Extras recap

A few years after the cure ended the pretty operations, Aya Fuse lives in a city where reputation is currency and everyone carries a face rank. Fifteen, obscure and ambitious, she works as a kicker, hunting stories for the feeds with her hovercam Moggle. To make her name she infiltrates the Sly Girls, a clique that despises fame and rides the tops of magnetic-levitation trains for the danger of it. On one run in the mountains the group sees strangers moving enormous quantities of metal into a hillside. Aya films them, calls them inhuman in the story she broadcasts, and becomes famous overnight, at the cost of the Sly Girls' trust. The story pulls in Tally Youngblood and her Specials. Investigating together, they find that the strangers are humans rebuilt for space travel, constructing launch machinery to leave the planet, machinery that could also be used as a weapon. The confrontation nearly kills Aya. The full and corrected story goes out to the world, Aya's rank soars, and Tally leaves with a warning that someone has to keep looking.

Previously, across the first three books: the cities of this world ran on an operation that made every citizen beautiful at sixteen and, secretly, left lesions in the brain that kept the population placid. Tally Youngblood discovered this, was turned pretty and then made into a Special by Special Circumstances, and finally turned on her own makers, forcing a cure on the head of the organization. The cure spread from city to city and the operations stopped, an upheaval remembered afterwards as the mind-rain. Freed populations invented new ways to organize themselves, some of them stranger than what they replaced, and the wild filled up with people who no longer had a city telling them what to do. Tally kept her Special body rather than be cured, and she and David went into the wild as its self-appointed guardians, watching to make sure the newly free cities did not strip the planet the way the Rusties once had. This book begins a few years later, in a different city, with people who know Tally only as a legend.

Aya Fuse lives in a city where the mind-rain has been replaced by a reputation economy: every citizen has a face rank, and fame buys housing, equipment and attention. Aya's rank is near the bottom, and her brother Hiro's is high enough to make the contrast painful. She works as a kicker, filming stories with her hovercam Moggle and pushing them to the feeds, but nothing she finds is big enough to matter. She also meets Frizz Mizuno, whose clique has taken a surgery that makes lying literally impossible, which is a complication for someone planning to lie her way into a story.

Aya settles on her target: the Sly Girls, a clique with no interest in fame at all, who go out of their way to leave nothing on the feeds. She talks her way in, hiding Moggle and telling the group nothing about being a kicker. Their initiation is physical and dangerous, and their real entertainment is surfing the tops of magnetic-levitation trains at speed. Aya passes the tests, is accepted by Lai and the others, and begins gathering the footage that will make her famous while genuinely starting to like the people she is deceiving.

Riding out beyond the city with the Sly Girls, Aya sees something that has nothing to do with the story she came for: a group of strangers, in a remote place, loading extraordinary quantities of metal into the side of a mountain. They do not look like anyone she has ever seen, their bodies altered in ways no city surge accounts for, and they are clearly working hard not to be noticed. Aya gets footage before being chased off. Whatever else the Sly Girls are, they have stumbled into something far larger than a clique's private game.

Aya takes the footage to Hiro and Ren and kicks the story, describing the strangers as inhuman and implying that something not of this world is hiding in the mountains. The feeds seize on it. Her face rank climbs faster than almost anyone's ever has, and she gets everything she wanted from fame at once. She also loses the Sly Girls, who consider her a traitor, and finds that Frizz, unable to soften anything, will tell her exactly what he thinks she did. Worse, she is not certain her own story is true.

The story travels far enough to reach Tally Youngblood, who arrives with Shay and her other Specials to find out what has been discovered. To them a hidden group with unlimited metal and no interest in being seen is a security problem, not a sensation, and they treat Aya as a source rather than a celebrity. Working with them, and with Frizz, Hiro and Ren, Aya learns how much of her original broadcast was wrong, and that correcting a story in public is far harder than kicking it in the first place.

The investigation reaches the mountain itself, and the purpose of the metal becomes clear. What is being built there is launch machinery on an enormous scale, and the people building it have had themselves surgically remade to survive conditions no ordinary body could. They are not aliens; they are humans preparing to leave the planet entirely. Tally's concern is immediate and practical: machinery that can throw mass into orbit can also be aimed at a city, and the group has been assembling it in secret while the cities argued about face ranks.

The confrontation at the launch site goes badly and nearly kills Aya, but the full story gets out. The world learns at once that the group exists, that its members are people who have rebuilt themselves for space, and that they intend to leave rather than attack, along with Aya's public corrections to the version she first broadcast. Aya's face rank rises to the top tier of the city and she finds that fame is nothing like what she was chasing. She repairs what she can with the Sly Girls and with Frizz. Tally leaves as she arrived, unimpressed by celebrity, with a warning that the freed cities are still capable of enormous damage without noticing, and that the world needs people willing to find out what is being hidden and say so out loud.

The people in the mountain are not aliens and not monsters. They are humans who have had themselves surgically rebuilt for life off the planet, quietly stockpiling metal and building the machinery to launch themselves away from an Earth they do not expect to remain habitable. The same machinery could be aimed at a city, which is why Tally Youngblood treats them as a threat rather than a curiosity, and the confrontation at the site nearly kills Aya. In the end the truth is broadcast in full, including the corrections to Aya's first, sensational version, and the whole world learns at once both that the group exists and what it actually intends. Aya's face rank rises to a height she never expected and is not sure she wants, since fame turns out to cost as much as it pays. She makes her peace with the Sly Girls, whose trust she broke, and with Frizz, who cannot lie to her about any of it. Tally leaves as she came, warning that the freed cities are still capable of doing enormous damage without noticing, and that the world needs people willing to find out what is being hidden and say so. Aya ends the book as a kicker with a reputation, a working hovercam, and no shortage of things left to investigate.