She looked at Hiro, who said, “If this is about defending us, then shouldn’t we know about it?”
“So, Hiro?” a tech-kicker interrupted. “What’s it like to be upstaged by your little sister?”
“Pretty vex-making,” Hiro said, then smiled. “But much better than watching my mansion getting bombed.”
The questions kept coming: Aya’s childhood, her favorite kicker, plans for follow-up stories. Endless talk about math and missiles, Sly Girls and spy-cams, parachutes and paparazzi. Every time one kicker peeled off to prepare their story for the feeds, another joined the fray, and soon the questions began to repeat. Aya tried to come up with fresh answers, but eventually found herself mouthing the same words again and again.
Finally Frizz dragged her away into a corner, promising she’d be back soon. Hiro kept going without losing a beat.
“Water,” she croaked.
Frizz thrust a glass into her hand, and Aya drank deep.
“Thanks,” she gasped when it was empty, taking a look around. The air was thick with hovercams pointed at her, but people were keeping their distance, trying not to stare. For the first time in her life, a reputation bubble had formed around Aya.
On the other side of the room, a bunch of tech-heads had gathered at the mansion’s big public wallscreen, watching Ren demonstrate the grim math of ballistic weapons and collapsing buildings. For a moment she was alone with Frizz.
“How’d I do?” she asked softly.
“Amazing.” He grinned. “So what does it feel like, being famous?”
She groaned, remembering her radical stupidity the last time they’d been together. “Very funny.”
“No really,” he said, “what’s it like hanging out with someone as face-missing as me?”
“Cut it out! What happened to your radical honesty?”
“Teasing isn’t lying,” Frizz argued. “And besides, I’m really wondering how you see me now.”
Aya rolled her eyes. “But it’s not like you’re some extra. There’s no difference in ambition between us!”
“Yes there is.”
“What do you mean?”
“You went for an hour without checking your face rank?” He laughed. “That’s pretty jaw-dropping. Take a guess, before I blurt it out.”
Aya swallowed. She’d hardly breathed since the story’d kicked, much less tracked her face rank. And somehow she was afraid to boot her eyescreen and check. “You mean I’m more famous than you? Am I under a thousand?”
“Don’t be brain-missing, Aya! Immortal crumblies got your brother under a thousand. This is a city killer! Take a real guess.”
Aya shrugged, not wanting to sound ego-kicking. “Um, five hundred?”
“Still brain-missing!” A pained expression twisted Frizz’s face. “Not telling you is killing me.”
“Then tell me!” Aya cried.
“You’re the seventeenth-most-famous person in the city!” Frizz spat out, then rubbed his temples. “Ouch. That hurt.”
Aya stared at him—even if Frizz couldn’t lie, he had to be mistaken. “Seventeen?”
“Nana Love kicked you.”
“No way!” Aya cried. “What does she care about Rusty weapons?”
“Nana-chan cares about all humanity.” He shrugged. “Which is nice of her. Maybe she pinged you.”
“No way!” Aya turned her eyescreen on, heart pounding as it came to life. “You really think so?”
“Probably. She pinged me when I hit the top thousand.”
Aya’s interface appeared, stuffed with an enormous stack of pings, tens of thousands of them stretching off into the invisible distance. She’d never have time to read them all!
“You should see yourself, Aya,” Frizz said, laughing. “You look like a littlie who just ate too much ice cream.”
“Too much is right. You should see all these messages!” She remembered Hiro’s trick after big stories, when he was always ping-bashed with tips. Her fingers began to twitch. “Hang on, let me sort them by face rank. Pings from extras go to the bottom and the important ones rise to the top. If Nana-chan really is in here, she’ll be right at the . . . whoa.”
There were so many pings, Aya could actually see them moving, the city interface straining as it checked each one against the constantly updating face ranks. Gradually a few bubbled to the top—big-face kickers, politicians, a note of thanks from the Good Citizen Committee. . . .
“I am totally going to score some merits out of this,” she murmured. “Shuffle Mansion, here I come.”
