“Disappear.”

They did.

Twelve blocks later, puffing from their run, Pita and her friends slowed. Chen had been running with a peculiar hop-step, and now he settled into a limp.

“Fragging goons,” he panted, surreptitiously wiping the last of the tears from his cheeks.

Shaz and Mohan walked a pace behind him. They were brothers, twelve and thirteen years old. They’d only been on the streets a year, and looked to Chen, with his six years of city smarts, for leadership. They had shaved their heads, thinking it would make them look tougher, and wore matching black T-shirts emblazoned with the grinning face of the ork rocker and go-gang leader who fronted Meta Madness. The group’s logo was stitched across the T-shirts in silver wire.

“Yao gave me that headset,” Chen muttered. “He said I wouldn’t be able to talk to him once he went underground, but that I could use it to watch his broadcasts. Now I won’t even be able to see him on trideo.”

“I know.” Pita untied her black synth-leather jacket from around her waist and tugged it on over her sleeveless flannel shirt. Her threadbare sneaks, cheap like everything else that came out of the Confederated American States, scuffed the sidewalk. Knobby knees poked out of the holes in her jeans as she walked. “At least you know he cares about you. My sister never even…”

Chen jerked to a halt. He turned toward Pita. “I’m sorry.” Wrapping his massive arms around her shoulders, he hugged her close. She felt Shaz and Mohan touch her back with gentle fingers.

Bitterness gnawed at her with sharp teeth as her mind flew back to when she’d first begun to goblinize. She’d hidden it from her family for a week, mumbling into her hand to conceal her expanding canines and wearing baggy clothes to hide her sudden growth. Then her sister had caught her in the bathroom, shaving the curly brown hair that had started to sprout from her shoulders. The next day, Pita came home from school to find the front door locked and her clothes jumbled into foamboard boxes on the lawn. Her old clothes. They’d saved the good ones for her sister.