"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?"