Specials

Cut Free

The next night, they found Zane and a small group of Crims waiting for them, clustered in the shadow of the dam that calmed the river before it encircled New Pretty Town. The sound of falling water and the nervous smells of the Crims set Tally's senses abuzz, her flash tattoos spinning like pinwheels on her arms.

After last night's adventures, her old random body would've been dead tired. She and Shay had walked all the way into the city center before calling Tachs to bring new boards, a hike that would have laid up any normal human for days. But a few hours' sleep had mostly restored Tally's body, and their exploits at the Armory now seemed like a practical joke—one that had gotten a little out of hand, maybe…

Her skintenna was crackling with the city's high alert: wardens and regular Specials out in force, the newsfeeds openly wondering if the city was at war. Half of Crumblyville had seen the inferno on the horizon, and the giant pile of black foam where the Armory had once stood was hard to explain away. There were military hovercraft visible over the center of town, stationed to protect the city government from any further attacks. The nightly fireworks displays had been canceled until further notice, leaving the skyline strangely dark.

Even the Cutters had been called in and told to search for any connection between the Smokies and the Armory's destruction, which Tally and Shay thought was pretty funny.

The buzz of the emergency energized Tally; she found the whole thing icy, like back when school was canceled because of a blizzard or a fire. Even with her sore muscles, she felt ready to follow Zane into the wild for weeks or months, whatever it took.

But as her board touched down, Tally made sure not to catch his watery-eyed gaze. She didn't want this icy feeling sucked out of her, randomized by his infirmity. So she turned her eyes to the rest of the Crims.

There were eight in all. Peris was among them, his big eyes widening as he took in Tally's new face. He was holding a cluster of toy balloons, like an entertainer at some littlie's birthday party.

"Don't tell me you're going," she snorted.

He returned her gaze without blinking. "I know I wimped out on you, Tally. But I'm bubblier now."

Tally looked at Peris's full lips, the softness of his trying-to-be-defiant expression, and wondered if his new attitude had come from one of Maddy's pills. "So what are those balloons for? In case you fall off your hoverboard?"

"You'll see," he answered, mustering a smile.

"You bubbleheads better be ready for a long trip," Shay said. "The Smokies may wait a while before they pick you up. I hope that's survival gear in those packs and not champagne."

"We're ready" Zane answered. "Water purifiers and sixty days of self-heating meals each. Lots of SpagBol."

Tally winced. Ever since her first trip into the wild, the merest thought of Spagbol made her stomach flip. Luckily, Specials gathered their own food in the wild; their rebuilt stomachs could extract the nutrition out of practically anything that grew. A few Cutters had actually taken up hunting, though Tally stuck to wild plants—she'd eaten her share of dead animals back in Smokey days.

The Crims started hoisting their backpacks, keeping their faces solemn, trying to look serious. She just hoped they didn't chicken out in the middle of the wild and leave Zane alone. He already looked a little shaky, even with his board still on the ground.

A few of the other Crims were staring at her and Shay. They wouldn't have seen a Special before, much less a scarred and wildly tattooed Cutter. But they didn't seem scared—like normal bubbleheads would be—just curious.

Of course, Maddy's nanos had been making the rounds for a while now. And the Crims would be the first to try anything to make themselves bubbly.

How would you run a city where everyone was Crim? Instead of most people going along with the rules, they'd always be stealing and doing tricks. Wouldn't you eventually wind up with real crimes—random violence and even murders—like back in Rusty days?

"All right," Shay said. "Get ready to move." She pulled out the alloy-cutter.

The Crims slipped their interface rings from their fingers, and as Peris handed each a balloon, they tied their rings to the dangling strings.

"Clever," Tally said, and Peris beamed a satisfied smile at her. When the balloons were let go with the rings attached, it would look to the city interface as though the Crims were taking a slow hoverboard trip together, letting the wind push them along in typical bubblehead fashion.

Shay took a step toward Zane, but he held up his hand. "No, I want Tally to set me free."

Shay let out a short, barked laugh and tossed Tally the tool. "Your boy wants you."

Tally took a slow breath as she crossed to where Zane stood, vowing to herself that she wouldn't let him randomize her brain. But when she reached out to grasp the metal chain, her fingers brushed his bare throat, and a shudder passed through her. Her eyes stayed on the necklace, but standing this close, fingertips centimeters from his flesh, brought up old and dizzy-making memories.

But then she saw the trembling in Zane's hands, and the repulsion rose in her once more. The war in her brain wouldn't end until he was a Special—his body as perfect as her own.

"Hold steady," she said. "This is hot."

Tally dimmed her vision as the tool sparked to life, a sputtering blue-and-white rainbow in the darkness. The heat hit her face like opening an oven, and a smell like burnt plastic filled the air.

Her own hands were shaking.

"Don't worry, Tally. I trust you."

She swallowed, still not looking up into his eyes. She didn't want to see their watery color, or Zane's thoughts so obvious on his face. She just wanted him to get moving, out into the wild where he could be found by the Smokies, recaptured, and then finally remade.

As the bright arc touched metal, Tally heard an alert ping go through her. Standard city procedure: The necklace was wired to send a signal if damaged. Any warden in the vicinity would have heard the ping too.

"Better let those balloons go," Shay said. "They'll come looking soon."

The arc sliced through the last few millimeters of the chain, and Tally lifted it from around his neck with both hands, careful to keep the glowing tips from his bare flesh.

Her arms were halfway around him when Zane took her wrists. "Try to change your mind, Tally."

She pulled away, his grip no stronger than the strands of a spider web. "My mind is fine the way it is."

His fingertips slid down her arm, along the ridges of cutting scars. "Then why do you do this?"

She looked at his hands, still afraid to meet his eyes. "It makes us icy. It's like being bubbly, but much better."

"What is it that you're not feeling, that you have to do that?"

She frowned, unable to answer the question. He just didn't understand cutting because he'd never done it. On top of which, her skintenna was carrying every word to Shay…

"You can rewire yourself again, Tally," he said. "The fact that they made you into a Special means you can change."

She stared at the still-glowing cutting tool, remembering what they'd gone through to get it. "I've already done more than you think."

"Good. Then you can choose what side you're on, Tally."

She looked up into his eyes at last. "This isn't about what side I'm on, Zane. I'm not doing this for anyone but us."

He smiled. "Neither am I. Remember that, Tally."

"What do you … ?" Tally dropped her gaze, shaking her head. "You have to get moving, Zane. You won't look very bubbly if the wardens catch you here before you've even taken a step."

"And speaking of being caught," Shay whispered, handing the tracker to Zane. "Give that a twirl when you find the Smoke, and we'll come running. It also works if you throw it into a fire, doesn't it, Tally-wa?"

He looked at the tracker, then slipped it into his pocket. All three of them knew that he wouldn't use it.

Tally dared another glance into Zane's eyes. He might not be special, but his fierce expression didn't look like a bubblehead's either.

"Try to keep changing, Tally," he said softly.

"Just go!" She turned and took a few steps away, snatching the last few balloons away from Peris, twisting their strings around the still-glowing necklace. When she let them go, the balloons struggled against the necklace's weight at first, until a gust of wind buoyed their strength.

By the time she looked back at Zane, his board was rising, his arms outstretched unsteadily, like a littlie walking a balance beam. One Crim flew on either side of him, ready to help.

Shay let out a sigh. "This is going to be way too easy."

Tally didn't answer, keeping her eyes on Zane until he disappeared into the darkness.

"We better get moving," Shay said. Tally nodded. When the wardens came sniffing, they might think it was somewhat random to find a couple of Specials hanging around Zane's last known location.

The scales of her sneak suit shuddered through their little boot-up dance, and Tally pulled on her gloves, drawing the hood down over her face.

Within seconds, Tally and Shay were as perfectly black as the midnight sky above.

"Come on, Boss," she said. "Let's go find the Smoke."

Outside

Zane's escape went much easier than Tally had expected.

The rest of the Crims and their pretty allies must have been in on the trick—hundreds of them released their interface rings on toy balloons at the same time, filling the air with false signals. Another hundred or so uglies did the same. The wardens' channel was full of irritated chatter as they went around collecting rings and putting a halt to dozens of pranks. The authorities weren't in the mood for practical jokes after last night's attack.

Shay and Tally finally switched off the wardens' babble.

"Pretty icy so far," Shay said. "Your boyfriend should make a good Cutter."

Tally smiled, feeling relieved to have Zane's shakiness out of her sight. The excitement of the chase was beginning.

They followed the little group of Crims from a kilometer back, the eight figures so clear in infrared that Tally could tell Zane's glowing silhouette apart from the others'. She noticed that at least one of them always flew close to him, ready to lend a hand.

The runaways didn't speed up the river toward the Rusty Ruins, but made their unhurried way to the southern edge of the city. When they ran out of grid, they descended into the forest and hiked, carrying their hoverboards toward the same river that Tally and Shay had jumped into the night before.

"That's bubbly of them," Shay said. "Not taking the usual way out."

"Must be tough on Zane, though," Tally said. Hoverboards were heavy carrying without a grid beneath them.

"If you're going to worry about him this whole trip, Tally-wa, it's going to be extremely boring."

"Sorry, Boss."

"Relax, Tally. We won't let anything happen to your boy." Shay dropped into the pine trees. Tally stayed up high for another moment, watching the little group's slow progress. It would be an hour before they made the river and could use their boards again, but she was reluctant to lose sight of the runaways out here in the wild.

"A little early in the trip to burn your fans out, don't you think?" Shay's voice came from below, intimate in the skintenna network's feed.

Tally sighed softly, then let herself descend.

An hour later, they were sitting on the riverbank waiting for the Crims to catch up.

"Eleven," Shay said, tossing another rock. Spinning wildly, it skipped across the water as she counted aloud, finally sinking after the eleventh bounce.

"Hah! I win again!" Shay announced.

"No one else is playing, Shay-la."

"It's me against nature. Twelve." Shay threw again, the rock bouncing happily out into the middle of the river, dropping to the bottom after exactly twelve skips. "Victory is mine! Come on, you try."

"No thanks, Boss. Shouldn't we check on them again?"

Shay groaned. "They'll be here soon, Tally. They were almost at the river last time you checked, which was about five minutes ago."

"So why aren't they here yet?"

"Because they're resting, Tally. They're all tired after lugging their crappy boards through the forest." She smiled. "Or maybe they're cooking up a delicious feast of Spagbol."

Tally grimaced. She wished the two of them hadn't flown ahead. The whole point of this trick was to stay close to the runaways. "What if they went the other way? Rivers go two ways, you know?"

"Don't be so random, Tally-wa. Why would they head away from the ocean? Once you get past the mountains, there's nothing but desert for hundreds of kilometers. The Rusties called it Death Valley even before the weeds took over."

"But what if they arranged to meet the Smokies back there? We don't know how much contact the Crims have had with outsiders."

Shay sighed. "Fine. Go and check." She kicked at the dirt between her feet, trying to find another flat rock. "Just don't stay up too long. They might have infrared."

"Thanks, Boss." Tally stood, snapping for her board.

"Thirteen," Shay answered, and threw.

From up high, Tally could make out the runaways. As Shay had suspected, they were on the riverbank, unmoving, probably resting their feet. But as she tried to figure out which was Zane, Tally frowned.

Then she realized what was bothering her: There were nine glowing blobs of heat, not eight. Had they built a fire? Was some self-heating meal tricking her infrared?

She adjusted her vision to bring them into focus. The silhouettes sharpened until Tally was certain that all of them were human-size.

"Shay-la," she whispered. "They did meet someone."

"Already?" Shay answered from below. "Huh. I didn't think the Smokies would make it this easy."

"Unless it's another ambush," Tally said softly.

"Let them try. I'm coming up."

"Hang on, they're moving." The glowing forms were slipping out onto the river, headed toward her and Shay at hoverboard speed. But one remained behind, walking into the cover of the forest. "They're on their way here, Shay. Eight of them, anyway. Somebody's going the other direction."

"Okay, you follow that one. I'll stick with the Crims."

"But—"

"Don't argue with me, Tally. I won't lose your boyfriend. Just get moving, and don't let them see you."

"Okay, Boss." Tally dropped toward the river to let her hoverboard's fans cool. Zooming toward the approaching Crims, she booted her suit, pulling the hood over her face. Tally angled closer to the bank and its cover of overhanging plants, slowing almost to a halt.

Within a minute, the Crims shot past, unaware, and she recognized Zane's unsteady form among the others.

"Got them," Shay said a moment later. Her voice was already fading. "If we go off river, I'll leave a skintenna beacon for you."

"Okay, Boss." Tally leaned forward, heading toward the mysterious ninth figure.

"Be careful, Tally-wa. I don't want to lose two Cutters in the one week."

"No problem there," Tally said. She wanted to get back to following Zane, not get captured herself. "See you soon."

"Miss you already…," Shay said as her signal faded.

Tally's senses scanned the forests on either side of the river. The dark trees crowding the banks were full of infrared phantoms; small animals and nesting birds flashed past as random flickers of heat. But nothing human-size…

As Tally neared the spot where the Crims had met their mysterious friend, she slowed, crouching low on her board. She smiled, beginning to feel icy and excited. If this was another ambush, the Smokies were going to discover that they weren't the only ones who could turn invisible.

She glided to a halt on the muddy riverbank, stepping from her board and sending it into the sky to wait for her.

The spot where the Crims had stood was marked by a swarm of footprints. The smell of an unwashed human lingered in the air, someone who had been days or longer without a bath. That couldn't be one of the Crims, who'd smelled like recyclable clothes and nervousness.

Tally moved carefully into the trees, following the trail of scent.

Whoever she was following knew something about woodcraft. No broken branches marked a clumsy passage, and the undergrowth showed no telltale signs of footsteps. But the smell grew stronger as Tally moved ahead, enough to make her nose wrinkle. Running water or not, even Smokies didn't smell this bad.

A flicker of infrared glow came through the trees, a human form ahead of her. She paused a moment to listen, but hardly a sound carried through the forest: Whoever it was could move as silently as David.

Tally crept forward slowly, eyes scanning the ground for the subtle markers of a trail. Seconds later she found it—an almost invisible channel through the dense trees, the path that the figure was following.

Shay had warned her to be careful, and whoever this person was—Smokie or not—they wouldn't be easy to sneak up on. But perhaps one ambush deserved another…

Tally veered off the trail, running deeper into the forest. She moved silent and light-footed through the soft undergrowth, sweeping around her quarry in a slow arc until she found the trail again. Then she crept forward, ahead of them now, until she spotted a high tree branch that stretched directly over the path.

The perfect spot.

As she climbed, her suit-scales sprouted the rough texture of bark, its colors shifting into a dappled moonlit pattern. She clung to an overhanging branch, invisible and waiting, her heartbeat quickening.

The glowing figure came through the trees in total silence. There were no synthetic smells among those of unwashed humanity: no sunblock patches, insect repellent, or even a trace of soap or shampoo. As Tally flipped through vision overlays, she detected no signs of electronics or a heated jacket, and her ears didn't catch the slight buzz of night-vision goggles.

Not that equipment would help her quarry. Absolutely motionless in her sneak suit, hardly breathing, Tally was undetectable even to the best technology…

And yet, just as the figure passed below her, it slowed, cocking its head as if listening for something.

Tally held her breath. She knew she was invisible, but her heart beat faster, her senses amplifying the sounds of the forest around her. Was there someone else out here? Someone who'd spotted her climbing the tree? Phantoms flickered at the corners of her vision. Her body longed to act, not hide up here among the leaves and branches.

For a long moment, the figure didn't move. Then, very slowly, its head tipped back to gaze upward.

Tally didn't hesitate—she dropped, flattening her scales to night black armored mode, wrapping both arms around the figure, pinning its arms as she dragged it to the ground. This close, the unwashed smell was almost choking.

"I don't want to hurt you," she hissed through the suit's mask. "But I will if I have to."

The young man struggled for a moment, and Tally saw the flash of a metal knife in his hand. She squeezed harder, pushing the breath from his lungs with a cracking of ribs until the knife slipped from his fingers.

"Sayshal," he hissed.

His accent sent a shudder of recognition through Tally. Sayshal? She remembered that strange word from somewhere. She flipped off her infrared, pulled him to his feet, and pushed him backward, taking in his face in a stray beam of moonlight.

He was bearded and dirty-faced, his clothing nothing but strips of animal skins sewn crudely together. "I know you…," she said softly. When he didn't answer, Tally pulled off her hood, letting him see her face.

"Young Blood," he said, smiling. "You have changed."

Barbarian

His name was Andrew Simpson Smith, and Tally had met him before.

When she'd escaped the city back in her pretty days, she'd stumbled across a sort of reservation, an experiment maintained by the city's scientists. The people inside the reservation lived like pre-Rusties, wearing skins and using only Stone Age tools—clubs and sticks and fire. They inhabited small villages that were constantly at war with each other, an endless cycle of revenge killings for the scientists to study, like a purified layer of human violence squeezed between the halves of a petri dish.

The villagers didn't know about the rest of the world, or that every problem they faced—illness and hunger and bloodshed—had been solved by humanity centuries before. That is, they hadn't known until Tally had stumbled into one of their hunting parties, been mistaken for a god, and told a holy man named Andrew Simpson Smith all about it.

"How did you get out?" she asked.

He smiled proudly. "I crossed the edge of the world, Young Blood."

