She headed for the nearest trees, trying to urge the board faster. But it was a city toy, nothing like the Sly Girls’ high-speed boards.
The trees rose up before them, and Aya twisted from side to side, banking between thick trunks. Beams of light from the hovercar stabbed through the leaves, scattering bright coins across the forest floor.
Frizz’s lips pressed against her ear. “Why aren’t we crashing?”
Aya blinked—Ren and Hiro had to be fifty meters away.
“Of course!” she cried. “They had to stop jamming to use their rigs, which means . . . Moggle, come here! I need you!”
“Aya!” Frizz shouted. “On the right!”
One of the figures was swooping down at them, long fingers splayed like talons. Frizz dropped down, pulling both of them into a crouch as the figure swept past.
“Ouch!” Frizz flinched behind her. “Something stuck me!”
“What?” Aya stood again, pulling the board into another hard turn. She craned her neck to look at him. “Are you okay?”
“I think so. But I feel a little . . . watch out!”
Aya whipped her head around to find the other inhuman waiting directly ahead, arms out wide, fingertips glistening with needles.
She twisted her whole body to one side, banking the board to a halt. But Frizz’s body was going limp, his arms slipping from around her waist.
“Frizz!” she called out, but heard only a groan in response. . . .
And then he was toppling from the board.
“Frizz!”
She reached out to grab him, but he was already tumbling through the air. He flew straight into the waiting inhuman, their bodies colliding with a grim thud. The spindly figure crumpled, its long arms wrapping around Frizz, both of them flying backward into the darkness.
Suddenly free of his weight, the board went into a lopsided spin. Tree trunks whirled around Aya, sharp branches whipping her face and hands. She knelt and clutched the edges, letting the board gyrate its momentum away.
When it had slowed a little, Aya let go and rolled off into the leaves. She stood and ran to where the two figures lay sprawled and unmoving on the forest floor.
Her eyes were drawn to the inhuman’s strange face. His skin was pale, his arms thin and weak-looking, but the needles on his fingertips were unambiguous—they were designed to do some damage.
But the strangest thing was the inhuman’s feet. Bare and misshapen, they looked almost like hands, their long toes curled up like a dead spider’s legs.
She dragged Frizz free of the tangle. “Can you hear me?”
He didn’t answer. Then Aya saw the tiny red mark on his neck. One nick from those needle fingers had knocked him unconscious . . . or worse.
She pulled him closer, her head swimming. The hovercar still drifted overhead, spilling a trembling light through the leaves. The shadows slanted as it moved, as though the whole world was swaying.
“Aya!” came a shout. She looked up, and saw Hiro and Ren angling through the trees.
But in front of them flew the other inhuman, zooming straight toward her, arms outstretched and fingers glistening. His pale skin glowed in the darkness.
She pulled Frizz closer, feeling utterly abandoned. Where were the wardens? Where were the half-million others who’d been watching her every move five minutes ago?
He was ten meters away, five . . .
A small dark shape shot from the shadows, barreling into the inhuman’s stomach. He crumpled into a ball with a grunt, then whirled past Aya, the hoverball rig keeping him airborne as he spun.
“Moggle,” Aya breathed. The hovercam bounced away, crashing through the brush.
The inhuman hung unconscious from his hoverball rig, his handlike feet swinging a meter from the ground. A groan escaped from his lips, and his eyes began to flutter open. . . .
Aya ran toward him, leaping up to grab his shoulders. They glided across the forest floor together, the rig adjusting to her weight.
His hand reached for her, but Aya grabbed his wrist and stuck a handful of needle fingers into his own neck. He sputtered for a moment, eyes widening, then passed out completely.
“Aya!” Hiro banked to a halt. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” She jumped down, glancing up at the hovercar. It waited overhead, unmoving, lights probing through the leaves uncertainly. “Help me with Frizz.”
Hiro glided to a halt. “He’ll be fine, Aya. They don’t care about him.”
