Uglies

Leaving

Tally left at midnight.

Dr. Cable had demanded that no one be told about her mission, even the dorm minders. It was fine if Peris spread rumors-no one believed the gossip of new pretties, anyway. But not even her parents would be officially informed that Tally had been forced to run away.

Except for her little heart pendant, she was on her own.

She slipped out the usual way, out the window and down behind the recycler. Her interface ring remained on the bedside table, and Tally carried nothing but the survival knapsack and Shay's note.

She almost forgot her belly sensor, but clipped it on just before she left. The moon was about half-full and growing. At least she'd have some light as she traveled.

A special long-range hoverboard was waiting under the dam. It hardly moved when she stepped on.

Most boards gave a little as they adjusted to a rider's weight, bouncing like a diving board, but this one was absolutely firm. She snapped her fingers, and it rose under her, steady as concrete under her feet.

"Not bad," she said, then bit her lip. Since Shay had run away ten days ago, she'd started talking to herself. That wasn't a good sign. She was going to be completely alone for at least a few days now, and the last thing she needed was more imaginary conversations.

The board eased forward smoothly, climbing the embankment to the top of the dam. Once on the river, Tally pushed it faster, leaning forward until the river was a shining blur beneath her feet. The board didn't seem to have a speed governor-no safety warning sounded. Perhaps its only limits were the open space in front of her, metal in the ground below, and Tally's feet staying on board.

Speed was everything if she was going to make up for the last four days in limbo. If Tally showed up too long after her birthday, Shay might realize that her operation had been delayed. From there, she might guess that Tally wasn't an ordinary runaway.

The river passed beneath her faster and faster, and she reached the rapids in record time.

Drops of spray stung like hailstones when she hit the first falls, and Tally leaned back to slow herself a bit. Still, she was taking the rapids faster than she ever had before.

Tally realized that this hoverboard was no ugly toy. It was the real thing. On its front end a half circle of lights glowed, giving feedback from the board's metal detector, which constantly searched ahead to see if there was enough iron in the ground to stay aloft. The lights stayed on solidly as she climbed the rapids, and Tally hoped that Shay was right about metal deposits being found in every river. Otherwise, this could be a very long trip.

Of course, at this speed she wouldn't have time to stop if the lights suddenly went out.

Which would make it a very short trip.

But the lights stayed on, and Tally's nerves were soothed by the roar of white water, the cold slap of spray in her face, the thrill of bending her body through curve after curve in the moon-speckled darkness.

The board was smarter than her old one, learning her moves in a matter of minutes. It was like graduating from a tricycle to a motorbike: scary, but thrilling.

Tally wondered if the route to the Smoke had a lot of rapids to ride. Maybe this really would be an adventure. Of course, at the end of the journey there would only be betrayal.

Or worse, she would discover that Shay's trust in David had been misplaced, which could mean…anything. Probably something horrible.

She shivered, deciding not to think about that possibility again.

When Tally reached the turnoff, she slowed and turned the board around, taking a last look at the city. It shone brilliantly in the dark valley, so distant that she could blot it out with one hand. In the clear night air, Tally could make out individual fireworks unfolding like bright flowers, everything in perfect miniature.

The wild around her seemed so much larger, the churning river full of power, the forest huge with the secrets hidden in its black depths.

She allowed herself a long stare at the city lights before she stepped onto shore, wondering when she would see her home again.

On the trail, Tally wondered how often she'd have to walk. The trip up the rapids had been the fastest she had ever flown, even quicker than the Special Circumstances hovercar dodging through city traffic.

After that rush of speed, carrying the knapsack and board felt like being turned into a slug.

But soon enough the Rusty Ruins appeared below, and the board's metal detector guided Tally to the natural vein of iron. She rode it down toward the crumbling towers, her nerves growing jumpy as the ruins rose up to blot out the half-moon. The broken buildings surrounded her, the scorched and silent cars passing below. Peering through the empty windows made her feel how alone she was, a solitary wanderer in an empty city.

"Take the coaster straight past the gap," she said aloud, an incantation to keep away any Rusty ghosts.

At least that much of the note was crystal clear: The "coaster" had to be the roller coaster.

When the towering ruins gave way to flatter ground, Tally opened up the hoverboard.

Reaching the roller coaster, she took the entire circuit at full speed. Maybe "straight past the gap" was the only important part of the clue, but Tally had decided to treat the note like a magic spell. Leaving out any part might make the whole thing meaningless.

And it felt good to ride fast and hard again, leaving the ghosts of the Rusty Ruins behind.

As she whipped around tight turns and down steep descents, the world whirling around her, Tally felt like something caught in the wind, not knowing which direction the journey would ultimately take her.

A few seconds before she took the jump across the gap, the metal-detector lights winked out. The board dropped away, and her stomach seemed to go with it, leaving a hollow feeling inside. Her suspicion had proved right-at top speed, there hadn't been much warning.

Tally flew through the air in the silent darkness, the rush of her passage the only sound.

She remembered her first time across the gap, how angry she'd been. A few days later it had turned into a joke between them, typical ugly stuff. But now Shay had done it again, disappearing like the track below, leaving Tally in free fall.

A count of five later, the lights flickered on, and the crash bracelets steadied her as the board reactivated, rising smoothly up under her feet with reassuring solidness. At the bottom of the hill the track turned, climbing into a steep corkscrew of turns. But Tally slowed and kept going ahead, murmuring, "straight past the gap."

The ruins continued under her feet. Out here they were almost completely submerged, only a few shapeless masses rising through the grasp of vegetation. But the Rusties had built solidly, in love with their wasteful skeletons of metal. The lights on the front of her board stayed bright.

"Until you find one that's long and flat," Tally said to herself. She had memorized the note backward and forward, but repeating the words hadn't made their meaning any clearer.

"One what?" was the question. A roller coaster? A gap? The first would be silly. Where would be the point of a long, flat roller coaster? A long, flat gap? Maybe that would describe a canyon, complete with a handy river at the bottom. But how could a canyon be flat?

Maybe "one" meant a one, like the number. Should she be looking for something that looked like a one?

But a one was just a straight line, anyway, kind of long and flat already. So was I, the Roman numeral for one, except for the crossbars on top and bottom. Or the dot on the top if it was a small i.

"Thanks for the great clue, Shay," Tally said aloud. Talking to herself didn't seem like such a bad idea there in the outer ruins, where the relics of the Rusties struggled against the grip of creeping plants.

Anything was better than ghostly silence. She passed concrete plains, vast expanses cracked by thrusting grasses. The windows of fallen walls stared up at her, sprouting weeds as if the earth had grown eyes.

She scanned the horizon, looking for clues. There was nothing long and flat that she could see. Peering down at the ground passing below, Tally could hardly make out anything in the weed-choked darkness.

She might zoom right past whatever the clue referred to and not even know it, and have to retrace her path in daylight. But how would she know when she'd gone too far? "Thanks, Shay," she repeated.

Then she spotted something on the ground, and stopped.

Through the shroud of weeds and rubble, geometrical shapes had appeared-a series of rectangles in a line. She lowered the board and saw that below her was a track with metal rails and wooden crossbars-like the roller coaster, but much bigger. And it went in a straight line, as far as she could see.

"Take the coaster straight past the gap, until you find one that's long and flat."

This thing was a roller coaster, but long and flat.

"But what's it for?" she wondered aloud. What fun was a roller coaster without any turns or climbs?

She shrugged. However the Rusties got their kicks, this was perfect for a hoverboard. The track stretched off in two directions, but it was easy enough to tell which one to take. One led back the way she'd come, toward the center of the ruins. The other headed outward, northward and angling toward the sea.

"Cold is the sea," she quoted from the next line of Shay's note, and wondered how far north she was going.

Tally brought the hoverboard up to speed, pleased that she'd found the answer. If all of Shay's little riddles were this easy to solve, this whole trip was going to a breeze.

Spagbol

She made good time that night.

The track zoomed along beneath her, tracing slow arcs around hills, crossing rivers on crumbling bridges, always headed toward the sea. Twice it took her through other Rusty ruins, smaller towns further along in their disintegration. Only a few twisted shapes of metal remained, rising above the trees like skeletal fingers grasping at the air. Burned-out groundcars were everywhere, choking the streets out of town, twisted together in the collisions of the Rusties' last panic.

Near the center of one ruined town, she discovered what the long, flat roller coaster was all about. In a nest of tracks tangled up like a huge circuit board, she found a few rotting roller-coaster cars, huge rolling containers full of Rusty stuff, unidentifiable piles of rust and plastic.

Tally remembered now that Rusty cities weren't self-sufficient, and were always trading with one another, when they weren't fighting over who had more stuff. They must have used the flat roller coaster to move trade from town to town.

As the sky began to grow light, Tally heard the sound of the sea in the distance, a faint roar coming from across the horizon. She could smell salt in the air, which brought back memories of going to the ocean with Ellie and Sol as a littlie.

"Cold is the sea and watch for breaks," Shay's note read. Soon, Tally would be able to see the waves breaking on the shore. Maybe she was close to the next clue.

Tally wondered how much time she'd made up with her new hoverboard. She increased its speed, wrapping her dorm jacket around herself in the predawn chill. The track was slowly climbing now, cutting through formations of chalky rock. She remembered white cliffs towering over the ocean, swarming with seabirds nesting in high caves.

Those camping trips with Sol and Ellie felt as if they'd happened a hundred years ago. She wondered if there was some operation that could make her back into a littlie again, forever.

Suddenly, a gap opened up in front of Tally, spanned by a crumbling bridge. An instant later she saw that the bridge didn't make it all the way across, and there was no river full of metal deposits beneath it to catch her. Just a precipitous drop to the sea.

Tally spun her board sideways into a skid. Her knees bent under the force of braking, her grippy shoes squealing as they slipped across the riding surface, her body turning almost parallel to the ground.

But the ground was gone.

A deep chasm opened up under her, a fissure cut into the cliffs by the sea. Boiling waves crashed into the narrow channel, their whitecaps glowing in the darkness, their hungry roars reaching her ears. The board's metal-detector lights flickered out one by one as Tally left the splintered end of the iron bridge behind.

She felt the board lose purchase, slipping downward.

A thought flashed through her mind: If she jumped now, she could make a grab for the end of the broken bridge. But then the hoverboard would tumble into the chasm behind her, leaving her stranded.

The board finally halted in its slide out into midair, but Tally was still descending. The last fingers of the crumbling bridge were above her now, out of reach. The board inched downward, metal-detector lights flickering off one by one as the magnets lost their grip.

She was too heavy. Tally slipped off the knapsack, ready to hurl it down. But how could she survive without it? Her only choice would be to return to the city for more supplies, which would lose two more days. A cold wind off the ocean blew up the chasm, goose-pimpling her arms like the chill of death.

But the breeze buoyed the hoverboard, and for a moment she neither rose nor fell. Then the board started to slip downward again….

Tally thrust her hands into the pockets of her jacket and spread her arms, making a sail to catch the wind. A stronger gust struck, lifting her slightly, taking some weight off the board, and one of the metal-detector lights flickered stronger.

Like a bird with outstretched wings, she began to rise.

The lifters gradually regained purchase on the track, until the hoverboard had brought her level with the broken end of the bridge. She coaxed it carefully back over the cliff's edge, a huge shiver passing through her body as the board passed over solid ground. Tally stepped off, legs shaking.

"Cold is the sea and watch for breaks, " she said hoarsely. How could she have been so stupid, speeding up just when Shay's note said to be careful?

Tally collapsed onto the ground, suddenly dizzy and tired. Her mind replayed the chasm opening up, the waves below smashing indifferently against the jagged rocks. She could have been down there, battered again and again until there was nothing left.

This was the wild, she reminded herself. Mistakes had serious consequences.

Even before Tally's heart had stopped pounding, her stomach growled.

She reached into her knapsack for the water purifier, which she'd filled at the last river, and emptied the muck-trap. A spoonful of brown sludge that it had filtered from the water glopped out. "Eww," she said, opening the top to peer in. It looked clear, and smelled like water.

She took a much needed drink, but saved most to make dinner, or breakfast, whatever it was. Tally planned to do most of her traveling at night, letting the hoverboard recharge in sunlight, wasting no time.

Reaching into the waterproof bag, she pulled out a food packet at random. "'SpagBol,'" she read from the label, and shrugged. Unwrapped, it looked and felt like a finger-size knot of dried yarn. She dropped it into the purifier, which made burbling noises as it came to a boil.

When Tally glanced out at the glowing horizon, her eyes opened wide. She'd never seen dawn from outside the city before. Like most uglies, she was rarely up early enough, and in any case the horizon was always hidden behind the skyline of New Pretty Town. The sight of a real sunrise amazed her.

