the wall with her flashlight as she slid through the air. Her blows echoed down the tunnel, the stone sounding as solid as a mountain.

"So that's our plan for finding the secret door?" Aya said softly. "Banging on the wall?"

"Do you think they could program smart matter to sound like stone?"

"Probably," Aya answered. Ren always said you could program smart matter to do practically anything. It was one of the big inventions since the mind-rain, like AI and internal eyescreens, innovations that the Prettytime had postponed for centuries. "But why would they bother? Whoever made that door wouldn't expect anyone to walk around down here looking for it."

Miki tapped her own flashlight against the stone—it sounded like solid rock. "So if it hadn't been for us mag-lev surfing, no one would ever have found that door." She smiled. "Maybe it's like the Youngblood cults say: Being crim can change the world."

Aya turned toward her, making sure the button cam had a shot. "And how does finding this door change the world?"

"Well … I guess that depends on what's inside." Miki tapped the stone. "I mean, what if there's something really scary hidden down here?"

"Like a secret toxic waste dump?" Aya smiled. "Think how many merits the Good Citizen Committee would give us for uncovering it."

"Don't say that too loud, Aya-chan. Kai hates merits even more than fame." Miki tapped the wall again. "But thanks for mentioning toxic waste. That should distract me from the unscheduled train I've been imagining."

"Hey, Eden!" someone called. "Come here!"

Ahead, a small cluster of Girls had gathered around a section of the wall, all tapping with their flashlights. Aya and Miki glanced at each other, then urged their boards farther into the tunnel.

As they grew closer, Aya listened hard. Was there was something hollow about the echoing blows?

"Let me past, Nosey," Eden Maru's voice came from behind her.

As Aya slid aside, she saw the device in Eden's hands and her heart began to race. It was a matter hacker.

This wasn't just tricks; this was really illegal. Matter hackers could reprogram smart matter any way you wanted— there were whole buildings you could hack to the ground if you were crazy enough.

And all she had was this stupid button camera. Shots of an illicit matter hacker would be a total eye-kick.

Aya peered ahead into the darkness, hoping that Moggle was lurking somewhere close. She was dying to check for a signal, but her eyescreen's flicker would be a dead giveaway in the blackness of the tunnel.

The cluster of Sly Girls parted for Eden, all eyes on the small device in her hands. She pressed it against the wall, fingers running over the controls.

After a moment, she nodded. "This is it. Stand back— there could be anything behind there."

"Or any one," Miki murmured.

Aya thought of the inhuman figures again, their strange faces and long, thin fingers. "But those body-crazy freaks were just storing something down here," she said. "Nobody lives in this place."

Miki shrugged. "I guess we're about to find out."

A humming filled the tunnel as the clever molecules of smart matter began to rearrange themselves—the wall rippled, its texture changing from rough stone to the pearly sheen of plastic. The door's shape came into focus, a rectangle the exact size of a mag-lev cargo door.

Then the wall began to peel aside, one layer after another, like water sliding across a flat surface.

Just as it had the night before, the air tasted tremulous, like a thunderstorm was coming.

The tremors traveled along Aya's skin, as if the matter hacker was changing her as well The last layer slipped away, and the door stood open wide before them. A long hallway stretched out ahead, lit with an orange glow.

"Now this is very sly," Kai said, and stepped inside.

The Hidden

The Sly Girls dashed ahead into the mountain hideaway, everyone wanting to be the first to discover what wonders were hidden here. Calls and laughter filled the air, echoing from the bare stone walls.

Aya couldn't see a single right angle, just arches and rounded corners. Every few meters, oval doorways led away to more winding halls, an undulating maze cut into stone.

"Well, whoever lives here is definitely moving out," Miki said.

Aya nodded. The main hallway was crowded with equipment and storage containers, a disorganized jumble covered with a fine layer of dust.

"Maybe we should look for those big metal cylinders," she said. "Those were the only things they were moving in last night."

"As long as whatever we find isn't alive." Miki gestured toward a bunch of work chairs crammed together in the hallway. They were the wrong shape—too high and narrow, suited for some inhuman form.

Aya shone her flashlight down at her feet. A meter-wide path of metal studs glistened from the stone floor, leading straight down the middle of the main hallway. "That's to give hover-lifters something to push against. Anything heavy would have to go this way. Come on."

The two of them followed the metal path with careful, silent footsteps. The arched doorways revealed empty rooms, dust patterns on the floor showing where furniture had been removed.

As they went deeper into the mountain, the echoes of the other girls' voices grew faint around them. Aya wondered how so many tons of rock had been carried away to make this place. Whoever had built it must have tricked the automatic mag-lev trains into taking a lot of cargo for them. Or maybe one of the city governments was involved—this all seemed too big to do on the sly.

Every city had expanded since the mind-rain, pulling the Rusty ruins apart for scrap, scrambling to get more metal.

"Who has the resources to build something like this?" Aya murmured.

"Maybe this was one of those Rusty places where they dug up metal. What were they called…mines?"

Aya realized that they were whispering. Noises reverberated sharply against the bare stone walls, making her conscious of every sound she made.

The long, sleep-missing day was finally catching up with her, a brain-fogging exhaustion erasing the excitement that had propelled her through the mag-lev ride. The dim orange lighting was playing tricks on her eyes. Long shadows leaped from the beams of their flashlights, and Aya doubted her button cam was getting any decent shots.

Suddenly Miki spun around. "Did you see that?"

"See what?"

"I don't know." Miki pointed her flashlight down the hall behind them. "The shadows were moving funny. Like something's following us."

"Something?" Aya said, turning to stare into the darkness. She felt totally awake now.

