Pretties

Descent

Tally dropped into silence, spinning out of control.

After the stillness in the balloon, the rush of passing air built around her with unexpected strength, almost tearing the hoverboard from Tally's hands. She held it tightly to her chest, but the wind's fingers continued to search for purchase, hungry to pry away her only hope of survival. She clasped her hands around the board's underbelly, kicking her legs, trying to control the spinning. Gradually, the dark horizon steadied.

But Tally was upside down, looking up at the stars and hanging from the board. She could see the dark orb of the balloon above. Then its flame ignited, giving the envelope a silvery glow against the darkness, like a huge, dull moon in the sky. She guessed that Peris was headed upward to throw off the pursuit. At least he was trying to help.

His change of heart stung her, but she didn't have time to worry about it, not while plummeting toward the earth.

Tally struggled to turn herself over, but the hoverboard was wider than she was — it caught the air like a sail, threatening to pull itself from her grasp. It was like trying to carry a large kite in a strong wind, except that if she lost control of this particular kite, she'd be splattered all over the ground in about sixty seconds.

Tally tried to relax, letting herself hang there. Something was tugging at her wrist, she realized. Up here in the void, the board's lifters might be useless for flying, but they would still interact with the metal in her crash bracelets.

She adjusted her left bracelet to maximize the connection. Her grip on the board made surer, she straightened out her right arm into the rushing air. It was like riding in her parents' groundcar as a littlie, her hand stuck out a window. Flattening her palm increased the resistance, and Tally found herself slowly beginning to turn over.

A few seconds later, the hoverboard was beneath her.

Tally swallowed at the sight of the earth spread out below, vast and dark and hungry. The rushing cold seemed to cut straight through her coat.

She'd been falling for what felt like forever, but the ground didn't look any closer. There was nothing to give it scale except the winding river, still no bigger than a piece of ribbon. Tally angled her outstretched palm experimentally, and watched the curve of moonlit water turn clockwise beneath her. She pulled her arm in, and the river steadied.

Tally grinned. At least she had some control over her wild descent.

As she fell, the silvery band of river grew in size, first slowly, then faster, the dark horizon of earth expanding like some huge predator advancing toward her, blotting out the starlit sky. Clinging to the hoverboard with both hands, Tally discovered that her outstretched legs could guide her descent, keeping the river directly below her.

And then in the last ten seconds, she began to realize how large the river was, its surface wide and troubled. She saw things moving in it.

It grew, faster and faster…

When the board's lifters kicked in, it was like a door slamming in her face, flattening her nose and breaking open her lower lip, the taste of blood instantly in her mouth. Her wrists were twisted cruelly by the crash bracelets, and her momentum squashed her against the braking hover-board, forcing the breath from her lungs like a giant vice. She struggled to pull in a breath.

The hoverboard was slowing rapidly, but the river's surface still grew, stretching farther in all directions like a huge mirror full of starlight, until…

Slap!

The board struck the water like the flat of a giant hand, catching Tally's body with another battering jolt, an explosion of light and sound filling her head. And then she was underwater, ears filled with a dull roar. She let go of the board and clawed for the surface, her lungs emptied by the impact. Forcing her eyes open, Tally saw only the faintest glimmer of light filtering down through the murky river. Her arms struggled weakly, and the light grew slowly closer. Finally, she broke into the air, gasping and coughing.

The river raged around her, the swift current kicking up whitecaps in every direction. She dog-paddled hard, the weight of her pack trying to pull her back under. Her lungs sucked in air, and she coughed violently tasting blood in her mouth.

Turning from side to side, Tally realized that she hit her mark too well — she was in the dead center of the river, fifty meters from either shore. She swore and kept paddling, waiting for a tug on her crash bracelets.

Where was her hoverboard? It should have found her by now.

It had taken so long for the lifters to kick in — Tally had expected to pull up in midair, not hit the river at speed. But after a few moments' thought, she realized what had happened. The river was deeper than she'd anticipated; the minerals on its floor were a long way below her kicking feet. She remembered how hoverboards sometimes got wobbly over the middle of the city river — too far from the mineral deposits for the lifters to work at full strength.

It was lucky the board had slowed her fall at all.

Tally looked around. Too dense to float, the hover-board had probably sunk to the bottom, the raging current carrying her away from it. She turned up her crash bracelets' calling range to a whole kilometer, and waited for the board's nose to push itself above the surface.

Shapes bobbed along in the water all around her, knobby and irregular, like a flotilla of alligators in the fast-moving current. What were they?

Something nudged her…

She spun around, but it was just an old tree trunk — not an alligator, and not her hoverboard. Tally grabbed on to it gratefully, though, already exhausted from paddling. In every direction were more trees, as well as branches, clots of reeds, masses of rotting leaves. The river was carrying all sorts of cargo on its surface.

The rain, Tally thought. Three days of downpour must have flooded the hills, washing all manner of stray matter down into the river, swelling its size and accelerating its current. The trunk she clung to was old and rotted black, but a few strands of green wood showed from a break. Had the flooding ripped it from the ground alive?

Tally's fingers traced where the tree had broken, and she saw that something unnaturally straight had struck it.

Like the edge of a hoverboard.

A few meters away, another log floated, cut with the same sharp edge. Tally's crash-landing had snapped the old, rotten tree in half. Her face was bleeding from the impact; she could still taste blood. So what damage had been done to the hoverboard?

Tally twisted the call controls of her crash bracelets higher, setting them to burn their batteries down. Every second, the current was carrying her farther from where she'd landed.

No hoverboard rose up above the surface, no tugging came at her wrists. As the minutes passed, Tally began to admit to herself that the board was dead, a piece of junk at the bottom of the river.

She switched her bracelets off and, still clinging to the log, began to kick her way toward shore.

The riverbank was slippery with mud, the ground saturated by the rains and the swollen river. Tally waded to shore in a small inlet, struggling through branches and reeds in the hip-deep water. It seemed the flood had collected everything that floated and dumped it in this one spot.

Including Tally Youngblood.

She stumbled up the bank, desperate to reach dry ground, every instinct impelling her to keep moving away from the rushing water. Her exhausted body felt full of lead, and Tally slid back down the slope, becoming covered with mud. Finally, she gave up and huddled on the muddy ground, shaking in the freezing cold. Tally couldn't remember feeling so tired since becoming a new pretty, as if the river had sucked away her body's vitality.

She took the firestarter from her backpack and, with trembling fingers, gathered a pile of washed-up twigs. But the wood was so wet from three days of rain that the firestarter's tiny flame only made the twigs hiss dully.

At least her coat was still working. She turned its heater up to full, not worrying about the batteries, and gathered herself into a ball.

Tally waited for sleep to come, but her body wouldn't stop trembling, like a fever coming on back in ugly days. But new pretties almost never got sick, unless she'd run herself too far down this last month — eating almost nothing, staying out in the cold, running on adrenaline and coffee, with hardly an hour in the last twenty-four when she hadn't been soaking wet.

Or was she finally getting the same reaction from the cure as Zane? Was the pill beginning to damage her brain, now that she was beyond any hope of medical care?

Tally's head pounded, fevered thoughts swirling through her. She had no hoverboard, no way of getting to the Rusty Ruins except on foot. No one knew where she was. The world had been emptied of everything but the wild, the freezing cold, and Tally Youngblood. Even the absence of the cuff on her wrist felt strange, like the gap left behind by a missing tooth.

Worst was the absence of Zane's body next to her. She'd stayed with him every night for the last month, and they'd spent most of every day together. Even in their enforced silence, she had grown used to his constant presence, his familiar touch, their wordless conversations. Suddenly he was gone, and Tally felt as if she'd lost some part of herself in the fall.

She had imagined this moment a thousand times, finally reaching the wild, free from the city at last. But never once had she imagined being here without Zane.

And yet here she was, utterly alone.

Tally lay awake a long time, replaying in her mind those last frantic minutes in the balloon. If she'd only jumped sooner, or had thought to look down before the city grid ran out. After what Zane had said, she shouldn't have hesitated, knowing that this escape was their only chance for freedom together.

Once again, things were screwed up, and it was all her fault.

Finally Tally's exhaustion overpowered her worries, and she drifted into troubled sleep.

Alone

So, there was this beautiful princess.

She was locked in a high tower, one whose smart walls had clever holes in them that could give her anything: food, a clique of fantastic friends, wonderful clothes. And, best of all, there was this mirror on the wall, so that the princess could look at her beautiful self all day long.

The only problem with the tower was that there was no way out. The builders had forgotten to put in an elevator, or even a set of stairs. She was stuck up there.

One day, the princess realized that she was bored. The view from the tower — gentle hills, fields of white flowers, and a deep, dark forest — fascinated her. She started spending more time looking out the window than at her own reflection, as is often the case with troublesome girls.

And it was pretty clear that no prince was showing up, or at least that he was really late.

So the only thing was to jump.

The hole in the wall gave her a lovely parasol to catch her when she fell, and a wonderful new dress to wear in the fields and forest, and a brass key to make sure she could get back into the tower if she needed to. But the princess, laughing pridefully tossed the key into the fireplace, convinced she would never need to return to the tower. Without another glance in the mirror, she strolled out onto the balcony and stepped off into midair.

The thing was, it was a long way down, a lot farther than the princess had expected, and the parasol turned out to be total crap. As she fell, the princess realized she should have asked for a bungee jacket or a parachute or something better than a parasol, you know?

She struck the ground hard, and lay there in a crumpled heap, smarting and confused, wondering how things had worked out this way. There was no prince around to pick her up, her new dress was ruined, and thanks to her pride, she had no way back into the tower.

And the worst thing was, there were no mirrors out there in the wild, so the princess was left wondering whether she in fact was still beautiful … or if the fall had changed the story completely.

When Tally awoke from this bogus dream, the sun was halfway across the sky.

She struggled to her feet, having to pry herself from the sucking embrace of the mud. At some point during the night, her winter coat had run out of charge. Without batteries, it was a cold thing clinging to her skin, still damp from her soaking in the river, and it smelled funny. Tally unstuck the coat from herself and laid it across the broad surface of a rock, hoping that the sun would dry it out.

For the first time in days the sky was cloudless. But in clearing, the air had turned crisp and cold — the warmer weather that had arrived with the rain had departed with it as well. The trees glittered with frost, and the mud under her feet sparkled, its thin layer of rime crackling underfoot.

Her fever had passed, but Tally felt dizzy standing, so she knelt beside her backpack to look through its contents — the sum of everything she possessed. Fausto had managed to gather up some of the usual Smokey survival gear: a knife, water filter, position-finder, firestarter, and some safety sparklers, along with a few dozen packets of soap. Remembering how valuable dehydrated food had been in the Smoke, Tally had packed three months' worth, which was all wrapped up in waterproof plastic, fortunately. When Tally saw the two rolls of toilet paper she'd brought, however, she let out a groan. They were soaked through, reduced to bloated, squishy blobs of white. She placed them on the rocks next to her jacket, but doubted that it was even worth drying them out.

She sighed. Even back in her Smokey days, she'd never gotten used to the leaf thing.

Tally found her pitiful pile of twigs, and remembered trying to light a fire the night before, too delirious to realize how stupid that would have been. The Special Circumstances hovercars that had come after the balloon would have easily spotted a fire in the darkness.

There was no evidence of pursuit in the sky this morning, but Tally decided to put some distance between herself and the river. Without a working heater in her jacket, she would need to build a fire that night.

But first things first, which meant food.

She trudged down to the river to fill the purifier, dried mud crumbling from her skin and clothing with every step. Tally had never been so dirty in her life, but she wasn't up to bathing in the freezing water, not without a fire to warm her up afterward. Last nights fever might have passed, thanks to her new-pretty immune system kicking in, but she didn't want to take any risks with her health out here.

Of course, Tally realized, it wasn't her own health she should be worrying about. Zane was somewhere out here too, maybe just as alone as she was. He and Fausto had jumped almost at the same moment, but they might have landed kilometers apart. If Zane had one of his attacks on the way to the ruins, with no one to help him…

Tally shook the thought from her head. All she could do right now for Zane or anyone else was get to the ruins herself. And that meant making food, not worrying about things she couldn't control.

The purifier took two fillings before it had strained enough, pure water from the silty inlet to make a meal. She chose a packet of PadThai and set the purifier to boil; the smell of reconstituting noodles and spices soon rose from the gurgling water.

By the time the meal pinged that it was ready, Tally was ravenous.

As she reached the end of the PadThai, she realized there was no longer any point in going hungry, and immediately boiled up a packet of CurryNoods. Starvation might have been useful for getting off the cuffs and staying bubbly, but her cuff was gone, and Tally now had the whole of the wild, dangerous and cold, to keep her bubbly. Not much chance of sinking into a pretty haze out here.

After breakfast, the position-finder offered up its bad news. Tally had to check her calculations twice before she believed the distance she'd traveled the night before. The winds from off the ocean had pushed the balloon a long way east, in the opposite direction from the Rusty Ruins, and then the rivers current had carried her another long distance southward. She was more than a week's journey by foot to the ruins, if she went in a straight line. And straight lines wouldn't come into it: She had to go the long way around the city, staying in the forest to hide herself from searchers in the air.

Tally wondered how long the Specials would bother to keep looking for her. Luckily, they didn't know that her hoverboard had disappeared into the river, so they would assume she was flying, not trudging along on foot. As far as they knew, Tally would have to stay near the river or some other natural vein of mineral deposits.

The sooner she got away from the riverbank, the better.

Tally packed up her pitiful camp unhappily. Her backpack held more than enough food for the journey, and the hills would be full of ready water after the long rains, but she felt defeated already. From what Sussy and Dex had said, the New Smokies hadn't set up a permanent camp in the ruins. They might leave any day now, and she was a week away.

Her only hope was that Zane and Fausto would stay behind, waiting for her to show up. Unless they thought that she had been captured, or killed by the fall, or had simply chickened out.

No, she told herself, Zane wouldn't think that last one of her. He might be worried, but Tally knew that he would wait for her, however long it took.

She sighed as she tied the still-damp coat around her waist and hoisted her backpack onto her shoulders. There was no point wondering about where the others were; her only choice was to hike toward the ruins and trust that someone would be waiting when she arrived.

Tally had nowhere else to go.

The way through the forest was rugged, every step a battle. Back in the Smoke, Tally had mostly traveled by hoverboard. When she had been forced to hike cross-country, it had been on paths hacked through the trees. But this was nature in the raw, hostile and unrelenting. The dense undergrowth tugged at her feet, trying to trip her, throwing up thick bushes and ankle-twisting roots and impenetrable walls of thorn.

Among the trees, the downpour still echoed. Pine needles sparkled with frost, which the day's heat was slowly changing to water, generating a constant rain of chill, sparkling mist. It was like a magnificent ice palace, with spears of sunlight shooting between the trees, visible in the mist like lasers through smoke. But every time Tally dared disturb a branch, it unloaded its freight of freezing water onto her head.

She remembered traveling to the Smoke through the ancient forest that had been devastated by the Rusties' biologically engineered weeds. At least walking through that flattened landscape had been easier than this dense growth. Sometimes, you could almost see why the Rusties had tried so hard to destroy nature.

Nature could be a pain.

As she walked, the struggle between the forest and Tally began to feel more and more personal. The grasping brambles seemed almost conscious of her, corralling Tally the way they wanted her to go, no matter what her direction-finder said. The dense undergrowth would split open welcomingly offering easy paths that wound pointlessly off her course. Hiking in a straight line was impossible. This was nature, not some Rusty superhighway cutting through mountains and across deserts without any regard for the terrain.

But as the afternoon progressed, Tally slowly became convinced that she was following an actual path, like the nature trails that the pre-Rusties had used a millennium before.

She remembered what David had told her out in the Smoke, that most of the pre-Rusty trails had originally been made by animals. Even deer, wolves, and wild dogs didn't want to fight their way through virgin growth. Just like people, animals stuck to the same paths for generation after generation, forging tracks through the forest.

Of course, Tally had always imagined that animal trails were something that only David could see. Having grown up in the wild, he was practically a pre-Rusty himself. But as the shadows lengthened around her, Tally found her path becoming easier and straighter, as if she had stumbled onto some uncanny fissure in the wild.

A gnawing feeling started in her stomach. The random sounds of dripping trees began to play with her mind, and Tally's nerves began to twitch, as if she was being watched.

It was probably just her perfect new-pretty eyesight helping her spot the subtle marks of animal passage. She must have picked up more skills than she knew out in the Smoke. This was an animal path. Certainly, no people could live out here. Not this close to the city, where they would have been detected by the Specials decades ago. Even out in the Smoke, no one knew of any other communities living outside the cities. Humanity had decided two centuries ago to leave nature alone.

Alone, Tally kept reminding herself. No one else was out here. Though, oddly, she couldn't decide whether being the only person in the forest made it feel less creepy, or more.

Finally, as the sky was fading to pink, Tally decided to come to a halt. She found an open clearing where the sun had beaten down all day, maybe drying out enough wood for a fire. The brutal hike had raised a sweat — Tally's shirt clung to her, and she'd never once worn her coat — but once the sun set, she knew the air would turn freezing cold again.

Finding dry twigs was easy, and Tally weighed a few small logs in her hand to find the lightest, which would contain the least water. All her Smokey knowledge seemed to have come back, with no scraps of pretty-mindedness remaining after the escape. Now that she was out of the city, the cure had settled over Tally's mind for good.

But she hesitated before putting the firestarter to the pile, paranoia staying her hand. The forest still made its sounds — dripping water, bird cries, the skitterings of small animals among the wet leaves — and it was easy to imagine something watching her from the darkened spaces between the trees.

