Three years after the events of Specials, the world is free of the pretty lesions and cities are reinventing themselves. In Yokohama, status is currency: a "reputation economy" ranks every citizen by fame, and fifteen-year-old Aya Fuse sits near the bottom of it. She is an extra — one of the unwatched — and she wants out. Armed with a hovercam called Moggle, she chases stories she can "kick" to the city feeds in the hope of climbing the face ranks.
The story she finds is the Sly Girls, an underground clique who keep their own ranks deliberately low so they can go unnoticed, and who spend their nights surfing mag-lev trains at lethal speed. To ride with them, Aya has to prove she is not there for the fame — and once she is inside, she stumbles onto something far larger and stranger than a stunt story, buried where nobody was meant to look.
The fourth book in Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series follows a new narrator rather than Tally Youngblood, and turns the sequence's attention from beauty and conformity to celebrity, attention, and the price of being seen.