Aya squeezed a fist to silence the alarm, groaning. She'd meant to nap this afternoon, but thanks to her brain-damaging conversation with Frizz, the littlie-watching shift, and an hour spent spraying Moggle with black camo paint, she hadn't crawled into bed till ten.
Less than two hours' sleep.
But she forced herself to sit up, remembering how famous tonight could make her. For a reminder, she glanced at her pathetic face rank of 451,611 in the corner of her vision.
Moggle rose from the floor, and the hovercam's point of view delicately overlaid her vision, a ghostly second sight perfectly balanced with her own.
Aya smiled. She wouldn't miss any eye-kicking shots tonight.
"Ready to go?" she whispered.
Moggle flashed its lights, and Aya winced. Thirty-six hours underwater hadn't cured the hovercam's bad habits.
She felt her way to the window, blinking away spots, and climbed onto the sill. Her eyes adjusted slowly, until the city lights made her throat tighten - the usual obscurity-panic, much worse now that she'd embarrassed herself in front of Frizz. All she'd meant to say was he didn't have to worry, because she was going to be famous too. But she'd wound up sounding as face-missing as a new ugly with her first feed. Obvious, he'd said.
It was pointless getting depressed about it, though. Fame wasn't like beauty, where you had to wait till you were sixteen, or get lucky like Nana Love and be born with it. Fame you could make yourself.
Once this story kicked, face rank wouldn't be an issue between her and Frizz anymore. She was certain of it.
Moggle drifted out the window, brushing against her shoulder, and Aya smiled as she wrapped her arms around the hovercam. She was glad to be headed somewhere away from the city lights.
Someplace mysterious enough that Frizz would go back to being amazed at her, once he found out all the things she'd done.
She pushed out herself out into the cold night air.
"Before we get started," Jai said, "we have some business. First item is my name; someone's been talking about me where the city interface can hear."
A few of the Sly Girls looked down sheepishly.
Jai clicked at them with her tongue. "That's right. I woke up this morning and my face rank was almost out of the bottom thousand. That means the city's starting to track my nickname again. Time to change it."
Aya raised an eyebrow. So that was how they kept their face ranks down, by changing nicknames - the same way Ren and Hiro concealed their obsessive hatred of the Nameless One.
"From now on, my name is Kai. Everybody got that? Good. And now for item number two."
Kai turned toward Aya, who felt a tingle roll down her spine.
"Our new friend is with us again," Kai said. "Anybody got a problem with that?"
A nervous-making silence fell, and Aya heard the distant rumble of a train on its way. On either side of her, the rails glowed a soft warning, looking hot to the touch, like the elements inside the hole in the wall after it fabricated something big. But none of the Sly Girls seemed to notice, as if the middle of the mag-lev tracks was where they always held their business meetings.
Aya couldn't even use Moggle to keep watch for the train. The hovercam was somewhere out among the industrial buildings, stalking her, but she had its point of view turned off to keep telltale flickers from her eye.
"Isn't she a kicker?" someone muttered.
Kai looked at Aya, waiting for an answer.
She cleared her throat. "I used to be. But I was never a big face. I didn't feel like kicking what Nana Love was wearing." A few of them laughed.
"But you still go around with a hovercam?" someone else said. Her name was Pana, Aya remembered. With their generic faces, she had trouble telling the Sly Girls apart - but Pana was taller than the rest of them, nearly Eden's height.
"I let you drop it in a lake - you all saw that. Had some pretty awesome lifters on it, too."
"No cams tonight?" Kai said.
Aya shook her head. She was wearing the dorm uniform from the underwater rescue, which looked as scruffy as the Girls' reject clothing. She hoped its shabbiness made the spy-cam in its top button less obvious.
Moggle was more likely to give her away. She wasn't certain the hovercam's tiny brain understood the whole staying-hidden concept. Moggle could only track Aya's skintenna signal up to a kilometer, and it had never operated independently for hours at a time before, especially while chasing speeding mag-levs.
The distant rumble was audible now, the train a few minutes away.
"Aya-chan was pretty brave when we saw the freaks," Miki said. "And you all saw her surf. I trust her."
When Miki smiled, Aya felt her first unpleasant ping of deceitfulness. When she kicked this story, Frizz would know she'd lied to them all. She wondered if he'd understand.
"How about we hear from you, Aya-chan?" Kai asked. "Tell us why you want to be a Sly Girl."
Aya cleared her throat, nervous under Kai's plain-Jane stare, as brain-freezing as the train's rumble growing under her feet. What did they want her to say, anyway?
Suddenly, the words she'd said to Frizz that morning came back to her.
"Like you said, I was a kicker. Since I was a littlie, I wanted to be famous. I didn't want to watch other people on the feeds - I wanted them watching me. Because if they didn't, I was invisible."
A murmur went through the group, and Aya saw cold expressions everywhere. She kept talking, trying to ignore the tremors underfoot and the trickle of sweat rolling down her back.
"Don't get me wrong. I wasn't some ego-kicker, sitting in my room with a cam pointed at myself, talking about what my cat ate for breakfast." Someone laughed at that, and Aya managed a smile. "I was trying to find stories that mattered. People who were using the mind-rain to do something really kick ... I mean, really interesting. That's how I found you."
Aya was looking back at them now, meeting their stares one by one.
"And here's what I realized: You Sly Girls don't cry when you watch the big-face parties on the feeds, just because you weren't invited. You don't stay friends with people you hate, just to bump your face rank. And even though nobody knows what you're doing out here, you don't feel invisible at all. Do you?"
No one answered, but they were listening.
"Fame is radically stupid, that's all. So I want to try something else."