Tally sighed. Maybe she still was a pretty-head, making up irrational stories about the empty forest. The longer she stayed alone out here, the more Tally understood why the Rusties and their predecessors had believed in invisible beings, praying to placate spirits as they trashed the natural world around them.

Well, Tally didn't believe in spirits. The only things she had to worry about were Specials, and they would be looking along the river, kilometers behind her. Darkness had fallen as she built the fire, and it was already halfway to freezing. She couldn't risk another fever out here in the wild, alone.

The firestarter flicked to life in her hand, and Tally held it to the twigs until a blaze erupted. She nursed the fire along with larger and larger branches until it was strong enough to ignite the lightest of her logs, then banked it with the others to dry them out.

Soon, the blaze was hot enough to push her back on her heels, and Tally felt warmth stealing into her bones for what seemed like the first time in days.

She smiled as she stared into the flames. Nature was tough, it could be dangerous, but unlike Dr. Cable or Shay or Peris — unlike people in general — it made sense. The problems it threw at you could be solved rationally. Get cold, build a fire. Need to get somewhere, walk there. Tally knew she could make it to the ruins, with or without a hoverboard under her. And from there she would eventually find Zane and the New Smoke, and everything would be all right.

Tonight, Tally realized happily, she was going to sleep well. Even without Zane beside her, she had made it through her first day of freedom in the wild, still bubbly and still in one piece.

She lay down, watching the fire's embers pulsing beside her, warm as old friends. After a while, her eyelids began to flicker, then to fall.

Tally was deep in pleasant dreams when the shrieking woke her.

Hunt

At first, she thought the forest was on fire.

There were flames moving through the trees, casting jittering shadows across the clearing, darting through the air like wild, burning insects. Shrieks rose up from every side, inhuman calls strung with meaningless words.

Tally staggered to her feet and stumbled straight into the remains of her fire. Kicked embers flared to life in all directions. She felt hot needles through the soles of her boots, and almost fell to her hands and knees among the glowing coals. Another shriek came from close by — a high-pitched cry of anger. A human form ran toward her, a torch raised in one hand. The torch hissed and sparked with every step, as if the flame were a living thing impelling its carrier onward.

The figure was swinging something across its path — a long, polished stick, gleaming in the firelight. Tally leaped back just in time, and the weapon whistled through empty air. She rolled backward on the ground, feeling the sting of the scattered embers in the middle of her back. Jumping to her feet, she spun away, dashing toward the trees. Another figure blocked her path, also brandishing a club.

His face was obscured by a beard, but even in the jittering torchlight Tally could see that he was an ugly — fat and with a bloated nose, the pale skin of his forehead pocked with disease. He had ugly reflexes, too: The swing of the club was slow and predictable. Tally rolled under the flailing weapon, lashing out with her feet to take his knees out from under him.

By the time she heard the thump of his body hitting the earth, Tally was up and running again, slashing through branches, angling toward the darkest part of the forest.

Another chorus of shrieks rose up behind her, the pursuers' torches casting flickering shadows onto the trees ahead. Tally crashed through the undergrowth almost blind, half-falling as she ran, wet branches whipping her face. A vine grasped her ankle, jerking Tally off-balance and throwing her to the ground. She stretched out both hands to catch herself, and felt one wrist bend too far backward with a wrenching burst of pain.

She cradled the injured hand for a moment, glancing back at the ugly hunters. They weren't as fast as Tally but they ducked and weaved through the forest skillfully, knowing the way through the trees even in darkness. The hovering lights of their torches flowed into place around where Tally lay, the racket from their reedy cries surrounding her once more.

But what were they? They looked small in stature, and they yelled back and forth in some language she didn't recognize. Like pre-Rusty ghosts risen from the grave…

Whatever they were, there wasn't time to ponder the question. Tally rose to her feet and made another dash for the darkness, aiming for the gap between two torches.

The two hunters closed on her as she approached: bearded men, their ugly faces marked with scars and sores. Tally crashed between them, close enough to feel the heat of the torches. A wildly swung club caught her shoulder with a glancing blow, but Tally managed to keep her feet, and found herself stumbling down a hill into blackness.

The two cried out as they followed her, and more shrieks came from up ahead. How many of them were there? They seemed to be rising up from the ground itself.

Suddenly, her feet splashed into cold water, and Tally found herself slipping, falling into a shallow creek. Behind, her two closest pursuers tumbled down the slope, their torches spitting out sparks as they bumped trees and branches. It was a wonder the whole forest wasn't aflame.

Tally got to her feet and dashed down the streambed, thankful for the route it cut through the undergrowth. She stumbled on the slick, rocky bottom, but found herself outpacing the burning eyes that darted along either bank. If she could only reach some sort of open ground, Tally knew that she could outrun the smaller, slower uglies.

The sound of splashing feet came from behind her, and then a grunt and a stream of curses in their unknown tongue. One of them had fallen. Maybe she was going to make it.

Of course, her food and water purifier were in her backpack in the clearing, back among the shrieking, club-wielding uglies. Lost.

She forced the thought from her mind and kept running. Her wrist still throbbed from the fall, and she wondered if it was broken.

A loud roar rose up before Tally, the stream boiling around her ankles, the ground rumbling. Then suddenly the earth seemed to disappear from under her feet as she ran…

Flailing through the air, Tally realized too late that the roar was behind her now — she'd run straight off the top of a waterfall. Her flight through emptiness lasted only a moment, then she hit water, a deep, churning pool that wrapped its chill around her, sound suddenly reduced to a low rumble in her ears. She felt herself hurtling downward into darkness and silence, slowly turning head over heels.

One shoulder brushed the bottom, and Tally pushed herself upward. She came up gasping, clawing at the water until her fingers found a rocky edge. Clinging to it, she pulled herself up into the shallows, on hands and knees, coughing and trembling.

Caught.

Torches hovered all around her, reflected in the churning water like swarms of fireflies. Tally raised her eyes and found at least a dozen pursuers glowering down from the stream's steep banks, their pale and ugly faces made even more hideous by the torchlight.

A man was standing in the stream in front of her — his fat belly and big nose marking him as the hunter she'd knocked over at the clearing. His bare knee was bleeding where she'd kicked it. He bellowed a wordless cry, raising his crude club high into the air.

Tally stared up at him in disbelief. Was he really going to hit her? Did these people murder total strangers for no reason at all?

But no blow came. As he stared down at her, fear gradually filled the man's expression. He thrust his torch toward her, and Tally shrank back, covering her face. The man sank to one knee before her, taking a closer look. She dropped her hands.

His milky eyes squinted in the torchlight, staring in confusion.

Did he recognize her?

Warily, Tally watched the thoughts racing across his exaggerated features: growing fear and doubt, and then a sudden realization that something terrible had happened…

The torch fell from his hand and into the stream, where it was extinguished with a strangled hiss and a puff of foul smoke. The man bellowed once more, this time as if in pain, the same word repeated again and again. He pitched forward, lowering his face almost into the water.

The others followed, dropping to their hands and knees, their torches falling to sputter against the ground. They all set up the same wailing cry, almost drowning out the roar of the waterfall.

Tally rose to her knees, coughing a little and wondering what the hell was going on.

Looking around, she noticed for the first time that all the hunters were men. Their clothes were irregular, far cruder than the Smokies' handmade clothing. They all had unhealthy marks on their faces and arms, and long beards that were matted and tangled. Their hair looked as if they'd never combed it in their lives. They were paler than pretty average, with the sort of freckly, pinkish skin of those occasional littlies born extra sensitive to the sun.

None of them stared back at her. Their faces were buried in their hands or pressed to the ground.

Finally one of them crawled forward. He was thin and horribly wrinkled, his hair and beard white, and Tally remembered from her time in the Smoke that this was what old uglies looked like. Without the operation, their bodies grew decrepit, like ancient ruins abandoned by their builders. He trembled as he moved, either from fear or ill health, and stared closely at her for what seemed an endless time.

At last he spoke, his wavering voice barely audible above the waterfall. "I know little the gods' tongue."

Tally blinked. "You what?"

"We saw fire and thought outsider. Not a god."

All the others had gone silent, waiting fearfully, ignoring their torches guttering on the ground. Tally saw a bush crackle to life, but the man crouching next to it seemed too paralyzed by fear to move.

So she terrified them all of a sudden? Were these people crazy?

"Never gods use fire before. Please understand." His eyes begged her for forgiveness.

She stood unsteadily. "Um, that's okay. No problem."

The old ugly rose from his crouch so suddenly that Tally stepped backward, almost toppling back into the churning pool. He yelled a single word, and the hunters repeated it. The cry seemed to release them from their spell; they stood up, stamping out the small fires that had sprung up around their dropped torches.

Suddenly, Tally felt outnumbered again. "But, hey," she added, "just no more with the…clubs, okay?"

The old man listened, bowed, and yelled out more words in the unknown language. The hunters sprang into action: Some propped their clubs against trees and split them with a kick; others pounded them against the ground until they shattered, or threw the weapons off into the darkness.

The old man turned back to Tally, his hands spread open, clearly waiting for approval. His club lay split in two at her feet. The others raised their free hands, empty and open.

"Yeah," she said. "Much better."

The old man smiled.

And then she saw it, the familiar glimmer in his ancient, milky eyes. The same look Sussy and Dex had given her when they'd first seen her pretty face. The same awe and eagerness to please, the same instinctive fascination — the sure result of a century of cosmetic engineering and a million years of evolution.

Tally looked around at the others, and found all of them shrinking from her gaze. They could barely meet her huge, copper-flecked eyes, almost couldn't stand to face her beauty.

God, he'd said. The old Rusty word for their invisible superheroes in the sky.

This was their world out here — this raw, cruel wilderness with its disease and violence and animal struggle for survival. Like these people, this world was ugly. To be pretty was to be from somewhere beyond.

Out here, Tally was a god.

Young Blood

The hunters' camp took about an hour to reach. With torches extinguished, the party followed pitch-black trails and waded down freezing streams, never uttering a word.

Tally's guides displayed a strange combination of crudity and skill. They were small and slow, a few even disfigured, shuffling along carrying all their weight on one leg. They smelled as if they never bathed, and wore shoes so poor, their feet were scarred. But they knew the forest, moving gracefully through the tangled undergrowth, guiding Tally unerringly through the darkness. The hunters didn't use direction-finders, or even pause to check the stars.

The suspicions that Tally had nursed the day before were proven right. These hills were laced with human-made paths. The trails she'd only half-glimpsed in daylight now seemed to open up magically in the darkness, the old man who led her taking turns and switchbacks without hesitation. The group moved in a single line, making no more noise than a snake among leaves.

The hunters had enemies, it seemed. After their cacophonous attack on Tally, she wouldn't have imagined them capable of stealth or cunning. But now they sent signals up and down the line with clicking sounds and birdlike chirps instead of words. They seemed perplexed whenever Tally tripped over an invisible root or vine, and nervous when she let out a string of curses as a result. They didn't like being unarmed, she realized. Perhaps they regretted breaking their weapons at the first sign of her displeasure.

Tough luck, Tally thought. No matter how friendly the hunters had become, she was glad they'd discarded the clubs, just in case they changed their minds. After all, if she hadn't fallen into the water, washing the day's mud and muck from her pretty face, Tally doubted she would be alive now.

Whoever the hunters' enemies were, the grudge was serious.

Tally smelled the village before they reached it. It made her nose wrinkle unhappily.

It wasn't just the scent of wood smoke, or the less welcome tang of animal slaughter, which she knew from watching rabbits and chickens killed for food back in the Smoke. The smell at the outskirts of the hunters' camp was much worse, reminding Tally of the outdoor latrines the Smokies had used. That was one aspect of camping she'd never quite gotten used to. Mercifully, the smell faded as the village came into sight.

The camp wasn't big — a dozen huts made of mud and reeds, a few sleeping goats tied to each, the furrows of vegetable plots casting ruffled shadows in the starlight. One big storehouse sat in the middle of everything, but there were no other large buildings that Tally could see.

The village's borders were marked by watch fires and armed guards. Having reached home, the hunters felt safe enough to raise their voices again, shouting the news that they'd brought back a … visitor.

People began to flow out of the huts, the hubbub growing as the village gradually awoke. Tally found herself at the center of a gathering crowd of curious faces. A circle formed around her, but the adult villagers never pressed too close, as if held back by the force field of her beauty. They kept their eyes averted.

The littlies, on the other hand, showed more courage. Some actually dared to touch her, darting out to lay a hand on her silvery jacket before retreating back into the crowd. It was strange seeing kids out here in the wild. Unlike their elders, the littlies looked almost normal to Tally. They were too young for their skin to show the ravages of bad nutrition and disease, and, of course, even in the city no one got the operation until they were sixteen. She was used to seeing asymmetrical faces and squinty eyes on littlies, and they were cute, anyway.

Tally knelt and reached out a hand, letting the bravest of them nervously stroke her palm.

She also saw women for the first time. Given that almost every man wore a beard, it was easy to tell the sexes apart. The women hung back in the crowd, tending to the smallest littlies and hardly daring a glance at Tally. A few were building a fire on a blackened pit in the middle of town. No men bothered to help them, she noticed.

Tally dimly remembered learning in school about the pre-Rusty custom of assigning different tasks to men and women. And it was usually women who got the crappy jobs, she recalled. Even some Rusties had doggedly clung to that little trick. The thought gave Tally a queasy feeling in her stomach, and she hoped similar rules didn't apply to gods.

She wondered exactly where the god idea had come from. Tally had her firestarter and other equipment in her backpack, recovered before she and the hunters had started on their way here. But none of them had seen those miracles yet. All it had taken was one glance. From what she knew of mythology, being divine meant more than having a pretty face.

Of course, she wasn't the first pretty they'd seen. At least some of them knew Tally's language. They might know something about high technology as well.

Someone shouted from the outskirts of the throng, and the crowd parted before her, growing silent. A man came into the circle, oddly shirtless in the cold. He walked with an air of unmistakable authority, striding right through Tally's divine force field and to within arm's length. He was almost her height, a giant among these people. He looked strong as well, wiry and hard, though Tally guessed that his reflexes were no match for hers. In the firelight, his eyes sparkled with curiosity rather than fear.

She had no idea what his age might be. His face had some of the lines of a middle pretty, but his skin looked better than most of the others'. Was he younger than most of them? Or simply healthier?

Tally also noticed that he wore a knife, the first metal tool she'd seen. Its handle shone with the matte black of plastic. She raised an eyebrow: The knife had to be city-made.

"Welcome," he said.

So he also spoke the gods' tongue. "Thanks. Um, I mean…thank you."

"We did not know you were coming. Not for many days."

Did gods usually call ahead before visiting? "Oh, sorry," she mumbled, but her response only seemed to confuse him. Maybe gods weren't supposed to apologize.

"We were confused," he said. "We saw your fire, and thought you were an outsider."

"Yeah, I got that. No harm done."

He tried to smile, but then frowned and shook his head. "We still do not understand."

You and me both.

The man's accent sounded slightly unusual, like someone from another city on the continent, but not from another civilization altogether. On the other hand, he seemed to lack words for the questions he wanted to ask, as if he wasn't accustomed to making small talk with gods. Possibly he was searching for: What the hell are you doing here?

Whatever concept of the divine these people had, Tally evidently wasn't fitting into it very well. And she had a feeling that if they decided she wasn't really a god, that would only leave one other category: outsider.

And outsiders got their heads caved in.

"Forgive us," he said. "We don't know your name. I am Andrew Simpson Smith."

A strange name for a strange situation, she thought. "I'm Tally Youngblood."

"Young Blood," he said, beginning to look a little happier. "So, you are a young god?"

"Uh, yeah, I guess. I'm only sixteen."

Andrew Simpson Smith closed his eyes, evidently relieved. Tally wondered if he wasn't very old himself. His earlier swagger seemed to abandon him during his moments of confusion, and he hardly had any beard yet. If you didn't notice the lines and a few pockmarks, his face could almost be an ugly of about David's age, maybe eighteen or so.

"Are you the…leader here?" she asked.

"No. He is headman." He pointed at the fat hunter with the bloated nose and bleeding knee, the one Tally had knocked down during the chase. The one who'd been totally about to cave her head in with his club. Great.

"I am the holy man," Andrew continued. "I learned the gods' tongue from my father."

"You speak it really well."

His face broke into a crooked-toothed smile. "I … thank you." He laughed, then a look that was almost sly crossed his face. "You fell, didn't you?"

Tally held her injured wrist. "Yeah, during the chase."

"From the sky!" He looked around with a stagey bafflement, spreading his empty hands. "You have no hovercar. So you must have fallen!"

Hovercar? That was interesting. Tally shrugged. "Actually, I guess you've got me there. I did fall from the sky."

"Ahh!" He sighed with relief, as if the world was beginning to make sense again. He called out a few words to the crowd, who murmured sounds of understanding.

Tally found herself beginning to relax. They all seemed much happier now that her presence on earth had a perfectly rational explanation. Falling from the sky, they could deal with. And hopefully young gods were held to different standards of conduct.

Behind Andrew Simpson Smith, the fire exploded to life with a crackle. Tally smelled food, and heard the unmistakable squawk of a chicken being captured for slaughter. Apparently, divine visitation was a good enough excuse for a midnight feast.

The holy man spread one arm toward the fire, and the crowd parted again to open a path toward it. "Will you tell the story of falling? I will change your words to ours."