A band of orange and yellow ignited the sky, glorious and unexpected, as spectacular as fireworks, but changing at a stately, barely perceptible pace. That's how things were out here in the wild, she was learning. Dangerous or beautiful. Or both.

The purifier pinged. Tally opened the top and looked inside. It was noodles with a red sauce, with small kernels of soy meat, and it smelled delicious. She looked at the label again. "SpagBol…spaghetti Bolognese!"

She found a fork in the knapsack and ate hungrily. With the sunrise warming her and the crash of the sea rumbling below, it was the best meal she'd had for ages.

The hoverboard still had some charge left, so after breakfast she decided to keep moving.

She reread the first few lines of Shay's note: Take the coaster straight past the gap, until you find one that's long and flat.

Cold is the sea and watch for breaks.

At the second make the worst mistake.

If "the second" meant a second broken bridge, Tally wanted to run into it in daylight. If she'd spotted the gap a split second later, she would have ended up so much SpagBol at the bottom of the cliffs.

But her first problem was getting across the chasm. It was much wider than the gap in the roller coaster, definitely too far to jump. Walking looked like the only way around. She hiked inland through the scrubby grass, her legs grateful for a stretch after the long night on board. Soon the chasm closed, and an hour later she had hiked back up the other side.

Tally flew much slower now, eyes fixed ahead, daring only an occasional glimpse at the view around her.

Mountains rose up on her right, tall enough that snow capped their tops even in the early autumn chill.

Tally had always thought of the city as huge, a whole world in itself, but the scale of everything out here was so much grander. And so beautiful. She could see why people used to live out in nature, even if there weren't any party towers or mansions. Or even dorms.

The thought of home, however, reminded Tally how much her sore muscles would love a hot bath. She imagined a giant bathtub, like they had in New Pretty Town, with whirlpool jets and a big packet of massage bubbles dissolving in it. She wondered if the water purifier could boil enough water to fill a tub, in the unlikely event that she found one. How did they bathe in the Smoke? Tally wondered what she'd smell like when she arrived, after days without a bath. Was there soap in the survival kit? Shampoo?

There certainly weren't any towels. Tally had never realized how much stuff she'd needed before.

The second break in the track came up after another hour: a crumbling bridge over a river that snaked down from the mountains.

Tally came to a controlled stop and peered over the edge. The drop wasn't as bad as the first chasm, but it was still deep enough to be deadly. Too wide to jump. Hiking around it would take forever. The river gorge stretched away, with no easy way down in sight.

"At the second make the worst mistake," she murmured.

Some clue. Anything she did right now would be a mistake. Her brain was too tired to handle this, and the board was short on power, anyway.

Midmorning, it was time to sleep.

But first she had to unfold the hoverboard. The Special who'd instructed her had explained that it needed as much surface area in the sun as possible while it recharged. She pulled the release tabs, and it came apart. It opened like a book in her hands, becoming two hoverboards, then each of those opened up, and then those, unfolding like a string of paper dolls. Finally, Tally had eight hoverboards connected side-to-side, twice as wide as she was tall, no thicker than a stiff sheet of paper. The whole thing fluttered in the stiff ocean breeze like a giant kite, though the board's magnets kept it from blowing away.

Tally laid it flat, stretched out in the sun, where its metallic surface turned jet black as it drank in solar energy. In a few hours it would be charged up and ready to ride again. She just hoped it would go back together as easily as it had pulled apart.

Tally pulled out her sleeping bag, yanked it out of its pack, and wriggled inside, still in her clothes.

"Pajamas," she added to her list of things she missed about the city.

She made a pillow of her jacket, struggled out of her shirt, and covered her head with it.

She could already feel a hint of burn on her nose, and realized she had forgotten to stick on a sun block patch after daybreak. Perfect. A little red and flaking skin should go quite nicely with the scratches on her ugly face.

Sleep didn't come. The day was getting warm, and it felt weird lying there in the open.

The cries of seabirds rang in her head. Tally sighed and sat up. Maybe if she had a little more to eat.

She pulled out food packets one by one. The labels read: SpagBol SpagBol SpagBol SpagBol SpagBol…

Tally counted forty-one more packets, enough for three SpagBols a day for two weeks.

She leaned back and closed her eyes, suddenly exhausted. "Thank you, Dr. Cable."

A few minutes later, Tally was asleep.

The Worst Mistake

She was flying, skimming the ground with no track under her, not even a hoverboard, keeping herself aloft by sheer willpower and the wind in her outspread jacket. She skirted the edge of a massive cliff that overlooked a huge, black ocean. A flock of seabirds pursued her, their wild screams beating at her ears like Dr. Cable's razor-edged voice.

Suddenly, the stony cliffs beneath her cracked and fissured. A huge rift opened up, the ocean rushing in with a roar that drowned the seabirds' cries. She found herself tumbling through the air, falling down toward the black water.

The ocean swallowed her, filling her lungs, freezing her heart so that she couldn't cry out….

"No!" Tally shouted, sitting bolt upright.

A cold wind off the sea struck her face, clearing her head. Tally looked around, realizing that she was up on the cliffs, tangled in her sleeping bag. Tired, hungry, and desperate to pee, but not falling into oblivion.

She took a deep breath. The seabirds still cried around her, but in the distance.

That last dream had been only one of many falling nightmares.

Night was coming, the sun setting over the ocean, turning the water blood red. Tally pulled her shirt and jacket on before daring to emerge from the sleeping bag. The temperature seemed to be dropping by the minute, the light fading before her eyes. She hurried to get ready to go.

The hoverboard was the tricky part. Its unfolded surface had gotten wet, covered with a fine layer of ocean spray and dew. Tally tried to wipe it off with her jacket sleeve, but there was too much water and not enough jacket. The wet board folded up easily enough, but it felt too heavy when she was done, as if the water was still trapped between the layers. The board's operation light turned yellow, and Tally looked closely. The sides of the board were gradually oozing the water away. "Fine. Gives me time to eat."

Tally pulled out a packet of SpagBol, then realized that her purifier was empty. The only ready source of water was at the bottom of the cliff, and there was no way down. She wrung out her wet jacket, which produced a few good squooshes, then scraped off handfuls of the water oozing from the board until the purifier was half-full. The result was a dense, over spiced SpagBol that required lots of chewing.

By the time she was done with the unhappy meal, the board's light had turned green.

"Okay, ready to go," Tally said to herself. But where? She stood still, pondering, one foot on the board and one on the ground.

Shay's note read, "At the second make the worst mistake."

Making a mistake shouldn't be that hard. But what was the worst mistake? She'd almost killed herself once today already.

Tally remembered her dream. Falling into the gorge would count as a pretty bad mistake.

She stepped onto the board and edged it to the crumbling end of the bridge, looking down to where the river met the sea far below.

If she climbed down, her only possible path would be to follow the river upstream. Maybe that's what the clue meant. But the steep cliff showed no obvious path, not even a handhold.

Of course, a vein of iron in the cliff might carry her down safely. Her eyes scanned the walls of the gorge, searching for the reddish color of iron. A few spots looked promising, but in the growing darkness, she couldn't be certain.

"Great." Tally realized that she'd slept too long. Waiting for dawn would be twelve hours lost, and she didn't have any more water.

The only other option was to hike upriver atop the cliff. But it might be days before she reached a place to climb down. And how would she see it at night?

She had to make up time, not blunder around in the dark.

Tally swallowed, coming to a decision. There had to be a way down on her board. Maybe she was making a mistake, but that's what the clue called for. She edged the board off the bridge until it began to lose purchase. It slipped down the cliffside, descending faster as it left the metal of the track behind.

Tally's eye searched desperately for any sign of iron in the cliff. She eased the board forward, bringing it closer to the wall of stone, but saw nothing. A few of the board's metal-detector lights flickered out. Any lower, and she was going to fall.

This wasn't going to work. Tally snapped her fingers. The board slowed for a second, trying to climb, but then shivered and continued to descend.

Too late.

Tally spread her jacket, but the air in the gorge was still. She spotted a rusty-looking streak in the wall of stone and coaxed the board closer, but it turned out to be just a slimy smear of lichen. The board slipped downward faster and faster, the metal-detector lights flickering out one by one.

Finally, the board went dead.

Tally realized that this mistake might be her last.

She fell like a rock, down toward the crashing waves. Just like in the dream, her voice felt choked by a freezing hand, as if her lungs were already filled with water. The board tumbled below her, spinning like a falling leaf.

Tally closed her eyes, waiting for the shattering impact of cold water.

Suddenly, something grabbed her by the wrists and yanked her up cruelly, spinning her in the air. Her shoulders screamed with pain, and she spun once all the way around like a gymnast on the rings.

Tally opened her eyes and blinked. She was being lowered onto the hoverboard, which waited rock-steady just above the water.

"What the…?" she wondered aloud. Then, as her feet came to rest, Tally realized what had happened.

The river had caught her. It had been dumping metal deposits there for centuries, or however long rivers lasted, and the board's magnets had found purchase just in time.

"Saved, more or less," Tally muttered. She rubbed her shoulders, which ached from being caught by the crash bracelets, and wondered how far you had to fall before the bracelets would rip your arms out of their sockets.

But she'd made it down. The river stretched out in front of her, winding its way into the snowcapped mountains. Tally shivered in the ocean breeze and pulled her soggy jacket tighter around her.

"'Four days later take the side you despise,'" she quoted Shay's note. "Four days. Might as well get started."

After her first sunburn, Tally stuck a sunblock patch onto her skin every morning at dawn.

But even with only a few hours in the sun each day, her already brown arms gradually deepened in color.

SpagBol never again tasted as good as it had that first time on the cliffs. Tally's meals ranged from decent to odious. The worst were SpagBol breakfasts, around sunset, when the mere thought of more noodles made her never want to eat again. She almost wished she would run out of the stuff and be forced to either catch a fish and cook it, or simply starve, losing her ugly-fat the hard way.

What Tally really dreaded was running out of toilet paper. Her only roll was already half-gone, and she rationed it strictly now, counting the sheets. And every day, she smelled a little worse.

On the third day up the river, she decided to take a bath.

Tally awoke, an hour before sunset as usual, feeling sticky inside the sleeping bag. She'd washed her clothes that morning and left them to dry on a rock. The thought of getting into clean clothes with dirty skin made her flesh crawl.

The water in the river was fast-moving, and left almost nothing in the muck-trap of the purifier, which meant it was clean. It was icy cold, though, probably fed by melting snow in the approaching mountains.

Tally prayed it would be slightly less freezing late in the day, after the sun had had a chance to warm it up.

The survival kit did have soap, it turned out-a few disposable packets tucked into a corner of the knapsack. Tally clenched one in her hand as she stood at the edge of the river, wearing nothing but the sensor clipped to her belly ring, shivering in the cool breeze.

"Here we go," she said, trying to keep her teeth from chattering.

She put one foot in and jumped back from the icy streak of agony that shot into her leg.

Apparently, there would be no easing slowly into the water. She had to take a running jump.

Tally walked along the riverbank, searching for a good place to leap in, slowly gathering her courage.

She realized she'd never been naked outside before. In the city, everywhere outdoors was public, but she hadn't seen another human face for days. The world seemed to belong to her. Even in the cool air, the sun felt wonderful on her skin.

She clenched her teeth and faced the river. Standing here pondering the wild wasn't going to get her clean. Just a few steps and a leap, and gravity would do the rest.

She counted down from five, then counted down from ten, neither of which worked. Then she realized that she was getting cold just standing there.

Finally, Tally jumped.

The freezing water closed like a fist around her. It paralyzed every muscle, turning her hands into shivering claws. For a moment, Tally wondered how she would make it back to shore. Maybe she would just expire here, slipping under the icy water forever.

She took a deep, shuddering breath, reminding herself that the people before the Rusties must have taken baths in freezing streams all the time. Tally clenched her teeth to stop them chattering, and dipped her head under the water and out, whipping wet hair onto her back.

A few moments later an unlikely kernel of warmth ignited in her stomach, as if the icy water had activated some secret reserve of energy within her body. Her eyes opened wide, and she found herself whooping with excitement. The mountains, towering above her after three nights' travel inland, seemed suddenly crystal clear, their snowy peaks catching the last rays of the setting sun. Tally's heart pounded fiercely, her blood spreading unexpected warmth throughout her body.

But the burst of energy was burning quickly. She fumbled the soap packet open, squishing it between her fingers, across her skin, and into her hair. Another dunking and she was ready to get out.

