Hiro slid to a stop close by, sitting cross-legged on his board. "Great hiding place, Aya. There's no actual ground to stand on, is there?"
"No," Ren said. "But we've got plenty of water."
"It's not exactly Shuffle Mansion." Aya sighed. The apartment Hiro had shown her lingered in her mind's eye - the huge open spaces, the perfect city views. And here she was on her first night of fame, skulking underground.
Frizz's slow breathing echoed from the stone arches. He stirred beneath her, the effects of the needle-stab fading. She checked the mark on his neck - the redness had almost disappeared.
"Whatever was in those needles was designed to knock you out, Aya," Ren said. "But Frizz is a pretty. He'll be okay."
She nodded. The operation made pretties' bodies stronger and quicker to heal as well as beautiful.
"So who were those people?" Hiro asked.
"I have no idea," she said. "I only saw them once before."
"When you first saw the mountain open up?" Ren asked.
"Yeah. Miki and I were watching over the edge of the train. There were three of them, really skinny and tall. But it was so dark, I thought it was just the crazy shadows ... at first."
Hiro cleared his throat. "And you didn't bother mentioning this?"
"I didn't have any shots of them! And it was so sense-missing. I thought if I started with those freaks, everybody would think it was just another surge-monkey story. Aliens didn't exactly fit the city-killer theme."
"They didn't fit the theme?" Hiro cried. "What are you, some Rusty kicker? That's what the background layer is for!"
"Lecture her later, Hiro," Ren said. "Right now we need to figure out who they are, and why they're after Aya."
Hiro snorted. "We should go back to the surface and kick this! Call the wardens if you want!"
"Do we trust our own city?" Ren asked.
"I trust anyone, as long as there's a few hundred thousand people watching," Hiro muttered.
"What I don't get is, how did those surge-monkeys figure out you'd seen them?"
"Maybe there's something in the background layer that explains that," Ren said. "Too bad we're cut off from the feeds down here."
"Moggles got a copy of everything," Aya said.
"Okay, I'll take a look. Shake me if anything exciting happens." Ren stretched out on his board, his eyescreens flickering a full immersion warning.
Aya swallowed. With Ren shot-scanning and Frizz half-conscious, she was practically alone with Hiro. The last sparkles of her dress were fading, the darkness making his expression look angrier every second.
"How about some light, Moggle?" she said.
The hovercam's night-lights came on, filling the cavern. The deep shadows shifted as Moggle floated restlessly around the reservoir, but Hiro remained stock-still, staring straight at her.
She sighed. "I didn't mean to lie."
"No, Aya. But when you pick and choose facts to make your story, you always wind up truth-slanting. That's why good kickers put everything up. Save the manipulation for extras who only watch for ten minutes."
"Once more: I didn't have any shots of the freaks!"
"Still, you saw them, and you hid them. That's like lying."
Aya groaned, staring into the water. Its surface grew blacker as her dress's sparkles flickered off one by one. "I messed everything up, didn't I?"
"Not everything." His shoulders slumped. "But if you'd told what you saw, we might already know who those people were."
"How?"
"The wisdom of the crowd, Aya. If a million people look at a puzzle, chances are that one of them knows the answer. Or maybe ten people each know one piece, and that's enough to put it all together."
Aya sighed. "I guess so. I just never thought about the feeds that way."
"That's because all you ever cared about was getting famous," Hiro said. "The feeds are more than that. Like I always say, being a kicker is about making sense of the world."
She rolled her eyes. Just what she needed: a philosophy lesson from her stuck-up older brother.
The last sparkles on her dress were sputtering out, the batteries finally expended. "Well, we don't have any crowds down here. So what do you think they are? Aliens?"
"No, they're some kind of surge-monkey." The tapping of Hire's fingers against his board echoed through the cavern. "Sort of like real monkeys, actually."
"How do you mean?" Aya shifted on her board. "I didn't see any fur."
"But you saw their toes, right? They were prehensile, like a monkeys. It's like they have four hands."