Tally sighed. She was exhausted, bewildered, and injured — her wrist still throbbed. She wanted nothing more than to curl up and sleep. But the fire looked warm and cheery after her soaking under the waterfall, and Andrew's expression was hard to resist.

She couldn't disappoint the whole village. There were no wallscreens here, no newsfeeds or satellite bands, and touring soccer teams were no doubt few and far between. Just like back at the Smoke, that made stories a valuable commodity, and it probably wasn't very often that a stranger dropped in from the sky.

"Okay," she said. "One story, but then I'm passing out."

The whole village gathered around the fire.

The smells of roasting chicken came from long spits held over the flames, and earthen pots were shoved in among the coals, something white and yeasty-smelling gently rising in them. The men sat in the front row, eating noisily, wiping their greasy hands on their beards until they glowed in the firelight. Women tended to the food while littlies ran amok underfoot, the older ones feeding the fire with branches scavenged from the darkness. But when the signal went up that Tally was going to speak, everyone settled down.

Perhaps it was sharing a meal with her, or possibly young gods weren't so intimidating, but many of the villagers now dared to catch her eye, some even gazing unapologetically at her pretty face as they waited for the story Andrew Simpson Smith sat beside her, proudly ready to translate.

Tally cleared her throat, wondering how to explain her journey here in a way that would make sense to these people. They knew about hovercars and pretties, apparently. But did they know about Specials? What about the operation? The Crims? The Smoke?

The difference between bubbly and bogus?

Tally doubted her story would make any sense to them at all.

She cleared her throat again, looking down at the ground to escape their expectant gazes. She felt tired, almost pretty-headed from the night's interrupted sleep. The whole trip from the city to this fireside seemed almost like a dream.

A dream. She smiled at that thought, and gradually the words for her story began to find their way to her lips.

"Once upon a time, there was a beautiful young goddess," Tally said, then waited as her words were translated into the tongue of the villagers. The strange syllables that came from Andrew's mouth made this firelit setting even more dreamlike, until the story was flowing from her without effort.

"She lived in a high tower in the sky. It was a very comfortable tower, but there was no way down and out into the world. And one day the young goddess decided that she had better things to do than look at herself in the mirror. …"

REVENGE Tally awoke to unfamiliar smells and sounds: sweat and morning breath, a soft chorus of snores and snuffling, the heavy, humid warmth of a small and crowded space.

She stirred in the darkness, and a ripple of movements spread out from her, intertwined bodies shifting to accommodate one another. Beneath the fur blankets, soft, comforting warmth suffused her senses. It felt almost like a pretty dream, except for the overwhelming smell of unwashed humans and the fact that Tally really had to pee.

She opened her eyes. Light filtered through the chimney, which was just a hole in the roof that let smoke out. Judging by the angle of the sun, it was midmorning; everyone was sleeping late. That was no surprise — the feast had lasted until dawn. Everyone told more stories after Tally's was over, competing to see whose tale could keep the sleepy god awake, with Andrew Simpson Smith tirelessly translating the whole time.

When at last they'd let her go to bed, Tally discovered that "bed" was in fact a foreign concept here. She had wound up sharing this hut with twenty other people. Apparently, in this village, staying warm on winter nights meant sleeping in piles, fur blankets strewn across everyone. It had been weird, but not weird enough to keep Tally awake another minute.

This morning, unconscious bodies lay all around her, more or less clothed, tangled up with one another and with the animal skins. But the casual contact hardly seemed sexual. It was just a way of keeping warm, like kittens in a pile.

Tally tried to sit up, and found an arm wrapped around her. It was Andrew Simpson Smith, snoring softly with his mouth half-open. She pushed his weight away from her, and he turned over without waking, draping his arm over the old man asleep on the other side of him.

As she moved through the semidarkness, Tally began to find the crowded hut dizzying. She had known that these people hadn't invented hoverboards or wallscreens or flush toilets, probably not even metal tools, but it had never occurred to Tally that there was ever anyone anywhere who hadn't invented privacy.

She made her way across the unconscious forms, stumbling over arms and legs and who-knew-what-else to reach the door. Stooping, she gratefully crawled out into the bright sun and fresh air.

The freezing cold goose-pimpled her bare arms and face, every breath carrying ice into her lungs. Tally realized that her coat was back in the hut, but she only wrapped her arms around herself, deciding she would rather shiver than run the gauntlet of all those sleeping bodies again. Out here in the cold, she felt her wrist throbbing from the fall the night before, and the sore muscles from the long day's hike. Maybe the human warmth of the hut hadn't been so bad, but first things first.

To find the latrine, Tally only had to follow her nose. It was nothing but a ditch, and the overwhelming smell made her glad for the first time that she had run away in winter. How did people live here in summer?

Tally had faced outdoor toilets before, of course. But the Smokies treated their waste, using a few simple, self-propagating nanos borrowed from city recycling plants. The nanos broke down sewage and routed it straight back into the soil, which helped produce the best tomatoes Tally had ever eaten. More important, they kept the latrines from raising a stink. The Smokies had almost all been born in cities, however much they loved nature. They were products of a technological civilization, and didn't like bad smells.

This village was another matter altogether, almost like the mythical pre-Rusties who had existed before high technology. What sort of culture had these people descended from? In school, they taught that the Rusties had incorporated everyone into their economic framework, destroying every other way of life — and although it was never mentioned, Tally knew that the Specials did pretty much the same thing. So where had these people come from? Had they returned to this way of life after the Rusty civilization crashed? Or had they lived out in the wild even before then? And why had the Specials left them alone?

Whatever the answers to these questions, Tally realized that she couldn't face the latrine ditch — she was too much of a city girl for that. She wandered farther back into the forest. Although she knew this had been frowned on in the Smoke, she hoped young gods got special dispensations here.

When Tally waved to a pair of watchmen on duty at the edge of town, they nodded back a bit nervously, averting their eyes and clumsily hiding their clubs behind them. The hunters were still wary of her, as if wondering why they hadn't gotten in trouble yet for trying to cave her head in.

Only a few meters into the trees, the village disappeared from view, but Tally wasn't worried about getting lost. Gusts of wind still brought smells of staggering intensity from the latrine trench, and she was still close enough to yell to the watchmen if she wound up hopelessly turned around.

In the bright sun, the night frost was melting, falling in a steady mist. The forest made soft shifting sounds, like her parents' old house when no one else was home. The shadows of leaves broke the outlines of the trees, making every shape indistinct, creating movement in the corner of her eye with every gust of wind. The feeling of being watched that she'd experienced the day before returned, and she found a spot and peed quickly.

But she didn't head straight back. It was pointless to let her imagination run away with her. A few moments of privacy were a luxury here. She wondered what lovers did when they wanted to be alone, and if anyone kept secrets for long in the village.

Over the last month, she'd gotten used to spending almost every minute with Zane. She could feel his absence right now; her body missed having his warmth next to her. But sharing sleeping quarters with a couple of dozen strangers was a strange and unexpected substitute.

Suddenly, Tally felt her nerves twitch, and she froze. Somewhere in her peripheral vision, something had shifted, not part of the natural play of sunlight and leaves and wind. Her eyes scanned the trees.

A laugh rolled from the forest.

It was Andrew Simpson Smith, crunching through the undergrowth with a big smile on his face.

"Were you spying on me?" she asked.

"Spying?" He said it as if he'd never heard the word, and Tally wondered if, with so little privacy, anyone here had even invented the concept of spying. "I woke when you left us, Young Blood. I thought maybe I would get to see you…"

She raised an eyebrow. "See me what?"

"Fly," he said sheepishly.

Tally had to laugh. The night before, no matter how she'd tried to explain it, Andrew Simpson Smith had never quite grasped the concept of hoverboarding. She had explained that younger gods didn't use hovercars very much, but the idea that there were different kinds of flying vehicles seemed to befuddle him.

He looked hurt by her amusement. Perhaps he thought Tally was hiding her special powers just to vex him.

"Sorry, Andrew. But like I kept saying last night, I can't fly."

"But in your story, you said you were going to join your friends."

"Yeah. But like I told you, my board's busted. And underwater. I'm afraid I'm stuck walking."

He seemed confused for a moment, perhaps amazed that divine contraptions could get broken. Then suddenly he beamed, revealing a missing tooth that made him look like a littlie. "Then I'll help you. We will walk there together."

"Uh, really?"

He nodded. "The Smiths are holy men. I am a servant of the gods, like my father was."

His voice fell flat on the last few words. Tally was amazed again at how easy it was to read Andrew's face. All the villagers' emotions seemed to live right on the surface, as if they had no more invented privacy in their thoughts than they had in their sleeping arrangements. She wondered if they ever lied to one another.

Of course, some pretties had lied to them at some point. Gods, indeed.

"When did your father die, Andrew? Not long ago, right?"

He looked up at her in wonder, as if she'd magically read his thoughts. "It was only a month ago, just before the longest night."

Tally wondered what the longest night was, but didn't interrupt.

"He and I were searching for ruins. The elder gods like us to find old and Rusty places for them, for study. We came upon outsiders."

"Outsiders? Like you mistook me for?"

"Yes. But this was no young god we found. It was a raiding party looking for a kill. We spotted them first, but their dogs had our scent. And my father was old. Forty years, he had lived," he said proudly.

Tally let out a slow breath. All eight of her great-crumblies were still alive, and all in their hundred-teens.

"His bones had grown weak." Andrew's voice fell almost to a whisper. "Running in a stream, he turned his ankle. I had to leave him behind."

Tally swallowed, dizzy at the thought of someone dying from a sprained ankle. "Oh. I'm sorry."

"He gave me his knife before I left him." Andrew pulled it from his belt, and Tally got a closer look than the night before. It was a disposable kitchen knife with a notched, ragged blade. "Now I am the holy man."

She nodded slowly. The sight of the cheap knife in his hand reminded Tally of how her first encounter with these people had almost ended. She had almost met the same fate as Andrew's father. "But why?"

"Why, Young Blood? Because I was his son."

"No, not that," she said. "Why would the outsiders want to kill your father? Or anyone?"

Andrew frowned, as if this was an odd question. "It was their turn."

"Their what?"

He shrugged. "We had killed in the summer. The revenge was on them."

"You had killed…one of them?"

"Our revenge, for a killing in the early spring." He smiled coldly. "I was in that raiding party."

"So this is like payback? But when did the whole thing start?"

"Start?" He stared into the flat of the knifes blade, as if trying to read something in the mirror of its dull metal. "It has always been. They are outsiders." He smiled. "I was glad to see that it was you they brought home, and not a kill. So that it is still our turn, and I may still be there for my father's revenge."

Tally found herself speechless. In seconds, Andrew Simpson Smith had changed from a grieving son into some kind of … savage. His fingers had turned even paler, wrapped around the knife so tightly that the blood was forced from them.

She took her eyes from the weapon and shook her head. It wasn't fair to think of him as uncivilized. What Andrew was describing was as old as civilization itself. In school, they'd talked about this sort of blood feud. And the Rusties had only been worse, inventing mass warfare, creating more and more deadly technologies until they'd almost destroyed the world.

Still, Tally couldn't afford to forget how different these people were from anyone she'd ever known. She forced herself to stare at Andrew's grim expression, his weird delight in the heft of the knife in his hand.

Then she remembered Dr. Cable's words. Humanity is a cancer, and we are the cure. Violence was what the cities had been built to end, and part of what the operation switched off in pretties' brains. The whole world that Tally had grown up in was a firebreak against this awful cycle. But here was the natural state of the species, right in front of her. In running from the city, perhaps this was what Tally was running toward.

Unless Dr. Cable was wrong, and there was another way.

Andrew looked up from his knife and sheathed it, spreading his empty hands. "But not today. Today I will help you find your friends." He laughed, suddenly beaming again.

Tally breathed out slowly, for a moment wanting to reject his help. But she had no one else to turn to, and the forests between her and the Rusty Ruins were filled with hidden paths and natural dangers, and probably more than a few people "who might think of her as an "outsider." Even if she wasn't being chased by a bloodthirsty raiding party, a sprained ankle alone in the freezing wilderness could prove fatal.

She needed Andrew Simpson Smith, it was that simple. And he had spent his life training to help people like her. Gods.

"Okay, Andrew. But let's leave today. I'm in a hurry."

"Of course. Today." He stroked the place where his slight beard was beginning to grow. "These ruins where your friends are waiting? Where are they?"

Tally glanced up at the sun, still low enough to indicate the eastern horizon. After a moments calculation, she pointed off to the northwest, back toward the city and, beyond that, the Rusty Ruins. "About a week's walk that way."

"A week?"

"That means seven days."

"Yes, I know the gods' calendar," he said huffily. "But a whole week?"

"Yeah. That's not so far, is it?" The hunters had been tireless on their march the night before.

He shook his head, an awed expression on his face. "But that is beyond the edge of the world."

Food Of The Gods

They left at noon.

The whole village turned out to see them off, bringing offerings for the trip. Most of the gifts were too heavy to carry, and Tally and Andrew politely turned them down. He did fill his pack, however, with the scary-looking strips of dried meat that were offered them. When Tally realized that the grisly stuff was meant to be eaten, she tried to hide her horror, but didn't do a very good job. The only gift she accepted was a wooden and leather slingshot offered by one of the older members of her littlie fan club. Tally remembered being pretty handy with slingshots back in her own littlie days.

The headman publicly bestowed his blessing on the journey, adding one last apology — translated by Andrew— for almost cracking open the head of such a young and pretty god. Tally assured him that her elders would never be told about the misunderstanding, and the headman seemed guardedly relieved. He then presented Andrew with a beaten copper bracelet, a mark of gratitude to the young holy man for helping to make up for the hunters' error.

Andrew flushed with pride at the gift, and the crowd cheered as he held it aloft. Tally realized that she had caused trouble here. Like wearing semiformal dress to a costume bash, her unexpected visit had thrown things out of whack, but Andrew's helping her was making everyone relax a little. Apparently, placating the gods was a holy man's most important job, which made Tally wonder how much city pretties interfered with the villagers.

Once she and Andrew were past the town limits, and their entourage of littlies had been called back home by anxious mothers, she decided to ask some serious questions. "So, Andrew, how many gods do you know…uh, personally?"

He stroked his non-beard, looking thoughtful. "Since my father's death no gods have come but you. None knows me as holy man."

Tally nodded. As she'd guessed, he was still trying to fill his father's shoes. "Right. But your accent's so good. You didn't learn to speak my language only from your father, did you?"

His crooked grin was sly. "I was never supposed to speak to the gods, only listen as my father attended them. But sometimes when guiding a god to a ruin or the nest of some strange new bird, I would speak."

"Good for you. So … what did you guys talk about?"

He was quiet for a moment, as if choosing his words carefully. "We talked about animals. When they mate and what they eat."

"That makes sense." Any city zoologist would love a private army of pre-Rusties to help them with fieldwork. "Anything else?"

"Some gods wanted to know about ruins, as I told you. I would take them there."

Ditto for archeologists. "Sure."

"And there is the Doctor."

"Who? The Doctor?" Tally froze in her tracks. "Tell me, Andrew, is this Doctor really…scary-looking?"

Andrew frowned, then laughed. "Scary? No. Like you, he's beautiful, almost hard to look upon."

She shuddered with relief, then smiled and raised an eyebrow. "You don't seem to find it too hard to look upon me."

His eyes fell to the ground. "I am sorry, Young Blood."

"Come on, Andrew, I didn't mean it." She took his shoulder lightly. "I was only kidding. Look upon me all you…um, whatever. And call me Tally, okay?"

"Tally," he said, trying out the name in his mouth. She dropped her hand from his shoulder, and Andrew looked at the place where she had touched him. "You are different from the other gods."

"I certainly hope so," she said. "So this Doctor guy looks normal? Or pretty, I mean? Or, anyway…godlike?"

"Yes. He is here more often than the others. But he does not care for animals or ruins. He asks only about the ways of the village. Who is courting, who is heavy with child. Which hunter might challenge the headman to a duel."

"Right." Tally tried to remember the word. "An anthro—" "Anthropologist, they call him," Andrew said.

Tally raised an eyebrow.

He grinned. "I have good ears, my father always said. The other gods sometimes mock the Doctor."

"Huh." The villagers knew more about their divine visitors than the gods realized, it seemed. "So you've never met any gods who were really…scary-looking, have you?"

Andrew's eyes narrowed, and he started hiking again. Sometimes he took a long time to answer questions, as if being in a hurry was another thing the villagers hadn't bothered to invent. "No, I haven't. But my father's grandfather told stories about creatures with strange weapons and faces like hawks, who did the will of the gods. They took human form, but moved strangely."

"Kind of like insects? Fast and jerky?"

Andrew's eyes widened. "They are real, then? The Sayshal?"

"Sayshal? Oh. We call them Specials."

"They destroy any who challenge the gods."

She nodded. "That's them, all right."

"And when people disappear, they sometimes say it was the Sayshal who have taken them."

"Taken them?" Where? Tally wondered.

She fell silent, staring down at the forest path in front of her. If Andrew's great-grandfather had run into Special Circumstances, then the city had known about the village for decades, probably longer. The scientists who exploited these people had been doing so for a long time, and weren't above bringing in Specials to shore up their authority. It seemed that challenging the gods was a risky business.

They hiked for a day making good time across the hills. Tally was beginning to spot the trails of the villagers without Andrew's help, as if her eyes were learning how to see the forest better.

As night fell, they found a cave to make camp in. Tally started to collect firewood, but stopped when she noticed Andrew watching her with a mystified expression. "What's up?"

"A fire? Outsiders will see!"