"Maybe I'm just imagining it."

Aya sighed. "Great. Now I'm imagining it too."

"Come on," Miki said. "I feel like we're getting close to something."

"Is that the same something that's following us? Or a different something?"

Miki shrugged, and moved ahead.

In the next room, the path of metal studs led to a large opening in the wall and a set of stairs leading down. There were no orange worklights below, only blackness.

Aya came to a halt. "Maybe we should call the others."

"You want Kai to think you're scared of the dark?" Miki snorted, and headed down the stairs.

Aya sighed, then followed.

As they descended, the echoes of their footsteps began to lengthen, a larger space opening up around them. Aya's flashlight played across high arches, like the stone roof of the giant reservoir below the city. For a moment she wondered if the entire mountain had been hollowed out to capture runoff during the rainy season—but why would people building a storm drain look so weird?

Then her flashlight found the cylinders. The room was full of them, in neat ranks like hulking metal soldiers on parade, stretching into the darkness.

"Okay, we found them," Miki whispered. "But what are they?"

Aya shook her head. She walked up to the closest cylinder and pressed her palm against it: cold metal, its surface seamless. When she stood on tiptoe to look at its top, she found no sign of any seal.

"Looks like solid steel to me."

Miki walked past her, a host of shadows wheeling in unison to avoid the beam of her flashlight.

Aya followed her deeper into the army of cylinders, looking for any clue as to what they might be. But the metal forms were unmarked and featureless, like giant pawns in an endless chess set, all exactly the same.

But wasn't there a metal shortage going on? This was enough steel to double the size of the city.

Miki came to a sudden halt. "There it is again."

"What?"

Miki turned and pointed her flashlight past Aya. "I saw a reflection in the metal. Someone's back there!"

Aya spun around, sweeping her flashlight across the ranks of cylinders. Shadows leaped and darted from its beam, but she saw nothing except the reflection of her own half-lit face, warped across the cylinders' smooth sides.

"Are you trying to scare me?" Aya hissed.

"No, I mean it," Miki whispered, her eyes wide in the red glow of their flashlights. "I'm going to get some help."

"Are you sure? Maybe we should…," Aya started, but Miki was already dashing toward the stairs, calling for the others.

Aya squinted into the darkness. Something flickered in the corner of her eye, but when she spun to face it, she saw nothing but shadows scattering from her wavering flashlight.

She took a few quick steps to the side, peering down the next row of metal cylinders. Still nothing.

Cries echoed down the stairs—the other girls answering Miki's shouts. They were coming, but not fast enough for Aya.

She began to walk back toward the stairs, checking nervously over her shoulder. Her flashlight swept from side to side, but that only made the long shadows dance and swivel around her, filling the room with furtive movements.

Then she saw it reflected in a row of smooth metal sides: a black silhouette smeared across them, darting through the shadows.

Aya froze, trying to work out which way the shape was moving, but it was like playing tag in a hall of mirrors.

"Miki!" she called. "I think it's …" Her voice faded. The hovering shape had floated into view directly before her, the red flashlight reflecting a familiar pattern of tiny lenses.

It was Moggle.

Escape

"Miki!" she shouted. "It's okay! I don't think there's anything—" "Don't worry, Aya-chan," Miki's voice called from halfway up the stairs. "They're almost here!"

"Crap," Aya muttered. She knelt, beckoning to the little hovercam. "Come here!"

It wavered for a moment—this new command contradicted its old orders to stay hidden. But when Aya called again, it scooted down the row of cylinders and shot into her arms.

"Hey, Moggle!" she whispered, stroking its sprayed-black plastic shell. "Good job finding me.

But you need to be more careful."

"Are you okay?" Miki's shout came from above.

"I'm totally fine! But I don't think anything's down here!" Aya called back, then hissed, "We have to find a place to hide you."

She switched off her flashlight and shoved it into a pocket, looking around for another exit. But the rows of featureless cylinders stretched endlessly into the darkness.

More shouts came from the top of the stairs. Miki was headed back down, a gaggle of flashlights bobbing behind her.

Aya ducked lower and headed away. The only light came from the Sly Girls descending the stairs, their red and yellow flashlights reflected in the smooth metal curves of the cylinders. Aya covered Moggle with the loose folds of her open jacket.

"When I let you go, find a place to hide. Understand?"

In answer, Moggle flashed its night-lights right into her face.

"Stop doing that!" Aya hissed, stumbling blindly to a halt.

"What was that?" Miki called. "Aya, where are you?"

Aya blinked away spots, standing up to peer across the cylinder tops. The Sly Girls were fanning out randomly across the room.

But Eden Maru was rising into the air, her hoverball rig using the metal cylinders for lift. She flew swiftly across the ranks of cylinders, arms outstretched like the wings of a bird of prey. She would have serious infrared, of course— most intercity hoverball games were at night.

Aya swore, ducking lower and running as quickly as she dared. She had to get into another room..

But was there any way out of here?

Suddenly Moggle was tugging at her grip.

"Not yet!" she whispered, but the hovercam yanked itself free, pulling Aya off balance. It shot away through the ranks of cylinders like a cannonball.

Aya stumbled to a halt, squinting into the darkness, trying to see where the hovercam had disappeared.

"Lose your flashlight, Nosey?"

She looked up to find Eden Maru hovering just above her.

Aya tried to think of some excuse for putting her flashlight away, but failed. "Yeah, I sort of dropped it."

"Nice going." Eden's eyes scanned the darkness. "So what are we chasing, anyway?"

"Beats me." Aya shrugged, careful not to look in the direction Moggle had fled. "I think maybe Miki's seeing things."