Tally raised an eyebrow. The reservation was bounded by "little men," dolls strung from the trees and armed with neural scramblers that caused terrific pain to anyone who got too close. The villagers were far too dangerous to be let loose into the real wild, so the city had given their world impassable borders.

"How did you manage that?"

Andrew Simpson Smith chuckled as he bent to pick up his knife, and Tally fought an urge to kick it from his hand. He had called her a Sayshal, the villagers' word for hated Specials. Of course, now that he'd seen her face, he remembered Tally as a friend, an ally against the gods of the city. He had no idea what her new lace of flash tattoos meant, no understanding that she had become one of the gods' feared enforcers.

"After you told me how much lay beyond the edge of the world, Young Blood, I began to wonder if the little men were afraid of anything."

"Afraid?"

"Yes. I tried many ways to scare them. Songs, spells. The skulls of bears."

"Um, they're not really men, Andrew. Just machines. They don't exactly get afraid."

His expression grew more serious. "But fire, Young Blood. I learned they fear fire."

"Fire?" Tally swallowed. "Um, Andrew, was this a really big fire, by any chance?"

His smile returned. "It burned many trees. When it was done, the little men had run away."

She groaned. "I think the little men were burned away, Andrew. So you're saying you started a forest fire?"

"Forest fire." He considered this for a moment. "Those are good words for it."

"Actually, Andrew, those are bad words. You're just lucky it's not summer, or that fire could've taken out your whole…world."

He smiled. "My world is bigger now, Young Blood."

"Yeah, but still…that wasn't what I had in mind."

Tally sighed. Her attempt to explain the real world to Andrew had resulted in massive destruction instead of enlightenment, and his fire had probably released several villages full of dangerous barbarians into the wild. There were Smokies and runaways and even campers from the city out here. "How long ago did you do this?"

"Twenty-seven days." He shook his head. "But the little men came back. New ones, who are not afraid of fire. I have been outside my old world ever since."

"But you've made some new friends, haven't you? City friends."

He looked at Tally suspiciously for a moment. He must have realized that if she'd seen him with the Crims, she had been following them. "Young Blood," he said cautiously. "By what fortune do we meet?"

Tally didn't answer right away. The concept of lies had hardly seemed to exist in Andrew's village, at least until Tally had explained the big lie they were all living in. But surely by now he was more wary of city people. She decided to choose her words carefully. "Those gods you just met, some of them are friends of mine."

"They are not gods, Tally. You taught me that."

"Right. Good for you, Andrew." She wondered what else he understood these days. He had grown more comfortable with the city's language, as if he'd been practicing a lot. "But how did you know they were coming? You didn't just run into them accidentally, did you?"

He looked at her warily for a moment, then shook his head. "No. They're running from the Sayshal, and I offered help. They are your friends?"

She chewed her lip. "One of them was … I mean, is…my boyfriend."

Comprehension spread across Andrew's face, and he let out a low chuckle. Reaching out one hand, he patted her shoulder roughly. "I see now. That's why you follow, making yourself as invisible as a Sayshal. A boyfriend."

Tally tried not to roll her eyes. If Andrew Simpson Smith wanted to think she was a jilted lover tagging along after the runaways, it was certainly simpler than explaining the truth. "So how did you know to meet them here?"

"After I found I could not go home, I set off to look for you, Young Blood."

"Me?" Tally asked.

"You were trying to get to the Rusty Ruins. You told me how far, and in what direction."

"And you made it there?"

Andrew's eyes widened as he nodded, a shiver passing through his frame. "A huge village, full of the dead."

"And met the Smokies there, didn't you?"

"The New Smoke Lives," he said gravely.

"Yeah, it sure does. And now you help runaways for them?"

"Not just me. The Smokies know how to fly above the little men. Others from my village have joined us. One day, we'll all be free."

"Well, that's great news," Tally said. The Smokies had really gone crazy now, letting a bunch of deadly savages out into the wild. Of course, the villagers would make useful allies. They knew woodcraft better than any city kids could ever hope to, probably even better than the oldest Smokies. They knew how to gather food on the trail and make clothes from natural materials, all the skills the cities had lost. And after generations of tribal warfare, they'd be experts in the art of ambush as well.

Andrew Simpson Smith had somehow sensed Tally overhead, even in her sneak suit. Instincts like that took a lifetime in the wilderness to hone.

"How did you help those runaways just now?"

He smiled proudly. "I gave them the way to the New Smoke."

"Great. Because, you see, I've sort of been out of the loop. And I was kind of hoping you'd help me out with that too."

He nodded. "Of course, Young Blood. Just speak the magic word."

Tally blinked. "A magic word? Andrew, it's me. I may not know any magic words, but I've been trying to get to the Smoke since you met me."

"True. But I've made a promise." He shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. "What happened to you, Young Blood, after you left? When I reached the ruins, I told the Smokies how you had appeared to us. They said the city had taken you away again. Had done things to you." He gestured at her face. "Is that another fashion statement?"

Tally sighed, looking into his eyes. He was just a random, and a particularly random random at that, with his uneven teeth and spotty, never-washed skin. But for some reason, she didn't want to lie to Andrew Simpson Smith. For one thing, it seemed way too easy, tricking someone who couldn't even read, who'd spent all but the last few weeks of his life trapped in an experiment.

"Your heart is beating fast, Young Blood."

Tally's hand went to her face, which was no doubt spinning. Andrew hadn't forgotten how flash tattoos revealed excitement and distress. Maybe it was pointless to lie to him. Instincts that could detect someone in a sneak suit were not to be underestimated.

She decided to tell the truth. The part that was important to her, anyway.

"Let me show you something, Andrew," she said, peeling off her right glove. She held out her palm, the short-circuited flash tattoos sputtering in time with her heartbeat in the moonlight. "See those two scars? They're marks of my love … for Zane."

He stared at her hand wide-eyed, nodding slowly "I've never seen scars on your people before. Your skin is always…perfect."

"Yeah. We only have scars if we want to, so they always mean something. These mean that I love Zane. He's the one who looked unwell, kind of shaky? I need to follow him, to make sure he's okay out here."

Andrew nodded slowly. "And he's too proud to accept the help of a woman?"

Tally shrugged. The villagers were pretty much Stone Age about the whole gender thing, too. "Well, let's just say he doesn't exactly want my help right now."

"I was not too proud when you taught me about the world." He smiled. "Maybe I'm smarter than Zane."

"Maybe you are." She made a fist with her bare hand. The ridges of scarring across her palm still felt stiff. "I'm asking you to break your promise, Andrew, and tell me where they're headed. I think I can cure Zane of his shakes. And I'm worried about him being out here with a bunch of city kids. They don't understand the wild like you and I do."

He still stared at her hand, thinking hard. Then his eyes raised to meet hers. "Without you, I'd still be trapped inside a false world. I want to trust you, Young Blood."

Tally forced herself to smile. "So you'll tell me where the New Smoke is?"

"I don't know. It's too big a secret for me. But I can give you a way." He reached into a pouch at his belt and withdrew a handful of tiny chips.

"Position-finders," Tally said softly. "With a route programmed in?"

"Yes. This one brought me here to meet these young runaways. And this one will lead you to the New Smoke. Do you know how it works?" Andrew's calloused, grubby forefinger hovered over the boot button of one of the finders, and there was an eager look on his face.

"Yeah, no problem. I've used them before." Tally smiled back at him, reaching for the device.

He pulled it away. She looked up, hoping she wouldn't have to take it by force.

His fist stayed closed. "Do you still challenge the gods, Young Blood?"

Tally frowned. Andrew knew that she had changed, but how much?

"Answer me," he said, his eyes bright in the moonlight.

She took a moment before answering. Andrew Simpson Smith wasn't like the non-Specials in the city, the blank-eyed mass of uglies and pretties. Living in the wild had made him more like her: a hunter, a warrior, a survivor. With the scars of a dozen fights and accidents, he almost looked like a Cutter.

Somehow, Tally didn't see Andrew as wallpaper. Whether or not she could deceive him, she realized now that she didn't want to.

"Do I still challenge the gods?" Tally thought of what she and Shay had done the night before, breaking into the city's most guarded facility and practically destroying it in the process. They had set off on their own without telling Dr. Cable their true plans. And this whole journey was, for Tally at least, more about fixing Zane than winning the city's war against the Smoke.

The Cutters might be Specials, but over the last few days Tally Youngblood had reverted to her own nature: thoroughly Crim.

"Yes. I still challenge them," she said softly, realizing that it was true.

"Good." He grinned, relieved, and handed her the position-finder. "Go then, follow your boyfriend. And tell the New Smoke that Andrew Simpson Smith was very helpful."

Split

As Tally made her way back down the river, she held the position-finder tightly in her scarred hand, thinking hard.

Once she told Shay about her encounter with Andrew Simpson Smith, the plan would change. With the finder the two of them could fly ahead of the slow-moving runaways, reaching the New Smoke long before Zane and his crew. By the time the Crims arrived, their destination would be a Special Circumstances encampment, full of imprisoned Smokies and recaptured runaways. Showing up after the rebellion had already been crushed wouldn't make Zane look very bubbly.

Worse, he'd be out here on his own for the rest of the trip, with only his Crim friends to help if something went seriously wrong. One bad fall from his hoverboard and Zane might not survive to see the New Smoke at all.

But how much would Shay care about all that? What she really wanted was to find the New Smoke, save Fausto, and get her revenge on David and the rest of them. Babysitting Zane wasn't her idea of an important mission goal.

Tally slowed to a stop, suddenly wishing she hadn't run into Andrew Simpson Smith at all.

Of course, Shay didn't know about the position-finder yet. Maybe she didn't need to know. If they stuck with the original plan, tracking the Crims the old-fashioned way, Tally could save the finder as a backup in case they lost the trail…

She opened her hand, looking down at the finder and at her scars, wishing for some of the clarity she'd felt the night before. She thought of drawing her knife, but remembered the expression on Zane's face as he stared at her scars.

It wasn't that she needed to cut herself, after all.

Tally closed her eyes, willing herself to think clearly.

Back in ugly days, Tally had always wimped out on decisions like this one. She'd always avoided any confrontation. That's how she'd wound up betraying the Old Smoke by accident, too afraid to tell anyone about the tracker she carried. And how she'd lost David, by never telling him she'd been a spy.

Lying to Shay now was what the old Tally would have done.

She took a deep breath. She was special now; she had clarity and strength. This time, she would tell Shay the truth.

Closing her fist, Tally urged her board forward again.

Ten kilometers upriver, her skintenna pinged as it picked up Shay's.

"I was getting worried about you, Tally-wa."

"Sorry, Boss. I ran into an old friend."

"Really? Anyone I know?"

"You never met him. Remember my campfire stories about the Restricted Experimental Area? The Smokies have started freeing the villagers and training them to help with runaways."

"That's crazy!" Shay paused. "But wait a second. You knew him? He was from the same village you stumbled into?"

"Yeah, and I'm afraid it's no coincidence, Shay-la. It's the holy man who helped me, remember? I told him where the Rusty Ruins were. He was the first to escape, and he's an honorary Smokey now."

Shay whistled in amazement. "Very random, Tally. So how was he supposed to help the Crims? Teach them to skin rabbits?"

"He's sort of a guide. Runaways give him a code word, and he gives them position-finders that lead you to the Smoke." She took a deep breath. "And for old times' sake, he gave me one too."

By the time Tally caught up with Shay, the Crims had made camp.

Tally watched from the darkness as one by one they made their way to the river's edge, dipping their purifiers into the silty water. She and Shay had hidden themselves downwind, and smells of self-heating food packs drifted from the runaways' camp. Tally vividly remembered all the tastes and textures from her own days in the wild, catching the scents of CurryNoods, PadThai, and the hated SpagBol on the breeze. Her ears picked up snatches of the Crims' still-excited chatter as they prepared to sleep the 'day' away.

"They did a good job on this thing—it won't tell me the final destination." Shay was playing with the position-finder. "It only gives you one waypoint at a time; it waits till you get there to give you the next one. We'll have to follow the whole path to find out where it ends." She snorted. "It'll probably take us the scenic route." Tally cleared her throat. "It won't be us, Shay-la." Shay looked up. "What's that, Tally?"

"I'm staying with the Crims. With Zane."

"Tally…that's a waste of time. We can travel twice as fast as they can."

"I know." She turned to face Shay. "But I'm not going to leave Zane out here with a bunch of city kids. Not in his condition."

Shay groaned. "Tally-wa, you're so pathetic. Don't you have any faith in him? Don't you keep telling me how special he is?"

"It's not about being special. This is the wild, Shay-la. Anything can happen: accidents, dangerous animals, his condition getting worse. You go ahead alone. Or call the rest of the Cutters—you won't have to worry about getting spotted, after all. But I'm staying close to Zane."

Shay's eyes narrowed. "Tally…this is not your choice. I'm giving you an order."

"After what we did last night?" Tally let out a choked laugh. "It's a little late to lecture me about the chain of command, Shay-la."

"This isn't about the chain of command, Tally!" Shay cried. "This is about the Cutters. About Fausto. You're choosing those bubbleheads over us?"

Tally shook her head. "I'm choosing Zane."

"But you have, to come with me. You promised you'd stop making trouble!"

"Shay, I promised that if they made Zane special, I'd stop trying to change things. And I'll keep that promise, once he's a Cutter. But until then …" Tally tried to smile. "What are you going to do? Report me to Dr. Cable?"

Shay let out a long hiss. Her hands were curled into fighting position, her teeth bared to show their points. She jerked her chin at the runaways. "What I'm going to do, Tally-wa, is go over there and tell Zane that he's a joke, a dupe, and that you've been tricking him—laughing at him. Let him run home scared while we end the Smoke forever, and see if he ever becomes a Special then!"

Tally clenched her own fists, holding Shay's gaze. Zane had already paid enough for her lack of courage; she had to stand her ground this time. Her mind spun for an answer to Shay's threat.

A moment later she saw it, and shook her head. "You can't do that, Shay-la. You don't know where that finder leads. It could take you to another test of some kind—not some barbarian, but a Smokey who'll know what you are, and who won't give you the next set of directions." Tally gestured at the runaways. "One of us has to stay with them. Just in case."

Shay spat on the ground. "You don't give a damn about Fausto, do you? He's probably being experimented on right now, and you want to waste time tracking these bubbleheads!"

"I know that Fausto needs you, Shay. I'm not asking you to stay with me." She spread her hands. "One of us has to go ahead, and the other stay with the Crims. It's the only way."

Shay made another hissing sound and stalked away to the river's edge. She yanked a flat stone from the mud and hoisted it, ready to throw it out across the water.

"Shay-la, they might see," Tally whispered. Shay paused, her arm still cocked. "Look, I'm sorry about this, but I'm not being totally random, am I?"

Shay's response was to stare at the stone for a moment, then drop it back into the mud and draw her knife. She began to roll up the arm of her sneak suit.

Tally turned away, hoping that once her mind was clear, Shay would understand.

She watched the runaway camp, where everyone was eating carefully, apparently having realized that self-heating meals could burn their tongues. That was the first lesson everyone got out in the wild: Nothing could be trusted, not even your own dinner. It wasn't like the city, where every sharp corner had been rounded off, every balcony equipped with a resistance field in case you fell, and where the food never came boiling hot.

She couldn't leave Zane out here alone, even if staying with him made Shay hate her.

A moment later, Tally heard Shay standing up, and turned to face her. Her arm was bleeding, her flash tattoos in dizzying motion, and as she approached, Tally saw the telltale sharpness of her eyes.

"All right. We split up," she said. Tally tried to smile, but Shay shook her head. "Don't you dare get happy about this, Tally-wa. I thought making you into a Special would change you. I thought if you could see the world clearly, you'd think about yourself a little less. It wouldn't just be you and your latest boyfriend; I thought you might let something else matter every once in a while."

"I care about the Cutters, Shay, honest. I care about you."

"You did until Zane reappeared. Now, nothing else matters." She shook her head in disgust. "And I've been trying so hard to please you, to make this work for you. But it's pointless."

Tally swallowed. "But we have to split up—it's the only safe way to make sure the finder works."

"I know that, Tally-wa. I can see your logic." Shay looked at the runaways, disgust all over her wildly spinning face. "But answer me this: Did you think it all through and then realize we should split up? Or had you already decided to stick with Zane, no matter what?" Tally opened her mouth, then closed it. "Don't bother lying, Tally-wa. We both know the answer." Shay snorted, turned away, and snapped her fingers for her hoverboard. "I really thought you'd changed. But you're still the same self-centered little ugly you've always been. That's what's amazing about you, Tally—even Dr. Cable and her surgeons don't stand a chance against your ego."

Tally felt her hands begin to tremble. She had expected an argument, but not this. "Shay…"

"You're even a failure as a Special, always worrying about everything. Why can't you just be icy?"

"I always tried to do what you—"

"Well you can stop trying now." Shay reached into the storage compartment of her board and pulled out medspray, giving her bleeding arm a long squirt. Then she pulled out a few more sealed packages, tossing them into the mud at Tally's feet. "Here's a pack of smart plastic, if you have to go undercover. A couple of skintenna beacons and a satellite booster." She let out a bitter laugh, her voice still quivering with contempt. "I'll even give you one of my leftover grenades. Just in case something big gets between you and shaky-boy."

The grenade dropped to the ground with a thud, and Tally flinched.