"Oh, right. Sorry." She sighed, rubbing her hands together to drive the chill from her fingers. "So this revenge thing makes for some cold nights on the trail, doesn't it?"

"Being cold is better than being dead, Tally," he said, then shrugged. "And perhaps our journey will not last so long. We will reach the edge of the world tomorrow."

"Right, sure." During the day's hike, Andrew hadn't been convinced by Tally's description of the world: a planet 40,000 kilometers around, hanging in an airless void, with gravity making everyone stick to it. Of course, from his perspective it probably did sound pretty nutty People used to get arrested for believing in a round world, they said in school— and it had usually been holy men doing the arresting.

Tally picked out two packages of SwedeBalls. "At least we don't have to build a fire to have hot food."

Andrew drew closer, watching her fill the purifier. He'd been chewing on dried meat all day, and was pretty excited about trying some "food of the gods." When the purifier pinged and Tally lifted the cover, his jaw dropped at the sight of steam rising from the reconstituted SwedeBalls. She handed it to him. "Go ahead. You first."

She didn't have to insist. Back in the village the men always ate first, and the women and littlies got leftovers. Tally was a god, of course, and in some ways they had treated her as an honorary man, but some habits died hard. Andrew took the purifier from her and stuck his hand in to grab a meatball. He yanked it out with a yelp.

"Hey, don't bum yourself," she said.

"But where is the fire?" he asked softly, sucking on his fingers as he held up the purifier to look for a flame underneath.

"It's electronic … a very small fire. Are you sure you don't want to try chopsticks?"

He experimented with the sticks hopelessly for a while, which allowed the SwedeBalls to cool, then finally dug in with his hands. A slightly disappointed expression crossed his face as he chewed. "Hmm."

"What's wrong?"

"I thought that food of the gods would be … better, somehow."

"Hey, this is dehydrated food of the gods, okay?"

Tally ate after he was done, but her CurryNoods were underwhelming after the feast of the night before. She remembered from her days in the Smoke how much better food could taste in the wild. Even fresh produce was never spectacular when it had been harvested from hydroponic tanks. And she had to agree with Andrew — dehydrated food was resolutely not divine.

The young holy man was surprised when Tally didn't want to sleep curled up with him — it was winter, after all. She explained that privacy was a god thing — he wouldn't understand — but he still moped at her as she chewed her toothpaste pill and found her own corner of the cave to sleep in.

It was the middle of the night when Tally awoke half-frozen, regretting her rudeness. After a long, silent session of self-recrimination, she sighed and crawled over to nestle against Andrew's back. He wasn't Zane, but the warmth of another person was better than lying on the stone floor shivering, miserable and alone.

When she awoke again at dawn, the smell of smoke filled the cave.

THE EDGE OF THE WORLD Tally tried to cry out, but a hand was planted firmly over her mouth.

She was about to thrash out with her fists in the semi-darkness, but some instinct told her not to — it was Andrew holding her. She could smell him, Tally realized. After two nights of sleeping next to each other, the back of her brain recognized his scent.

She relaxed, and he let go.

"What is it?" she whispered.

"Outsiders. Enough of them to build a fire."

She puzzled over this for a moment, then nodded: Because of the blood feud, only a large party of armed men would dare build a fire outside the safety of their village.

Tally sniffed the smoky air, detecting the smell of searing meat. The sounds of raucous conversation reached her ears. They must have camped close by after Tally and Andrew had gone to sleep, and now they were cooking breakfast.

"What do we do?"

"You stay here. I will see if I can find one alone."

"You're doing what?" she hissed.

He drew his father's knife. "This is my chance to settle the score."

"Score? What is this, a soccer game?" Tally whispered. "You'll get killed! Like you said, there must be lots of them."

He scowled. "I will only take one who is alone. I'm not a fool."

"Forget it!" She took hold of Andrew, locking her fingers around his wrist. He tried to pull away, but his wiry strength was no match for her postoperation muscles.

He glared at her, then spoke in a loud voice. "If we fight, they'll hear us."

"No kidding. Shhh!"

"Let me go!" His voice raised in volume again, and Tally realized that he would gladly shout if he had to. Honor compelled him to hunt the enemy, even if it jeopardized both their lives. Of course, the outsiders probably wouldn't hurt Tally once they saw her pretty face, but Andrew would be killed if they were caught, which was going to happen if he didn't shut up. She had no choice but to release his wrist.

Andrew turned away without another word and crawled from the cave, knife in hand.

Tally sat in the darkness, stunned, replaying their fight in her mind. What could she have said to him? What whispered arguments could overcome decades of blood feud? It was hopeless.

Maybe it went deeper than that. Tally remembered again her conversation with Dr. Cable, who had claimed that human beings always rediscovered war, always became Rusties in the end — the species was a planetary plague, whether they knew what a planet was or not. So what was the cure for that, except the operation?

Maybe the Specials had the right idea.

Tally crouched in the cave, miserable, hungry, and thirsty. Andrew's waterskin was empty and there was nothing to do except wait for him to come back. Unless he wasn't coming back.

How could he just leave her here?

Of course, he'd had to leave his own father lying in a cold stream, injured and certain to be killed. Maybe anybody would want revenge after going through a thing like that. But Andrew wasn't looking for the men who'd killed his father, he was just out to murder a random stranger— anyone would do. It didn't make any sense.

The smells of cooking eventually faded. Creeping up to the mouth of the cave, Tally no longer heard any sounds from the outsider camp, only wind in the leaves.

Then she saw someone coming through the trees…

It was Andrew. He was covered in mud, as if he'd been crawling around on his belly, but the knife clutched in his hand looked clean. Tally didn't see any blood on his hands. As he grew closer, she saw with relief that he wore an expression of disappointment. "So, no luck?" she said.

He shook his head. "My father is not yet avenged."

"Tough. Let's get going."

He frowned. "No breakfast?"

Tally scowled. A moment ago he'd wanted nothing more than to ambush and murder some random stranger, and now his face looked like a littlie's whose promised ice cream had been snatched away.

"Too late for breakfast," she said, and pulled her backpack up onto her shoulder. "Which way to the edge of the world?"

They walked in silence until well past noon, when Tally's grumbling stomach finally forced a stop. She prepared VegiRice for them both, not in the mood for the taste of pseudomeat.

Andrew was like an anxious-to-please puppy, gamely trying to use chopsticks and making jokes about his clumsiness. But Tally couldn't bring herself to smile. The chill that had seeped into her bones while he was out looking for revenge hadn't gone away.

Of course, it wasn't completely fair being upset with Andrew. Probably he couldn't understand Tally's aversion to casual murder. He'd grown up with the cycle of revenge. It was just a part of his pre-Rusty life, like sleeping in piles or cutting down trees. He didn't see it as wrong any more than he could understand how utterly the latrine ditch revolted her.

Tally was different from the villagers — at least that much had changed in the course of human history. Maybe there was hope after all.

But she didn't feel much like talking it over with Andrew, or even giving him a smile.

"So what's beyond the edge of the world?" she finally said.

He shrugged. "Nothing."

"There must be something."

"The world just ends."

"Have you been there?"

"Of course. Every boy goes, one year before you become a man."

Tally scowled — another boys-only club. "So what does it look like? A wide river? Some kind of cliff?"

Andrew shook his head. "No. It looks like the forest, like any other place. But it is the end. There are little men there, who make sure you go no farther."

"Little men, huh?" Tally remembered an old map on the library wall at her ugly school, the words "Here Be Dragons" written in flowery letters in all the blank spots. Maybe this world's edge was nothing more than the borderline of the villager's mental map of the world — like their need for revenge, they simply couldn't see beyond it. "Well, it won't be the end for me."

He shrugged again. "You are a god."

"Yeah, that's me. How far are we now?"

He glanced up at the sun. "We'll be there before nightfall."

"Good." Tally didn't want to spend another cold night huddled with Andrew Simpson Smith if she could help it.

They saw no more signs of outsiders over the next few hours, but the habit of silence had settled onto the journey. Even after Tally had decided she was no longer angry at Andrew, she found herself covering the kilometers without uttering a word. He looked dejected by her silent treatment, or maybe he was still moping about not getting his kill that morning.

A bad day all around.

Late afternoon shadows had begun to stretch behind them when he said, "We are close now."

Tally came to a halt for a drink of water, scanning the horizon. It looked like every other bit of forest she'd seen since falling from the sky. Perhaps the trees were thinning a little here, the clearings growing larger and almost bare of grass in the growing cold of winter. But it hardly looked like someone's idea of the end of the world.

Andrew walked more slowly as they continued, as if looking for signs among the trees. He sometimes glanced at the faraway hills to point out landmarks. Finally, he halted, staring with wide eyes into the forest.

Tally took a moment to focus, then saw something hanging from a tree. It looked like a doll, a human-shaped bundle of twigs and dried flowers, no bigger than a fist. It swayed in the breeze, like a little person dancing. She could see more of them stretching into the distance.

Tally had to smile. "So those are the little men?"

"Yes."

"And this is your edge of the world?" It looked like more of the same to her: dense undergrowth and trees filled with squawking birds.

"The edge, not mine. No one has ever passed beyond it."

"Yeah, right." Tally shook her head. The dolls probably just marked the territory of the next tribe over. She noticed a bird perched close to one, regarding the doll curiously, possibly wondering if it was edible.

She sighed and adjusted her backpack on her shoulder, striding toward the nearest doll. Andrew didn't follow, but he would catch up with her once his superstitions were disproved. Centuries before, Tally remembered, sailors had been afraid to sail into the deep ocean, thinking that sooner or later they would fall off the edge. Until someone tried it, and it turned out there were more continents out there.

On the other hand, maybe it would be better if Andrew didn't follow her. The last thing she needed was a traveling companion who was bent on revenge at any cost. The people beyond of the edge of world certainly hadn't had anything to do with the death of his father, but one outsider would be as good as another to Andrew.

As she grew nearer, Tally saw more of the dolls. They hung every few meters, marking some kind of border, like misshapen ornaments for an outdoor party. Their heads were at funny angles, she saw — the dolls all hung from their necks, nooses of rough twine around every one. She could understand how the villagers might find the little men creepy, and a slow chill ran down her spine…

Then the tingling sensation moved to her fingers.

At first, Tally thought her arm had fallen asleep, pins and needles spreading from her shoulders down. She adjusted the backpack, trying to restore her circulation, but the tingling continued.

A few steps later, Tally heard the sound. A rumble seemed to come up from the earth itself, a note so low that she could feel it in her bones. It played across her skin, the world trembling around her. Tally's vision blurred, as if her eyes were vibrating in sympathy with the sound. She took another step forward, and it grew louder, now like a swarm of insects inside her head.

Something was very wrong here.

Tally tried to turn around, but found that her muscles had melted into water. Her backpack felt suddenly filled with stone, and the ground had become mush under her feet. She managed a staggering step backward, the sound fading a little as she moved away.

Holding up a hand in front of her face, she saw it trembling; maybe her fever had returned.

Or was it this place?

Tally stretched her arm out farther, and the vibrations in her fingertips increased, itching like an untended sunburn. The air itself was buzzing, growing worse with every centimeter her hand moved toward the dolls. It felt as if her flesh itself were repelled by them.

She gritted her teeth and took a defiant step forward, but the buzzing swarmed into her head, blurring her vision again. Her throat gagged on her next breath, as if the air were too electrified to breathe.

Tally staggered back from the dolls, sinking to her knees once the sound had faded. Tingles still ran across her skin, like a horde of ants swarming under her clothes. She tried to move farther, but her body refused.

Then she smelled Andrew again. His strong hands lifted her from the ground, and as he half-carried and half-dragged her away from the line of dolls, the riot of sensations slowly faded.

Tally shook her head, trying to clear the vibrating echoes. Her whole body was quivering inside. "That buzzing, Andrew … I feel like I swallowed a beehive."

"Yes. Buzzing, like bees." Andrew nodded, staring at his own hands.

"Why didn't you tell me?" she cried.

"But I did. I told you of the little men. I said you could not pass."

Tally scowled. "You could have been more specific."

He frowned, then shrugged. "It's the edge of the world. It has always been this way. How could you not know?"

She groaned in frustration, then sighed. Looking up at the closest doll, Tally finally noticed what she'd missed before. It seemed to be made of twigs and dried flowers— natural materials — but it showed no signs of weathering. All of the dolls Tally could see looked brand new, not like handmade things that had hung for days in a torrential downpour. Unless someone had replaced every single one of them since the rains, the dolls were made of something hardier than twigs.

Something like plastic, maybe.

And inside them was something far more sophisticated, a security system powerful enough to cripple human beings, but clever enough not to harm the trees or the birds. Something that attacked the human nervous system, drawing an impassable border around the villagers' world.

Tally saw it then, why the Specials could allow the village to exist. This wasn't just a few stray people living in the wilderness; it was someone's pet anthropology project, a preserve of some kind. Or … what had the Rusties called them?

This was a reservation.

And Tally was trapped inside.

Oly Day

"You don't have a way across?" Andrew finally asked.

Tally sighed, shaking her head. Her outstretched fingers felt the tingling here, as they had every other spot she'd tried over the last hour. The line of dolls stretched unbroken as far as she could see, and all of them seemed to be in perfect working order.

She stepped back from the edge of the world, and the prickling in her hands subsided. After her first experience, Tally hadn't tested the barrier further than the tingling stage— once was enough for that — but she was fairly certain that all the other dolls had just as much punch as the one that had brought her to her knees. City machines could last a long time, and there was plenty of solar power up there in the trees.

"No. There's no way."

"I did not think so," Andrew said.

"You sound disappointed."

"I'd hoped you might show me…what is beyond."

She frowned. "I thought you didn't believe me, about there being more."

Andrew shook his head vigorously. "I believe you, Tally. Well, not about the airless void and gravity, but there must be something beyond. The city where you live must be real."

"Lived," she corrected him, sticking her fingers out again. The tingling traveled through them, feeling uncannily as if she'd sat on her hand for an hour or so. Tally stepped back and rubbed her arm. She had no idea what sort of technology the barrier was using, but it might not be very healthy to keep testing it. No point in risking permanent nerve damage.

The little dolls hung there, mocking her as they danced in the breeze. She was stuck here, inside Andrew's world.

Tally remembered all the tricks she'd pulled back in ugly days, sneaking out of dorms to cross the river at night, even crashing a party in Peris's mansion after he'd turned pretty. But her ugly skills didn't necessarily apply out here. As she'd learned in her conversation with Dr. Cable, the city was an easy place to trick. Security there was designed to stimulate uglies’ creativity, not to fry anyone's nervous system.

But this barrier had been created to keep dangerous pre-Rusty villagers away from the city, to protect campers and hikers and anyone else who might have wandered out into nature. These dolls weren't likely to succumb to Tally's tinkering with the point of her knife.

The thought of ugly tricks sent Tally's hand to the slingshot in her back pocket. It seemed like an unlikely way to trick the edge of the world, but maybe the direct approach was worth a try.

She found a smooth, flat stone and loaded it up, the leather creaking as she drew it back. Tally let fly, but missed the nearest doll by a meter or so. "Guess I'm a little out of practice."

"Young Blood!" Andrew said. "Is that wise?"

She smiled. "Afraid I'll break the world?"

"The stories say that the gods put these here, to mark the edge of oblivion."

"Yeah, well. They're more like 'Keep Out' signs, or 'Keep In,' I guess — as in keeping you guys in your place. The world goes on for a whole lot farther, trust me. This is just a trick to keep you from knowing it."

Andrew looked away, and Tally thought he was going to argue some more, but instead he knelt and lifted a rock the size of his fist. He pulled back his arm, took aim, and hurled it. Tally saw from the moment it left his hand that the stone was dead on-target. It struck the nearest doll and sent it spinning, the noose tightening around its neck, then the doll spun the other way, unwinding like a top.

"That was brave of you," she remarked.

He shrugged. "As I said, Young Blood, I believe what you say. Maybe this isn't really the edge of the world. If that is true, I want to see beyond."

"Good for you." Tally stepped forward and thrust out a hand. No change: Her fingertips buzzed with the latent energy in the air, the ants crawling up her arm until she pulled away. Of course. Any system designed to last for decades in the wild — surviving hailstorms, hungry animals, and lightning strikes — was probably more than a match for a few rocks.

"The little men are still doing their thing." She rubbed life back into her fingers. "I don't know how to get past this place, Andrew. But nice try."

He was staring down at his empty hand, as if a little surprised at himself for challenging the gods' work. "It is a strange thing to want to go past the edge of the world. Isn't it?"

She laughed. "Welcome to my life. But I'm sorry to bring you all this way for nothing."

"No, Tally. It was good to see."

She tried to read his expression, a mix of puzzlement and intensity. "To see what? Me getting serious nerve damage?"

He shook his head. "No. Your slingshot."

"Excuse me?"

"When I came here as a boy, I felt the little men crawling inside me and wanted to run back home." He looked at her, still puzzled. "But you wanted to sling a rock at them. You don't know some things that every child knows, but you are so certain about the shape of this…planet. You act as if…" He trailed off, his knowledge of the city language failing him.

"As if I see the world differently?"

"Yes," he said softly, his intense expression deepening. Most likely, Tally thought, it had never occurred to him before now that people could see reality in completely different ways. Between surviving outsider attacks and getting enough food to live, villagers probably didn't have a lot of time for philosophical disagreements.

"That's the way it feels," she said, "once you get off the reservation, I mean, once you go beyond the edge of the world. Speaking of which, do you know for sure that no matter what direction we walk in, we'll run into these little guys?"