"That doesn't sound like Miki," Eden murmured, her surged eyes scanning the cylinders. Her gaze came to rest in the direction Moggle had flown. "What's over there?"

Aya squinted into the darkness. The other Sly Girls' flashlights were growing closer now, and her unsurged eyes could just make out where the ranks of metal cylinders ended. She took a few steps closer, and saw a meter-wide circle of blackness—the mouth of a passageway.

Aya let out a silent sigh. Moggle must have decided to hide in there. Eden Maru was already on her way, gliding through the air.

"Maybe we should wait for the others," Aya called, jogging after her. "Whatever it is could be dangerous."

"I thought you said Miki was seeing things," Eden said. She landed in front of the circular hole and crawled inside.

As she ran to catch up, Aya realized that the opening was exactly the right size for one of the cylinders to pass through endwise. At its mouth, she felt the familiar pattern of inlaid studs beneath her palms, metal to carry the cylinders on hover-lifters.

Aya crawled after Eden as fast as she could. "Find anything?"

"Yeah. But it doesn't make sense."

A few of the Sly Girls had reached the tunnel entrance behind Aya. Flashlight beams flickered down the tunnel, revealing what Eden had discovered.

A thick metal door stood open, one small window glinting in its center.

Aya frowned. "That's the only door I've seen down here."

"You mean airlock," Eden said, pointing ahead. "There's another one up there."

"An airlock?"

Aya shook her head. "Why would anyone have an airlock inside a mountain?"

But as they crawled farther, she saw more metal glinting ahead—another heavy door, standing open just like the first. She swallowed. If this really was an airlock, this tunnel had to be a dead end.

Which meant that Moggle was trapped.

"I better go first!" she said, pushing past Eden.

"But you can't even see!"

Aya ignored her, scrambling down the tunnel. At least she could warn Moggle that someone—judging from the echoing voices behind her, everyone—w as coming.

"Moggle!" she said with the barest hiss of sound.

She slowed a little, trying to listen. Somehow the air felt different in here.

A step later Aya's foot twisted beneath her, coming down wrong on an uneven stretch of floor.

She grunted, reaching her hands out ahead to steady herself They touched nothingness.

And then Aya was rolling forward, falling into a void.

Shaft

Aya dropped in absolute darkness, spinning head over heels into the mountains depths.

She reached for her crash bracelets, hoping they would find enough metal to keep her from splattering. At the first twist, the bracelets found purchase, jerking her upright with a shoulder-wrenching snap. Her feet swung out with unspent momentum, and one cracked against solid stone.

Aya hung there stunned for a moment, pain sparkling against the solid blackness. As her head cleared, the echo of her own breathing pressed close around her. She swung her feet out—they connected with stone, pushing Aya backward into a wall of rock. The impact prized a cry of pain from her lungs.

"Quit kicking!" came Eden's voice from the darkness just above. Seconds later strong arms wrapped around her waist, lifting her up. The agony in her shoulders lessened a little.

"You okay, Nosey?" Eden said.

"I'll live. But maybe no more falling tonight."

"I hope you don't keep trying to get killed just to impress me."

Aya only grunted. As Eden carried her back up through the formless darkness, she felt the tingle of blood rushing back into her hands.

Eden set her down firmly on a ledge—the one she'd just plummeted off. "Maybe you should leave the exploring to people who can see in the dark. And can fly."

"Sure," Aya said, gingerly rubbing her shoulders. "And thanks."

"Thanks again, you mean."

Voices echoed around them—the other Sly Girls were headed down the tunnel.

"Slow down!" Eden shouted. "It's a trap … or something."

"Yeah, something," Aya muttered, pulling out her flashlight and leaning carefully over the shaft. It was circular, big enough across for the cylinders to travel down. The walls were striped with copper coils as thick as Aya's arm, laid into the stone under clear plastic.

The shaft also continued upward, past where her flashlight faded in the distance.

Moggle had certainly found an odd place to hide.

Eden grunted. "I see you found your flashlight, Nosey."

"Oh, yeah." Aya shrugged. "I guess it was in my pocket all the time."

Eden nodded slowly.

"You found something?" Kai's voice called. She pushed her way past the other Sly Girls crowding the tunnel, crawled to the edge of the shaft, and peered into its depths. "Wow. What this?"

is "I guess we're not sure," Eden said. "Are we, Nosey?"

"No clue," Aya said, rubbing her wrists. "But take it from me—don't jump down it."

Kai crouched there, her hands tracing the metal studs in the tunnel floor. She glanced back toward where the cylinders stood waiting in their rows.

"This must be where those big metal things wind up."

"I guess so," Aya said. "Maybe it's some kind of elevator."

"An elevator with an airlock?" Kai shook her head. "Not likely. Can you see the bottom?"

"No, but I can go there." Eden stepped off into the void, her hoverball rig's lifters catching before she fell even a centimeter. "Sorry to steal all the glory, Kai." Eden smiled as she dropped out of sight.

Aya watched her fall into the depths, hoping that Moggle had gone up rather than down Kai turned to her. "What were you and Miki chasing, anyway?"

Aya shrugged, which sent a twinge of pain through her shoulders.

"You okay?"

"I've been using my crash bracelets a lot tonight."

"I noticed that." Kai chuckled. "I knew you were one of us, Aya-chan."

"Thanks." Aya smiled weakly—another dizzy-making wave of exhaustion was hitting. "But maybe I'll rest a minute. My adrenaline needs a recharge."

"No problem." Kai leaned out to peer down the shaft and sighed. "This could take a while."

