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could scrape together enough merits for a new hovercam.
    All Aya wanted to do was sleep until tomorrow morning, when Ren had promised to meet her at the new construction site. But this afternoon was already stuffed with classes—the ones she'd rescheduled from this morning on top of the dreaded Advanced English. She couldn't skip: Schoolwork was the quickest way to build up merits when you were an ugly—all the good jobs went to pretties and crumblies.
    When she reached Akira Hall, she went down to the basement and found an empty wallscreen.
    "Aya Fuse," she told it.
    It popped to life, listing her pings and assignments, and displaying her miserable face rank of 451,441.
    She was dying to look up Frizz Mizuno and Radical Honesty, but not until schoolwork was out of the way. As she scanned the list for any new assignments, her eyes froze on one…
    It was anonymous and spitting animations, like the fluttering hearts that littlies decorated their pings with. But these weren't hearts, or exclamation points, or smilies. They were eyes—dull, unsurged, Plain Jane eyes—and they kept winking at her. Aya opened the ping…

    Saw your story about the graffiti. Not bad, for a kicker. Meet us at midnight, where the mag-lev line leaves Uglyville.
    But don't bring a cam, or we won't let you play
    —your new friends

    SLY GIRLS

    "Can't I use my own hoverboard?"
    Jai snorted. "That toy? Too slow. The train will be doing a hundred and fifty by the time you jump on."
    "Oh." Aya stared down at the long, shimmering curve of the mag-lev line. It cut through the low industrial buildings, an arc of white through dull orange worklights. The Sly Girls had brought her to the city's edge, where the greenbelt faded into factories and new expansions. "I just assumed you guys got on the train while it was standing still."
    "The wardens would be expecting that, wouldn't they?" Jai swung her feet casually, as if there weren't a hundred-meter drop below them. "They have monitors all over the train yards."
    "But isn't a hundred and fifty kind of fast?" Most boards were safety-capped at sixty kilometers an hour.
    "That's nothing for a mag-lev," Eden Maru said. "We're catching it when it slows down on the bend." She pointed toward the wild. "The trains do three hundred once they hit the straightaway outside town."
    "Three hundred klicks? And we'll still be riding it?"
    "Let's hope so." Jai smiled. "Considering the alternative." Aya glanced down at the magnetic bracelets strapped to her wrists. They were like the crash bracelets everyone wore for hoverboard falls, just much bigger. But were they really powerful enough to fight a three-hundred-kilometer headwind?
    She wrapped her arms around herself, trying not to look down at the nervous-making drop. The three of them were balanced atop a tall transmission tower, high enough to see darkness on the horizon, the place where the city stopped.
    Aya had never glimpsed the wild before tonight, except on nature feeds. Somehow the thought of venturing out into that lightless, barren expanse was even scarier than jumping on a speeding train. Moggle's absence made her doubly uneasy. It was eerie knowing that none of this was being recorded. Like a dream, whatever happened would all be gone tomorrow morning. Aya felt cut off from the world, unreal.
    "The next tram passes in three minutes," Jai said. "So what's the most important thing to remember once we're surfing?"
    A cold trickle squirmed down Aya's spine. "The decapitation signals."
    "Which work how?"
    "When anyone in front of me flashes a yellow light, that means duck. Red means a tunnel's coming, so lie flat against the train."
    "Just don't get too excited." Jai giggled. "Or you'll lose your head." Aya wondered if the Sly Girls had ever considered lying flat for the whole ride, which would make decapitation much less of an issue. Or realized that not surfing mag-levs at all would keep head-losing safely in the realm of the unimaginable, where it