Extras

Captive Audience

The whole world was dizzy-making.

Everything spun and whirled, dreamlike and unsteady beneath her. A confusion of anger, exhilaration, and terror tumbled through her thoughts, cut with the cold taste of betrayal. All five senses blurred into a constant roar, as if every certainty had tangled.

Then a sudden focus: a mote of pain amid the jumble of sensations. Something fierce stabbing her shoulder, rushing red-hot through her veins Aya Fuse came suddenly awake.

"No!" She sat bolt upright, the sudden fury roiling through her, but strong hands pushed her back down.

"Don't yell," someone said. "We're supposed to be asleep."

Asleep? But Aya's heart was pounding, her blood sizzling with energy. Her body convulsed, hands flexing and clawing at the hard metal floor beneath her.

A shuddering moment later, her vision finally cleared.

An ugly face looked down at Aya. Two fingers reached out and carefully pulled her eyes wider—checking one, then the other.

"Try to relax. I think I gave you too much."

"Too much what?" Aya asked breathlessly.

"Wake-up juice," the ugly girl said. "You'll be okay in a minute, though."

Aya lay there, her heart pounding, the burning sensation fading in her shoulder. She took steadying breaths, waiting until reality stopped spinning.

But steady was a relative concept. As her body soaked up the mad energy that had possessed her, Aya gradually realized where she was: the cargo hold of a large hovercar that was passing through a violent storm. The frame shuddered, the metal floor bucking beneath her, and rain battered the windows.

Lifting fans shrieked as they fought to keep the craft level, adding their cacophony to the howling wind.

In the dim and shifting light, it took Aya a moment to remember that the ugly girl who'd awakened her was in disguise.

"Tally Youngblood," she breathed. "You're a truth-slanting, trust-wrecking waste of gravity!"

Tally chuckled. "I'm glad that was in Japanese, Aya-la. Because it didn't sound very respectful."

Aya squeezed her eyes shut, forcing the sticky gears of her mind to switch to English. "You…lied to us."

"I never lied," Tally said calmly. "I just didn't explain the details of our plan."

"You call this a detail!"

Aya looked around the dark, storm-tossed hold. A windowless metal door separated them from the drivers' cabin. The walls were lined with cargo webbing, which twisted and swung with the rocking of the car. The air was hot and muggy, and Aya felt trickles of sweat inside her heavy coverall. "We trusted you, and you got us captured by those freaks! On purpose!"

"Sorry, Aya-la. But explaining our plans to some feed-happy random didn't seem like a very icy idea. This was our one chance to find out where these kidnappers come from. We couldn't risk you turning it into your next big story."

"I never would have done that!"

"That's what you told the Sly Girls."

Aya's mouth opened, but no words came out. Her fury began to rise again, the last dregs of wake-up juice boiling in her blood. Why was Tally twisting everything?

"That was totally different!" she finally managed. "I may have misled the Sly Girls, but I didn't use anyone as bait."

"Not as bait, but you did use them, Aya-la. And we had to do the same to you."

"But you lied to us!"

Tally shrugged. "What did you say in your interview? 'Sometimes you have to lie to find the truth.'" Aya found herself speech-missing again, appalled to have her own words used against her. But then she remembered who'd said them first—Frizz. The last she'd seen of him, he'd been spinning toward the ground on Fausto's board.

"My friends … are they okay?"

"Relax. Everyone's fine." Tally moved aside.

Aya pulled herself up, leaning back against the shuddering hovercar wall. Shay and Fausto sat cross-legged on the other side of the hold, with Hiro curled between them, still unconscious. Ren's long form stretched down the middle of the cabin, snoring happily.

Frizz lay next to Aya, absolutely still. She rolled closer and squeezed his hand…but he didn't respond.

"Are you sure he's all right?" Aya asked. "Frizz got stuck with those needles twice last night."

"I already countered the nanos they stuck you with. He's just asleep." Tally pulled her sleeve up and glanced at the flash tattoos on her arm. The patterns there were laid out like an interface, not mere decoration. "You've all been out for six hours, which seems a little excessive to me. Do you always sleep till noon?"

The hovercar lurched, setting off Aya's accumulated aches and bruises. Her muscles were sore after the hours of crouching in the reservoir, fleeing paparazzi, and sleeping on a shuddering metal floor.

"No, we don't. We were pretty exhausted after running around all night, waiting for you to rescue us."

She spat the last two words.

"Listen, Aya-la. Believe it or not, you're safer here with us than back in your city. The freaks would have snatched you sooner or later—they always do. At least this way we're around to protect you."

Aya snorted. "And you've been doing a great job at that so far."

"You look like you're in one piece to me." Tally's eyes narrowed. "So far."

"But how do you think this feels?" Aya cried. "You're the most famous person in the world, and you used us!"

"How do I think it feels?" Tally leaned in closer, her black eyes glowing with sudden intensity. "I know what it's like to be manipulated, Aya-la. And I know what it's like to be in danger. While your city was building you mansions to live in, my friends and I have been protecting this planet. We've spilled more blood than you have flowing in your veins. So don't try to make me feel guilty!"

Aya shrank away. For a few terrible seconds, she'd glimpsed the Special face behind the mask, and heard the razors in Tally's voice. She remembered the shudder-making rumors back in school about what the word "Cutters" really meant.

Suddenly, she believed them.

"Stay icy, Tally-wa," Shay said from across the cargo hold. "The randoms are fragile, and we still need their help."

The anger faded from Tally's face, and she slumped back against the cargo webbing, as if exhausted by the outburst. Suddenly she looked like an ordinary ugly again. "Okay, but you talk to her.

She's making me less than icy."

Shay turned to Aya, spreading her hands. "I understand your annoyance, Aya-la. You know that feeling you're having about Tally right now? Let's just say I've had that feeling before. A few times."

Tally smiled. "You couldn't live without me, Shay-la."

"I was living without you," Shay said. "The rest of us Cutters were having a great time in Diego, until you showed up with this brain-missing plan."

"Brain-missing?" Aya looked from Shay to Tally. "But you're friends, I thought."

"Best friends forever," Shay said softly. "It's just that getting captured by a bunch of freaks isn't my idea of fun. How about you, Fausto? You like being stuck in this brain-rattling hovercar?"

"Loving every minute of it," he said absently, shifting his sneak suit through different dorm plaids, as if he didn't want to get involved.

"I don't remember you having a better idea," Tally said.

"I had plenty of ideas." Shay turned back to Aya. "But I've learned that when Tally gets a plan in her head, it's easier just to go along. Otherwise, you'll find out that Tally can be very, very special."

Aya swallowed, wondering if her English had been scrambled by whatever the inhumans had stabbed her with. The conversation had started her head spinning again. The Cutters were so different from how merit-rich, world-saving, famous people were supposed to be.

"By 'special'… do you mean something bad or good?" she asked.

"Not bad or good. Just special." Shay shrugged. "Tally's someone who makes things happen, that's all, and the easiest thing is just to play along. So are you going to be a good little random and help us?"

"But you're the Cutters!" Aya said. "You ended the Prettytime, and I'm fifteen. How am I supposed to help you?"

Shay smiled. "Well, from the rough translation we saw of your story, you seem to be pretty good at fooling people."

Aya sighed. "Thanks for the reminder."

"You're welcome," Shay said. "All we're asking is for you to lie a little more. Explain to our surge-crazy captors why a bunch of foreign uglies were trying to sneak you out of the city." She pointed at her ugly mask. "These disguises won't hold up if they get suspicious."

Aya frowned, slowly realizing how tricky this was going to be. "But you don't even speak Japanese."

"I'm sure you'll think of some explanation," Shay said, then laughed. "Just imagine the great story you'll get out of it. Honorary Cutter!"

Aya nodded slowly. It would be an amazing story: an ugly drawn into helping the Cutters save the world. Plus, she could show what the famous Tally Youngblood was really like.

"But I don't even have a spycam. Stories don't mean anything without shots."

"Are you sure about that? Check your eyescreen."

Aya flexed her ring finger. The familiar feeds were all missing, but a few signals hovered at the edge of her vision: an unrecognizable language from some passing city fragments of the hovercar's interface beneath layers of security. And in its corner, her last known face rank captured as they'd shot through the flash-bombed hovercams: eight.

"I made the top ten," she said softly.

Then she saw it: Moggle's signal, its power minimized but steady, coming from only meters away.

Her eyes widened. "Moggles stuck to the bottom of the car."

"Yep. It snuck under there while they were loading us on," Shay said. "Pretty clever little hovercam you've got there."

Aya looked down at Ren's sleeping form. "It's his mods, not mine."

"Smart boy."

"Okay, you've got a story," Tally said. "So is it worth your time to help us save the world?"

"You promise to protect us?"

"Yeah," Tally said. "I promise."

Aya took a slow breath, remembering Lai's words on the sled.

"Sure, I'll help. I happen to like the world, after all."

"That's just bubbly of you, Aya-la," Shay said. "Now what about your friends? Are they going to be a problem?"

"No, I'm sure they'll help too." Aya took Frizz's hand, wondering if she should wake the rest of them up. It was best if they all learned what was going on now, before anyone had a chance to give everything away.

Aya looked down at Frizz, her eyes widening. He was beginning to stir at her touch, a soft moan escaping his lips…his beautiful lips that could speak nothing but the truth.

And suddenly Aya realized that now was not the best time for Radical Honesty.

Advanced English

"Aya?" Frizz murmured softly, his eyes fluttering open. "Is that you?"

"Yeah, it's me." She leaned closer. "Are you okay?"

"I think I'm covered in bruises," Frizz answered. "And I know I'm very upset with Tally Youngblood."

Aya squeezed his hand, unsure how much to tell him about their situation. After what Shay had said, she wondered what Tally would do to Frizz if she found out that his brain surge threatened her plans.

Knock him out again? Toss him out of the hovercar?

Aya decided that she needed help with this.

She turned to Shay. "Wake those two up, Shay-la? I might as well explain everything at once."

Shay nodded, then nudged Hiro and Ren. They came awake slowly, their eyes sweeping around the shuddering cargo hold in disbelief.

"What happened?" Hiro said, sitting up. His lifter rig had been removed, and his party clothes were rumpled beyond repair.

Aya helped Frizz sit up, then gestured the others closer. When they were huddled together, she spoke in rapid Japanese.

"They used us as bait, and let us all get captured. So I guess we're headed to wherever those freaks come from."

Ren glanced at Shay. "So that's the real reason they're in disguise."

"Yeah. And now they need our help," Aya said. "They want to sneak into the inhumans' base without anyone knowing who they are. We have to pretend they're friends of ours."

"Are they brain-missing?" Hiro cried. "How dare they drag us into this?"

Aya turned to him and shrugged. "I guess Tally's so famous she thinks she can do anything."

"Well, I'm not helping them." Hiro crossed his arms. "Not after they got us kidnapped on purpose!"

"But we wouldn't just be helping than" Frizz said. "Tally said there were more mass drivers.

Lots. Don't you think that somewhere there might be a cylinder pointed at our city, Hiro? Maybe programmed to take out your mansion?"

"Well, maybe," Hiro mumbled, casting an annoyed look at Tally.

"And don't you think this will make a better story if we help them?" Aya asked. "They want us to be sort of … honorary Cutters."

"Honorary Cutters?" Ren whispered. "That would be a pretty big story."

Hiro shook his head. "Pretty crappy story without cams."

"Not to worry," Aya said. "Moggle is still with us, stuck to the bottom of this car."

"Moggle did that while we were all knocked out?" Ren laughed. "My mods rule!"

Aya nodded. "So what do you say, Hiro? Do we kick this?"

The hovercar hit a patch of serious turbulence, dropping out from under them for a moment.

They all lifted into the air, then came down hard against the metal floor. But Hiro just sat there as though the storm wasn't happening, thinking hard.

Finally he nodded. "Okay, but we all kick our stories at the same time. And everyone gets to use any of Moggle's shots they want."

"Agreed," Aya said.

"You two are very strange sometimes," Frizz said. "Can I point out that how you kick this story is not our biggest problem."

Aya sighed. "You're right about that."

Ren's excited expression fell, and he let out a slow breath. "Radical Honesty."

"So what?" Hiro said. "Can't you just keep quiet?"

Frizz shook his head. "I can't even keep a surprise party a secret. How am I supposed to hide the fact that the world's most famous person is standing next to me in disguise?"

"You can't keep a birthday party secret?" Hiro said. "Okay, Radical Honesty is officially the most brain-missing clique I've ever heard of!"

"Well, when I came up with it, I wasn't planning on sneaking Tally Youngblood into someplace full of aliens, okay?" Frizz cried. "And neither were you, until you found out you could kick the story!"

"What's your point?" Hiro asked.

"There's one more thing," Aya interrupted. "I think Tally's a little…unstable."

Hiro and Ren looked at her like they thought she was kidding, but Frizz nodded. "When I first got the idea for Radical Honesty, I spent some time studying the history of brain surge. Not just the bubbleheads, but everything, including what Tally's city did to Specials." Frizz glanced at the three Cutters. "They could be deadly when people got in their way. Their motto was, 'I don't want to hurt you, but I will if I have to.' And they did. They even killed people."

Hiro gave Aya a sidelong glance. "And you want us to be 'Honorary Cutters'?"

"But I thought they were all cured," she said.

Frizz nodded. "Most of them were completely despecialized. But the Cutters who'd protected Diego in the war were allowed to keep their reflexes and strength, because their brains were cured." He leaned in closer. "But Tally Youngblood never changed at all. She didn't want anyone 'rewiring' her, she said—that's why she disappeared into the wild."

"Crap," Ren said. "They really don't tell it that way on the history feeds."

Aya swallowed. This was much worse than she'd thought.

She turned to Frizz. "So you understand the problem? You can't let Tally know about Radical Honesty. There's no telling what she'll do if she finds out you could ruin her plans."

Frizz's eyebrows rose. "So let me get this straight, Aya-chan. You want me, a person who can't lie, to lie about the fact that I can't lie?"

"We need another plan," Hiro said.

"What about the language barrier?" Ren said. "Maybe you could just tell her everything…but in Japanese."

Frizz shook his head. "It doesn't work that way, Ren. Speaking the wrong language is just another way of hiding the truth. I can't deceive people."

"But couldn't you, sort of, forget they don't speak Japanese?" Ren asked.

"I can't lie to myself any more than I can to them." Frizz groaned with frustration. "The more we talk about this, the more I'll think about it. And the more I think about it, the more I'll need to let them know we have a secret!"

He groaned again, looking in Tally's direction.

Tally returned his gaze. "So how's that going over there? Coming to any decisions?"

In perfect English, Frizz said, "They don't want me to talk to you!" He choked to a halt, clamping both hands over his mouth.

Tally raised an eyebrow. "What?"

"Nothing!" Aya said in English. "We're still discussing everything, that's all."

Shay gestured with her chin. "Well, you better hurry up. Looks like someone's coming to visit."

Aya looked up and saw that the metal door to the drivers' cabin was swinging open.

Oh, great, she thought.

More people for Frizz to talk to.

Udzir

Two of the inhumans floated in.

Even here inside the car, they wore their hoverball rigs. The man glided across the cargo hold over their heads. The other, a woman, waited, hands grasping the edges of the doorway, fingertips glistening with needles. Behind her Aya could see the drivers' cabin, where two more inhumans were seated at the car's controls.

This close, the freakish faces were even more unsettling. The inhumans' eyes were so far apart that they seemed to point in different directions, like the gaze of a fish. The floating man took them all in without turning his head, fixing Aya with one steely eye. He kept himself in place by stirring the hot, muggy air with his hands and strange bare feet.

"I see you are awake," he said. "And no one is injured?"

His Japanese was imperfect—Aya realized that after six hours in flight the hovercar could be anywhere in Asia. She wondered where the inhumans really came from.

