Her whole hand throbbed.
This was fast. ... If only Moggle were watching.
Ahead, Miki was only a meter from the train - another girl farther on was already reaching out a hand toward the roof. Aya had to get onboard before the mag-lev line straightened out.
"Here goes," she said through gritted teeth.
She crooked her left thumb, barely lifting it from the hoverboard's front edge. The board responded more evenly this time, angling toward the steady expanse of the mag-lev's roof. She drifted closer in cautious stages, like handling a kite with minute tugs on its strings.
A few meters from the train, her board began to jump and shudder again. Jai had warned her about this, too: the shock wave, an invisible boundary of turbulence stirred up by the train's passage.
Aya fought the tumult with twitches and gestures, every muscle straining. Her ears popped with pressure changes, and her eyes streamed tears into the wind.
Suddenly she pulled free of the turbulence, sweeping across the remaining space to bump softly against the metal flank of the train. Aya felt the mag-lev's vibrations buzzing in the board beneath her as its magnets firmed up the connection.
The wind was muted now - she was inside a thin bubble of calm surrounding the train, like the eye of a hurricane.
Aya demagnetized her left crash bracelet, then slowly slid her hand across the board's grippy surface to the roof of the train.
It smacked down hard and secure.
But it was nervous-making, disconnecting her other crash bracelet. The hoverboard was Aya-size, the mag-lev inhumanly huge and powerful. She was like a rat hitching a ride on a stampeding dinosaur.
Shutting her eyes, she pulled her right hand free, then hauled herself up onto the roof and slapped her wrist down.
She'd done it! The tram rumbled below her like an unsettled volcano, and the half-muted wind still tore at her hair and clothes. But Aya was onboard.
The humming rose up around her - the train's smart-matter joints pulling it back straight. She'd made it just in time.
The train's roof stretched out dead straight ahead of her, dotted with nine Sly Girls along its length. Glancing back, the wind whipping handfuls of hair into her mouth, she saw the other three - everyone had made it.
The wind built as the train accelerated, and most of them were already surfing, standing with their arms out to catch the wind. Just like flying, Eden had said.
Aya sighed - as if riding on top of a mag-lev wasn't risky enough without standing up!
But if the Girls were going to accept her, she'd have to be as crazy as they were. And it wasn't really surfing if you were lying down.
She unthreaded the straps on her right bracelet, pulled it off, and curled up to wrestle it over her foot. It was all very clumsy, but after a minute's fumbling, she had the bracelet strapped tightly around her ankle.
She magnetized it, and felt her shoe plant hard against the metal roof.
Gingerly she released her other wrist...the wind didn't whip her away.
Time for the scary part.
Aya pushed herself up gradually, feet planted wide apart and arms out, like a littlie standing on a hoverboard for the first time. Up ahead, Miki's body was angled sideways into the wind, like a fencer presenting the smallest possible target. Aya imitated her as she stood up.
The higher she got, the fiercer the wind grew. Invisible, chaotic whirlwinds buffeted her body, twisting her hair into knots.
But finally Aya was fully upright, every muscle straining.
All around her, the world was a wild blur.
The train had reached the outer edge of the new expansion, where the city grew every day.
Banks of work-lights shot past like bright orange comets, earthmovers the size of mansions flitting by.
The wild lay just ahead, its dark mass the only steady shape in the maelstrom of lights and noise and rushing wind.
Then the last glow of construction streaked past, and the train plunged into a sea of darkness. As the city network fell behind, Aya's skintenna lost its connection with the city interface. The world was quickly emptied: no feeds, no face ranks, no fame.
As if the screaming wind had stripped everything away.
But somehow Aya didn't miss it all - she was laughing. She felt huge and unstoppable, like a littlie on horseback galloping at breakneck speed.
The train's awesome power flowed across her hands. Angling her palms flat, she felt the airstream lift her up, pulling her against the straps around her ankle, like a bird straining to fly. Every gesture whipped her body into a new stance, as if the wind was an extension of her will.
But just ahead, Miki's dark outline was crouching. Something was in her hand...
A yellow light.
"Crap!" Aya angled her palms down and bent her knees.
As she crumpled to the train's roof, something huge and invisible sliced the air overhead, hissing like the blade of a sword whipping past. Its shock wave rang through her body like a blow.
Then it was gone. Aya hadn't even seen what it was.
She swallowed, squinting into the wind. Ahead, a string of yellow lights stretched away toward the front of the train. They flicked off one by one, the danger past.
How had she missed them?
"Don't get too excited," Jai had warned. "Or you'll lose your head."
Trembling, she rose slowly from her crouch, her momentary sense of giddy power vanished. The darkness stretched out ahead as far as she could see.
Suddenly Aya Fuse felt very small.
TUNNEL
There were four things Aya was realizing about the wild.
It was formless. The forest rushing by on either side blurred into one impenetrable mass, a roiling void of speed.
It was endless, or maybe time had broken. Whether she'd been surfing for minutes or hours, she had no idea.
Third, the wild had a huge sky, which didn't make sense - it seemed like the sky would be the same size everywhere. But the blackness overhead sprawled out - unmarked by the city's jagged skyline, unstained by reflected light - starlit and vast.
And lastly, it was cold. Though that was probably thanks to the three-hundred-klick wind in Aya's face.
Next time, she was bringing two jackets.
Some time later, Aya saw Miki's outline drop into a crouch. She looked worriedly at the other girls ahead, but no decapitation warning lights were showing.
Miki seemed to be playing with the bracelet around her ankle - then suddenly she was untethered, sliding backward across the train's roof on the seat of her pants, carried by the fierce headwind.