Andrew nodded. "My father taught that the world is a circle, seven days' walk across. This is the nearest edge to our village. But my father once walked around the entire compass of the world."

"Interesting. You think he was looking for a way out?"

Andrew frowned. "He never said."

"Well, I guess he didn't find one. So how am I going to escape this world of yours and get to the Rusty Ruins?"

Andrew was silent for a while, but Tally could tell he was thinking, taking one of his interminable delays to ponder her question. Finally, he said, "You must wait for the next holy day."

"The next what?"

"The holy days mark when the gods visit. And they will come in hovercars."

"Oh, yeah?" Tally sighed. "I don't know if you've figured this out yet, Andrew, but I'm not supposed to be here. If any elder gods see me, I'm busted."

He laughed. "Do you think I'm a fool, Tally Young Blood? I listened to your story about the tower. I understand that you have been cast out."

"Cast out?"

"Yes, Young Blood. You bear this mark." His fingers brushed her left brow.

"Mark? Oh, right …" For the first time since meeting the villagers, Tally remembered her flash tattoo. "So you think this means something?"

Andrew bit his lip, dropping his eyes from her brow. "I am not sure, of course. My father never taught me of such things. But in my village, we only mark those who have stolen."

"Yeah, sure. But you thought I was…marked somehow?" He looked up sheepishly, and Tally rolled her eyes. No wonder the villagers had been so confused by her; they'd thought the flash tattoo was some kind of badge of shame. "Listen, it's just a fashion statement. Or, um, let me put that another way. It's just something me and my friends did to amuse ourselves. You notice how it moves sometimes?"

"Yes. When you are angry, or smiling, or thinking hard."

"Right. Well, that's called being 'bubbly' Anyway, I ran away I didn't get cast out."

"And they'll want to take you home, I understand. You see, when the gods come, they leave their hovercars behind when they walk in the forest. …"

Tally blinked, and then a smile spread across her face. "And you'd help me steal from the elder gods?"

He only shrugged.

"Won't they get cranky with you?"

Andrew sighed, stroking his non-beard as he considered this. "We must be careful. But I have noticed that the gods are not…perfect. You escaped their tower, after all."

"Well, well, imperfect gods." Tally allowed herself a chuckle. "What would your father say, Andrew?"

He shook his head. "I am not sure. But he isn't here. I am the holy man now."

That night, they camped near the barrier. Andrew said that no one — outsiders or otherwise — would be likely to venture this close to the dolls at night. It was a place of superstitious dread, on top of which, no one wanted to get their brains fried when they woke up and stumbled off into the darkness to pee.

The next morning they began a roundabout journey back to Andrew's village, taking their time, avoiding the outsiders' hunting grounds. It took three days, during which Andrew displayed his knowledge of the forest, mixing villager lore with scientific knowledge he'd picked up from the gods. He understood the water cycle, and a little about the food chain, but after a day of arguing about gravity, Tally gave up.

When they neared the village, it was still almost a week before the next holy day. Tally told Andrew to find her a cave to hide in, one near the clearing where the gods parked their hovercars. She had decided to stay out of sight. If none of the villagers knew she had returned, they couldn't give Tally away to the elder gods. And she didn't want anyone getting blamed for harboring a runaway.

Andrew headed back home, where he planned to tell how the Young Blood had passed through the edge of the world and to the beyond. Apparently, the villagers knew how to lie after all — at least the holy men did.

And his story would be true, once Tally got her hands on a hovercar. She was no expert at driving, but she'd taken the same safety course that every ugly took at fifteen: learning how to fly straight and level and how to land in an emergency. She knew that some uglies went trick-riding all the time, and said it was easy. Of course, they'd only stolen idiotproof cars that flew on the city grid.

Still, how much harder could it be than hoverboarding?

As Tally waited out the days in the cave, she couldn't stop wondering how the other Crims were. While her own survival had been an issue, it had been easy to forget them. But now that she had nothing to do all day but sit and watch the sky, Tally found herself slowly going crazy from worry. Had the Crims escaped the Specials' pursuit? Had they found the New Smokies yet? And, most important, how was Zane? She could only hope that Maddy had been able to fix whatever was wrong with him.

She remembered their last minutes before he'd jumped from the balloon — the last words he'd said. In all of Tally's tattered memories, she'd never experienced anything like that moment. It had felt beyond bubbly, beyond any trick, like the world would change forever.

And now she didn't even know whether he was still alive.

It didn't help Tally's state of mind that Zane and the other Crims had to be just as worried about her, wondering if she'd been recaptured or had fallen to her death. They would have expected to see her at the Rusty Ruins at least a week ago, and had to be thinking the worst by now.

How long would it be before even Zane gave up, deciding she was dead? What if she never made it out of the reservation? No one's faith could last forever.

When she wasn't driving herself crazy Tally also spent the time wondering about Andrew's confined world. How had it come to exist? Why were the villagers allowed to live out here, when the Smoke had been ruthlessly destroyed? Maybe it was the fact that the villagers were trapped, believing old legends and stuck in ancient blood feuds, while the Smokies had known the truth about the cities and the operation. But why keep a brutal culture alive, when the whole point of civilization was to curb the violent, destructive tendencies of human beings?

Andrew visited her every day, bringing her nuts and a few root vegetables to go with her dehydrated god-food. He wouldn't give up on bringing strips of dried meat until she tried it. It tasted like it looked — as salty as seaweed and harder than an old shoe — but she gratefully accepted his other offerings.

In return, Tally told him stories about home, especially those that showed how the city of the gods wasn't all divine perfection. She explained about uglies and the operation, how the beauty of gods was just a technological trick. The difference between magic and technology was lost on Andrew, but he listened intently. He'd inherited a healthy skepticism from his father, whose experiences with the gods, it turned out, hadn't always left the old holy man full of respect.

Andrew could be frustrating company, though. He made some brilliant leaps of insight, but other times he was just as thick as could be expected from someone who thought the world was flat — especially when it came to the boys-in-charge thing, which she found particularly annoying. Tally knew she should be more understanding, but was only willing to cut Andrew so much slack; being born into a culture that assumed women were servants didn't make it okay to go along with the plan. After all, Tally had turned her back on everything she'd been raised to expect: an effortless life, perfect beauty, pretty-mindedness. It seemed like Andrew could learn to cook his own chickens.

Maybe the barriers around Tally's pretty world weren't as obvious as the little men hanging in the trees, but they were just as hard to escape. She remembered how Peris had chickened out as he'd looked down on the wild from the balloon, suddenly unwilling to jump and leave behind everything he'd known. Everyone in the world was programmed by the place they were born, hemmed in by their beliefs, but you had to at least try to grow your own brain. Otherwise, you might as well be living on a reservation, worshipping a bunch of bogus gods.

They arrived at dawn, right on schedule.

From overhead came the roar of two cars — the kind that Specials used, each with four lifting fans to carry it through the air. It was a noisy way to travel, the wind roiling the trees like a storm. From the mouth of her cave, Tally saw a huge cloud of dust rising up from the landing area, and then the whine of their rotors cycled down into a riot of frightened birdcalls. After almost two weeks of natural sounds, the powerful machines sounded strange to Tally's ears, like engines from another world.

She crept toward the clearing in the dawn light, moving in total silence. Rehearsing her approach every morning, Tally had become familiar with every tree along the way. For once, the elder gods were going to face someone who knew all their tricks, and a few of her own.

She watched from under cover at the clearing's edge. Four middle pretties were unpacking the cars' cargo holds, pulling out digging tools, hovercameras, and specimen cages, loading everything onto carts. The scientists looked like campers dressed in bulky winter gear, field glasses hanging around their necks, water bottles dangling from their belts. Andrew said they never stayed more than a day, but they looked ready for weeks in the wild. Tally wondered which one was the Doctor.

Andrew worked among the four pretties, lending a hand as they arranged their equipment, being a helpful holy man. When the carts were all packed with gear, he and the scientists pushed them into the forest, leaving Tally alone with the hovercars.

She hoisted her backpack and approached the clearing warily.

This was the trickiest part of the plan. Tally could only guess what sort of security the hovercars had on board. Hopefully the scientists hadn't thought to use more than childproof minders, the simple codes that kept littlies from flying off with a car. Surely the scientists wouldn't suspect the villagers of knowing the same tricks as a city kid like Tally.

Unless they'd been warned that there were runaways in the area…

That was nonsense, of course. No one knew Tally was stranded out here without a board, and she hadn't seen a hovercar since the night she'd left the city. If the Specials were looking for her, they weren't looking around here.

She reached one of the cars and peeked into its open cargo door, finding nothing but pieces of packing foam shifting in the soft breeze. A few more steps brought her to the window of the passenger cabin, also empty. She reached for the door handle.

A man's voice called from behind her.

Tally froze. After two weeks of sleeping rough, her clothes torn and dirty, she might pass for a villager from a distance. But once she turned around, her pretty face would give her away.

The voice called out again in the villagers' language, but it was inflected with a late pretty's gravelly air of authority. Footsteps were coming closer. Should she dive into the hovercar and try to make it away?

The words faded as the man grew closer. He had noticed her city clothes under all the dirt.

Tally turned around.

He was equipped like the others, with field glasses and a water bottle, his crumbly face a picture of surprise. He must have been sitting inside the other hovercar, moving a little slower than the rest of them — that's why he'd caught her.

"Good heavens!" he exclaimed, switching languages. "What are you doing out here?"

She blinked, pausing for a moment, a vacant look on her pretty face. "We were in a balloon."

"A balloon?"

"There was some kind of accident. But I don't remember exactly. …"

He took a step forward, then his nose wrinkled. Tally might look like a pretty, but she smelled like a savage. "I think I saw something on the feeds about balloons going wrong, but that was a couple of weeks ago! You couldn't have been here that…" He looked at her torn clothes, his nose wrinkling again. "But I suppose you have."

Tally shook her head. "I don't know how long it's been."

"You poor dear." Recovering from his surprise, he was now all late-pretty concern. "You're okay now. I'm Dr. Valen."

She smiled like a good pretty, realizing that this must be the Doctor. A bird-watcher probably wouldn't know the villagers' language, after all. This was the man in charge.

"It feels like I've been hiding out forever," she said. "There are all these crazy people out here."

"Yes, they can be quite dangerous." He shook his head, as if still not believing that a young city pretty had survived out here for so long. "You're lucky to have stayed clear of them."

"Who are they?"

"They're…part of a very important study."

"A study? Of what?"

He chuckled. "Now, that's all very complicated. Perhaps I should tell someone we've found you. I'm sure everyone's very anxious to know if you're okay. What's your name?"

"What are you studying out here?"

He blinked, perplexed that a new pretty was asking questions instead of whining about getting home. "Well, we're looking at certain fundamentals of… human nature."

"Of course. Like violence? Revenge."

He frowned. "Yes, in a manner of speaking. But how …?"

"I thought so." All at once, it was becoming clear. "You're studying violence, so you'd need a violent, brutal group of people, wouldn't you? You're an anthropologist?"

Confusion still played across his face. "Yes, but I'm also a doctor. A medical doctor. Are you sure you're all right?"

A realization hit Tally. "You're a brain doctor."

"We're called neurologists, actually." Dr. Valen warily turned to reach for the hovercar door. "But perhaps I should make that call. I didn't get your name."

"I didn't give it."

Her tone stopped him cold.

"Don't touch that door," she said.

He turned to face her again, his late-pretty composure crumbling. "But you're …"

"Pretty? Think again." She smiled. "I'm Tally Youngblood. My mind is very ugly. And I'm taking your car."

The Doctor was quite afraid of savages, it seemed — even beautiful ones.

He meekly allowed himself be locked into the cargo container of one of the hovercars, and handed over the take-off codes to the other. The security was nothing Tally couldn't have tricked herself, but it saved time. And the expression on Dr. Valen's face as he gave her the codes was pretty indeed. He was used to dealing with villagers in awe of his godhood. But one look at Tally's knife and he'd realized who was giving the orders.

The man answered a few more of Tally's questions, until no doubt remained in her mind what this reservation was all about. This had been the place where the operation had been developed, from which the first test subjects had been drawn. The purpose of the brain lesions was to deter violence and conflict, so who better to experiment on than people caught up in an endless blood feud? Like rabid enemies in a locked room, the tribes trapped within the ring of little men would reveal anything you wanted to know about the very human origins of bloodshed.

She shook her head. Poor Andrew. His whole world was an experiment, and his father had died in a conflict that meant precisely nothing.

Tally paused a moment in the hovercar before taking off, familiarizing herself with the controls. They seemed about the same as a city car, but she had to remember that this one wasn't idiotproof — it would fly into a mountain if you told it to. She would have to be careful in the high spires of the ruins.

The first thing she did was put her boot through the communication system; she didn't want the car telling the city authorities where it was.

"Tally!"

She started at the shout, peering out through the front windows. But it was only Andrew, and he was alone. She slid out of the drivers door, waving for him to be silent and pointing at the other car. "I've got the Doctor locked up," she hissed. "Don't let him hear your voice. What are you doing back here?"

He looked at the other hovercar, eyes widening at the thought of a god imprisoned within, and whispered, "I was sent back to see where he was. He said he would be just behind us."

"Well, he's not coming. And I'm about to leave." He nodded. "Of course. Good-bye, Young Blood."

"Good-bye." She smiled. "I won't forget all your help." Andrew was staring into her eyes, the familiar pretty-awed expression coming over his face. "I'll not forget you, either."

"Don't look at me that way."

"What way, Tally?"

"Like a … god. We're just humans, Andrew." He looked at the ground, nodding slowly. "I know."

"Not very perfect humans, some of us worse than you could imagine. We've done awful things to your people for a long time now. We've used you." He shrugged. "What can we do? You are so powerful."

"Yeah, we are." She took his hand. "But keep trying to get past the little men. The real world is huge. Maybe you can get far enough away that the Specials will stop looking for you. And I'll try to…" She didn't finish the promise. Try to do what?

A smile broke across Andrew's face, and he reached out to touch her flash tattoo. "You are bubbly now."

She nodded, swallowing.

"We will wait for you, Young Blood."

Tally blinked, then hugged him wordlessly. She slid back into the hovercar and started the rotors. As the whine of its engines built, she watched the birds scatter from the clearing, terrified by the roar of the gods' machine. Andrew backed away.

The car rose at her first touch on the controls, its power shuddering through her bones. The rotors whipped the treetops around her into a frenzy, but the car rose steadily, under control.

Tally looked down as the car cleared the trees, and saw Andrew waving up at her, his crooked, gap-toothed smile still hopeful. Tally knew that she would have to return, just like he'd said; she no longer had a choice. Someone had to help the people here escape the reservation, and they had no one else but Tally.

She sighed. At least one thing was consistent about her life: It just kept on getting more complicated.

The Ruins

Tally reached the sea while the sun was still rising, painting the water pink through the low clouds out on the horizon.

She angled the machine northward in a slow, even turn. As she'd expected, this out-of-city car had a scary tendency to do whatever Tally asked of it. Her first turn had been sharp enough to bang her head against the drivers side window. This time, she was taking it easy.

As the car gradually climbed, she soon spotted the outskirts of the Rusty Ruins. A distance that would have taken a week on foot had shot by in a blur below Tally in less than an hour. When the sinuous shape of the ancient roller coaster came into view, she began to bank the craft inland.

Landing was the easy part. Tally pulled the emergency bar, the one they taught littlies to use if their driver had a heart attack or passed out. The car brought itself to a halt and began to descend. Tally had picked a flat spot, one of the many giant concrete fields that the Rusties built to park their groundcars in.

The vehicle settled onto the weed-choked ground, and Tally opened her door the moment the car bumped to a stop. If the other scientists had found the Doctor and made some sort of emergency call, the Specials would already be looking for her. The more distance she put between herself and the stolen hovercar, the better.

The spires of the ruins rose up before Tally, the tallest about an hour away on foot. She was, of course, arriving almost two weeks after the others. But hopefully they hadn't given up on her, or maybe they'd left a message of some kind.

Surely Zane would have stayed, waiting in the tallest building, unwilling to leave while there was still a chance she would show up.

Unless, of course, their escape had come too late for him.

Tally shouldered her backpack and started to walk.

The ruined streets were full of ghosts.

Tally had hardly ever walked in the city before. She had always cruised around on a hoverboard — ten meters up, at least — avoiding the burned-out cars down at ground level. In the last days of Rusty civilization, an artificial plague had spread across the world. It didn't infect human beings or animals, just petroleum, reproducing itself in the gas tanks of groundcars and jet aircraft, slowly making the infected oil unstable. Plague-transformed petroleum burst into flame when it came into contact with oxygen, and the oily smoke from the sudden fires spread the bacterial spores on the wind, into more gas tanks, more oil fields, until it had reached every Rusty machine across the globe.

The Rusties really hadn't liked walking, it turned out. Even after they'd figured out what the plague was doing, panicked citizens still jumped into their funny, rubber-wheeled groundcars, thinking to escape into the wild. If Tally looked hard enough, she could see crumbling skeletons through the smeared windows of the cars jammed onto the ruins' streets. Only a few of the people back then had been smart enough to walk out, and strong enough to survive the death of their world. Whoever had engineered the plague had definitely understood the Rusties' weakness.

"Boy, you guys were stupid," Tally muttered at the car windows, but calling them names didn't make the dead Rusties any less ominous. The few intact skulls just stared back at her with empty expressions.

Farther into the dead city, the buildings grew taller and taller, their steel frameworks rising up like the skeletons of giant and extinct creatures. Tally took a winding path through the narrow streets, looking for the tallest building in the ruins. The huge spire was easy to spot from a hover-board, but from the ground the city was a tangled maze.