Looking back at the shore, Tally realized that she'd been carried away from her camp by the river's current. She swam a few strokes upstream, then trudged toward the rocky shore.

Waist-high in the water, already shivering from the breeze on her wet body, Tally heard something that made her heart freeze.

Something was coming. Something big.

The Side You Despise

Thunder came from the sky, like a giant drum beating fiercely and fast, forcing its way into her head and chest. It seemed to rattle the whole horizon, making the surface of the river shimmer with every thud.

Tally crouched low in the water, sinking to her neck just before the machine appeared.

It came from the direction of the mountains, flying low and kicking up dust in a dozen separate windstorms in its wake. It was much bigger than a hovercar, and a hundred times louder. Apparently without magnets, it beat the air into submission with a half-invisible disk shimmering in the sun.

When the machine reached the river, it banked into a turn. Its passage churned the water, sending out circular waves as if some huge stone were skimming across the surface. Tally saw people inside, looking down at her camp. The unfolded hoverboard pitched in the windstorm, its magnets fighting to keep it on the ground. Her knapsack disappeared in the dust, and she saw clothing, the sleeping bag, and packets of SpagBol scattering in the machine's wake.

Tally sank lower into the frantic water, struck by the thought that she would be left here, naked and alone, with nothing. She was already half frozen.

But the machine dipped forward, just like a hoverboard, and moved on. It headed toward the sea, vanishing as quickly as it had appeared, leaving her ears pounding and the river's surface boiling.

Tally crept out shivering. Her body felt ice cold, her fingers barely able to clench into a fist. She made her way back to her camp, grasping clothes to her body, putting them on before the setting sun could dry her. She sat and wrapped her arms around herself until the shaking stopped, glancing fearfully at the red horizon every few seconds.

The damage was less than she'd feared. The hoverboard's operation light was green, and her knapsack, dusty but unharmed. After a search for SpagBol and a count of the remaining packets, Tally found that she had lost only two. But the sleeping bag was shredded. Something had chopped it to pieces.

Tally swallowed. There was nothing left of the bag bigger than a handkerchief. What if she had been in it when the machine had come?

She folded the hoverboard quickly and packed everything away. The board was ready to go almost instantly. At least the strange machine's windstorm had dried it off.

"Thanks a lot," Tally said as she stepped on, leaning forward as the sun began to set. She was anxious to leave the campsite behind her as quickly as possible, in case they came back.

But who were they? The flying machine had been just like what Tally imagined when her teachers had described Rusty contraptions: a portable tornado crashing along, destroying everything in its path. Tally had read about aircraft that shattered windows as they flew past, armored war vehicles that could drive straight through a house.

But the Rusties had been gone a long time. Who would be stupid enough to rebuild their insane machines?

Tally rode into the growing darkness, her eyes peeled for any signs of the next clue-"Four days later take the side you despise"-and for whatever other surprises the night would bring.

One thing was certain now: She wasn't alone out here.

Later that night, the river branched in two.

Tally cruised to a halt, surveying the junction. One of the branches was clearly larger, the other more like a broad stream. A "tributary," she remembered, was the name for a small river that fed into a larger one.

Probably she should just stay on the main river. But she'd been traveling for just three days, and her hoverboard was a lot faster than most. Maybe it was time for the next clue.

"Four days later take the side you despise," Tally muttered.

She peered at the two rivers in the light from the moon, which was almost full now. Which river did she despise? Or which one would Shay think she despised? They both looked pretty ordinary to her. She squinted into the distance. Maybe one led toward something despicable that would be visible in daylight.

But waiting would mean losing a night's travel, and sleeping in the cold and dark without a sleeping bag.

Tally reminded herself that the clue might not be about this junction. Maybe she should just stay on the big river until something more obvious came up. Why would Shay call the two rivers "sides," anyway? If she'd meant this junction, wouldn't it be "take the direction you despise"?

"The side you despise," Tally mumbled, remembering something.

Her fingers went to her face. When she had showed Shay her pretty morphos, Tally had mentioned how she always started by doubling her left side-that she had always hated the right side of her face. Which was exactly the sort of thing that Shay would remember.

Was this Shay's way of telling her to take a right?

Branching to the right was the smaller river, the tributary. The mountains were closer in that direction.

Maybe she was drawing near the Smoke.

She stared at the two rivers in the darkness, one big and one small, and remembered Shay saying that pretty symmetry was silly, because she'd rather have a face with two different sides.

Tally hadn't realized it at the time, but that had been an important conversation for Shay, the first time she had talked about wanting to stay ugly. If only Tally had noticed at the time, maybe she could have talked Shay out of running away. And they'd both be in a party tower right now, together and pretty.

"Right it is." Tally sighed, and eased her board onto the smaller river.

By the time the sun rose, Tally knew she had made the right choice.

As the tributary climbed its way into the mountains, the fields around her filled with flowers. Soon the brilliant white bonnets were as thick as grass, driving every other color from the landscape. In the dawn light, it was as if the earth were glowing from within.

"'And look in the flowers for fire-bug eyes,'" Tally said to herself, wondering if she should get off the board. Maybe there was some kind of bug with fiery eyes she should be looking for.

She drifted to shore and stepped off.

The flowers came right up to the edge of the water. Tally knelt to inspect one closely. The five long white petals curved delicately up from the stem and around its mouth, which contained just a hint of yellow deep inside. One of the petals below the mouth was longer, arching down almost to the ground. Motion caught her eye, and she spotted a small bird hovering among the flowers, flitting from one to the next to alight on the longest petal, thrusting its beak into one after another.

"They're so beautiful," she said. And there were so many of them. She wanted to lie down in the flowers and sleep.

But she couldn't see anything that might be "fire-bug eyes." Tally stood, scanning the horizon. Nothing met her gaze but hills, blinding white with flowers, and the glimmering river climbing up into the mountains.

It all looked so peaceful, a different world from the one that the flying machine had shattered last night.

She stepped back on the board and continued, slower now as she looked carefully for whatever might fit Shay's clue, remembering to stick on a sunblock patch as the sun rose higher.

The river climbed higher into the hills. From up there, Tally saw bare stretches among the flowers, expanses of dry, sandy earth. The patchy landscape was a strange sight, like a beautiful painting that someone had taken sandpaper to.

She got off her board several times to inspect the flowers, looking for insects or anything else that might match the words "fire-bug eyes." But as the day wore on, nothing made sense.

By the time noon approached the tributary was gradually growing smaller. Sooner or later, she would reach its source, a mountain spring or melting snowdrift, and then she'd have to walk. Tired after the long night, she decided to make camp.

Her eyes scanned the sky, wondering if any more of the Rusty flying machines were around. The idea of another one crashing into her in her sleep terrified her. Who knew what the people inside the thing wanted? If she hadn't been hidden in the water the night before, what would they have done with her?

One thing was certain: The shiny solar cells of the hoverboard would be obvious from the air. Tally checked the charge; more than half remained thanks to her slow speed and the bright sun now overhead.

She unfolded the hoverboard, but only halfway, and hid it among the tallest flowers she could find. Then she hiked to the top of a nearby hill. From up there Tally could keep her eye on the hoverboard, and hear and see anything approaching from the air. She decided to repack her knapsack before she went to sleep, so she could bolt at a moment's notice.

It was the best she could do.

After a mildly revolting packet of SpagBol, Tally curled up in a spot where the white flowers were tall enough to hide her. The breeze stirred their long stalks, and shadows danced on her closed eyelids.

Tally felt strangely exposed without her sleeping bag, lying there in her clothes, but the warm sun and the long night's travel put her quickly to sleep.

When she awoke, the world was on fire.

Firestorm

At first there was a sound like a roaring wind in her dreams.

Then a tearing noise filled the air, the crackle of dry brush inflamed, and the smell of smoke swept over Tally, bringing her suddenly and completely awake.

Billowing clouds of smoke surrounded her, blotting out the sky. A ragged wall of flame moved through the flowers, giving off a wave of blistering heat. She grabbed her knapsack and stumbled down the hill away from the fire.

Tally had no idea in which direction the river lay. Nothing was visible through the dense clouds. Her lungs fought for air in the foul brown smoke.

Then she spotted a few rays from the setting sun breaching the billows, and she oriented herself. The river was back toward the flame, on the other side of the hill.

Tally retraced her path to the top of the hill and peered down through the smoke. The fire was growing stronger. Fingers of it shot up the hill, leaping from one beautiful flower to another, leaving them scorched and black. Tally caught the glimmer of the river through the smoke, but the heat pushed her back.

She stumbled down the other side again, coughing and spitting, one thought in her mind: Was her hoverboard already engulfed in flames?

Tally had to get to the river. The water was the only place safe from the rampaging fire. If she couldn't go over the hill, maybe she could go around.

She descended the slope at full tilt. There were a few spots burning on this side, but nothing like the galloping flame behind her. She reached level ground and made her way around the base of the hill, crouching low to the ground to duck under the smoke.

Halfway around, she reached a blackened patch where the fire had already passed. The brittle stems of flowers crunched under her shoes, and the heat coming off the scorched earth stung her eyes.

Her footsteps ignited with flame as she ran through the blackened flowers, like stabbing a poker into a slumbering fire. She felt her eyes drying, her face blistering.

Moments later, Tally spotted the river. The fire stretched in an unbroken wall across the opposite shore, a roaring wind pressing at its back and sending embers flying across to alight on the near side. A rolling billow of smoke surged toward her, choking and blinding her until it passed.

When her eyes could open again, Tally spotted the shiny solar surface of her hoverboard.

She ran toward it, ignoring the burning flowers in her path.

The board seemed untouched by the flame, protected by good luck and the layer of dew it collected every nightfall.

She quickly folded the board and stepped onto it, not waiting for the yellow light to turn green. The heat had mostly dried it already, and it rose into the air at her command. Tally took the board over the river, just above the water, and skimmed her way upstream, looking for a break in the wall of fire to her left.

Her grippy shoes were ruined, their soles cracked like sunbaked mud, so she flew slowly, scooping up handfuls of water to soothe her burning face and arms.

A noise thundered to life on Tally's left, unmistakable even above the roar of the fire. She and the board were caught in a sudden wind, shoved back toward the other shore. Tally leaned hard against it and stuck a foot into the water to slow the board. She clung tightly with both hands, desperately fighting being thrown into the river.

The smoke suddenly cleared, and a familiar shape loomed out of the darkness. It was the flying machine, its thundering beat now obvious above the raging fire. Sparks jumped across the river as the machine's windstorm stirred the fire to a new intensity.

What were they doing? she wondered. Didn't they realize they were spreading the fire?

Her question was answered a moment later when a gout of flame shot from the machine, squirting across the river to ignite another patch of flowers.

They had set the fire, and were driving it on in every way they could.

The flying machine thundered closer, and she glimpsed an inhuman face staring at her from the pilot seat.

She turned her board to fly away, but the machine lifted up into the air, passing right over her, and suddenly the wind was too great.

Tally pitched off and into the water. Her crash bracelets caught for a moment, holding her up above the waves, but then the wind caught the hoverboard, much lighter without her on it, and spun it away like a leaf.

She sank into the deep water in the middle of the river, knapsack and all.

It was cool and quiet under the waves.

For a few endless moments, Tally felt only relief to have escaped the searing wind, the thundering machine, the blistering heat of the firestorm. But the weight of the crash bracelets and knapsack pulled her down fast, and panic welled up in her pounding chest.

She thrashed in the water, climbing up toward the flickering lights of the surface. Her wet clothes and gear dragged at her, but just as her lungs were about to burst, she broke the surface into the maelstrom.

Tally gulped a few breaths of smoky air, then was slapped in the face by a wave. She coughed and sputtered, struggling to stay afloat.

A shadow passed over her, blacking out the sky. Then her hand struck something-a familiar grippy surface….

Her hoverboard had come back to her! Just the way it always did when she spilled. The crash bracelets lifted her up until she could grab on to it, her fingers clinging to its knobbly surface as she gasped for air.

A high-pitched whine came from the nearby shore. Tally blinked away water from her eyes and saw that the Rusty machine had landed. Figures were jumping from the machine, spraying white foam at the ground as they crashed through the burning flowers and into the river. They were headed for her.

She struggled to climb onto the board.

"Wait!" the nearest figured called.

Tally rose shakily to her feet, trying to keep steady on the wet surface of the board. Her hard-baked shoes were slippery, and her sodden knapsack seemed to weigh a ton. As she leaned forward, a gloved hand reached up to grab the front of the board. A face came up from the water, wearing some sort of mask. Huge eyes stared up at her.

She stomped at the hand, crunching the fingers. They slipped off, but her weight was thrown too far forward, and the board tipped its nose into the water.