"Shay, why are you—"

"Stop talking to me." The order silenced Tally who could only stare as Shay rolled her sneak suit down her arm and drew its hood over her face, replacing her furious expression with a mask of midnight darkness. Her voice came distorted through the mask. "I'm not waiting around any longer. Fausto's my responsibility, not that pack of bubbleheads."

Tally swallowed. "I hope he's okay."

"I'm sure you do." Shay leaped onto her board. "But I'm all done with caring what you hope or think, Tally-wa. Forever."

Tally tried to speak, but Shay's last word had come out so coldly that she couldn't.

Shay rose into the sky, her silhouette barely visible against the dark trees on the other bank. She slipped out over the river, then shot into the blackness, disappearing instantly, like something winking out of existence.

But Tally could still hear her breathing through the skintenna link. It sounded harsh and angry as it began to fade, as if Shay's teeth were still bared in hatred and disgust. Tally tried to think of one more thing to say, something that would explain why she had to do this. Staying with Zane was more important than being a Cutter, more important than any promise she'd ever made.

This decision was about who Tally Youngblood was inside, whether ugly or pretty or special…

But a moment later Shay was out of range, and Tally still hadn't said a word. She found herself alone and in hiding, waiting for the Crims to fall asleep.

Incompetence

The Crims tried to build a fire, and failed.

All they managed to do was set a few wet branches smoldering, the angry hiss so loud that Tally could hear it from her hiding place. They never got a real blaze going, and the pile was still sputtering desultorily as dawn began to break. That's when the Crims noticed the dark column of smoke rising into the lightening sky, and tried to put it out. They wound up dumping handfuls of mud on the half-alive fire. By the time they had it under control, their city clothes looked like they'd been sleeping rough for a week.

Tally sighed, imagining Shay's chuckle as they struggled with the simplest things. At least they had realized that it was smarter to sleep during the day and travel at night.

As the runaways wrestled their way into sleeping bags, Tally allowed herself to fall into catnap mode. Specials didn't need much sleep, but she could still feel the Armory break-in and the long hike afterward in her muscles. The Crims would be bone tired after their first night in the wild, so now was probably the best time to catch up on her rest. Without Shay along to trade watches with, Tally might have to stay alert for days at a time.

She sat with her legs crossed, facing the runaway camp and setting her internal software to ping every ten minutes. But sleep didn't come easily. Her eyes burned with unshed tears from the fight with Shay. Accusations still echoed in her mind, making the world fuzzy and distant. She took slow, deep breaths, until finally her eyes fell closed…

Ping. Ten minutes already.

Tally checked the Crims, who hadn't moved, then tried to fall asleep again.

Specials were designed to sleep this way, but being roused every ten minutes still did weird things to time. As if Tally was watching a fast-motion video of the day, the sun seemed to rise quickly into the sky, the shadows shifting around her like living things. The soft sounds of the river blurred into a single droning note, and her mind drifted uneasily between worry for Zane and dejection about the fight. It seemed like no matter what happened, Shay was destined to hate her. Or maybe Shay had been right, and Tally Youngblood had a talent for betraying her friends…

When the sun was almost at its peak, Tally awakened not from the sound of a ping, but from a blinding flash hitting her eyes. She jolted upright, hands curled in fighting position.

The light was coming from the Crims' camp. As she rose, it winked out again.

Tally relaxed. It was only the runaways' solar-powered hoverboards spread out across the riverbank to recharge. As the sun moved across the sky, it had caught the reflective cells at just the right angle to shine in Tally's eyes.

Watching the boards sparkle, Tally felt uneasy. After only a few hours on board, the runaways didn't really need to recharge yet—they should be a lot more worried about staying invisible.

Shielding her eyes, Tally looked up. To any passing hovercar, the unfurled boards would glitter like a distress beacon. Didn't the Crims realize how close to the city they were? Their few hours of boarding had probably seemed like an eternity to them, but they were still practically on the doorstep of civilization.

Tally felt another a wave of shame. She had disobeyed Shay and betrayed Fausto to babysit these bubbleheads?

She opened her skintenna to the city's official channels, and instantly picked up chatter coming from a warden's car on a slow, lazy patrol along the river. The city had realized by now that last night's pranks had been diversions for yet another escape. All the obvious routes away from the city— rivers and old rail lines—would be under scrutiny. If the wardens spotted the unfurled hoverboards, Zane's escape would come to an ignominious end, and Tally would have gone against Shay for nothing.

She wondered how to get the Crims' attention without revealing herself. She could throw a few rocks, hoping to wake them up with a convincingly random noise, but they probably didn't have a city-band radio with them. The runaways wouldn't recognize the danger they were in—they'd just go back to sleep.

Tally sighed. She was going to have to fix this herself.

Pulling her hood down, she took a few steps to the riverbank and slipped into the water. The sneak suit's scales began to undulate as she swam, mimicking the ripples around her and turning as reflective as the slow, glassy river.

Closer to the camp, the smell of extinguished fire and discarded food packs met her nostrils. Tally took a deep breath and submerged completely, swimming underwater until she reached the riverbank.

She belly-crawled up from the water, raising her head slowly, letting the suit adjust itself to every change around her. It turned brown and soft, scales burrowing into the mud and pushing her along like a slug.

The Crims were asleep, but buzzing flies and the occasional stir of wind brought soft murmurs from them. New pretties might have lots of practice sleeping until noon, but never on hard ground. The slightest noise could bring them all awake.

Their camo-mottled sleeping bags would be invisible from the air, at least. But the unfurled boards only shone brighter as the sun climbed, eight of them crowding the riverbank. Wind tugged at the corners, which were weighted with stones and clumps of mud, making them flash like glitterbombs.

To recharge a hoverboard, you pulled it apart like a paper doll, exposing the maximum surface area to the sun. Fully unfurled, they were as thin and light as kite plastic, and a gust of wind might carry them into the trees—at least, if the Crims woke up and found their boards moved into the forest, they might believe that was what had happened.

Tally crawled to the nearest board and plucked the rocks from its corners. Rising slowly to her feet, she dragged it into the shade. After a few minutes' work, she had it wedged between two trees in a way that she hoped looked random, but was secure enough that the wind wouldn't carry it away for good.

Only seven more to go.

The work was excruciatingly slow. Tally had to consider every step she took among the sleeping bodies, and every accidental sound made her heart flutter. All the while she half-listened to the warden's car approaching on her skintenna feed.

Finally, the last of the eight hoverboards had been carefully dragged into the shade. They were tangled together, like crumpled umbrellas after a windstorm, the bright solar arrays turned facedown in the brush.

Before slipping back into the river, Tally stood for a moment regarding Zane. Asleep, he looked more like his old self; the random shakes didn't trouble him in unconsciousness. Without his thoughts traveling across his face, he looked smarter, almost special. She imagined his eyes sharpened to cruel-pretty angles, and let her mind trace lacework flash tattoos across his face. Tally smiled and turned, taking a step back toward the river…

Then she heard a sound, and froze.

It was a soft, sudden intake of breath, a noise of surprise. She waited motionless, hoping it had been a nightmare, and that the breathing would settle back into sleep. But her senses told her that someone was awake.

Finally she turned her head with excruciating slowness to look over her shoulder.

It was Zane.

His eyes were open, sleepy and squinting in the sunlight. He stared straight at her, dazed and half-asleep, unsure if she was real.

Tally stood absolutely still, but the sneak suit didn't have much to work with. It might show a blurry version of the water behind Tally, but in broad daylight Zane would still see a transparent humanoid figure, like a statue of solid glass standing half in the river. To make things worse, mud still clung to the suit, clods of brown hovering against the background.

He rubbed his eyes and looked around the empty riverbank, realizing that the hoverboards were missing. Then he looked up at her again, a puzzled expression still on his face.

Tally remained motionless, hoping that Zane would decide this was nothing but a strange dream.

"Hey," he said softly. His voice came out croaking, and he cleared his throat to speak louder.

Tally didn't let him. She took three swift steps through the mud, whisking off one glove, flicking out the stinger from her ring.

As the tiny needle plunged into his throat, Zane managed to let out a soft and startled cry, but then his eyes rolled back up into his head and he sank back to the ground, fast asleep again. He began to snore softly.

"Just a dream," Tally whispered into his ear. Then she lowered herself onto her belly and slithered back into the river.

Half an hour later, the warden's hovercar passed, moving from side to side like a lazy snake. It didn't spot the Crims, never pausing for a moment in the sky.

Tally stayed close to the camp, hidden in a tree about ten meters away from Zane, her sneak suit prickly with the texture of pine needles.

As the afternoon wore on, the Crims started to wake up. No one appeared to worry too much about the windblown hoverboards, just dragged them back out into the sunlight and went on with the process of breaking camp.

As she watched, the runaways wandered off into the woods to pee, cooked themselves meals, or took quick swims in the cold river, trying to clean off the mud and sweat of travel and the general greasiness of sleeping rough.

All except Zane. He stayed unconscious longer than the rest, the knockout drugs slowly working their way through his system. He didn't wake up until the sun was setting, when Peris finally leaned over him to give him a shake.

Zane sat up slowly, holding his head in his hands, the perfect picture of a pretty with a bad hangover. Tally wondered what he remembered. Peris and the others so far believed the wind had moved their hoverboards, but they might change their minds after hearing about Zane’s little dream.

Peris and Zane huddled together for a while, and Tally slid slowly around her tree, gaining a vantage where she could almost read their lips. Peris seemed to be asking if Zane was all right. New pretties hardly ever got sick—the operation made them too healthy for trivial infections—but with his condition and all …

Zane shook his head and gestured down at the riverbank, where the hoverboards were soaking up the last rays of sun. Peris pointed toward the spot where Tally had arranged them. The two walked over to it, coming alarmingly close to where Tally clung to her tree. The expression on Zane's face looked unconvinced. He knew that at least one part of his dream—the missing boards— had been real.

After a few long, tense minutes, Peris returned to packing up camp. But Zane stayed, sweeping his gaze slowly around the horizon. Even invisible in her suit, Tally flinched as his eyes slid past her hiding place.

He wasn't certain of anything, but Zane suspected what he'd seen had been more than a dream.

Tally would have to be very careful from now on.

Invisible

Over the next few days, Tally's pursuit of the Crims fell into a steady rhythm.

The runaways stayed up later each night, their random bodies slowly adjusting to traveling in darkness and sleeping during the day. Soon they managed to ride all night, making camp only when the first rays of dawn broke on the horizon.

Andrew's position-finder was leading them south. They followed the river to the ocean, then hopped onto the rusting rails of an old high-speed train line. Someone had made the coastal tracks safe for hoverboarding, Tally noticed, with no dangerous gaps in the magnetic field. Wherever the line was broken, buried metal cables kept the Crims from crashing. They never even had to hike.

She wondered how many other runaways had used this path, and from how many other cities David and his allies were recruiting.

The New Smoke was certainly farther away than she'd expected. David's parents were originally from Tally's city, and he had always hidden within a few days' travel of home. But Andrew's position-finder had led them halfway to the southern continent, the days visibly growing longer and the nights warmer as they headed south.

As the coast began to rise into high cliffs, the waves crashing far below faded to a dull roar, and tall grasses choked the ancient train tracks. In the distance huge fields of the white weed glimmered in the sun. The weed was a form of engineered orchid that some Rusty scientist had let loose upon the world. It grew everywhere, leeching the ground of nutrients and choking whole forests in its path. But something about the ocean, perhaps the salt air, kept it away from the coast.

The Crims seemed to grow used to the routine of travel. Their hoverboarding skills improved, though following them was never a challenge. The steady practice didn't hurt Zane's coordination, but compared to the others he was still unsteady on his board.

Shay had to be getting farther ahead every hour. Tally wondered if the rest of the Cutters had joined her. Or was she being cautious and traveling alone, waiting until she'd found the New Smoke before calling in reinforcements?

Every day that the Crims didn't reach their goal, it became more likely that Special Circumstances was already there, and that their entire journey was a cruel joke, just like Shay had said.

Traveling alone gave Tally a lot of time to think, and she spent most of it wondering if she really was the self-centered monster Shay had described. It didn't seem fair. When had she even had a chance to be selfish? Ever since Dr. Cable had recruited her, other people had made most of Tally's choices for her. Someone was always forcing her to join their side in the conflict between the Smokies and the city. Her only real decisions so far had been staying ugly in the Old Smoke (which hadn't worked out at all), escaping from New Pretty Town with Zane (ditto), and splitting up with Shay to protect Zane (not great so far). Everything else had happened because of threats, accidents, lesions in her brain, and surgery changing her mind for her. Not exactly her fault.

And yet she and Shay always seemed to wind up on opposite sides. Was that a coincidence? Or was there something about the two of them that always turned them from friends into enemies? Maybe they were like two different species—hawks and rabbits, say—and could never be allies. So who was the hawk? Tally wondered. Out here alone, she felt herself changing again. Somehow the wild made her feel less special. She still saw the world's icy beauty, but something was missing: the sounds of the other Cutters around her, the intimacy of their breathing in the skintenna network. She began to realize that being a Special wasn't just about strength and speed; it was about being part of a group, a clique. Back at camp Tally had felt connected to the others—always reminded of the powers and privileges they shared, and of the sights and smells only their superhuman senses could detect.

Among the Cutters, Tally had always felt special. But now that she was alone in the wild, her perfect vision only made her feel minuscule. In all its glorious detail, the natural world seemed big enough to swallow her.

The distant group of runaways weren't impressed or terrorized by her wolflike face and razor fingernails. How could they be when they never even glimpsed her? She was invisible, an outcast fading away.

She was almost relieved when the Crims made their second mistake.

They'd stopped to make camp on one side of a tall rocky outcrop, protected from the wind coming off the ocean. The weeds were close here, glowing softly as the sun rose, turning the inland hills as white as sand dunes.

The Crims unfurled their boards and weighted them down, made a halfway competent fire and ate their meals. Tally watched them drop off to sleep with their usual speed, exhausted from a long day of travel.

This far from the city, she no longer had to worry about the boards being spotted. Her skintenna hadn't picked up traffic from the wardens for days. But as she settled in for a long day of watching, Tally noticed that one of the boards— Zane's—had been left out in the ocean breeze whipping around the outcrop.

The board fluttered, and one of the stones weighting its corners rolled off.

Tally sighed—after a week on the trail, the runaways still hadn't learned to do this right—but inside she felt a ping of eagerness. Fixing this would give her something to do, at least, and maybe make her feel less insignificant. For those few moments she wouldn't be completely alone. She would hear the breathing of the sleeping Crims and take a closer look at Zane. Seeing him still and asleep, untroubled by his shaking, always reminded Tally of why she had made the choices she had.

She crawled toward the camp, her sneak suit turning the color of the dirt. The sun was rising behind her, but this would be much easier than the riverbank, where all eight boards had gone astray. Zane's hoverboard was still fluttering, another corner having freed itself, but it hadn't leaped into the air just yet. Perhaps its magnetics had found purchase with some underground vein of iron, and were dutifully holding it down.

When Tally reached the board, it was flapping like a wounded bird, the breeze swirling around it smelling of seaweed and salt. Strangely, someone had left an old leather-bound book open next to the hoverboard. Its pages snapped noisily in the wind.

Tally squinted. It looked like the one that Zane had been reading, that first night she'd seen him back from the hospital.

Another corner of the board slipped free, and Tally raised a hand to snatch it before the wind pulled it away.

But the hoverboard didn't budge.

Something was wrong here…

Then Tally saw why it wasn't moving. The fourth corner was tied to a stake, secured against the wind, as if whoever had placed it out here in the breeze had known the stone weights would fail.

Then she heard something over the fluttering pages of the book—the stupid, noisy book that had obviously been left here to cover other sounds. One of the Crims was breathing less evenly than the others…someone was awake.

She turned and saw Zane watching her.

Tally jumped to her feet, whipping off her glove and flicking out her stinger in one motion. But Zane raised one hand: It held a collection of metal stakes and firestarters. Even if Tally somehow made it those five meters and stung him, all that metal would fall clattering to the ground, waking the rest of them.

But why hadn't he just cried out? She tensed, waiting for him to raise an alarm, but instead he lifted a finger slowly to his lips.

His sly expression said, I won't tell if you don't.

Tally swallowed, scanning the other Crims in the darkness. None of them watched through slitted eyes; they were all fast asleep. He wanted to talk to her alone. She nodded, her heart beating fast.

The two crept out of the camp and around the outcrop, to where the breeze and crash of waves would cloak their words in a steady roar. Now that Zane was moving, his trembling had started again. As he settled himself next to her in the scrubby grass, Tally didn't look at his face. She already felt revulsion threatening to rise up inside her.

"Do the others know about me?" she asked.

"No. I wasn't sure myself. Thought I was imagining things." He touched her shoulder. "I'm glad I wasn't."

"Can't believe I fell for that stupid trick."

He chuckled. "Sorry to take advantage of your better nature."

"My what?"

In the corner of her eye, Tally saw him smile. "You were protecting us that first day, weren't you? Moving the hoverboards out of sight?"

"Yeah. A warden was about to spot you. Bubbleheads."

"Thought so. That's why I figured you'd help out again. Our own personal protector."

Tally swallowed. "Yeah, great. It's nice to be appreciated."

"So is it just you?"

"Yeah, I'm all alone." It was true now, after all.

"You're not supposed to be out here, are you?"