Aya crawled past the other Sly Girls in the tunnel, waving off their questions, saying she needed a rest. She climbed out and made her way through the cylinders and to the stairs. Halfway up, she crouched down, booting her eyescreen.

"Moggle?" she whispered.

The hovercam's point of view appeared against the darkness. It took Aya's tired brain a moment to adjust to infrared, but Moggle was looking down.

The cluster of body-heat blobs below were the Sly Girls crowded at the shaft's edge. Eden Maru was a pinprick of light farther down, the lifters of her hoverball rig shimmering against cold stone.

Moggle had lucked out so far. Of course, Eden would explore the upper part of the shaft eventually.

"Keep climbing," she whispered. "And look for a way out."

The sides of the shaft passed by unchanging—thick copper coils every meter or so, no way in or out. But a subtle infrared glow came from directly over Moggle, a sliver of heat at the top of the shaft.

"Find out what's up there. But don't use your night-lights!"

Aya dimmed her eyescreen for a moment, checking to make sure no one had followed her. The room full of cylinders was still empty.

As Moggle climbed, its signal began to fritz, shimmers of static dancing across her eyes. The connection was punching through a lot of stone, and Aya wondered how long the shaft was. Her skintenna could only reach a kilometer without the city network helping.

By the time Moggle reached the top, Aya could barely see through the clouds of interference.

The hovercam seemed to be in a transparent bubble; soft lights shone down through the rounded plastic walls.

They looked like…stars.

Aya moved a few steps up, and the static cleared for a moment. It was true: Moggle was looking out from the top of the mountain.

Suddenly the whole mountain range was laid out around her. Sharp peaks cut into the starry sky, and down in the valley the mag-lev's solar collectors glimmered with reflected starlight. Aya could even see the lights of the city glowing faintly in the distance.

But what was the point of carrying the cylinders up to the top of the mountain? There were simpler ways to move big hunks of metal, after all—lifting fans and heavy vehicles.

And why do it all from inside a mountain?

The signal fritzed again, and Aya shifted on the stairs until she found a better spot. When the image cleared, she frowned. Something glittered in the corner of her eye.

"Turn left a little, Moggle."

The view rotated to bring the mag-lev line in front of her, and Aya swallowed. The warning lights along the expanse of tracks were blinking Then she saw it in the distance, a string of lights crawling silently from the city. An unlikely, maybe-once-a-month, unscheduled train was headed toward the tunnel.

And Kai had left the hidden door wide open.

Air Pressure

"Stay up there until I call you," she whispered. "But be ready to move!"

Aya ran down the stairs, wondering what would happen if the train shot past the open doorway.

Equipment and furniture were piled up around the entrance, along with a big stack of the Sly Girls' hoverboards.

Aya had felt with her own body what the wake of a speeding mag-lev train could do.

She ran through the cylinders, her reflection a blur in their smooth metal sides, her mind spinning.

How was she supposed to explain how she knew a train was coming?

The mouth of the tunnel glowed with the Sly Girls' flashlights. They were sprawled around its entrance and down its length, crowding the narrow space.

"Out of my way!" She dove into the tunnel, crawling straight across the Girls, ignoring their annoyed shouts. "Everyone, listen! A train's coming!"

Silence fell, and Kai turned to peer at her. "What do you mean?"

"You know those unscheduled trains you weren't worried about? Well, one's headed toward us!

It'll be here in a few minutes!"

Kai narrowed her eyes. "What makes you think that?"

"I was heading back toward the main door … to get a hoverboard. I thought maybe some of us could go down the shaft on one."

"You got all the way there and back in five minutes?"

"No…but halfway there I could feel the ground rumbling. Come on, Kai. We don't have time to lose!"

Kai hesitated, and a murmur of disbelief traveled through the tunnel.

Aya groaned, scrambling over more bodies and up to the edge of the shaft. ''Eden … a train's coming!"

A few seconds later Eden Maru shot up into view. "A train? We didn't seal the door!"

"So what?" Kai said. "At that speed, who'll notice anything? Most mag-levs don't even have crews."

"But our boards! They'll get sucked into the slipstream, along with anything else that's not tied down!"

"And you didn't mention this before?" Kai cried.

"You said there wouldn't be any trains!"

"I said probably!” "Just get out of my way!" Eden put her hands together like a diver, and shot down the crowded tunnel.

Instantly the narrow tunnel was full of scrambling bodies. The Sly Girls were shouting and shoving past one another, tumbling out to follow Eden back toward the entrance to the mountain.

Kai hesitated for a moment, her eyes fixed on Aya. "You sure you didn't just imagine this?"

Aya nodded, still breathless.

Kai swore and rose into a hall crouch, scrambling after the others.

Aya waited until the sounds of pursuit faded away, then booted her eyescreen again. She lay against the stone floor, staring straight up into the blackness of the shaft.

There was nothing but air between her and Moggle now, the view from the mountain top crystal clear. The train was much closer, a bright string of pearls crawling along the flashing mag-lev line, only minutes away.

"Get down here fast, Moggle!'' she said. "Don't hover— just drop!"

Moggle angled its lenses downward, and Aya watched the fall from the hovercam's point of view. The hot yellow infrared speck of her own head grew, faster and faster as Moggle accelerated down the shaft, until she could see her own wide-eyed expression.

"Stop!" she shrieked.

The hovercam came to a perfect halt a few centimeters from her nose, and flashed its night-lights happily.

"Its nice to see you too. And ouch, blinded, etc." Aya scuttled down the narrow tunnel. "Follow me, but not too close. If we run into anyone else, remember to hide!"

