"Tally! Climb!"
"Quit waving your arms, Aya-la, or this could get messy."
"It's already messy!"
They shot straight into the outspread arms of the inhuman, and Aya felt a needle jab in her side.
Slivers of cold began to spread through her, like tendrils wrapping around her lungs and heart.
"Do something," she whispered, still expecting Tally's smart-plastic disguise to burst away and reveal her fearsome Cutter face.
Then she saw it clutched in Tally's handone of Hiro's shoulder pads, its straps undone. Tally had pulled it off on purpose. She dropped it as the hoverboard spun toward the ground.
"Just hang on for a few more seconds, Aya-la. Don't want to bump your head." Tally slumped down toward the riding surface, her eyes fluttering closed. But she sounded totally alert as she hissed, "And wherever you wake up, don't call me Tally. We're just your ugly friends, got that?"
"But why ?"
"Trust me, Aya-la. Sometimes it's a messy business, saving the world."
Aya's brain was spinning from the needle jab, losing its grip on consciousness, but slowly she grasped what the plan had been all along: a way for the disguised Cutters to be captured.
Aya and the others had been nothing but bait And Tally Youngbloodarchitect of the mind-rain, the most famous person in the worldwas nothing but a truth-slanting Slime Queen.
Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.
Othello (Iago, Act II, scene iii)
The whole world was dizzy-making.
Everything spun and whirled, dreamlike and unsteady beneath her. A confusion of anger, exhilaration, and terror tumbled through her thoughts, cut with the cold taste of betrayal. All five senses blurred into a constant roar, as if every certainty had tangled.
Then a sudden focus: a mote of pain amid the jumble of sensations. Something fierce stabbing her shoulder, rushing red-hot through her veins Aya Fuse came suddenly awake.
"No!" She sat bolt upright, the sudden fury roiling through her, but strong hands pushed her back down.
"Don't yell," someone said. "We're supposed to be asleep."
Asleep? But Aya's heart was pounding, her blood sizzling with energy. Her body convulsed, hands flexing and clawing at the hard metal floor beneath her.
A shuddering moment later, her vision finally cleared.
An ugly face looked down at Aya. Two fingers reached out and carefully pulled her eyes widerchecking one, then the other.
"Try to relax. I think I gave you too much."
"Too much what?" Aya asked breathlessly.
"Wake-up juice," the ugly girl said. "You'll be okay in a minute, though."
Aya lay there, her heart pounding, the burning sensation fading in her shoulder. She took steadying breaths, waiting until reality stopped spinning.
But steady was a relative concept. As her body soaked up the mad energy that had possessed her, Aya gradually realized where she was: the cargo hold of a large hovercar that was passing through a violent storm. The frame shuddered, the metal floor bucking beneath her, and rain battered the windows.
Lifting fans shrieked as they fought to keep the craft level, adding their cacophony to the howling wind.
In the dim and shifting light, it took Aya a moment to remember that the ugly girl who'd awakened her was in disguise.
"Tally Youngblood," she breathed. "You're a truth-slanting, trust-wrecking waste of gravity!"
Tally chuckled. "I'm glad that was in Japanese, Aya-la. Because it didn't sound very respectful."
Aya squeezed her eyes shut, forcing the sticky gears of her mind to switch to English. "You lied to us."
"I never lied," Tally said calmly. "I just didn't explain the details of our plan."
"You call this a detail!"
Aya looked around the dark, storm-tossed hold. A windowless metal door separated them from the drivers' cabin. The walls were lined with cargo webbing, which twisted and swung with the rocking of the car. The air was hot and muggy, and Aya felt trickles of sweat inside her heavy coverall. "We trusted you, and you got us captured by those freaks! On purpose!"
"Sorry, Aya-la. But explaining our plans to some feed-happy random didn't seem like a very icy idea. This was our one chance to find out where these kidnappers come from. We couldn't risk you turning it into your next big story."
"I never would have done that!"
"That's what you told the Sly Girls."
Aya's mouth opened, but no words came out. Her fury began to rise again, the last dregs of wake-up juice boiling in her blood. Why was Tally twisting everything?
"That was totally different!" she finally managed. "I may have misled the Sly Girls, but I didn't use anyone as bait."
"Not as bait, but you did use them, Aya-la. And we had to do the same to you."
"But you lied to us!"
Tally shrugged. "What did you say in your interview? 'Sometimes you have to lie to find the truth.'" Aya found herself speech-missing again, appalled to have her own words used against her. But then she remembered who'd said them firstFrizz. The last she'd seen of him, he'd been spinning toward the ground on Fausto's board.
"My friends are they okay?"
"Relax. Everyone's fine." Tally moved aside.
Aya pulled herself up, leaning back against the shuddering hovercar wall. Shay and Fausto sat cross-legged on the other side of the hold, with Hiro curled between them, still unconscious. Ren's long form stretched down the middle of the cabin, snoring happily.
Frizz lay next to Aya, absolutely still. She rolled closer and squeezed his hand but he didn't respond.
"Are you sure he's all right?" Aya asked. "Frizz got stuck with those needles twice last night."
"I already countered the nanos they stuck you with. He's just asleep." Tally pulled her sleeve up and glanced at the flash tattoos on her arm. The patterns there were laid out like an interface, not mere decoration. "You've all been out for six hours, which seems a little excessive to me. Do you always sleep till noon?"