Then she turned a corner and saw it, chunks of old concrete clinging to the towering matrix of steel beams, the empty windows gazing down at her, jagged shapes of bright sky showing through. This was definitely the place — Tally remembered when Shay had taken her up to its top the first time she'd come out to the Rusty Ruins. There was only one problem.

How was she going to get up?

The innards of the building had long since rotted away. There were no stairs, and hardly any floors to speak of. The steel frame made it perfect for a hoverboards magnetic lifters, but there was no way for a person to climb it without serious mountaineering gear. If Zane or the New Smokies had left a message for Tally, it would be up there, but she had no way of reaching it.

Tally sat down, suddenly exhausted. It was like the tower in her dream, without stairs or elevator, and she'd lost the key, which in this case was her hoverboard. All she could think of was to hike back to the stolen car and fly it up there. Maybe she could bring it close enough beside the building…but who would hold it in a steady hover while she climbed out onto the ancient steel frame?

For the thousandth time, Tally wished that her board hadn't been wrecked.

She stared up at the tower. What if no one was up there? What if, after traveling all this way, Tally Youngblood was still alone?

She got to her feet and yelled as loud as she could, "Heeeey!"

The sound echoed through the ruins, sending a flock of birds into flight from a distant rooftop.

"Hey! It's me!"

Once the echoes faded, there was no sound in answer. Tally's throat felt sore from yelling. She knelt to dig a safety flare out of her backpack. A fire would be pretty obvious down here in the shadows of the cavernous buildings.

She cracked the flare open, holding its hissing flame away from her face, then cried out again. "It's meeeee…Tally Youngblood!"

Something shifted in the sky above.

Tally blinked away the spots that the flare had left in her eyes and stared into the bright blue sky. A shape drifted away from the towering building, a tiny oval that began to grow slowly…

The underside of a hoverboard. Someone was coming down!

Tally tossed the flare onto a pile of rocks, her heart pounding, suddenly realizing she had no idea who was descending to meet her. How had she been so dimwitted? It could be anyone up there on the board. If the Specials had caught the other Crims and made them talk, they would know this was the planned meeting place, and Tally's latest escape was about to come to a sudden end.

She told herself to calm down. It was a hoverboard, after all, and only one. Surely if Specials had been lying in wait, they would have rushed out from every direction in a bunch of hovercars.

In any case, there was no point in panicking. She wasn't likely to escape on foot now. The only thing to do was wait. The safety flare sizzled out to a sputtering death while the hoverboard descended slowly, hugging the metal frame of the building. Once or twice, Tally thought she saw a face peering over the edge, but against the bright sky it could have been anyone.

When it was only ten meters overhead, Tally found the nerve to cry out again. "Hello?" Her voice sounded shaky in her ears.

"Tally…," someone called back, the voice familiar.

The hoverboard settled beside her, and Tally found herself staring into a thoroughly ugly face: the forehead too high, the smile crooked, a small scar cutting a white line through one eyebrow. She stared at him, blinking in the gloom of the broken city.

"David?" she said softly.

Faces

He stared at her, of course.

Even if she hadn't shouted out her name, David knew her voice. And he had been waiting for Tally, after all, so he must have known from the first cry who was down here. But the way he stared at her, it was as if he were seeing someone else.

"David," she said again. "It's me."

He nodded, still speechless. But it wasn't pretty-awe that had caught his tongue — that much Tally realized. His gaze seemed to be searching for something, trying to recognize what the operation had left of her old face, but his expression remained unsure…and a bit sad.

David was uglier than she remembered. In Tally's ugly-prince dreams, his imbalanced features had never been so disjointed, his unsurged teeth never so crooked or discolored. His blemishes weren't as bad as Andrew's, of course. He looked no worse than Sussy or Dex, city kids who'd grown up with toothpaste pills and sunblock patches.

But this was David, after all.

Even after her time with the villagers, many of them toothless and scarred, his face sent a shock through her. Not because he was hideous — he wasn't — but because he was simply…unimpressive.

Not an ugly prince. Just ugly.

And the weird thing was, even as she had these thoughts, her long-suppressed memories were finally flooding back. This was David, who had taught her how to make a fire, how to clean and cook fish, how to navigate by the stars. They had worked side by side, traveled together for weeks on end, and Tally had given up her city life to stay with him in the Smoke — she'd wanted to live with him forever.

All those memories had survived the operation, hidden somewhere inside her brain. But her life among the pretties must have changed something even more profound: the way she saw him, as if this wasn't the same David in front of her anymore.

Neither of them said anything for a while.

Finally, he cleared his throat. "We should probably get moving. They sometimes send patrols out around this time of day."

She looked at the ground. "Okay."

"I've got to do this first." He pulled a wandlike device from one pocket and swept it over her. It stayed silent.

"No bugs on me?" she said.

He shrugged. "Can't be too careful. You don't have a board?"

Tally shook her head. "It got damaged in the escape."

"Wow. Takes a lot to break a hoverboard."

"It was a long fall."

He smiled. "Same old Tally. I knew you'd show up, though. Mom said you'd probably…" He didn't finish.

"I'm fine." She looked up at him, unsure of how much to say. "Thanks for waiting."

They rode his board. Tally was taller than David now, so she stood behind him, hands around his waist. She'd abandoned her heavy crash bracelets before her long trek with Andrew Simpson Smith, but her sensor was still clipped to her belly ring, so the board could feel her center of gravity and compensate for the extra weight. Still, they went slowly at first.

The feel of David’s body, the way he leaned into the turns, was so familiar — even the smell of him set her memories spinning. (Tally didn't want to think about how she smelled, but he didn't seem to have noticed.) She was amazed at how much was coming back; her memories of him seemed to have been ready and waiting, and were all flooding in now that he stood next to her. Here on the board, with David turned away from her, Tally's body cried out to hold him tight. She wanted to take back all the stupid, pretty-minded thoughts she'd had at her first glimpse of his face.

But was it just that he was ugly? Everything else had changed as well.

Tally knew she should be asking about the others, especially Zane. But she couldn't bring the name to her lips, couldn't speak at all. Just standing on the board with David was almost too much.

She kept wondering why it had been Croy who'd brought her the cure. In Tally's letter to herself, she had been so certain that David would be the one to rescue her. He was the prince of her dreams, after all.

Was he still angry that she had betrayed the Smoke? Did he blame her for his father's death? The same night she'd confessed everything to David, Tally had gone back to the city to give herself up, to become pretty so she could test the cure. She'd never had a chance to explain how sorry she was. They hadn't even said good-bye to each other.

But if David hated her, why had he been the one waiting in the ruins? Not Croy, not Zane — David. Her head was spinning, almost like being pretty-minded again, but without the happy part.

"It's not far," David said. "Maybe three hours, traveling tandem like this."

She didn't answer.

"I didn't think to bring another board. Should have known you wouldn't have one, since it took you so long to get here."

"I'm sorry."

"No big deal. We just have to fly a little slower."

"No. I'm sorry. For what I did." She fell silent. The words had exhausted her.

He let the board coast to a stop between two towering husks of metal and concrete, and they stood there for a long moment, David still facing away. She rested one cheek on his shoulder, her eyes beginning to burn.

Finally, he said, "I thought I would know what to say. Once I saw you."

"Forgot about the new face, didn't you?"

"I didn't forget, exactly. But I didn't think it would be so … not you."

"Me either," Tally said, then realized her words wouldn't make sense to him. David's face hadn't changed, after all.

He turned around carefully on the board and touched her brow. Tally tried to look at him, but couldn't. She felt her flash tattoo pulsing under his fingers.

Tally smiled. "Oh, is that freaking you out? It's just a Crim thing, to see who's bubbly."

"Yeah, a tattoo keyed to your heartbeat. They told me. But I hadn't imagined one on you. It's so … weird."

"It's still me inside, though."

"It feels that way, flying together." He turned away, tilting the hoverboard forward and into motion.

Tally held him tighter now, not wanting him to turn around again. This was hard enough without the confused feelings that rose up every time she looked at him. He probably didn't want to look at her city-made face either, with its huge eyes and animated tattoo. One thing at a time. "Just tell me, David, why did Croy bring me the cure instead of you?"

"Things got messed up. I was going to come for you when I got back."

"Got back? From where?"

"I was away scouting another city, looking for more uglies to join us, when the Specials came in force. They started to make huge sweeps of the ruins, looking for us." He took her hand and pressed it to his chest. "My mom decided to get out of town for a while. We've been holed up in the wild."

"Leaving me stuck in the city," she said, and sighed. "Maddy wouldn't have much problem with that, I guess." Tally had little doubt that David's mother still blamed her for everything — the end of the Smoke, Az's death.

"She didn't have a choice," David protested. "There's never been so many Specials before. It was too dangerous to stay here."

Tally took a deep breath, remembering her little chat with Dr. Cable. "I guess Special Circumstances has been recruiting lately."

"But I hadn't forgotten about you, Tally. I'd made Croy promise to bring you the pills and your letter if anything happened to me, just to make sure you had a chance of escaping. When they started to pack up the New Smoke, he figured we might not be back for a while, so he snuck into the city."

"You told him to come?"

"Of course. He was my backup. I never would have left you alone in there, Tally."

"Oh." Dizziness swept over her again, as if the board were a feather spinning toward the ground. She closed her eyes and held David tighter, finally grasping the solidness and reality of him, more powerful than any memory. Tally felt something inside herself depart, a disquiet that she'd hardly known was there. The torment in her dreams, the worry that David had forsaken her, had all been over a mix-up, just plans that had gone wrong, like in old stories when a letter arrived too late or was sent to the wrong person, and the trick was not killing yourself over it.

David had wanted to come for her himself, it turned out.

"Of course, you weren't alone," he said softly.

Tally's body stiffened. By now he knew about Zane, of course. How was she supposed to explain that she'd simply forgotten David? It wouldn't sound like much of an excuse to most people, but he knew all about the lesions — his parents had raised him knowing what being pretty-minded meant. He had to understand.

Of course, in reality it wasn't as simple as that. Tally hadn't forgotten Zane, after all. She could see his beautiful face right now, gaunt and vulnerable, the way his golden eyes had flashed just before he jumped from the balloon. His kiss had given her the strength to find the pills; he had shared the cure with her. So what was she supposed to say?

The easiest thing was, "How is he?"

David shrugged. "Not great. But not too bad, considering. You're lucky it wasn't you, Tally."

"The cure is dangerous, isn't it? It doesn't work for some people."

"It works perfectly. Your pals have already all had it, and they're fine."

"But Zane's headaches …"

"More than just headaches." He sighed. "I'll let my mother explain it to you."

"But what…" Tally let her question fade into silence. She couldn't blame David for not wanting to talk about Zane. At least her unasked questions had all been answered. The other Crims had made it here and had hooked up with the Smokies; Maddy had been able to help Zane; the escape had worked perfectly. And now that Tally had made it to the ruins herself, everything was just fine and dandy. "Thank you for waiting for me," she said again, softly.

He didn't answer, and they flew the rest of the way without looking at each other once.

Damage Control

The path to the New Smokies' hiding place wound along streams and ancient railway beds, wherever there was enough metal to keep the hoverboard aloft. Finally, they climbed a small mountain far outside the Rusty Ruins, the boards lifters clinging to the fallen remains of an old cable car track, up to where a huge concrete dome, cracked open by the centuries, stood against the sky.

"What was this place?" Tally asked, her voice dry after three hours in silence.

"An observatory. There used to be a big telescope in that dome. But the Rusties took it out once the pollution from the city got too bad."

Tally had seen pictures of the sky filled with dirt and smoke — they showed those a lot in school — but it was hard to imagine that the Rusties had really managed to change the color of the air itself. She shook her head. Everything that she thought her teachers had exaggerated about the Rusties always turned out to be true. The temperature had dropped steadily as they'd climbed the mountain, and the afternoon sky looked crystal clear to her.

"After the scientists couldn't see the stars anymore, the dome was just for tourists," David said. "That's what all these cable cars were for. Lots of ways down by hoverboard, if we ever need to get out of here fast, and we can see for miles in every direction."

"Fort Smokey, huh?"

"I guess. If the Specials ever find us, at least we've got a chance."

A lookout had evidently spotted them on the way up— people were spilling from the broken observatory as the hoverboard settled to the earth. Tally spotted the New Smokies — Croy, Ryde, and Maddy, along with a few uglies she didn't recognize — and the two dozen or so Crims who'd come along on the escape.

Tally searched for Zane's face among the crowd, but he wasn't there.

She jumped from the board, running to hug Fausto. He grinned at her, and she could see from his sharpened expression that he'd taken the pills. He wasn't just bubbly anymore; he was cured.

"Tally, you smell," he said, still grinning.

"Oh, yeah. Long trip. Long story."

"I knew you'd make it. But where's Peris?"

She took a deep breath of the cold mountain air.

"Chickened out, huh?" Fausto said before she could answer. When she nodded, he added, "Always thought he would."

"Take me to Zane."

Fausto turned, gesturing toward the observatory. The others were hovering close, but looked a little put off by her bedraggled appearance and ripe smell. The Crims called out hellos, and she could see the uglies reacting to a new pretty face, their eyes widening even though she was a mess. Worked every time, even when they didn't think you were a god.

Tally paused to nod at Croy. "I haven't had a chance to thank you yet."

He raised an eyebrow. "Don't thank me. You did it yourself."

She frowned, noticing that Maddy was staring strangely at her. Tally ignored the look, not interested in what David's mother thought, and followed Fausto into the broken dome.

It was dark inside — a few lanterns were strung up around the edge of the huge, open hemisphere, and a narrow shaft of blinding sunlight streamed through the dome's great fissure. An open fire cast jittering shadows through the space, its smoke climbing lazily up through the crack overhead.

Zane lay on a pile of blankets by the fire, his eyes closed. He looked even thinner than when they'd been trying to starve the cuffs off, his eyes sunken into his head. The covers rose and fell softly with his breathing.

Tally swallowed. "But David said he was okay. …"

"He's stable," Fausto said, "which is good, considering."

"Considering what?"

Fausto spread his hands helplessly. "His brain."

A chill moved through Tally, the shadows in the corners of her eyes rippling for a moment. "What about it?" she said softly.

"You had to experiment, didn't you, Tally?" came a voice from the darkness. Maddy stepped into the light, David at her side.

Tally held her steely glare. "What are you talking about?"

"The pills I gave you were meant to be taken together."

"I know. But there were two of us…" Tally trailed off at David's expression. And I was too scared to do it alone, she added to herself, remembering the panic of those moments in Valentino 317.

"I suppose I should have known," Maddy said, shaking her head. "This was always a risk, letting a pretty-head treat herself."

"What was?"

"I never explained how the cure worked, did I?" Maddy said. "How the nanos remove the lesions from your brain? They break them down, like the pills that cure cancer."

"So what went wrong?"

"The nanos didn't stop. They went on reproducing, breaking down Zane's brain."

Tally turned to look at the form on the bed. His breathing seemed so shallow, the movement of his chest at the edge of perception.

She faced David. "But you said the cure worked perfectly."

He nodded. "It does. Your other friends are fine. But the two pills were different. The second pill, the one you took, is the cure for the cure. It makes the nanos self-destruct after they finish with the lesions. Without it, Zane's nanos kept reproducing, kept eating away at him. Mom said they stopped at some point, but not before they did a … certain amount of damage."

The sickening feeling in Tally's stomach redoubled as the realization sunk home: This was her fault. She had swallowed the pill that would have kept Zane from this, the cure for the cure. "How much damage?"

"We don't know yet," Maddy said. "I had enough stem tissue to regenerate the destroyed areas of his brain, but the connections that Zane had built up among those cells are gone. Those connections are where memories and motor skills are stored, and where cognition happens. Some parts of his mind are almost a blank slate."

"A blank slate? You mean…he's gone?"

"No, just a few places are damaged," Fausto spoke up. "And his brain can rewire itself, Tally. His neurons are making new connections. That's what he's doing right now. Zane had been doing it all along; he hoverboarded all the way here on his own before he collapsed."

"Rather amazing that he lasted so long," Maddy said, shaking her head slowly. "I think not eating is what saved him. By starving himself, he eventually starved the nanos. They appear to be gone."

"He can still talk and everything," Fausto said. He looked down at Zane. "He's just a little…tired right now."

"It could have been you in that bed, Tally." Maddy shook her head. "A fifty-fifty chance. You just got lucky."

"That's me. Little Miss Lucky," Tally said softly.

Of course, she had to admit to herself that it was true. They'd split the two pills randomly, assuming they were the same. The nanos could have been eating away at Tally's brain all this time instead of Zane's. Lucky her.

She let her eyes close, realizing at last how hard Zane must have worked to hide what was happening to him. All those long silences when they'd been wearing the cuffs, he'd been fighting, struggling to keep his mind together, unsure of exactly what was happening, but risking everything to escape becoming pretty-minded again.

Tally gazed down at him, wishing for a moment it had been the other way around. Anything was better than seeing him like this. If only she'd taken the nano pill, and he had taken the one that…had done what? "Wait a second. If Zane got the nanos, how did my pill cure me?"

"It didn't," Maddy said. "Without the other pill, the anti-nanos you took would have no effect whatsoever."

"But …"

"It was you, Tally," came a soft voice from the bed. Zane's eyes had opened a slit, catching the sunlight like the edges of gold coins. He gave her a weary smile. "You got bubbly on your own."

