"What do you want, Aya-chan?"

"I need to talk to you."

"Way too early."

Aya groaned. Without Moggle to float her back up to her window, she'd had to wait till dawn to get back into her dorm. And Hiro thought he was tired?

He couldn't have had a worse night than she'd had. She kept imagining Moggle at the bottom of the underground lake, lying cold and lifeless.

"Please, Hiro? I just spent a bunch of merits to switch my morning classes, so I could come see you."

A grumbling noise. "Come back in an hour."

Aya glared at the elevator door. She couldn't even go up and pound on his window; the mansions in the famous part of town didn't let you fly close to them.

"Well, can you at least tell me where Ren is? His locator's off."

"Ren?" A chuckle came from the door. "He's on my couch."

Aya breathed a sigh of relief. Hiro was a million times easier to deal with when his best friend was around. "Can I talk to him, then…please?"

The door went silent for so long that Aya wondered if Hiro had gone back to sleep. But finally Ren's voice came on.

"Hey, Aya-chan. Come on in!"

The door opened, and Aya stepped inside.

Hiro's rooms were garlanded with a million cranes.

It was an old custom from pre-Rusty days, one of the few that had survived the Prettytime: When a girl turned thirteen, she made a string of a thousand origami birds with her own two hands. It took weeks of folding little squares of paper into wings and beaks and tails, then stringing them together with an old-fashioned needle and thread.

After the mind-rain, a few girls had started a new trend: sending their finished strings to reputation-crushes, new-pretty boys with big face ranks. Boys like Hiro, in other words.