"We're all in one piece," she said. "But not very happy."

"We did not expect to have to take seven of you," he answered, performing a little midair bow.

"We apologize for any discomfort."

"Discomfort!" Hiro cried. "You kidnapped us!"

The inhuman nodded, an expression of regret passing over his strange features. "It is necessary to hide ourselves for the moment. You have to be silenced."

"Silenced?" Aya said, swallowing. "You mean you're going to kill us?"

"No, indeed! And I am sorry for my Japanese," he said. "I only mean you cannot communicate with your home. But very soon there will be no more need for secrecy, and you may return."

"Why can't we go now?" Aya asked.

"We land shortly, then we can explain everything," he said. "In the meantime, my name is Udzir.

May I ask yours?"

Aya paused for a moment, then bowed and introduced herself. Ren and Hiro followed suit. The Cutters got the hint, giving false names when Udzir turned to them.

But his stare lingered on Tally.

"You do not seem like the others," he said.

Aya wondered exactly what he meant. Back in the Prettytime, the Global Concord Committee had averaged the different regions of the world, and the crazy surgery since the mind-rain had only further confused the old Rusty genetic categories. But uglies still showed their heritage, and the Cutters' smart-plastic masks didn't look particularly Asian.

But Udzir was singling Tally out—had he glimpsed a hint of uncured Special in her eyes?

"It's true," Frizz said through gritted teeth. "She isn't like the rest of us."

Aya snapped out of her silence. "What Frizz means is that our friends are students from another city. They don't speak Japanese very well."

"They don't speak it at all!" Frizz proclaimed. Aya squeezed his hand, willing him to stay silent.

"English, then?" Udzir switched effortlessly.

Tally nodded. "Yes, English is better. Did you say where we're going?"

"You will see soon."

"We've been flying south for hours," Fausto said. "And it's pretty hot. We must be near the equator."

Udzir nodded, smiling. "And you are very good students, I see. Let me reward your cleverness: We will soon land on an island that the Rusties called Singapore."

Aya frowned, trying to remember her geography. The name wasn't ringing any bells, but there were hundreds of Rusty cities that had been lost. At least the change in subject had quieted Frizz's need for Radical Honesty.

The hovercar was descending now, the ride growing rougher as clouds darkened the windows.

The hold began to pitch from side to side, setting the cargo straps swinging. Aya felt her stomach lurch, and was suddenly glad she hadn't eaten anything since dinner the night before.

Tally, Fausto, and Shay seemed unfazed by the turbulence. They shifted their weight like hoverboard riders, compensating for every movement of the car. It was as if they'd learned to read the storm's howls and anticipate the next assault of the wind.

Udzir, unperturbed in midair, looked down at the Cutters with renewed interest. "You've ridden in a tropical storm before?"

"We travel a lot," Tally said simply.

"I noticed your hoverboards were made to fly in the wild. Most unusual, especially for uglies."

"Really?" Shay said. "They're all the rage where we come from."

Frizz tensed up beside Aya, and she dug her fingernails into his hand.

"Which is where, exactly?" Udzir asked.

"We're from Diego," Shay said, and Aya felt Frizz relaxing a little at the sound of the truth.

"A city known for its forward-looking nature," Udzir said approvingly. "Perhaps you will appreciate our project."

"Which is what?" Tally asked.

"When we land," the man said. The hovercar banked suddenly, and he glanced toward the drivers' cabin. "As you will all realize very soon now. If you wish to take a look at our home, you may."

"Why not?" Tally said. She pulled herself up and peered down through one of the tiny windows.

The other Cutters followed suit.

Moggle was probably shooting from the bottom of the car, but Aya decided to take a look herself. She gulped a deep breath of the dense, muggy air to fight the nausea rising in her stomach, and pulled herself up by the cargo webbing.

"Be careful, Aya," Frizz said.

She nodded, gaining her feet unsteadily. The window was small and streaked with rain, the plastic thick and vision-warping.

The car was passing through a layer of clouds, the window revealing nothing but a dark gray mass and streaks of rain. But gradually the clouds grew thinner, boiling away into tendrils as the car descended.

The view cleared, the hovercar abruptly steadying.

A steely gray ceiling hung just above them, a solid sheet of clouds. Beneath the storm a dense rain forest spread out all the way to a shimmering glimpse of ocean. The mass of jungle was wrapped around the largest rums she'd ever seen. Clusters of huge towers reared up from the wind-whipped treetops, their metal skeletons disappearing into the clouds.

Even with the storm raging, construction lifters were attached to the ancient Rusty buildings, grasping iron beams like birds of prey, as if waiting for a break in the weather to tear them apart.

The car banked hard, tipping the view in a dizzy-making way, the Rusty towers disappearing.

Now Aya could see a broad clearing cut from the jungle. A hoverport sprawled out beneath her—hundreds of cars and heavy lifters arrayed across a landing field, mag-lev lines converging from every direction on a central station.

"This is huge," Tally breathed.

"Yes," Udzir said. "We are very proud of all we've done."

"But you're clear-cutting the jungle!" Tally said, and Aya heard razors in her voice.

"We serve a greater cause," Udzir said. "Once you see more, you will understand the sacrifices we've made."

The car banked harder, gyrating around the port like a tiny boat being sucked into a giant whirlpool, and more structures rotated into Aya's view. Long storehouses, prefab housing, automated factories all jumbled together without rhyme or reason. Figures darted among them, wearing heavy plastic coats against the rain…and flying.

None of them walked—they glided from place to place, pushing from poles driven into the ground, gripping with hands and feet to fight the wind.

Aya turned from the window and sank back to the metal floor, her nausea rising again.

"What is it?" Frizz asked.

"You were right, Ren," she said softly. "There really is a whole city of them."

"We're not a city," Udzir said. "We are a movement."

"Sounds bubbly," Tally said. "What kind of movement?"

Udzir spun himself in midair, reaching out a hand to grasp the webbing on the cabin's ceiling.

"We're saving the world from humanity. Perhaps you'll want to join us."

Tally smiled. "Maybe we will."

"I doubt that," Frizz muttered.

Aya recognized the pained look from when Frizz had been trying not to blurt out her face rank; he was about to explode! If only Udzir would shut up and go back into the drivers' cabin.

But both inhumans were looking at Frizz curiously now, as if he'd said one radically honest thing too many.

"Your cities are expanding across the wild like a brushfire, young man," Udzir said. "So don't judge us before you know our purposes."

"I'm not judging you," he said, squeezing Aya's hand so hard it hurt.

Udzir frowned. "Then what exactly are you doing?"

"He's just airsick," Aya said.

"I'm not airsick!" Frizz's voice was choked. "I'm trying not to tell you everything!"

"What the …?" Shay began.

"What are you trying not to tell us?" Udzir said sharply.

Aya saw Frizz's willpower failing, and she reached out to try and stop him. But one of her hands was clenched in his, the other tangled in cargo webbing.

"That this is Tally Youngblood!" Frizz burst out. "And she's here to take you down!"

Hard Landing

For a moment no one said anything.

Then Shay broke the silence, yelling at Frizz, "You bogus little moron!"

Tally launched herself across the cargo hold, flying beneath Udzir and into the woman hovering at the door. As she flew, her face seemed to explode, the smart-plastic disguise vanishing in an angry puff.

The woman swung her needle-tipped fingers, but Tally snatched her wrists and propelled a shoulder into the woman's stomach. She crumpled instantly, and Tally rolled past her into the drivers' cabin.

Across the hold, Shay rose almost casually to punch Udzir in the face. As he spun in midair, she slipped past his flailing limbs and after Tally.

Fausto stood up, his mask bursting from his face to reveal cruel-pretty features.

"I don't want to hurt you," he announced. "But nobody move."

"We're not moving!" Hiro said.

Aya turned to Frizz, whose face was pale. "Are you okay?"

"I'm sorry," he said. "I couldn't stop myself."

Suddenly the hovercar banked, twisting into a violent turn. Udzir's unconscious body crashed against the ceiling, then bounced back into the middle of the hold, spinning in midair. As Aya gripped the cargo webbing, her stomach lurching toward her mouth, she realized that he wasn't really spinning—he was steady in the air, the hovercar spinning around him Shay appeared at the drivers' cabin door, shoving the crumpled inhuman woman out of her way.

"A quick question," she said, bracing herself in the frame. "Do any of you bubbleheads know how to fly a hovercar?"

"What?" Aya cried. "Don't you?"

Shay spread her hands. "What are we supposed to be? Magic?"

The car pitched into a wild climb, and the two weightless inhumans went tumbling again, their limbs flopping like rag dolls. The needle-tipped fingers of the woman whizzed past Aya's face, missing her by a few centimeters.

"Someone grab her!" Aya shouted.

Frizz reached out and snagged the woman's leg, which snapped her body down against the cabin floor with a sickening thud.

"Oops, sorry," he said.

"You'd think Tally would have asked before she knocked out the drivers," Shay said from the doorway. "But that's Tally for you."

"Get in here and help me!" called Tally's voice. Shay turned and disappeared as the hovercar went into another series of wild spins, dropping again.

Fausto leaped across the hold, grabbing the unconscious woman. He guided her into the cargo webbing, making sure her needle fingers weren't exposed.

The car dipped and twisted, the hold spinning all the way around every few seconds. But Fausto gathered and secured Udzir's body easily. He darted across the tumbling surfaces, stepping from wall to floor to ceiling, like a littlie playing in a funhouse.

The lifting fans shrieked unhappily, drowning out the howl of the wind. Aya clutched the cargo webbing with white knuckles, barely keeping her grip. Gravity twisted around her, like some wild animal trying to pry her from the wall.

Then suddenly the car leveled out, the scream of the lifting fans settling into a steady roar. At last the floor of the cargo hold felt like down again.

Shay appeared in the doorway. "Everyone okay?"

"More or less," Fausto said. "Took you long enough to find the autopilot."

"I wish we hadn't," Shay said. "It's programmed to take us straight into their hoverport. And it looks like the drivers got off a warning, so they'll be expecting us. We have to jump. Everyone's got crash bracelets, right?"

"Sure, but are we still over their city?" Fausto asked.

"After all that craziness?" Shay said. "Kilometers away. But there's plenty of Rusty metal down there, as far as we can tell."

Fausto's eyes widened. "Are you kidding? Isn't that a little risky?"

Shay shrugged. "Safer than staying in here."

"At this speed, we'll need more than crash bracelets." Fausto knelt and stripped the forearm lifter pads from Udzir, tossing them to Shay.

She strapped them on, turning to Ren. "Come on, you and me first."

"We're jumping out into a storm, with only ruins to catch us?" he cried. "But that's brain-missing!"

She laughed. "You'd rather wind up with a bunch of insane surge-monkeys? Are you thinking of joining them?"

Ren groaned, then started to unwind himself from the cargo webbing.

"Open the side door!" Shay called to Tally. "And we'll see you at the usual place!"

The wall behind Aya and Frizz began to move. They scrambled away, suddenly doused by driving rain, the wind tearing at their clothes and hair. As the door opened, the hovercar lost its stability again, shivers passing through its frame, the storm rushing greedily inside.

In the hard gray light that spilled into the cargo hold, Aya saw how close they'd come to crashing—the tops of storm-tossed trees were shooting past, their highest branches whipping the underside of the car.

"Ready?" Shay yelled against the wind.

Ren nodded, and she wrapped her arms around him, jumping through the sliding door with a wild and wordless cry.

"Our turn, Hiro!" Fausto said as he stood up, the inhuman woman's lifter pads hastily strapped onto his forearms.

"This better work!" Hiro cried, then turned to Aya. "Good luck, and don't forget Moggle."

Fausto grabbed Hiro and yanked him out of the hovercar, the two of them disappearing into the driving rain without a sound.

"But there's two of us left," Frizz said. "And only…" "Me," Tally said. She stood in the doorway of the drivers' cabin, slipping on a hoverball shin pad.

"Lucky those freaks all wear these things. I think they can't walk on those feet of theirs."

"You can carry us both?" Aya asked.

Tally scowled. "Why should we take this moron? He betrayed us!"

"But he can't help it!" Aya cried.

"What is he, brain-missing?"

"No," Frizz said. "I just have to tell the truth."

"You have to do what?"

"Radical Honesty," Frizz said. "It's a kind of brain surge."

Tally's eyes narrowed. "Wow. Your city is officially the weirdest place on Earth. Why would they do something like that to you?"

Aya tried to think of something distracting to say, but Frizz was already explaining, "I asked for the surge. I designed it, actually."

"You mean you're a voluntary bubblehead? That's it—I'm leaving you behind. Come on, Aya—there's no time to argue!"

Aya struggled out of Tally's grip. "You can't just leave him here! Those freaks will get him!"

"So? He's a freak too. And this is dangerous enough with only two of us!"

"I'm not a bubblehead," Frizz said. "But she's right, Aya. You'll be safer without me. Leave me!"

"Crap," Tally growled. "You just had to say that!"

She grabbed them both, then jumped.

At this speed the rain felt hard as stones.

"Moggle!" Aya yelled as they tumbled away from the hovercar. "Follow me!"

Then the treetops hit—wet ferns whipping and slapping at her face and hands, branches crunching as they tumbled through the air. Tally's grip around Aya was lung-crushing, the gray light spinning into darkness as they dropped beneath the canopy of jungle.

The roar of the hovercar slipped away, and Tally twisted next to Aya, the borrowed hoverball rig straining to maneuver among tree trunks and shafts of rusty iron. Aya felt magnetic forces wrenching at her crash bracelets—the three of them rose up above the trees again in a shallow hover-bounce, like a speeding rock skipping off water.

They dropped again, tearing through tangled vines and ferns, every obstruction heavy with rain.

Aya felt thorns tearing at her clothes and hair—then suddenly the forces in her crash bracelets disappeared, and the Earth itself crashed up against her.

They hit at a shallow angle, tumbling through brush and leaves, skidding across meters of thick, wet mud. She felt her ribs cracking in Tally's grip, her breath forced from her like a punch to the gut.

Finally they slid and rolled to a halt.

Aya took deep, painful breaths, slowly opening her eyes.

Above her, vast flocks of birds were wheeling, scattering away from their wild and unexpected arrival. The jungle was dense down here, the sky almost completely hidden. Aya could actually see the path their sidelong fall had taken, a tunnel of wrecked branches that stretched away into the distance.

Water still spilled from the leaves and ferns they had shaken in passing, as if the storm had followed them down.

"You two okay?" Tally asked.

"Uh," Aya managed. It hurt to breathe.

"Let me guess," Frizz said. "We ran out of metal."

"Barely enough," Tally said. "Any less and we would have splatted."

"We did splat," Aya grunted. Her soaking hair was tangled around her face, leaves and ferns and mud plastered over every inch of her body.

Tally raised herself into a crouch, pointing up at a towering structure that stretched up beside them. "Yeah, but if we hadn't fallen past that, we'd be paste right now. Whatever those freaks are up to includes salvaging all the ground-level metal from these ruins."

Aya groaned, sitting up slowly. If they'd almost crashed, what about…?

She started to flex her ring finger.

"No pings!" Tally snapped, grabbing her wrist. "You'll give us away. Besides, we must be a few kilometers from the others. Much too far for your skintenna to carry."

"But they could be hurt!"

Frizz took Aya's hand, pulling it gently from Tally's grip. "Fausto and Shay were only carrying one passenger each. They probably had a softer landing than the three of us."

"Probably? You mean if they didn't fly straight into a tree!" she cried, but resisted the urge to boot her eyescreen. She scanned the jungle, wondering if Moggle had found enough metal to come down soft. "You mind if I yell, at least?"

Tally shrugged. "Go ahead."