"You mean am I disobeying orders? Afraid so."

Zane nodded. "I knew you and Shay had some trick up your sleeves, letting me go. I mean, you didn't really expect me to use that tracker." He reached out and took her arm, his fingers pale against the dull gray of the sneak suit. "But how are you following us, Tally? It's not something inside me, is it?"

"No, Zane. You're clean. I'm just staying close, watching you every minute. Eight city kids in the wild aren't very hard to spot, after all." She shrugged, still staring out into the crashing waves. "I can smell you too."

"Oh." He laughed. "Not too bad yet, I hope."

She shook her head. "I've been in the wild before, Zane. I've smelled worse. But why didn't you … ?" She turned toward him but lowered her gaze, focusing on the zipper of his jacket. "You set a trap for me, but didn't mention it to the other Crims?"

"I didn't want to panic everybody." Zane shrugged. "If a whole bunch of Specials were following us, there wasn't much they could do about it. And if it was just you, I didn't want the others to know. They wouldn't understand."

"Understand what?" Tally said softly.

"That this whole trip wasn't a trap," he continued. "That it was just you. Protecting us."

She swallowed—of course, it had been a trap. But what was it now? Just a joke? A pointless waste of time? Shay, Dr. Cable, and the rest of Special Circumstances were probably already waiting for them at the Smoke.

He squeezed her arm. "It's changing you again, isn't it?"

"What is?"

"The wild. That's what you always said—traveling to the Smoke that first time, it's what made you what you are."

Tally turned away to stare out at the ocean, tasting its salt in her mouth. Zane was right—the wild was changing her again. Every time she crossed the wilderness alone, the beliefs the city had instilled in her were shaken up. But this time around, Tally's realizations weren't making her particularly happy. "I'm not sure what I am anymore, Zane. Sometimes I think I'm nothing but what other people have done to me—a big collection of brainwashing, surgeries, and cures." She looked down at her scarred hand, the tattoos flickering brokenly across her palm. "That, and all the mistakes I've made. All the people I've disappointed."

He traced the scar with a quivering fingertip; she closed her hand and looked away. "If that were true, Tally, you wouldn't be out here now. Disobeying orders."

"Yeah, well, I'm pretty good at the disobeying part."

"Look at me, Tally."

"Zane, I'm not sure if that's a good idea." She swallowed. "You see …"

"I know. I saw your face that night. I've noticed how you haven't looked at me. It makes perfect sense that Dr. Cable would pull something like that—Specials think everyone else is worthless, right?"

Tally shrugged, not wanting to explain that it was worse with Zane than anyone else. Partly because of the way she'd felt about him before, the contrast between now and then. And partly … the other thing.

"Try, Tally," he said.

She turned away, almost wishing for a moment that she wasn't special, that her eyes weren't so perfectly tuned to capture every detail of his infirmity That her mind hadn't been turned against everything random and average and…crippled.

"I can't, Zane."

"Yes you can."

"What? So you're an expert on Specials now?"

"No. But remember David?"

"David?" She glared at the sea. "What about him?"

"Didn't he once tell you that you were beautiful?"

A chill went through her. "Yeah, back in ugly days. But how did you … ?" Then Tally remembered their last escape, how Zane had gotten to the Rusty Ruins a week before her. He and David had had plenty of time to get to know each other before she'd finally shown up. "He told you about that?"

Zane shrugged. "He'd seen how pretty I was. And I guess he was hoping that you could still see him, the way you had back in the Old Smoke."

Tally shuddered, a rush of old memories sweeping through her: that night two operations ago when David had looked at her ugly face—thin lips and frizzy hair and squashed-down nose—and said that she was beautiful. She'd tried to explain how it couldn't be true, how biology wouldn't let it be true…

But still he'd called her beautiful, even when she was ugly.

That was the moment that Tally's whole world had started to unravel. That was the first time she'd switched sides.

She felt an unexpected ping of pity for poor, random-faced David. Raised a Smokey, he'd never had the operation, hadn't even seen any city pretties back then. So of course he might think that ugly Tally Youngblood would be okay to look at.

But after she'd been turned pretty, Tally had given herself up to Dr. Cable just to stay with Zane, and had pushed David away.

"That's not why I chose you, Zane. Not because of your face. It's because of what you and I did together—how we freed ourselves. You know that, right?"

"Of course. So what's wrong with you now?"

"What do you mean?"

"Listen, Tally. When David saw how beautiful you were, he took on five million years of evolution. He saw past your imperfect skin and asymmetry and everything else our genes select against." Zane held out his hand. "And now you can't even look at me just because I'm shaking a little?"

She stared at his sickening, quivering fingers. "It's worse than being a bubblehead, Zane. Bubbleheads are just clueless, but Specials are … single-minded about some things. But at least I'm trying to fix the situation. Why do you think I'm out here following you?"

"You want to take me back to the city, don't you?"

She groaned. "What's the alternative? Having Maddy try one of her half-baked cures?"

"The alternative is inside you, Tally. This isn't about my brain damage; it's about yours." He slid closer, and she closed her eyes. "You freed yourself once before. You beat the pretty lesions. In the beginning, all it took was a kiss."

She felt the heat of his body next to her, smelled the campfire smoke on his skin. She turned away, eyes still shut tight. "But it's different being special—it isn't just some little piece of my brain. It's my whole body. It's the way I see the world."

"Right. You're so special no one can touch you."

"Zane …"

"You're so special you have to cut yourself just to feel anything."

She shook her head. "I don't do that anymore."

"So you can change!"

"But that doesn't mean …" She opened her eyes.

Zane's face was centimeters from hers, his gaze intense. And somehow the wild had changed him, too—his eyes no longer looked watery and average to her. His stare was almost icy.

Almost special.

She leaned closer…and their lips met, warm in the chill of the outcrop's shadow. The roar of the waves filled her ears, drowning out her nervous heartbeat.

She slid closer, hands pushing inside his clothes. She wanted to be out of the sneak suit, no longer alone, no longer invisible. Arms around him, she squeezed tight, hearing his breath catch as her lethal hands gripped harder. Her senses brought her everything about him: his heart pulsing softly in his throat, the taste of his mouth, the unwashed scent of him cut by the salt spray.

But then his fingers brushed her cheek, and Tally felt their trembling.

No, she said silently.

The tremors were soft, almost nothing, as faint as the echoes of rain falling a kilometer away. But they were everywhere, on the skin of his face, in the muscles of his arms around her, in his lips against hers—his whole body shivering like a littlie's in the cold. And suddenly Tally could see inside him: his damaged nervous system, the corrupted connections between body and brain.

She tried to blot the image from her mind, but it only grew clearer. She was designed to spot weaknesses, after all, to take advantage of the frailties and flaws of randoms. Not ignore them.

Tally tried to pull away a little, but Zane's grip on her arm tightened, as if he thought he could hold her there. She broke the kiss and opened her eyes, glaring down at the pale fingers grasping her, a sudden, unstoppable flash of anger rising.

"Tally, wait," he said. "We can—"

But he hadn't let go. Rage and disgust filled her, and Tally sent a flutter of razor spines rolling across her sneak suit. Zane cried out and pulled back, his fingers and palms bleeding.

She rolled away, springing to her feet and running. She'd kissed him, let herself be touched by him—someone unspecial and barely average. Someone crippled…

Bile rose in her throat, as if the memory of kissing him was trying to tear itself free of her body. She stumbled and fell to one knee, her stomach heaving, the world spinning.

"Tally!" He was coming after her.

"Don't!" She raised one hand, not daring to look up at him. Breathing in the cold, pure sea air, the nausea was beginning to pass. But not if he got any closer.

"Are you okay?"

"Does it look like I'm okay?" A wave of shame whipped through Tally. What had she done? "I just can't, Zane."

She pulled herself up and ran toward the ocean, away from him. The outcrop ended on a chalky cliff, but Tally didn't slow down…

She jumped, barely clearing the rocks below, hitting the waves with a slap, diving down into the icy embrace of the water. The churning ocean spun her around, almost dumping her back on the jagged shore, but Tally pulled herself deeper with a few powerful strokes, until her hands brushed the dark and sandy bottom. The roiling water began to fall back, shifting into a riptide around her. It pulled Tally outward, rumbling in her ears, erasing her thoughts.

She held her breath, letting the ocean claim her.

A minute later Tally let herself break the surface, gasping for air. She was half a kilometer from where she'd started, well offshore and being carried south by the current.

Zane was at the cliff's edge, scanning the water for her, his bleeding hands wrapped in his jacket. After what she'd done, Tally couldn't face him, didn't even want to be seen by him. She wanted to disappear.

She drew down her hood and let the suit take on the rippling silver of the water, let herself be pulled farther away.

Finally, when he'd gone back to camp, Tally swam toward shore.

Bones

After that, the journey seemed to take forever.

Some days, she became convinced the position-finder was nothing but a Smokey trick leading them around the wild forever: crippled Zane struggling to make it through the long nights of travel; psycho Tally alone inside her sneak suit, detached and invisible. Both of them in separate hells.

She wondered how Zane felt about her now. After what had happened, he must have realized how weak she really was: Dr. Cable's feared fighting machine undone by a kiss, sickened by something as simple as a quivering hand.

The memory of it made her want to cut herself, to tear at her own flesh until she had become something different inside. Something less special, more human. But she didn't want to go back to cutting after telling Zane she'd stopped. It would be like breaking a promise to him.

Tally wondered if he'd told the other Crims about her. Were they already planning something—a way to ambush Tally and turn her over to the Smokies? Or would they try to escape, leaving her behind, alone in the wild forever?

She imagined sneaking into camp again while the others were sleeping, and telling Zane how bad she felt. But she couldn't bear to face him. She might have gone too far this time, almost throwing up in his face, not to mention cutting up his hands.

Shay had already given up on her. What if Zane also decided he'd had enough of Tally Youngblood?

Toward the end of two weeks, the Crims came to a halt on a cliff that jutted out high above the sea.

Tally glanced up at the stars. It was well before dawn, and the rail line stretched before them unbroken. But the runaways all jumped from their boards and gathered around Zane, looking down at something in his hand.

The position-finder.

Tally watched and waited, hovering just below the edge of the sea cliff, lifting fans keeping her aloft above the crashing waves. After a few long minutes, she saw camp fire smoke; it was clear the Crims weren't going any farther tonight. She drifted closer and pulled herself onto the cliff.

Circling around in the high grass, she made her way closer to the encampment. Flares of infrared erupted as the Crims heated their meals.

Finally, Tally reached a spot where the wind carried sounds and the smell of city food to her.

"What do we do if no one comes?" one of the girls was saying.

Zane's voice answered. "They'll come."

"How long?"

"I don't know. But there's nothing else we can do."

The girl started talking about their water supply, and the fact that they hadn't seen a river for the last two nights.

Tally sank back into the grass, relieved—the position-finder had told them to stop here. This wasn't the New Smoke, obviously, but perhaps this awful journey was coming to an end soon.

She looked around, sniffing the air, wondering what was special about this place. Among the scents of self-heating meals, Tally smelled something that made her skin crawl…something rotten.

She crawled toward the scent through the high grass, eyes sweeping the ground. The stench grew and grew, finally so strong it almost made her gag. A hundred meters from the camp she found the source: a pile of dead fish, heads and tails and picked-clean spines with flies and maggots crawling all over them.

Tally swallowed, telling herself to stay icy as she searched the area around the pile. In a small clearing, she discovered the remains of an old campfire. The charred wood was cold, the ash all blown away, but someone had camped here. Many people, in fact.

The lifeless fire was in a deep pit, banked against the sea breeze, and built to give off heat efficiently Like all city pretties, the Crims always optimized their fires for light instead of heat, burning through wood carelessly. But this fire had been made by practiced hands.

Tally glimpsed something white among the ashes, and reached in to gently draw it out…

It was a bone, about as long as her hand. She couldn't tell what species it belonged to, but it was marked with small depressions where human teeth had gnawed into the marrow.

Tally couldn't imagine city kids eating meat after only a couple of weeks in the wild. Even the Smokies rarely hunted for food—they raised rabbits and chickens, nothing as big as whatever this bone had come from. And the teeth had left uneven marks; whoever they were, they didn't know a lot about dentistry. One of Andrew's people had probably built this fire.

A shiver went through her. The villagers she'd met thought of outsiders as enemies, like animals to be hunted and killed. And pretties weren't "gods" to them anymore. Tally wondered how the villagers felt about discovering that they'd lived inside an experiment all their lives, and that their beautiful gods were nothing but human beings.

She wondered if any of the Smokies' recruits ever thought about getting revenge on the city pretties.

Tally shook her head. The Smokies had trusted Andrew enough to put him in charge of guiding the runaways here. Surely the others they had recruited weren't homicidal maniacs.

But what if other villagers had learned to escape from their "little men"?

As dawn approached, Tally stayed awake, not bothering with her usual catnaps. She watched the sky for signs of hovercars as always, but she also kept an eye on the inland approach to the cliffs, infrared at full power. The unpleasant rumble in her stomach from seeing the pile of rotten fish never completely went away.

They came three hours after sunrise.

New Arrivals

Fourteen figures showed in infrared, slowly climbing the lazy inland hills, all but hidden by the long grass.

Tally booted her sneak suit, and felt its scales ripple up to mimic the grass, like the hackles of a nervous cat. The only figure she could see clearly was the woman at the front of the group. She was definitely a villager—clad in skins and carrying a spear.

Tally sank lower into the grass, remembering the first time she'd met the villagers—they'd jumped her in the middle of the night, ready to kill for the crime of being an outsider. The Crims would be fast asleep by now.

If there was any violence, it would happen suddenly, leaving little time for Tally to save anyone. Maybe she should wake up Zane now and tell him what was approaching…

But the thought of how he might look at her, her own disgust mirrored in his eyes, sent her head spinning.

Tally took a deep breath, ordering herself to stay icy. The long nights of traveling—invisible and alone, trying to protect someone who probably didn't even want her around— had started to make her paranoid. Without a better look, she couldn't assume that the approaching group posed a threat.

She crawled on hands and knees, moving swiftly in the tall grass, giving the pile of rotten fish a wide berth. A little closer, Tally heard a clear voice ring out across the fields, carrying an unfamiliar tune in the random-sounding syllables of the villagers' language. The song didn't sound particularly warlike—more happy, like something you'd sing when your team was winning a soccer game.

To these people, of course, random violence pretty much was a soccer game.

As they grew closer, Tally raised her head…

And breathed a sigh of relief. Only two of the approaching group wore skins. The rest were city pretties—bedraggled and tired-looking, but definitely not savages. The whole group balanced water packs on their shoulders, the bubbleheads hunched under the weight, the villagers carrying it effortlessly Tally looked into the distance the way they'd come, and saw the glimmer of water from an ocean inlet. They'd only been away on a provisions run.

Remembering how Andrew had detected her, Tally stayed well clear of the group. But she was close enough to make out their clothes. The city pretties' seemed all wrong, totally fashion-missing, or maybe a few years out of style. But these kids hadn't been out here that long.

Then Tally heard one boy asking how far it was back to camp, and the strangeness of his accent sent a shiver through her. They were from another city, somewhere far enough away that they talked differently. Of course, she was halfway to the equator. The Smokies had been spreading their little rebellion far and wide.

But what were they doing here? she wondered. Surely this little patch of cliff wasn't the New Smoke. Tally crawled along behind the group, still watching them warily as they approached the sleeping Crims.

Suddenly, she came to a halt, feeling something in her bones—something all around, as if the earth were rumbling under her.

A strange noise came from the distance, low and rhythmic, like huge fingers drumming on a table. It faded in and out for a few moments before steadying.

The others could hear it now. The villager heading up the little party let out a cry, pointing toward the south, and the city pretties all looked up expectantly. Tally could already see it, thundering across the hills toward them, its engines glowing hot in infrared.

She raised herself into a half crouch and started running for her board, the thrumming sound building around her. Tally remembered her first trip into the wild, when she'd gotten a lift to the Smoke in a strange Rusty flying vehicle. The rangers, naturalists from another city, had used old contraptions like this one to fight the white weed.

What were they called again?

It wasn't until she had made it back to her hoverboard that Tally remembered the name.

The "helicopter" landed not far from the cliff's edge.

Twice the size of the one Tally had ridden to the Smoke, it descended with an awesome fury, the whirlwind battering down the grass in a wide circle. The helicopter kept itself aloft with two huge spinning blades that mercilessly beat the air, like huge lifting fans. Even in her hiding place, their sound rattled Tally down to her ceramic bones, her hoverboard bucking beneath her like a nervous horse in the windstorm.

The Crims were awake by now, of course, shaken to consciousness by the thundering beat. Whoever was flying the helicopter had spotted them from up high, and had waited for them to furl their boards before landing. By the time the machine came down, the other group had made its way back to the cliffs. The two sets of runaways were eyeing each other warily as the helicopter's crew jumped out onto the beaten grass.

The rangers, Tally remembered, came from a city with different attitudes from her own, one that didn't particularly care whether the Smoke existed or not. Their main concern was preserving nature from the engineered plagues that the Rusties had left behind, especially the white weed. The rangers had traded favors with the Old Smoke sometimes, giving runaways lifts in their flying machines.

Tally had liked the rangers she'd met. They were pretties but, like firefighters or Specials, they didn't have the bubblehead lesions. Thinking for themselves was a part of their job description, and they possessed the calm competence of the Smokies—without the ugly faces.