“Yeah, but I do.” She ran to Frizz’s unconscious body, towing the hoverboard behind her. She knelt and pulled at his arm, trying to get his weight up onto the riding surface.
He let out a groan.
“Are you all right?”
“Feel weird,” he murmured. “Heavy.”
“Tell me about it!” Aya strained. “If only we had a way to . . .” She glanced at the inhuman lying next to Frizz.
Hiro stepped off his board beside her, staring down at the inhuman. “Whoa. You left this out of your story?”
“Help me get the hoverball rig off this freak.” Aya grunted, tugging at the inhuman’s shin lifter. “We can put it on Frizz!”
“All right,” Hiro said, kneeling. “Here’s how you do it.”
He loosened the straps with practiced fingers, pulling the lifter pad free and slipping it onto Frizz’s leg.
“What happened to him?” Ren asked, joining in the scramble.
“That freak stuck him with those needle fingers.” Aya glanced up at the hovercar. Its side door was opening again, light spilling out around two more silhouettes. “Crap. More coming!”
“I’m done.” Hiro was strapping the last forearm pad into place. “I’ve set the rig to neutral. He should be zero-g.”
Frizz lifted easily from the ground, suddenly weightless. She wrestled his drifting body onto her board and knelt across him.
Hiro and Ren slipped up on either side and reached out their hands, pulling her forward like a littlie between two parents. Soon they were shooting ahead through a gap in the trees.
“Are they following us?” Aya asked.
Ren looked back. “I don’t think so. They’re picking up the other two.”
“Two freaky bodies are worse than one live witness, I guess,” Hiro said. “Speaking of which, you have some explaining to do, Aya.”
“When we get to safety.”
“Which is back at the party, right?”
“No. We’re doing what Tally says—we’re hiding.”
“Where?” Ren asked.
Aya bit her lip, holding tight to keep Frizz’s unconscious form from slipping off the board. “The underground reservoir.”
“Cold and wet,” Ren said. “But it’s the one place in the city with no cams.”
“Exactly,” Aya said. Something was skimming through the trees in the corner of her eye, and she dared a glance. It was a camo-black hovercam, still wobbly from a recent collision.
It flashed its night-lights happily, and shaky images began to spill across Aya’s vision. Whatever the inhuman creatures were, this time they’d been caught by more than just her eyes. She found herself smiling.
Moggle had gotten the shot.
THE WISDOM OF THE CROWD
The new construction site glowed dull orange, the earth-moving machines resting quietly in their foundation pits.
“Check your pings again,” Hiro said. “Before we get cut off.”
Aya scanned her eyescreen, then shook her head. A few priority pings had come in on the wardens’ channel—and maybe ten thousand more asking her what was going on, not to mention a million theories burning up the feeds—but nothing from Tally Youngblood.
“If she’s coming on a suborbital, she’ll be out of contact for a few hours,” Ren said.
Aya sighed. “As long as she gets here fast.”
They dropped toward the tunnel below them and slipped inside.
“Hey, am I passing out again?” Frizz groaned, his weight shifting as the dark
ness closed around them.
“No, we’re just going underground.” Aya squeezed him tighter. “No lights, Moggle. Too obvious.”
“Your dress,” Frizz murmured. “Sparkles.”
Aya nodded, flexing her fingers, and the party dress sputtered to life. The battery was down to its last dregs, but the flickering embers were enough to cut the gloom.
“Told you this was the right dress, Hiro,” she said.
“Very funny. Are you going to tell us about what happened back there?”
“Not yet.”
They descended, the orange worklights of the surface fading behind them. After long minutes, the echoes of trickling water reached their ears, then the tunnel opened over the reservoir’s huge expanse.
Aya brought her board to a halt in midair.
The cavern flickered with the dying lights of her dress, the ceiling shimmering with the water’s trembling reflections. Moggle seemed to remember the place, and was soon drifting in nervous circles around the cavern, checking for hidden Sly Girls with lock-down clamps.
Hiro slid to a stop close by, sitting cross-legged on his board. “Great hiding place, Aya. There’s no actual ground to stand on, is there?”