Aya sucked in a deep breath and yelled, "Moggle!"

From the depths of the jungle, she spotted an answering flash of night-lights. Through the ferns and hanging vines, she saw the hovercam making its way toward them, weaving from side to side, its lifters grasping whatever metal was left in the ground.

"Did you get that fall?" she called.

The night-lights flashed once more, and Aya smiled.

Ren's mods had pulled through once again.

Jungle

Aya had never realized how annoying the wild could be.

The jungle was unimaginably hot, snarled, and logic-missing. Every direction was blocked by massive roots that spilled down from the trees. Spiderwebs glistened among the ferns, and the humid air was choked with clouds of insects. Ankle-grabbing vines covered the ground, which the rain had turned into a maze of waterfalls, rivulets, and mudslides. Her Ranger coverall was having trouble staying slime-resistant, and Frizz's clothes—the formals he'd worn to the tech-head bash last night—were threatening to fall apart.

The dense plant life had only one redeeming feature: It made the downpour bearable. Though the rain found its way steadily to the jungle floor, streaming down tree trunks and dripping from saturated leaves, at least it wasn't battering her on the head.

It was amazing that any of the Rusty ruins had survived in this climate, but Aya glimpsed the metal skeletons of ancient buildings among the trees. They were wrapped in vines and ferns, the jungle at work tearing apart their straight lines and right angles.

"Where are we headed, anyway?" Frizz asked. "How do we find the others without pings?"

"Shay said the usual place," Tally said.

"Usual?" Aya waved a mosquito away from her nose. "I thought you'd never been here before."

"She meant the tallest tower in the ruins." A smile played on Tally's lips. "That's where we always met people back in ugly days."

Frizz frowned, and Aya felt a radically honest moment coming on.

"You and Shay are logic-missing," he said. "Sometimes you're like best friends, other times you seem to hate each other."

"Maybe that's because sometimes we're best friends," Tally said. "And other times we hate each other."

"I don't understand," Frizz said.

Tally sighed. "Back in the Prettytime, we kept winding up on opposite sides. It wasn't because we wanted to fight, but people kept rewiring us, manipulating us to betray each other." Her voice grew softer. "I guess we kind of got stuck that way."

"But when the mass driver story kicked, you called her to help," Frizz said. "So she's your friend, right?"

"Of course she is—she saved me from life as a bubblehead, along with everyone else in the world. But along the way, we had a lot of fights." Tally's eyes narrowed at Frizz. "That's why your brain surge freaks me out. Bad things can happen when other people rewire you. Stuff you can't fix later."

"Maybe you could fix things," Frizz said, "if you talked with people instead of running off into the wild."

Tally's eyebrows rose, and Aya said hastily, "Maybe we should figure out where we're going, and leave this for later."

"Let me get this straight," Tally said to Frizz. "You had to get brain surge just so you could talk about things!"

"I used to lie all the time," he said. "I couldn't trust myself, so I had to change."

"That's so courage-missing!" Tally said. "Couldn't you just learn to tell the truth?"

"Truth-telling what I'm learning, Tally."

is "But you aren't making a choice!" Tally pointed at her temple. "I've still got Special wiring in my head, but I fight it every day."

"And sometimes you lose, I've noticed," Frizz said.

Tally's lips curled. "You haven't seen me really lose it, bubblehead. You better hope you never do."

"Technically, I'm not a—" Aya stepped between them. "Maybe instead of comparing brain surge, we should figure out which way to go? The rain's clearing a little."

Tally glared at Frizz for a long moment, then looked up. The steady drumbeat of rain on the leaves above had lessened.

"Fine with me," she spat.

She spun away and bounded toward the nearest tree, launching herself at its trunk and scrambling up toward the treetops. Frizz and Aya watched in silence—it was mesmerizing when Tally moved quickly, slipping through the ferns with deadly grace, scuttling along branches that seemed hardly strong enough to hold her weight.

"I keep upsetting her," Frizz said.

Aya sighed. "I guess Tally and Radical Honesty don't mix. She and Shay have been through a lot.

They fought a war when they were our age, after all."

He dropped his eyes from the treetops. "What if she's right? Maybe I'm just too lazy to tell the truth without surge."

"You're not lazy, Frizz. Not everyone starts their own clique."

"Maybe," he said, slapping a mosquito on his arm. "But if it wasn't for my Radical Honesty, we wouldn't be stuck out here in this jungle."

"No, we'd still be captives." Aya turned to him, looking into his manga eyes. "And if it wasn't for your Radical Honesty, you probably wouldn't have stopped me that night to compliment my nose."

"Don't say that," Frizz said, pulling her closer. "Sometimes it scares me, that we met by accident.

If you'd left that party a minute earlier, we wouldn't even know each other."

She pulled a wet fern leaf from his hair. "Then you wouldn't be stuck out in this mud-plastering jungle."

"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.

"Its 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 spider-webs 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 cleaning, 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 ruins 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 rums 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 suddenly 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.

Up here in the highest layer of the trees, the jungle was much less dismal. The vines sprouted flowers, and shafts of sunlight caught the iridescence of insect wings. A flock of pink-crested birds fluttered just overhead. They squawked and fought over the best branches, baring white bellies inside green wings. One stared suspiciously down at Aya, a bright yellow beak between its beady eyes.

Maybe the jungle wasn't so bad after all—once you could float above the mud and slime. Of course, its magnificence just made Aya feel even more cam-missing.

"Tally-wa," Frizz said softly. "May I ask you a question?"

"Can I stop you?"

"Probably not," he said. "Those cylinders Aya found, what if they weren't really weapons?"

"What else could they be?" Aya asked.

Frizz paused for a moment, staring at the cables strung around them. "What if they were just metal? That's what this is all about, right?"

"But Frizz,'' Aya said. "They had smart matter in them, remember? That proved they were weapons!"

He shook his head. "That proved they had a guidance system. But what if they were programmed to fly to this island?"' "Why would anyone bomb themselves!"

Aya asked.

"They wouldn't have to aim for the buildings," he said.

"That's true," Tally said. "This is an island, after all. The cylinders could fall into the ocean. That would cool them off after reentry, then you could salvage the metal."

Frizz spun in midair to face her, his hands stirring the ferns around him. "You said the inhumans were salvaging metal everywhere. So maybe the mass drivers are just a way to get it all here."

"Easier than smuggling it halfway around the world," Tally said. "Maybe all those empty mountains we found had already launched all their metal."

Frizz nodded. "That would explain why they were moving out of the place you found, Aya-chan.

They were almost ready to send the cylinders here."

"Frizz!" Aya cried. "Why are you on her side?"

"It's not about sides." He shrugged. "It's about what's true."

"What's the matter, Aya-la? Afraid your little story won't hold up?" Tally chuckled. "I wouldn't be surprised if you got it wrong. If you see everything through hovercams and feed stories, you wind up blind to what's right in front of you."

Aya tried to answer, but found herself sputtering. She glared at Frizz.

He cleared his throat. "Well, we still haven't got a clue why they want all this metal."

"They're not building anything here," Aya said. "All we've seen is a few factories and some storage buildings."

Tally pondered for a moment.

"You heard what Udzir said about making sacrifices, right?" Aya said. "Didn't that sounded a little ominous to you?"

"He said they wanted to save humanity" Tally sighed. "Historically speaking, that can mean anything from solar power to worldwide brain damage."

"Or worldwide destruction!" Aya said.

"With the cities expanding like crazy, David and I have been tempted to do a little destruction ourselves." Tally shook her head. "Sometimes it looks like we're headed back to Rusty days."

"But you can't be Rusty without metal," Frizz said quietly.

Tally looked at him. "You think the inhumans are trying to slow down the expansion?"

Frizz shrugged. "You need metal for buildings and mag-levs, after all."

"And without a steel grid, nothing hovers," Tally said. "No cars, no boards, no new fancy floating mansions."

"But wouldn't everyone just start strip-mining again?" Aya asked.

"It's easier to blow up a mining robot than someone's mansion," Tally said softly.

Aya raised an eyebrow.

"If blowing up things was what you were inclined to do … in special circumstances." Tally shrugged. "If that's what the freaks are up to, I might even be on their side. Once they stop kidnapping people."

Aya stared through the leaves at the cluster of towering ruins being taken apart, stunned by the thought that Frizz and Tally could be right.

If the mass drivers weren't weapons, that meant the world wasn't descending into a horrific new age of warfare. If the freaks had figured out a way to stop the cities from ruining the wild, it meant that some human beings really were sane, and that Toshi Banana and his kind could shut up for good.

But unfortunately it also meant one other thing: that a brain-missing fifteen-year-old named Aya Fuse had completely blown the biggest story since the mind-rain.

Make Like A Monkey

They flew across the treetops, Aya and Frizz each holding one of Tally's hands.

Brilliant flocks of birds burst up from the jungle as they passed, and wild monkeys screeched at them from below. Tally had to drag them into the trees to hide from hovercars again, down among a shimmering cloud of butterflies whose radiant orange wings were bigger than Aya's hands.

But she hardly saw any of it.

The City Killer story had seemed so logical: a whole mountain hollowed out, like some Rusty command post from three centuries ago. A mass driver pointed at the sky, ready to launch cylinders full of smart matter and steel.

But what if she'd gotten it wrong?

Aya tried to remember the exact moment when she'd become certain that no more proof was needed.

When she'd realized how famous a city-killing weapon would make her?

The greatest outrage was always the biggest story, after all. She'd learned that from Toshi Banana, with his earth-shattering alerts about new cliques and poodle hairstyles. That was why every feed in the city had jumped on her story without question. Of course they'd just as gleefully jump on Aya if she was proven wrong.

Reigning as Slime Queen for a day would be nothing compared to that humiliation. Maybe the city interface didn't care why people were talking about you—because you were talented or merely beautiful, ingenious or just crazy, concerned about the planet or outraged over nothing at all—but Aya cared.

And she didn't want to be famous for a false alarm.

They spent the next few hours navigating the network of cables, hiding from construction lifters and hovercars, backtracking when they reached dead ends.

It wasn't the most happy-making trip. Moggle's absence nagged her like a constant toothache, and the thick, humid air felt like soup in Aya's lungs. Sweat soaked her Ranger coverall.

When Aya complained that she and Frizz hadn't eaten since the night before, Tally produced emergency bars from the pockets of her sneak suit. While they ate, Tally found and munched her way through a bunch of tiny bananas, entirely green and inedible-looking. Apparently her Special stomach could digest anything.

They made gradual progress toward the cluster of skyscrapers. A steady stream of lifters laden with scrap flowed outward from the spires, marking the route.

With only a few kilometers to go, Tally pulled Aya and Frizz down into the jungle.

"We have to stay out of sight the rest of the way."

Aya groaned. "Does that mean we have to walk again?"

"I don't have time for your mud-crawling," Tally said. "Just keep those rigs in zero-g mode, and stay close to the cables."

Tally gave them both a firm push deeper into the jungle, until the slanting afternoon sun disappeared behind the tangle of vines and branches.

"Aren't you going to tow us?" Aya asked.

Tally snorted. "It's a little too crowded down here to hold hands. Just make like a monkey."

To demonstrate, she grabbed a nearby branch and pulled hard, sending herself shooting away through the dense vegetation. Reaching out to snag a passing tree trunk, she swung herself to a halt.

"See? It's easy when you're weightless."

Aya shared a sidelong glance with Frizz, then sighed and looked around for a handhold. A nearby stem of bamboo looked strong enough. But as she air-swam closer, Aya spotted a creature with about a million legs crawling along it. She reached out gingerly avoiding the crawly thing, and gave the bamboo a tug.

The effort propelled her a few meters before the heavy tropical air eased her to a halt beside a lichen-wrapped tree trunk. She twisted herself sideways and kicked out at it, and was rewarded with a much longer glide through the tangled forest.

It was a strange sensation—though the hoverball rig carried her weight, Aya still had plenty of mass and inertia. Getting herself moving took real effort, especially through the humid air. But once she'd built up speed, coming to a stop—or even changing direction—proved just as tricky.

It didn't help that every surface seemed to be slimy or sticky or covered with insects, or that all the vegetation was still water-laden from the storm. Every time Aya plunged through a growth of ferns, she shook loose a clothes-soaking spray. But gradually she got the hang of it, her brain learning to juggle the tasks of spotting clear paths through the obstacle course, checking ahead for the next object to push off from, and avoiding sticky spiderwebs and water-dumping ferns.

Gliding through the dense canopy, Aya marveled at how rich and intertwined the jungle was, how much more complicated than some ten-minute feed story. She wondered how hard becoming a Ranger would be. At least then she'd be doing something useful, protecting something beautiful instead of stirring up fake calamities for a bunch of bored extras.

After half an hour of pulling herself from vine to trunk to branch, Aya realized she was being watched.

A troop of red-faced monkeys perched in the trees nearby, silently observing as she and Frizz crashed through the ferns and vines. Aya couldn't blame them for their perplexed expressions. She was painfully aware of the eons of evolution that separated her from them, her lack of simian reflexes and Prehensile toes.

Aya grabbed hold of the next vine to bring herself to a halt.

"You okay?" Frizz asked, sliding to a stop beside her.

She nodded. "Yeah. But I think I just figured out their crazy body mods."

"The inhumans'?" he asked, then laughed. "You mean you could actually concentrate while swinging along like a …" He trailed off, looking at the tiny faces watching them through the leaves. "A monkey."

She nodded again. One of the monkeys dangled from its feet, long toes curled around a branch like fingers.

"Even Hiro noticed," she said. "Back when we were hiding and waiting for Tally-wa…the freaks are like monkeys."

"What are you two gossiping about?" Tally called impatiently from ahead. "We're almost there!"

Aya realized they'd been talking in Japanese, and she gave a little bow. "Sorry, Tally-wa. But I think we figured out something. If you're getting around in a jungle wearing zero-g rigs, another pair of hands is a lot more useful than feet."

"Like the freaks?" Tally thought for a moment, drifting closer in her rig. "I guess it makes sense having more fingers, if you're never going to touch the ground."

"So maybe they're collecting metal for a huge grid," Aya said. "You think they want people to give up cities and live in jungles, like some sort of hovering monkeys?"

"And go backward five million years?" Tally raised an eyebrow. "That's a pretty radical way to get along with nature."

"Radical is what the mind-rain is all about, Tally-wa," Frizz said.

Tally sighed. "Why does everyone always say that like it's my fault?"

Frizz looked at her and shrugged. "Well, you started it."

"Don't blame me. I didn't tell everyone in the world to go crazy!"

"But didn't you expect some weird stuff to happen?" Aya asked.

Tally rolled her eyes. "I didn't expect anyone to change their feet into extra hands. Or let hovercams follow them all day. Or get brain surge just so they could tell the truth!"

Frizz shook his head. "But we lost so much in the Prettytime—all the foundations were gone. So we're stuck making it up as we go along!"

Tally laughed. "So what else is new, Frizz? Life doesn't come with an instruction manual. So don't tell me that humanity being logic-missing is my fault." She spun herself around and pointed up through the trees. "Anyway, we're almost at those skyscrapers. Shay and Fausto are probably already there."

Above them, the skeletal spires glinted with afternoon sunlight through the trees. The upper reaches were swarmed with construction lifters, and the screech of metal-chewing blades echoed down from them.

"But if we can't use pings, how do we find them?" Aya asked.

Tally shrugged. "We make it up as we go along."

The Pile

The jungle was clear-cut around the base of the spires, but the ancient Rusty streets were heaped with lattices of salvaged steel.

The pile reminded Aya of a game littlies played: You dropped a bunch of chopsticks onto the floor, then tried to pick up one without moving the others. But instead of chopsticks, these were huge metal beams, encrusted with ancient concrete and rusted cables.