"But it doesn't make sense." Aya sighed. "Why be a surge-monkey if you're going to hide all the time?"
"I don't think it's a fashion statement, Aya. It's like my immortal crumb lies: The surgery means something. There must be some way this all fits together."
"You mean city-killing weapons, hidden bases, and monkey toes?"
Hiro smiled. "I can see why you had trouble fitting all that into ten minutes."
They were silent for a while, Aya watching the flicker in Ren's eyes. Maybe by early morning, the flurry of City Killer kick would have faded a little. People had to sleep sometime, after all, no matter how big a story was. In a few hours, sneaking up to send Tally Youngblood a ping would be easy.
She remembered the year before in ugly school, learning about the origins of the mind-rain: the Smoke, the Specials, the awful Diego War. One common theme ran through all those lessons: Once Tally-sama arrived, the bad guys didn't stand a chance.
Time passed strangely in the cavern. Cut off from the city interface, the clock in Aya's eyescreen didn't work, but the minutes seemed to crawl. She dozed off once, coming awake in a panic, wondering where she was.
But Frizz was still beside her, sleeping off the effects of the needle. Nestled this close on the board, she could feel his breathing, and his warmth cut the cavern's chill. Whatever Hiro said about fame protecting her, it felt safer next to Frizz than under the eyes of a million people.
Hiro sat cross-legged on his board, eyes closed and head nodding. Ren's eyes were open, his eyescreens shimmering like two red fireflies in the air, but he didn't make a sound.
It seemed like hours later when Frizz began to stir beside her. He sat up halfway and rubbed his neck.
"How do you feel?" she whispered.
"Much better." He looked around sleepily "Where are we?"
"Underground." She squeezed his hand. "Don't worry. We'll be safe down here till Tally-sama comes."
"You brought me here? How did you manage...whoa." For a moment Frizz had started to drift up from the board. "What's going on?"
Aya smiled. "We borrowed a hoverball rig from those freaks. You're almost weightless."
He stopped moving, letting himself settle beside her. "You saved me."
She sighed. "I got you in huge trouble, you mean. If it wasn't for my truth-slanting, you wouldn't be in this mess."
"Truth-slanting?"
"Aya nodded slowly "Like I said, I saw those freaks ten days ago, but I didn't know what they were. So I sort of ... left them out of my story"
Frizz didn't say anything, just stared at the black water.
"I think I'm a natural liar," she finally whispered.
He shook his head. "No, you're not."
"I am," she hissed. "I can't go ten seconds without slanting the truth. I'm the seventeenth-most-famous person in the city right now, and for what? Tricking a whole clique into thinking I was one of them! And then I couldn't even kick the story without leaving out something. You must hate me."
Frizz took a slow breath. "I never told you how I came up with Radical Honesty, did I?"
"I never asked." Aya sighed. "I pretty much just talked about my own fame obsession."
"Well, I used to lie ... constantly,'" Frizz said. "Sometimes for a reason, but mostly just for fun. I was always pretending, making up a new Frizz for everyone I met - especially, you know, girls." He shrugged, his manga eyes glistening in the darkness. "But I started to forget who I really was. That probably sounds weird."
"Not really," Aya said. "That's sort of what happened to me with the Sly Girls. I liked being that person - she was braver than me."
He shrugged. "Sometimes it's fun to change yourself. But I wanted to see what it was like without lies. How a relationship works when you can't hide anything." He took her hand, sending a tingle through her skin. "What it's like to do this ..."
He leaned forward the small distance between their faces, and kissed her.
As they pulled apart, Frizz whispered, "Without lies."
"Dizzy-making," Aya breathed. She felt warmth in her face, like a blush, but not shaming. A ghostly echo of Frizz's lips lingered on hers, and shivers moved across her skin.
"You're right." He smiled. "Dizzy-making is what it is."
"Even with me, the Slime Queen of truth-slanting?"
He shrugged. "But you're also honest, Aya. You put yourself in your stories, one way or another.