Tally tumbled into the river again.

Hands grabbed at her, pulling her away from the hoverboard. She was hoisted out of the water and onto a broad shoulder. She caught glimpses of masked faces: huge, inhuman eyes staring at her unblinkingly.

Bug eyes.

Bug Eyes

They pulled her to the shore and out of the water, hauling her to the flying machine.

Tally's lungs felt full of water and smoke. She could hardly take a breath without a wracking cough shaking her whole body.

"Put her down!"

"Where the hell did she come from?"

"Give her some oh-two."

They flopped Tally onto her back on the ground, which was thick with the white foam.

The one who'd carried her pulled off his bug-eyed mask, and Tally blinked.

He was a pretty. A new pretty, every bit as beautiful as Peris.

The man plunged the mask over her face. Tally fought weakly for a moment, but then cold, pure air surged into her lungs. Her head grew light as she gratefully sucked it down.

He pulled the mask off. "Not too much. You'll hyper-ventilate."

She tried to speak but could only cough.

"It's getting bad," another figure said. "Jenks wants to take her back up."

"Jenks can wait."

Tally cleared her throat. "My board."

The man smiled beautifully and glanced up. "It's headed over. Hey! Somebody stick that thing to the chopper! What's your name, kid?"

"Tally." Cough.

"Well, Tally, are you ready to move? The fire won't wait."

She cleared her throat and coughed again. "I guess so."

"Okay, come on." The man helped her up and pulled her toward the machine. She found herself pushed inside, where the noise was much less, crowded into the back with three others in bug-eyed masks.

A door slammed shut.

The machine rumbled, and then Tally felt it lift from the ground. "My board!"

"Relax, kid. We got it." The woman pulled her mask off. She was another young pretty.

Tally wondered if these were the people in the clue. The "fire-bug eyes." Was she supposed to be looking for them?

"Is she going to make it?" a voice popped through the cabin.

"She'll live, Jenks. Make the usual detour, and work the fire a little on the way home."

Tally looked down as the machine climbed. Their flight followed the course of the river, and she saw the fires spreading across to the other shore, driven by the wind of its passage. Occasionally, the craft would shoot out a gout of flame.

She looked at the faces of the crew. For new pretties, they seemed so determined, so focused on their task. But their actions were madness. "What are you guys doing?" she said.

"A little burning."

"I can see that. But why?"

"To save the world, kid. But hey, we're real sorry about your getting in the way."

They called themselves rangers.

The one who'd pulled her from the river was called Tonk. They all spoke with an accent, and came from a city Tally had never heard of.

"It's not too far from here," Tonk said. "But we rangers spend most of our time out in the wild. The fire helicopters are based in the mountains."

"The firewhats?"

"Helicopters. That's what you're sitting in."

She looked around at the rattling machine, and shouted over the noise, "It's so Rusty!"

"Yeah. Vintage stuff, a few pieces of it are almost two hundred years old. We copy the parts as they wear out."

"But why?"

"You can fly it anywhere, with or without a magnetic grid. And it's the perfect thing for spreading fires.The Rusties sure knew how to make a mess."

Tally shook her head. "And you spread fires because…"

He smiled and lifted one of her shoes, pulling a crushed but unburned flower from the sole.

"Because of phragmipedium panthera, " he said.

"Excuse me?"

"This flower used to be one of the rarest plants in the world. A white tiger orchid. In Rusty days, a single bulb was worth more than a house."

"A house? But there's zillions of them."

"You noticed?" He held up the flower, staring into its delicate mouth. "About three hundred years ago, some Rusty figured a way to engineer the species to adapt to wider conditions. She messed with the genes to make them propagate more easily."

"Why?"

"The usual. To trade them for lots of stuff. But she succeeded a little too well. Look down."

Tally peered out the window. The machine had gained altitude and left the firestorm behind. Below were endless fields of white, interrupted only by a few barren patches.

"Looks like she did a good job. So what? They're nice."

"One of the most beautiful plants in the world. But too successful. They turned into the ultimate weed. What we call a monoculture. They crowd out every other species, choke trees and grass, and nothing eats them except one species of hummingbird, which feeds on their nectar. But the hummingbirds nest in trees."

"There aren't any trees down there," Tally said. "Just the orchids."

"Exactly. That's what monoculture means: Everything the same. After enough orchids build up in an area, there aren't enough hummingbirds to pollinate them. You know, to spread the seeds."

"Yeah," Tally said. "I know about the birds and the bees."

"Sure you do, kid. So the orchids eventually die out, victims of their own success, leaving a wasteland behind. Biological zero. We rangers try to keep them from spreading. We've tried poison, engineered diseases, predators to target the hummingbirds…but fire is the only thing that really works." He turned the orchid over in his hand and held up a firestarter, letting the flame lick into its mouth. "Have to be careful, you know?"

Tally noticed the other rangers were cleaning their boots and uniforms, searching for any trace of the flowers among the mud and foam. She looked down at the endless white.

"And you've been doing this for…"

"Almost three hundred years. The Rusties started the job, after they figured out what they'd done. But we'll never win. All we can hope to do is contain the weed."

Tally sat back, shaking her head, coughing once more. The flowers were so beautiful, so delicate and unthreatening, but they choked everything around them.

The ranger leaned forward, handing her his canteen. She took it and drank gratefully.

"You're headed to the Smoke, aren't you?"

Tally swallowed some water the wrong way and sputtered. "Yeah. How'd you know?"

"Come on. An ugly waiting around in the flowers with a hoverboard and a survival kit?"

"Oh, yeah." Tally remembered the clue: "Look in the flowers for fire-bug eyes." They must have seen uglies before.

"We help the Smokies out, and they help us out," Tonk said. "They're crazy, if you ask me-living rough and staying ugly. But they know more about the wild than most city pretties. It's kind of admirable, really."

"Yeah," she said. "I guess so."

He frowned. "You guess so? But you're headed there. Aren't you sure?"

Tally realized that this was where the lies started. She could hardly tell the rangers the truth: that she was a spy, an infiltrator. "Of course I'm sure."

"Well, we'll be setting you down soon."

"In the Smoke?"

He frowned again. "Don't you know? The location's a big secret. Smokies don't trust pretties. Not even us rangers. We'll take you to the usual spot, and you know the rest, right?"

She nodded. "Sure. Just testing you."

The helicopter landed in a swirl of dust, the white flowers bending in a wide circle around the touchdown spot.

"Thanks for the ride," Tally said.

"Good luck," Tonk said. "Hope you like the Smoke."

"Me too."

"But if you change your mind, Tally, we're always looking for volunteers in the rangers."

Tally frowned. "What's a volunteer?"

The ranger smiled. "That's when you pick your own job."

"Oh, right." Tally had heard you could do that in some cities. "Maybe. In the meantime, keep up the good work. Speaking of which, you're not setting any fires around here, are you?"

The rangers laughed, and Tonk said, "We just work the edges of the infestation, to keep the flowers from spreading. This spot is right smack in the middle. No hope left."

Tally looked around. There wasn't a glimpse of any color but white as far as she could see. The sun had set an hour ago, but the orchids glowed like ghosts in the moonlight.

Now that she knew what they were, the sight chilled Tally. What had he called it?

Biological zero.

"Great."

She jumped out of the helicopter and yanked her hoverboard from the magnetic rack next to the door.

She backed away, careful to crouch as the rangers had warned her to.

The machine whined back to life, and she peered upward into the shimmering disk. Tonk had explained that a pair of thin blades, spinning so quickly that you couldn't see them, carried the craft through the air.

She wondered if he'd been kidding. It just looked like a typical force field to her.

The wind grew crazed again as the machine reared up, and she held on to her board tightly, waving until the aircraft disappeared into the dark sky. She sighed.

Alone again.

Looking around, she wondered how she could find the Smokies in this featureless desert of orchids.

"Then wait on the bald head until it's light," was the last line of Shay's note. Tally scanned the horizon, and a relieved smile broke onto her face.

A tall, round hill rose up not far away. It must have been one of the places where the engineered flowers had first taken root. The top half of the hill was dying, nothing left but bare soil, ruined by the orchids.

The cleared area looked just like a bald head.

She reached the bald hilltop in a few hours.

Her hoverboard was useless there, but the hiking was easy in the new shoes the rangers had given her, her own so burned that they had fallen apart in the helicopter. Tonk had also filled her purifier with water.

The ride in the helicopter had begun to dry out Tally's clothing, and the hike had done the rest. Her knapsack had survived the dunking, even the SpagBol remaining dry in its waterproof bag. The only thing lost to the river was Shay's note, reduced to a soggy wad of paper in her pocket.

But she had almost made it. As she looked out from the hilltop, Tally realized that, except for the burn blisters on her hands and feet, some bruises on her knees, and a few locks of hair that had gone up in smoke, she had pretty much survived. As long as the Smokies knew where to find her, and believed her story that she was an ugly coming to join them, and didn't figure out that she was actually a spy, then everything was just great.

She waited on the hill, exhausted but unable to sleep, wondering if she could really do what Dr. Cable wanted. The pendant around her neck had also survived the ordeal. Tally doubted a little water would have ruined the device, but she wouldn't know until she reached the Smoke and activated it.

She hoped for a moment that the pendant wouldn't work. Maybe one of the bumps along the way had broken its little eye-reader and it would never send its message back to Dr.

Cable. But that was hardly worth hoping for. Without the pendant, Tally was stuck out here in the wild forever. Ugly for life.

Her only way home was to betray her friend.

Lies

A couple of hours after dawn, they came and got her.

Tally saw them hiking through the orchids, four figures carrying hoverboards and dressed all in white.

Broad white hats in a dappled pattern hid their heads, and she realized that if they ducked down into the flowers, they would practically disappear.

These people went to a lot of trouble to stay hidden.

As the party drew close, she recognized Shay's pigtails bobbing under one of the hats and waved frantically. Tally had planned to take the note literally and wait on the hilltop, but at the sight of her friend, she grabbed her board and dashed down to meet them.

Infiltrator or not, Tally couldn't wait to see Shay.

The tall, lanky form broke from the others and ran toward her, and the two embraced, laughing.

"It is you! I knew it was!"

"Of course it is, Shay. I couldn't stand missing you." Which was pretty much true.

Shay couldn't stop smiling. "When we spotted the helicopter last night, most people said it had to be another group. They said you'd taken too long, and that I should give up."

Tally tried to smile back, wondering if she hadn't made up enough time. She could hardly admit starting four days after her sixteenth birthday.

"I kind of got turned around. Could your note have been any more obscure?"

"Oh." Shay's face fell. "I thought you'd understand it."

Unable to bear Shay blaming herself, Tally shook her head. "Actually, the note was okay.

I'm just a moron. And the biggest problem was when I got to the flowers. The rangers didn't see me at first, and I almost got roasted."

Shay's eyes widened as she took in Tally's scratched and sunburned face, the blisters on her hands, and her patchy, scorched hair. "Oh, Tally! You look like you went through a war zone."

"Just about."

The other three uglies walked up. They stood back a bit, one boy holding a device in the air. "She's carrying a bug," he said.

Tally's heart froze. "A what?"

Shay gently took Tally's board from her and handed it to the boy. He swept his device across it, nodded, and pulled one of the stabilizer fins off. "Here it is."

"They sometimes put trackers on the long-range boards," Shay said. "Trying to find the Smoke."

"Oh, I'm really…I didn't know. I swear!"

"Relax, Tally," the boy said. "It's not your fault. Shay's board had one too. That's why we meet you newbies down here." He held up the bug. "We'll take it away in some random direction and stick it on a migrating bird. See how the Specials like South America." The Smokies all laughed.

He stepped closer and swept the device up and down her body. Tally flinched when it passed close to the pendant. But he smiled. "It's okay. You're clean."

Tally sighed with relief. Of course, she hadn't activated the pendant yet, so his device couldn't detect it.

The other bug was just Dr. Cable's way of misleading the Smokies, getting them to drop their guard.

Tally herself was the real danger.

Shay stepped up next to the boy, taking his hand in hers. "Tally, this is David."

The boy smiled again. He was an ugly, but he had a nice smile. And his face held a kind of confidence that Tally had never seen in an ugly before. Maybe he was a few years older than she was. Tally had never watched anyone mature naturally past age sixteen. She wondered how much of being ugly was just an awkward age.

Of course, David was hardly a pretty. His smile was crooked, and his forehead too high.

But, uglies or not, it was good to see Shay, David-all of them. Except for a couple of stunned hours with the rangers, she hadn't seen human faces in what seemed like years.