The helicopter's blades kept spinning as it sat on the ground, stirring the air beneath her board and making it impossible to hear a thing. But from her vantage hovering just below the edge of the sea cliff, it was obvious that Zane was introducing himself and the other Crims. The rangers didn't seem to care, one listening as the others checked over their ancient, cantankerous machine. The two villagers regarded the newcomers suspiciously, though, until Zane produced the position-finder.

At the sight of it, one of them pulled out a scanning wand and began to wave it around Zane's body. She took special care to check his teeth, Tally noticed. The other villager was busy scanning another Crim, the two of them checking all eight of the new arrivals thoroughly.

Then they began to herd the runaways, all twenty of them, onto the helicopter. The thing was much bigger than a warden's hovercar, but it was so crude and loud and ancient-looking…Tally wondered how it could carry them all.

The rangers didn't seem worried. They were busy sticking the city kids' hoverboards onto the machine's undercarriage, sandwiching them together magnetically.

As crowded as the runaways would be inside, it had to be a short trip…

The problem was, Tally wasn't sure how she could tag along. The helicopter she'd ridden in was faster and could go much higher than any hoverboard. And if she lost sight of them, there would be no way to follow the Crims the rest of the way to the New Smoke.

Tracking the old-fashioned way had its disadvantages.

She wondered what Shay had done when she'd reached this point. Tally boosted her skintenna, but found no trace of another Special nearby; no waiting beacons pulsed a message for her.

But Andrew's position-finder must have led Shay here as well. Had she disguised herself as an ugly and tried to fool the villagers? Or had she managed to follow the helicopter somehow?

Tally peered at the undercarriage again. Among the twenty sandwiched hoverboards was just enough space for a human being.

Maybe Shay had snuck a ride…

Tally pulled on her grippy gloves, readying herself. She could wait until the helicopter took off, then pursue it in a short chase across the hills, followed by a quick climb up through the windstorm of its spinning blades.

She felt a smile spreading across her face. After two weeks of skulking after the Crims, it would be a relief to face a real challenge, one that would make her feel like a Special again.

And even better, the New Smoke had to be close. She had almost reached the end of the line.

Pursuit

Soon the pretties were all loaded into the helicopter, and the two villagers stepped back, waving and smiling.

Tally didn't wait for it to take off. She headed southward down the coast, back in the direction it had come from, staying below the cliffs to keep out of sight. The trick would be waiting until the machine was far enough from the villagers before climbing into the open sky. After weeks of hiding, she didn't want to be spotted this close to her goal.

The helicopter's spinning blades changed pitch, the whine building slowly to a thunderous beating in the air. She resisted the urge to look back, keeping her eyes on the winding and rugged cliff wall. She snaked along it, only an arm's length away, staying low and out of sight.

Tally's ears told her when the helicopter lifted into the air behind her. She urged her hoverboard faster, wondering what the Rusty contraption's top speed was.

Tally had never pushed a Special Circumstances board as fast as it could go. Unlike hoverboards designed for randoms, the Cutters' didn't have safety features to keep you from doing anything stupid. If you let them, the lifting fans would spin until they overheated, or worse. She knew from Cutter training that fans didn't always fail gracefully—you could push them until they tore themselves apart in a shower of white-hot metal…

Tally flicked on her infrared vision and glanced down at the fan in front of her left foot; it already had the red-hot glow of campfire embers.

The helicopter was catching up, its thunder closing in behind and above her, battering the air. She dropped farther below the cliff level, the crashing waves passing beneath her in a wild blur, every outcrop of rocks threatening to take off her head.

By the time the helicopter drew even overhead, it was a hundred meters off the ground and still climbing. She had to make her move now.

Tally angled back and shot up over the cliff's edge, skimming the earth to a spot directly below the helicopter, out of view of its bulbous windows. Behind her the two villagers had shrunk to mere dots. Her sneak suit was tuned sky blue, so even if they were still watching, they would only see the sliver of her hoverboard.

As Tally climbed toward the thundering machine, her board began to shiver, the vortex beneath the helicopter flailing at her with invisible fists. The air pulsed around her, like a sound system with the bass turned way too high.

Suddenly, her board dropped out from under her, and Tally found herself falling for a moment. Then its grippy surface bucked up under her feet again. She glanced down to check if one of her fans had failed, but they were both still spinning. Then the board dropped again, and Tally realized that she was hitting random pockets of low pressure in the maelstrom, the board abruptly finding itself without enough air to push against.

Tally bent her knees and climbed faster, ignoring the white-hot glow of her lifting fans and the buffeting blows of the tempest around her. She didn't have time for caution— the helicopter was still climbing, still gaining speed, and would soon be out of reach.

Suddenly, the wind and noise quieted—she had reached a zone of calm, like the eye of a hurricane. Tally glanced up. She was directly underneath the machine's belly, sheltered from the turbulence created by the spinning blades. This was her chance to climb aboard.

She climbed higher, reaching out with grippy-gloved hands. Her crash bracelets tugged upward, connecting with the metal in the craft. Another meter higher and she would be there…

Out of the blue, the world seemed to tilt around Tally. The helicopter's belly dipped to one side, then pulled away. The machine was banking hard, making a sudden turn inland, stripping her of the protection of its massive body, like coming around a corner into the path of a storm.

The wind hit Tally in a roiling wave, whipping her legs out from under her and sending the hoverboard fluttering away. Her ears popped in the eddies and currents of the helicopter's vortex, and for a terrifying second she saw the giant blades loom close to her in a great blurred wall of force, their ear-shattering beat pounding through her body.

But instead of cutting her to ribbons, the blades' fury flung her away; she spun in midair, the horizon wheeling around her. For a moment, even her special sense of balance failed, as if the world was whirling into chaos.

After a few seconds of freefall, Tally felt a tug on her wrists, and made the gesture to recall her hoverboard. It had leveled itself off and was shooting toward her at top speed, its lifting fans so hot they had turned whiter than the sun.

She made a grab for the board, and the superheated riding surface burned her hands even through gloves, the scent of grippy plastics at their melting point assaulting her nostrils. The heat was so intense that her sneak suit switched itself to armored mode, trying to offer some protection.

Still spinning, Tally hung from the board for a moment, until its winglike shape stabilized her. Then she rolled herself up onto it and rose to a riding stance.

She switched the sneak suit back to sky blue and looked ahead—the helicopter was receding into the distance.

Tally hesitated, realizing that she should give up now, return to the pickup point, and wait for the next group of runaways. Surely helicopters made this trip regularly.

But Zane was in there, and she couldn't abandon him now. Shay and the rest of Special Circumstances might already be on their way.

Tally urged her overheating board faster. The helicopter had lost altitude and speed during its turn, and soon she was catching up.

The heat of her hoverboard's surface began to burn the soles of her feet, and Tally felt its vibration shifting beneath her. The metal fans were expanding in the white heat, changing the board's sound and feel. She pushed it forward, until the tempest swirling around the helicopter began to batter her again, the air rumbling as she made another approach.

But this time Tally knew what to expect; she had learned the shape of the invisible vortex in her first trip through. Instinct guided her through its whorls and eddies and into the small bubble of protection underneath the machine.

Her hoverboard was whining furiously now, but she urged it upward toward the undercarriage, arms outstretched…

Closer and closer.

Tally felt the moment of breakdown through the soles of her feet, the board's unsteady vibration changing all at once into a wild shudder. A metal scream reached her ears as the lifting fans disintegrated, and she realized it was too late to go any direction but up. She bent her knees and leaped…

At the peak of her jump, Tally scrambled for something to grab on to, her fingers brushing against the stored hoverboards. But they were packed into thick sandwiches without any handholds, and the helicopter's landing struts were out of reach on either side.

Tally began to fall…

She stabbed at her crash bracelets' controls, setting them to exhaust their batteries, to pull her toward the tons of metal above as hard as they could. A sudden, crushing force seized her wrists—the combined magnetics of twenty boards booting up and taking hold. The bracelets dragged her upward, pinning Tally against the nearest riding surface, her arms almost ripped from their sockets by the sudden jerk.

Below, the screech of her hoverboard turned into a wracking cough, then it dropped away. Tally's ears caught the metal squeal of the board, tearing itself to pieces as it fell, until the helicopter's portable maelstrom whisked the noise away.

Tally found herself stuck to the underside of the helicopter, its vibration rumbling through her like crashing waves.

For a moment, she wondered if the pilots and passengers had heard her board disintegrate, but then Tally remembered her own helicopter flight the year before. To make themselves heard, she and the rangers had been forced to shout over the roar of the blades.

After a few minutes of hanging from her wrists, Tally turned off the magnetics in one of her bracelets and swung out both feet, wrapping them around a landing strut. She switched off the other, then dangled head-down from the strut for a nervous-making moment in the furious wind before pulling herself up into a small gap between the runaways' boards. From there, she watched as the trip unfolded.

The helicopter proceeded on its inland course, the world growing more lush and forested as the sea slipped away behind. It climbed still higher, moving faster until the trees were nothing but a green blur below. Only a few spots had been touched by the white weed here.

Keeping a careful grip, Tally pulled off her gloves and checked her hands. The palms were burned, with a few pieces of melted plastic stuck to them, but the flash tattoos still pulsed, even those already broken by her cutting scar. Her medspray had gone down with the hoverboard, along with everything else. Only her crash bracelets, ceremonial knife, and sneak suit had survived.

But she'd made it. Tally finally allowed herself a slow breath of relief. Watching the scenery pass below, the pleasure of accomplishing a really icy trick washed through her.

Tally's fingers brushed the old metal belly of the helicopter—Zane was only a few meters from her. He had accomplished quite a trick as well. Despite his lesions and his brain damage, he had almost made it to the New Smoke. Whatever Shay thought of Tally now, she couldn't deny that Zane had earned the right to join Special Circumstances. After all this, Tally wouldn't take no for an answer.

By Tally's internal software, it was an hour later that the first signs of their destination began to appear below.

Although the forest was still dense, a few rectangular fields came into view, the trees chopped down and stacked to make way for some sort of building project. Then more marks of new construction: huge diggers tearing at the earth and magnetic lifters moving hoverstruts into place. Tally frowned. The New Smoke was crazy if they thought they could get away with clear-cutting.

But then more familiar sights began to pass below. The low buildings of a factory belt, then the dense row houses of suburbia. Then a cluster of taller buildings rose up on the horizon, and the air began to fill with hovercars. A ring of soccer fields and dormitories passed below, exactly like Uglyville back in her own city.

Tally shook her head. All this couldn't have been built by Smokies…

Then she remembered Shay's words the night they'd snuck into New Pretty Town to see Zane, about how David and his pals had acquired sneak suits from mysterious allies, and she realized the truth.

The New Smoke wasn't some hidden encampment in the wild, where people crapped into holes and ate dead rabbits, burning trees for fuel. The New Smoke was right here, spread out below her.

An entire city had joined the rebellion.

Hard Landing

Tally had to get off before the helicopter landed.

She didn't want to be found clinging to the underside when they touched down. Zane would see her, and the rangers would probably know that her cruel beauty marked her as an agent of another city. But as the helicopter settled into a circling approach, headed toward a landing pad, Tally could see nowhere safe to drop.

In her own city, a river wrapped around the island of New Pretty Town. But she saw no convenient bodies of water to jump into, and she was too high to use crash bracelets safely. The sneak suit's armor might protect Tally, but the landing pad was nestled between two large buildings, surrounded by crowded slidewalks full of fragile pedestrians.

As the helicopter made its final approach, she spotted the tall hedges surrounded the landing pad—sturdy enough to dampen the wind from the helicopter's blades. They looked prickly, but a few thorns were nothing the sneak suit's armor couldn't handle.

The helicopter slowed as the pad loomed below, and Tally pulled her hood down to protect her face. As the helicopter banked to bring itself to a halt, she let herself drop, rolling into a ball as she fell, like a littlie jumping into a swimming pool.

Her left shoulder hit the hedge with a sudden crunch, branches snapping off against the suit's armor, and she bounced away from the barrier in an explosion of leaves, spinning through the air. She managed to land on her feet, but found herself stumbling across an unsteady surface…the quick-moving slidewalk she'd seen on the way down.

Tally waved her arms, almost regaining her balance, but one last step took her onto another slidewalk going the opposite way, which spun her around and dumped her on her back, spread-eagled and staring dumbfoundedly up at the sky

"Ouch," she murmured. Specials might have unbreakable ceramic bones, but there was still plenty of flesh to be bruised and nerve endings to complain.

Two tall buildings crowded the sky above her. They seemed to be moving gracefully past…She was still being carried along by the slidewalk.

A middle-pretty face came into view, looking down at her with a stern expression. "Young lady! Are you all right?"

"Yeah. Mostly."

"Well, I am aware that standards of conduct have changed. But you could still be reported to the wardens for a stunt like that!"

"Oh, sorry," Tally said, rising painfully to her feet.

"I suppose that suit was meant to protect you?" the man continued sternly. "But did you ever stop to think of the rest of us!"

Tally rubbed her probably bruise-covered back with one hand, held up the other in defense. For a middle pretty, this guy wasn't very understanding. "I said I was sorry. I had to get off that helicopter."

The man snorted. "Well, if you can't wait to land, next time use a bungee jacket!"

A sudden wave of annoyance came over Tally. This average, aging middle pretty just wouldn't shut up. She decided she was bored with the conversation and pulled off the sneak suit's hood, baring her teeth. "Maybe next time, I'll aim for you!"

The man looked straight back into her black and wolfen eyes, her lacework tattoos and razor smile, and only snorted again. "Or maybe you'll break your pretty neck!"

He made a satisfied little noise and stepped onto the faster lane of the slidewalk, which whisked him away without another glance back at Tally.

She blinked. That hadn't been the reaction she'd been expecting. In the windows of the passing building, her warped reflection drifted by. She was still a Special, her face still marked with all the signs of cruel beauty, designed to call up all humanity's ancient fears. But the man had hardly noticed.

Tally shook her head. Maybe in this city Special Circumstances agents didn't keep themselves hidden, and he'd seen cruel pretties before. But what was the point of looking terrifying if everyone had a chance to get used to it?

She played the conversation back in her mind, realizing how close the man's accent was to how she remembered the rangers'—fast, clipped, and precise. This had to be their home city.

But if this whole city really was the New Smoke, where was Shay? Tally boosted her skintenna range, but got no answering ping. Of course, cities were big—she might simply be out of range. Or maybe she had switched off, still sulking over Tally's latest betrayal.

Tally glanced back toward the landing pad. The helicopter's engines were still idling. Perhaps this city wasn't the New Smoke, and was only a refueling stop. Stepping over onto the opposite slidewalk, Tally headed back toward the pad.

A couple of new pretties glided by, and Tally noticed that they were wearing costume surge. One had skin much paler than any Pretty Committee would ever allow, with red hair and a smattering of freckles across her face, like one of those littlies who always had to worry about sunburn. The other's skin was so dark it was almost black, and his muscles were way too obvious.

Maybe that explained the middle-pretty man's reaction, or lack of it. There had to be some sort of costume bash happening tonight, one that all the new pretties were surging up for. The costume surgery was more extreme than would ever be allowed back in Tally's city, but at least it meant she wouldn't stick out like a sore thumb while she tried to figure out what was going on.

Of course, the armored black of her sneak suit wasn't exactly fashionable. With a little fiddling, she tuned it to resemble the clothing the two new pretties had been wearing: striped patterns in bold colors, like you'd dress a littlie in back at home. The garish hues made her feel even more conspicuous, but when a few more young pretties glided past—with translucently pale faces, oversize noses, and wildly colored clothes—Tally almost felt as if she was starting to fit in.

The buildings here didn't look too different from those she'd grown up with. The two on either side of the landing pad looked like typical government monoliths. In fact, the closer of the two had stone letters cut into it spelling out town hall, and most of the slidewalk step-offs were labeled with the names of city agencies. Ahead of Tally were the hovering party towers and sprawling mansions of what had to be New Pretty Town, and she could see ugly-dorms and soccer fields in the distance.

It seemed strange, though, not having a river between New Pretty Town and Uglyville. It would be too easy to sneak across, hardly a challenge at all. How would you keep party-crashers out?

She hadn't seen any wardens so far. Would anyone here know what her cruel beauty meant?

A young pretty stepped onto the slidewalk beside her, and Tally decided to see if she could pass for a local.

"Where's the bash tonight?" she asked, trying to imitate the local accent and hoping she didn't sound too random for not knowing.

"The bash?. You mean a party?"

Tally shrugged. "Yeah, sure."

The young woman laughed. "Take your pick. There's mountains of them."

"Right, mountains. But which one's all the costume surge for?"

"Costume surge?" The woman looked at Tally like she'd said something totally random. "Did you just get off the chopper or something?"

Tally's eyebrows rose. "Um, the helicopter? Yeah, sort of."

"With a face like that?" The woman frowned. Her own skin was dark brown, her fingernails decorated with tiny video screens, each showing a different flickering image.

Tally could only shrug again.

"Oh, I see. Couldn't wait to look like one of us?" She laughed again. "Listen, kid, you should really be hanging out with the other newbies, at least until you know what's going on here." She squinted her eyes, her fingers making an interface gesture. "Diego says they're all up at the Overlook tonight."

"Diego?"