Even that one about..." Frizz paused, looking around the cavern with a thoughtful expression. "Hey, are we close to that graffiti you kicked?"
"Sure, those tunnels all lead down here." She laughed softly. "You want to see them in person?"
He shook his head. "But isn't that story on your feed? Where everyone can see it?"
Aya hesitated. Before tonight, hardly anyone ever looked at her feed. But with a face rank of seventeen, lots more people would be checking her out. And at the same time, everyone was theorizing and debating where Aya Fuse had disappeared to and why.
Maybe only a few thousand would bother to watch her old stories, and most wouldn't notice what a perfect hiding place the graffiti tunnels were. But out of a million people in the city, what if just one
sent a hovercam down to check?
"Uh-oh. You might be right. Hiro! I think we have to go!"
Her brother jerked awake. "What? Why?"
"The tunnels that lead down here, they're on my feed. That graffiti story I kicked."
"But that was two weeks ago..." Hiro's voice faded.
"What did you call it?" she said. "The wisdom of the crowd?"
Stirred by their voices, Ren sat up, blinking away eye-screen flicker. "What's up?"
"This place is famous from Aya's feed," Frizz said.
Ren got it instantly, groaning, "We're so brain-missing."
"Moggle!" Aya hissed. "Lights off!"
The hovercam obeyed, plunging them into total blackness.
Aya blinked away traces of vision, holding Frizz tighter. Gradually her eyes adjusted, and she saw something...
From one of the trickling storm drains, the barest shimmer of light was moving, sending shadows gliding across the dark.
PAPARAZZI
"Follow my voice, Moggle," she called, urging her board toward the nearest wall.
The storm drains on this side of the reservoir hadn't appeared in her graffiti story. Surely there weren't enough Aya-hunters down here to cover every tunnel and conduit in the city.
"Here's the wall," Frizz whispered.
She reached out and touched cool stone, drifting toward the sound of trickling water until a storm drain mouth echoed before them.
"Moggle? Come here," she called softly. A moment later the hovercam bumped against her. "Go up and see if it's clear. No lights!"
Moggle slipped away.
"No," Ren said. "But we've got plenty of water."
"It's not exactly Shuffle Mansion." Aya sighed. The apartment Hiro had shown her lingered in her mind's eye - the huge open spaces, the perfect city views. And here she was on her first night of fame, skulking underground.
Frizz's slow breathing echoed from the stone arches. He stirred beneath her, the effects of the needle-stab fading. She checked the mark on his neck - the redness had almost disappeared.
"Whatever was in those needles was designed to knock you out, Aya," Ren said. "But Frizz is a pretty. He'll be okay."
She nodded. The operation made pretties' bodies stronger and quicker to heal as well as beautiful.
"So who were those people?" Hiro asked.
"I have no idea," she said. "I only saw them once before."
"When you first saw the mountain open up?" Ren asked.
"Yeah. Miki and I were watching over the edge of the train. There were three of them, really skinny and tall. But it was so dark, I thought it was just the crazy shadows ... at first."
Hiro cleared his throat. "And you didn't bother mentioning this?"
"I didn't have any shots of them! And it was so sense-missing. I thought if I started with those freaks, everybody would think it was just another surge-monkey story. Aliens didn't exactly fit the city-killer theme."
"They didn't fit the theme?" Hiro cried. "What are you, some Rusty kicker? That's what the background layer is for!"
"Lecture her later, Hiro," Ren said. "Right now we need to figure out who they are, and why they're after Aya."
Hiro snorted. "We should go back to the surface and kick this! Call the wardens if you want!"
"Do we trust our own city?" Ren asked.
"I trust anyone, as long as there's a few hundred thousand people watching," Hiro muttered.
"What I don't get is, how did those surge-monkeys figure out you'd seen them?"
"Maybe there's something in the background layer that explains that," Ren said. "Too bad we're cut off from the feeds down here."
"Moggles got a copy of everything," Aya said.
"Okay, I'll take a look. Shake me if anything exciting happens." Ren stretched out on his board, his eyescreens flickering a full immersion warning.
