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  Aya glanced at her brother, who was deep in a feed-trance, absorbing all twelve screens at once, no doubt plotting his big follow-up to immortality. Not the right moment to mention her new story, especially since that would mean bringing up a certain missing hovercam.

  “Maybe not right now,” she said. “So what are you working on?”

  “Nothing huge,” he said. “This middle-pretty science clique asked me for a kick. They’ve got some merits but no face. They’re trying to recreate all those species the Rusties erased, you know? From old scraps of DNA and junk genes.”

  “Really?” Aya said. “That sounds totally kickable!”

  “Yeah, till it turned out they’re starting with worms and slugs and insects. I was like, ‘Worms? Let me know when you get to tigers!’” He laughed. “I saw your underground graffiti story, by the way. Good work.”

  “Really?” Aya felt herself blush. “You thought those guys were interesting?”

  “They will be,” Hiro murmured from his chair, “in about a thousand years, when their work gets unburied.”

  Ren smiled, whispering, “See? Hiro watches your feed too.”

  “Not that she returns the favor,” Hiro said, his eyes never leaving the wallscreen.

  “So what are you kicking next, Aya-chan?” Ren asked.

  “Well, it’s kind of a secret right now.”

  “A secret?” Hiro said. “Ooh, mysterious.”

  Aya sighed. She’d come here to ask for Hiro’s help, but he obviously wasn’t in a help-giving mood. He was going to be insufferable now that he’d reached the top thousand.

  Maybe it was pointless anyway. She wasn’t even sure that the Sly Girls would keep their promise and contact her, or how to find them again if they didn’t.

  “Don’t worry, Aya-chan,” Ren said. “We won’t tell anybody.”

  “Well . . . okay. Have you guys ever heard of the Sly Girls?”

  Ren glanced at Hiro, who turned slowly in his chair to face her. A strange expression had appeared on both their faces.

  “I’ve heard of them,” Hiro said. “But they’re not real.”

  Aya laughed. “Not real? Like, they’re robots or something?”

  “More like a rumor,” he said. “The Sly Girls don’t exist.”

  “What do you know about them?” she asked.

  “Nothing. There’s nothing to know about them, because they aren’t real!”

  “Come on, Hiro,” she said. “Unicorns aren’t real, and I know stuff about them. Like . . . they have horns on their foreheads. And they can fly!”

  Hiro groaned. “No, that’s Pegasus that flies. Unicorns just have a horn, which makes them a lot more real than the Sly Girls, who I can’t tell you anything about. It’s just a random phrase kickers use. Like last year when someone was jumping off bridges wearing homemade parachutes, and no one ever figured out who. Everyone just said, ‘The Sly Girls did it.’ Because sly in English means clever or sneaky.”

  Aya rolled her eyes. “My English is a lot better than yours, Hiro-sensei. But what if they really exist?”

  “Then they wouldn’t be secret, would they? I mean, some cliques start off underground, and a lot of people pull tricks on the sly, but nobody stays anonymous forever.” He swept his gaze around the apartment—the huge wallscreen, the garlands of paper cranes, the floor-to-ceiling window with its slowly shifting view. “Thanks to the reputation economy, they’d rather be famous. Did you know that every real criminal since the mind-rain has wound up confessing?”

  Aya nodded. Everyone knew that, and how they’d all hit the top one thousand for at least a few days. “But what if—?”

  “It’s not real, Aya. Whatever it is.”

  “So if I bring you some shots of the Sly Girls?” she said. “What are you going to say then?”

  Hiro turned back toward the wallscreen. “The same thing I’d say if you stuck a plastic horn on a horse and started kicking unicorns: Quit wasting my time.”

  Aya clenched her fists, her eyes stinging. The doubts she’d had about sneaking footage of the Girls were gone now. She was going to make Hiro eat his words.

  She turned to Ren. “What’s a good cam to requisition? One that’s small enough to hide.” She fingered a button on her dorm uniform. “This big.”

  “That’s easy,” Ren said, then frowned. “Where’s your hovercam, anyway? You never used to go anywhere without Moggle.”

  “Oh . . . well, that’s sort of why I was looking for you, Ren.”

