However panic-making this looked, everything was going to be okay.
She dared a glance over her shoulder. The three hovercars were gaining easily on the overloaded boards. As they grew nearer, the lifter fans began to shake the air.
Tally began to rock the board, and Aya squeezed tighter. 'What are you doing!'
'They're trying to push us around. We have to make it look like it's working!'
'But why?' Aya cried, trying to keep her balance without shifting her feet. One wrong step, and she'd squash Hiro's fingers!
'Have you not been listening?' Tally yelled. 'We don't want to give ourselves away!'
Aya frowned. What was the point of looking helpless? Whatever trap the Cutters had planned, wasn't now the time to spring it?
The edge of the city was in sight?maybe that was where they'd make their move. Once they were over the grid, Hiro could fly again, and their crash bracelets would work.
She looked around. Frizz and Fausto were only ten meters away, Frizz's manga eyes wider than ever. Fausto was swaying their board back and forth, an expression of wild delight on his plastic ugly face. Ren and Shay were pulling ahead, riding low and straight.
A car pulled level with Aya and Tally. The side door slid open, revealing two freaks staring at her, lifter rigs strapped on.
'They're waiting until we get back over the grid,' Tally yelled. 'That means they don't want to kill us.'
'Wonderful.' Aya swallowed, thinking of all the worse things than death the freaks might have planned.
One of the hovercars swept in closer, and Aya felt a familiar shudder building in the air.
'Shock wave!' she shouted, just as the turbulence hit.
Her ears popped, the wind battering her eyes shut. Then the board hit a pocket of low pressure and dropped. Her feet lifted from the riding surface, and Aya clutched Tally's waist as hard as she could.
Then the board popped back up, Aya's ankle twisting as her feet slammed down against a bump on the riding surface.
Him'$ fingers Aya heard his cry as he fell away, the city's edge still in the distance.
'Tally!' she screamed.
'Don't worry.' Tally's body twisted in Aya's grip, bringing them around in a heart-stopping turn.
For a moment there was nothing below Aya but trees and brush?she was almost upside down, the howling lifter fans pushing her down past Hiro's tumbling form.
Aya wanted to scream, but every ounce of her strength went into squeezing Tally's waist.
They fell past Hiro, his panicked cries Dopplering by, then the board twisted again, sweeping up beneath them. Tally reached out and casually grabbed his arm, swinging him onto the board.
His face was pale.
'Sorry to cut that so close, Hiro,' Tally said, glancing up at the hovercars. 'Didn't want to make it look too easy.'
The three of them staggered on the unsteady board, arms wrapped around each other. The lifting fans screeched under Hiro's added weight.
Aya's nose caught the scent of burning metal. 'Are we overheating?'
'Yeah,' Tally said. 'The timing's perfect.'
They shot across the city's edge just as the fans seized up with metallic shriek. The board shuddered as the magnetics took over.
But they were still descending 'We're too heavy!' Hiro yelled. 'Let me go! I can fly now!'
'Not yet.' Tally still had an arm wrapped around him.
Above them six inhumans had jumped out of the cars. Two pursued each of the Cutters' boards, their needle fingers glistening in the dawn light like icicles.
'This is when you get them, right?' Aya asked. She hoped Moggle was close enough to capture the Cutters bursting out of their disguises and surprising the inhumans.
'Not yet,' Tally said.
In the distance Aya saw Frizz and Fausto spinning out, their board losing control as two inhumans closed in on them.
Aya looked down. The ground was still rushing up too fast for her liking. Tally guided them toward a narrow alley between two factories, where one of the inhumans waited, all four arms extended.
'Let me go!' Hiro shouted.
Tally nodded. 'Okay, in three seconds?two ?' On one she pushed him from the board. Hiro leaped forward, arms outstretched?but something was wrong.
He was spinning wildly out of control, his limbs whirling like a top. An inhuman swept up beside his flailing form and stabbed him with a needle.
'Hiro!'
Aya screamed. 'Tally! Do something!'
'Don't worry, Aya-la. It's all going according to plan.'
Tally twisted the board away from the inhuman. But another waited at the alley's other end. They were headed straight toward him.
'Tally! Climb!'
'Quit waving your arms, Aya-la, or this could get messy.'
'It's already messy!'
They shot straight into the outspread arms of the inhuman, and Aya felt a needle jab in her side.
Slivers of cold began to spread through her, like tendrils wrapping around her lungs and heart.
'Do something,' she whispered, still expecting Tally's smart-plastic disguise to burst away and reveal her fearsome Cutter face.
Then she saw it clutched in Tally's hand?one of Hiro's shoulder pads, its straps undone. Tally had pulled it off on purpose. She dropped it as the hoverboard spun toward the ground.
'Just hang on for a few more seconds, Aya-la. Don't want to bump your head.' Tally slumped down toward the riding surface, her eyes fluttering closed. But she sounded totally alert as she hissed, 'And wherever you wake up, don't call me Tally. We're just your ugly friends, got that?'
'But why??'
'Trust me, Aya-la. Sometimes it's a messy business, saving the world.'
Aya's brain was spinning from the needle jab, losing its grip on consciousness, but slowly she grasped what the plan had been all along: a way for the disguised Cutters to be captured.
Aya and the others had been nothing but bait And Tally Youngblood?architect of the mind-rain, the most famous person in the world?was nothing but a truth-slanting Slime Queen.
Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.
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.