"So, what've you got?"

"Huh?"

Croy was one of the other uglies who'd come to meet her. He also looked older than sixteen, but it didn't suit him like it did David. Some people needed the operation more than others. He reached out a hand for her knapsack.

"Oh, thanks." Her shoulders were sore from being strapped to the thing for the last week.

He pulled it open as they hiked, looking inside. "Purifier. Position-finder." Croy pulled out the waterproof bag and opened it. "SpagBol! Yum!"

Tally groaned. "You can have it."

His eyes widened. "I can?"

Shay pulled the knapsack away from him. "No, you can't."

"Listen, I've eaten that stuff three times a day for the past…what seems like forever," Tally said.

"Yeah, but dehydrated food's hard to get in the Smoke," Shay explained. "You should save it to trade."

"Trade?" Tally frowned. "What do you mean?" In the city, uglies might trade chores or stuff they'd stolen, but trade food?

Shay laughed. "You'll get used to the idea. In the Smoke, things don't just come out of the wall. You've got to hang on to the stuff you brought with you. Don't go giving it away to anyone who asks." Shay glared at Croy, who looked down sheepishly.

"I was going to give her something for it," he insisted.

"Sure you were," David said.

Tally noticed his hand on Shay's shoulder, touching her softly as they hiked. She remembered the way Shay had always talked about David, kind of dreamily. Maybe it wasn't just the promise of freedom that had brought her friend here.

They reached the edge of the flowers, a dense growth of trees and brush that started at the foot of a towering mountain.

"How do you keep the orchids from spreading?" Tally asked.

David's eyes lit up, as if this was his favorite subject. "This old-growth forest stops them.

It's been around for centuries, probably even before the Rusties."

"It's got lots and lots of species," Shay said. "So it's strong enough to keep out the weed." She looked at David for approval.

"The rest of this land used to be farms or grazing pasture," he continued, gesturing back at the expanse of white behind them. "The Rusties had already broken its back before the weed arrived."

A few minutes into the forest, Tally realized why the orchids were no match for it. The tangled brush and thick trees were knotted together into an impassable wall on either side.

Even on the narrow path, she was constantly shoving past branches and twigs, tripping over roots and rocks. She'd never seen any woodlands this raw and inhospitable. Vines dotted with cruel thorns ran through the semidarkness like barbed wire. "You guys live in here?"

Shay laughed. "Don't worry. We've got a ways to go. We're just making sure you weren't followed.

The Smoke's much higher, where the trees aren't so intense. But the creek's coming up.

We'll be on board soon."

"Good," Tally said. Her feet were already chafing in the new shoes. But they were warmer than her destroyed grippies, she realized, and were better for hiking. She wondered what would have happened if the rangers hadn't given them to her. How did you get new shoes in the Smoke? Trade someone all your food? Make them yourself? She looked down at the feet ahead of her, David's, and saw that his shoes did look handmade, like a couple of pieces of leather crudely sewn together. Strangely, though, he moved gracefully through the undergrowth, silent and sure while the rest of them crashed along like elephants.

The very idea of making a pair of shoes by hand boggled her mind.

It didn't matter, Tally reminded herself, taking a deep breath. Once in the Smoke, she could activate the pendant and be home within a day, maybe within hours. All the food and clothes she would ever need, hers for the asking. Her face pretty at long last, and Peris and all their old friends around her.

Finally, this nightmare would be over.

Soon, the sound of running water filled the forest, and they reached a small clearing.

David pulled his device out again, pointing it back toward the path. "Still nothing." He grinned at Tally. "Congratulations, you're one of us now."

Shay giggled and hugged Tally again as the others readied their boards. "I still can't believe you came. I thought I'd messed everything up, waiting so long to tell you about running away. And I was so stupid, getting into a fight instead of just telling you what I was going to do."

Tally shook her head. "You'd said everything already, I just wasn't listening. Once I realized you were serious, I needed a chance to think about it. It just took me a while…every minute, until the last night before my birthday." She took a deep breath, wondering why she was saying all this, lying to Shay when she didn't really have to. She should just shut up, get to the Smoke, and get it over with. But Tally found herself continuing. "Then I realized I'd never see you again if I didn't come. And I'd always wonder."

That last part was true, at least.

As they boarded higher up into the mountain the creek widened, cutting an archway of trees into the dense forest. The gnarled, smaller trees became taller pines, the undergrowth thinning, the brook breaking into occasional rapids. Shay cried out as she rode through the spray of churning white water.

"I've been dying to show you this! And the really good rapids are on the other side."

Eventually, they left the creek, following a vein of iron over a ridge. From the top, they looked down into a small valley that was mostly clear of forest.

Shay held Tally's hand. "There it is. Home."

The Smoke lay below them.

The Model

The Smoke really was smoky.

Open fires dotted the valley, surrounded by small groups of people. The scents of wood smoke and cooking drifted up to Tally, smells that made her think of camping and outdoor parties. In addition to the smoke there was a morning mist in the air, a white finger creeping down into the valley from a bank of clouds nestled against the mountain higher up. A few solar panels glimmered feebly, gathering what sun was reflected from the mist.

Garden plots were planted in random spots between the buildings, twenty or so one-story structures made from long planks of wood. There was wood everywhere: in fences; as cooking spits; laid down in walkways over muddy patches; and in big stacks by the fires.

Tally wondered where they had found so much wood.

Then she saw the stumps at the edges of the settlement, and gasped. "Trees…," she whispered in horror. "You cut down trees."

Shay squeezed her hand. "Only in this valley. It seems weird at first, but it's the way the pre-Rusties lived too, you know? And we're planting more on the other side of the mountain, pushing into the orchids."

"Okay," Tally said doubtfully. She saw a team of uglies moving a felled tree, pushing it along on a pair of hoverboards. "There's a grid?"

Shay nodded happily.

"Just in places. We pulled up a bunch of metal from a railroad, like the track you came up the coast on. We've laid out a few hoverpaths through the Smoke, and eventually we'll do the whole valley. I've been working on that project. We bury a piece of junk every few paces. Like everything here, it's tougher than you'd think. You wouldn't believe how much a knapsack full of steel weighs."

David and the others were already headed down, gliding single file between two rows of rocks painted a glowing orange. "That's the hoverpath?" Tally asked.

"Yeah. Come on, I'll take you down to the library. You've got to meet the Boss."

The Boss wasn't really in charge here, Shay explained. He just acted like it, especially to newbies. But he was in command of the library, the largest of the buildings in the settlement's central square.

The familiar smell of dusty books overwhelmed Tally at the library door, and as she looked around, she realized that books were pretty much all the library had. No big air-screen, not even private workscreens. Just mismatched desks and chairs and rows and rows of bookshelves.

Shay led her to the center of it all, where a round kiosk was inhabited by a small figure talking on an old-fashioned handphone. As they drew closer, Tally felt her heart starting to pound. She'd been dreading what she was about to see.

The Boss was an old ugly. Tally had spotted a few from a distance on the way in, but had managed to turn her eyes away. But here was the wrinkled, veined, discolored, shuffling, horrific truth, right before her eyes. His milky eyes glared at them as he berated whoever was on the phone, in a rattling voice and waving one claw at them to go away.

Shay giggled and pulled her toward the shelves. "He'll get to us eventually. There's something I want to show you first."

"That poor man…"

"The Boss? Pretty wild, huh? He's, like, forty! Wait until you talk to him."

Tally swallowed, trying to erase the image of his sagging features from her mind. These people were insane to tolerate that, to want it. "But his face…," Tally said.

"That's nothing. Check these out." Shay sat her down at a table, turned to a shelf, and pulled out a handful of volumes in protective covers. She plonked them in front of Tally.

"Books on paper? What about them?"

"Not books. They're called 'magazines,'" Shay said. She opened one and pointed. Its strangely glossy pages were covered with pictures. Of people.

Uglies.

Tally's eyes widened as Shay turned the pages, pointing and giggling. She'd never seen so many wildly different faces before. Mouths and eyes and noses of every imaginable shape, all combined insanely on people of every age. And the bodies. Some were grotesquely fat, or weirdly over-muscled, or uncomfortably thin, and almost all of them had wrong, ugly proportions. But instead of being ashamed of their deformities, the people were laughing and kissing and posing, as if all the pictures had been taken at some huge party. "Who are these freaks?"

"They aren't freaks," Shay said. "The weird thing is, these are famous people."

"Famous for what? Being hideous?"

"No. They're sports stars, actors, artists. The men with stringy hair are musicians, I think.

The really ugly ones are politicians, and someone told me the fatties are mostly comedians."

"That's funny, as in strange," Tally said. "So this is what people looked like before the first pretty? How could anyone stand to open their eyes?"

"Yeah. It's scary at first. But the weird thing is, if you keep looking at them, you kind of get used to it."

Shay turned to a full-page picture of a woman wearing only some kind of formfitting underwear, like a lacy swimsuit.

"What the…," Tally said.

"Yeah."

The woman looked like she was starving, her ribs thrusting out from her sides, her legs so thin that Tally wondered how they didn't snap under her weight. Her elbows and pelvic bones looked sharp as needles.

But there she was, smiling and proudly baring her body, as if she'd just had the operation and didn't realize they'd sucked out way too much fat. The funny thing was, her face was closer to being pretty than any of the rest. She had the big eyes, smooth skin, and small nose, but her cheekbones were too tight, the skull practically visible beneath her flesh.

"What on earth is she?"

"A model."

"Which is what?"

"Kind of like a professional pretty. I guess when everyone else is ugly, being pretty is sort of, like, your job."

"And she's in her underwear because…?" Tally began, and then a memory flashed into her mind. "She's got that disease! The one the teachers always told us about."

"Probably. I always thought they made that up to scare us."

Back in the days before the operation, Tally remembered, a lot of people, especially young girls, became so ashamed at being fat that they stopped eating. They'd lose weight too quickly, and some would get stuck and would keep losing weight until they wound up like this "model." Some even died, they said at school. That was one of the reasons they'd come up with the operation. No one got the disease anymore, since everyone knew at sixteen they'd turn beautiful. In fact, most people pigged out just before they turned, knowing it would all be sucked away.

Tally stared at the picture and shivered. Why go back to this?

"Spooky, huh?" Shay turned away. "I'll see if the Boss is ready yet."

Before she disappeared around a corner, Tally noticed how skinny Shay was. Not diseased skinny, just ugly skinny-she'd never eaten much. Tally wondered if, here in the Smoke, Shay's under eating would get worse and worse, until she wound up starving herself.

Tally fingered the pendant. This was her chance. Might as well get it over with now.

These people had forgotten what the old world was really like. Sure, they were having a great time camping out and playing hide-and-seek, and living out here was a great trick on the cities. But somehow they'd forgotten that the Rusties had been insane, almost destroying the world in a million different ways.

This starving almost-pretty was only one of them. Why go back to that?

They were already cutting down trees here.

Tally popped open the heart pendant, looking down into the little glowing aperture where the laser waited to read her eye-print. She brought it closer, her hand shaking. It was foolish to wait. This would only get harder.

And what choice did she have?

"Tally? He's almost-" Tally snapped closed the pendant and shoved it into her shirt.

Shay smiled slyly. "I noticed that before. What gives?"

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, come on. You never wore anything like that before. I leave you alone for two weeks and you get all romantic?"

Tally swallowed, looking down at the silver heart.

"I mean, it's a really nice necklace. Beautiful. But who gave it to you, Tally?"

Tally found she couldn't bring herself to lie. "Someone. Just someone."

Shay rolled her eyes. "Last-minute fling, huh? I always thought you were saving yourself for Peris."

"It's not like that. It's…"

Why not tell her? Tally asked herself. She'd figure it out when the Specials came roaring in, anyway. If she knew, Shay could at least prepare herself before this fantasy world came tumbling down. "I have to tell you something."

"Sure."

"My coming here is kind of…the thing is, when I went to get my-" "What are you doing?"

Tally jumped at the craggy voice. It was like an old, broken version of Dr. Cable's, a rusty razor blade drawn across her nerves.

"Those magazines are over three centuries old, and you're not wearing gloves!" The Boss shuffled over to where Tally was sitting, producing white cotton gloves and pulling them on. He reached around her to close the one she was reading.

"Your fingers are covered with very nasty acids, young lady. You'll rot away these magazines if you're not careful. Before you go nosing around in the collection, you come to me!"

"Sorry, Boss," Shay said. "My fault."

"I don't doubt it," he snapped, reshelving the magazines with elegant, careful movements at odds with his harsh words. "Now, young lady, I suppose you're here for a work assignment."

"Work?" Tally said.

