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  “Oh, thank you, Toshi-sensei.” Hiro cleared his throat. “I appreciate that.”

  Aya rolled her eyes. One compliment from the Nameless One, and Hiro was already face-grubbing.

  “Cloned hearts! Disgusting!” Toshi glanced back at the leopard girl and rolled his eyes. “Some people love to pervert the natural order, eh?”

  “You mean those crumblies?” Hiro shrugged. “I think they were just afraid to die.”

  “Fear, exactly! That’s what the mind-rain has given us.”

  “You keep slamming the mind-rain,” Ren said. “So why not go back to being a bubblehead?”

  Toshi turned his huge frame and sized Ren up. “Do I know you?”

  Ren bowed a fraction of a degree. “I doubt it.”

  “Well, contrary to popular belief, not everyone was a bubblehead back in the Prettytime. Some people had to run the city.” Toshi turned back to Hiro. “Your face rank seems to have slipped since that story, Hiro-chan. Maybe it’s the company you’re keeping.”

  “Hey!” Aya cried, doing a little frictionless spin. “His company is standing right here!”

  Toshi looked down at her. “An extra? Dating downward, Hirochan?”

  “Dating? That’s my . . . ,” Hiro started, but under the stares of Toshi’s entourage, his voice faded.

  The Nameless One exhaled a slow breath, his gaze drifting over Hiro’s shoulder, as if looking for someone more important. “Well if your effort tonight is interesting, perhaps you can guest on my feed. It might help you break into the big leagues.”

  “Forget it!” Aya said. “After tonight, we’ll both be a zillion times famouser than you!”

  The entourage’s hovercams swiveled, all suddenly focusing on Aya. Toshi stared down at her like he’d found a cockroach between his chopsticks.

  “Is this ugly in your story, Hiro-chan? If so, I don’t get it.”

  As Aya started to reply, a troubling realization crossed her mind. To mind-rain slammers like the Nameless One, the city killer would be more evidence that humanity threatened the planet, just more proof that everyone had to be controlled again.

  With his dozen hovercams, Toshi was already gathering material to spin her story his way. He’d already used Hiro’s immortality kick to stir up fear of overpopulation. How much more could he do with a city killer?

  “Don’t worry, Toshi-chan,” Ren said. “You’ll get it soon enough. Everyone will.” He turned to Aya. “Let’s kick it early. Let’s kick it now.”

  “Really?”

  “Good idea, Ren,” Hiro said. “A little surprise for everyone.”

  Aya looked up at the Nameless One. Anything that threw him off balance was fine with her. She bowed. “Excuse us. We have something important to do.”

  He started to sputter a reply, but the three of them were already walking away. Unlock codes tumbled across Aya’s eyescreen, and Hiro’s fingers were already twitching. She shot a quick ping to Frizz, just to make sure he caught the story the first time around.

  Hiro’s hands settled, and he turned to her. “Ready, little sister?”

  She nodded slowly, and felt her flash tattoos spinning. “Ready.”

  “Kick in three . . . two . . . one . . .”

  They mouthed their final codes together, then stared at each other.

  The City Killer story was on the feeds.

  Ren pushed straight through the crowd, stepping into the middle of the room beside a manga-head with meter-tall sparkling hair. He clapped his hands together twice.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, a brief announcement!” He paused for a moment while the chatter settled down. Even the Reputation Bombers were silenced by his audaciousness, but Ren looked unashamed, fixing everyone with his gaze.

  He gave the room a low bow.

  “Forgive me for interrupting, but Hiro and Aya Fuse’s new story is up and running. And it concerns something you may be interested in . . . the end of the world!”

  TRUTH-SLANTING

  Fifteen minutes later, it was starting to build.

  Of course, most of the partygoers had gone back to their conversations after Ren’s announcement. A few handhelds flickered, but the mansion’s big public wallscreen stayed dark. Why interrupt a bash to watch one feed out of a million? Especially once it turned out to be Hiro Fuse’s little sister kicking tonight, and not Mr. Big Face himself.

