Extras Read Free Page A

day to find her shadow gone.
    She stared at the last image the hovercam had sent: the inside of a storm dram, grainy and distorted by infrared. Eden Maru was curled up tight, a human cannonball zooming through the confines of the tunnel, headed so deep that Moggie's transmitter couldn't reach the surface anymore. The only way to find Eden again was to follow her down.
    Aya leaned forward, urging her hoverboard back into motion. The new construction site rose up around her, dozens of iron skeletons and gaping holes.
    After the mind-ram, nobody wanted to live in fashion-missing Prettytime buildings. Nobody famous, anyway. So the city was expanding wildly, plundering nearby Rusty ruins for metal. There were even rumors that the city planned to tear open the ground to look for fresh iron, like the earth-damaging Rusties had three centuries ago.
    The unfinished towers flashed past, their steel frames making her board shudder. Hoverboards needed metal below them to fly, but too many magnetic fields made them shivery. Aya eased back her speed, checking for Moggie again.
    Nothing. The hovercam was still underground.
    A huge excavation came into sight, the foundation of some future skyscraper. Along its raw dirt floor, puddles of afternoon rain reflected the starlit sky, like jagged slivers of mirror. In a corner of the excavation she spotted a tunnel mouth, an entry to the network of storm drams beneath the city.
    A month ago, Aya had kicked a story about a new graffiti clique, uglies who left artwork for future generations. They painted the insides of unfinished tunnels and conduits, letting their work be sealed up like time capsules. No one would see the paintings until long after the city collapsed, when its ruins were rediscovered by some future civilization. It was all very mind-rain, a rumination about how the eternal Prettytime had been more fragile than it seemed.
    The story hadn't bumped Aya's face rank—stories about uglies never did—but she and Moggie had spent a week playing hide-and-seek through the construction site. She wasn't afraid of the underground.
    Letting her board drop, Aya ducked past idle lifter drones and hoverstruts, diving toward the tunnel mouth. She bent her knees, pulled in her arms, and plunged into absolute blackness…
    Her eyescreen flickered once—the hovercam had to be nearby.
    The smell of old rainwater and dirt was strong, trickling drainage the only sound. As the worklights behind her faded to a faint orange glow, Aya slowed her board to a crawl, guiding herself with one hand sliding along the tunnel wall.
    Moggies signal flickered back on … and held.
    Eden Maru was standing upright, flexing her arms. She was someplace spacious and dead-black in infrared, extending as far as Moggie's cams could see.
    What was down there?
    More human forms shimmered in the grainy darkness. They floated above the black plain, the lozenge shapes of hoverboards glowing beneath their feet.
    Aya smiled. She'd found them, those crazy girls who rode mag-lev trains.
    "Move in and listen," she whispered.
    As Moggie drifted closer, Aya remembered a place the graffiti uglies had bragged about finding—a huge reservoir where the city stored runoff from the rainy season, an underground lake in absolute darkness.
    Through Moggie's microphones, a few echoing words reached her.
    "Thanks for getting here so fast."
    "I always said your big face would get you into trouble, Eden."
    "Well, this shouldn't take long. She's just behind me."
    Aya froze. Who was just behind Eden? She glanced over her shoulder…
    Nothing but the glimmer of water trickling down the tunnel.
    Then her eyescreen faded again. Aya swore, flexing her ring finger: off/on…but her vision stayed black.
    "Moggie?" she hissed.
    No flicker in the eyescreen, no response. She tried to access the hovercam's diagnostics, its audio feed, the remote flying controls. Nothing worked.
    But Moggie was so close—at most twenty meters away. Why couldn't she connect?
    Aya