There was no sign of the freaks down here at ground level. The deconstruction crews were all up in the spires, cutting more metal for the pile.

"See the tallest one?" Tally pointed. "Stay under cover till we get there."

"You mean crawl through this?" Aya glanced at Frizz. "But I heard that some ruins have Rusty skeletons in them."

Tally laughed. "That's up north. Down here in the tropics, the jungle eats everything." She pushed off into the pile, threading her way through the rubble and steel.

"Oh, lovely," Aya said, then followed.

Sneaking through the chopped-up buildings was a little like moving through jungle. The rain had left the girders wet and slippery, and lichen grew on their rusty sides.

Hard steel was less forgiving than ferns and bark, though. As they floated after Tally, scraping past girders and jagged chunks of concrete, Aya and Frizz collected scratches like they were crawling through a thornbush.

"Remind me to drink some tetanus meds when we get home," Frizz said, inspecting a bloody scrape across his palm.

"What's tetanus?" Aya asked.

"It's a disease you get from rust."

"Rust gives you diseases?" Aya cried, pulling her hands away from the ancient steel beam before her. "No wonder the Rusties died out."

"Shh!" Tally hissed. "Something's coming."

Shadows flickered around them: a large object passing overhead.

Through the tangle of metal Aya glimpsed its clawed shape—a heavy construction lifter carrying a giant severed piece of skyscraper, like the steel rib cage of some long-dead giant in a predator's jaws.

The freshly cut edges sparkled in the sunlight.

"I wonder where they plan to put that down," Frizz said softly.

The lifter came to a halt directly overhead, and Aya felt a shudder pass through the pile. Girders shimmered around her, the magnetic fields straining under tons of ancient metal.

Suddenly the trembling stopped "Uh-oh," Frizz said.

The chunk of skyscraper dropped from the lifter's claws.

Aya grabbed the nearest beam and pulled hard, scrambling away.

The falling iron skeleton struck home above her, metal pounding and shrieking, the whole heap ringing with the collision. A shower of rust and pulverized concrete rained down on Aya, clouds of eye-stinging dust billowing from above. She saw steel beams bending around her, twisting under the weight of the new addition.

"Aya!" she heard Frizz call.

She turned—his formal jacket was caught in a cluster of ancient cables, their twisted points like fishhooks through the silk. As he struggled to pull his arms out, the sleeves flipped inside out, trapping his hands inside.

Aya spun around and pushed back toward him, reaching out to grasp his shoulders. She pulled as hard as she could—and with a shredding sound, Frizz ripped free, the jacket tearing into ribbons.

Above, the steel skeleton was still settling, raining debris down on their heads. The iron lattice sagged around them, flakes of ancient rust erupting from ancient beams as they bent into new shapes.

They shot ahead, flying half-blind through the pulverized concrete and rust, the beams squeezing tighter around them. Through the clouds Aya saw Tally waiting, her back braced against a steel bar as long as she was tall—it was set between two girders, like a toothpick holding open a giant's jaw And bending slowly under the pressure.

"Come on!"

Tally cried.

Aya kicked hard at the nearest beam, and she and Frizz flew past Tally.

Tally jumped after them, abandoning the steel bar, which skidded to one side, squealing like fingernails scraping metal. It bent and twisted, then slipped free, bouncing back into the center of the pile.

The whole vast structure crumpled, a host of jagged metal teeth gnashing down on the place Frizz and Aya had just vacated. The new addition slowly rocked itself to a halt on the pile, grinding more concrete dust into the air.

The three of them floated into the ordered lattice of the tallest tower.

"Whoa," Aya murmured. "That was close."

"You're welcome," Tally said, rubbing her shoulders.

Aya remembered the awe she'd felt first laying eyes on Tally. It wasn't just her strength—somehow she'd sensed the dynamics of the pile and braced a piece of iron in just the right place, giving Frizz the long seconds he needed to escape.

Tally really was special, even if Moggle hadn't been here to get the shot.

Aya gave a low bow. "Thank you, Tally-sama."

Frizz just stared into the crumpled pile, stunned into silence. His face was ghost white with dust, like an actor wearing rice powder.

"No problem." Tally nodded approvingly. "You two managed to keep your heads."

"Barely." Aya glanced up at the departing construction lifter. "Were they trying to kill us?"

"They didn't even see us," Tally said.

"You saved me, Aya," Frizz said softly.

"It wasn't just me…," she started, but Frizz took her shoulders and pulled her into a kiss. His lips tasted of concrete dust and sweat.

When they pulled apart, Aya glanced at Tally, who rolled her eyes.

"Good to see that you two are okay."

"We're fine." Aya smiled at Frizz, then glanced at a scrape on her elbow. "Except I'm going to get that Rusty disease."

"Relax. Shay's got meds for anything." Tally glanced upward. "And here she comes."

Aya looked up into the reaches of the skeletal tower. The ruin stretched as high as she could see, shafts of sunlight cutting straight through its crumbling walls. She heard the faraway echoes of metal being cut, and heard debris filtering down through the empty, broken floors.

As she stared, shapes began to shimmer against the darkness, like ripples in the air. They took on human form as they descended, surrounding Aya, Tally, and Frizz. They were standing on hoverboards, the riding surfaces wrapped entirely in camouflage.

One shimmering arm pulled a sneak suit hood away, revealing Shay's face.

"Wow. You three look like crap!"

"How'd you get here?" Hiro said, pulling off his own hood. "In a rock grinder?"

"Just about." Aya pointed back at the still groaning pile. "We almost got crushed under that. …" She paused. There were five of the sneak-suited figures: Hiro, Ren, Fausto and Shay…and someone else.

A boy pulled his hood off, revealing a scarred and ugly face.

"You found us," Tally said softly.

He shrugged. "It was a little tricky, after you escaped earlier than planned. But I figured you'd come to the usual place."

Tally turned to Aya and Frizz, a smile breaking across her face.

"This is David. He's here to rescue us."

The Usual Place

It was David who'd brought the hoverboards. He'd also brought real city-made food, and the air was already full of slurping sounds and the scent of self-heating meals.

Aya and the others were halfway up the Rusty skyscraper, on a mostly intact floor. The nearest deconstruction crew was a hundred meters above, their metal-chewing blades whining in the background. But there was no chance of being discovered: David's rescue equipment included lots of sneak suits. Aya's felt as smooth as silk pajamas against her skin, though the outer scales were steel-hard to the touch. Everyone was almost invisible from the neck down, bodies blending into the half-missing walls, heads floating eerily as they ate.

"David followed us here," Tally explained between bites of CurryNoods. "In case we couldn't break out on our own."

Aya looked at David. She remembered him from mind-rain class, of course. His name was mentioned in Tally's famous manifesto, when she'd declared her plan to save the world. During the Prettytime he'd been one of the Smokies, a group who'd lived in the wild, fighting the evil Specials and helping runaways from the cities. So it was natural that Tally would want him around, now that she lived in the wild too. But Aya couldn't figure out why he was wearing an ugly mask.

"Like anyone could keep you three locked up," David said. "My real job was to bring extra equipment and a hovercar."

"Any trouble tracking us?" Tally asked.

David shook his head. "Never more than fifty klicks behind you. The plan would've worked perfectly if you hadn't decided to jump out." He glanced at Frizz.

"It's okay," Hiro said, slurping his own noodles. "I already explained Radical Honesty to them."

"What is it with you city kids and surgery?" David muttered.

"But how did you find each other?" Aya asked. "I thought we couldn't use pings."

"When I got into town, these ruins looked like they had burning flares on top." David laughed, looking out through the crumbling wall at sparks falling past. "I thought it was you signaling me!"

"That's how we got in touch with David in the old days," Shay explained.

"After I figured out what the sparks were, I waited here anyway," David said. "Just in case you decided to come to the usual place."

"You always know where to find me," Tally said with a soft smile.

Aya frowned. "One thing I don't get, David. Why are you in disguise?"

"Excuse me?"

"Why are you still wearing…?" Aya began. "Oh, that's not smart plastic? You're really an ugly?"

David rolled his eyes, and Shay said quietly, "David's never had any surge at all. But I wouldn't use the word ugly—Tally might eat you."

"I just figured he was a Cutter, but with…," she began, but found herself silenced by Tally's death-threatening stare.

Aya went back to slurping her PadThai, wishing she'd paid more attention in mind-rain history.

David pointed at a shiny satellite dish on the floor. "We're set up to call in help if you want, Tally.

That antenna is focused on a comm satellite, and it transmits as straight as a laser—no one else will hear a thing."

Everyone looked at Tally, who paused, chopsticks halfway to her mouth.

"I don't want any help yet," she said. "We still don't know what the inhumans are up to. And I'm starting to think Aya-la's City Killer story might be a false alarm."

Their stares turned to Aya, who was chewing a mouthful of noodles. She swallowed them slowly, hoping Tally would keep going. It seemed a million times more shaming to explain the mistake herself.

"Yeah," Aya finally said. "The mass drivers might not be weapons."

"What else would they be?" Hiro asked.

"A way to slow down the cities," Tally said. "To strip the world of metal and send it here. No more cheap metal, no more expansion."

"You've got to be kidding!" Shay cried. "You mean these weirdos are on our side?"

"It makes sense," Fausto said. "They could even get rid of the metal permanently—just shoot it into orbit. Those cylinders don't have to come down."

Hiro let out a disgusted sigh. "You mean you got this story wrong, Aya?"

"I got it wrong?" Aya cried. "You and Ren were the ones who came up with the city killer angle!"

"But it was your story, Aya!" Hiro said. "We just gave you an idea!"

"But before you guys started talking about reentry speeds and TNT, I just wanted to kick the Sly Girls mag-lev surfing!"

Frizz frowned. "I thought you said you weren't going to kick that?"

"Would you randoms be quiet?"

Tally said, her voice suddenly full of razors. "You want those freaks up there to hear us?"

Aya fell silent, glaring at Hiro. It was bad enough that every feed in the city would blame this bogus story on her; she didn't need her own brother piling on. She glanced at Frizz, hoping he understood what she'd meant.

"Don't forget, we aren't sure of anything yet," Tally said. "They could be building a hundred mass drivers right here, getting ready to bombard every city in the world. We may have to blow something up, after all."

"We're almost at the equator," Fausto said.

"The equator?" Tally shook her head. "What does that have to do with it?"

"The closer you are to the equator, the faster the Earths spinning—more centrifugal force."

Fausto made a whirling motion over his head. "Like a pre-Rusty sling—the longer it is, the more momentum it gives the stone. Right here's the best place to shoot something into orbit."

"So maybe there are mass drivers here!" Aya said. Maybe her story hadn't been totally truth-missing "Don't get too excited, Aya-chan." Ren stood up and crossed to the largest opening in the wall. "I haven't see any mountains on this island."

"The nearest ones I saw were more than a hundred klicks north," David said.

"If you drill a mass driver shaft at sea level, your projectile starts too low," said Ren. "And on a tropical island you'd have to worry about flooding. It'd be a nightmare."

Aya sighed. This island wasn't the best place to destroy the world from, and it was guilty-making how that fact filled her with sadness. If only the inhumans had been up to something world-threatening here "So why are they salvaging these ruins?" Frizz paused, listening for a moment to the shriek of saws echoing through the ruin. "And why are they on a schedule? In the hovercar, Udzir told us that they'd let us go soon."

"When did he say that?" Tally asked.

"Oh," Frizz said. "I think that was when we were speaking Japanese."

"Thanks for telling me!" Tally shook her head. "Here I've spent all day babysitting you two, while these freaks are getting ready to … do whatever!"

She stood up, snapping for her hoverboard. The other Cutters and David scrambled to their feet.

"Good," Shay said. "I've had enough sitting around."

Aya stood. "Yeah, let's go get some answers."

Tally turned to her. "Where do you think you're going?"

"Um, with you?"

"Forget it. You four are staying right here."

"Here?" Aya cried. She had a story to rekick! "But what if you don't come back? Or if the freaks find us?"

"In those sneak suits they'll never see you." David pointed at the satellite dish. "And if we're still gone at sundown tomorrow, you can call for help."

Tally stepped onto her hoverboard. Its riding surface shimmered for a moment, then faded into the background. The four of them pulled on their hoods, and soon they were little more than ripples in the air.

"See you later, randoms!" Shay's voice said from nowhere.

The four shapes rose up, slipping without another word through the gaps in the broken wall.

"Wait, Tally-wa…" Aya's cry trailed off.

"They're already gone," Frizz said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

Aya shook him off and went to the crumbling wall of the skyscraper, looking out across the jungle. The sun had set over the trees, and in the distance the inhumans' hoverport was coming alight. The outlines of storehouses and factories glowed against the blackness of the jungle.

All the answers were right there in front of her. All she had to do was go get them.

Aya looked down at her own hand, almost perfectly invisible in her sneak suit glove "Aya-chan," Hiro asked, "are you thinking of doing something brain-missing?"

"No." She set her jaw. "I'm thinking that I don't care what Tally Youngblood says. This is still my story."

Do-Over

"You're nuts," Hiro said.

"Look out there," she said. "The freaks' base isn't that far away. And we've got sneak suits!"

"But the Cutters took all the hoverboards," Ren said. "Are we supposed to walk there?"

"Well…" Aya frowned, looking at the floor. "We've got enough pieces of hoverball rig for three of us. We can move pretty fast in those."

"You want to float through the jungle at night?"

Frizz said. "It was tricky enough when we could see!"

Ren nodded. "There are wild animals down there, Aya-chan. And poisonous snakes and spiders."

Aya groaned. Why was everyone suddenly so backbone-missing?

"You're just self-shaming because you got the story wrong," Hiro said.

"That's not why I'm—," Aya started, then glanced at Frizz. "Okay, it's totally shaming. But there's still a story here, and we're still kickers, right?"

"I'm actually more of a clique founder," Frizz muttered.

"Doesn't matter how big a story it is," Ren said. "We don't even have a …" He paused, staring at her. "Um, where's Moggle?"

"Of course!" Aya cried. "Moggle could tow me in a hoverball rig, maybe two of us. Then we could fly over the jungle, above all the vines and poisonous stuff!"

"But it's still back at that ruin," Frizz said.

"You lost Moggle!" Hiro cried.

"Again?"

Aya shook her head. "Moggle isn't lost, okay? Just waiting at this rum we found. We have to send a ping."

"Brain-missing for two reasons," Hiro said. "One, if we send a ping, the freaks will swoop down and capture us. Two, a ping won't travel more than a kilometer here. There's no city interface to repeat it—just jungle."

"He's right, Aya," Ren said, spreading his hands. "There's nothing we can do but wait for Tally."

Aya sighed, sinking to the floor.

If she couldn't rekick the story somehow, she'd be remembered forever as the ugly who'd blown the biggest story since the mind-rain, a useless kicker who'd needed Tally Youngblood to find the real facts.

The name Aya Fuse would forever be synonymous with truth-missing.

She looked up. For some reason, Frizz was making a low growling sound through his teeth.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

"It's nothing…" He flinched. "I mean, practically nothing."

Aya recognized his pained expression, and smiled. "You've got an idea, haven't you?"

He shook his head, biting his lip. "Too dangerous!"

"Come on!" she pleaded. "Tell me!"

"Linear transmission!" Frizz blurted out, pointing to the satellite dish that David had left behind.

He rubbed his temples. "We just need to point that in the right direction."

Ren nodded slowly. "Like David said, the freaks will never hear a thing."

The sun was down, and the horizon was dotted with worklights and sprays of cutting sparks. The first cool breeze of the day was wafting in from the sea, bringing the smells of salt and brine.

"That looks like the place," Frizz said, pointing into the darkness. "Two towers in a clearing, one twice as tall as the other."

"But the inhumans are there again." Aya watched the sparks tumbling from the taller spire. "Won't they hear us?"