Aya swallowed. With Ren shot-scanning and Frizz half-conscious, she was practically alone with Hiro. The last sparkles of her dress were fading, the darkness making his expression look angrier every second.
"How about some light, Moggle?" she said.
The hovercam's night-lights came on, filling the cavern. The deep shadows shifted as Moggle floated restlessly around the reservoir, but Hiro remained stock-still, staring straight at her.
She sighed. "I didn't mean to lie."
"No, Aya. But when you pick and choose facts to make your story, you always wind up truth-slanting. That's why good kickers put everything up. Save the manipulation for extras who only watch for ten minutes."
"Once more: I didn't have any shots of the freaks!"
"Still, you saw them, and you hid them. That's like lying."
Aya groaned, staring into the water. Its surface grew blacker as her dress's sparkles flickered off one by one. "I messed everything up, didn't I?"
"Not everything." His shoulders slumped. "But if you'd told what you saw, we might already know who those people were."
"How?"
"The wisdom of the crowd, Aya. If a million people look at a puzzle, chances are that one of them knows the answer. Or maybe ten people each know one piece, and that's enough to put it all together."
Aya sighed. "I guess so. I just never thought about the feeds that way."
"That's because all you ever cared about was getting famous," Hiro said. "The feeds are more than that. Like I always say, being a kicker is about making sense of the world."
She rolled her eyes. Just what she needed: a philosophy lesson from her stuck-up older brother.
The last sparkles on her dress were sputtering out, the batteries finally expended. "Well, we don't have any crowds down here. So what do you think they are? Aliens?"
"No, they're some kind of surge-monkey." The tapping of Hire's fingers against his board echoed through the cavern. "Sort of like real monkeys, actually."
"How do you mean?" Aya shifted on her board. "I didn't see any fur."
"But you saw their toes, right? They were prehensile, like a monkeys. It's like they have four hands."
"But it doesn't make sense." Aya sighed. "Why be a surge-monkey if you're going to hide all the time?"
"I don't think it's a fashion statement, Aya. It's like my immortal crumb lies: The surgery means something. There must be some way this all fits together."
"You mean city-killing weapons, hidden bases, and monkey toes?"
Hiro smiled. "I can see why you had trouble fitting all that into ten minutes."
They were silent for a while, Aya watching the flicker in Ren's eyes. Maybe by early morning, the flurry of City Killer kick would have faded a little. People had to sleep sometime, after all, no matter how big a story was. In a few hours, sneaking up to send Tally Youngblood a ping would be easy.
She remembered the year before in ugly school, learning about the origins of the mind-rain: the Smoke, the Specials, the awful Diego War. One common theme ran through all those lessons: Once Tally-sama arrived, the bad guys didn't stand a chance.
Time passed strangely in the cavern. Cut off from the city interface, the clock in Aya's eyescreen didn't work, but the minutes seemed to crawl. She dozed off once, coming awake in a panic, wondering where she was.
But Frizz was still beside her, sleeping off the effects of the needle. Nestled this close on the board, she could feel his breathing, and his warmth cut the cavern's chill. Whatever Hiro said about fame protecting her, it felt safer next to Frizz than under the eyes of a million people.
Hiro sat cross-legged on his board, eyes closed and head nodding. Ren's eyes were open, his eyescreens shimmering like two red fireflies in the air, but he didn't make a sound.
It seemed like hours later when Frizz began to stir beside her. He sat up halfway and rubbed his neck.
"How do you feel?" she whispered.
"Much better." He looked around sleepily "Where are we?"
"Underground." She squeezed his hand. "Don't worry. We'll be safe down here till Tally-sama comes."
"You brought me here? How did you manage...whoa." For a moment Frizz had started to drift up from the board. "What's going on?"
Aya smiled. "We borrowed a hoverball rig from those freaks. You're almost weightless."
He stopped moving, letting himself settle beside her. "You saved me."
