“I’d rather be here with you than anywhere else,” he said.
Aya wrapped her arms around his shoulders. His jacket was soaked, ripped down the back from their wild landing, and her sore ribs still throbbed, but she squeezed him hard. “I don’t care what Tally-wa thinks. When you say stuff like that, I’m glad you can’t lie.”
He gently pulled her closer, and their lips met in a kiss. For a moment the buzzing gnats and dripping rain faded around Aya, leaving only Frizz’s shivering warmth in her arms.
There was a sudden thrashing in the trees above. They glanced up.
It was Tally . . . dropping through the air, hands darting out to catch branches and vines, swinging and tumbling from perch to perch, handhold to handhold.
She alighted a few meters away, landing softly among the ferns. For a moment she stared at them, her Cutter features intense and unguarded.
“What’s wrong?” Aya asked, pulling away from Frizz.
“I spotted some inhumans near here.”
“Did they see you?”
“Of course not.” Tally turned away, her face clouded.
“But you’re upset,” Frizz said.
“It’s nothing.”
Aya decided not to ask, but Frizz, of course, had other ideas.
“Our kissing upset you, didn’t it?”
Tally turned to him, shifting from wide-eyed surprise to anger, and then to something else. . . .
“Frizz,” Aya said softly. “I don’t think that Tally-wa cares if we—”
“The last time I kissed someone, I wound up watching him die,” Tally said simply. “And I was just thinking: Dying’s one of those things that can’t be fixed. Not by talking about it, not with all the brain surge in the world.”
Aya swallowed, holding Frizz tighter, her heart pounding.
“I’m sorry, Tally-wa,” he said. “That’s sad.”
“Tell me about it.” She looked away. “I can’t believe I just said that. Is your brain-missing surge contagious or something?”
Aya nodded slowly.
“But you shouldn’t give up kissing,” Frizz said. “Just because of that.”
Tally held his gaze for a moment, then laughed bitterly. “You want to stand here and discuss ancient history?”
“No,” Aya said quickly. “I think we’ve had enough Radical Honesty for the moment.”
“Then follow me,” Tally said.
She spun around and bounded away into the mass of ferns, trees, and mud. Aya stared after her—and sighed.
Wherever they were going, this was going to be a long walk.
RUIN
Keeping up with Tally wasn’t much fun.
Thanks to her Special muscles and reflexes, nothing stopped her—not the giant tangles of brush, the dead trees crumbled into a dozen pieces, or the roaring tumults of rain. She scrambled up trunks to check their route, and leaped across the interlocking web of branches overhead, splayed like a monkey against the sky. As she waited with a bored expression for Aya and Frizz to catch up, the rain and mud slid from her sneak suit, which was camo-mottled into a hundred greens.
Moggle bounced from ruin to ruin, using magnetic fields like stepping-stones. In the few places where the hovercam couldn’t find a way, Aya and Frizz had to carry it through the steaming heat. Tally refused, saying she didn’t like cams. The amazing thing to Aya was how much a soccer-ball-size hunk of lifters, optics, and electronic brains could weigh.
But the worst part was crawling under tangles of hanging tree roots, slithering through mud, and hacking away spiderwebs and vines. Sheets of rotten leaves disintegrated under her hands, and a nest of centipedes scattered from beneath one misplaced foot. The gray light of the cloudy sky barely filtered through the trees, shrouding the jungle floor in constant gloom.
To distract herself, Aya wondered who Tally had been talking about. Lots of people had died in the Diego War, of course, but no Cutters that she could remember. Who else would Tally have been kissing? Everyone else back then was either ugly or a bubblehead. It didn’t make sense.
Tally was so different from normal famous people. If some boyfriend of Nana Love’s had died, everyone in the city would know his name. But Tally was so closed off—even her outbursts of radical honesty were mysterious.
Aya felt a mosquito biting her arm and smashed it flat—too late. Blood was spattered all over its tiny mangled body. She sighed and flicked it away.