Ren looked at the satellite dish. "The transmission will only hit a small area, and those workers have a building to chop up. Why would they be listening for random radio noise?"

"I guess so." Aya twitched her fingers nervously, playing with her sneak suit's controls. The scales shifted, a texture like tree bark flickering across her body. Her hoverball rig was completely hidden beneath the suit.

"See that heavy lifter?" Ren pointed at a machine leaving the ruin. "If Moggle follows that cable line, then turns there, it'll be here in twenty minutes."

Aya shook her head, remembering all the random twists and turns Tally had taken on the way here. Down in the treetops the network of cables had been invisible. But from this height, the lifters and hovercars flying to and fro revealed its shape, like a glowing, moving map spread across the darkness.

"I'll stay here and guide Moggle while you wait down there." Ren pointed to where the pile of scrap spilled into the jungle. "Take your hoods off, and I'll tell Moggle to look for a couple of heads glowing in infrared."

"There'll be three of us," Hiro said.

Aya turned to face him. "Sorry, Hiro. But Moggle can't tow three people."

"You forget: I actually know how to fly in a hoverball rig. I don't need to be towed." Hiro drifted into the air, spinning around once to demonstrate. "And I'm not going to let my little sister upstage me twice in one week."

She smiled. "Glad to have you along, Hiro."

Ren carried the satellite dish to the outer wall and knelt, balancing it on a pile of rubble. He carefully aimed the metal parabola at the distant ruin.

A flicker of lights blossomed across its controls, but Ren kept his stare focused on the horizon.

He adjusted the dish in tiny increments, probing the darkness with its invisible beam.

Long minutes passed that way, Ren's fingers moving the dish as slowly as a minute hand. There was no sound in the room but the metal saws overhead.

"I still can't believe we got the story wrong," Hiro murmured.

Aya smiled. "Thanks for saying we, Hiro. But you were right—it was my fault."

He grunted. "You're just lucky to get a do-over."

"Maybe …" "No, definitely," Ren said, staring into the flickering controls. "I finally got an answer!"

"Is Moggle okay?" Aya asked.

"Looks fine from here. The batteries are even recharged—must have found a sunny spot!"

Aya felt a smile growing on her face. She had a hovercam again.

"Let's get moving," Hiro said. He glided to a hole in the floor and dove through, slipping out of sight. Frizz followed, pushing with his hands to propel himself downward.

Before she dropped, Aya turned to Ren. "You'll be okay all alone?"

"Sure. Just don't leave me here too long." He patted the satellite dish. "If no one makes it back in twenty-four hours, I'm kicking this to the whole world."

Night Flight

They descended through the iron skeleton of the tower, floating past ruined floors in darkness, like divers exploring an ancient shipwreck. The whine of cutting blades faded above, the darkness growing around Aya.

With Moggle on its way here, finally she could make up for all those cam-missing hours flying over the jungle. Not that nature shots were ever famous-making—quite the opposite. Like Miki had said, the point of fame was to be obvious, and so much of the jungle was hidden.

But Aya wanted to remember its quiet magnificence nonetheless.

"Through there?"

Hiro asked when she landed at ground level. He was pointing to the pile of steel and rubble.

"Yeah, but wait a minute," Aya said. "A lifter's coming down."

They stayed in the shadows, watching until the construction lifter dropped its load of scrap. Metal shrieked and bent, grinding concrete rubble into dust as the new addition settled onto the pile.

"Okay, quick," Frizz said. "Before another one comes."

Hiro was already shooting ahead, slipping into the twisted maze without a glance backward. Aya vowed to learn how to use a hoverball rig properly some day. Floating in zero-g mode was faster than crawling, but way too slow when bone-crushing piles of steel were being thrown around.

It seemed to take forever, making her way through the rubble. As the spires fell behind, stray cables clinging to the girders grabbed at Aya from the darkness—only the sneak suit's armor protected her from countless tetanus-infecting scratches. And she couldn't help imagining another lifter overhead, bringing a giant mass of scrap to squash them all.

Finally the jungle grew closer. Vines had crept into the snarl of metal around her, and the buzz of insects drowned out the distant cutting saws. Aya could barely see, but the shrill cries of birds guided her to the edge of the pile.

"Whoa," Frizz's voice came from absolute blackness. "It's totally different at night."

It was true—the jungle was transformed. The oppressive heat had lifted, and the darkness echoed with a hundred unidentifiable noises. The air was laden with the rich smell of night-flowering plants, and half-glimpsed shadows darted across the stars.

"Pull off your hoods," Hiro said. "Moggle's expecting three of us in infrared."

Aya pulled her hood off, and a buzzing swarm immediately gathered. The cloud was so dense that her first startled breath drew bugs into her mouth. She spat them out. "These mosquitoes are crazy-making!"

A slapping sound came from Frizz's direction. "We'll have to take malaria meds when we get home," he said.

"What's malaria?" Aya asked.

"A disease you get from mosquito bites."

"Gah! Is there anything in this jungle that doesn't give you diseases?"

"Hey, Frizz," Hire's voice called from the darkness. "How do you know all this stuff, anyway?"

"When I was studying brain surge, I took a few medical classes. Maybe I'll be a doctor once Radical Honesty gets old."

"It's already old," Hiro said.

"A doctor?" Aya swatted at a buzzing near her ear. "I didn't know that."

Frizz chuckled. "Even with Radical Honesty, there's a lot you don't know about me."

"Wait a second!" Hiro hissed. "Do you hear that?"

They fell silent, and a sound came through the buzzing jungle. Something tentative and wary was slithering among the vines, setting the branches above them creaking.

It slowly grew closer.

"Um…hello?" Aya called softly.

Reflected starlight glinted through the tangled vines— Aya recognized the familiar pattern of lenses bobbing happily in the air.

"Hey, for once you didn't blind me!" Aya said, and felt a smile growing on her face.

She finally had a hovercam again.

They flew so fast that even the mosquitoes couldn't catch them.

Aya had one arm wrapped around Moggle and the other around Frizz, their bodies pressed tight together. The hovercam towed them across the treetops, following the cable network toward the inhumans' base. Hiro flew alongside, visible only in the fleeting moments when his sneak suit blotted out stars from the sky.

Suspended above the black sea of the jungle, the fierce wind streaming down her body, the journey was almost like mag-lev surfing. But this was better than any train— the magnetic currents were invisible and silent, so Aya could hear the calls of birds and bats and unknown creatures whipping past on either side.

She wondered where the Sly Girls were now. Probably still in hiding, waiting for their unwanted fame to fade. She missed them, and in a funny way, Tally Youngblood had reminded her of Lai—or whatever her name was now. Lai was at war with face ranks and merits; Tally struggled with the Special wiring in her head. Both wanted to disappear, yet they kept doing things that were bound to make them famous.

And both of them were borderline sanity-challenged. Aya remembered the death glare she'd received for calling David an ugly. What else was she supposed to call him? Beautiful?

Did Tally like him? But she said she hadn't kissed anyone since "Aya?" Hiro's voice came from beside her. "We're getting close."

Aya scanned the dark horizon, and saw hovercars and heavy lifters in all directions, their lights converging on the inhumans' base.

Hiro flickered momentarily into view, his sky-black hand waving for them to drop down into the canopy.

They descended, Moggle slowing, the darkness of the jungle wrapping around them. Aya tightened her hood as they slid to a halt, not wanting any bugs creeping in.

"See that lifter?" Hiro said.

Behind them, a heavy lifter was approaching, a load of scrap in its jaws. The jungle creaked and moaned, complaining as tons of metal pressed down on the cables strewn across the canopy. Uneasy cries and fluttering wings stirred the humid, scented air.

"It's pretty hard to miss," Aya said. Clouds of insects danced in its skirt of floodlights, and she wondered if Moggle's camo paint was as invisible-making as the sneak suits. "Maybe we should go farther down."

"No," Hiro said. "We should follow it in."

"Follow it?"

"Whatever they're up to, it's about the metal, right? Let's see where they're taking that scrap."

Aya watched the machine's steady approach. Massive girders dangled from its jaws, along with wires and pipes— all the metal guts of Rusty buildings. It looked like some huge beast finishing up a messy meal.

"Okay," Frizz said. "But even in sneak suits, we'll have to be careful."

"No problem," Hiro said. "See how the floodlights are all around the edge, pointing outward? If we float along underneath, we'll be right in the middle of them."

Aya nodded. "And they'll blind anyone who looks up at us."

As the jungle gradually filled with slanting shadows, Aya pulled herself closer to the nearest tree trunk. She felt her sneak suit mimicking the rough bark. The cables sagged around her, branches bending and creaking, Aya's lifter rig trembling in the magnetic currents.

As its jaws passed over their heads, her throat tightened. Concrete dust filtered down, and Aya had to remind herself that the inhumans wouldn't randomly drop scrap into the jungle.

At least, she hoped they wouldn't.

Finally the bank of floodlights was directly above them.

"Now!" Hiro said, shooting upward.

Aya grabbed Moggle. "Come on, Frizz!"

The hovercam pulled them straight up, and for a moment Aya found herself blinded. But seconds later she and Frizz had reached the darkness of the lifter's underside. The floodlights pointed outward in all directions, buzzing with energy and rippling the cool night air with heat.

"Great view, huh?" Hiro said.

Aya looked down into the glowing jungle below them.

Flocks of birds scattered from the lifters approach; clouds of insects thronged in its path, their wings iridescent blues and oranges; and the gleaming eyes of awestruck nocturnal creatures gazed up at the strange machine flying overhead.

"I hope you're shooting, Moggle," she breathed.

"There it is," Frizz said.

Ahead of them, a bright line on the horizon, the inhumans' base was only a few kilometers away.

Mass Production

The jungle fell away, ending in a clear-cut line, the magnetic network coming to an abrupt end.

There was no more need for cables—the hard-packed dirt was spiked with huge pieces of steel.

Every few meters, girders had been driven halfway into the ground, like crooked candles in an endless birthday cake.

"Look at that hover grid," Frizz said. "Talk about having metal to waste!"

"It's so crude," Hiro said. "Those girders are still rusty, like they were pulled straight from the ruins."

Aya frowned. So far they'd seen no paths or hovertrails, just drainage ditches half full of runoff from that morning's storm. "This whole place looks like they got here a few days ago."

"Or like they're about to leave," Hiro said.

"Shh!" Frizz pointed down.

An inhuman moved below, pushing herself from one girder to the next, like a bird gliding between branches.

"She must be new," Hiro whispered. "See how she has to push herself around? That's not good hoverball technique. She's in zero-g mode, like you two."

"I don't know," Aya said. The woman's flight looked graceful to her, like some long-practiced piece of choreography. "I saw a bunch of freaks from up in the hovercar, and they were all getting around that way."

Hiro snorted. "Why wear hoverball rigs if you're not going to use them properly?"

"Good question," Frizz said softly.

The heavy lifter turned away, following a row of low buildings, all identical except for the camo patterns mottling their rooftops.

Aya felt warmth rising from them. Their tops were rippling, she realized, billowing like sails.

"They're just big tents," Frizz whispered.

"So this place really is temporary," Hiro said. "It's not a city at all."

The heavy lifter slid to a halt, its jaws directly over a huge pile of scrap. Smaller lifting drones were darting in and out, carrying single girders and tangles of cable away.

At some unheard signal, the little drones all scattered at once.

"Look out below," Frizz said.

The lifter's jaws opened, and the mass of scrap tumbled down onto the pile. Metal crashed against metal in an angry chorus, glinting in the floodlights as it bent and settled. The lifter began to rotate over their heads, facing back toward the jungle.

"This is where we get off," Aya said. "See anyone around?"

"Anything this dangerous is probably automated," Hiro said. "Besides, we're wearing sneak suits.

Just set your rigs a little above zero weight, so you stay close to the ground."

He dropped, his outline obvious in the floodlights.

"Hiro, be careful!" Frizz hissed.

Aya adjusted her rig. "Come on, Moggle."

She pushed off from the lifter's underside, floating down to land softly beside the pile. The three of them crouched there, sneak suits blending into the tangle of scrap as the heavy lifter glided back toward the jungle. The edge of its floodlights drifted away, leaving them in darkness.

"See?" Hiro said. "There's no worklights here. It's all automatic."

He started to glide toward the factory buildings.

"Hiro!" Aya called. "Those little ones are coming back!"

The smaller lifting drones they'd seen from above were approaching from all directions, headed toward the pile of scrap. They looked like giant floating hands, each metal finger as long as Aya.

One was coming right for Hiro, the fingers opening He shot higher into the air, and it floated right under him, still reaching toward the pile.

"Hey, look," Hiro said. "They can't see me!"

He did a few midair jumping jacks, his sneak suit a hovering whirlwind as another drone passed underneath.

Frizz laughed. "They must only see in infrared. We're totally invisible!"

Aya frowned. Invisible or not, Hiro was enjoying his sneak suit way too much. The large tents weren't far away, and they'd already seen one inhuman out here in the dark.

Another of the lifting drones glided up beside Aya, ignoring her and reaching into the pile. Moggle jumped away from its grasp, but the drone was too single-minded to notice, picking through the tangle until its huge fingers found a girder. They closed on it and pulled, dragging along a snarl of cables that almost swept Aya from her feet.

"Hey, watch it!" she said. The drone ignored her, hauling the girder away toward the low tents.

"Come on," Frizz said, pulling her away in a bounding, near-zero-g step. "Those things could fly right into you and not even know it."

Aya nodded. "I guess being invisible is sort of dangerous."

Another long leap took them to the edge of the nearest tent, where Hiro and Moggle waited, peering through the gap between canvas and dirt.

The tent covered a pit, about ten meters deep and brightly lit. Rusted girders were everywhere, glinting in the worklights. An inhuman wearing a breathing mask floated overhead, spraying some sort of goo onto a pile of scrap—like the foam from a fire extinguisher, but silvery and seething.

The goo began to bubble, the metal writhing and twisting. Rust and chunks of concrete spat out, clouds of dust hissing into the air.

"Hey, Aya," Hiro whispered. "Remember that really boring story you kicked about recycling a year ago?"

"Yeah." Aya's nose caught a smell like approaching rain. "Those must be nanos—like smart matter, but not as smart. You can purify old steel with them, or combine it into stronger alloys."

"Nanos can also eat whole buildings if you're not careful," Hiro said. "That's why they're working in a pit, in case they get out of control."

"So the freaks could use nanos as weapons, right?" Aya said.

Hiro snorted. "Whatever makes my little sister happy."

"I'm just saying, they're not exactly making sushi down there," she mumbled. "I hope you're getting some shots, Moggle."

The inhuman air-swam toward a rusted girder that a lifting drone had just dragged in. He gave it a spray of the silvery nanos, and another wave of heat billowed from the tent.

The drone glided away from the wriggling mass, heading toward the pile of scrap that had already been treated. The bubbling nanos were gradually subsiding, leaving a shiny lump of steel. The drone closed its huge fingers around the metal and dragged it out of the tent.

"Let's see what happens next," Hiro said.

Beneath the next tent was another pit, a pile of purified steel lumps at one end. At the other sat a dozen curved shapes made of thin, crisscrossing lines, like skeletons made of wire.

"Nano-frames," Hiro said.

Aya nodded. "Those were in your hole-in-the-wall story, right?"

"Yeah, but I kicked that ages ago." He paused for a second, and they watched a lifting drone drag a lump of metal across the pit. Another hovering inhuman guided its progress, making gestures with his fingers.

"That looks like fun," Aya said, glancing over her shoulder to make sure Moggle was shooting.

"See how that drone follows whatever his hand does?"

The nano-frame was glowing now, turning bright white. It was about fifteen meters long, with swelling curves like the hull of a boat.

"Nano-frames are the patterns inside holes in the wall," Hiro explained.