Then she saw it . . . a glowing ping rising on angel’s wings.
“Oh, Frizz. You were right . . . Nana-chan was watching!”
He laughed. “I told you so!”
Aya was about to open it, but suddenly the ping slid down. She stared at the new message in disbelief. It carried no decoration at all, its black text as bare as an automatic reply.
“Um, Frizz, there’s another one above it.”
“Another what?”
“I think someone more famous than Nana Love just pinged me.”
“But there isn’t anyone who’s . . . except . . .” Frizz let out a strangled sound. “You mean Tally Youngblood just pinged you?”
Aya nodded slowly. It was right there, painted in laser light on her eyeball. A ping from the world’s most famous person—the girl who’d made the mind-rain fall. The name prayed to by the Youngblood cults every morning, cursed by Toshi Banana as he slammed the latest mind-rain clique, repeated countless times whenever the story of the Diego War was taught to littlies . . .
“How could she know so fast?” Aya murmured. “Isn’t she hiding in the wild somewhere?”
“The story went global two hours ago,” Frizz said. “She must have friends checking the feeds for her.”
“But since when does Tally Youngblood just ping people?” Saying the name made her throat go dry again.
“Who cares? Open it!”
Aya twitched her finger, and the ping expanded. It was tagged by the global interface, guaranteed authentic. But as she read the message, Aya wondered if Tally’s English was confusing her somehow.
“What does it say?” Frizz cried.
“It’s only seven words.”
“What words? ‘Thanks’? ‘Congratulations’? ‘Hello’?”
“No, Frizz. It says, ‘Run and hide. We’re on our way.’”
PINNED
“This is stupid,” Hiro hissed. “We should go back to the party. Running off like this is making us look like idiots!”
“You’re telling me to ignore Tally Youngblood?” Aya said. “Her ping said run and hide!”
“You call this hiding?” Ren asked.
Aya glanced into the sky. A hundred or so hovercams had trailed them out of the party, probably wondering why the seventeenth-most-famous person in the city had suddenly abandoned her first interview ever. The swarm was silhouetted against the night sky, a host of lenses glinting down at them like the eyes of predators.
“That’s a good point,” Frizz said. “We have to find somewhere private.”
“I’m trying.” Aya sighed.
The four of them had left the bash by a side door and headed randomly across a darkened baseball field. Safety fireworks were still shooting up from the mansion’s roof. Flickering across the grass, they sent Aya’s huge, jittering shadow stretching out in front of her.
She remembered Lai’s last warning on the sled: “Whoever built this monstrosity is dangerous.”
“What’s the point of privacy?” Hiro snapped. “If you think someone’s coming after you, shouldn’t we stay where everyone can see us?”
Aya came to a halt, stopping so quickly that Moggle bumped her from behind. Maybe the safest place was in full view. No one would dare do anything at a crowded party—or with a hundred hovercams directly overhead, for that matter.
She sighed. “I guess we could go back in.”
“Exactly,” Hiro cried. “We can kick Tally Youngbl
ood’s ping. If everyone finds out she’s on her way here, it’ll be massive!”
Frizz cleared his throat. “This probably isn’t the best time to worry about face ranks, Hiro.”
“This isn’t about face ranks, you bubblehead!”
“Technically speaking, I’m not a bubblehead,” Frizz said calmly. “Which is why I’m not shouting our plans where everyone can hear them.”
Aya glanced up. There was still a fair-size reputation bubble around her, but a few cams were close enough to have caught Hiro’s outburst.
“Whatever we do, let’s keep our voices down,” she said. “Somehow, I don’t think Tally-sama wants the whole city to know she’s coming.”
Ren shook his head. “She’s not from here, Aya, so she doesn’t understand how the reputation economy works. About half a million people are watching right now. Your fame will protect us.”
“You can’t hide, Aya,” Hiro said. “Everyone knows exactly where you are. Wasn’t that the point of tonight?”
Frizz frowned, looking at her. “I thought the point of tonight was to save the world.”