  In one corner, Toshi Banana was making a show of ignoring the rest of the party, telling jokes to his entourage and basking in their laughter. But Aya noticed one of his groupies lost in her eyescreen. As the story reached the truth about the city killer, she rose on her tiptoes to whisper in the Nameless One’s ear, and a thoughtful look crossed his face.

  Out in the city it was building faster—friends pinging friends, feeds rekicking it, the story spreading like a brushfire in the dry season. Aya watched her feed ratings slowly climb, her face rank crawling upward, already back under a hundred thousand.

  “Just caught a ping-blast on the wardens’ feed,” Ren said. Both his eyescreens were on, his expression lost in scribbles of light. “They’re scrambling hovercars.”

  Aya smiled. Like a good little citizen, she’d put a security flag on the story to make sure the city government watched it right away. They’d have wardens out there tonight, securing the site from thrill-seekers and paparazzi, making sure nobody got smashed into mag-lev paste. Of course, this wasn’t just about personal safety—by tomorrow, the Global Concord Committee’s suborbitals would no doubt be headed here from every continent.

  Staring into his eyescreens, Ren burst out laughing. “This is hilarious! Gamma Matsui is slamming you: She thinks you faked the sled footage! She says you couldn’t have stayed up in the air that long—so the whole story’s a hoax.”

  Aya’s jaw dropped open. “That’s so mean! What does she know, anyway?”

  “It doesn’t matter what she knows, Aya,” Ren said. “What matters is that she’s the most famous kicker to notice you so far.”

  Aya growled in frustration, but it was true: Her feed ratings had just bumped again. She brought up Gamma on her eyescreen, struggling to hear over the music and babble of the party.

  “I’d kill for your wallscreen right now, Hiro,” she said, her eyes suddenly itching for twenty feeds to follow the story’s spread. “Why did I let you guys talk me into coming here?”

  Ren placed a hand on Aya’s shoulder, giving her a glass. “Hush, and drink some champagne. See that extra-looking woman playing with the puzzle cube? She can calculate the sled’s terminal velocity off the top of her head, just by watching. When it comes to physics, she’ll eat Gamma for breakfast. That’s why we’re here.”

  “But she’s not even watching my feed!” Aya cried. “Should I go explain to her?”

  “Don’t you dare,” Hiro said. “No one else is talking about hoaxes yet. Don’t poke a dead fire.”

  Aya groaned, putting the champagne aside. Sometimes, the hardest thing was doing nothing.

  “Well, there’s some good news,” Hiro said. “The Nameless One’s leaving.”

  Aya looked up in time to catch Toshi Banana and his entourage heading out the door. They looked like they were in a hurry.

  Ren chuckled. “Probably wants to get back to his wallscreens and start slamming you before this gets too big.”

  “Shouldn’t we be slamming him first?” Aya asked.

  Ren blinked away his eyescreen squiggles and turned to face her. “We don’t need to. This is a city killer, remember? It’s way too big for that bubblehead to make his own.”

  • • •

  Five minutes later the story went massive, ballooning out across the feeds, reaching past the city interface into the global network. It seemed to happen all at once, in one of those explosions of kick that was inexplicable—or at least way too fast for Aya’s little eyescreen to make sense of.

  Here at the party people were starting to glance in her direction, aware that something big was roiling the city interface. They pulled
out handhelds, gathering in corners to watch together.

  “So far so good,” Hiro announced. “Your face rank just hit the top ten thousand. You’re beating tonight’s Reputation Bomber!”

  “Glad to hear that.” She flinched—her alert tone had just gone crazy, like a tiny jackhammer ringing a bell in her ear. “Something’s wrong with my eyescreen!”

  “Nothing’s wrong, Aya,” Ren said. “Those are pings rolling in. Better turn off your sound.”

  She squeezed her fists shut, silencing the noise, then rubbed her ear. “Ouch. Being famous is so brain-shattering!”

  “Aya Fuse, complaining about fame?” someone said. “Talk about brain-shattering.”

  Aya turned to find Frizz standing there, huge-eyed, beautiful, and grinning.

  “Frizz!” she cried, gathering him into a hug. “Did you see my story?”