Aya dashed through the stone warren of the hideout, following the metal studs back toward the entrance. That was how Moggle had found her, of course. Just like the cylinders, a hovercam could only travel along the metal path.

By the time she reached the main hallway Aya was breathless from running, her heart pounding.

Straight ahead, the crowd of Sly Girls was silhouetted by the entrance to the mag-lev tunnel.

Staggering to a halt, Aya felt the trains rumble beneath her feet.

''Any time now," Kai was saying.

"I'm trying!"

Eden knelt by the doorway, the matter hacker clutched in one hand, the other flitting across its controls.

But the smart matter of the door wasn't moving.

Aya glanced over her shoulder and caught Moggle peeking out to get a shot. She smiled.

Whether the door closed or not, whatever happened next was going to be very kickable.

"Everyone get set," Eden said. "Just in case."

Ahead of her, the Sly Girls linked crash bracelets to form a human chain. Not that it would help—if this loose furniture and equipment started flying around, they were all in trouble anyway.

Finally Eden Maru let out a grunt of triumph. The smart matter was rippling to life, its black tendrils beginning to weave across the opening.

But the train was already in the tunnel—Aya could feel it, her ears popping as the air squeezed toward them at three hundred klicks an hour. The rainy scent of the changing smart matter washed over her.

The rumble was building quickly now, whirlwinds of dust spinning madly in flashlight beams. The first layer of the door had stretched across the entrance, but it bulged out toward Eden, like a toy balloon squeezed between two hands.

If the door blew out, Aya wondered what would happen to the train. Would the sudden change in pressure be enough to blow it off its tracks?

Next to the bulging expanse, Eden was still twisting at the hacker's controls, yelling something drowned out by the roar of the train.

More layers slid into place The thundering peaked, the piles of equipment all around Aya dancing across the floor. The smart-matter surface of the doorway was vibrating too fast to see, shimmering like a plucked guitar string.

After a long moment, the roar began to fade as the train slipped away.

The door hadn't collapsed; now that the train had passed, Aya couldn't even tell the smart matter apart from the stone.

As Eden slumped to the floor, Kai turned to the rest of them, a weary smile on her face. "Maybe that was enough fun for one night."

A tired murmur went through the others; maybe Aya wasn't the only one who'd gone sleep-missing the last couple of nights. The Sly Girls started sorting out their hoverboards, getting ready to head for home.

The only problem now was sneaking Moggle out.

"Hey, Kai," Aya called. "Can we borrow a few things?"

Kai looked around at the equipment cluttering the hall. "I suppose so. But don't make it too obvious someone's been here."

"In this mess?" Aya laughed. "They're stripping the place, not taking inventory."

Adding their assent, a few of the Sly Girls started poking through the equipment. With no face rank or merits, Aya realized, they couldn't do much requisitioning. The wallscreens and workstations lying around were tempting targets.

She walked quickly back to where Moggle was hiding, and picked a storage carton at random.

Dumping the contents out—light pens and drawing tablets—she waved the hovercam inside. The plastic top sealed with an airtight pop, hiding Moggle completely.

At a twist of her crash bracelets, Aya's hoverboard made its way down the hall to her. She pressed the container against its riding surface, and felt the snap of Moggle's lifters gripping through plastic.

She was ready to go, carrying one hovercam full of very kickable shots.

"Pretty tricky, you knowing that train was coming."

She looked up to find Eden Maru floating above her.

Aya shrugged. "Not what I'd call tricky. The floor was rumbling."

"Funny thing, though," Eden said. "When I first got here, I couldn't feel anything. Not till the train was much closer. But you noticed it from way back inside the mountain."

"Maybe it's that hoverball rig you're always wearing." Aya smiled. "You're not used to walking the Earth like us extras."

"Yeah, that must be it." Eden glanced down at Moggle's hiding place. "Find anything interesting?"

"Just light pens, stuff like that. Want one?"

Eden hesitated, then shook her head. "No thanks. I don't have to steal stuff. I'm famous, remember?"

"Sorry, I forgot."

Eden finally smiled. "Don't be sorry, Nosey-chan. It shows you're coming along."

She slapped Aya on her sore shoulder, then new back to the matter hacker and began reopening the door.

Slime Queen

Aya slept through her alarm the next morning, missing Advanced English and two kinds of math.

By the time she awoke, the sun was streaming into her window, a despair-making sight. Missed classes meant stacks of merits gone missing, enough damage to keep her at zero for a month.

But as she lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and rubbing the aches and bruises of last nights adventure, it occurred to Aya that merits wouldn't matter much longer. Once her Sly Girls story hit the feeds, she'd be too famous to bother with exams, dorm chores, and littlie-watching jobs—they'd all be as worthless as the moldy displays of Rusty money in the city museum.

A big face rank meant you didn't have to worry about impressing the Good Citizen Committee.

All you had to do was stay famous, which, as ego-kickers liked to say, was much easier than getting that way in the first place.

Aya rubbed her eyes. She'd fallen asleep reviewing shots downloaded from Moggle and her button cam: hours of mag-lev surfing, mysterious tunnels, and hard-edged Sly Girls spilling the secrets of their clique. All of it very kickable.

It was almost too much to work with, more complicated than any story Aya had ever attempted before. Hiro always said that no matter how eye-kicking the shots, people got bored after ten minutes.

How was she supposed to squeeze secret hideouts, skinny aliens, and crazy Sly Girl stunts down to that?

She could do ten minutes on mag-lev surfing alone!