Aya sighed. “There may have been several points, okay? Everyone just be quiet for a second while I think!”
The other three fell silent. Aya stood there, feeling their eyes on her, and the lenses of a hundred hovercams, and another half a million people watching through them. Even Moggle was staring at her.
It wasn’t the best spot for thinking.
Frizz drew closer, putting an arm around her shoulder. “If we go back to the party and someone comes after you, who’s going to stop them? A bunch of pixel-heads?”
Hiro shrugged. “The wardens, just like any other crime.”
“Do we trust the wardens?” Frizz asked. “Remember what that kicker said? Our city might have built this thing!”
“The guy who called her a traitor?” Hiro laughed. “He was totally brain-missing!”
“Well, maybe not totally,” Ren said. “The mass driver was built using mag-levs that started here. Someone from our city must have been part of it.”
“Someone with a lot of authority,” Frizz added. “To use all that steel with nobody knowing.”
Aya swallowed. The city killer was so huge—whoever had built it wielded enough power to hollow out mountains. Could a few wardens really stop them? Would half a million witnesses stay their hand, when they had the audacity to destroy whole cities?
Gazing into the dark ring of trees around the baseball field, she remembered Eden Maru’s words. . . .
“You can disappear in front of a crowd, too.”
“Moggle, go as high as you can and look around.” She turned to Hiro. “I’m going to do what Tally-sama says . . . and hide.”
She started walking again—away from the mansion’s lights, away from everything.
Hiro followed, still arguing. “You’re thinking like an extra. You can’t hide! All anyone has to do to find you is turn on the feeds!”
A dizziness washed over Aya as she walked—the hovercams were moving overhead now, shadowing her every step, as if she was on a treadmill going nowhere. She felt trapped under their lenses, like a butterfly fixed with a hundred pins.
“Can you do something about those things?” she asked Ren.
“Well, maybe.” Ren pulled out a trick-box. “When the big tech-kickers want an industrial-size reputation bubble, they jam everything for a hundred meters or so. I might be able to arrange a couple of minutes out of sight.”
“Please.” Aya glanced up at the cams overhead. “A little obscurity looks pretty good right now. Safer, anyway.”
“But why would anyone want to come after you?” Hiro kept arguing. “Everyone in the world already knows this weapon exists. What more can you do to them? You didn’t hide anything, did you?”
Aya shook her head. “Of course not. You and Hiro always say burying shots is totally truth-slanting. So it’s all in there. Well, except . . .”
She paused, thinking of the inhuman-looking figures she and Miki had seen.
“Except what?” Frizz asked softly.
“There’s one thing I sort of left out.” She looked at Hiro. “But I didn’t even have any shots of them.”
His eyes narrowed. “Shots of who, Aya?”
“Well, that first night I surfed . . . What does it matter, anyway?”
Hiro took a step closer. “Because if you don’t put everything on the feeds, someone can silence you! What did you leave out?”
“Well, in the tunnel that first night, I saw some people who weren’t quite, um . . . human.”
There was a pause. The three of them stared at her, dumbfounded.
A thump came from the darkness nearby, and they all jumped. A few meters away, a hovercam lay on its side, its running lights dark. Another thump came from farther away, then a third. Aya looked up.
The hovercams were starting to fall.
She smiled. “Wow, Ren. How’d you do that?”
Ren lowered the trick-box, a puzzled expression on his face. “Here’s some bad news. I’m not doing that—someone else is.”
The thudding came from every direction now, like a slowly building hailstorm. Raising her arms over her head, Aya saw that the sky was already half empty.
Soon she would be invisible again. And then, once no one was watching, Aya Fuse might disappear forever.
She started running.
RUN AND HIDE
“Get us four hoverboards!” Hiro was yelling. “Property override! I don’t care who owns them, this is an emergency!”
Aya led them back toward the bash—at this point, a crowd seemed better than darkness. The last few hovercams trailed them doggedly, tumbling from the air one by one.