They both looked down at her puzzled expression, and Shay burst into laughter.

Work

The Smokies all had lunch together, just like at an ugly dorm.

The long tables had clearly been cut from the hearts of trees. They showed knots and whorls, and wavy tracks of grain ran down their entire length. They were rough and beautiful, but Tally couldn't get over the thought that the trees had been taken alive.

She was glad when Shay and David took her outside to the cooking fire, where a group of younger uglies hung out. It was a relief to get away from the felled trees, and from the disturbing older uglies. Out here, at least, any of the Smokies could pass as a senior. Tally didn't have much experience in judging an ugly's age, but she turned out to be more or less right. Two had just arrived from another city, and weren't even sixteen yet. The other three-Croy, Ryde, and Astrix-were friends of Shay's, from the group that had run away together back before Tally and Shay had first met.

Here in the Smoke only five months, Shay's friends already had a hint of David's self-assurance.

Somehow, they carried the authority of middle pretties without the firm jaw, the subtly lined eyes, or the elegant clothing. They spent lunch talking about projects they were up to. A canal to bring a branch of the creek closer to the Smoke; new patterns for the sheep wool their sweaters were made from; a new latrine. (Tally wondered what a "latrine" was.) They seemed so serious, as if their lives were a really complicated trick that had to be planned and replanned every day.

The food was serious too, and was piled on their plates in serious quantities. It was heavier than Tally was used to, the tastes too rich, like whenever her food history class tried to cook their own meals. But the strawberries were sweet without sugar, and although it seemed weird to eat it plain, the Smokies' bread had its own flavor without anything added. Of course, Tally would have happily devoured anything that wasn't SpagBol.

She didn't ask what was in the stew, though. The thought of dead trees was enough to deal with in one day.

As they emptied their plates, Shay's friends started pumping Tally for news from the city.

Dorm sports results, soap opera story lines, city politics. Had she heard of anyone else running away? Tally answered their questions as best she could. No one tried to hide their homesickness. Their faces looked years younger as they remembered old friends and old tricks.

Then Astrix asked about her journey here to the Smoke.

"It was pretty easy, really. Once I got the hang of Shay's directions."

"Not that easy. Took you what, ten days?" David asked.

"You left the night before our birthday, right?" Shay said.

"Stroke of midnight," Tally said. "Nine days…and a half."

Croy frowned. "It took a while for the rangers to find you, didn't it?"

"I guess so. And they almost roasted me when they did. They were doing a huge burn that got out of control."

"Really? Whoa." Shay's friends looked impressed.

"My board almost burned. I had to save it and jump in the river."

"Is that what happened to your face?" Ryde asked.

Tally touched the peeling skin on her nose. "Well, that's kind of…"Sunburn, she almost said. But the others' faces were rapt. She'd been alone so long, Tally found herself enjoying being the center of attention.

"The flames were all around me," she said. "My shoes melted crossing this big patch of burning flowers."

Shay whistled. "Incredible."

"That's weird. The rangers usually keep an eye out for us," David said.

"Well, I guess they missed me." Tally decided not to go into the fact that she'd intentionally hidden her hoverboard. "Anyway, I was in the river, and I'd never even seen a helicopter-except for the day before-and this thing came thundering out of the smoke, driving the fire toward me. And of course I had no idea the rangers were the good guys. I thought they were Rusty pyromaniacs risen from the grave!"

Everyone laughed, and Tally felt herself enjoying the warmth of the group's attention. It was like telling everyone at dorm about a really successful trick, but much better, because she really had survived a life-or-death situation. David and Shay were hanging on to every word. Tally was glad she hadn't activated the pendant yet. She could hardly sit here enjoying the Smokies' admiration if she'd just betrayed them all. She decided to wait until tonight, when she was alone, to do what she had to.

"That must have been creepy," David said, his voice pulling her away from uncomfortable thoughts, "being alone in the orchids for all those days, just waiting."

She shrugged. "I thought they were kind of pretty. I didn't know about the whole superweed thing."

David frowned at Shay. "Didn't you tell her anything in your note?"

Shay flushed. "You told me not to write anything that would give the Smoke away, so I put it in code, sort of."

"It sounds like your code almost got her killed," David said, and Shay's face fell. He turned to Tally.

"Hardly anyone ever makes the trip alone. Not their first time out of the city."

"I'd been out of the city before." Tally put her arm around Shay's shoulder comfortingly.

"I was fine. It was just a bunch of pretty flowers to me, and I started with two weeks of food."

"Why did you steal all SpagBol?" Croy asked. "You must love the stuff." The others joined in his laughter.

Tally tried to smile. "I didn't even notice when I pinched it. Three SpagBols a day for nine days. I could hardly stomach the stuff after day two, but you get so hungry."

They nodded. They all knew about hard traveling, and hard work, too, apparently. Tally had already noticed how much everyone had consumed for lunch. Maybe Shay wasn't so likely to get the not-eating disease. She had cleaned her heaping plate.

"Well, I'm glad you made it," David said. He reached across and touched the scratches on Tally's face softly. "Looks like you had more adventures than you're telling us."

Tally swallowed and shrugged, hoping she looked modest.

Shay smiled and hugged David. "I knew you'd think Tally was awesome."

A bell rang across the grounds, and they hurried to finish their food.

"What's that?" she asked.

David grinned. "That's back to work."

"You're coming with us," Shay said. "Don't worry, it won't kill you."

On the way to work, Shay explained more about the long, flat roller coasters called railroads. Some stretched across the entire continent, one small part of the Rusty legacy still scarring the land. But unlike most ruins, the railroads were actually useful, and not just for hoverboarding. They were the main source of metal for the Smokies.

David had discovered a new railroad track a year or so earlier. It didn't run anywhere useful, so he had drawn up a plan to plunder it for metal and build more hoverpaths in and around the valley. Shay had been working on the project since she'd come to the Smoke ten days before.

Six of them took their boards up and out the other side of the valley, down a stream churning with white water, and along a razor-sharp ridge filled with iron ore. From there, Tally finally understood how far up the mountain she'd come since leaving the coast. The whole continent seemed to be spread out before them. A thin bank of clouds below the ridge mirrored the heavier layer overhead, but forests, grasslands, and the shimmering arcs of rivers were visible through the misty veil.

The sea of white orchids could still be glimpsed from this side of the mountain, glowing like an encroaching desert in the sun.

"Everything's so big," Tally murmured.

"That's what you can never tell from inside," Shay said. "How small the city is. How small they have to make everyone to keep them trapped there."

Tally nodded, but she imagined all those people let loose in the countryside below, cutting down trees and killing things for food, crashing across the landscape like some risen Rusty machine.

Still, she wouldn't have traded anything for this moment, standing there and looking down at the plains spread out below. Tally had spent the last four years staring at the skyline of New Pretty Town, thinking it was the most beautiful sight in the world, but she didn't think so anymore.

Lower down and halfway around the mountain, another river crossed David's railroad track. The route there from the Smoke twisted in all directions, taking advantage of veins of iron, rivers, and dry creek beds, but they'd never had to leave their boards. Walking wouldn't be an option, Shay explained, when they came back loaded with heavy metal.

The track was overgrown with vines and stunted trees, every wooden cross-tie in the grip of a dozen tentacles of vegetation. The forest had been hacked away in patches surrounding a few missing segments of rail, but it held the rest firmly in its grasp.

"How are we going to get any of this out?" Tally asked. She kicked at a gnarled root, feeling puny against the strength of the wild.

"Watch this," Shay said. She pulled a tool from her backpack, an arm-length pole that telescoped out almost to Tally's height. Shay twisted one end, and four short struts unfolded from the other like the ribs of an umbrella. "It's called a powerjack, and it can move just about anything."

Shay twisted the handle again, and the ribs retracted. Then she thrust one end of the jack under a cross-tie. With another twist of her wrist, the pole began to shudder, and a groaning sound came from the wood. Shay's feet slipped backward, but she leaned her weight into the pole, keeping it wedged under the cross-tie. Slowly, the ancient wood began to rise, tearing free from plants and earth, bending the rail that lay across it.

Tally saw the struts of the powerjack unfolding underneath the tie, gradually forcing it up, the rail above beginning to pull free of its moorings.

Shay grinned up at her. "I told you."

"Let me try," Tally said, holding out her hand, eyes wide.

Shay laughed and pulled another powerjack from her backpack. "Take that tie there, while I keep this one up."

The powerjack was heavier than it looked, but its controls were simple. Tally pulled it open and jammed it under the tie that Shay had indicated. She turned the handle slowly, until the jack started to shudder in her hands.

The wood began to shift, the stresses of metal and earth twisting in her hands. Vines tore from the ground, and Tally could feel their complaints through the soles of her shoes, like a distant earthquake rumbling. A metal shriek filled the air as the rail began to bend, pulling free of vegetation and the rusty spikes that had held it down for centuries. Finally, the jack had opened to its full extent, the rail still only half-free from its ancient bonds. She and Shay struggled to pull their jacks out.

"Having fun?" Shay asked, wiping sweat from her brow.

Tally nodded, grinning. "Don't just stand there, let's finish the job."

David

A few hours later, a pile of scrap metal stood in one corner of the clearing. Each segment of rail took an hour to get free, and required all six of them to carry. The railroad ties sat in another pile; at least all the Smokies' wood didn't come from live trees. Tally couldn't believe how much they had salvaged, literally tearing the track from the forest's grasp.

She also couldn't believe her hands. They were red and raw, screaming with pain and covered with blisters.

"Looks pretty bad," David said, glancing over Tally's shoulder as she stared at them in amazement.

"Feels pretty bad," she said. "But I didn't notice until just now."

David laughed. "Hard work's a good distraction. But maybe you should take a break. I was just about to scout up the line for another spot to salvage. Want to come?"

"Sure," she said gratefully. The thought of picking up the powerjack again made her hands throb.

Leaving the others at the clearing, they hoverboarded up and over the gnarled trees, following the barely visible track below into dense forest. David rode low in the canopy, gracefully avoiding branches and vines as if this were a familiar slalom course. Tally noticed that, like his shoes, his clothes were all handmade. City clothing only used seams and stitching for decoration, but David's jacket seemed to be cut together from a dozen patches of leather, all different shades and shapes. Its patchwork appearance reminded her of Frankenstein's monster, which led to a terrible thought.

What if it were made of real leather, like in the olden days? Skins.

She shuddered. He couldn't be wearing a bunch of dead animals. They weren't savages here. And she had to admit that the coat fit him well, the leather following the line of his shoulders like an old friend. And it fended off the whips of branches better than her microfiber dorm jacket.

David slowed as they came into a clearing, and Tally saw that they had reached a wall of solid rock.

"That's weird," she said. The railroad track seemed to plunge straight into the mountain, disappearing into a pile of boulders.

"The Rusties were serious about straight lines," David said. "When they built rails, they didn't like to go around stuff."

"So they just went through?"

David nodded. "Yeah. This used to be a tunnel, cut right into the mountain. It must have collapsed sometime after the Rusty panic."

"Do you think there was anyone…inside? When it happened, I mean."

"Probably not. But you never know. There could be a whole trainload of Rusty skeletons in there."

Tally swallowed, trying to imagine whatever was in there, flattened and buried for centuries in the dark.

"The forest's a lot clearer around here," David said. "Easier to work through. I'm just worried about these boulders collapsing if we start prying rails up."

"They look pretty solid."

"Oh, yeah? Check this out," David said. He stepped off his board onto a boulder, and deftly climbed to a spot that lay shadowed in the setting sun.

Tally angled her board closer and jumped onto a large rock next to David. When her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw that a long space extended back between the boulders.

David crawled inside, his feet disappearing into the darkness.

"Come on," his voice called.

"Um, there isn't really a trainload of dead Rusties in there, right?"

"Not that I've found. But today might be our lucky day."

Tally rolled her eyes and lowered herself onto her belly. She crawled inside, the cool weight of the rocks settling over her.

A light flicked on ahead. She could see David sitting up in a small space, a flashlight glowing in his hand.

She pulled herself in and took a seat next to him on a flat bit of rock. Giant shapes were stacked above them. "So the tunnel didn't collapse completely."

"Not at all. The rock cracked into pieces, some big and some small." David pointed the flashlight down through a chink between where they sat. Tally squinted into the darkness and saw a much bigger open space below. A glint of metal revealed a segment of track.

"Just think. If we could get down there," David said, "we wouldn't have to pull up all those vines. All that track just waiting for us."

"Just a hundred tons of rock in the way, is all."

He nodded. "Yeah, but it would be worth it." He pointed the flashlight upward at his face, making himself hideous. "No one's been down there for hundreds of years."