  “Of course.” He squeezed her hard, then took a step backward and bowed to Hiro and Ren. “Frizz Mizuno.”

  Hiro smirked as he returned the introduction. “So you’re the famous Slime King?”

  “And you’re Aya’s famous older brother,” Frizz said, then frowned. “But probably not so famous anymore, compared to her.”

  Hiro’s eyes widened, and Aya grabbed his arm.

  “Go do something else, Hiro,” she commanded. Radical Honesty was anxiety-making enough without her older brother around.

  Smiling, Ren dragged Hiro away toward a group of kickers waiting for interviews.

  “I’ve only got a minute, Frizz. I’m supposed to answer questions soon. But I’m glad you came!”

  “I missed you.” He stepped closer, his eyes locked on hers. “I never got to say sorry in person for getting you slammed.”

  Aya looked away, trembling a little under his manga gaze. “It wasn’t your fault, Frizz—I should have been more careful. And being Slime Queen was kind of . . . interesting.”

  “After tonight they won’t call you that anymore.” He took her arm. “But I never thought of you as slimy.”

  She dared his gaze again, speaking too softly for the buzzing hovercams to hear. “But remember what you said that day? That you weren’t sure what kind of person I was? Do you see now why I had to lie to get this story?”

  It was Frizz who looked away this time. “It sounded awful, betraying friends like that. But I get it now.” He sighed. “I guess sometimes you have to lie to find the truth.”

  He looked so sad saying those words that Aya wrapped her arms around him again, squeezing tight. She didn’t care how many hovercams were watching, or how many slammer feeds compared her ugliness to Frizz’s beauty.

  “But I’ll never lie to you, Frizz.” She felt his muscles tighten.

  “Then tell me one thing,” he said.

  “Anything.”

  “If you hadn’t found the city killer, if this story was just about the Sly Girls and their mag-lev surfing, would you have kicked it anyway?”

  Aya pulled away. Frizz wasn’t stupid; he’d noticed that her truth-slanting had started long before she’d known about the city killer.

  But would she have betrayed them, just to get famous? Like Miki had said, surfing through the wild had been so brain-expanding, and the more time Aya had spent with them, the more the Sly Girls had started to feel like friends. She could have changed her mind . . . maybe.

  Was it lying if you weren’t certain about the truth?

  She cleared her throat. “When I joined the Sly Girls, I was just looking for a story, any story. But after talking to you that day, I was starting to wonder.”

  He nodded. “So you’d already changed your mind?”

  Aya looked up into his manga eyes—he wanted to believe her. It would be so easy just to agree.

  And why make Frizz sad? It wasn’t like she could ever be incognito again. After tonight everyone would know Aya Fuse was a kicker—no more lying for stories. So what did it matter if she was a truth-slanting Slime Queen just one last time?

  “It all happened so fast,” she said. “First it was just tricks, then suddenly the whole world was at stake.” She looked away. “But no . . . I couldn’t have done that to them.”

  Frizz pulled her close again. “That’s a relief.”

  Aya squeezed her eyes shut, hiding from her own doubts. Frizz had believed her, just like that. Maybe it wasn’t such a stretch—the whole question was hypothetical, after all.

  It would be crazy to throw Frizz away forever, when the price of keeping him was one little stretch of the truth.

  “Um, Aya?” Frizz whispered in her ear. “I think your brother wants you.”

  She grasped him tighter. “I don’t care.”

  “Actually, it’s not just Hiro. It’s sort of . . . lots of people.”

  Aya sighed and pulled away, glancing over his shoulder. When she saw them all, her jaw dropped open.

  The feeding frenzy had begun.

  FEEDING FRENZY

  There were dozens of people waiting. Ren was arranging them on the mansion’s main staircase, with the most famous closest to the bottom. About half were tech-heads with crazy surge and smart-matter clothes, the rest looking out of place here at the bash—ego-kickers, newsies, a handful of city officials. Some big faces, some not.

  But all of them were here to see her.