“How can Tally-sama stand to live out here?” she muttered to Frizz. “It’s so comfort-missing.”
“I don’t think she cares about comfort,” he grunted. He was carrying Moggle, trying to struggle over a rotting tree trunk without dropping it.
Aya took the hovercam from him. “And apparently she doesn’t like her friends much either. So what does she care about?”
“Well, the planet for one thing.” He dropped back to the muddy earth, and took Moggle back from her. “That’s why we’re out here, remember?”
“Oh, yeah . . . that.” Aya sighed, trudging forward. “I never expected saving the world to be so hot and slime-covering. Are we even going in the right direction? I haven’t seen Tally in ages. She must be off scouting again.”
“Wherever we’re headed, at least there’s some metal around.” Moggle was rising out of his arms, moving ahead eagerly as its lifters found purchase.
They followed the hovercam until the jungle parted before them. At the center of a recently cut clearing, a pair of ancient Rusty spires stood, their steel girders wrapped in vines.
Aya blinked in the sudden brightness; the downpour must have stopped some time before. It was like two different worlds: Back in the jungle the rain still fell, the trees dripping like wet clothes, but out here in the open, rays of sunshine played across the ferns.
With a soft thud, Tally landed beside them.
“Stay quiet,” she said softly, looking up at the towers. “The freaks I saw before are still up there.”
Aya took a step back into the shadows, whispering, “You mean you took us right to them?”
“We need to borrow some transportation. Did you think I was going to watch you two walk across this jungle?”
“Do you want us to get captured again?” Frizz asked.
Tally sighed. “Not with your bubblehead surge. You’d just give everything away.”
“Technically, I’m not a—”
“Just wait here,” Tally said, darting across the clearing and into the undergrowth around the base of the ruins.
Aya peered up at the two towers.
One was much taller than the other, but still not as big as some of the spires she’d glimpsed from the hovercar. But like all Rusty buildings, it was big and simple—childlike square angles, no gaps or moving sections, just a huge column thrusting into the air. Vines climbed its girders, wrapped around them tightly, as if the jungle itself were trying to drag down the vast metal skeleton.
At its summit, she saw three inhumans tending a construction lifter. In their hoverball rigs they looked like swimmers, pushing against the muggy air, their long-toed feet waving like extra pairs of hands.
Frizz pointed. “There she goes.”
Tally was climbing through the center of the taller tower, through gaps in the ancient rotten floors and invading vegetation. She leaped from level to level, boosting herself with her borrowed hoverball rig, as graceful and silent as a cat slinking toward its prey.
“Follow her, Moggle,” Aya whispered. “But stay out of sight.”
She pushed the hovercam forward, and it zipped across the clearing and disappeared into the ruin.
Tally had already reached the top, but the inhumans were too intent on their work to notice her approach. They were guiding the construction lifter’s claws, setting its cutting blades to tear away a large section of girders.
Moggle rose swiftly through the ruin, lenses glinting in stray beams of sunlight. Aya was aching to watch Tally from the hovercam’s point of view, but using her skintenna would give
them away.
The construction lifter’s blades came to life, wild shrieks erupting as whirring teeth bit metal. Stirred by the sudden commotion, clouds of tiny brown birds—bats, Aya realized a moment later—swept out from the darkness inside the spires. Waterfalls of sparks showered out in glittering arcs.
As the sound spilled across the jungle, Tally flew from the cover of the vine-choked ruin, ramming straight into one of the inhumans. The figure crumpled, then spun away from the tower, floating limply through the air.
The other two turned to look, but Tally had already disappeared again, bouncing from the collision to slip back into the ruin. The two inhumans made confused gestures at each other, stirring the air frantically, trying to figure out what had happened.
Tally shot from hiding again, barreling into them. Her blows landed swiftly, sending both spinning through the air.
“Uh-oh,” Frizz said.
He was pointing at Tally’s first victim, who was floating away from the ruins. Drifting farther and farther from the towers’ magnetic field, the figure began to descend. . . .
“You think that’s going to be a soft landing?” Aya asked.
