Then the treetops hitwet ferns whipping and slapping at her face and hands, branches crunching as they tumbled through the air. Tally's grip around Aya was lung-crushing, the gray light spinning into darkness as they dropped beneath the canopy of jungle.
The roar of the hovercar slipped away, and Tally twisted next to Aya, the borrowed hoverball rig straining to maneuver among tree trunks and shafts of rusty iron. Aya felt magnetic forces wrenching at her crash braceletsthe three of them rose up above the trees again in a shallow hover-bounce, like a speeding rock skipping off water.
They dropped again, tearing through tangled vines and ferns, every obstruction heavy with rain.
Aya felt thorns tearing at her clothes and hairthen suddenly the forces in her crash bracelets disappeared, and the Earth itself crashed up against her.
They hit at a shallow angle, tumbling through brush and leaves, skidding across meters of thick, wet mud. She felt her ribs cracking in Tally's grip, her breath forced from her like a punch to the gut.
Finally they slid and rolled to a halt.
Aya took deep, painful breaths, slowly opening her eyes.
Above her, vast flocks of birds were wheeling, scattering away from their wild and unexpected arrival. The jungle was dense down here, the sky almost completely hidden. Aya could actually see the path their sidelong fall had taken, a tunnel of wrecked branches that stretched away into the distance.
Water still spilled from the leaves and ferns they had shaken in passing, as if the storm had followed them down.
"You two okay?" Tally asked.
"Uh," Aya managed. It hurt to breathe.
"Let me guess," Frizz said. "We ran out of metal."
"Barely enough," Tally said. "Any less and we would have splatted."
"We did splat," Aya grunted. Her soaking hair was tangled around her face, leaves and ferns and mud plastered over every inch of her body.
Tally raised herself into a crouch, pointing up at a towering structure that stretched up beside them. "Yeah, but if we hadn't fallen past that, we'd be paste right now. Whatever those freaks are up to includes salvaging all the ground-level metal from these ruins."
Aya groaned, sitting up slowly. If they'd almost crashed, what about ?
She started to flex her ring finger.
"No pings!" Tally snapped, grabbing her wrist. "You'll give us away. Besides, we must be a few kilometers from the others. Much too far for your skintenna to carry."
"But they could be hurt!"
Frizz took Aya's hand, pulling it gently from Tally's grip. "Fausto and Shay were only carrying one passenger each. They probably had a softer landing than the three of us."
"Probably? You mean if they didn't fly straight into a tree!" she cried, but resisted the urge to boot her eyescreen. She scanned the jungle, wondering if Moggle had found enough metal to come down soft. "You mind if I yell, at least?"
Tally shrugged. "Go ahead."
Aya sucked in a deep breath and yelled, "Moggle!"
From the depths of the jungle, she spotted an answering flash of night-lights. Through the ferns and hanging vines, she saw the hovercam making its way toward them, weaving from side to side, its lifters grasping whatever metal was left in the ground.
"Did you get that fall?" she called.
The night-lights flashed once more, and Aya smiled.
Ren's mods had pulled through once again.
Aya had never realized how annoying the wild could be.
The jungle was unimaginably hot, snarled, and logic-missing. Every direction was blocked by massive roots that spilled down from the trees. Spiderwebs glistened among the ferns, and the humid air was choked with clouds of insects. Ankle-grabbing vines covered the ground, which the rain had turned into a maze of waterfalls, rivulets, and mudslides. Her Ranger coverall was having trouble staying slime-resistant, and Frizz's clothesthe formals he'd worn to the tech-head bash last nightwere threatening to fall apart.
The dense plant life had only one redeeming feature: It made the downpour bearable. Though the rain found its way steadily to the jungle floor, streaming down tree trunks and dripping from saturated leaves, at least it wasn't battering her on the head.
It was amazing that any of the Rusty ruins had survived in this climate, but Aya glimpsed the metal skeletons of ancient buildings among the trees. They were wrapped in vines and ferns, the jungle at work tearing apart their straight lines and right angles.
"Where are we headed, anyway?" Frizz asked. "How do we find the others without pings?"
"Shay said the usual place," Tally said.
"Usual?" Aya waved a mosquito away from her nose. "I thought you'd never been here before."
"She meant the tallest tower in the ruins." A smile played on Tally's lips. "That's where we always met people back in ugly days."
Frizz frowned, and Aya felt a radically honest moment coming on.
"You and Shay are logic-missing," he said. "Sometimes you're like best friends, other times you seem to hate each other."
"Maybe that's because sometimes we're best friends," Tally said. "And other times we hate each other."
"I don't understand," Frizz said.
Tally sighed. "Back in the Prettytime, we kept winding up on opposite sides. It wasn't because we wanted to fight, but people kept rewiring us, manipulating us to betray each other." Her voice grew softer. "I guess we kind of got stuck that way."
"But when the mass driver story kicked, you called her to help," Frizz said. "So she's your friend, right?"
"Of course she isshe saved me from life as a bubblehead, along with everyone else in the world. But along the way, we had a lot of fights." Tally's eyes narrowed at Frizz. "That's why your brain surge freaks me out. Bad things can happen when other people rewire you. Stuff you can't fix later."
"Maybe you could fix things," Frizz said, "if you talked with people instead of running off into the wild."
Tally's eyebrows rose, and Aya said hastily, "Maybe we should figure out where we're going, and leave this for later."
"Let me get this straight," Tally said to Frizz. "You had to get brain surge just so you could talk about things!"
"I used to lie all the time," he said. "I couldn't trust myself, so I had to change."
"That's so courage-missing!" Tally said. "Couldn't you just learn to tell the truth?"
"Truth-telling what I'm learning, Tally."
is "But you aren't making a choice!" Tally pointed at her temple. "I've still got Special wiring in my head, but I fight it every day."