"Great." Tally's skin tingled, her eyes picking out the dark fissures all around them.

Maybe no human beings had been there for a long time, but lots of things liked to live in cool, dark caves.

"I keep thinking," David said, "the whole thing might tumble open if we could just move the exact right boulder…."

"And not the exact wrong one, the one that makes the whole thing crush us?"

David laughed and pointed the flashlight so that it lit her face rather than his. "I thought you might say that."

Tally peered through the darkness, trying to make out his expression. "What do you mean?"

"I can see that you're struggling with this."

"Struggling? With what?"

"Being here in the Smoke. You're not sure about it all."

Tally's skin tingled again, but not from the thought of snakes or bats or long-dead Rusties.

She wondered if David had somehow already figured out she was a spy. "No, I guess I'm not sure," she said evenly.

She caught a glimmer of reflected light from David's eyes as he nodded. "That's good.

You take this seriously. A lot of kids come out here and think it's all fun and games."

"I don't think that for a minute," she said softly.

"I can tell. It's not just a trick to you, like it is to most runaways. Even Shay, who really believes the operation is wrong, doesn't get how deadly serious the Smoke is."

Tally didn't say anything.

After a long moment of silence in the dark, David continued. "It's dangerous out here.

The cities are like these boulders. They may seem solid, but if you start messing with them, the whole pile could crumble."

"I think I know what you mean," Tally said. Since the day she'd gone to get her operation, she'd felt the massive weight of the city looming over her, and had learned firsthand how much places like the Smoke threatened people like Dr. Cable. "But I don't really understand why they care so much about you guys."

"It's a long story. But part of it is…"

She waited for a moment before saying, "Is what?"

"Well, this is a secret. I don't usually tell people until they've been here for a while. Years.

But you seem…serious enough to handle it."

"You can trust me," Tally said, then immediately wondered why. She was a spy, an infiltrator. She was the last person David should trust.

"I hope I can, Tally," he said, reaching out to her. "Feel the palm of my hand."

She took it, running her fingers over the flesh. It was as rough as the wood grain of the table in the dining hall, the skin along his thumb as hard and dry as leather cracking with age. No wonder he could work all day and not complain. "Wow. How long does it take to get calluses like that?"

"About eighteen years."

"About…?" She stopped in disbelief, then compared the horn of his palm with her own tender, blistered flesh. Tally could feel it there, the grueling afternoon of real work she'd put in today, but stretched across a lifetime. "But how?"

"I'm not a runaway, Tally."

"I don't understand."

"My parents were runaways, not me."

"Oh." She felt stupid now, but it had never once occurred to her. If you could live in the Smoke, you could raise children here too. But she hadn't seen any littlies. And the whole place seemed so tenuous, so temporary. It would be like having a child on a camping trip.

"How did they manage? Without any doctors, I mean."

"They are doctors."

"Huh. But…hang on. Doctors? How old were they when they ran away?"

"Old enough. They weren't uglies anymore. I think it's called being a middle pretty?"

"Yeah, at least." New pretties worked or studied, if they wanted to, but few people got serious about a profession until their middle years. "Wait. What do you mean they weren't uglies?"

"They weren't. But they are now."

Tally tried to get her mind to process his words. "You mean, they never did the third operation? They still look middle, even though they're crumblies?"

"No, Tally. I told you: They're doctors."

A shock ran through her. This was more stunning than the felled trees or the cruel pretties; as overwhelming as anything she'd felt since Peris had gone away." They reversed the operation?"

"Yes."

"They cut each other? Out here in the wild? To make themselves…" Her throat closed on the word, as if she was going to gag.

"No. They didn't use surgery."

Suddenly the dark cave seemed to be crushing her, squeezing the air from her chest. Tally forced herself to breathe.

David pulled his hand away, and with a corner of her panicked mind Tally realized she'd held on to it all that time.

"I shouldn't have told you all this."

"No, David, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to get all hyperventilated."

"It's my fault. You just got here, and I dumped all this on you."

"But I do want you to…"-she fought saying it, but lost-"to trust me. To tell me this stuff. I do take it seriously." That much was true.

"Sure, Tally. But maybe that's enough for now. We should get back." He turned and crawled toward the sunlight.

As she followed, Tally thought of what David had said about the boulders. However massive, they were ready to topple if you pushed them the wrong way. Ready to crush you.

She felt the pendant swinging from her neck, a tiny but insistent pull. Dr. Cable would be impatient by now, waiting for the signal. But David's revelation had suddenly made everything much more complicated. The Smoke wasn't just a hideout for assorted runaways, she realized now. It was a real town, a city in its own right. If Tally activated the tracker, it wouldn't just mean the end of Shay's big adventure. It would be David's home taken from him, his whole life stripped away.

Tally felt the weight of the mountain pressing down upon her, and found that she was still struggling to breathe as she pulled herself out into the sunlight.

Heartthrob

Around the fire at dinner that night, Tally told the story of how she'd hidden in the river when the rangers' helicopter first appeared. She had everyone wide-eyed again.

Apparently, she'd had one of the more exciting journeys to the Smoke.

"Can you imagine? I'm naked and crouching down in the water, and this Rusty machine is destroying my camp!"

"Why didn't they land?" Astrix asked. "Didn't they see your stuff?"

"I thought they did."

"The rangers only pick up uglies in the white flowers," David explained. "That's the rendezvous spot we tell runaways to use. They can't just pick up anyone, or they might accidentally bring a spy here."

"I guess you wouldn't want that," Tally said softly.

"Still, they should be more careful with those helicopters," Shay said. "Someone's going to get chopped to pieces one day."

"Tell me about it. The wind almost took my hoverboard away," Tally said. "It lifted my sleeping bag right off the ground and up into the blades. It was totally shredded." She was pleased by the amazement on the faces of her audience.

"So where'd you sleep?" Croy asked.

"It wasn't that bad. It was only for-" Tally stopped herself just in time. She'd spent one night without the sleeping bag, but in her cover story she'd spent four days in the orchids.

"It was warm enough."

"You'd better get a new one before bedtime," David said. "It's a lot colder up here than down in the weeds."

"I'll take her over to the trading post," Shay said. "It's like a requisition center, Tally.

Only when you get something, you have to leave something else behind as payment."

Tally shifted uncomfortably in her seat. She still hadn't gotten used to the idea that you had to pay for things here. "All I've got is SpagBol."

Shay smiled. "That's perfect to trade with. We can't make dehydrated food here, except fruit, and traveling with regular food is a total pain. SpagBol's good as gold."

After dinner, Shay took her to a large hut near the center of town. The shelves were full of things made in the Smoke, along with a few objects that had come from the cities. The city-made stuff was mostly shabby and worn, repaired again and again, but the handmade things fascinated Tally. She ran her still-raw fingers across the clay pots and wooden tools, amazed at how each had its own texture and weight. Everything seemed so heavy and…serious.

An older ugly was running the place, but he wasn't as scary as the Boss. He brought out woolen gear and a few silvery sleeping bags. The blankets, scarves, and gloves were beautiful, in subdued colors and simple patterns, but Shay insisted that Tally get a city-made sleeping bag. "Much lighter, and it squishes up small. Much better for when we go exploring."

"Of course," Tally said, trying to smile. "That'll be great."

She wound up trading twelve packets of SpagBol for another sleeping bag, and six for a handmade sweater, which left her with eight. She couldn't believe that the sweater, brown with bands of pale red and green highlights, cost half as much as the sleeping bag, which was threadbare and patched.

"You're just lucky you didn't lose your water purifier," Shay said as they walked home.

"Those things are impossible to trade for."

Tally's eyes widened. "What happens if they break?"

"Well, they say you can drink water from the streams without purifying it."

"You're kidding."

"Nope. A lot of the older Smokies do," Shay said. "Even if they've got a purifier, they don't bother."

"Yuck."

Shay giggled. "Yeah, no kidding. But hey, you can always use mine."

Tally put a hand on Shay's shoulder. "Same goes for mine."

Shay's pace slowed. "Tally?"

"Yeah?"

"You were going to say something to me, back in the library, before the Boss started yelling at you."

Tally's stomach sank. She pulled away, her fingers automatically going to the pendant at her neck.

"Yeah," Shay said. "About that necklace."

Tally nodded, but didn't know how to start. She still hadn't activated the pendant, and since her conversation with David, she wasn't sure she could. Maybe if she returned to the city in a month, starving and empty-handed, Dr. Cable would take mercy on her.

But what if the woman kept her promise, and Tally never got the operation? In twenty-something years, she would be lined and wrinkled, as ugly as the Boss, an outcast. And if she stayed here in the Smoke, she'd be sleeping in an old sleeping bag and dreading the day her water purifier broke down.

She was so tired of lying to everyone. "I haven't told you everything," she started.

"I know. But I think I've got it figured out."

Tally looked at her friend, afraid to speak.

"I mean, it's pretty obvious, right? You're all upset because you broke your promise to me. You didn't keep the Smoke a secret."

Tally's mouth fell open.

Shay smiled, taking her hand. "As you got closer to your birthday, you decided you wanted to run away.

But in the meantime, you met someone. Someone important. The same someone who gave you that heart necklace. So you broke your promise to me. You told that someone where you were going."

"Um, kind of," Tally managed.

Shay giggled. "I knew it. That's why you've been all nervous. You want to be here, but you also wish you were somewhere else. With someone else. And before you ran away, you left directions, a copy of my note, in case your new heartthrob wants to join us. Am I right or am I right?"

Tally bit her lip. Shay's face glowed in the moonlight, obviously thrilled with herself for figuring out Tally's big secret. "Uh, you're partly right."

"Oh, Tally." Shay grabbed both her shoulders. "Don't you see that it's okay? I mean, I did the same thing."

Tally frowned. "What do you mean?"

"I wasn't supposed to tell anyone I was coming here. David made me promise I wouldn't even tell you."

"Why?"

Shay nodded. "He hadn't met you, and wasn't sure if he could trust you. Normally, runaways only recruit old friends, people they've tricked with for years. But I'd only known you since the beginning of summer. And I never once mentioned the Smoke to you until the day before I left. I was never brave enough, in case you said no."

"So you weren't supposed to tell me?"

"No way. So when you actually showed up, it made everyone nervous. They don't know whether they can trust you. Even David's been acting weird around me."

"Shay, I'm so sorry."

"It's not your fault!" Shay shook her head vigorously. "It's mine. I screwed everything up.

But so what? Once they get to know you, they'll think you're really cool."

"Yeah," Tally said softly. "Everyone's been really nice." She wished she had activated the pendant the moment she'd gotten there. In only one day she'd begun to realize that it wasn't just Shay's dream she'd be betraying. Hundreds of people had made a life in the Smoke.

"And I'm sure your someone will be cool too," Shay said. "I can't wait till we're all together."

"I don't know if…that's going to happen." There had to be some other way out of this situation. Maybe if she went to another city…or found the rangers again and told them that she wanted to volunteer, they'd make her pretty. But she hardly knew anything about their city, except that she didn't know anyone there….

Shay shrugged. "Maybe not. But I wasn't sure you'd come either." She squeezed Tally's hand. "I'm really glad you did, though."

Tally tried to smile. "Even though I got you into trouble?"

"It's not such a big deal. I think everyone's way too paranoid around here. They spend all this time disguising the place so satellites can't see it, and they mask the handphone transmissions so they won't be intercepted. And all the secrecy about runaways is way overdone. And dangerous. Just think-if you hadn't been smart enough to figure out my directions, you could be halfway to Alaska by now!"

"I don't know, Shay. Maybe they know what they're doing. The city authorities can be pretty tough."

Shay laughed. "Don't tell me you believe in Special Circumstances."

"I…" Tally closed her eyes. "I just think that the Smokies have to be careful."

"Okay, sure. I'm not saying we should advertise. But if people like you and me want to come out here and live differently, why shouldn't we? I mean, no one has the right to tell us we have to be pretty, right?"

"Maybe they're just worried because we're kids. You know?"

"That's the problem with the cities, Tally. Everyone's a kid, pampered and dependent and pretty. Just like they say in school: Big-eyed means vulnerable. Well, like you once told me, you have to grow up sometime."

Tally nodded. "I know what you mean, how the uglies here are more grown up. You can see it in their faces."

Shay pulled Tally to a stop and looked at her closely for a second. "You feel guilty, don't you?"

Tally looked back into Shay's eyes, speechless for a moment. She suddenly felt naked in the cold night air, as if Shay could see straight through her lies.

"What?" she managed.

