Those cylinders are just solid steel!"
"Yeah, Aya, and the dinosaurs were wiped out by iron," Ren said. "Iron falling from space.
These things wouldn't come down randomly. The smart matter could split them into slivers, one for every building in a city. How many of those cylinders did you say there were?"
"There were hundreds, Ren," she said softly.
"Thousands of tons?" he said. "With the metal shortage going on?"
Aya shook her head. "But aren't you guys jumping to conclusions? We don't even know if there's any smart matter inside."
"Maybe I can get you something to test them," Ren said.
"Would a matter hacker work?" Aya asked, and they both turned to stare at her. "Because the Sly Girls sort of, um...have one."
"Aya," Hiro said slowly. "Don't tell me you've been playing around with matter hackers."
"I never even touched it!"
"Aya! Matter hackers aren't just merit-losing illegal; they're going-to-jail illegal!"
"It's perfect, though," Ren said. "Just send a basic run command to one, and watch what it does."
"Ren!" Hiro shouted. "No way is my little sister spending another second with those Sly Girls. Do you want my mom and dad to kill me?"
Ren turned to her. "If you don't want to go, Aya, I'll try to get in there. But it's your story. ..."
Aya didn't answer at first, staring at the tangle of math on the screen, remembering when she was ten years old. Her entire littlie class had been loaded into hovercars and taken to an ancient ruin from the Rusty's second global war. A burned-out shell of a dome rose up from shattered walls with empty windows, marking where a hundred thousand people had died in one quick flash. She hadn't believed it possible, not even of the Rusties.
But it looked like someone was following in their footsteps.
"Sorry, Hiro, but I have to," she said. "The end of the world isn't something we can kick halfway."
Part II
CITY KILLERS
Lurking behind every chance to be made whole by fame
is the axman of further dismemberment.
- Leo Braudy The Frenzy of Renown
BANNED
The Sly Girls were not pleased with Slime Queen.
It turned out that Kai watched the others' face ranks as closely as her own. Aya's sudden jump from obscurity to mild fame hadn't escaped her notice. After several pings back and forth, Kai admitted that maybe it wasn't entirely Aya's fault, but it was still a problem.
No hovercam-magnets allowed.
So Aya was banned from the Sly Girls, at least until her face rank fell back into six figures.
At first Aya thought the delay would drive her crazy. Here she was, a huge story finally in her grasp, and she had to wait for a bunch of nobodies to stop making fun of her about nothing.
On top of that, Aya didn't dare hang out with Frizz until this was all over. If anyone spotted them together, another wave of Slime Queen slamming would erupt, driving her face rank back up.
But as the days passed, waiting turned out not to be so bad.
Aya stayed in her room, avoiding classes by claiming that her underground lake chill had worn her out. She took all her old stories down from her feed for a week, and only answered pings from Hiro, Ren, and Kai. And gradually Aya Fuse (and her alter ego, Slime Queen) began to disappear, her face rank dropping thousands every day.
The strangest part was not having a feed. For the last two years, everything important to Aya had been stored there: images, stories, class schedules, and grades. Lists of everything she did and thought and wanted, and of all her friends and enemies. Even if hardly anyone ever looked at it, blanking her own feed was like erasing part of herself.
Fortunately Aya had plenty to keep her occupied.
It took a whole week to edit a rough draft, making sure to conceal the awful truth until the end, yet still revealing enough to keep people watching. It was the longest story she'd ever kicked - almost twenty whole minutes. Hiro told her to shorten every version he saw, but Aya wasn't worried about anyone getting bored.
The story had everything: eccentric outsiders, mysterious technology, eye-kicking shots of the wild, even a near miss with a mag-lev train. And of course, good old humanity trying to wreck the planet once again - all the promise and danger of the mind-rain wrapped up in one big kick.
The only thing she left out was the trio of inhuman figures she and Miki had seen. There weren't any shots of them, after all. And surely city-killing weapons were enough, without adding implausible aliens to the mix. She didn't even mention them to Hiro and Ren, who would probably just say she was believing in unicorns again.
She left a blank space at the end for the truth about the cylinders, once she'd proved Ren's theory about smart matter. But Aya was already convinced: The math all checked out, and she'd found out that the Rusties had also hollowed out mountains, places for their leaders to survive while the rest of the world crumbled. This was all an awful flashback to the ancient wars that had killed millions.
Maybe once they saw the truth, the Sly Girls would forgive her for kicking the story. Even Kai could understand that the safety of the world was more important than keeping a few tricks secret.
So Aya waited patiently, editing and reediting, putting up with Hiro's annoying comments, and giving Ren a whole minute to fill with the math of orbital mechanics and kinetic energy. That part was boring at first, but it ended with explosions - the perverse eye-kicks of buildings tumbling after their hoverstruts were ripped apart by slivers of half-molten metal.
And finally, after a long week, her face rank slipped back across a hundred thousand. Slime Queen was no more, and Aya Fuse became a Sly Girl one last time.
TESTING
"You're sure nothing followed you?" Kai called.
"Very," Aya said, skidding her hoverboard to a halt. Just to be certain, Moggle had stalked her all the way from Akira Hall, watching for any hovercams left over from Slime Queen's short reign. And to make doubly sure, Ren had sewn six spy-cams into her dorm jacket, facing in all directions, and none had spotted a thing.
"Where's everyone else?" asked Aya. Eden and Kai were the only Sly Girls waiting here at the edge of town.
"Taking the night off," Eden said. "It's a little windy for surfing. But we thought you'd be game, since you've been on parole."