"Huh," Frizz said. "I always wondered about that."

The chunk of metal inside the nano-frame began to turn red, its edges softening like a melting ice cube's. A wave of heat spilled out from the tent.

Aya squinted, her eyes stinging. It felt like standing too close to a fire.

"Whoa," Frizz said. "How come my wall never gets this hot?"

"Because you never made anything that big," Hiro said.

The metal was moving now, flowing across the nanoframe like a viscous liquid, taking on its shape. It filled the spaces between the wires, like skin covering a skeleton. When it had stretched across the entire frame, the steel began to cool back into a solid. The inhuman was already guiding the lifting drone, nudging another lump of metal onto the next nano-frame.

"So here's a question," Frizz said. "What do all these shapes make when you put them together?"

Aya looked at the jumble of pieces. All were gently curved, but she couldn't figure out how they went together.

"They look like boat hulls," she said.

Hiro snorted. "Ah, the popular solid steel canoe."

"I said like boats," Aya said.

"There's no point guessing," Frizz said. "Let's keep moving till we get to the end."

The next tent was much larger, as wide as a soccer field.

The pit beneath it was at least forty meters deep, full of finished metal shapes and tangles of circuitry. Several inhumans floated inside, each manipulating a pair of hand-shaped lifting drones. The air was full of clanking and hissing as hot metal collided and fused.

As she crept along the tent, Aya saw how the system worked. Each inhuman added one new piece, then passed it down, hardly pausing before setting to work on the next.

"An assembly line," Frizz said. "Like an old Rusty factory."

"Except much bigger," Hiro said. "Thanks to those drone hands."

Aya nodded, remembering the Rusty term for this: mass production. Instead of making things only when people needed them, like holes in the wall did, Rusty factories had churned out vast quantities of stuff—t he whole world in a giant competition to use up resources as quickly as possible.

The first hundred years of mass production had created more widgets and toys than the rest of history put together, but had also covered the planet with junk and sucked its resources dry. Worse, it was the ultimate way to turn people into extras—sitting all day performing the same task again and again, each worker a minuscule part of the whole machine. Anonymous and invisible.

As they neared the end of the tent, the shape of the assembled pieces gradually became clear.

One finished piece stood there, almost as tall as the pit was deep, with curved sides swelling gently in the middle. It was sleek and aerodynamic, the top tapered to a sharp point. Flight control surfaces stuck out from its sides, like fins on a shark.

Aya remembered this history lesson too—no one could forget it—and realized that the inhumans' plans didn't really need mass drivers, or smart matter, or anything more advanced than classic Rusty technology.

The awful thing that stood before her was a missile— an old-fashioned city killer, pure and simple.

And every few minutes, another one was coming off the assembly line.

Missile

"Huh," Aya murmured. "I was actually right."

Hiro nodded slowly. "Somehow, I wish you weren't."

"But this doesn't make any sense," Frizz said. "Why build all those mass drivers and then use old-fashioned missiles?"

"Maybe chunks of falling steel weren't evil enough for them," Hiro said. "Think of all the stuff Rusty missiles carried. Nanos, bio-warfare bugs, even nukes."

Aya swallowed. "So this isn't about using up metal, or even knocking down a few cities. It's about …" "Killing everyone," Hiro finished.

"So they strip the ruins all over the world, shoot the metal here, then launch it right back at us?"

Frizz shook his head. "Isn't that a little complicated?"

"You heard Fausto," Hiro said. "The equator's the easiest place to launch from."

Aya nodded, feeling a wave of guilty relief. Her story was true, except she'd been too optimistic.

Nukes, nanos, bugs—whatever these missiles were carrying had to be a hundred times worse than falling metal.

"But it only took a single Rusty missile to kill a whole city," Frizz said. "Why are they building so many?"

"Humanity survived the oil plague," Aya said, shivering. "Maybe they want to make sure they kill everyone this time."

"We have to warn Tally," Hiro said.

"How?" Aya asked. "She's probably more than a kilometer away. And the freaks will catch us if we even try to ping her."

"Then we have to go back to the ruin, use that transmitter to kick this place to the whole world."

"But Tally said to wait!"

"She thought the freaks might be on her side," Hiro said. "But it looks like they're not on anyone's side."

Frizz shook his head. "But what if we're wrong? Do you want to make the same mistake twice, Aya?"

He was staring at her, Hiro too, like she was responsible for the whole world's safety. But it was still her story, she supposed. Right or wrong, history would remember Aya Fuse as the one who'd kicked it.

She sighed. "Okay. Before we do anything, let's make absolutely sure. We have to take a closer look."

Down in the pit, three lifting drones had gathered around the newly constructed missile.

Stretching out their metal fingers, they gently tipped it over onto its side, carrying it out of the factory and into the night.

Aya scanned the darkness, but saw nothing except for the crooked shapes of girders thrusting from the ground. "No one's around."

"Those drones must be automatic," Hiro said. His night-black hand stretched out a finger. "Look where they're headed."

In the distance was a taller building. A lot more solid than the tents, it was shrouded in darkness.

Hiro glided ahead, and Aya and Frizz took hold of Moggle. The hovercam towed them through the girders, staying low to the ground.

"It's kind of weird how few people we've seen," Frizz said.

"Mosquitoes, I guess," Aya said. "If we weren't in these suits, we'd have been eaten right now."

"Maybe so. But you'd think anyone planning to nuke the world wouldn't mind using a little bug spray."

Aya remembered what she'd seen from the hovercar— lots of inhumans braving the wind and rain, pushing their way through the girders. But on this still night no one was outside. Were they all busy making weapons?

As they neared the darkened building, the lifting drones slowly angled the missile upright again.

Two huge doors swung open, revealing a vast space within. Orange worklights spilled out across the hard-packed dirt.

The drones carried the missile inside.

The three of them floated to the edge of the huge doorway and peered in.

"Nothing but a bunch of parts," Hiro said softly. "No people, as far as I can see."

The doors began to swing closed.

"What do we do?" Frizz asked.

"We have to get a closer look at that thing," Aya said. She crept along behind one slowly closing door, Frizz and Hiro following. They slipped inside just before the doors met, the boom echoing through the building.

"Great," Frizz whispered. "We're stuck in here now."

The missile stood before them, the three lifting drones still attached to it.

Dozens of tiny platforms hovered in the air, like serving drones at a party, but motionless. They carried instruments and tools, electronic parts, and objects that Aya found completely mysterious.

"Shoot those," she told Moggle.

"This must be the next step in the assembly line," Hiro said. "Where they do all the detailed work by hand."

"So where are they?" Frizz asked. "We haven't seen anyone since that last tent."

"I guess that's a little nervous-making," Hiro said.

A hissing noise filled the room.

Frizz nodded. "Definitely nervous-making."

Aya looked up—flakes were falling from the sky, like snow, but softly glowing. Near the ceiling a swarm of tiny drones hovered, spraying out gleaming white clouds.

She caught a snowflake, watching it melt into a softly glowing white spot on her palm. Through the sneak-suit glove, she couldn't tell if it was warm or cold.

"Maybe it's some kind of fire-fighting foam," Hiro said.

Aya frowned. "But nothing's on fire."

"Maybe they're really safety conscious," Hiro muttered.

"I don't think it's about safety," Frizz said. "Look at us!"

Aya turned to Frizz, and her eyes widened. Glowing spots had appeared all over his sneak suit.

She watched another flake hit his shoulder, melting into a soft white mark. Luminous flecks covered her own arms.

"You're both totally visible." Hiro looked down at himself. "Me too!"

Frizz shook his head. "They knew we were wearing sneak suits!"

"That means they know where we are…" Aya's voice faded. The three lifting drones had drifted away from the missile. They turned as one, floating closer through the air.

Their huge fingers were opening wide

Hands

"Moggle," Aya cried. "I need you!"

Hiro was already zooming toward the ceiling. One of the drones swerved to follow him, the other two coming straight for Aya and Frizz.

"Jump!" Frizz grabbed her hand and pushed off hard from the ground.

They shot into the air, spinning wildly around each other, like a pair of hoverballs tied together.

The snow swirled around them in a glowing blizzard.

"Let go … now!" Frizz shouted.

His hand slipped from her grasp, and they shot away in opposite directions—the two drones flew between them, both missing by centimeters.

Tumbling head over heels, Aya saw an expanse of wall coming toward her. She bent her knees, kicking with both feet as hard as she could. The metal boomed and shivered with the impact as she bounced away.

"Moggle, here!" Aya screamed again.

The hovercam twisted through the air below her, its black camo paint speckled with white dots.

It wheeled and turned uncertainly, as if the glowing flakes had affected its vision.

"This way!" she shouted. "Follow my voice!"

A lifting drone was headed toward her, its fingers opening, reaching for her Moggle barreled into Aya like a punch in the stomach, shoving her out of its grasp.

She doubled over with a grunt, arms wrapping around the hovercam, fingers scrambling for purchase on its smooth sides. The giant hand veered to follow, but its bulk was slow-turning, designed for carrying heavy weights, not chasing people.

"Climb! Quick!" Aya cried.

The hovercam obeyed, jerking her up toward the ceiling. The pursuing drones fingers crushed the air beneath her dangling feet.

Hiro passed her on the way down, diving with both hands pressed together. His sneak suit was coated with white now, a Hiro-shaped constellation of sparkles. Another of the drones followed close behind him, leaving whirlwinds of glowing snow in its wake.

"Frizz?" she called, looking around. He was somersaulting through the air, a giant hand only meters behind him.

"That way, Moggle!" she cried. The hovercam shuddered in her arms, twisting in random directions, almost pulling itself from her grasp, then headed straight for the ceiling. "No, not up!"

She heard Frizz cry out below, and looked down. He'd bounced off a wall, straight into the outstretched fingers of the drone. As he struggled, the hand closed around him.

"Hiro!" she yelled. "You have to help Frizz!"

"I can't!" he called back, his arms and legs twitching wildly. "Something's wrong with my rig!"

"Down, Moggle!" Aya screamed with frustration. "Now!"

Finally the hovercam obeyed, pulling her into a sudden dive. Aya's feet flailed behind her, one ankle clanging against the pursuing drone's metal palm, and spots of red pain washed over her vision.

When she could see again, Moggle was still diving, headed right for the floor.

"Not so fast!"

But the hovercam was suddenly a hunk of lifeless metal in her hands. It had lost power completely, pulling her down like an anchor toward the hard dirt floor.

"Moggle!" she shouted. "Wake up!"

There was no response, and Aya let go. She tried to spin around and get her feet under her, readying to kick herself into the air once more. But somehow she wasn't weightless anymore, the pads of her hoverball rig as dead as Moggle.

Momentum carried her down, faster and faster. The ground rose up like a huge fist, and a thud went through her body.

And for a long moment Aya was swimming in a sea of blackness

An Old Friend

Something hard and huge pressed against her, squashing her lungs—the ground, she realized. She was lying on hard-packed dirt, no longer weightless, every breath hurting like a knife between her ribs.

"Aya?"

She opened her eyes, turned painfully over. A featureless face looked down at her, nothing but gray contours where a mouth and eyes should be, flecked with glowing white dots … a sneak-suit mask.

"Frizz?" she said, then let out a gasp. Talking hurt too, it turned out. "What happened?"

"Looks like they caught us."

"Oh, right." The last few minutes came back to Aya as she took a shuddering breath, cataloging all the places she hurt: ribs, shoulders, left ankle. She felt her sneak suit flickering with random textures, damaged from the fall. But its armor had probably saved her from much worse injuries. "Are you two okay?"

"We're fine," Hiro said. "You fell pretty hard, though."

"No kidding," she grunted. "I think something went wrong with Moggle."

Frizz nodded. "Hire's suit went out too."

"Your hovercam is undamaged," a strange voice said in English.

Aya pulled herself up, looking around for whoever had spoken.

But there was no one in sight but Frizz and Hiro.

From down here on the floor of the huge orange-lit building, the unfinished missile towered overhead like a skyscraper. The three lifting drones lay on the dirt floor around them, their giant fingers in the air like the legs of dead spiders.

The glowing snow had stopped falling, but the ground shimmered softly, as did Frizz's and Hiro's sneak suits and her own arms and hands. They'd gone from invisible to sparkling like fireflies.

"The freaks jammed the magnetics in here," Hiro whispered. "We're not weightless anymore."

"So I noticed," she said. After all day floating in the hoverball rig, Aya felt like she weighed a thousand kilograms.

"Our apologies for any injuries," came the strange voice again. "But we know how dangerous you can be."

Aya blinked, finally discovering the source of the words—it was lying right there on the ground, less than a meter away.

"Moggle?" she said softly.

"Forgive us for making modifications to your hovercam," Moggle said in its weird and unexpected new voice. "We found it damaged in the jungle. While making repairs, we installed this voice chip."

Aya groaned, remembering her reunion with Moggle out by the ruins. For once it hadn't flashed its blinding night-lights, which wasn't like Moggle at all.

"We hoped you would rejoin your hovercam," the voice continued. "And we would have a chance to talk with you directly."

"You've been watching us this whole time!" Aya cried.

"Our apologies for our deception, and for your injuries. It was necessary to disable you temporarily and bring you into a controlled environment."

"Controlled environment?" Aya snorted. "You mean a prison?"

"Of course not!" Moggle's new voice said. "We are honored to have you here. Our colleague offers her profound thanks, by the way. Your hovercam saved her life when she fell from the ruins."

"Yeah, this is some thanks." Aya sat up straighter, pain shooting through her.

"If you allow us to explain, we think you'll discover that our aims and yours are complementary."

Aya laughed. "Sorry, but our aims don't include blowing up the world!"

The voice paused, then answered, "It is unfortunate, but certain foolish children have misled you.

Perhaps you'll listen to an old friend."

Aya frowned. An old friend? Who did they think she was? And why were they talking to her in English, anyway?

A rumble passed through the building, the huge doors parting a bare sliver. Through the opening, Aya saw several inhumans hovering nervously, needle fingers at the ready.

In front of them was a strange-looking man, with wild hair and bizarre ragged clothes. He slipped through the doors, which hurriedly closed behind him.

Aya blinked—she'd never seen anyone so ugly.

His skin was sunburned and his features crooked. The beaming smile he gave her was unbelievably snaggle-toothed.

He laughed and said in English, "I knew you would come for me, Young Blood!"

"Um, I don't think we've met," Aya said. "And what did you just call me?"

"Your voice is …" He stepped closer, sharp eyes flicking among the three of them. "If you would show your face, Young Blood."

A short, painful laugh escaped Aya. "You think I'm…?"

"She's not Tally Youngblood!" Frizz exploded. He turned to Aya. "The freaks think we're Cutters."

Frizz reached up to pull his hood off. Aya did the same, and after a moment's hesitation, Hiro sighed and followed suit.

The man stared at the three of them, dumbfounded.

"See?" Aya said. "I really don't think we've met." She gave as deep a bow as her injured ribs allowed. "My name is Aya Fuse."

"But you…," the man sputtered, fingering his own dirty, ragged garment. "You wear the Sayshal clothing, and the floating ones said you had come to rescue me. But your faces are not Sayshal!"

"Indeed," Moggle's new voice agreed. "We seem to have made an error."

Aya nodded slowly. "We aren't Cutters, but we're friends of Tally."

"Young Blood is an old friend of mine as well!" The strange man smiled and clapped her on the shoulder. "My name is Andrew Simpson Smith."

Two Birds With One Stone

Things were starting to make sense. Sort of.

Soon after their hovercar had limped home on autopilot, the freaks must have realized that Tally Youngblood had arrived. Who else but Specials would have jumped out over the jungle? And Frizz, after all, had announced Tally's name to Udzir. That explained why the inhumans had let Aya, Frizz, and Hiro roam their camp, too afraid to confront them, waiting until they were trapped before attacking. In the sneak suits they'd looked exactly like Cutters.