“I doubt it,” Frizz said, stepping out of the shadows and calling upward, “Tally, look!”
But the construction lifter’s blades were still grinding away, the shrieks echoing through the jungle, sparks cascading around Tally as she subdued the other two inhumans.
“She can’t hear you!” Aya cried. “What do we do?”
“Can Moggle get him?” Frizz asked. “Like back in the city, when you and I fell off your board?”
“But Moggle can’t hear us either.”
The inhuman was over the jungle now, descending faster, still spinning and unconscious, headed down toward the trees.
“Then use a ping!” Frizz cried.
“But Tally said we shouldn’t—”
“You have to!”
Aya swallowed, then flexed her ring finger. “Moggle, go catch the freak who’s falling! Quick!”
She cut the connection, hoping the ping hadn’t been long enough to track.
Overhead, Moggle’s tiny outline shot away from the ruin, rushing out toward the tumbling figure. The two shapes met just at the treetops, disappearing into the dense canopy.
“I hope that wasn’t too late,” Frizz murmured.
The sound of the metal-eating blades finally cut off, the last echoes fading into the screams of unsettled birds. The construction lifter pulled a few meters away from the ruins, then began to descend, like a huge pair of claws reaching down toward them.
Tally was at the controls, with two unconscious inhumans aboard.
“Brought you some hoverball rigs!” she shouted down. “They must have a magnetic line around here to carry this scrap metal away. No more walking!”
“Um, that’s great,” Aya called back up. “But did you see what happened with the third one?”
Tally scanned the horizon. “That’s funny. Where’d she go?”
Aya waited another few seconds as the lifter descended, unsure how to explain what she’d done.
Frizz’s Radical Honesty spared her the trouble.
“She went spinning off,” he said. “Past the ruin’s magnetic field.”
“Did she fall?” Tally asked.
Frizz shook his head. “No. We sent Moggle to catch her.”
“Good thinking.” Tally smiled. “I guess sometimes you city kids aren’t completely useless.”
“There’s one problem,” Frizz said. “Moggle was up there in the ruins with you, too far away to hear us. We had to send a ping.”
“You sent a ping?”
He nodded. “It was that or let her fall.”
Aya swallowed, bracing herself for an explosion of Cutter fury.
But Tally’s was voice calm and cold. “You had to send your toy after me, didn’t you? Did it occur to you that a hovercam might have given me away? Or that I might not want everything I do put in some brain-missing feed story?”
“Sorry,” Aya squeaked, still expecting a burst of red-hot anger.
Tally only sighed. “Okay, then we better get moving. They’ll be on their way here soon.”
She knelt and began to strip the hoverball rigs from the two inhumans, tossing a pair of shin pads down to Aya.
“Uh, Tally?” Aya said nervously. “We don’t know how to use these.”
“Just set them to zero-g,” Tally snapped. “I’ll tow you.”
As they strapped the pads on, Aya glanced at where Moggle and the inhuman had fallen. Nothing moved among the treetops except a few birds settling back after the disruption. Aya wished she could check through Moggle’s viewpoint, just to see if the inhuman and her hovercam had survived.
But Tally probably wouldn’t find that idea very happy-making.
Once Aya was suited up, Frizz booted the hoverball rig for her. An eerie weightlessness overtook her body, as if invisible spirits had grasped her arms and legs. She took a step and found herself wafting upward, the breeze gently pushing her along.
“Quit playing around!” Tally ordered. “Grab my hand.”
“But Moggle’s not back yet!”
“Do you think I care? We have to go!”
“But can I ping Moggle to follow us? Otherwise it’ll just wait here!”
“Don’t worry, Aya-la,” Tally said, firmly grasping her wrist. “You’ll still be real, even with no hovercam watching.”
She grabbed Frizz’s offered hand and pulled them both away into the air.
METAL
They shot through the air above the treetops, scanning the skies for any sign of pursuit.