"The city." She laughed again, her fingernails flashing in tandem with the sound. "Wow, kid, you really are just off the chopper."

"Yeah, I guess. Thanks," Tally said, suddenly feeling very average and helpless, not special at all. Trying to navigate this new city her strength and speed meant nothing, and even her cruel beauty didn't seem to impress anyone. It was like being an ugly again, when things like knowing the best bashes and how to dress had been more important than being superhuman.

"Well, welcome to Diego," the young pretty called, and stepped into a high-speed lane, waving good-bye with the vague embarrassment of ditching a loser at a party.

As she approached the landing pad, Tally kept a wary eye out for the runaway Crims. She stepped off the slidewalk where the hedge showed damage from her collision, and peeked through one of the gaps she'd left behind.

The runaways had unloaded from the helicopter, but they were still getting themselves sorted. Like typical bubbleheads, they were having trouble figuring out which hoverboard was whose. They clustered around the ranger who was trying to organize things, like littlies after ice cream.

Zane was waiting patiently, looking the happiest Tally had seen him since they'd escaped the city. A few of the other Crims crowded around him, slapping him on the back and congratulating one another.

One of the Crims brought Zane his board, and all eight of them set off toward the huge building across from Town Hall.

Tally saw that it was a hospital. That made sense. Anyone from outside would be checked for diseases, and for injuries and food poisoning from the trip. And since this city really was the New Smoke, newcomers would have their bubblehead lesions taken away as well.

Of course, Tally thought. Maddy's pills didn't have to work perfectly anymore. The runaways would all wind up here, where a city hospital staffed with real doctors could take care of their lesions.

She took a step back, breathing out slowly, finally admitting it to herself: The New Smoke was a thousand times larger and more powerful than she and Shay had expected.

The authorities here were taking in other cities' runaways, curing them of bubbleheadness. Now that she thought about it, none of the people she'd met so far had the lesions. All of them had expressed their opinions openly, not like bubbleheads at all.

That would explain why this city—"Diego," the woman had called it—had thrown out the Pretty Committee's standards, letting everyone look the way they wanted. They'd even started to build new structures in the surrounding forests, expanding out into the wild.

If that was all true, it was no wonder that Shay was no longer here. She'd probably gone home to report all this to Dr. Cable and Special Circumstances.

But what could they do about it? Cities couldn't tell one another how to run their affairs, after all.

This New Smoke could last forever.

Random Town

Tally spent the day walking around the city, marveling at how different it was from her own.

She saw new pretties and uglies hanging out together, friends that the operation hadn't separated. And littlies clinging to their ugly older brothers and sisters instead of being stuck in Crumblyville with their parents. Those small changes were almost as surprising as the wild facial structures, skin textures, and body mods she encountered. Almost. It might take a while to get used to coats of downy feathers, pinkie fingers replaced with tiny snakes, skin every shade between deep black and alabaster, and hair that writhed like some sinuous creature under the sea.

Whole cliques wore the same skin color, or shared similar faces, like families used to before the operation. It reminded Tally uncomfortably of how people grouped themselves back in pre-Rusty days, into tribes and clans and so-called races who all looked more or less alike, and made a big point of hating anyone who didn't look like them. But everyone seemed to be getting along so far—for every clique of people who looked alike, there was another of wild variations.

Diego's middle pretties seemed less crazy about the whole surgery thing. Most of them looked more or less like Tally's parents, and she heard more than a little grumbling about "new standards," how current fads were an eyesore and a disgrace. But they did so in such a forthright way that Tally had no doubt their own lesions were gone.

Disconcertingly the crumblies seemed to be further into surgery than anyone else. A few wore the wise, calm, trustworthy faces that the Pretty Committee enforced at home, but others looked weirdly young. Half the time Tally wasn't exactly sure what age people were supposed to be, as if the city's surgeons had decided to let all the stages of life blur together.

She even heard a few people who, from the sound of their conversation, were still bubbleheads. For some reason— whether it was a philosophical position or a fashion statement— they had elected to keep the lesions in their brains.

Apparently, you could do just about anything you wanted here. It was like she'd landed in Random Town. Everyone was so different that her own special face practically faded into…nothing.

How had this all happened?

It couldn't have been very long ago. The transformations seemed to be still rippling all around her, as if a stone had been hurled into a small pond.

Once she managed to tune her skintenna to the city newsfeeds, Tally found them full of arguments. There were discussions about the wisdom of taking in the runaways, about standards of beauty, and most of all about the new construction at the city's edge—and not everyone bothered with the pleasant, civil debating style of home. Tally had never heard squabbling among adults like this before, not even in private. It was as if a bunch of uglies had taken over the airwaves. Without the lesions making everyone agreeable, society was left roiling in a constant battle of words, images, and ideas.

It was overwhelming, almost like the way the Rusties had lived, debating every issue in public instead of letting the government do its job.

And the changes already in place here in Diego were just a beginning, Tally realized. All around her she felt the city seething, all those unfettered minds bouncing their opinions off each other, like something ready to explode.

That night, she went to the Overlook.

The city interface guided her to the highest point in town, a stretch of parkland atop a chalk-faced cliff that overlooked the city center. The first young pretty she'd met had been right: The park was crowded with runaways, about half uglies and half new pretties. Most wore the faces they'd brought with them, not yet ready to plunge into extremes of cosmetic fashion. Tally could understand why the newbies were hanging out together; after a day on the streets of Diego, the sight of old-fashioned, Pretty Committee-designed faces was a relief.

Tally hoped that Zane would be here. Today had been the longest he'd spent out of her sight since his escape, and she wondered exactly what they'd done to him at the city hospital. Would removing Zane's lesions make him any less shaky? How would he decide to remake himself, here where anyone could look like anything, where the very possibility of being average had disappeared?

Maybe they would be able to fix him better than her own city's hospital. With all their practice in crazy surgery, Diego's surgeons might be almost as good as Dr. Cable.

Maybe the next time they kissed, things would be different.

And even if Zane was exactly the same, at least Tally could show him how much she had changed. Her journey through the wild and what she'd seen in Diego had already made a difference. Maybe this time she could show him what was really inside her, deeper than any operation could reach.

Tally stalked the darkness outside the hoverglobes' reach, listening to the newcomers. The music wasn't loud— the bash was more about getting to know each other than drinking and dancing—and she heard all kinds of accents, even other languages from the deep south. All the runaways were telling the stories of how they'd gotten here—comic, arduous, or terrifying voyages through the wild to reach pickup spots all over the continent. Some had come by hoverboard, some had walked, and a few even claimed they'd stolen warden hovercars with lifting fans, flying in comfort across the wild.

The party grew as she watched, like Diego itself, more runaways arriving all the time. Soon Tally spotted Peris and a few of the other Crims near the cliff edge. Zane wasn't with them.

She retreated farther into the shadows, eyes searching the crowd, wondering where he was. Maybe she should have stayed close; this city was so strange. Of course, he probably thought she'd lost the helicopter and was still behind in the wild. Was probably relieved to be rid of her…

"Hey, I'm John," came a voice from behind.

Tally spun around, finding herself face-to-face with a standard new pretty. His eyebrows rose at the sight of her cruel beauty and tattoos, but the reaction was slight. He had already gotten used to seeing crazy surge here in Diego.

"Tally," she said.

"That's a funny name."

Tally frowned. She'd thought "John" sounded pretty random, herself, though his accent wasn't too unfamiliar.

"You're a runaway, right?" he asked. "I mean, that's new surge you're trying on?"

"This?" Her fingers brushed her face. Since she'd woken up at Special Circumstances headquarters, the cruel beauty had felt like something that defined her, made her what she was, and this average boy was asking if she was trying it on, like some new hairstyle?

But there was no point in giving herself away. "Yeah, I guess. Like it?"

He shrugged. "My friends say it's better to wait until you know the fashions. Don't want to look like a mountainous dork."

Tally let out a slow breath, trying to remain calm. "You think I look like a dork?"

"What do I know? I just got here." He laughed. "I'm not sure what look I'll go for. But probably something less, I don't know, scary."

Scary? Tally thought, her anger building. She could show this arrogant little pretty what scary was.

"I wouldn't keep those scars, if I were you," he added. "Kind of grim."

Tally's hands lashed out to grab the boy by his new and brightly colored jacket. Her fingernails ripped into its fabric as she lifted him from the ground, her razor smile as fierce as she could make it.

"Listen, you bubblehead-until-five-minutes-ago, this is not a fashion statement Those scars are something you'll never even—"

A soft ping sounded in her head.

"Tally-wa," a familiar voice came. "Put that kid down."

She blinked, lowering the pretty to the ground.

Her skintenna had picked up another Cutter.

The boy was giggling. "Hey, neat trick! Didn't see the teeth before."

"Quiet!" Tally loosened her grip from the ruins of his jacket, spinning around to scan the crowd.

"Are you in a clique?" the pretty babbled on. "That guy over there looks just like you!"

She followed his gesture and saw the familiar face coming toward her through the crowd, tattoos spinning with pleasure.

It was Fausto, smiling and special.

Reunion

"Fausto!" she cried, then realized she didn't have to shout. Their skintennas had already connected, creating a network of two.

"So you still remember me?" he joked, his voice whisper-close in her ears.

The intimacy she'd missed for the last weeks—the feeling of being a Cutter, of belonging to something—sent a shiver through her, and Tally ran toward Fausto, forgetting about the pretty who'd insulted her.

She gathered him into a hug. "You're okay!"

"I'm better than okay," he said.

Tally pulled away. She was so overwhelmed, her brain exhausted by everything it had absorbed that day—and now here was Fausto right in front of her, safe and sound.

"What happened to you? How did you escape?"

"That's a long story."

She nodded, then shook her head and said, "I'm so confused, Fausto. This place is all so random. What's going on?"

"Here in Diego?"

"Yeah. It doesn't seem real."

"It's real."

"But how did this all happen? Who let it happen?"

He looked out toward the cliff, gazing thoughtfully at the city lights. "As far as I can tell, it's been happening for a long time. This city was never like ours. They didn't have the same barriers between pretties and uglies."

She nodded. "No river."

He laughed. "Maybe that had something to do with it. But they've always had fewer bubbleheads than us."

"Like the rangers I met last year. They didn't have the lesions."

"Even the teachers didn't, Tally. Everyone here grew up being taught by non-bubbleheads."

Tally blinked. No wonder the Diego government had been sympathetic to the Smoke. A little colony of freethinkers wouldn't seem threatening to them at all.

Fausto leaned closer. "And you know what the weird thing is, Tally? They don't have any kind of Special Circumstances here. So when the pills started coming in, Diego didn't have a way stop them. They couldn't keep control."

"You mean the Smokies took over?"

"They didn't exactly take over." Fausto laughed again. "The authorities are still in charge. But the change came a lot faster here than it will at home. It only took a month or so after the first pills came in before most people were waking up, the whole system falling apart. It's still falling apart, I guess."

Tally nodded, remembering all the things she'd seen in the last twelve hours. "You got that right. This whole place has gone crazy."

"You'll get used to it." The smile grew on his face.

Tally narrowed her eyes. "And none of this bothers you? Didn't you notice that they're clear-cutting out on the edge of the city?"

"Of course, Tally-wa. They have to expand. The population's going up fast."

The words hit her like a punch in the stomach. "Fausto…populations don't go up. They can't do that."

"It's not like they're breeding, Tally. It's just runaways." He shrugged, like it was no big deal, and Tally felt something start to spin inside her. His cruel beauty, the intimacy of his voice in her ears, even his flash tattoos and razor teeth didn't excuse what Fausto was saying. This was the wild he was talking about, being chewed up and spat out to make way for a bunch of greedy pretties.

"What did the Smokies do to you?" she said, her voice suddenly dry.

"Nothing I didn't ask for."

She shook her head furiously, not wanting to believe.

Fausto sighed. "Come with me. I don't want any city kids to hear us—there are some weird rules here about being special." He placed a hand on Tally's shoulder, guiding her toward the far end of the party. "Remember our big escape last year?"

"Of course I remember. Do I look like a bubblehead?"

"Hardly." He smiled. "Well, something happened after that tracker in Zane's tooth went off, and you insisted on staying behind with him. While we were all running away, us Crims came to an agreement with the Smokies." He paused as they passed a clique of young pretties all comparing their new surge—skin that flashed from paper white to pitch black, following the music's beat.

Letting their skintennas carry the words, Tally hissed, "What do you mean, an agreement?"

"The Smokies knew that Special Circumstances had been recruiting. There were more Specials every day, most of them the same uglies who'd run away to the Old Smoke."

Tally nodded. "You know the rules. Only the tricky ones become special."

"Sure. But the Smokies were just starting to figure that out." They had almost reached the shadows at the other edge of the party, where a stand of trees cast deep shadows. "And Maddy still had Dr. Cable's data, so she thought she could make a cure for being special."

Tally froze in her tracks. "A what?"

"A cure, Tally. But they needed someone to test it on. Someone who could give them informed consent. Like you gave consent to be cured, before you let yourself be turned pretty."

She looked into his eyes, trying to peer into their black depths. Something was different in them…they were flatter, like champagne with no bubbles.

Just like Zane, Fausto had lost something.

"Fausto," she said softly. "You're not special anymore."

"I gave my consent as we were running away," he said. "We all agreed. If we got caught and turned into Specials, Maddy could try to cure us."

Tally swallowed. So that was why they'd kept Fausto and let Shay escape. Informed consent—Maddy's excuse for playing with people's brains. "You let her experiment on you? Don't you remember what happened to Zane?"

"Someone had to, Tally." He held up an injector. "It works, and it's perfectly safe."

Her lips slid back from her teeth, her skin crawling at the thought of nanos eating away at her brain. "Don't touch me, Fausto. I'll hurt you if I have to."

"No, you won't," he said softly, then his hand darted toward her neck.

Tally's fingers shot up, catching the injector a few centimeters from her throat. She twisted hard, trying to make him drop it, and a cracking sound came from his fingers. Then his other hand moved, and she realized it held another injector. Tally dropped to the ground, his swing passing inches from her face.

Fausto kept coming, both hands trying to land a needle in her. She scrambled backward on the grass, barely staying clear. He flailed at her desperately, but she fended him off with a kick to his chest, then another that connected with his chin, sending him stumbling back. He wasn't the same—still faster than a random, maybe, but no longer as fast as Tally Something ruthless and sure had been sucked out of him.

Time slowed down, until she saw an opening in his predictable attack. She lashed out with a well-aimed kick that knocked one of the injectors from his hands.

By now the sneak suit had detected Tally's rush of adrenalin; its scales rippled across her, hardening to armored mode. She rolled to her feet, throwing herself straight at Fausto. His next swing made contact with her elbow, the suit's armor crushing the injector, and Tally landed a blow on his cheek with an open palm. He stumbled backward, his tattoos spinning wildly.

A flicker of sound from the darkness caught Tally's ear—something headed her way through the air. Her infrared overlay fell into place, senses expanding as she dropped again to the ground. A dozen glowing figures appeared in the trees, half of them in archers' stances.

The flutter of feathers passed overhead—arrows with needle tips glittering—but Tally was already scrambling back toward the mass of the party. She scrambled through the crowd, knocking down runaways around her, creating a barrier of fallen bystanders. Beer spilled across her, and startled cries filled the air over the music.

Tally sprang to her feet and weaved her way deeper into the crowd. There were Smokies in all directions, figures that moved confidently among the baffled runaways, enough to overwhelm her with sheer numbers. Of course, dozens of the Smokies must be here at the Overlook; they had made Diego their home base. All they needed was one hit with an injector, and the chase would be over.

She'd been a fool to let her guard down, to walk around gawking at this city like a tourist. And now she was caught…trapped between her enemies and the cliff that gave the Overlook its name.

Tally ran toward the darkness at its edge.

She passed through an open space and more arrows flew at her, but she ducked and blocked and rolled, all of her senses and reflexes engaged. With every seamless movement Tally became more certain she didn't want to become like Fausto—only half a Special, flat and empty, cured.

She was almost there.

"Tally, wait!" Fausto's voice came over the network. He sounded breathless. "You haven't got a bungee jacket!"

She smiled. "Don't need one."

"Tally!"

A last volley of arrows flew, but Tally dropped beneath them, another roll taking her almost to the edge. She leaped up and threw herself between two runaways staring down onto their new home, into the empty air…

"Are you crazy?" Fausto shouted.

She fell, staring out at the lights of Diego. The pale cliff-face rushed past, gridded with metal to keep climbers' harnesses aloft. Directly below Tally was the darkness of more parkland, lit only with a few lampposts, probably studded with trees and other things to be impaled on.

Angling her hands in the wind, Tally spun herself around in midair to peer back up at her pursuers, a row of silhouettes arriving one by one on the cliff's edge. None of them had jumped after her—too confident in their ambush to have brought bungee jackets. They'd have hoverboards somewhere close by, of course. But by the time they could get to them, it would be too late.

Tally turned herself around again, facing the ground for the last few seconds of the fall, waiting…

At the last moment she hissed, "Hey, Fausto, how's this for crazy? Crash bracelets."

It hurt like hell.

Over a city grid, bracelets could stop a fall, but they were designed for tumbles from cruising height, not cliff-jumping. They didn't distribute the force across your entire body like a well-strapped bungee jacket, just grabbed you by both wrists, swinging you in tight circles until your momentum was expended.