But there was one thing Aya couldn't figure out "How do you know Tally? And what are you doing here?"

Andrew Simpson Smith smiled proudly. "Young Blood fell from the sky near my village, three and a half years ago."

"She fell from the sky," Aya repeated. "Near your village?"

Andrew nodded. "It is very far from here. Among the little men."

"The little men?" Aya asked, looking closer at him. Had his teeth been surged to be that crooked? His clothing had scruffy bits of fur clinging to it, like something made of dead animals. "Are you in some kind of clique that does pre-Rusty re-creations?"

Confusion clouded his face. "I don't understand. Perhaps you do not speak the gods' language as well as I?" He leaned closer. "Many of the floating ones also speak it poorly."

Aya sighed, deciding to stick to simple English. "Are you from Tally's city?"

"My people live in the wild," Andrew said firmly. "But now we know the ways of magnets and other magic. We help Young Blood watch the cities, to make sure they don't injure the Earth. That is how I met the floating ones."

Aya nodded slowly. "She said she had a friend who got kidnapped by the freaks. That's you, right?"

"Yes." He added softly, "The floating ones don't like to be spied on."

Moggle spoke up again. "Andrew, perhaps you can explain what you've learned about us."

Aya rolled her eyes at the hovercam. Did the inhumans think that this pre-Rusty-looking oddball could convince her of anything?

But the man was nodding sagely. "Do you know about the shape of the world, Aya?"

"Um, pardon me?"

"It is not flat, as it appears. But round, like a ball."

Hiro barked out an astonished laugh, but Frizz bowed and said, "Yes, we've heard this before."

"You are wise, then." Andrew squatted next to where Moggle lay on the ground, placing one dirty finger against its curved, camo-black skin. "All of us live on the surface of this ball. More all the time—more people, more cities, less wild."

"We know." Frizz squatted next to him. "We call that the expansion."

"Expansion." Andrew nodded. "The gods' word for making bigger. But the ball of the world does not get bigger."

"Yeah," Frizz said. "We're kind of stuck with what we've got."

Andrew smiled. "That is where the floating ones are clever. What if we build a new city…here."

His finger wavered in the air, a few centimeters from Moggle's skin.

Frizz was silent for a few moments, then said, "In space?"

Andrew nodded slowly, spreading out his hands as if warming them over Moggle's surface.

"There is a steady place over our heads, called orbit.

A ring that fits around the world."

"I don't believe it," Hiro said softly.

Andrew chuckled. "It is hard at first, I know. But I learned from Young Blood that the world has no edge, no end. You must learn to see beyond the little men."

"The little men?"

asked Hiro.

Frizz looked up at the towering metal shape above them. "Turns out you were right, Aya, back when we saw them making this thing. You said it looked like a ship!"

Aya looked up at the missile, or ship, or whatever it was. She shook her head. "But it looks exactly like one of those Rusty weapons!"

"The Rusties had more than one dream," the inhuman voice said.

Aya realized the sound hadn't come from Moggle, and she turned around. Udzir and two other inhumans floated above her.

"After the first crude city killers were invented," he continued, "they were redesigned to send people into space. Death and hope in one machine."

"That's what this is all about?" she asked softly. "Space?"

"That's why you're all so lame in hoverball rigs!" Hiro cried. "You're not using them to get around quicker— you're using them to practice for zero-g!"

"So you do believe in orbit!" Andrew said happily. "It is a place where everyone floats!"

Aya closed her eyes, remembering her own trip through the jungle. "And that's why you're all surged up like freaks. In zero-g there's no point in having feet. So you've all got extra hands."

Udzir frowned, swimming in the air. "We aren't 'freaks,' Aya Fuse. Every change we've made adapts us better to our future home. We're the first extraterrestrial people." He bowed. "We call ourselves Extras."

Aya barely managed to stifle her laughter.

"I assure you," Udzir said firmly "we are completely serious about our new home."

"Sorry it's just that in my city 'extra' means…well, never mind."

"So you are on the same side as Tally," Frizz said. "All that metal's leaving Earth for good."

Udzir nodded. "Two birds with one stone. We can slow the expansion here on Earth and redirect it into space. It's time for humanity to leave our home, before we destroy it."

"You're going to stay in orbit?" Frizz asked. "Not go to some other planet?"

"Permanent orbital habitats," Udzir said. "Close enough to Earth to lift more supplies with mass drivers, near enough the sun for plenty of solar power. And miniature ecosystems to recycle our water and oxygen."

"The Rusties never managed to save themselves this way," another of the Extras said. "They were overwhelmed by their own numbers and their wars. But humanity is smaller and more united now—we have another chance."

"Unless Tally Youngblood and the Cutters stop us," Udzir added, turning to Aya. "A possibility we have you to thank for."

"Me?" Aya said. "Why didn't you just tell everyone what you were doing? If you hadn't been hiding here and kidnapping people, I bet Tally-wa would totally be on your side!"

"We have great respect for Tally Youngblood," Udzir said. "But we couldn't reveal our plans. Do you think the cities would let us strip the old ruins of metal? Or build a fleet of ships that could be easily turned into city killers?"

"You better ping Tally now and explain," Frizz said. "She's probably already here. And if she sees those ships, she'll think the same thing we did!"

"She has not listened to us so far," Udzir said. "We hope that you will try, Aya Fuse."

Aya nodded slowly, her last doubts falling away. The Extras weren't trying to destroy the world; they were trying to save it. The zero-g rigs, their monkey toes, the spaceship towering over her—finally the whole story fit together.

The biggest story since the mind-rain "I'll try," she said. "But one condition. Give me back my hovercam."

"I should have known," Udzir sighed.

He waved his hand, and Aya felt her limbs lighten, her hoverball rig coming back to life. Hiro floated up into the air, and Moggle rose uncertainly from the floor.

"Is that really you?" she asked.

Moggle's night-lights flashed.

She smiled, blinking away spots and booting her eye-screen. "Tally-wa? Are you around? I've got some news for you."

There was no response.

Aya shook her head. "She must be farther than a klick away. Can you boost my signal?"

"We can try," Udzir said. "But if your ping goes out through our network, Tally may not believe that it's really …" His voice faded.

Outside, a low rumbling sound was spilling through the night, like distant thunder. Aya felt it through the soles of her feet, and the walls of the building shivered around them. She heard the squeal of a faraway alarm.

"That sounds like Young Blood," Andrew said softly, and Aya nodded.

Tally was finally blowing something up.

Conflagration

"Come on, Aya!" Hiro said, reaching down for her. "I'm the fastest person here."

She nodded, grabbing his gloved hand and shouting, "Moggle, bring Frizz!"

The huge doors were already swinging wider, and Hiro pulled her off her feet, shooting toward the opening. Aya's injured ribs burned with pain, her feet flailing behind her.

"Slow down!" she gasped.

"Sorry, little sister," he said. "But we don't have time."

He shot out into the night and through a sweeping turn, leaving Aya gasping as her ribs creaked inside her.

"Maybe you should go ahead," she grunted. "You'll get there faster without me."

"Your English is better than mine. And Tally will listen to you!"

"But she hates me! Or thinks I'm an idiot, anyway."

He laughed. "I doubt that, Aya. And she'll have to believe you on this one—you wouldn't change your mind about the freaks unless you were positive."

"Because it means my story was totally truth-missing?" she cried.

"Exactly," he said, then pointed with his free hand. "Uh-oh."

The horizon before them flickered with a series of flashes, the ramble of detonations arriving several tardy seconds later. Distant clouds of smoke rose into the air, flickering red from fires on the ground below. It looked almost like a party mansion, but the rumbling thunder was much deeper than the crackle of safety fireworks.

"I guess that's where the Extras' ships are," Hiro said.

Aya could only grunt. Hiro was weaving through the floating forms of Extras who'd spilled out into the night, pulling her one way and then the other. Her wrist twisted in his hand, and her ribs screamed with every turn.

Hovercars rose into the air around them. A few flew past overhead, lifting fans stirring the air, screaming toward the flashes on the horizon.

"This could get messy," Hiro said. "It'll turn into a battle if we can't stop her soon."

Aya nodded, flexing her ring finger. "Tally-wa! It's me!"

"We're still too far away," he cried, dropping closer to the girders thrusting up from the ground.

Aya could feel them whipping past, the magnets in Hiro's rig pushing off from their metal, each burst of speed threatening to wrench her shoulder from its socket.

The buildings and factory tents fell behind them—Hiro was dragging her across a broad, clear-cut plain, empty except for the girders.

"Look!" Hiro's free hand pointed downward. Huge burn marks darkened the earth, and a charred smell filled Aya's nose.

"They must have tested the rockets here," she yelled.

"I hope that means we're getting close!"

The air itself trembled around them now—Aya felt the explosions rumbling through her body.

The flashes threw long shadows from the girders, and half the night sky was shrouded in smoke.

"Aya?" Frizz's voice sounded in her ear. "Moggle and I are right behind you." He paused. "Well, maybe not right behind you—Hiro's flying like crazy. But we're coming as fast as we can."

"Okay, Frizz. Just make sure that Moggle gets some good—crap!"

Hiro was pulling her into a sudden climb, wrenching apart her wounded ribs. A black expanse of wall stretched out before them, as wide as Aya could see. They skimmed over its top, then suddenly were flying across what looked like a burning expanse of jungle canopy, treetops waving wildly in the spreading flames But this wasn't jungle at all, Aya realized. An endless camouflage net stretched out beneath them, textured with vines and flowering ferns, as detailed as a vast sneak suit. The flames were real, though—sheets of them roared across the dark expanse, an eye-watering windstorm of heat and smoke spilling up into the air.

Where the camouflage had already burned away, Aya saw the tops of the Extras' ships thrusting through the camouflage, as black as ashes, the needle sharpness of their nose cones melted.

She and Hiro soared higher above the nearest flames, carried for long seconds by the momentum of their climb— but soon began to fall.

"Sneak suit!" she cried, scrambling with her free hand to pull on her hood. She saw Hiro reaching up to do the same.

They descended into the fire, skimming among the metal ships in a shallow dive, clouds of smoke churning in their wake. The boiling air burned Aya's lungs, and she smelled her own stray hairs bursting into flame. Even through the sneak suit's armor, her skin blistered from the heat.

But Hiro was already pulling her out again, hover-bouncing up from the forest of steel and flame.

She looked around—there were hundreds of them, a vast fleet of ships stretching in all directions.

A dozen of the Extras' cars hovered over the conflagration, spraying fire-fighting foam in all directions. But new fires were bursting into life much faster than they could put them out.

A boom thundered across the field, shuddering through Aya's body. She saw the shock wave spreading, a growing circle of roiling smoke and flame. At its center was the wreckage of one ship, a tower of steel ripped and twisted from within, slowly tipping over It crashed to the ground with a metal shriek, spilling a fresh sheet of flame across the ground. The burning rocket fuel wrapped around the base of the next ship, traveling up its side like a lit and crawling fuse.

Aya tore her eyes away and flexed her finger, shouting, "Tally!"

The name rasped from her smoke-filled lungs, barely audible. But a moment later a faint answer came through the roaring tumult…"Aya?"

"Tally-wa!" she croaked. "It's me!"

"Why aren't you back at the ruin? It's dangerous here!"

Aya coughed. "I noticed!"

Hiro and she were descending again, like a rock skipping across water, plunging back down into the sea of smoke and flame.

"You have to stop!" she said quickly. "I was wrong about—" The fire enveloped Aya again, setting her coughing. She could see nothing but smoke and the dark shapes of the Extras' ships surrounding them. Her sneak suit was stiffening around her skin, its armored surface breaking down in the heat.

"Where are you, Aya?" Tally's voice said, the signal stronger now.

Aya felt Hiro's grip tighten, and he pulled her up out of the smoke once more.

"Flying over the ships!"

"What ships?"

Aya coughed again, cursing herself for being brain-missing. "The missiles!

I'm right over them.

But they're not really missiles!"

"Are you sanity-challenged?" Tally shouted. "Get out of there!"

"I think she's this way," Hiro said, yanking Aya into a shoulder-wrenching turn. They wheeled just above the nose cones of the ships, level and steady, Hiro's hover-bouncing finally under control.

Another deafening boom erupted, closer this time, knocking Aya's breath out of her. She lost her grip on Hiro's hand, and shot away from him into an aimless, weaving course in zero-g, buffeted by the windstorms of the raging inferno and the ships' magnetic fields.

"You have to stop, Tally!" Aya yelled, angling her hands like a mag-lev-surfing Sly Girl, guiding herself back toward Hiro. "Wait until we reach you, and I'll explain."

"Some of these missiles are already fueled!" Tally said. "They could start launching the moment we let up!"

"But they're not missiles! They're ships! Stop blowing things up and let me explain!"

"Forget it!" Tally shouted. "If even one of those missiles launches, a whole city dies. Get out of there now!"

Hiro came sweeping toward Aya, reaching for her, but she twisted away and he shot past empty-handed.

"If you don't promise to stop, I'm staying right here," she said flatly. "And you can blow us up too!"

"I can't sacrifice whole cities for you," Tally said. "And I know you, Aya-la—you'll save your own skin. You have ten seconds."

"I'm not budging!" she yelled.

"I doubt that."

Hiro had turned around and was cutting back toward her, reaching out his hand again. Aya sobbed with frustration— who would believe that a truth-slanting ugly like her would sacrifice herself?

"I'm here too," came another voice. "And I'm not leaving."

"Frizz?" Tally said. "Have you all gone brain-missing?"

"The Extras aren't trying to kill anyone," he said firmly.

"But what if you're wrong?" Tally yelled.

"I'm certain," Frizz said. "And you know I can't lie, Tally."

Hiro grabbed Aya's hand, pulling her up and away from the flames. She twisted in his grasp, searching for Frizz. There he was—clutching Moggle near the center of the field, his glowing sneak suit barely visible against the inferno.

"Tally, please," she sobbed. "He means it!"

Tally let out a long sigh, then said, "Start moving, Aya-la. You have two minutes to convince me."

A single flare rose on the horizon, and Hiro headed toward it.

Rekicking It

Two sneak-suited forms were waiting at the jungle's edge, perched on the high wall that surrounded the Extras' fleet.

Tally pulled off her hood as they landed, her black eyes glistening in the light of the inferno.

"Fausto and Shay are waiting for a signal from us. Ninety seconds from now they'll launch more bombs, unless I tell them otherwise. So start explaining."

Aya swallowed. "The Extras … I mean the freaks, aren't what we thought."

"Then what are all those missiles for?" David said, pulling off his own hood.

"They aren't missiles," Aya said. "They're ships."

Tally frowned.

"Ships?"

"It all fits, Tally-wa. You just have to listen! Them taking the metal from the whole world! And they float in the air! Their extra hands…because they don't need feet up there!"

Hiro grabbed her hand and muttered, "Aya, slow down."

"Or at least make sense," Tally said. "You've only got seventy seconds left."

Aya closed her eyes, trying to put the story together in her head. More pieces were coming together now, all the threads she'd been following since her first steps into the hollow mountain back at home.

"When I tested that cylinder for my story, the smart matter was programmed to guide it up … but not back down. And remember what Fausto said? How mass drivers would be perfect to shoot the cylinders into orbit permanently? That's exactly what the freaks are doing. Except they don't want to get rid of the world's resources—they want to use them up there."

"Use them for what?" Tally asked.

"To live. Your friend Andrew explained it to us! They're going to build orbital habitats out of all that metal and smart matter. The whole point of the mass drivers is to launch their raw materials."

"All the mountains we found were empty," David said slowly. "Because the metal's already gone up?"