"But I felt so different after we …" She fell silent, remembering that day — their kiss, sneaking into Valentino Mansion, climbing the tower. But, of course, all those things had happened before they'd taken the pills. Being with Zane had changed her from the beginning, from that first kiss.

Tally remembered how her "cure" always seemed to come and go. She'd had to work to stay bubbly, more like the other Crims than Zane.

"He's right, Tally," Maddy said. "Somehow, you cured yourself. "

Cold Water

Tally stayed at Zane's bedside. He was awake and talking now, and it was easier to be here than dealing with everything that she and David still had to work out. The others left them alone.

"Did you know what was happening to you?"

Zane took a moment before answering. His speech was full of long silences now, almost like Andrew's epic pauses. "I knew that everything was getting harder. Sometimes I had to concentrate just to walk. But I hadn't felt so alive since I'd turned pretty; it was worth it, being bubbly with you. I figured once we found the New Smoke, they could help me."

"They are helping. Maddy said that she put in some new …" Tally swallowed.

"Brain tissue?" he supplied, and smiled. "Sure, blank neurons fresh out of the oven. Just got to fill them up now."

"We will. We'll do bubbly-making things," Tally said, but the promise felt strange in her mouth—"we" meant she and Zane, as if David didn't exist.

"If there's enough left of me to be bubbly," he said tiredly. "It's not like all my memories are gone. It was mostly my cognition centers that were affected, and some motor skills."

"Cognition? You mean like thinking?" Tally said.

"Yeah, and motor skills, like walking." He shrugged. "But the brain's built to take damage, Tally. It's wired so that everything is stored everywhere, sort of. When a part of it gets damaged, things don't get lost, just fuzzier. Like a hangover." He laughed. "A really bad one. On top of which, I'm sore from lying in bed all day. And it feels like I've got a toothache from all this Smokey food. It's just phantom pains from brain damage, Maddy says." He rubbed one cheek with a scowl.

She took his hand. "I can't believe you're so brave about this. It's incredible."

"You should talk, Tally." He struggled to sit up, his movements shaky and infirm. "You managed to cure yourself without getting your brain chewed up. That's what I'd call incredible."

Tally looked down at their clasped hands. She didn't feel very incredible. She felt smelly and dirty, and horrible that she hadn't had the guts to take both pills, which would have prevented all of this from happening. She didn't even have the guts to talk to Zane about David, or vice versa. Which was just pathetic.

"Is it strange, seeing him?" he asked.

She looked at Zane, and he chuckled at her surprise. "Come on, Tally. It's not like I'm reading your mind. I had plenty of warning about this. You told me about the guy the first time we kissed, remember?"

"Oh, yeah." So Zane had been expecting this all along. Tally should have foreseen it herself. Maybe she simply hadn't wanted to face the obvious. "Yeah, it is strange seeing him. I definitely didn't expect to find him waiting for me in the ruins. Just me and him alone."

Zane nodded. "It was interesting, waiting for you. His mother said you wouldn't come at all. That you must have chickened out, because you hadn't really been cured. Like you were just playing along with me, imitating my bubbliness."

Tally rolled her eyes. "She doesn't much like me."

"You don't say?" He grinned. "But David and me figured you'd show up sooner or later. We figured that—" Tally groaned. "So are you guys like friends now?"

Zane took one of his excruciatingly long pauses. "I guess so. He asked me a lot about you when we first got here. I think he wanted to know how being pretty has changed you."

"Really?"

"Really. He was the one who met us when we arrived in the ruins. Him and Croy, camping out and watching for flares. It turns out that those two left the magazines for the city uglies to find, so they'd know the ruins were being visited again." Zane's voice had gotten dreamy, as if he was falling asleep. "At least I finally got to see him again, after chickening out all those months ago." He turned to her. "David really missed you, you know."

"I ruined his life," Tally said softly.

"You didn't do anything on purpose; David understands that now. I told him how when you'd planned to betray the Smoke, it was because the Specials threatened to keep you ugly for life."

"You told him that?" Tally let out a slow breath. "Thanks. I never really had a chance to explain why I'd come to the Smoke, how they'd forced me. Maddy made me leave the same night I confessed everything."

"Yeah. David wasn't happy with her about that. He wanted to talk to you again."

"Oh," she said. There was so much that she and David hadn't gotten straight between them. Of course, the thought of Zane and him discussing her history in great detail didn't exactly thrill Tally, but at least David knew the whole story now. She sighed. "Thanks for telling me all this. It must be weird."

"A little. But you shouldn't feel so bad. About what happened back then."

"Why not? I destroyed the Smoke, and David's father died because of me."

"Tally, everyone in the city is manipulated. The purpose of everything we're taught is to make us afraid of change. I've been trying to explain it to David, how from the day we're born, the whole place is a machine for keeping us under control."

She shook her head. "That doesn't make it right to betray your friends."

"Yeah, well, I did, long before you even met Shay. When it comes to the Smoke, I'm just as much at fault as you."

She looked at him in disbelief. "You? How?"

"Did I ever tell you how I met Dr. Cable?"

Tally looked at him, realizing that this was one conversation they'd never had a chance to finish. "No. You didn't."

"After the night that Shay and I chickened out, most of my friends were gone away to the Smoke. The dorm minders knew I was the leader, so they asked me where everyone had run off to. I played tough, and didn't say a word. So Special Circumstances came for me." His voice grew softer, as if the cuff were still around his wrist. "They took me to that headquarters of theirs out in the factory belt, same as you. I tried to be strong, but they threatened me. Said they'd make me into one of them."

"One of them? A Special?" Tally swallowed.

"Yeah. After that, being a pretty-head didn't seem so bad anymore. So I told them everything I knew. I told them that Shay had planned to run away, but also chickened out, and that's why they knew about her. And that's probably why they started watching …" His voice trailed off.

Tally blinked. "Watching me, when she and I became friends."

He nodded tiredly. "So, you see? I started the whole thing, by not leaving when I was supposed to. I'll never judge you for what happened to the Smoke, Tally. It was my fault as much as yours."

She took his hand, shaking her head. He couldn't accept blame, not after everything he'd gone through. "Zane, no. It can't be your fault. That was a long time ago." She sighed. "Maybe neither of us is to blame."

They were silent for a while, Tally's own words echoing in her head. With Zane lying here in front of her, his mind half-missing, what was the point of wallowing in old guilt — his, or hers, or anyone's? Maybe the bad blood between her and Maddy was as meaningless as the feud between Andrew's village and the outsiders. If they were all going to live together here in the New Smoke, they would have to let the past go.

Of course, things were still complicated.

Tally took a slow breath, then said, "So what do you think of David?"

Zane looked at the arched ceiling dreamily. "He's very intense. Really serious. Not as bubbly as us. You know?"

Tally smiled, and squeezed his hand. "Yeah, I do."

"And kind of … ugly."

She nodded, remembering how back in the Smoke, David had always looked at her as if she was pretty. And at times, looking at him had felt the same as looking into a pretty's face. Maybe when she'd had the real cure, those feelings would come back. Or maybe they were really gone for good, not because of any operation, but just because time had passed, and because of what she'd had with Zane.

When Zane had finally fallen asleep, Tally decided to take a bath. Fausto told her how to get to a spring on the far side of the mountain, choked with icicles at this time of year, but deep enough to submerge your whole body. "Just take a heated jacket," he said. "Or you'll freeze to death before you make it back."

Tally figured death was better than being this filthy, and she needed more than a rubdown with a wet cloth to feel clean again. She also wanted to be alone for a while, and maybe the shock from some freezing water would help her get up the nerve to talk to David.

Hoverboarding down the mountain in the crisp, late afternoon air, Tally was amazed at how clear and bright everything looked. She still found it hard to believe that she hadn't really taken the cure; she felt as bubbly as ever. Maddy had muttered something about a "placebo effect," as if believing you were cured would be enough to fix your brain. But Tally knew it was more than that.

Zane had changed her. From their very first kiss, even before he'd had the cure himself, being with him had made her bubbly. Tally wondered if she even needed the cure now, or if she could stay this way forever on her own. The thought of swallowing the same pill that had eaten away Zane's brain didn't thrill her, even with the anti-nanos as a chaser. Maybe she could skip it altogether, and rely on Zane's magic. They could help each other now, rewiring his brain at the same time Tally fought becoming pretty-minded.

They had come this far together, after all. Even before the pills, they had changed each other.

Of course, David had changed Tally too. Back in the Smoke, he'd been the one who'd convinced her to stay in the wild, even to stay ugly, giving up her future in the city Her reality had been transformed by those two weeks in the Smoke, starting…when? That first time David and she had kissed.

"How lucky is that?" Tally muttered to herself. "Sleeping Beauty with two princes."

What was she supposed to do? Choose between David and Zane? Especially now that all three of them were living together here at Fort Smokey? Somehow it didn't seem fair that she found herself in this position. Tally had barely remembered David when she'd met Zane — but she hadn't wanted to have her memories erased, after all.

"Thanks again, Dr. Cable," she said.

The water looked really cold.

Tally had easily kicked through the layer of ice on top, and was now staring down with dread into the gurgling spring. Maybe smelling bad wasn't the worst thing in the world. Spring would come in only three or four months, after all…

She shivered, turning the heat up in her borrowed jacket, then sighed and started to take off her clothes. This little bath would be very bubbly-making, at least.

Tally smeared a soap packet onto herself before jumping in, rubbing some into her hair, guessing she would last about ten seconds in the half-frozen spring. She knew she'd have to jump — no dangling of the foot or lowering herself in slowly. Only the laws of gravity would keep her going once her naked flesh hit cold water.

Tally took a breath, held it… and leaped into the spring.

The icy water crushed her like a vice, forcing the breath from her lungs, locking every muscle tight. She hugged herself with her arms, rolling into a ball in the shallow pool, but the cold seemed to cut through her flesh and straight into her bones.

Tally fought to take a breath, but managed only shallow little gasps of air, her entire body shaking as if it would break apart. With a titanic act of will she dunked her head in, erasing all sound, the rasp of her breath and gurgle of the spring replaced by the rumble of roiling water. She rubbed furiously at her hair with trembling hands.

When her head burst into the air again, Tally drew in great breaths and found herself laughing — everything had turned strangely clear, the world more bubbly than a cup of coffee or a glass of champagne could make it, the sensation more intense than falling toward the earth on her hoverboard. She lay there for a moment in the water, amazed at it all — the clarity of the sky and the perfection of a leafless tree nearby.

Tally remembered her first bath in a cold stream on the way to the Smoke, all those months ago. How it had shifted the way she saw the world — even before the operation had put the lesions on her brain, before she'd met David, much less Zane. Even then, her mind had started to change, realizing that nature didn't need an operation to make it beautiful, it just was.

Maybe she didn't need a handsome prince to stay awake— or an ugly one, for that matter. After all, Tally had cured herself without the pill and had made it all the way here on her own. No one else she'd ever heard of had escaped the city twice.

Maybe she'd always been bubbly, somewhere inside. It only took loving someone — or being in the wild, or maybe just a plunge into freezing water — to bring it out.

Tally was still in the pond when she heard the cry: a hoarse shout that came from the air.

She climbed out hurriedly and the wind cutting through her felt colder than the water. The towels Tally had brought were brittle in the chill air, and she was still drying herself when a hoverboard streaked into view, banking to a halt a few meters away.

David hardly seemed to register that she was naked. He jumped from the board and ran toward her, clutching something in his hand. Skidding to a halt by her pack, he waved the device across it — scanning it for bugs, she realized.

"It's not you," he said. "I knew it wasn't."

Tally was pulling on her clothes. "But you already—" "A signal just started up out of nowhere, broadcasting our location. We picked it up on the radio, but haven't localized it yet." He looked down at her pack, the relieved expression still on his face. "But you didn't bring it."

"Of course I didn't." Tally sat down to yank on her boots. Her pounding heart began to drive the cold from her body. "Don't you scan everyone who joins you?"

"Yeah. But the bug must have been dormant — it only started sending when someone activated it, or maybe it was set to go off at a certain time." His eyes scanned the horizon. "The Specials will be here soon."

She stood. "So we run."

He shook his head. "We can't go anywhere until we find it."

"Why not?" She pulled on crash bracelets.

"It's taken us months to build up the supplies we've got, Tally. We can't leave them all behind, not with all you Crims having just joined us. But we won't know what's safe to take until we figure out where the signal's coming from. It's not showing up anywhere."

Tally hoisted her pack and snapped her fingers, her board rising into the air. As she stepped on, her mind still racing from the freezing bath, she recalled something from earlier that day. "Toothache," she said.

"What?"

"Zane was in the hospital two weeks ago. It's inside him."

Tracker

They swept back up the mountain, banking hard against the high gravities of their turns. Tally stayed in the lead, positive that she was right. The doctors had made Zane unconscious for a few minutes in the hospital while they'd repaired his broken hand. They must have hidden a tracker in his teeth at the same time. Of course, regular city doctors wouldn't have done something like that on their own — it had to be the work of Special Circumstances.

The camp was bedlam when they arrived. New Smokies and Crims ran in and out of the observatory door with equipment, clothing, and food, making two piles beside Croy and Maddy, who stood waving scanners over everything wildly. Others hurriedly repacked the scanned gear, getting ready to flee once the bug was found.

Tally tipped back her hoverboard and forced it up as high as it would go, launching herself over the chaos, directly at the broken dome. When the board reached its maximum height the lifters shuddered, then firmed up as the magnets found the steel frame of the observatory. The crack in the dome was wide enough to glide through, and Tally dropped straight down through the rising smoke, jumping off next to Zane's makeshift bed.

He looked up at her with a soft smile. "Nice entrance, Tally."

She knelt beside him. "Which tooth hurts?"

"What's going on? Everyone's freaking out."

"Which tooth hurts, Zone? You have to show me."

He frowned, but stuck a trembling finger into his mouth, tenderly probing the right side. Tally pulled his hand away and opened his mouth wider, and he made a whimper of protest.

"Shush. I'll explain in a second."

Even in the dim firelight, she could see it: One tooth stood out from the others, its shade of white imperfectly matched — a rushed bit of dentistry, of course.

The signal was coming from Zane.

The wheep of a scanner booting up sounded beside her ear; David had followed her down the hole into the dome. He waved the scanner past Zane's face, and it buzzed angrily. "It's in his mouth?" David asked.

"In his tooth! Get your mother."

"But, Tally—" "Get her! You and I can't take out a tooth!"

He put a hand on her shoulder. "Neither can she. Not in a few minutes."

She stood, staring into his ugly face. "What are you saying, David?"

"Well have to leave him behind. They'll be here soon."

"No!" she shouted. "Go get her!"

David swore and turned away, running toward the door of the observatory. Tally looked down at Zane again.

"What's happening?" he asked.

"They put a tracker in you, Zane. At the hospital."

"Oh," he said, rubbing his face. "I didn't know, Tally, honest. I thought my toothache was from all this wild food."

"Of course you didn't know. You were unconscious for those minutes at the hospital, remember?"

"Are they really going to leave me?"

"I won't let them. I promise."

"I can't go back," he said weakly. "I don't want to be pretty-minded again."

Tally swallowed. If Zane was returned to the city now, the doctors would put the lesions back in, right on top of his blank new tissue. His brain would rewire around them…What chance would he have of staying bubbly?

She couldn't let this happen.

"I'll take you on my hoverboard, Zane — we'll escape on our own if we have to." Her mind raced. She'd still have to get rid of the tracker somehow. She couldn't just bash it out with a rock…Tally looked around for some sort of tool, but the New Smokies had taken everything useful outside to be scanned.

Voices came from the darkness. It was Maddy, David, and Croy. Tally saw that Maddy was carrying some sort of forceps in her hand, and her heart skipped a beat.

Maddy knelt beside Zane and forced open his mouth. He whimpered in pain again as the metal tool probed his teeth.

"Be careful," Tally pleaded softly.

"Hold this." Maddy handed her a flashlight. When Tally pointed it into Zane's mouth, the discolored tooth was obvious.

After a moment, Maddy said, "This isn't good." She released Zane's head, and he fell back onto the blankets with a groan, his eyes closing.

"Just take it out!"

"They've rooted it to the bone." She turned to Croy. "Finish packing up. We have to run."

"Do something for him!" Tally cried.

Maddy took the light from her. "Tally, it's bonded to the bone. I'd have to shatter his jaw to remove it."

"So don't take it out, just make it stop sending! Smash the tooth! He can take it!"

Maddy shook her head. "Pretty teeth are made of the same stuff they use in aircraft wings. You can't just smash them. I'd need special dental nanos to break it down." She turned the flashlight on Tally, reaching for her mouth.

Tally twisted away. "What are you doing?"

"Just making sure about you."

"But I didn't go into the hos—," Tally began, but Maddy wrenched open her mouth. Tally growled at the back of her throat, but let the woman poke around for a moment; it was quicker than arguing. When she grunted and let go, Tally said, "Satisfied?"

"For now. But we have to leave Zane behind."

"Forget it!" Tally shouted.

"They'll be here in another ten minutes," David said.

"Less." Maddy stood.

Tally's vision swam with spots from the little flashlight. She could hardly see their faces in the firelight. Didn't they understand what Zane had gone through to get here, what he had sacrificed for the cure? "I won't leave him."

"Tally—," David began.

"It doesn't matter," Maddy interrupted. "Technically, she's still a pretty-head."

"I am not!"

"You didn't even take the right pill." Maddy put a hand on David's shoulder. "Tally's still got the lesions. Once they scan her brain, they won't even put her under the knife. They'll think she just came along for the ride."

"Mom!" David shouted. "We are not leaving her!"