  He grinned. “What, did you break another lens? You’ve got to stop jumping out your window.”

  “Um, it’s kind of worse than that,” Aya said softly, but she could see that Hiro was listening. Why was she always invisible to him, until she made a mistake? “You see, I kind of . . . lost Moggle.”

  Ren’s eyes widened. “But how . . . ?”

  “You lost it?” Hiro turned to them, a glare set on his pretty face. “How do you lose a hovercam? They just fly home when you leave them behind!”

  “It’s not like I left it somewhere,” she said. “I mean, I would never—”

  “Do you know how long Ren spent on those mods?”

  “Look, Hiro, I know where Moggle is, sort of,” Aya said, a lump rising in her throat. “I just need a little help finding it and . . . getting it back to the surface.”

  “The surface of what?” Hiro cried.

  “There’s this sort of underground lake, and . . .” Her throat closed up around the words, and Aya shut her eyes. If Hiro kept yelling at her, she’d burst into tears.

  She felt Ren’s hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay, Aya-chan.”

  “I’m sorry,” she managed.

  “Well, it sounds like a pretty famous-making story.” He exhaled slowly. “I think I’ve got some time tomorrow. Maybe I can help you dredge up Moggle from this . . . underground lake?”

  She nodded, eyes still closed. “Thanks, Ren-chan.”

  “She’ll just lose it again,” Hiro said.

  “No I won’t!” she shouted. “And I’m going to prove that you’re wrong about the Sly Girls, too!”

  But Hiro didn’t answer . . . he just shook his head.

  • • •

  Aya made her way home, still trying not to cry.

  She was exhausted, Ren hated her, and her stupid brother was getting more famous and horrible every second. If Ren couldn’t find Moggle, there was no way she could scrape together enough merits for a new hovercam.

  All Aya wanted to do was sleep until tomorrow morning, when Ren had promised to meet her at the new construction site. But this afternoon was already stuffed with classes—the ones she’d rescheduled from this morning on top of the dreaded Advanced English. She couldn’t skip: Schoolwork was the quickest way to build up merits when you were an ugly—all the good jobs went to pretties and crumblies.

  When she reached Akira Hall, she went down to the basement and found an empty wallscreen.

  “Aya Fuse,” she told it.

  It popped to life, listing her pings and assignments, and displaying her miserable face rank of 451,441.

  She was dying to look up Frizz Mizuno and Radical Honesty, but not until schoolwork was out of the way. As she scanned the list for any new assignments, her eyes froze on one. . . .

  It was anonymous and spitting animations, like the fluttering hearts that littlies decorated their pings with. But these weren’t hearts, or exclamation points, or smilies.

  They were eyes—dull, unsurged, Plain Jane eyes—and they kept winking at her.

  Aya opened the ping. . . .

  Saw your story about the graffiti. Not bad, for a kicker. Meet us at midnight, where the mag-lev line leaves Uglyville.

  But don’t bring a cam, or we won’t let you play.

  —your new friends

  SLY GIRLS

  “Can’t I use my own hoverboard?”

  Jai snorted. “That toy? Too slow. The train will be doing a hundred and fifty by the time you jump on.”

>   “Oh.” Aya stared down at the long, shimmering curve of the mag-lev line. It cut through the low industrial buildings, an arc of white through dull orange worklights. The Sly Girls had brought her to the city’s edge, where the greenbelt faded into factories and new expansions. “I just assumed you guys got on the train while it was standing still.”

  “The wardens would be expecting that, wouldn’t they?” Jai swung her feet casually, as if there weren’t a hundred-meter drop below them. “They have monitors all over the train yards.”

  “But isn’t a hundred and fifty kind of fast?” Most boards were safety-capped at sixty kilometers an hour.

  “That’s nothing for a mag-lev,” Eden Maru said. “We’re catching it when it slows down on the bend.” She pointed toward the wild. “The trains do three hundred once they hit the straightaway outside town.”

  “Three hundred klicks? And we’ll still be riding it?”

  “Let’s hope so.” Jai smiled. “Considering the alternative.”