Tally had taken some bad spills back in ugly days— shoulder-wrenching, wrist-spraining doozies that made her wish she'd never set foot on a hoverboard, crashes that felt like an unfriendly giant were ripping her arms out of her sockets.

But nothing had ever hurt like this.

The crash bracelets kicked in five meters before she struck the ground. No warning, no smooth buildup from the magnetics. It felt like Tally had tied two cables to her wrists, just long enough to snap her to a halt at the last possible moment.

Her wrists and shoulders screamed with pain, the sensation so sudden and extreme that blackness washed over her mind for a moment. But then her special brain chemistry shoved her back to consciousness, forcing Tally to face the clamoring of her injured body.

She was twirling by her wrists, the landscape whirling around and around, her wild momentum sending the whole city spinning. With every rotation her agony grew, until finally Tally slowed to a halt, the force of her fall expended, the bracelets lowering her slowly and painfully to the ground.

Her feet were unsteady underneath her, the grass mockingly soft. A few trees stood close by, and she heard the sounds of a stream. Her arms dropped to her sides, hanging useless and burning with pain.

"Tally?" Fausto's voice came, close in her ears. "Are you okay?"

"What do you think?" she hissed at him, then turned her skintenna off. That's how the Smokies had known where she was, of course. With Fausto on their side, they could have been tracking her since the first moment she'd arrived in town…

Which meant they also would have spotted Shay. Had they gotten her already? Tally hadn't seen her among the pursuers…

She took a few more steps, every movement sending waves of agony through her injured shoulders. Tally wondered if her ceramic bones had been shattered, the monofilament muscles damaged beyond repair.

She gritted her teeth, straining to lift one hand. The simple motion hurt so much that Tally gasped aloud, and when she closed her fingers the grip felt pathetically weak. But at least her body was still responding to her will.

This was no time to congratulate herself for making a fist, though. The Smokies would be here soon, and if any of them had the guts to jump off the cliff on a hoverboard, she didn't have much time.

Tally ran toward the nearby trees, every step sending a jolt of pain through her. In the dark foliage, she set her sneak suit to camouflage mode. Even the rippling of its scales across her wrists and shoulders felt like fire.

The buzz of repair nanos had started up, a tingling all down her arms, but as bad as her injuries were, they would take hours to heal. She reached up, both arms screaming in pain, to pull the sneak-suit hood over her head. She almost blacked out, but again Tally's special brain kept her conscious.

Panting, she stumbled toward a tree whose lowest branches were close to the ground. She jumped up, landing unsteadily on one foot, and leaned against the trunk, gasping for breath. After a long moment she started the arduous process of climbing higher without using her hands, stepping from one branch to the next, grippy-soled shoes scrabbling to stay on.

It was slow and painful going, her teeth gritted and heart racing. But Tally somehow managed to push herself upward slowly. One meter higher, then another…

Her eyes caught a flicker of infrared through the leaves, and she froze.

A hoverboard was moving silently past, exactly at her eye level. She could see the glowing rider's head swivel from side to side, listening for any sound among the treetops.

Tally's breath slowed, and she allowed herself a grim smile. The Smokies had expected Fausto, their tamed Special, to bag her for them—they hadn't even bothered with sneak suits. This time around, she was the invisible one.

Of course, the fact that the invisible one couldn't lift her arms kind of evened things out.

Finally the pain had been replaced by the buzz of nanos gathering in her shoulders, starting on their repairs and squirting anesthetic around. As long as she didn't move too much, the little machines would keep the agony down to a dull ache.

In the distance, Tally heard other searchers bashing at the leaves, thinking they could flush her out like a flock of birds. But the closest Smokey was hunting quietly, listening and watching. The rider stood in profile, head still moving slowly from side to side, scanning the trees. Its silhouette revealed infrared glasses.

Tally smiled to herself. Night vision wasn't going to work any better than banging at the trees. But then the figure froze, staring right at her. The hoverboard slid to a halt.

Barely moving her head, Tally glanced down at herself. What was showing?

Then she saw it. After all the days she'd lived in the sneak suit, all the thrills and spills she'd put it through…finally, that one last leap from the Overlook had done it in.

On her right shoulder, the seam had split. It glowed almost white in infrared, heat from her metabolism gushing out like sunlight.

The figure slid closer through the air, slow and cautious.

"Hey," she called nervously. "I think I've got something here."

"What is it?" came the answer.

Tally recognized the answering voice. David, she thought, a little shiver going through her. So close to him, and Tally could hardly make a fist.

The Smokey girl paused, still staring right at Tally. "There's a hot spot in this tree. Baseball-size."

Laughter came from David's way, and someone else shouted, "Probably just a squirrel."

"Way too hot for a squirrel. Unless it's on fire."

Tally waited, squeezing her eyes closed and willing her body to slow down, to stop generating so much energy. But the Smokey girl had got it right: Between the racing engine of her heart and the nanos busily repairing her shoulders, Tally felt like she was on fire.

She tried to move her left hand up to cover the rip, but her muscles would no longer respond. All she could do was stand there and try not to move.

More glowing figures glided her way.

"David!" someone else called from the distance. "They're coming!"

He swore, spinning his hoverboard in midair. "They won't be happy with us. Come on, let's get out of here!"

The girl who'd spotted her let out a frustrated snort, then banked her board and shot away after him. The other Smokies trailed behind the two, flitting through the leafy treetops and into the distance.

Who's coming? Tally wondered. Why had they just left her here? Who were the Smokies afraid of in Diego?

Then the sound of running feet came through the forest, and Tally saw flashes of bright yellow on the ground. She'd seen that exact color in the uniforms of safety workers and wardens earlier today—yellow with bold black stripes, like littlies costumed as bumblebees.

She remembered what Fausto had said, about how the Diego authorities were still in charge, and smiled. They might tolerate the Smokies' presence here, but the wardens probably didn't appreciate kidnapping attempts at parties.

Tally pressed herself harder against the tree trunk, feeling the tear in her sneak suit like a bleeding wound. If they had night vision, they'd spot her just as the Smokies had. Once more, Tally tried to lift her left hand to cover the open seam…

A startling moment of agony sent a wave of dizziness through her, and Tally heard herself utter a racking gasp of pain. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying not to cry out again.

Suddenly, the world was listing to one side. Tally opened her eyes, realizing too late that one foot had slipped from its branch. Instinctively her hands scrambled for a hold, but the attempt only sent fresh agony through her. And then she was tipping over, out of control and crashing through the tree, injuries wailing as she seemed to hit every branch on the way down.

She landed with a grunt, arms and legs splayed like a dummy thrown to the ground.

A circle of yellow-suited wardens quickly formed around her.

"Don't move!" one said gruffly.

Tally looked up and groaned with frustration. The wardens were unarmed, average middle pretties, nervous as a gaggle of cats surrounding a rabid Doberman. Uninjured, she could have laughed in their faces, danced among them, flicking them over like dominoes.

But as things were, the wardens construed her immobility as surrender.

Violations Of Morphology

She woke up in a padded cell.

The place smelled exactly like the big hospital at home: the chemical tang of disinfectant, the unpleasant scent of too many humans who'd been washed by robots instead of taking showers. And somewhere out of sight, Tally detected bedpans quietly stewing.

But most hospital rooms didn't have padded walls, and they weren't missing a door. Probably that was hidden under the padding somewhere, seamlessly fitted. Soft light in mixed pastel colors, probably meant to be soothing, filtered down from filaments sprinkled across the high ceiling.

Tally sat up and flexed her arms, rubbing her shoulders. The muscles were stiff and achy, but their usual strength had returned. Whatever the wardens had used to knock her out had kept her unconscious for some time. Shay had broken Tally's hand in training once to demonstrate how her self-repair worked, and it had taken hours to feel right again.

Tally kicked the bedcovers off with her feet, then looked down at herself and muttered, "You've got to be kidding."

They'd replaced her sneak suit with a thin, disposable nightgown covered with pink flowers.

Tally got up and tore it off, crumpling the garment into a ball. Dropping it to the floor, she kicked it under the bed. Better to be naked than look ridiculous.

Actually, it felt heavenly to be out of the sneak suit at last. The scales might transport sweat and dead skin cells to its surface, but nothing beat taking a real shower now and then. Tally rubbed at her skin, wondering if she could get one in this place.

"Hello?" she said to the room.

When no answer came, she peered more closely at the wall. The fabric of the padding glittered with a hexagonal pattern of micro-lenses, thousands of tiny cameras woven into it. The doctors could watch anything she did from any angle.

"Come on, guys, I know you can hear me," Tally said aloud, then made a fist and punched the wall as hard as she could.

"Ouch." She swore a few times, waving her hand in the air. The padding had helped a little, but the wall behind it was made of something harder than wood or stone—solid construction ceramic, probably. Tally wasn't going to break out of here bare-handed.

She returned to the bed and sat down, rubbing her fingers and letting out a sigh.

"Please be careful, young lady," a voice said. "You'll hurt yourself."

Tally glanced at her hand. The knuckles weren't even red. "Just wanted to get your attention."

"Attention? Hmm. Is that what this is all about?"

Tally groaned. If anything was more annoying than being sealed up in a wacko chamber, it was being talked to like a littlie who'd been caught chucking a stink bomb. The voice sounded deep and calming and generic, like some therapy drone. She imagined a committee of doctors behind the wall, typing in answers for the soothing computer voice to speak.

"Actually, this is about my room not having a door," she said. "Did I break a law or something?"

"You are being held under controlled observation, as a possible danger to yourself and others."

Tally rolled her eyes. When she got out of here, she was going to be a lot more than a possible danger. But she only said, "Who, me?"

"You jumped off the Overlook Cliff with inadequate equipment, for starters."

Tally's mouth dropped open. "You're saying that was my fault? I was just talking to an old friend of mine, and suddenly all these random nutcases with bows and arrows started shooting at me. What was I supposed to do? Stand around and get kidnapped?"

The voice paused. "We are reviewing video of the incident. We admit, however, that there are certain immigrant elements here in Diego who can be difficult. We apologize. They've never behaved this badly before. Rest assured that mediation is taking place."

"Mediation? Like, you're talking to them about it? Why don't you lock a few of them up, instead of me? After all, I'm the victim here."

There was another pause. "That remains to be determined. May I ask your name, city of origin, and exactly how you know this 'old friend' of yours?"

Tally felt the bedcovers between her fingers. Like the wall padding, they were woven through with microsensors, greedy little machines to measure her heart rate, sweat, and galvanic skin response. She took a few slow breaths, getting her anger under control. If she stayed focused, they could polygraph her all day without detecting a flicker of a lie.

"My name's Tally," she said carefully. "I ran away from up north. I heard you guys were nice to runaways."

"We welcome immigrants. Under the New System, we allow anyone to apply for Diego citizenship."

"'The New System'? Is that what you call this?" Tally rolled her eyes. "Yeah, well the New System sucks if you lock people up just for running away from psychos. Did I mention the bows and arrows?"

"Rest assured, you are not under observation because of any of your actions, Tally. We're more concerned with certain morphological violations."

Despite her focus, a nervous flicker ran down Tally's spine. "My what?"

"Tally, your body has been constructed around a reinforced ceramic skeleton. Your fingernails and teeth have been weaponized, your muscles and reflex centers significantly augmented."

With a sickening feeling, Tally realized what the wardens had done. Thinking she was seriously hurt, they'd brought her to the hospital for deep scanning, and what the doctors had found had made the authorities very nervous.

"I'm not sure what you're talking about," she said, trying to sound innocent.

"There are also certain structures in your higher cortex, apparently artificial, which seemed designed to change your behavior. Tally, do you ever suffer from sudden flashes of anger or euphoria, countersocial impulses, or feelings of superiority?"

Tally took another deep breath, fighting to remain calm. "What I'm suffering from is being locked up," she said in a slow, deliberate voice.

"Why do you have scars on your arms, Tally? Did someone do that to you?"

"What, these?" She laughed, running her fingers down the row of cutting scars. "Where I come from, they're just a fashion statement!"

"Tally, you may not be aware of what has been done to your mind. It may seem natural for you to cut yourself."

"But they're just…" Tally groaned and shook her head. "After all the crazy surgery I've seen around here, you're worried about a few scars?"

"We're only worried about what they indicate regarding your mental balance."

"Don't talk to me about mental balance," Tally growled, deciding to give up on acting calm. "I'm not the one who locks people up!"

"Do you understand the political disputes between your city and ours, Tally?"

"Political disputes?" she asked. "What does that have to do with me?"

"Your city has a long history of dangerous surgical practices, Tally. That history, and Diego's policy on runaways, have often been a source of diplomatic conflict. The advent of the New System has only made things worse."

Tally snorted. "So you're locking me up because of where I come from! Have you guys gone totally Rusty?"

There was a long pause after that. Tally imagined the doctors arguing over what to type into their voice software. "Why are you torturing me?" she shouted, trying to sound like a harmless, whining pretty. "Let me see your faces! "

She curled up on the bed and made sobbing noises, but readied herself to leap in any direction. These dimwits probably didn't realized that her arms had completely fixed themselves while she was asleep. All she needed was one door open half a centimeter and she would be out of this hospital in a heartbeat, naked or not. After another moment's silence, the voice returned. "I'm afraid, Tally, that you cannot be allowed to go free. Because of your body modifications, you meet our criteria for a dangerous weapon. And dangerous weapons are illegal in Diego."

Tally stopped her crying act, her jaw dropping open. "You mean, I'm illegal!" she cried. "How can a person be illegal?"

"You are not accused of any crime, Tally. We believe the authorities of your city are responsible. But before you leave this hospital, your morphological violations must be corrected."

"Forget it! You're not touching me!" The voice didn't react to her anger, just droned on soothingly. "Tally, your city has often meddled in the affairs of other cities, especially on the issue of runaways. We believe that you were unknowingly altered and sent here to create instability among our immigrant population."

They thought she was a dupe, not even a conscious agent of Special Circumstances. Of course, they had no idea how complicated the truth really was.

"Then let me go home," she said softly, trying to turn her frustration into tears. "I'll leave, I promise. Just let me go." She squeezed her teeth down harder on her lower lip. Her eyes burned, but as always, no tears came.

"We cannot allow you to go free in your current morphological configuration. You're simply too dangerous, Tally."

You have no idea, she thought.

"You're free to leave Diego if you want," the voice continued, "but not until we make some physical adjustments."

"No." A chill washed over her. They couldn't.

"We cannot legally release you without disarming you."

"But you can't operate on me if I don't want you to." She imagined herself weak again, pathetic and puny and average. "What about…informed consent?"

"If you prefer, we will make no experimental attempts to change your altered brain chemistry. With counseling, you may learn to control your behavior. But your dangerous body modifications will be corrected using proven surgical techniques. Informed consent is not required."

Tally opened her mouth again, but nothing came out. They wanted to make her average again without even fixing her brain? What sort of nightmare logic was that?

The four impregnable walls around her seemed suddenly suffocating, their glittering eyes hungry and mocking. Tally imagined cold metal instruments reaching into her and tearing out everything special from inside.

For those few moments kissing Zane, she'd imagined that she wanted to be normal. But now that someone was threatening to grind her down to averageness, she couldn't stand the thought.

She wanted to be able to look at Zane without disgust, to touch him, kiss him. But not if it meant being changed against her will again…

"Just let me go," she whispered.

"I'm afraid we can't, Tally. But when we're done, you'll be as beautiful and healthy as everyone else. Think of it, here in Diego you can look any way you want."

"This isn't about how I look!" Tally sprang to her feet and ran to the nearest wall. She pulled her fist back and gave it the hardest blow she could. Pain shot through her again.

"Tally, please stop."

"Forget it!" She set her teeth and grimly punched the wall again. If she started hurting herself, someone would have to open the door.

And then they'd see how dangerous she really was.

"Tally, please."

Again, she drew back her hand and struck the wall, felt her knuckles threatening to shatter against the iron hardness behind the padding. A gasp of pain slipped through her lips, and spatters of blood marked the padding, but Tally couldn't hold back. They knew how strong she was, and this had to look real.

"You leave us no choice."

Good, she thought. Just come on in and try to stop me.

She struck the wall again, another cry escaping…more blood.

Then Tally felt something through the pain: a dizziness washing over her.

"No," she said. "Not fair."

From under all the hospital smells of disinfectant and bedpans, so slight that no average human would have detected it, it filtered into her nostrils. Specials were usually immune to knockout gas, but Diego knew her secrets now. They could have designed this just for her…

Tally sank to her knees. She slowed her breathing to a minimum, trying desperately to calm herself, to suck in as little air as possible. They might not have guessed how thoroughly she was designed to deal with every form of attack, how quickly she could metabolize toxins.

Tally leaned against the wall, feeling weaker every second. The padding was suddenly so comfortable, as if someone had put pillows everywhere. She managed a few interface gestures with her left hand, setting her software to ping her every ten minutes. Tally had to wake up before they were ready to operate.

She tried to focus, to plan, but the sparkling of the little lenses in the padding was so lovely. Her eyes slid closed. She had to escape, but first Tally needed to sleep.

Sleep wasn't that bad, really, like being a bubblehead again, nothing to worry about, no anger deep inside…

Voices

It was nice here. Nice and quiet.

For the first time in a long while, Tally felt no fury, no frustration. The tension in her muscles had gone, along with the feeling that she had to be somewhere, do something, prove herself again. Here in this place, she was just Tally, and that simple knowledge flowed across her skin like a pleasant breeze. Her right hand felt particularly nice—all bubbly, as if someone were dribbling warm champagne over it.