Of course, most shots of any story wound up in the background layer, so other kickers could use them later, or check to see if you were truth-slanting, like Rusty feeds always had. But if Aya was going to betray the Sly Girls, she owed it to them to show how amazing they really were, not hide their best tricks where only a few feed-addicts would ever see them.

Lying there, she wondered about breaking the story up into a series. Last summer Hiro had kicked a ten-part cycle about people hurting themselves to become famous: cutters, self-starvation, the people trying to grow tobacco to smoke. But the thought of creating something that intricate—weaving characters in and out, recapping themes without being repetitious—was too overwhelming.

The inhuman-looking figures were the worst part. Aliens were totally unbelievable, especially since Aya didn't have any shots of them. She might as well put unicorns in the story.

She turned her eyescreen on, and saw that Ren was at Hire's. He'd know what to do, and maybe Hiro would even help, now that Aya could prove that the Sly Girls were real.

She was about to call Ren when her voice caught— hundreds of messages were spilling across her vision, almost all of them from strangers. For some reason she'd been ping-bashed the night before.

Then a familiar name caught her eye—Frizz Mizuno.

Aya hesitated. What if he was writing to say something radically honest, like he'd made a terrible mistake in liking her? Or that Aya Fuse was a face-missing extra that nobody would want to hang out with, much less someone famous and beautiful?

There was only one way to find out. She opened the ping.

Swarmed by hovercams today!

And I just figured out why.

Oops…I'm so sorry.

—Frizz Aya frowned. Why was he apologizing, when she'd been the totally brain-missing one yesterday?

And what did he mean about hovercams? Then she noticed that the ping ended with a feed kick, and a trickle of nerves started in her stomach.

She followed the kick, and one of the fashion-slammer feeds blossomed across her vision The shot had been taken yesterday, right after she'd rescued Moggle. There she was in her dorm uniform, covered with muck and slime and talking to Frizz beside the Akira Hall soccer fields. Even through the grainy minicam lens he was as beautiful as ever, sitting cross-legged on his hoverboard. But Aya looked like she'd just crawled out of a sewer.

The caption read: Who's the ugly making slime with frizz Mizuno?

Aya closed her eyes. Not this…not now.

The worst thing was, she should have known this would happen. Frizz had just started a new clique and was rocketing up the face ranks. Paparazzi cams probably trailed him everywhere, but she'd been so addled by his attention that being careful had never occurred to her.

Just when she was trying to stay incognito, here she was burning up the feeds.

Aya watched the shot again; at least you couldn't hear what she and Frizz were saying, and Moggle had been off chasing plastic missiles and war wheels.

And it was just a stupid slammer feed, the kind of story that Aya glanced at, laughed about, then promptly forgot every day. She should just ignore it.

But for some reason Aya couldn't stop herself. She glanced through the shots in the background layer, dozens of them, all just as hideous. Of course, whoever had kicked them hadn't bothered to show her after she'd taken a shower. Where was the fun in that?

And the worst part was reading the web of conversations flowing outward from the images, a thousand joking captions and slams and stupid theories: that Radical Honesty surge had given Frizz some kind of brain damage, that he had a thing for big noses, that a new species of girlfriend had crawled from the sewers.

Late last night, an anonymous resident from Akira Hall had recognized Aya and rekicked to her feed, but by then the fact that she had a name hardly mattered. Everyone was having too much fun calling her "Slime Queen."

Aya lay back on her bed, wondering how people could be so integrity-challenged, sending hovercams to sneak shots of people. Like Ren had said yesterday, slammer feeds were for unkick idiots.

Most of them were probably just jealous, annoyed that Frizz liked her, an ugly extra, instead of some other big face.

But no matter how much Aya dismissed them in her mind, it didn't help that they all were brain-missing and petty. For some reason, what they said still hurt.

A soft chime sounded in her ear, and she groaned— probably more ping-bashing from one of Slime Queen's new fans. But when the sender's name appeared, she sat bolt upright.

"Frizz?"

"Hey, Aya-chan. Um, have you seen the feeds this morning?"

She lay back down and sighed. "Yes. Slime Queen at your service."

"I'm so sorry, Aya. I haven't gotten used to this whole paparazzi thing yet. It didn't occur to me that—" "It's not your fault, Frizz. I should have known better." She sighed. "Hiro's been famous since his first story. I knew the rules. I just forgot them when I saw you waiting for me."

There was a moment of silence, then he said, "That's happy-making, I suppose."

For the first time since waking up, Aya felt something besides the awfulness of being ambushed.

At least Frizz wasn't calling to say how lame she was. "Yeah, I guess so."

"Why don't you come over? We can go on a picnic or something."

"I thought you were cam-swarmed."

"Totally, but so what?" Frizz said. "It's a chance for people to see you without the, you know, slime factor." He giggled.

"But I can't. Remember that story I'm working on? It's still a secret."

"So we won't talk about it. It's not like I know anything."

"But the clique I'm kicking, they have this crazy brain condition about fame—they hate any whiff of it. If they see me out cam-grubbing with you, they're going to get suspicious."

"Suspicious of what? That you like picnics?"

"Frizz," Aya groaned. "I'm incognito, remember? The clique doesn't know I'm doing a story on them."

There was a long pause. "Wait a second … I thought it was just secret from other kickers, but it's secret from the clique, too?"

"Yeah. They don't know I'm a kicker."

"You mean you're doing the same thing to them that just happened to us? Taking shots without telling them?"

Aya's mouth opened, then shut again, her words tangling in her head. Finally all she managed was, "It's completely different!"

"How is it different?"

"I'm not slamming them, Frizz—I'm showing how kick they are! This story's going to make them famous!"

"But I thought you said they hated fame."