  Aya glanced down at the magnetic bracelets strapped to her wrists. They were like the crash bracelets everyone wore for hoverboard falls, just much bigger. But were they really powerful enough to fight a three-hundred-kilometer headwind?

  She wrapped her arms around herself, trying not to look down at the nervous-making drop. The three of them were balanced atop a tall transmission tower, high enough to see darkness on the horizon, the place where the city stopped.

  Aya had never glimpsed the wild before tonight, except on nature feeds. Somehow the thought of venturing out into that lightless, barren expanse was even scarier than jumping on a speeding train.

  Moggle’s absence made her doubly uneasy. It was eerie knowing that none of this was being recorded. Like a dream, whatever happened would all be gone tomorrow morning. Aya felt cut off from the world, unreal.

  “The next train passes in three minutes,” Jai said. “So what’s the most important thing to remember once we’re surfing?”

  A cold trickle squirmed down Aya’s spine. “The decapitation signals.”

  “Which work how?”

  “When anyone in front of me flashes a yellow light, that means duck. Red means a tunnel’s coming, so lie flat against the train.”

  “Just don’t get too excited.” Jai giggled. “Or you’ll lose your head.”

  Aya wondered if the Sly Girls had ever considered lying flat for the whole ride, which would make decapitation much less of an issue. Or realized that not surfing mag-levs at all would keep head-losing safely in the realm of the unimaginable, where it belonged.

  “Sounds like you’ve got it down,” Jai said.

  Eden snorted. “Yeah, she’s practically an expert.”

  “Relax, face-queen,” Jai said. “Not all of us are hoverball stars.”

  “Not all of us are fifteen, either. Or kickers.”

  “She doesn’t even have a cam anymore.”

  Aya listened to them argue, wondering how high Jai’s face rank was. Lots of people who avoided the feeds were famous, of course. In fact, the most famous person in the city—in the whole world—didn’t have a feed of her own. But people talked about her every time they mentioned the mind-rain.

  “You don’t have to worry about me,” Aya said. “Just because I’m an ugly doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”

  “Of course not,” Jai said. “In fact, I find your ugliness enchanting.”

  “I’ve been getting a lot of that lately,” Aya said, thinking of Frizz Mizuno.

  “One minute to go!” Eden called, and jumped from the tower. Her hoverball rig caught her fall, and she pirouetted in midair to face them. “Just be careful, Aya.”

  “She will be.” Jai pushed off, stepping onto her waiting board. “They’re always careful the first time!”

  She laughed and spun away, the two of them sweeping down toward the tracks together.

  Aya stepped gingerly onto the high-speed board they’d given her. It gave a little under her weight, like a diving board, but she could feel the power surging beneath her feet.

  The approaching train was visible now, just crawling out from the yards, loaded with trade bound for other cities. She couldn’t hear its rumble yet, but Aya knew that three hundred tons of speeding metal would shake the earth like a suborbital launch as it passed.

  She followed Jai and Eden across the factory belt, down to the hiding place where the others waited—the rooftop of a low industrial building next to the tracks. A few driverless trucks rumbled along the streets below, tending the factories and building sites. No people anywhere.

  As Aya swept in for a landing, loose gravel crunched under her hoverboard. She slid to a hiding spot behind a ventilation tower spitting exhaust from the underground depths of the factory. A smell like sulfur and hot glue tinged the air.

  Crouching there, listening to the train rumbling in the distance, Aya found herself thinking of Frizz Mizuno again. He seemed to cross her mind every few minutes—how had one random conversation been so brain-rattling?

  The teachers always warned about getting too involved with pretties. Since the mind-rain, they weren’t as innocent as they looked. They could mess with your head so easily, just by gazing at you with those huge, gorgeous eyes.

  Of course, Frizz wasn’t like that. She’d checked the city interface after classes, and Ren had been right about Radical Honesty: They couldn’t lie, or even imply a falsehood. The whole truth-slanting part of their brain had been switched off, just like bubbleheads were missing willpower, creativity, and despair.

  But the fact that Frizz had been truthful just made him more nerve-jangling. As did the fact that his face rank was going up every hour. He’d only been pretty a few months, and he was headed for the top thousand.

