Tally's lips curled. "You haven't seen me really lose it, bubblehead. You better hope you never do."
"Technically, I'm not a" Aya stepped between them. "Maybe instead of comparing brain surge, we should figure out which way to go? The rain's clearing a little."
Tally glared at Frizz for a long moment, then looked up. The steady drumbeat of rain on the leaves above had lessened.
"Fine with me," she spat.
She spun away and bounded toward the nearest tree, launching herself at its trunk and scrambling up toward the treetops. Frizz and Aya watched in silenceit was mesmerizing when Tally moved quickly, slipping through the ferns with deadly grace, scuttling along branches that seemed hardly strong enough to hold her weight.
"I keep upsetting her," Frizz said.
Aya sighed. "I guess Tally and Radical Honesty don't mix. She and Shay have been through a lot.
They fought a war when they were our age, after all."
He dropped his eyes from the treetops. "What if she's right? Maybe I'm just too lazy to tell the truth without surge."
"You're not lazy, Frizz. Not everyone starts their own clique."
"Maybe," he said, slapping a mosquito on his arm. "But if it wasn't for my Radical Honesty, we wouldn't be stuck out here in this jungle."
"No, we'd still be captives." Aya turned to him, looking into his manga eyes. "And if it wasn't for your Radical Honesty, you probably wouldn't have stopped me that night to compliment my nose."
"Don't say that," Frizz said, pulling her closer. "Sometimes it scares me, that we met by accident.
If you'd left that party a minute earlier, we wouldn't even know each other."
She pulled a wet fern leaf from his hair. "Then you wouldn't be stuck out in this mud-plastering jungle."
"I'd rather be here with you than anywhere else," he said.
Aya wrapped her arms around his shoulders. His jacket was soaked, ripped down the back from their wild landing, and her sore ribs still throbbed, but she squeezed him hard. "I don't care what Tally-wa thinks. When you say stuff like that, I'm glad you can't lie."
He gently pulled her closer, and their lips met in a kiss. For a moment the buzzing gnats and dripping rain faded around Aya, leaving only Frizz's shivering warmth in her arms.
There was a sudden thrashing in the trees above. They glanced up.
It was Tally dropping through the air, hands darting out to catch branches and vines, swinging and tumbling from perch to perch, handhold to handhold.
She alighted a few meters away, landing softly among the ferns. For a moment she stared at them, her Cutter features intense and unguarded.
"What's wrong?" Aya asked, pulling away from Frizz.
"I spotted some inhumans near here."
"Did they see you?"
"Of course not." Tally turned away, her face clouded.
"But you're upset," Frizz said.
"Its nothing."
Aya decided not to ask, but Frizz, of course, had other ideas.
"Our kissing upset you, didn't it?"
Tally turned to him, shifting from wide-eyed surprise to anger, and then to something else "Frizz," Aya said softly. "I don't think that Tally-wa cares if we" "The last time I kissed someone, I wound up watching him die," Tally said simply. "And I was just thinking: Dying's one of those things that can't be fixed. Not by talking about it, not with all the brain surge in the world."
Aya swallowed, holding Frizz tighter, her heart pounding.
"I'm sorry, Tally-wa," he said. "That's sad."
"Tell me about it." She looked away. "I can't believe I just said that. Is your brain-missing surge contagious or something?"
Aya nodded slowly.
"But you shouldn't give up kissing," Frizz said. "Just because of that."
Tally held his gaze for a moment, then laughed bitterly. "You want to stand here and discuss ancient history?"
"No," Aya said quickly. "I think we've had enough Radical Honesty for the moment."
"Then follow me," Tally said.
She spun around and bounded away into the mass of ferns, trees, and mud. Aya stared after herand sighed.
Wherever they were going, this was going to be a long walk.
Keeping up with Tally wasn't much fun.
Thanks to her Special muscles and reflexes, nothing stopped hernot the giant tangles of brush, the dead trees crumbled into a dozen pieces, or the roaring tumults of rain. She scrambled up trunks to check their route, and leaped across the interlocking web of branches overhead, splayed like a monkey against the sky. As she waited with a bored expression for Aya and Frizz to catch up, the rain and mud slid from her sneak suit, which was camo-mottled into a hundred greens.
Moggle bounced from ruin to ruin, using magnetic fields like stepping-stones. In the few places where the hovercam couldn't find a way, Aya and Frizz had to carry it through the steaming heat. Tally refused, saying she didn't like cams. The amazing thing to Aya was how much a soccer-ball-size hunk of lifters, optics, and electronic brains could weigh.
But the worst part was crawling under tangles of hanging tree roots, slithering through mud, and hacking away spider-webs and vines. Sheets of rotten leaves disintegrated under her hands, and a nest of centipedes scattered from beneath one misplaced foot. The gray light of the cloudy sky barely filtered through the trees, shrouding the jungle floor in constant gloom.
To distract herself, Aya wondered who Tally had been talking about. Lots of people had died in the Diego War, of course, but no Cutters that she could remember. Who else would Tally have been kissing? Everyone else back then was either ugly or a bubblehead. It didn't make sense.
Tally was so different from normal famous people. If some boyfriend of Nana Love's had died, everyone in the city would know his name. But Tally was so closed off even her outbursts of radical honesty were mysterious.
Aya felt a mosquito biting her arm and smashed it flat too late. Blood was spattered all over its tiny mangled body. She sighed and flicked it away.
"How can Tally-sama stand to live out here?" she muttered to Frizz. "It's so comfort-missing."
"I don't think she cares about comfort," he grunted. He was carrying Moggle, trying to struggle over a rotting tree trunk without dropping it.