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 half 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.
“It’s 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 train’s 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 car
ton 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 flew 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 night’s 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 Hiro’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 camgrubbing 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.”