“No,” Ren said. “But we’ve got plenty of water.”
“It’s not exactly Shuffle Mansion.” Aya sighed. The apartment Hiro had shown her lingered in her mind’s eye—the huge open spaces, the perfect city views. And here she was on her first night of fame, skulking underground.
Frizz’s slow breathing echoed from the stone arches. He stirred beneath her, the effects of the needle-stab fading. She checked the mark on his neck—the redness had almost disappeared.
“Whatever was in those needles was designed to knock you out, Aya,” Ren said. “But Frizz is a pretty. He’ll be okay.”
She nodded. The operation made pretties’ bodies stronger and quicker to heal as well as beautiful.
“So who were those people?” Hiro asked.
“I have no idea,” she said. “I only saw them once before.”
“When you first saw the mountain open up?” Ren asked.
“Yeah. Miki and I were watching over the edge of the train. There were three of them, really skinny and tall. But it was so dark, I thought it was just the crazy shadows . . . at first.”
Hiro cleared his throat. “And you didn’t bother mentioning this?”
“I didn’t have any shots of them! And it was so sense-missing. I thought if I started with those freaks, everybody would think it was just another surge-monkey story. Aliens didn’t exactly fit the city-killer theme.”
“They didn’t fit the theme?” Hiro cried. “What are you, some Rusty kicker? That’s what the background layer is for!”
“Lecture her later, Hiro,” Ren said. “Right now we need to figure out who they are, and why they’re after Aya.”
Hiro snorted. “We should go back to the surface and kick this! Call the wardens if you want!”
“Do we trust our own city?” Ren asked.
“I trust anyone, as long as there’s a few hundred thousand people watching,” Hiro muttered. “What I don’t get is, how did those surge-monkeys figure out you’d seen them?”
“Maybe there’s something in the background layer that explains that,” Ren said. “Too bad we’re cut off from the feeds down here.”
“Moggle’s got a copy of everything,” Aya said.
“Okay, I’ll take a look. Shake me if anything exciting happens.” Ren stretched out on his board, his eyescreens flickering a full immersion warning.
Aya swallowed. With Ren shot-scanning and Frizz half-conscious, she was practically alone with Hiro. The last sparkles of her dress were fading, the darkness making his expression look angrier every second.
“How about some light, Moggle?” she said.
The hovercam’s night-lights came on, filling the cavern. The deep shadows shifted as Moggle floated restlessly around the reservoir, but Hiro remained stock-still, staring straight at her.
She sighed. “I didn’t mean to lie.”
“No, Aya. But when you pick and choose facts to make your story, you always wind up truth-slanting. That’s why good kickers put everything up. Save the manipulation for extras who only watch for ten minutes.”
“Once more: I didn’t have any shots of the freaks!”
“Still, you saw them, and you hid them. That’s like lying.”
Aya groaned, staring into the water. Its surface grew blacker as her dress’s sparkles flickered off one by one. “I messed everything up, didn’t I?”
“Not everything.” His shoulders slumped. “But if you’d told what you saw, we might already know who those people were.”
“How?”
“The wisdom of the crowd, Aya. If a million people look at a puzzle, chances are that one of them knows the answer. Or maybe ten people each know one piece, and that’s enough to put it all together.”
Aya sighed. “I guess so. I just never thought about the feeds that way.”
“That’s because all you ever cared about was getting famous,” Hiro said. “The feeds are more than that. Like I always say, being a kicker is about making sense of the world.”
She rolled her eyes. Just what she needed: a philosophy lesson from her stuck-up older brother. The last sparkles on her dress were sputtering out, the batteries finally expended. “Well, we don’t have any crowds down here. So what do you think they are? Aliens?”
“No, they’re some kind of surge-monkey.” The tapping of Hiro’s fingers against his board echoed through the cavern. “Sort of like real monkeys, actually.”
“How do you mean?” Aya shifted on her board. “I didn’t see any fur.”
“But you saw their toes, right? They were prehensile, like a monkey’s. It’s like they have four hands.”
