Скотт Вестерфельд - Extras

"I'm done." Hiro was strapping the last forearm pad into place. "I've set the rig to neutral. He should be zero-g."

Frizz lifted easily from the ground, suddenly weightless. She wrestled his drifting body onto her board and knelt across him.

Hiro and Ren slipped up on either side and reached out their hands, pulling her forward like a littlie between two parents. Soon they were shooting ahead through a gap in the trees.

"Are they following us?" Aya asked.

Ren looked back. "I don't think so. They're picking up the other two."

"Two freaky bodies are worse than one live witness, I guess," Hiro said. "Speaking of which, you have some explaining to do, Aya."

"When we get to safety."

"Which is back at the party, right?"

"No. We're doing what Tally says—we're hiding."

"Where?" Ren asked.

Aya bit her lip, holding tight to keep Frizz's unconscious form from slipping off the board. "The underground reservoir."

"Cold and wet," Ren said. "But it's the one place in the city with no cams."

"Exactly," Aya said. Something was skimming through the trees in the corner of her eye, and she dared a glance. It was a camo-black hovercam, still wobbly from a recent collision.

It flashed its night-lights happily, and shaky images began to spill across Aya's vision. Whatever the inhuman creatures were, this time they'd been caught by more than just her eyes. She found herself smiling.

Moggle had gotten the shot.

The new construction site glowed dull orange, the earthmoving machines resting quietly in their foundation pits.

"Check your pings again," Hiro said. "Before we get cut off."

Aya scanned her eyescreen, then shook her head. A few priority pings had come in on the wardens' channel—and maybe ten thousand more asking her what was going on, not to mention a million theories burning up the feeds— but nothing from Tally Youngblood.

"If she's coming on a suborbital, she'll be out of contact for a few hours," Ren said.

Aya sighed. "As long as she gets here fast."

They dropped toward the tunnel below them and slipped inside.

"Hey, am I passing out again?" Frizz groaned, his weight shifting as the darkness closed around them.

"No, we're just going underground." Aya squeezed him tighter. "No lights, Moggle. Too obvious."

"Your dress," Frizz murmured. "Sparkles."

Aya nodded, flexing her fingers, and the party dress sputtered to life. The battery was down to its last dregs, but the flickering embers were enough cut the gloom.

"Told you this was the right dress, Hiro," she said.

"Very funny. Are you going to tell us about what happened back there?"

"Not yet."

They descended, the orange worklights of the surface fading behind them. After long minutes, the echoes of trickling water reached their ears, then the tunnel opened over the reservoir's huge expanse.

Aya brought her board to a halt in midair.

The cavern flickered with the dying lights of her dress, the ceiling shimmering with the water's trembling reflections. Moggle seemed to remember the place, and was soon drifting in nervous circles around the cavern, checking for hidden Sly Girls with lock-down clamps.

Hiro slid to a stop close by, sitting cross-legged on his board. "Great hiding place, Aya. There's no actual ground to stand on, is there?"

"No," Ren said. "But we've got plenty of water."

"It's not exactly Shuffle Mansion." Aya sighed. The apartment Hiro had shown her lingered in her mind's eye— the huge open spaces, the perfect city views. And here she was on her first night of fame, skulking underground.

Frizz's slow breathing echoed from the stone arches. He stirred beneath her, the effects of the needle-stab fading. She checked the mark on his neck—the redness had almost disappeared.

"Whatever was in those needles was designed to knock you out, Aya," Ren said. "But Frizz is a pretty. He'll be okay."

She nodded. The operation made pretties' bodies stronger and quicker to heal as well as beautiful.

"So who were those people?" Hiro asked.

"I have no idea," she said. "I only saw them once before."

"When you first saw the mountain open up?" Ren asked.

"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?"