She sighed. "I got you in huge trouble, you mean. If it wasn't for my truth-slanting, you wouldn't be in this mess."
"Truth-slanting?"
"Aya nodded slowly "Like I said, I saw those freaks ten days ago, but I didn't know what they were. So I sort of ... left them out of my story"
Frizz didn't say anything, just stared at the black water.
"I think I'm a natural liar," she finally whispered.
He shook his head. "No, you're not."
"I am," she hissed. "I can't go ten seconds without slanting the truth. I'm the seventeenth-most-famous person in the city right now, and for what? Tricking a whole clique into thinking I was one of them! And then I couldn't even kick the story without leaving out something. You must hate me."
Frizz took a slow breath. "I never told you how I came up with Radical Honesty, did I?"
"I never asked." Aya sighed. "I pretty much just talked about my own fame obsession."
"Well, I used to lie ... constantly,'" Frizz said. "Sometimes for a reason, but mostly just for fun. I was always pretending, making up a new Frizz for everyone I met - especially, you know, girls." He shrugged, his manga eyes glistening in the darkness. "But I started to forget who I really was. That probably sounds weird."
"Not really," Aya said. "That's sort of what happened to me with the Sly Girls. I liked being that person - she was braver than me."
He shrugged. "Sometimes it's fun to change yourself. But I wanted to see what it was like without lies. How a relationship works when you can't hide anything." He took her hand, sending a tingle through her skin. "What it's like to do this ..."
He leaned forward the small distance between their faces, and kissed her.
As they pulled apart, Frizz whispered, "Without lies."
"Dizzy-making," Aya breathed. She felt warmth in her face, like a blush, but not shaming. A ghostly echo of Frizz's lips lingered on hers, and shivers moved across her skin.
"You're right." He smiled. "Dizzy-making is what it is."
"Even with me, the Slime Queen of truth-slanting?"
He shrugged. "But you're also honest, Aya. You put yourself in your stories, one way or another.
Even that one about..." Frizz paused, looking around the cavern with a thoughtful expression. "Hey, are we close to that graffiti you kicked?"
"Sure, those tunnels all lead down here." She laughed softly. "You want to see them in person?"
He shook his head. "But isn't that story on your feed? Where everyone can see it?"
Aya hesitated. Before tonight, hardly anyone ever looked at her feed. But with a face rank of seventeen, lots more people would be checking her out. And at the same time, everyone was theorizing and debating where Aya Fuse had disappeared to and why.
Maybe only a few thousand would bother to watch her old stories, and most wouldn't notice what a perfect hiding place the graffiti tunnels were. But out of a million people in the city, what if just one
sent a hovercam down to check?
"Uh-oh. You might be right. Hiro! I think we have to go!"
Her brother jerked awake. "What? Why?"
"The tunnels that lead down here, they're on my feed. That graffiti story I kicked."
"But that was two weeks ago..." Hiro's voice faded.
"What did you call it?" she said. "The wisdom of the crowd?"
Stirred by their voices, Ren sat up, blinking away eye-screen flicker. "What's up?"
"This place is famous from Aya's feed," Frizz said.
Ren got it instantly, groaning, "We're so brain-missing."
"Moggle!" Aya hissed. "Lights off!"
The hovercam obeyed, plunging them into total blackness.
Aya blinked away traces of vision, holding Frizz tighter. Gradually her eyes adjusted, and she saw something...
From one of the trickling storm drains, the barest shimmer of light was moving, sending shadows gliding across the dark.
PAPARAZZI
"Follow my voice, Moggle," she called, urging her board toward the nearest wall.
The storm drains on this side of the reservoir hadn't appeared in her graffiti story. Surely there weren't enough Aya-hunters down here to cover every tunnel and conduit in the city.
"Here's the wall," Frizz whispered.
She reached out and touched cool stone, drifting toward the sound of trickling water until a storm drain mouth echoed before them.
"Moggle? Come here," she called softly. A moment later the hovercam bumped against her. "Go up and see if it's clear. No lights!"
Moggle slipped away.