“But it doesn’t make sense.” Aya sighed. “Why be a surge-monkey if you’re going to hide all the time?”
“I don’t think it’s a fashion statement, Aya. It’s like my immortal crumblies: The surgery means something. There must be some way this all fits together.”
“You mean city-killing weapons, hidden bases, and monkey toes?”
Hiro smiled. “I can see why you had trouble fitting all that into ten minutes.”
They were silent for a while, Aya watching the flicker in Ren’s eyes. Maybe by early morning, the flurry of City Killer kick would have faded a little. People had to sleep sometime, after all, no matter how big a story was. In a few hours, sneaking up to send Tally Youngblood a ping would be easy.
She remembered the year before in ugly school, learning about the origins of the mind-rain: the Smoke, the Specials, the awful Diego War. One common theme ran through all those lessons: Once Tally-sama arrived, the bad guys didn’t stand a chance.
• • •
Time passed strangely in the cavern. Cut off from the city interface, the clock in Aya’s eyescreen didn’t work, but the minutes seemed to crawl. She dozed off once, coming awake in a panic, wondering where she was.
But Frizz was still beside her, sleeping off the effects of the needle. Nestled this close on the board, she could feel his breathing, and his warmth cut the cavern’s chill. Whatever Hiro said about fame protecting her, it felt safer next to Frizz than under the eyes of a million people.
Hiro sat cross-legged on his board, eyes closed and head nodding. Ren’s eyes were open, his eyescreens shimmering like two red fireflies in the air, but he didn’t make a sound.
It seemed like hours later when Frizz began to stir beside her. He sat up halfway and rubbed his neck.
“How do you feel?” she whispered.
“Much better.” He looked around sleepily. “Where are we?”
“Underground.” She squeezed his hand. “Don’t worry. We’ll be safe down here till Tally-sama comes.”
“You brought me here? How did you manage . . . whoa.” For a moment Frizz had started to drift up from the board. “What’s going on?”
Aya sm
iled. “We borrowed a hoverball rig from those freaks. You’re almost weightless.”
He stopped moving, letting himself settle beside her. “You saved me.”
She sighed. “I got you in huge trouble, you mean. If it wasn’t for my truth-slanting, you wouldn’t be in this mess.”
“Truth-slanting?”
“Aya nodded slowly. “Like I said, I saw those freaks ten days ago, but I didn’t know what they were. So I sort of . . . left them out of my story.”
Frizz didn’t say anything, just stared at the black water.
“I think I’m a natural liar,” she finally whispered.
He shook his head. “No, you’re not.”
“I am,” she hissed. “I can’t go ten seconds without slanting the truth. I’m the seventeenth-most-famous person in the city right now, and for what? Tricking a whole clique into thinking I was one of them! And then I couldn’t even kick the story without leaving out something. You must hate me.”
Frizz took a slow breath. “I never told you how I came up with Radical Honesty, did I?”
“I never asked.” Aya sighed. “I pretty much just talked about my own fame obsession.”
“Well, I used to lie . . . constantly,” Frizz said. “Sometimes for a reason, but mostly just for fun. I was always pretending, making up a new Frizz for everyone I met—especially, you know, girls.” He shrugged, his manga eyes glistening in the darkness. “But I started to forget who I really was. That probably sounds weird.”
“Not really,” Aya said. “That’s sort of what happened to me with the Sly Girls. I liked being that person—she was braver than me.”
He shrugged. “Sometimes it’s fun to change yourself. But I wanted to see what it was like without lies. How a relationship works when you can’t hide anything.” He took her hand, sending a tingle through her skin. “What it’s like to do this . . .”
He leaned forward the small distance between their faces, and kissed her.
As they pulled apart, Frizz whispered, “Without lies.”
“Dizzy-making,” Aya breathed. She felt warmth in her face, like a blush, but not shaming. A ghostly echo of Frizz’s lips lingered on hers, and shivers moved across her skin.
“You’re right.” He smiled. “Dizzy-making is what it is.”