Tally had been right: A skein of thick cables stretched across the jungle canopy, magnetic purchase to carry iron salvaged from the ruins—more than enough metal to carry them. Compared to tons of scrap, three people in hoverball rigs were nothing.
But it was nervous-making, flying without a hoverboard. Eden Maru had made it look easy, but Aya felt wobbly in the lifter rig, like balancing on invisible stilts strapped to her limbs.
More disorienting was Moggle’s absence. Aya’s second set of eyes was lost and alone, probably damaged, falling behind them every second.
And she didn’t even have a button cam.
“See those ruins?” Tally said. “That’s where Shay and Fausto should meet us.”
Ahead and to their right, where a glimpse of ocean glimmered with sunlight, a huge tower rose above the jungle, its summit still lost in the slowly breaking clouds. More skeletal spires clustered around it, all of them in various stages of being dismantled. Even at this distance, Aya could see cascades of sparks spraying out from metal-chewing blades.
Here above the jungle, Aya could see how far the ruins stretched. She remembered that Rusty cities had held populations of ten and twenty million, much bigger than anything in the modern world. And the inhumans were taking it all apart.
“What do they need all this metal for?” Aya said.
Frizz turned to her. “Maybe this is where they make those projectiles you found. They could ship them by mag-lev to their hollowed-out mountains.”
“Nice theory, Frizz-la, but I doubt it’s that simple,” Tally said. “David and I have been all over the planet. Everywhere we go, someone’s been secretly tearing into the ruins, salvaging them faster than the cities can.”
“And it’s always the freaks?” Aya asked.
“As far as we can tell. A friend of ours saw them stripping the big ruins back near my home city. He’s the one who told us about them.” Tally looked back at Aya. “Then he disappeared, like you would’ve if we hadn’t come along.”
“That explains why everyone’s scrambling for metal,” Frizz said. “Our city was even talking about ripping the earth open to find whatever the Rusties left in their mines.”
Tally gave him a cold look. “If they try that, they’ll be getting a visit from the new Special Circumstances.”
She paused for a moment, then sudd
enly pulled them to a halt, dragging them lower into the trees. They sank through dense layers of branches, through tangled vines and sticky expanses of spiderweb.
“What’s wrong?” Aya whispered.
“Someone heard your ping.”
Aya stared up into the fragmented sky, but saw nothing.
The surface of Tally’s sneak suit began to stir, its mottled patches of green camouflage shifting and slithering, as if breaking into separate pieces. Slowly the scales began to spread, crawling across Aya’s coverall. She looked at Frizz, and saw that he too was being enveloped, the sneak suit spreading out like a pair of scaly wings.
“This will hide your infrared,” Tally whispered. “Just don’t move.”
A shadow moved in the jungle, blocking out the scattered shafts of sunlight filtering through the leaves. Before the sneak suit covered her face, Aya glimpsed its source—a pair of hovercars passing slowly overhead.
A creaking sound filled the jungle, cables sagging as the cars’ weight pressed against them. Birds scattered, the air full of fluttering green wings for a moment. Aya could feel her hoverball rig trembling as the magnetic currents built, her hair crackling.
The cars seemed to pause overhead, and Aya heard voices—probably freaks in hoverball rigs gliding alongside, looking down into the jungle. She focused on the ground below, trying not to breathe.
But finally the shadows floated past, the creaking of the jungle slipping into the distance.
Long seconds after the sound had faded, Tally released Aya and Frizz. Her suit folded around her body again, slivers of Tally’s skin showing as it restructured itself. Aya glimpsed rows of thin scars lining her arms.
“That’s why we can’t use pings,” Tally said.
“You know, they also might have noticed you beating up their workers,” Aya said, taking a painful breath. Tally’s grasp had left her feeling like a crumpled piece of paper.
“Good point.” Tally smiled. “But they know we’re somewhere on this line. We have to stay down here until those cars are out of sight.”
They floated there, listening to the constant insect buzz of the jungle. Aya was growing more comfortable in the hoverball rig. She practiced stirring the air like the inhumans did, drifting in the cool treetop breezes.