  “Nervous?” a voice came from the darkness.

  It was one of the other Sly Girls, crouching beside the next air vent. She looked younger than Jai and Eden—with the same Plain Jane surge and hole-in-the-wall rejects they all wore.

  “No, I’m okay.”

  “But surfing’s more fun if you’re scared.”

  Aya laughed. With her mousy brown hair, the girl looked almost like an ugly. Her eyes were so lusterless and dull that Aya wondered if she’d surged them that way.

  “This should be plenty of fun, then.”

  “Good.” The girl grinned. “It’s supposed to be!”

  She certainly looked like she was having fun. As the rumble of the train built, her smile gleamed like a pretty’s in the darkness. Aya wondered what made her so thrilled to be risking her life like this. How many people even knew that she was a Sly Girl?

  “Hey, aren’t you in my dorm?” Aya asked. “What’s your name?”

  The girl laughed. “You going to check my face rank later?”

  “Oh.” Aya looked away. “Is it that obvious?”

  “Fame’s always obvious—that’s the point of it.” She glanced back toward where Jai was hiding. “I know you kick stories once in a while. We’ll have to break you of that habit.”

  “Sorry I asked.”

  “No problem. Listen, if it makes you feel better, my first name’s Miki. And my face rank’s about nine hundred and ninety-seven thousand.”

  “You’re kidding . . . right?”

  “Pretty sly, huh?” Miki said with a grin.

  Aya shook her head, trying to think through the building rumble of the train. It didn’t make sense. Anyone who pulled tricks like this should have cracked a hundred thousand, whether they’d been kicked or not. The city interface picked up any mention of your name, especially gossip, tall tales, and rumors.

  And 997,000 was almost a million! That was the land of extreme extras, like newborn littlies and crumblies who’d never taken the mind-rain pills. Non-people, practically.

  Miki just laughed at Aya’s dumbfounded expression. “Of course, Jai’s even slyer. That’s why she’s the boss.”

  “You mean slyer . . . as in less famous?”

  Miki winked. “As in kissing a mill
ion.”

  “Get ready!” Eden Maru called, barely audible above the growing roar of the train.

  “Surf’s up!” Miki yelled, kneeling.

  Aya grabbed her hoverboard’s forward edge, trying to focus. This story was suddenly much stranger than just surfing a mag-lev. For some reason, the Sly Girls had turned the reputation economy upside down.

  They wanted to disappear. But why?

  Her crash bracelets snapped against the board, locking her down tight. The factory roof itself was shuddering now, the gravel strewn across it dancing like hailstones hitting grass.

  She could finally kick a story like one of Hiro’s: long, dizzy-making interviews, a dozen background layers tracing the Girls’ histories, wild footage of train rides and underground meetings. If she could just shoot it without them finding out . . . and with her hovercam at the bottom of a lake.

  Aya glanced over her shoulder at Jai, feeling a cold smile creep onto her face. Finally she knew how to take the perfect revenge for Moggle’s watery burial. She was going to kick this story big, and make the Sly Girls famous beyond their wildest nightmares.

  She’d make sure everyone knew their names.

  “Hey, you look a little funny,” Miki called above the roar. “Not finally getting scared, are you?”

  Aya laughed. “No. Just getting ready!”

  The thunder built louder and louder, finally exploding as the train arrived, a solid blur of lights and noise shooting past. A dozen whirlwinds of dust swirled to life across the rooftop.

  Then the train leaned into the curve, and Aya heard a chorus of humming slowly build, like an orchestra of wineglasses tuning up. Three hundred tons of levitating metal and smart matter were bending into a new shape, slowing down just a little bit.

  “Now!” Eden screamed.

  And they rose into the air.

  SURFING

  The board shot forward, dragging Aya along by her wrists.

  It wrenched and twisted like a bad spinout, when crash bracelets could almost jerk a rider’s arms from their sockets. But spinouts never lasted this long. Aya’s hoverboard was still accelerating, faster and faster along the slow curve of the mag-lev line.

  She squeezed as flat as she could against the board, her feet dangling off the back end, her dorm jacket snapping like a flag in a gale.