She half-opened her eyes. Everything was pleasantly out of focus, not all sharp and edgy like usual. In fact, it was pretty much all clouds around here, white and fluffy. Like a littlie staring up into the sky, Tally could see any shape she wanted. She tried to imagine a dragon, but her brain couldn't make the wings look real…and the teeth were sort of complicated.

Besides, dragons were too scary. Tally, or maybe it was someone she knew, had once had a bad experience with one.

It was better to imagine her friends: Shay-la and Zane-la, everyone who loved her. That's all she really wanted, to go and see them once she'd gotten a little more sleep. She closed her eyes again.

Ping.

There was that sound again. It came back every once in a while, like an old friend checking up on her.

"Hi, ping-la," she said.

The ping never answered. But Tally liked to be polite.

"Did she just say something, Doctor?" someone asked.

"Couldn't have. Not with what we gave her."

"Did you see her metabolic chart?" a third voice said. "We're not taking any risks. Check those straps."

Someone grumbled, then started fiddling with Tally's hands and feet one by one, in a circle that started with her bubbly right hand and went clockwise. Tally imagined that she was a clock, lying there and quietly ticking.

"Don't worry, Doctor. She's not going anyplace."

The voice was wrong about that, because a moment later Tally was going places, floating along on her back. She couldn't open her eyes, but it felt like being on some kind of hovercarrier. Lights pulsed overhead, bright enough to see even through her eyelids. Her inner ear felt the hovercarrier take a left turn, slow down, then rumble across a bump in the magnetic grid. Then she was accelerating upward, fast enough that her ears popped a little.

"All right," one of the voices said. "Wait here for the prep team. Do not leave her alone, and call me if she moves."

"Okay, Doctor. But she's not moving."

Tally smiled. She decided to play a game where she didn't move. Somewhere in the back of her mind was the idea that fooling the voice would be lots of fun.

Ping.

"Hi," she answered, then remembered about not moving.

Tally lay still for a moment, then started to wonder where the pings were coming from. They were starting to get annoying.

She shifted her fingers, until an interface dropped down over the inside of her eyelids. Her internal software wasn't as fuzzy as everything else, and she didn't have to do anything but twitch her fingers to make it work.

Tally saw that the pings were a wake-up reminder. She was supposed to get up and do something.

She let out a slow sigh. Lying here was so nice. Besides, she couldn't remember what it was she had pinged herself about. Which made the whole ping pretty pointless. In fact, the whole ping was silly. Tally would have giggled, if giggling weren't so difficult. Suddenly, every ping was silly.

She twitched a finger to switch off the wake-up cycle, so it wouldn't bother her again.

But the question kept bugging Tally: What was she was supposed to do? Maybe one of the other Cutters would know. She flicked on her skintenna feed.

"Tally?" a voice asked. "Finally!"

Tally smiled. Shay-la always knew what to do.

"Are you okay?" Shay said. "Where've you been!"

Tally tried to answer, but talking was too hard.

"Are you all right, Tally?" Shay said after a few moments, sounding worried now.

Tally remembered that Shay had been mad at her, and her smile grew. Shay-la didn't sound mad anymore, just concerned.

Tally tried hard, and managed to drawl, "I'm sleepy."

"Oh, crap."

That was weird, Tally thought. Two voices had said "Oh, crap" at exactly the same time, in exactly the same scared way. One voice was Shay's inside her head, and the other was that other voice she kept hearing.

This was getting complicated, like the dragon's teeth she'd tried to imagine.

"Need to wake up," she said.

"Oh, crap!" said the other voice.

At the same time, Shay was saying, "Stay where you are, Tally. I think I've got your feed located. You're in the hospital, right?"

"Uh-huh," Tally murmured. She recognized the hospital smell, even though the other voice was making it hard to concentrate. It was shouting stuff in a way that hurt Tally's head. "I think she's waking up! Someone get something to put her back down!" Blah, blah, blah…

"We're close by," Shay said. "We figured you were somewhere in there. You're scheduled for despecialization in an hour."

"Oh, right," Tally said, remembering now what she was supposed to do: escape from this place, which was going to be really difficult. Much harder than moving her fingertips. "Help, Shay-la."

"Just hang on, Tally, and try to wake up! I'm coming for you."

"Yay, Shay-la," Tally whispered.

"But turn off your skintenna, now. If they've scanned you, they might be listening in…"

"Okay," Tally said, and as her fingers gestured, the voice in her head went quiet. The other voice was still shouting, still complaining in its worried way. It was starting to give Tally a headache.

"Doctor! She just said something! Even after that last dose! What the hell is she?"

"Whatever she is, this should keep her down," someone else said, and sleepiness swept over her again.

So Tally went back to not thinking at all.

Light

Consciousness returned in a burst of light.

Adrenaline shot through Tally, like waking up from a nightmare screaming. The world was suddenly diamond clear, as sharp as the teeth in her mouth, as bright as a spotlight in her eyes.

She sat bolt upright, breathing hard and clenching her fists tight. Shay stood at the end of the hospital bed, fiddling with the straps around her ankles.

"Shay!" she shouted. Tally felt everything so brilliantly she had to shout.

"That woke you up, didn't it?"

"Shay!" Her left arm stung; someone had just given her a shot. Energy was boiling through her, all her fury and strength returned. She jerked one foot against an ankle strap, but the metal restraint held.

"Calm down, Tally-wa," Shay said. "I'll get it."

"Calm down?" Tally muttered, her eyes scanning the room. The walls were lined with machines, all of them flickering with activity. In the room's center was an operating tank, life-support liquid slowly gurgling into it, a breathing tube hanging loosely, waiting to be put to use. Scalpels and vibrasaws waited on a nearby table.

Lying on the floor were a pair of unconscious men in hospital scrubs—one a middle pretty, the other young enough to sport leopard spots all over his downy fur. At the sight of them, the past twenty-four hours came rushing back to Tally: Random Town, being captured, the threatened operation to make her average again.

She twitched against the ankle restraints, needing to escape this room now.

"Almost got it," Shay said soothingly.

Tally's right arm itched, and she found a braid of wires and tubes stuck into it, life support for major surgery. She hissed and ripped them out. Blood spattered across the spotless white floor, but it didn't hurt—the collision between anesthetic and whatever Shay had used to awaken her had filled Tally with a pain-numbing fury.

When Shay finally got the second ankle strap unlocked, Tally leaped up, her fingers curled.

"Um, maybe you better put this on," Shay said, tossing her a sneak suit. Tally looked down at herself. She was wearing another disposable nightgown: pink with blue dinosaurs.

"What is it with hospitals?" she shouted, ripping the gown off and sticking one foot into the suit.

"Quiet down already, Tally-wa," Shay hissed…"I've plugged the sensors, but even randoms can hear you shouting like that, you know. And don't turn on your skintenna yet. It'll give us away."

"Sorry, Boss." A sudden wave of dizziness came over Tally; she'd stood up too fast. But she managed to slide her legs into the sneak suit and pull it up around her shoulders. Detecting her wild heart rate, it booted up straight into armored mode, scales rippling, then lying flat and hard.

"No, tune it this way," Shay whispered, one hand on the door. Her own suit was set to a pale blue, the color of hospital scrubs.

As Tally tuned her suit, trying to match the color of Shay's, her head still spun with wild energy. "You came for me," she said, trying to keep her voice low.

"I couldn't let them do this to you."

"But I thought you hated me."

"I hate you sometimes, Tally. Like I've never hated anybody else before." Shay snorted. "Maybe that's why I keep coming back for you."

Tally swallowed, looking around once more at the operating tank, the table full of cutting instruments, all the tools that would have turned her average again—despecialized her, as Shay had put it. "Thanks, Shay-la."

"No problem. Ready to get out of here?"

"Wait, Boss." Tally swallowed. "I saw Fausto."

"So did I." There was no anger in Shay's voice, simply a statement of fact.

"But he's …"

"I know."

"You know …" Tally took a step forward, her mind still spinning from waking up, from everything that was happening. "But what are we going to do about him, Shay?"

"We have to go, Tally. The rest of the Cutters are waiting for us on the roof. Something big is coming. A lot bigger than the Smokies."

Tally frowned. "But what—?"

The shriek of an alarm split the air.

"They must be getting close!" Shay cried. "We have to go!" She grabbed Tally's hand and pulled her through the door.

Tally followed, her mind reeling, her feet still unsteady beneath her. Outside the room, a long, straight hallway stretched in both directions, the alarm echoing down its length. People in hospital scrubs were spilling out of doors on either side, filling the hallway with confused babble.

Shay sprinted away, slipping among the stunned doctors and orderlies like they were statues. She was so light-footed and quick, the milling crowd hardly noticed the matching pale blue streak hurtling through them.

Tally thrust aside her questions and followed, but her just-woken-up dizziness was fading very slowly. She dodged people as best she could, plowing straight through any who got in her way. She caromed off bodies and the walls, but managed to keep moving, letting her wild energy carry her.

"Stop!" a voice shouted. "Both of you!"

In front of Shay, a cluster of wardens stood in their yellow-and-black uniforms, shock-sticks glowing in the soft, pastel light.

Shay didn't hesitate, her suit turning black as she plunged into them, hands and feet flashing. The air filled with the smell of fresh lightning as shock-sticks struck her armored scales, sizzling like mosquitoes frying on a bug light. She spun wildly amid the fracas, sending yellow figures staggering in all directions.

By the time Tally reached the struggle, only two wardens were left standing, backing down the hall and trying to ward off Shay, their shock-sticks flailing through the air. Tally stepped up behind one and grabbed her by the wrist, twisting it with a snap and pushing her into the other, sending them both sprawling to the floor.

"No need to break them, Tally-wa."

Tally looked down at the woman, who was clutching her wrist, a pained cry spilling from her lips. "Oh, sorry, Boss."

"It's not your fault, Tally. Come on." Shay pushed through the stairwell door and headed upward, taking each flight in two long bounds. Tally trailed behind, her dizziness almost under control, the manic energy from the wake-up shot fading a little as she ran. The stairwell doors closed behind them, dampening the earsplitting shriek of the alarm.

She wondered what had happened to Shay, where she had been all this time. How long had the other Cutters been here in Diego?

But the questions could wait. Tally was simply glad to be free again, fighting alongside Shay and being special. Nothing could stop the two of them together.

A few flights up, the stairs came to an end. They burst through the last door and onto the roof. The night overhead glittered with thousands of stars, beautifully clear.

After the padded cell, it felt glorious to be out under the open sky. Tally tried to suck in a breath of fresh air, but the smell of hospital still poured from the forest of exhaust chimneys around them.

"Good, they're not here yet," Shay said.

"Who isn't?" Tally asked.

Shay led her across the roof, toward the huge, darkened building next to the hospital—Town Hall, Tally remembered. Shay peered over the edge.

People were streaming out of the hospital, staff in pale blue and white, and patients in flimsy gowns—some walking, some being pushed along on hovercarriers. Tally heard the alarm echoing out of the windows below, and realized that the sound had changed to a two-toned evacuation signal.

"What's going on, Shay? They're not evacuating just because of us, are they?"

"No, not us." Shay turned to her, put a hand on her shoulder. "I need you to listen carefully, Tally This is important."

"I'm listening, Shay. Just tell me what's going on!"

"All right. I know all about Fausto—I tracked down his skintenna signal the moment I got here, more than a week ago. He explained everything."

"Then you know…he's not special anymore."

Shay paused. "I'm not sure if you're right about that, Tally."

"But he's different, Shay. He's weak. I saw it in his …" Tally's voice faded as she peered closer, breath catching in disbelief. In Shay's eyes was a softness that had never been there before. But this was Shay, still so fast and deadly— she'd cut through those wardens like a scythe.

"He's not weak," Shay said. "Neither am I."

Tally shook her head, pulled away, and stumbled back. "They got you too."

Shay nodded. "It's okay, Tally-wa. It's not like they turned me into a bubblehead." She took a step forward. "But you have to listen."

"Don't come near me!" Tally hissed, her hands curling.

"Wait, Tally, something big is happening."

Tally shook her head. She could hear the weakness in Shay's voice now. If she hadn't been so groggy, she would have seen it from the start. The real Shay wouldn't have been so worried about some random warden's wrist. And the real Shay—special Shay—would never have forgiven Tally so easily.

"You want to make me like you! Like Fausto and the Smokies tried to do!"

"No, I don't," Shay said. "I need you the way you—"

Before Shay could utter another word, Tally turned and started running for the opposite edge of the roof as quickly as she could. She had no crash bracelets, no bungee jacket, but she could still climb like a Special. If Shay was as soft as Fausto, she would no longer be as reckless. Tally could just escape this crazy city, and get help from home…

"Stop her!" Shay cried.

Faceless human forms flickered into being among the shapes of exhaust chimneys and antennas. They leaped out of the darkness at Tally, grabbing at her arms and legs.

This was all a trap. "Don't turn on your skintenna," Shay had said, so the rest of them could talk to each other silently, plotting against her.

Tally threw a punch, her wounded fist connecting painfully with an armored suit. A faceless Cutter gripped her arm, but Tally turned her suit slippery and pulled away. She let her momentum carry her into a backward roll, springing up from the ground, leaping to the top of a tall exhaust pipe.

She struggled to pull her suit hood down over her face, to turn invisible before they reached her, but a pair of gloved hands grasped Tally's ankles, pulling her feet out from under her. As she fell from the pipe, another figure caught her. Still more hands grabbed her arms, checking her wild flurry of blows, and with a gentle strength dragged her back down to the roof.

Tally struggled, but special or not, there were too many of them.

They pulled off their hoods—Ho, Tachs, all the other Cutters. Shay had gotten every one of them.

They smiled softly at her, an awful, average kindness in their eyes. Tally struggled, waiting for the sting of an injection in her bare neck.

Shay stood before her, shaking her head. "Tally, would you just relax?"

Tally spat at her, "You said you were saving me."

"I am. If you'd settle down and listen." Shay let out an exasperated sigh. "After Fausto gave me the cure, I called the Cutters. I told them to meet me halfway here. On our way back to Diego, I cured them one by one."

Tally looked around at their faces—a few of them grinning at her as if she were some littlie who wasn't in on a joke—and saw no doubts, no hint of rebellion against Shay's words. They were sheep now, no better than bubbleheads.

Her anger faded into despair. All of their brains had been infected with nanos, made weak and pitiful. Tally was completely alone.

Shay spread her hands. "Listen, we just got back here today. I'm sorry that the Smokies tried to jump you; I wouldn't have let them. This cure isn't what you need, Tally."

"Then let me go!" Tally growled.

Shay paused for a moment, then nodded. "Okay. Let her go."

"But Boss," Tachs said. "They're through the defenses already. We've got less than a minute."

"I know. But Tally's going to help us. I know she will."

One by one, the others cautiously released their grip. Tally found herself free, still glaring at Shay, unsure what to do next. She was still surrounded and outnumbered.

"There's no point running, Tally. Dr. Cable's on her way here."

Tally raised an eyebrow. "To Diego? To get you all back?"

"No." Shay's voice broke, almost like some littlie about to cry. "It's all our fault, Tally. Yours and mine."

"What is?"

"After what we did to the Armory, no one believed it was Crims or Smokies. We were too icy, too special. We terrified the whole city."

"Since that night," Tachs said, "everyone in town goes by to see the smoking crater you two left. They bring classes of littlies out to gawk at it."

"And Cable's coming here?" Tally frowned. "Wait, you mean, they figured out it was us?"

"No, they have another theory." Shay pointed at the horizon. "Look."

Tally turned her head. In the distance beyond Town Hall, a mass of bright lights had filled the sky. As she watched, they grew closer and brighter, shimmering like stars on a hot night.

Just like when Tally and Shay had been chased from the Armory.

"Hovercraft," Tally said.

Tachs nodded. "They've given Dr. Cable control of the city military. Everything that's left, anyway."

"Get your boards," Shay said. The others scattered in all directions across the roof.

Shay pushed a pair of crash bracelets into Tally's hands. "You have to stop trying to run away, and face what we started."

Tally didn't flinch at Shay's touch, suddenly too confused to worry about being cured. She could hear the approaching craft now, a swarm of lifting fans humming like some vast engine warming up. "I still don't get it."

Shay adjusted her own bracelets, and a pair of hoverboards rose up from the darkness. "Our city has always hated Diego. Special Circumstances knew about them helping the runaways, about the helicopters carrying people to the Old Smoke. So after the Armory was destroyed, Dr. Cable decided it must have been a military attack. She blamed Diego."

"So those hovercraft…they're coming to attack this city?” Tally murmured. The lights grew larger and larger until they swirled overhead, dozens of hovercraft, a great vortex of them surrounding Town Hall. "Even Dr. Cable wouldn't do that."

"I'm afraid she would. And the other cities will just sit back and watch, for now. The New System has them all totally scared." Shay pulled her sneak-suit hood down over her head. "Tonight we have to help them here, Tally, we have to do whatever we can. And tomorrow, you and I need to go home and stop this war we started."

"War? But cities don't …" Tally's voice faded. The roof under her feet had begun to rumble, and under the drone of a hundred lifting fans she heard a small, thin sound from the streets below.

People were screaming.

A few seconds later, the armada overhead opened fire, filling the sky with light.