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-ram 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
'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 tram passes in three minutes,' Jai said. 'So what's the most important thing to remember once we're surfing?'