“Moggle, are you still up there?” she hissed. The hovercam’s view appeared—she saw herself and the others from a distance, specks against the vast expanse of the baseball field. No one else was in sight. “Stay up high, Moggle! Someone’s jamming everything around us.”
On cue, another hovercam crashed to the ground in front of Aya. She jumped over it, her party dress threatening to tangle around her ankles.
“There they are!” Hiro shouted.
Four hoverboards were shooting across the field toward them, silhouetted by the lights from the tech-head party.
“Won’t they just crash?” Aya asked. “Like the cams?”
“I think I can block the lifter jamming,” Ren said, poking at his trick-box as he ran. “Just stick close to me.”
“But is anyone chasing us?” Frizz asked.
Aya scanned the darkness between mansions. Still nobody in sight—nothing but the motionless remains of cams littering the ground.
Then she heard the whoosh of a hovercar.
It shot overhead, drowning out the thudding of their footsteps, whipping her hair with its passage. For a moment Aya thought it was the wardens, but then she heard the scream of lifting fans—the car was designed to work outside the city, where wardens never went.
And somehow she doubted it was Rangers overhead.
The car wheeled violently, dropping in front of them. The grass shimmered underfoot, roiling in the tempest of the lifting fans. Whirlwinds of dirt rose from the baselines of the baseball diamond.
Through the windshield, two drivers gazed back at her with a strange calm—their eyes set too wide apart, their skin pale and hairless, just like the ghastly faces in the tunnel.
She stumbled to a halt. Like Miki had said that night, they didn’t look human.
Frizz pulled her back into a run, angling around the hovercar. Flying dust forced her eyes half-shut, and her dress billowed like an open parachute around her.
As the car settled to the ground, its side split open, spilling a wedge of light across the field. Two more figures stood silhouetted inside, visible for a moment among rolling clouds of dirt.
Then Aya heard a cry—Ren and Hiro zooming out of the dust storm, two empty hoverboards following them.
“I’ve never ridde
n one of those before!” Frizz shouted.
“Just stick with me!” Aya leaped onto a board, pulling him on behind her. They veered wildly for a moment, Frizz swaying like a littlie on a balance beam.
“Stay close or they’ll jam you!” Ren yelled, waving the trick-box as he shot past.
Aya leaned into a hard turn, following Ren and Hiro. She felt Frizz’s arms wrap around her, his body pressing close as they gathered speed.
Behind them, the whine of the hovercar rose again, the wind of its fans battering the air. Aya thrust her arms out wide, wishing she hadn’t worn platform shoes tonight. At least the last two weeks were paying off: Riding double through a roaring wind wasn’t half as tricky as mag-lev surfing.
Frizz’s extra weight was a problem, though—Hiro and Ren were pulling away. Aya leaned forward, urging the board faster. If they fell too far behind Ren, they’d drop like the jammed hovercams.
And they weren’t even wearing crash bracelets. . . .
“Hold up!” she shouted, but the scream of the pursuing car erased her words.
Luckily, the mansion wasn’t far away now. She could see partygoers on its roof watching the chase, probably wondering what sort of publicity stunt this was.
The hovercar roared overhead again, the wash of its fans sending her and Frizz into a series of serpentine curves. Aya twisted her body, barely keeping them onboard.
“Up there!” Frizz shouted.
Two figures had jumped from the open hovercar door, their freakish arms and legs splaying wide as they fell through the air. They hover-bounced, spinning in the whirlwinds beneath the car, but quickly gained control. Aya spotted lifter pads bulging from their thin-limbed bodies.
“They’re wearing hoverball rigs!” she shouted. “Not good!”
The figures were zooming toward them now, riding the car’s wash like windsurfers in a gale.
“Hold on tight!” she cried, and spun the board into a quick reverse, heading back across the field. Frizz’s arms wrapped around her tighter, his weight shifting with hers.
But the inhumans were closing the gap quickly. When Hiro and Ren turned to follow, the spindly figures shot past them without a second glance.
Aya Fuse was who they wanted.