"They do but…," Aya started, but her words got snarled again. Frizz's Radical Honesty was crazy-making! Sometimes it was like he was from some face-missing city.

"I need to think about this, Aya," he said softly.

"You need to … what?"

"Sorry, but it's strange for me, all this incognito stuff. But it sounds like you have to stay clear of me anyway. So maybe we should back off a while."

For a moment Aya wanted to argue, or even to rush out and see him, hovercams or not. But she couldn't just blow her cover. Things were already bad enough with her name all over the feeds.

Maybe he was right about holding off for a few days, even if it was very unhappy-making to admit it.

"Are you sure, Frizz?"

"Yes. I need to think about this. It's hard to know what kind of person you are sometimes."

Aya clenched her fists, grasping for something to say. Now Frizz thought she was some brain-missing slammer! If only she could explain to him that this story was more important than the Sly Girls' privacy; whatever was hidden in that mountain could be dangerous.

But thanks to his Radical Honesty and his fame, anything she told him would be on the feeds the next day. She didn't dare.

Finally they said good-bye, and the connection went dead.

Aya lay there, deleting mocking pings, growing more miserable every second. Maybe avoiding Frizz was already pointless. What if one of the Sly Girls stumbled on the Slime Queen story? Would they blame Aya for her sudden spurt of fame? It wasn't her fault that Frizz was famous and beautiful and a total hovercam-magnet Exactly the sort of boyfriend she would've killed to have a week ago.

Aya frowned, realizing that this was the first morning since littlie days that she hadn't checked her face rank— and for once it might have risen. She blanked the fashion-slammer feed, clearing away the meme-lines and gossip threads that cluttered her eyescreen, until she could see her little corner of shame.

She sat there for a moment, staring at it, not sure what to think.

Her face rank hovered at 26,213—much higher than she'd ever been before. At long last, Aya Fuse was famous.

For being slimy.

Mass Driver

There were hovercams lurking in front of Akira Hall.

The Slime Queen story was already fading—there were much bigger faces to slam in the city, after all—but Aya decided to be careful. A few more days of obscurity and she'd be happy with all the cam-swarming she got.

Arms wrapped around Moggle, she jumped out a fifth-story back window, landing hard in the dorm's new chrysanthemum garden. A monitor drone chirped at Aya angrily—she'd crushed a flower flat into the mud.

This wasn't going to be a good day for merits, it seemed.

"Get my board, Moggle," she said. "But don't let any of those cams see you."

Moggle spun away toward the hoverboard racks, pausing to peer around the corner. After last night's adventure, it was finally getting the hang of sneaking.

Aya scanned the forest as she waited, wondering if any paparazzi cams were hidden among the trees. Her skin prickled as she imagined being watched. Was this what it felt like being Kai? Skulking around all the time, nervous of any whiff of a reputation? It seemed like a paranoia-making way to live.

Moggle reappeared with her board in tow, and Aya jumped on.

"See you at Hire's," she ordered.

Moggle flashed, then shot ahead into the forest, toward the famous part of town.

"Hey, Slime Queen!"

Aya groaned. "Let me in, Hiro. Someone might recognize me."

"But how could they? You're not wearing your raiment of slime."

"Hiro!"

More laughter, but finally the elevator door slid open, and she and Moggle slipped inside.

Hiro and Ren were still laughing when the door opened again. The two were splayed across the couch, playing a thumb-twitch game on Hiro's giant wallscreen. Explosions and the chatter of gunfire were making the strings of paper cranes rattle and dance.

"What are you two doing?" Aya shouted over the noise.

"The Nameless One just kicked some story slamming thumb-twitch games," Ren yelled. "So we've devoted ourselves to a day of war!"

She rolled her eyes. Hiro was still annoyed at the Nameless One for slamming the crumblies in his immortality story calling them freaks and world-wreckers. "Isn't it kind of loud, though?"

"Sorry, Slime-sensei," Hiro yelled. "Nice work on your face rank, by the way. A few more appearances as Slime Queen, and you'll get an invitation to the Thousand Faces Party!"

She scowled. "Aren't you the one who always says there's no bad fame?"

"No, that's the city interface," Hiro cried. "I'm against slime-fame!"

Ren giggled, falling to one side to coax his thumb-twitch character through some perilous maneuver.

"What are you laughing at, Ren?" Aya shouted. "You're the one who made me go underwater!"

"I didn't know you were going to talk to some big-face pretty boy on the way home."

"Neither did I!" Aya screamed over the explosions.

"Sure you didn't," Hiro answered. "Just like when we saw Frizz Mizuno's feed yesterday, and you had no idea who he was."

"I didn't know him yesterday. I didn't know his name, anyway. I'd just met him the night before

… at this party."

Hiro frowned, then made a gesture. The wallscreen images froze, the sound abruptly shutting off.

"Since when do you get invited to the same parties as Frizz Mizuno?"

"I wasn't exactly invited," Aya said. One of Hiro's eyebrows rose, and she groaned. "I crashed this tech-head bash, okay? I was looking for the Sly Girls."

"Oh, the imaginary Sly Girls again." Hiro let out a long sigh. "Why are you wasting your time with unicorns, Aya-chan?"

"They're not imaginary. Actually, I joined up with them last night."

"You joined the unicorns?" Hiro asked.

"The Sly Girls, you bubblehead. I even went surfing with them."

"What do you mean?" Ren asked.

"You guys haven't heard of mag-lev surfing?" Aya gestured, and Moggle started loading a stack of shots into Hiro's wallscreen. "Then you need to watch this."

Hiro started to say something, but the wallscreen was already flickering to life. He crossed his arms, staring in silence as Aya's night as a Sly Girl began to unfold.