"And I'm not coming," Tally said.

Maddy shook her head. "Perhaps the lesions aren't as important as we thought. Your father always suspected that being pretty-minded is simply the natural state for most people. They want to be vapid and lazy and vain" — Maddy glanced at Tally—"and selfish. It only takes a twist to lock in that part of their personalities. He always thought that some people could think their way out of it."

"Az was right," Tally said softly. "I'm cured now." David let out a pained growl. "Cured or not, Tally, you can't stay here. I don't want to lose you again! Mom! Do something!"

"You want to argue with her? Go ahead." Maddy spun on one heel and strode toward the observatory entrance. "We're leaving in two minutes," she said without turning around. "With or without you."

David and Tally were silent for a few moments. It was like when they'd first seen each other in the ruins that morning, neither knowing what to say. Though now, Tally realized, David's face no longer shocked her. Maybe the panic of the moment or the freezing bath had stripped her remaining pretty thoughts away. Or maybe it had simply taken a few hours to align her memories and dreams with the truth…

David wasn't a prince — handsome or otherwise. He was the first boy she'd fallen in love with, but not the last. Time and experiences apart had changed what had been between them.

More important, she had someone else now. However unfair it was that her memories of David had been erased, Tally had built a whole new set of memories, and she couldn't just trade them in for the old ones. Zane and she had helped each other become bubbly, had been imprisoned by the cuffs together, and escaped the city together. She couldn't abandon him now, just because he had been robbed of part of his mind.

Tally knew too well what that was like, being handed over to the city all alone.

Zane was the one person in her life she had never betrayed, and she wasn't about to start now. She took his hand. "I'm not leaving him."

"Think logically, Tally." David spoke slowly, talking to her like she was a littlie. "You can't help Zane if you stay here. You'll both be captured."

"Your mother's right. They won't do anything more to my brain, and I can help him from inside the city."

"We can smuggle Zane the cure, like we did for you."

"I didn't need the cure, David. Maybe Zane won't either. I'll keep him bubbly, I can help him rewire his brain. But he won't stand a chance without me."

David started to speak, but froze for a moment. Then his voice changed, his eyes narrowing. "You're just staying with him because he's pretty."

Tally's eyes widened. "I'm what?"

"Don't you see it? It's like you always used to say: It's evolution. Since your Crim friends got here, Mom's been explaining to me how prettiness works." He pointed at Zane. "He's got those big, vulnerable eyes, that childlike perfect skin. He looks like a baby to you, a needy child, which makes you want to help him. You're not thinking rationally. You're giving yourself up just because he's pretty!"

Tally stared back at David in disbelief. How dare he say this to her? The mere fact that she was standing here proved that Tally could think for herself.

Then she realized what was going on: David was only repeating Maddy's words. She must have warned him not to trust his feelings when he saw the new Tally. Maddy didn't want her son turning into some awestruck ugly, worshipping the ground Tally walked on. So now David thought that all that Tally could see was Zane's pretty face.

David still thought she was just some city kid. Maybe he didn't even really believe that she was cured. Maybe he'd never really forgiven her.

"It's not the way Zane looks, David," she said, her voice trembling with anger. "It's because he makes me bubbly, and because we took a lot of risks together. It could just as easily be me lying there, and he would stay with me if it was."

"It's just programming!"

"No. It's because I love him."

David started to speak again, but the sound choked off.

She sighed. "Go on, David. Whatever your mother said a second ago, she won't really leave without you. They'll all get caught if you don't start moving now."

"Tally—" "Go!" she cried. David had to start running, or the New Smoke would die, and it would be her fault again.

"But you can—" "Get your ugly face out of here!" Tally screamed.

The echoes shuddered back at her from the observatory walls for a moment, and Tally tore her gaze away from David. She cradled Zane's face in one hand and kissed him. The shouted insult had the effect she'd wanted, but Tally couldn't bring herself to look up as she heard David's footsteps retreating into the darkness, first walking, then at a run.

She saw shapes pulsing in the corners of her vision. It wasn't shadows cast by the flickering fire — it was her heart, pounding so hard that she could see the rushing blood beating against her eyes, like something trying to escape.

She had called David ugly. He would never forget that, nor would she.

But she'd had to use that word, Tally told herself. Every second counted, and nothing else would have pushed him away so powerfully. She'd made her choice.

"I'll take care of you, Zane," she said.

He opened his eyes into slits and smiled weakly. "Um, I hope you don't mind if I pretended to pass out for that."

Tally let out a strangled laugh. "Good idea."

"We really can't run? I think I can stand up."

"No. They'd just find us."

He probed at his tooth with his tongue. "Oh, yeah. That sucks. And I almost got everyone else caught too."

She shrugged. "Been there. Done that."

"Are you sure you want to stay with me?"

"I can escape the city again, Zane, anytime I want. I can save you and Shay, and everyone else we left behind. I'm cured for good now." Tally looked at the entrance, saw hoverboards lifting into the air. They were leaving, all of them. She shrugged again. "Besides, I think it's pretty much a done deal. Running after David now would kind of spoil my brilliant breakup line."

"Yeah, I suppose that's true. " Zane chuckled softly. "Do me a favor, Tally? If you ever break up with me, just leave a note."

She smiled back at him. "Okay. As long as you promise never to put your hand in a crusher again."

"Agreed." Zane looked at his fingers, then made a fist. "I'm scared. I want to stay bubbly."

"You'll be bubbly again. I'll help you."

He nodded, grasping her hand. His voice shook as he said, "Do you think David was right? My big beautiful eyes are why you chose me?"

"No. I think it was…what I said. And what you said, before you jumped off the balloon." She swallowed. "What's your opinion?"

Zane lay back and closed his eyes, and was silent so long that Tally thought he had fallen asleep again. But then he said softly, "You and David could both be right. Maybe humans beings are programmed … to help one another, even to fall in love. But just because it's human nature doesn't make it bad, Tally. Besides, we had a whole city of pretties to choose from, and we chose each other."

She took his hand and murmured, "I'm glad we did."

Zane smiled, then closed his eyes again. A moment later, she saw his breathing slow, and realized that he had managed to pass out again. At least brain damage had some advantages.

Tally felt the last scraps of energy leave her body, and wished she could sleep too, just spend the next few hours unconscious and wake up in the city — an imprisoned princess again, as if this had all been a dream. She laid her head onto Zane's chest and closed her eyes.

Five minutes later, Special Circumstances arrived.

Specials

The scream of hovercars filled the observatory, echoing like the cries of predatory birds. Whirlwinds from their rotors swept through the crack in the dome, sending the fire into a sudden blaze. Dust choked the air, and gray forms charged through the entrance, taking up positions in the shadows.

"I need a doctor here," Tally announced in a tentative, pretty voice. "Something’s wrong with my friend."

A Special appeared beside her out of the darkness. He held a weapon. "Don't move. We don't want to hurt you, but we will if we have to."

"Just help my friend," she said. "He's sick." The sooner city doctors looked at Zane, the better. Maybe they could do more than Maddy had.

The Special said something into a handphone, and Tally glanced down at Zane. Fear showed through his slitted eyes.

"It's okay," she said. "They'll help you."

Zane swallowed, and Tally saw his hands trembling, the last of his brave front crumbling now that their captors had arrived.

"I'll make sure you're cured, one way or another," she said.

"A medical team is coming," the Special said, and Tally smiled prettily at him. The city doctors might mistake Zane's condition for some kind of brain disease, or maybe they would figure out that someone had attempted a cure for the lesions, but they would never recognize how Tally had transformed herself. She could pretend that she'd just come along for the ride, as Maddy had put it. Tally was safe from the operation now.

Maybe Zane could be cured again without more pills. Maybe everyone in the city could be changed. After their balloon escape and another "rescue" by the Specials, Tally and Zane would be even more famous. They could start something huge, something the Specials couldn't stop.

A razor-edged voice came through the shadows, and Tally flinched.

"I thought I might find you here, Tally." Dr. Cable came into the light, stretching her fingers toward the fire as though she'd stepped inside to get warm.

"Hi, Dr. Cable. Can you help my friend?"

The woman's wolflike smile gleamed in the dark. "Toothache?"

"Something worse." Tally shook her head. "He can't move, can hardly talk. Something's wrong with him."

More Specials streamed into the observatory, including three carrying a stretcher, wearing blue silk instead of gray. They pushed Tally out of the way and laid the litter down next to Zane. He closed his eyes.

"Don't worry," Dr. Cable said. "He'll be fine. We know all about his condition from your little trip to the hospital. It seems that someone slipped Zane some brain nanos. Very bad for his pretty head."

"You knew he was sick?" Tally stood up. "Why didn't you fix him?"

Dr. Cable patted her shoulder. "We brought the nanos to a halt. But the little implant in his tooth was programmed to give him headaches — false symptoms to keep you motivated."

"You were playing with us …," Tally said, watching as the Specials took Zane away.

Dr. Cable was looking around the observatory. "I wanted to see what you were up to and where you would go. I thought you might lead us to those responsible for young Zanes illness." She frowned. "I was going to wait a bit longer to activate the tracker, but after you were so rude to my good friend Dr. Valen this morning, I thought we should come out and bring you home. You certainly know how to cause trouble."

Tally stayed silent, her mind racing. The tracker in Zane's tooth had been activated remotely, but not until the other scientists had discovered Dr. Valen. Once again, Tally had brought Specials along with her.

"We wanted a car to get away," she said, trying to sound pretty. "But we got lost."

"Yes, we found it in the ruins. But I don't think you made it all the way here on foot. Who helped you, Tally?"

She shook her head. "No one."

A Special in gray silk appeared beside Cable and gave a quick report. His razored voice made Tally's flesh crawl, but she couldn't make out any of the muttered words.

"Send the youngsters after them," Dr. Cable ordered, then turned to Tally. "No one, you say? What about the cooking fires and hunting snares and latrines? Quite a few people were camped here, it seems, and they left not long ago." She shook her head. "Pity we didn't get here quicker."

"You won't catch them," Tally said with a pretty smile.

"Won't we?" Dr. Cable's teeth gleamed red in the firelight. "We've got a few new tricks ourselves, Tally."

The doctor turned and strode toward the entrance. When Tally tried to follow, a Special took her shoulder in a grip of iron and sat her down by the fire. Shouted orders and the sounds of more hovercars landing filtered into the dome, but Tally gave up trying to see what was going on through the entrance, and stared at the flames unhappily.

Now that Zane had been taken away, Tally only felt defeated. She'd been played perfectly by Dr. Cable again, tricked into finding the New Smoke, almost betraying everyone one more time. And after her last words, David probably hated her now.

But at least Fausto and the other Crims had escaped the city, hopefully for good. They and the New Smokies had the benefit of a few minutes' head start. They couldn't outrun the Specials' cars in a straight line, but their hoverboards were more nimble. Without Zane's tracker to give them away, they could simply disappear into the surrounding forest. Tally and Zane's rebellion had swelled the ranks of the New Smokies by a couple of dozen members. And now that the cure had been tested, they could bring it to the city, and to other cities, and eventually everyone would be free.

Maybe the city hadn't won, this time.

And being caught might be the best thing for Zane. The city doctors would be better able to treat him than a band of outlaws on the run. Tally focused her mind on how she would help him recover, making him bubbly all over again if she had to.

Maybe she would start with a kiss…

An hour or so after the Specials had first arrived, the fire had burned low, and Tally began to feel the cold again. As she turned up her jacket's heater, a shadow moved in the red shaft of sunset that slanted through the dome's opening.

Tally started. It was someone coming down on a hover-board. Was it David returning to save her? She shook her head. Maddy would never let him.

"We got a couple of them," a harsh voice called from the board. The gray silk of Special uniforms fluttered in the gloom — two more figures descending through the crack in the dome. The hoverboards were longer than normal, with lifting fans built into their front and back ends. Their rotors stirred the embers of the fire.

So this was their new trick, Tally thought. Specials on hoverboards, perfect for tracking the New Smokies. She wondered who they'd caught.

"Uglies or pretties?" Dr. Cable called. Tally looked up and saw that the doctor had rejoined her by the fire.

"Just a couple of the Crims. The uglies all got away," came the answer. Tally realized that beneath its razor sharpness, she recognized the sound of the Special's voice.

"Oh, no," she said softly.

"Oh, yes, Tally-wa." The figure hopped off her board and strode into the firelight. "New surge! Do you like it?"

It was Shay. She was Special.

"Dr. C let me get more tattoos. Aren't they totally dizzying?"

Tally looked at her old friend, awestruck by the transformation. The spinning lines of flash tattoos covered her, as if Shay's skin were wrapped in a pulsing black net. Her face was lean and cruel, her upper teeth filed down to sharp, triangular points. She was taller, with hard new muscles in her bare arms. The line of the scars where she had cut herself stood out prominently, outlined with swirling tattoos. Shay's eyes flashed in the firelight like a predator's, shifting between red and violet as the flames danced.

She was still pretty, of course, but her cruel, inhuman grace sent shivers through Tally, like watching a colorful spider traverse its web.

Behind her, the other hoverboards descended. Ho and Tachs, Shay's fellow Cutters, each held a limp form. Tally grimaced when she saw that they'd caught Fausto, who'd never been on a hoverboard in his life before a few days ago. But most of the others had escaped, at least…and David had made it to safety.

The New Smoke still lived.

"Think my new surge is pretty-making, Tally-wa?" Shay said. "Not too much for you?"

Tally shook her head tiredly. "No. It's bubbly, Shay-la."

A broad, cruel smile filled Shay's face. "About a zillion milli-Helens, huh?"

"At least." Tally turned from her old friend and stared into the fire.

Shay sat down beside her. "Being Special is more bubbly than you can imagine, Tally-wa. Every second is totally spinning. Like, I can hear your heartbeat, can feel the electric buzz of that jacket trying to keep you warm. I can smell your fear."

"I'm not afraid of you, Shay."

"You are a little bit, Tally-wa. You can't lie to me anymore." Shay put her arm around Tally. "Hey, remember the crazy faces I used to design back when we were uglies? Dr. C will let me do them now. Cutters can surge however we want. Even the Pretty Committee can't tell us what we can and can't look like."

"That must be great for you, Shay-la."

"Me and my Cutters are the bubbly new thing in Circumstances. Like special Specials. Isn't that totally happy-making?"

Tally turned to face her, trying to see what was behind the flashing violet-red eyes. Despite the pretty-talk, she heard a cold, serene intelligence in Shays voice, a pitiless joy in having snared her old betrayer.

Shay was a new kind of cruel pretty, Tally could see. Something even worse than Dr. Cable. Less human.

"Are you really happy, Shay?"

Shay's mouth quivered, her sharp teeth running along her lower lip for a moment, and she nodded. "I am, now that I've got you back, Tally-wa. It wasn't very nice, all of you running off like that without me. Totally sad-making."

"We wanted you along, Shay, I swear. I left you all those pings."

"I was busy." Shay kicked at the dying fire with one boot. "Cutting myself. Searching for a cure." She snorted. "Besides, I've had enough of the camping thing. And, anyway, we're together now, you and me."

"We're against each other." Tally barely whispered the words.

"No way, Tally-wa." Shay's hand squeezed her shoulder roughly. "I'm sick of all the mix-ups and bad blood between us. From now on, you and I are going to be best friends forever."

Tally closed her eyes; so this was Shay's revenge.

"I need you in the Cutters, Tally. It's so bubbly-making!"

"You can't do this to me," Tally whispered, trying to pull away.

Shay held her firmly. "That's the thing, Tally-wa. I can."

"No!" Tally cried, lashing out and trying to struggle to her feet.

Quick as lightning, Shay's hand shot forward, and Tally felt a sharp sting on her neck. Seconds later, a thick fog began to settle over her. She managed to pull away and take a few stumbling steps, but her limbs seemed to fill with liquid lead, and she fell to the ground. A shroud of gray descended across the fire in front of her, the world growing dark.

Words tumbled at her through the void, carried on a razor voice: "Face it, Tally-wa, you're…"

Bogus Dreams

Over the next few weeks, Tally never quite awoke. She would stir sometimes, and realize from the feel of sheets and pillows that she was in bed, but mostly her mind floated free of her body, drifting in and out of disjointed versions of the same dream…

There was this beautiful princess locked in a high tower, one with mirrored walls that wouldn't shut up. There was no elevator or any other way down, but when the princess grew bored of staring at her own pretty face in the mirrors, she decided to jump. She invited all her friends to come along, and they all followed her down — except her best friend, whose invitation had been lost.

The tower was guarded by a gray dragon with jeweled eyes and a hungry maw. It had many legs and moved almost too fast to see, but it pretended to be asleep, and let the princess and her friends sneak past.

And you couldn't have this dream without a prince.

He was both handsome and ugly, bubbly and serious, cautious and brave. In the beginning he lived with the princess in the tower, but later in the dream he seemed to have been outside all along, waiting for her. And in a dream-logic way he was often two princes, which she had to choose between. Sometimes the princess chose the handsome prince, and sometimes the ugly one. Either way, her heart was broken.

And whomever she picked, the dream's ending never changed. The best friend, the one whose invitation had been lost, always tried to follow the princess. But the gray dragon woke up and swallowed her, and liked her taste so much that it came after the rest of them, hungry for more. From inside its stomach, the best friend looked out through the dragons eyes, and spoke with its mouth, swearing it would find the princess and punish her for leaving a friend behind.

And over all those sleepy weeks, the dream always ended the same way, with the dragon coming for the princess, saying the same words every time…

"Face it, Tally-wa, you're Special."