Aya nodded, pointing out across the burning field. "And these are all ships, rockets to take people up. Mass drivers would kill you if you tried to ride one at full speed—the Sly Girls said so. That's why this base is here at the equator, the easiest place to get into orbit."

"And the hoverball rigs they wear," Hiro said in maddeningly slow English. "They are practicing for zero-g."

"In orbit, where an extra pair of hands are more useful than feet," David said. He turned to Tally.

"Twenty-five seconds left."

Aya watched suspicion settle on Tally's cruel pretty features. According to Frizz, Tally had never fixed the wiring in her head. She'd been designed to have contempt for anyone who wasn't Special, to think that humanity was always trying to destroy the world. What if her brain surge wouldn't allow her to see what the Extras were really planning?

Like Udzir had said, rockets were death and hope in one machine—it was all how you saw them. Aya wasn't even Special, and she'd been confused before Andrew had explained, convinced by her upbringing and her own story-slanting that the Extras threatened the world.

Once you'd told yourself a story enough times, it was so easy to keep on believing it.

Tally shook her head, her eyes shut tight. "If we let up, even for a few minutes, they could launch enough of these things to wreck the planet."

David put a hand on her shoulder. "But why would they? Even the Rusties managed not to do that. Maybe they built the missiles and aimed them …" Tally opened her eyes. "But they never pushed the button. Shay! Fausto!"

"Yeah, we heard," Shay's voice pinged. "No more bombs today."

Aya let out a long, shuddering breath.

Tally turned to look out across the Extras' fleet, her features softening. The camouflage netting was still burning, and every ship looked charred and blackened. But only a handful had been completely destroyed, toppled on their sides, burning rocket fuel spilling from them like rivers of fire in the darkness.

There were still hundreds of the ships standing, maybe thousands. Enough to lift a whole city into the sky.

"Okay, Cutters," Tally said, exhaustion in her voice. "Maybe we should give them a hand with these fires."

"Why not?" Shay said. "Fighting fires is almost as fun as starting them!"

Tally pulled her hood back over her face, then stepped onto her waiting board. Her sneak suit switched to bright orange, like a firefighter's coverall, and she shot out across the burning field.

Aya saw two more hoverboards rising from the forest of metal shapes. They joined the Extras' hovercars, attacking the burning leftovers of camouflage netting with bursts of foam, spraying any ships that were dangerously close to the blazing spills of rocket fuel.

"They cleared the jungle here," David said. "Once that camo netting's gone, the fire won't have much fuel." He pulled his hood from his face. "Still, you two stay here. You look fried enough for one night."

Aya nodded wordlessly. Her sneak suit crackled when she moved, the scales fused solid, and its coloring was stuck for good on the red-tinged gray of smoke and flame.

"Tell Tally this wasn't her fault," Aya said to David. "We thought the same thing."

He turned toward her, and shrugged. "It's no wonder. We were all brought up in the world the Rustles almost destroyed. It's hard to remember that they did more than fight each other. But thanks."

"For what? For slanting the truth, so you all came here expecting world-killing monsters?"

"No. For helping Tally rewire herself a little more." David lifted into the air, his hoverboard shooting out across the firestorm.

"You did pretty good, Aya-chan," Hiro said.

She looked up at her brother. "Are you kidding?"

He shook his head. "I'm serious. You finally learned how to kick a story without going over time."

Aya let out a short laugh, which sent a fresh wave of pain rippling across her ribs. She groaned, rubbing her sides. Her right shoulder was sprained and twisted from being towed here at hoverball speeds, and her wrist felt like someone had squashed it in a sushi maker.

"Look," Hiro said.

Moggle was making its way across the smoldering ruin of the camo netting with Frizz in tow, the smoke swirling around them.

"Are you okay?" she pinged.

"A little singed," Frizz said. "But we got some awesome shots."

Aya shook her head, for once not caring if any of this was recorded. At last all the threads of the last two weeks made sense, the truth assembling itself like an Extras' ship out of scattered bits of scrap. It was a relief, no longer having to struggle with unwieldy facts and her own total lack of Radical Honesty.

As Frizz landed and took her gently into his arms, a brain-calming hum traveled through Aya's battered body, like a perfect edit falling into place.

She'd finally gotten this story right.

Thousand Faces

"Remind me again why I'm doing this."

"To show your support." Aya adjusted the sparkles on Tally's gown, then took a step back to admire them. "You're the most famous person in the world, Tally-wa. If you tell everyone you're behind the Extras, they'll get a lot more recruits."

"And less hassle for all that metal they grabbed," Fausto added. He adjusted his necktie. "And for kidnapping everyone who saw them."

"Plus, Tally-wa," Shay said, straightening her hair. "We haven't been to a party in ages!"

Tally just grunted, looking at herself doubtfully in Aya's huge wallscreen. Her ball gown was rippling smart matter and velvet, as black as night and shimmering like starlight. Perfect for the Thousand Faces Party.

"Don't look so glum," Shay said. "You used to wear stuff like that all the time."

"Yeah, back when I was a bubblehead."

Aya tried to picture Tally perpetually happy and clueless, and shook her head. Even in the ball gown, Tally was still a total Cutter, her face and bare arms laced with flash tattoos and scars.

"You know," Aya said softly, "there's still time to fix those if you want."

"No chance." Tally ran one finger down her arm. "They remind me of things I don't want to forget."

"You look beautiful," David said. He was wearing one of Hiro's antique silk jackets, having proclaimed that anything from a hole in the wall made him nervous. He'd been jumpy since he and Tally had arrived from Singapore that afternoon, as if the city was too cramped for him.

Aya's apartment was a little crowded tonight. All nine of them were here—Aya, Frizz, Hiro, and Ren; Andrew, David, and the three Cutters—everyone who'd featured in the Leaving Home story. It had kicked two days ago, and all of them were in the top one thousand. Nowhere but Shuffle Mansion had enough security to keep the paparazzi cams at bay.

At least there was room for everyone here. Upon her return home, Aya had found her apartment twice as big as when she'd left, expanding in proportion to her fame. Maybe face rank wasn't everything, but there were some advantages to being the third-most-famous person in the city.

"I still don't see why we have to go to this stupid party," Tally said. "Couldn't I do some kind of feed announcement?"

Aya frowned. "That won't be any fun. And it won't help the Extras nearly as much."

"Plus," David said, "we sort of owe them for a couple of dozen spaceships."

"I guess." Tally gave her ball gown one last glum stare.

Shay chuckled. "They're just lucky we didn't use nanos."

When they stepped outside, swarms of hovercams were waiting.

"Okay," Tally said. "I officially hate this city."

Aya took a deep breath, but couldn't find it in herself to argue. It was getting annoying, being followed everywhere, constantly pinged and cam-swarmed, her hairstyle imitated by littlies, her nose mocked on slammer feeds. Sometimes Aya wondered if she'd ever get any privacy again.

Even her own hovercam made her a little nervous these days. Ren had taken it apart and removed the Extras' mods, but Aya still had nightmares full of betrayal and swarms of talking Moggles.

But it was useless pretending not to enjoy her single-digit face rank. After all, here she was with her famous friends, all headed toward Nana Love's party, a smile on her face and Moggle in tow to capture every second.

"So how do we get through those things?" Tally asked.

"Glitter bombs?" Fausto suggested.

"Nanos!" Shay cried.

"None of the above!" Aya said. "You don't always have to blow stuff up, Tally-wa. In this city you've got a reputation bubble."

"A what?"

"Just start walking, and they'll give you room."

Tally took a few steps forward, and the wall of hovercams curved away from Shuffle Mansions fifty-meter boundary. David took her arm and pulled Tally farther along, and soon they were headed into the night, an almost perfect sphere of hovercams surrounding them.

"This is very strange," Andrew Simpson Smith said. "Are all cities like this?"

"Not really," Tally answered. "After the mind-rain, this one went particularly brain-missing."

"The reputation economy isn't brain-missing!" Hiro said. He'd been practicing English with Andrew Simpson Smith over the last few days, and enjoyed spouting long sentences. "Wanting to be famous motivates people, which makes the world more interesting!"

Tally snorted. "I've seen that motivation at work, Hiro. It leads to some truth-slanting, too."

Aya sighed, wondering when Tally was going to let it go. Most of the feeds had already gotten over the mistakes in her City Killer story. They had better things to kick, now that Aya Fuse had given them a new future to speculate about, a whole new kind of Extra.

And, unlike certain people, she hadn't blown anything up.

Nana Love's mansion was filled with astonishing sights.

The NeoFoodies were there in force, showing off their new aerogel, both edible and smart. It floated overhead, changing forms and flavors as the night went on, contesting with the hovercams for valuable airspace.

The surge-monkeys were all playing Extra, with wide eyes and pale skin, though most stopped short of prehensile toes. Hoverball rigs set to zero-g were fashion-making too, though Hiro kept muttering about how everyone could use some training.

Glittercams, newly invented for this party, were everywhere. Hovering at eye level like nosey fireflies, each recorded only a few pixels, from which city interface assembled a continuous image—everyone in the city could navigate through the party as if they'd sent their own invisible hovercam.

Of course, it wasn't long before the glittercams had annoyed Tally. She swatted a handful to the ground, and the rest retreated into a respectful reputation bubble. Before long Tally had vanished into the recesses of Nana Love's mansion, the other Cutters in tow.

"Good evening, Aya," a familiar voice said in English.

Aya looked up to find Udzir floating next to Moggle, dressed in a formal sari and holding a champagne glass in one set of curved toes.

She bowed, hiding her expression. The Extras still gave her the creeps, even after Udzir had explained their surge in detail. The Extras' pale skin was to help produce vitamin D from the barest sliver of sunlight. Even the wide-set eyes made sense—the first orbital habitats would be so cramped that normal depth perception wasn't necessary.

Still, the overall effect was unsettling.

"I hope you're enjoying the party," she said.

"Indeed. It was kind of you to arrange an invitation."

"It wasn't me," Aya said. As the new face of extraterrestrial humanity, Udzir's fame was top one hundred. Everyone joked that he was the only Extra who wasn't, strictly speaking, an extra at all.

"One way or another, Aya, my presence here is thanks to your story." He performed a little midair bow. "You have helped our cause immensely."

"I'm just glad things got cleared up before Tally-sama toasted your whole fleet."

"As are we," he said. "Though as it turns out, the drama of our rescue has proved more valuable than the ships we lost. A strange thing, fame."

"That's for sure. Getting many recruits?"

"Indeed." He glanced over Aya's shoulder. "Even a few tonight."

"Hey, Nosey."

Aya turned, and her mouth fell open. "Lai? How did you…?"

"Get in here?" Lai asked, then smiled. "Same as you: with an invitation."

Aya blinked. She hadn't thought to check the Sly Girls' face ranks lately, but of course with a whole new version of the story kicking "Nine hundred and fifty-seven," Lai supplied. "Since you were about to ask."

"Oh. You must be hating that."

Lai shrugged. "It won't matter much in orbit." She glanced up at Udzir, who had turned to talk to someone else. "I just hope Mr. Big Face Alien realizes that there's no time for fame on the new frontier."

Aya laughed, then pictured Lai with four hands and fish eyes. She shuddered, banishing the image from her mind. "I'm still sorry about sneaking all those shots of you."

"And I'm sorry for shooting you out of a mass driver." Lai paused. "Wait a minute—no, I'm not.

That was fun."

Aya laughed again. "I guess it was. So how are the Sly Girls?"

"Probably all watching this party on their wallscreens."

Aya frowned. "Really? But the Thousand Faces doesn't exactly seem like a Sly Girl kind of thing."

Lai shrugged, then glanced up at Moggle and leaned in closer. "So, you want a lead on a story?"

"A story?" Aya asked. She hadn't thought much about what to kick next. After the end of the world and the birth of a new frontier, everything seemed anticlimactic. She still wondered sometimes about becoming a Ranger. "I guess."

"Okay, but you have to promise you won't tell anyone before they cut the cake."

Aya raised an eyebrow. One of the traditions of the Thousand Faces Party was Nana Love serving a huge pink cake at the stroke of midnight. All the big faces gathered around it when she did, sharing their slices of fame.

"Um, okay."

Lai waved away a few glittercams, then pressed her lips almost against Aya's ear, her voice dropping to the barest whisper. "I injected the cake with this smart matter that Eden cooked up. It's spreading as we speak, making the sugar kind of … unstable."

"Unstable?"

"Shh!" Lai giggled. "When Nana cuts it, it'll sort of explode. Not in a lethal way…just in a cake-spreading way."

Aya's jaw dropped as she tried to imagine the city's illustrious faces covered with pink frosting.

"But that's…" "Pure genius? I agree," Lai said, turning away with a smile. "Just remember that you promised, Nosey. You owe me one kept secret."

Aya pinged for Frizz's location, then went to find him on the upstairs balcony. He was alone, looking out over the darkened privacy gardens.

"I have an ethical question for you, Frizz."

He turned to her, his manga eyes glittering with the safety fireworks overhead. "An ethical dilemma? At this party?"

She looked around: no glittercams sparkled in the air, and Moggle was the only hovercam in sight. Nana Love's garden was off-limits to cams tonight, which was probably why the balcony was empty.

"What if you were a kicker, Frizz, and you knew something was going to happen at, say, a party? And it might be host-shaming—definitely shaming—but you'd promised not to tell anyone?"

"Hmm," he said. "It's only embarrassment we're talking about, right?"

"Yeah, but quite a lot."

He shrugged. "Probably I'd keep my promise."

She sighed, staring across the city at the windows flickering with feed light—everyone watching the Thousand Faces on their wallscreens. "Sometimes I wish I could tell you secrets."

"Maybe you can soon."

Aya frowned. "What do you mean?"

"I've been thinking about what Tally said, how I'm a wimp for not telling the truth on my own."

He pointed as his temple. "Maybe Radical Honesty is getting a little old."

"But the cliques bigger than ever now!" she said.

"Exactly. They don't need me anymore."

Aya blinked, trying to imagine Frizz without his mortifying outbursts. "I don't know, Frizz-chan. I kind of need you around to keep me honest."

His arm wrapped around her shoulders, drawing her closer. "Don't worry. I'll still be here. And I'm not giving up on honesty, just Radical Honesty."

She leaned her weight against him. "But if you're not compelled to tell the truth, how will I know you still like my big nose? I'm not fixing it, you know. Tally-wa made me promise."

"Yeah, she told me about that. But don't worry, a little brain surge won't change my mind. Not about you."

They stayed there on the balcony for a long time, listening to the ebb and flow of laughter and music inside.

It was strange, hovering at the edges of the party. As long as she could remember, Aya had watched the Thousand Faces unfolding on the feeds, imagining herself as one of the anointed few. But now that she was really here, all she wanted was to be alone with Frizz, staring at the city over the empty expanse of Nana Love's cam-missing gardens, immensely happy that no one else wanted privacy tonight.

The tumult behind her was just a party, after all. Generations of bubbleheads had occupied this very mansion, weaning pretty much the same clothes, mostly saying the same things. Glittercams and face ranks didn't change that A soft thump came from below, and Aya looked down.

It was David, rolling to his feet. He must have jumped out of one of the windows.

Tally Youngblood was right behind him, descending as gracefully as a cherry blossom, her hands and feet darting out and catching windowsills and sashes to slow her fall. She landed softly, slipped her arm through David’s, and they made their way into the garden.

Frizz leaned closer. "I was wondering about those two."

"You heard what she said, though," Aya whispered. "No one since …" But Tally was leaning against David, pulling him deeper into the darkness, their shoulders pressed together in the cool night air.

"Moggle, are you getting this?" Aya began, then shook her head. "Never mind."

She turned to Frizz, leading him from the balcony with a smile.

"Come on, it's almost midnight. Let's go watch them cut the cake."