When it was over, the first thing Hiro said was, "Mom and Dad will kill you."

Aya couldn't argue. Her parents didn't even approve of bungee jumping. She couldn't imagine what Mom was going to say after watching her mag-lev surf.

"Crumblies are the least of your worries," Ren said. "After you kick this, the wardens are going to visit."

"I know." Aya sighed. "That's the bad part about kicking this story. Nobody's ever going to mag-lev surf again."

"That's not what I mean," Ren said softly. "The wardens will forget all about surfing once they spot that mass driver."

Aya glanced at Hiro, but he looked as puzzled as she was.

"What's a mass driver?" she asked.

Ren stood and crossed to the wallscreen, rewinding the images with a twirl of his finger. He froze the shot where Moggle was climbing up the shaft, reached out, and pointed at the glint of metal embedded in the stone. "That's a copper coil, right?"

"I guess," Aya said. "Like in an electric motor?"

"Or a train track," Ren said. "Mag-levs have two kinds of magnets. The ones that levitate the train and the mass drivers."

"Which do what?" Aya asked.

"They move the train. As it glides along, the mass drivers switch from negative to positive—pulling from in front, pushing from behind, sending it faster and faster. You can do the same thing straight up."

"So this shaft is like a mag-lev train that goes up and down?" Aya shrugged. "You mean it an is elevator?"

Ren shook his head. "This could accelerate a thousand times faster than any elevator. You saw that airlock, right? If you suck all the air out of the shaft, you're accelerating through a vacuum. No friction at all—pure speed. With enough juice, a mass driver could throw you into orbit."

"But what's the point?"

Hiro asked. "Why hide it in a mountain?"

Ren stared at the image of the copper coil. "That depends on what those cylinders are."

Aya shrugged. "They just looked like big hunks of metal."

"What if there's smart matter inside? They could change shape as they fly, make fins and wings to guide themselves to a target. Maybe even whip up a heat shield as they fall."

"No way, Ren." Hiro sat up straight. "The Nameless One is actually right—our thumb-twitch games have made you war-crazy!"

"Very funny, Hiro." Ren moved the image to a close-up of a cylinder. "Let me do some math.

How big are they, Aya?"

"Um…maybe a meter across the top? And a little taller than me." Aya frowned. "What are you getting so excited about?"

"He's delusional," Hiro said.

"Let's say two meters tall." Ren's fingers twitched and spun, and numbers began cascading across the wallscreen image of the cylinder. "So the radius squared is a quarter of a meter, times pi is about point seven-five. Times two meters tall is one and a half. Hey, room? How much would one-and-a-half cubic meters of steel weigh?"

"What kind of steel?" the room asked.

"I don't care. Just round it off."

"Almost twelve tons."

"Twelve tons!"

Ren took a step backward and fell into Hire's feed-watching chair, staring wide-eyed at the screen.

"What's the big deal?" Aya asked softly.

Hiro leaned forward, the amused expression fading from his face. "Hey, room? How much energy would twelve tons of steel have if you dropped it from orbit?"

"From how high in orbit?" the room asked.

Hiro glanced at Ren, who shrugged and said, "Two hundred kilometers? Forget about air resistance and round it off."

The room hardly paused. "The object would land at two thousand meters per second, releasing twenty-four gigajoules, equal to six tons of TNT."

"Okay…that's not good," Hiro said.

"What's TNT?" Aya asked.

"These days, it's a unit of energy," Ren said. "But a long time ago, it was a chemical that Rusties used to make bombs."

"Bombs?"

She swallowed. "Like when they used to shoot missiles at each other?"

"Wow, Slime Queen," Hiro said. "You catch on quick."

Ren nodded slowly. "This could be some kind of city killer."

"You're not serious." Aya remembered the Rusty weapons that had destroyed whole cities in seconds, burning the sky and leaving the ground poisoned for decades. "But city killers had warheads.

Those cylinders are just solid steel!"

"Yeah, Aya, and the dinosaurs were wiped out by iron," Ren said. "Iron falling from space.

These things wouldn't come down randomly. The smart matter could split them into slivers, one for every building in a city. How many of those cylinders did you say there were?"

"There were hundreds, Ren," she said softly.

"Thousands of tons?" he said. "With the metal shortage going on?"

Aya shook her head. "But aren't you guys jumping to conclusions? We don't even know if there's any smart matter inside."

"Maybe I can get you something to test them," Ren said.

"Would a matter hacker work?" Aya asked, and they both turned to stare at her. "Because the Sly Girls sort of, um…have one."

"Aya," Hiro said slowly. "Don't tell me you've been playing around with matter hackers."

"I never even touched it!"

"Aya! Matter hackers aren't just merit-losing illegal; they're going-to-jail illegal!"

"It's perfect, though," Ren said. "Just send a basic run command to one, and watch what it does."

"Ren!" Hiro shouted. "No way is my little sister spending another second with those Sly Girls. Do you want my mom and dad to kill me?"

Ren turned to her. "If you don't want to go, Aya, I'll try to get in there. But it's your story. …" Aya didn't answer at first, staring at the tangle of math on the screen, remembering when she was ten years old. Her entire littlie class had been loaded into hovercars and taken to an ancient ruin from the Rusty's second global war. A burned-out shell of a dome rose up from shattered walls with empty windows, marking where a hundred thousand people had died in one quick flash. She hadn't believed it possible, not even of the Rusties.

But it looked like someone was following in their footsteps.

"Sorry, Hiro, but I have to," she said. "The end of the world isn't something we can kick halfway."