"Not exactly." I took a deep breath, because in between crippling bouts of feeling sorry for myself all night, I'd actually thought about this. "Jen, I'm not sure about the Jammers. I think they shoot for easy targets. And they take risks with other people's brains. You can't just go around rewiring people without asking. The moment someone gets seriously hurt, the whole trickster thing kind of loses its quirky appeal, you know?"

She thought about this for a moment, then shrugged. "Maybe. But that just means they need us to help them out. Your analytical skills, your vast database of useless facts. And my, uh, original thinking or whatever. We can help them. And they're just so cool."

"I know they are." I remembered my first day at school here in New York, realizing how far down the pyramid I'd fallen. I was suddenly a dork; anyone could see from the moment I walked into class. And I could see in turn who the cool kids were. It was like they were glowing, bright razors, so sharp that it hurt to look at them. I've been able to spot the cool kids ever since, no matter how young or old they are.

But since that day, I've never really trusted them.

So why did I trust Jen? I wondered. This was the girl who'd broken up with me only twelve hours before over… a pile of shoes. Or rather hated me because I hadn't stayed there to help, oblivious to her conviction that if she lost this one chance with the Jammers, she'd lose her cool again, as easy as tripping over a crack in the sidewalk.

Which was a nutty thing to believe but very Jen.

Anyway, she'd stopped hating me now.

"Maybe we'd make them even cooler, Hunter."

I looked at her and laughed, knowing that I'd help her find them. Because Jen thought she needed them, and I needed her. "Sure, we would."

She looked at the factory. Shrugged. "I've got a present for you."

"Another one?" I said.

"The jacket wasn't a present. It was yours, bought and paid for."

I twinged. "Not paid for yet, actually."

She smiled and put the binoculars into her backpack (in their thick, padded, Soviet-era case, I was glad to see). Pulled out a paper bag. Before she even had it open, I caught a whiff of burned plastic.

"I told you I'd find one. You should have stayed with me. If I'd had some help, it might not have taken two whole hours." She unwrapped it carefully as she spoke. "Just one, right at the bottom of the pile."

My mouth dropped open.

The shoe had remained miraculously untouched by the heat, the panels still pliable, their silvery, liquid-metal shine unblemished. The laces ran through my fingers like tendrils of sand. The eyelets glittered, tiny bicycle spokes spinning in the sunlight.

I'd almost forgotten how good they were.

"Smells like the fire," Jen said. "But I stuck a couple of shoe deodorizers in it, and it's already better. Just give it time."

"I don't care what it smells like."

I needed this too, I realized. It didn't take much to rewire Jen. Her brain was something unique, poised to turn ten years old again at the drop of a paka-paka attack, ready for every rooftop emergency door or plummeting j air shaft or secret revolution. But I hadn't felt this way in so long—like I could fly or at least dunk from the free-throw line, like the mortar in my brain was loosening. I took the shoe from her and held on tightly.

"Still think the Jammers are so bad?" Jen asked.

I swallowed, looked out over the river at the enemies of all I held dear, and gave them the Nod.

"They have their moments."

Chapter 36

I OWNED THE SHOE FOR ABOUT THREE WEEKS. THEN MY CREDIT-CARD

bill arrived. Drastic action was required.

"You can always buy a pair when they come out," Jen assured me.

"Yeah, but not with the real logo." I'd miss that bar sinister. As a certain French philosopher once said, "Man is the animal that says no."

But I couldn't say no to a certain credit-card company whose name is a four-letter word. So we called up Antoine to make sure he was working that day, said we had something important to show him, and went uptown.

Dr. Jay's, like hip-hop culture itself, appeared in the Bronx in 1975. They're still there and now all over town, selling shoes and tracksuits and all manner of sports gear made from synthetic materials with names like Supplex and Ultrah, space-age words to conjure images of robot courtesans.

"My man, Hunter," Antoine said, then gave Jen the Nod, which probably meant that he remembered what she'd said at the focus group and thought it had been pretty cool.

He led us to the back, through the good-natured chaos egged on by the store's awesome sound system: little kids running the carpet to test fit and feel, guys trying on jerseys to find that perfect length between waist and knee, reflective rainbows of team logos spinning on their racks.

We reached the sanctuary of the storeroom and squeezed ourselves between high shelves of boxes ranked by size and make, Antoine pushing a rolling library ladder out of our way.

"What's that smell?" he asked as the shoe box opened.

"Jet engine," Jen said matter-of-factly, unwrapping the shoe from its paper.

When it came into the light, Antoine's eyes began to shine. He took it gingerly from her hands, rotated it to every side in turn, checking eyelets, tongue, laces, tread.

A minute later he whispered, "Where did it come from?"

"Bootleg," Jen said. "But they were all destroyed. That's the last one as far as we know"

"Damn."

"The client will be doing a version," I said. "But this is the original."

He nodded slowly, his eyes never leaving the shoe. "They won't do it right. Not like this. Some committee will mess it up."

"And it'll never have that." I pointed to the anti-logo.

He laughed. "Guess I won't be wearing them to work."

"There's no them. Only one survived."

"Damn."

I swallowed. "The thing is, I have to sell it. Serious money problems."

He looked at me, waiting for the catch.

"I have to sell it, okay?" I said.

"Huh. Never figured you like that, Hunter. But if you need the money, you need it."

"I do," I said, sounding like the groom at a shotgun wedding.

"How much?"

"Well, you see, I've got this credit-card bill, and it's about a thousand dollars—"

"Done."

It wasn't until we were out on the street, cash in hand, that I realized I could have asked for more.

The punch line to this tragic little tale is that the client never released the shoe. They never intended to.

Instead, they pirate little bits of it every season. Like Frankenstein's monster in reverse, the shoe is being slowly disassembled, its beautiful organs transplanted into a dozen different bodies.

You've probably seen the shoe yourself if you've kept your eyes on the ground, but only in pieces. It's easy to recognize, on the client's products and a dozen knockoffs and bootlegs—that part of any shoe that rewires your brain, makes you think for a moment that you can fly. But you'll never hold the whole thing in your hand. It went up in smoke.

Still, you can't blame the client for following the first rule of consumerism: Never give us what we really want. Cut the dream into pieces and scatter them like ashes. Dole out the empty promises. Package our aspirations and sell them to us, cheaply made enough to fall apart.

At least Antoine got good value for his money: he got the real thing.

And I got Jen.

We wound up kissing after the shoe was sold and gone, out on the street in the Bronx, me a little bit nervous about the thousand dollars stuffed into our pockets, big wads of small bills. (Try it sometime—it's pretty intense.) And after that we went back downtown and back to work, me knowing that I was following a compass whose needle swung toward trouble. Jen's an impact player, a spoiled brat, a royal pain in the ass, and she rewires me like nothing else. But things get better when she turns them inside out.