"Stupid Hiro," she murmured. If it wasn't for Mr. Big Face, being an extra wouldn't be so hard.
She wouldn't have so much to prove.
And she wouldn't have traded Moggle for nothing.
Aya squeezed her fists tight, letting her board descend until she heard the light slap of its lifters against the water. Kneeling, she stretched out one hand in the darkness, lowering her palm and resting it gently on the surface. She could still feel the ripples spreading from where Moggle had splashed.
"I'm sorry," Aya whispered. "But I'll be back soon."
Vast mansions zoomed past Aya, huge and brightly lit with torches. In the early morning light, bonfires burned everywhere: massive carbon allowances on display. Overhead drifted swimming pools, hovering bubbles of water shaped by invisible lines of force. As she flew beneath them, Aya glimpsed the outlines of people lounging on floaters, gazing at the dawn.
Hire's mansion rose three hundred meters into the air, a spindly tower of gleaming glass and steel.
To keep the gorgeous views from getting stale, the entire building rotated at the speed of an hour hand.
Its mass held up by hoverstruts, only a single elevator shaft touched the ground, like an enormous and glacial ballerina spinning on one toe.
In this neighborhood, all the buildings moved. They hovered and transformed and did other flabbergasting things, and everyone who lived here was legendarily bored by it all.
Hire lived in the famous part of town.
As Aya's hoverboard approached the mansion steps, she remembered what her brother had been like in those months during the Prettytime: beautiful, contented, respectful. Sure, he'd gone to all the bashes, but he'd come home for every holiday, always bringing Aya and the crumblies presents.
The mind-rain had changed all thatexcept for his pretty face.
For the first year after being cured, Hiro had jumped from clique to clique: Extreme Surge, the city hoverball team, even a tour in the wild as a Ranger trainee. He hadn't stuck with anything, shifting aimlessly, unable to make sense of freedom.
Of course, in that logic-missing first year a lot of people were confused. Some actually decided to reverse the mind-rainnot just old crumblies, but new pretties, too. Even Hiro had talked about turning back into a bubblehead.
Then two years ago came the news that the economy was in trouble. Back in the Prettytime, bubbleheads could ask for anything they wanted: Their toys and party clothes popped out of the hole in the wall, no questions asked. But creative, free-minded human beings were more ravenous than bubbleheads, it turned out. Too many resources were going to random hobbies, new buildings, and major projects like the mag-lev trains. And nobody was volunteering for the hard jobs anymore.
Some people wanted to go back to Rusty "money," complete with rents and taxes and starving if you couldn't pay for food. But the City Council didn't go that crazy; they voted for the reputation economy instead. From now on, merits and face ranks would decide who got the best mansions, the most carbon emissions, the biggest wall allowances. Merits were for doctors, teachers, wardens, all they way down to littlies doing schoolwork and their choreseveryone who kept the city going, as determined by the Good Citizen Committee. Face ranks were for the rest of culture, from artists to sports stars to scientists. You could use all the resources you wanted, as long as you captured the city's collective imagination.
And to keep the face ranks fair, every citizen over the age of littlie was given their own feeda million scattered threads of story to help make sense of the mind-rain.
The word "kicker" hadn't even been invented yet, but somehow Hiro had understood it all instinctively: how to make a clique huge overnight, how to convince everyone to requisition some new gadget, and most of all how to make himself legendary in the process.
As Aya landed outside the mansion's elevator door, she sighed quietly. Hiro had been so smart since they'd fixed his brain If only all that fame hadn't turned him into such a self-centered snob.
"What do you want, Aya-chan?"
"I need to talk to you."
"Way too early."
Aya groaned. Without Moggle to float her back up to her window, she'd had to wait till dawn to get back into her dorm. And Hiro thought he was tired?
He couldn't have had a worse night than she'd had. She kept imagining Moggle at the bottom of the underground lake, lying cold and lifeless.
"Please, Hiro? I just spent a bunch of merits to switch my morning classes, so I could come see you."
A grumbling noise. "Come back in an hour."
Aya glared at the elevator door. She couldn't even go up and pound on his window; the mansions in the famous part of town didn't let you fly close to them.
"Well, can you at least tell me where Ren is? His locator's off."
"Ren?" A chuckle came from the door. "He's on my couch."
Aya breathed a sigh of relief. Hiro was a million times easier to deal with when his best friend was around. "Can I talk to him, then please?"
The door went silent for so long that Aya wondered if Hiro had gone back to sleep. But finally Ren's voice came on.
"Hey, Aya-chan. Come on in!"
The door opened, and Aya stepped inside.
Hiro's rooms were garlanded with a million cranes.
It was an old custom from pre-Rusty days, one of the few that had survived the Prettytime: When a girl turned thirteen, she made a string of a thousand origami birds with her own two hands. It took weeks of folding little squares of paper into wings and beaks and tails, then stringing them together with an old-fashioned needle and thread.
After the mind-rain, a few girls had started a new trend: sending their finished strings to reputation-crushes, new-pretty boys with big face ranks. Boys like Hiro, in other words.
Just seeing them made Aya's fingers ache from the memory of her own thousand cranes. The chains of paper birds were draped everywhere in the apartment, except for Hiro's sacred feed-watching chair.
He was slumped there, wearing a hoverball sweatshirt and rubbing his eyes. Green tea was swirling from the spigots of the hole in the wall, filling the air with the scents of cut grass and caffeine.
"Could you get those?" he asked.
"Good morning to you, too." She gave him a sarcastic bow and went to fetch the tea. Two cups, of coursefor him and Ren, not her. Aya couldn't stand green tea, but still.
"Morning, Aya-chan," Ren called groggily from the couch. He sat up, a flock of squashed cranes unpeeling from his back. Empty bottles were strewn everywhere, and a cleaning drone was vacuuming up the remains of food and spilled bubbly.
She handed Ren his tea. "Were you guys celebrating something, or just reliving bubblehead days?"
"You don't know?" Ren laughed. "Well, you better congratulate Hiro-sensei."
"Hiro-sensei? What?"
"That's right." Ren nodded. "Your brother finally cracked the top thousand."
"The top thousand?" Aya blinked. "Are you kidding?"
"Eight hundred and ninety-six, at the moment," Hiro said, staring at the wallscreen. Aya saw the number on it now: 896 in meter-high numerals. "Of course, my own sister ignores me. Where's my tea?"
"But I didn't " Aya's exhaustion turned dizzy-making for a moment. This morning was the first in ages that she hadn't checked Hiro's face rank. And he'd hit the top thousand!