  Hiro took Aya’s arm and gently propelled her toward an empty spot at the bottom of the stairs. Several hundred hovercams were focused on her now, in constant motion as they jostled for the best angles, shadowing her every step. Aya felt strangely small under their collective gaze, as insignificant as that first night she’d surfed into the wild.

  But this was the opposite of obscurity, she reminded herself. This was what she’d always wanted—for people to watch her, to pay attention to every word she said.

  “Eyescreen off,” Hiro whispered. “You’ll need your whole brain for this.”

  Aya nodded and flexed her ring finger. But as she stared up at the attentive faces before her, all suddenly crystal clear, the answers she’d practiced the night before started flying from her head.

  “Um, this is kind of paralyzing,” she said softly.

  Hiro squeezed her arm. “I’ll be right here.”

  She nodded and cleared her throat. “Okay, let’s start.”

  The questions came hard and fast.

  “How did you find the Sly Girls, Aya?”

  “Just lucky, I guess. I just saw them surfing one night, and tracked them down at a party like this one.”

  “Why are some shots in the background layer altered?”

  Aya cleared her throat, wondering how anyone had watched all those hours so quickly. “The Sly Girls wanted anonymity. So I scrubbed a few faces. That’s all.”

  “You’re not hiding anyone else?”

  “Like who?”

  “The builders of the mass driver.”

  “Of course not!”

  “So you don’t know anything about them?”

  Aya paused, wishing she’d mentioned the inhuman-looking figures in her story. But it was such a crazy claim, and she didn’t have a single shot to back it up. Alien builders would be a million times more implausible if she brought them up now.

  “Why would I protect them? Whoever built the city killer is crazy. Or did you miss the city-killing part?”

  “Isn’t that title a little hype-making, Aya?” another kicker asked. “A few tons of falling steel can’t really destroy a city, can it?”

  Aya smiled. Ren had made sure she was ready for this one. “At reentry velocities, it only takes a small projectile to knock out a hoverstrut-supported building. So if a cylinder splits into thousands of pieces . . . well, you do the math. Or better yet, ask that woman over there to do it. The one with the puzzle cube.”

  “Couldn’t we stop the cylinders? Like the Rusties used to shoot down rockets?”

  She’d looked this one up herself. “The Rusties never got very good at intercepting city killers—except in their own propaganda. And rockets trail bi
g plumes of smoke. Slivers of metal would be tiny and invisible.”

  “Why do you think they left the mountain empty?”

  “Ren Machino, who helped me with all this, thinks the mass driver was designed to be completely automatic.”

  “Do you think there could be more of these things in the world?”

  She blinked. “I sure hope not.”

  “With the metal shortage going on, where do you think they got all that steel?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “What made you want to be a kicker, Aya?”

  “Um . . .” She paused, unready for this one, though Hiro had warned her that there was always some bubblehead asking personal questions, no matter how important a story was. “After the mind-rain I was having trouble figuring out the world. And telling other people’s stories is a good way to do that.”

  The kicker smiled. “Isn’t that the same answer your big brother always gives?”

  “Oh, crap . . . no comment,” Aya said. At the sound of their laughter, she smiled and finally relaxed a little.

  “What kind of face do you want when you turn sixteen?” a fashion-kicker shouted from the back.

  “I don’t know yet. I’m sort of partial to manga-heads.”

  “So we noticed, Slime Queen!”

  “Okay. No comment again.”

  “Do you worry that you’re glorifying dangerous tricks, Aya?”

  She shrugged. “I’m just telling the truth about the world.”

  “But you didn’t tell the truth to the Sly Girls. . . .”

  Aya glanced at Frizz and said, “Sometimes you have to lie to find the truth.”

  “Why do you think a big face like Eden Maru hangs out with the Sly Girls?”

  Aya shrugged. “Like she said in that interview: to get away from you guys.”

  “Do you think our city built the mass driver?” someone in the back row asked—one of Toshi Banana’s groupies, Aya realized.

  “Why would we do that?”

  “We’re the closest city to the mountain. Wouldn’t that make you a traitor?”

  “Make me a what?”

  “What if we need the mass driver to defend ourselves?”