"Guilty. Not just that you told your someone about the Smoke, but that they might actually come. Now that you've seen the Smoke, you're not sure if that was such a good idea." Shay sighed. "I know it seems weird at first, and it's a lot of hard work. But I think you'll eventually like it."

Tally looked down, feeling tears welling into her eyes. "It's not that. Well, maybe it is. I just don't know if I can…" Her throat felt too full to speak. If she said another word, she'd have to tell Shay the truth: that she was a spy, a traitor sent there to destroy everything around them.

And that Shay was the fool who had led her there.

"Hey, it's okay." Shay gathered Tally in her arms, rocking her gently as Tally began to cry. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to unload everything on you at once. But I've felt kind of distant from you since you got here. It feels like you're not sure you want to look at me."

"I should tell you everything."

"Shhh." Tally felt Shay's fingers stroking her hair. "I'm just glad you're here."

Tally let herself cry, burying her face in the scratchy wool sleeve of her new sweater, feeling Shay's warmth against her, and feeling awful about every gesture of kindness from her friend.

With half her mind, Tally was actually glad she'd come and seen all this. She could have lived her whole life in the city and never seen this much of the world. With the other half, Tally still wished she had activated the pendant the moment she'd arrived in the Smoke. It would have been so much easier that way.

But there was no way back in time now. She had to decide whether to betray the Smoke or not, completely understanding what it would do to Shay, to David, to everyone here.

"It's okay, Tally," Shay murmured. "You'll be okay."

Suspicion

As the days passed, Tally fell into the routines of the Smoke.

There was something comforting about the exhaustion of hard work. All her life, Tally had been troubled by insomnia, lying awake most nights thinking about arguments she'd had, or wanted to have, or things she should have done differently. But here in the Smoke her mind shut off the moment her head hit the pillow, which wasn't even a pillow, just her new sweater stuffed into a cotton bag.

Tally still didn't know how long she was going to stay there. She hadn't come to a decision about whether to activate the pendant, but she knew that thinking about it all the time would drive her crazy. So she decided to put it out of her mind. One day she might wake up and realize that she couldn't stand to live her entire life as an ugly, no matter who it hurt or what it cost…but for the moment, Dr. Cable could wait.

Forgetting her troubles was easy in the Smoke. Life was much more intense than in the city. She bathed in a river so cold that she had to jump in screaming, and she ate food pulled from the fire hot enough to burn her tongue, which city food never did. Of course, she missed shampoo that didn't sting her eyes, and flush toilets (she'd learned to her horror what "latrines" were), and mostly medspray. But however blistered her hands became, Tally felt stronger than ever before. She could work all day at the railroad site, then race David and Shay home on hoverboards, her backpack full of more scrap metal than she could have lifted a month before. She learned from David how to repair her clothes with a needle and thread, how to tell raptors from their prey, and even how to clean fish, which turned out to be not nearly as bad as cutting them up in bio class.

The physical beauty of the Smoke also cleared her mind of worries. Every day seemed to change the mountain, the sky, and the surrounding valleys, making them spectacular in a completely new way.

Nature, at least, didn't need an operation to be beautiful. It just was.

One morning on the way to the railroad track, David pulled his board up alongside Tally's.

He rode silently for a while, taking the familiar turns with his usual grace. Over the last two weeks, she'd learned that his jacket was actually made of leather, real dead animals, but she'd gradually gotten used to the idea. The Smokies hunted, but they were like the rangers, killing only species that didn't belong in this part of the world or that had gotten out of control thanks to the Rusties' meddling. With its random patches, the jacket would probably look silly on anyone else. But it suited David, somehow, as if growing up here in the wild allowed him to fuse with the animals that had donated their skins to his clothes.

And it probably didn't hurt that he had actually made the jacket himself.

He spoke up suddenly. "I've got a present for you."

"A present? Really?"

By now, Tally understood that nothing in the Smoke ever lost its value. Nothing was discarded or given away just because it was old or broken. Everything was repaired, refitted, and recycled, and if one Smokey couldn't put it to use, it was traded to another.

Few things were given away lightly.

"Yeah, really." David angled closer and handed her a small bundle.

She unwrapped it, following the familiar route down the stream almost without looking. It was a pair of gloves, handmade in light brown leather.

She shoved the bright, city-made wrapping paper into her pocket, then pulled the gloves onto her blistered hands. "Thanks! They fit perfectly."

He nodded. "I made them when I was about your age. They're a little small for me these days."

Tally smiled, wishing she could hug him. When they spread their arms to take a hard turn, she held his hand for a second.

Flexing her fingers, Tally found that the gloves were soft and pliant, the palms worn pale from years of use. White lines across the finger joints revealed how they had fitted David's hands. "They're wonderful."

"Come on," David said. "It's not like they're magic or anything."

"No, but they've got…something." History, Tally realized. In the city, she'd owned lots of things-practically anything she wanted came out of the wall. But city things were disposable and replaceable, as interchangeable as the T-shirt, jacket, and skirt combinations of dorm uniforms. Here, in the Smoke, objects grew old, carrying their histories with them in dings and scratches and tatters.

David chuckled at her and sped up, joining Shay at the front of the pack.

When they got to the railroad site, David announced that they had to clear more track, using vibrasaws to cut through the vegetation that had grown up around the metal rails.

"What about the trees?" Croy asked.

"What about them?"

"Do we have to chop them down?" Tally asked.

David shrugged. "Scrub trees like this aren't good for much. But we won't waste them.

We'll take them back to the Smoke for burning."

"Burning?" Tally said. The Smokies usually only cut down trees from the valley, not the rest of the mountain. These trees had been growing there for decades, and David wanted to use them just to cook a meal? She looked at Shay for support, but her friend's expression was carefully neutral. She probably agreed, but didn't want to argue with David in front of everyone about how to run his project.

"Yes, burning," he said. "And after we've salvaged the track, we'll replant. Put a row of useful trees where the railroad used to be."

The five others looked at him silently. He spun a saw in his hand, anxious to get started, but aware he didn't have their full support yet.

"You know, David," Croy said. "These trees aren't useless. They protect the underbrush from sunlight, which keeps the soil from eroding."

"Okay, you win. Instead of planting some other kind of tree, we'll let the forest take back the land. All the crappy scrub and underbrush you want."

"But do we have to clear-cut them?" Astrix asked.

David took a slow breath. "Clear-cutting" was the word for what the Rusties had done to the old forests: felling every tree, killing every living thing, turning entire countries into grazing land. Whole rain forests had been consumed, reduced from millions of interlocking species to a bunch of cows eating grass, a vast web of life traded for cheap hamburgers.

"Look, we're not clear-cutting. All we're doing is pulling out the garbage that the Rusties left behind," David said. "It just takes a little surgery to do it."

"We could chop around the trees," Tally said. "Only cut into them where we need to. Like you said: surgery."

"Okay, fine." He chuckled. "Let's see what you think of these trees after you've had to hack a few out of the ground."

He was right.

The vibrasaw purred through heavy vines, parted tangled underbrush like a comb through wet hair, and sliced cleanly through metal when the odd misstroke brought the cutting edge down onto the track. But when its teeth met the gnarled roots and twisted branches of the scrub trees, it was a different story.

Tally grimaced as her saw bounced across the hard wood again, spitting bits of bark at her face, its low hum transformed into a protesting howl. She struggled to force the edge down into the tough old branch.

One more cut and this section of track would be clear.

"Going good. You almost got it, Tally."

She noticed that Croy stood well back, poised to jump if the saw somehow slipped from her hands. She could see now why David had wanted to chop the scrub trees into pieces.

It would have been a lot easier than reaching through the tangle of roots and branches, trying to bring the vibrasaw to bear against a precise spot.

"Stupid trees," Tally muttered, gritting her teeth as she plunged the blade down again.

Finally, the saw found purchase in the wood, letting out a high-pitched scream as it bit into the branch.

Then it slipped through, free for a second before it thrust, spitting and screeching, into the dirt below.

"Yeah!" Tally stepped back, lifting her goggles, the saw powering down in her hands.

Croy stepped forward and kicked the section of branch away from the track. "Perfect surgical slice, Doctor," he said.

"I think I'm getting the hang of this," Tally said, wiping her brow.

It was almost noon, and the sun was beating down into the clearing mercilessly. She pulled off her sweater, realizing that the morning chill was long gone. "You were right about the trees giving shade."

"You said it," Croy said. "Nice sweater, by the way."

She smiled. Along with her new gloves, it was her prized possession. "Thanks."

"What did it cost you?"

"Six SpagBols."

"A little pricey. Pretty, though." Croy caught her eye. "Tally, remember that first day you got here?

When I kind of grabbed your knapsack? I really wouldn't have taken your stuff. Not without giving you something for it. You just surprised me when you said I could have everything."

"Sure, no problem," she said. Now that she'd worked with Croy, he seemed like a nice enough guy.

She'd rather have been teamed up with David or Shay, but those two were cutting together today. And it was probably time she got to know some of the other Smokies better.

"And you got a new sleeping bag, too, I hope."

"Yeah. Twelve SpagBols."

"Must be almost out of trade."

She nodded. "Only eight left."

"Not bad. Still, I bet you didn't realize on your way here that you were eating your future wealth."

Tally laughed. They crouched under the partly cut tree, pulling handfuls of cut vines from around the track.

"If I'd known how valuable food packets were, I probably wouldn't have eaten so many, starving or not. I don't even like it anymore. The worst was SpagBol for breakfast."

"Sounds good to me." Croy chuckled. "This section look clear to you?"

"Sure. Let's start on the next one." She handed him the saw.

Croy did the easy part first, attacking the underbrush with the humming saw. "So, Tally, there's one thing that's kind of confusing."

"What's that?"

The saw glanced off metal, sending up a smattering of sparks.

"The first day you were here, you said you left the city with two weeks of food."

"Yeah."

"If it took you nine days to get here, you should only have had five days of food left.

Maybe fifteen packets altogether. But I remember on that first day, when I looked into your bag, I was, like, 'She's got tons!'" Tally swallowed, trying not to show any expression.

"And it turns out I was right. Twelve plus six plus eight is…twenty-six?"

"Yeah, I guess."

He nodded, working the saw carefully beneath a low branch. "I thought so. But you left the city before your birthday, right?"

Tally thought fast. "Sure. But I guess I didn't really eat three meals every day, Croy. Like I said, I was pretty sick of SpagBol after a while."

"Seems like you didn't eat much at all, for such a long trip."

Tally struggled to do the math in her head, to figure out what sort of numbers would add up. She remembered what Shay had said that first night: Some Smokies were suspicious of her, worried that she might be a spy. Tally had thought they all accepted her by now.

Apparently not.

She took a deep breath, trying to keep the fear out of her voice. "Look, Croy, let me tell you something. A secret."

"What's that?"

"I probably left the city with more than just two weeks' worth of food. I never really counted."

"But you kept saying-" "Yeah, I might have exaggerated a little, just to make the trip sound more interesting, you know? Like I could have run out of food when the rangers didn't turn up. But you're right, I always had plenty."

"Sure." He looked up at her, smiling gently. "I thought maybe so. Your trip did sound a little bit too…interesting to be true."

"But most of what I said was-" "Of course." The saw whined to a stop in his hand. "I'm sure most of it was. Question is, how much?"

Tally met his piercing eyes, struggling to think of what to say. It was nothing but a few extra food packets, hardly proof that she was a spy. She should just laugh it off. But the fact that he was dead right silenced her.

"You want the saw for a while?" he said mildly. "Clearing this up is hard work."

Since they were clearing brush, there was no load of metal to take back at midday, so the railroad crew had brought their lunch out with them: potato soup, and bread with salty olives dotted through it. Tally was glad when Shay took her lunch away from the rest of the group, to the edge of the dense forest. She followed, settling next to her friend in the dappled light. "I need to talk to you, Shay." Shay, not looking at her, sighed softly as she tore her bread into pieces. "Yeah, I guess you do."

"Oh. Did he talk to you, too?"

Shay shook her head. "He didn't have to say anything."

Tally frowned. "What do you mean?"

"I mean it's obvious. Ever since you got here. I should have seen it right away."

"I never-" Tally started, but her voice betrayed her. "What are you saying? You think Croy's right?"

Shay sighed. "I'm just saying that-" She stopped and turned to face Tally. "Croy? What about Croy?"

"He was talking to me before lunch, and he noticed my sweater and asked if I got a sleeping bag. And he figured that after nine days getting here I had too much SpagBol left."

"You had too much what?" Shay's expression was one of total confusion. "What on earth are you talking about?"

"Remember when I got here? I told everyone that…" Tally trailed off, for the first time noticing Shay's eyes. They were lined with red, as if she hadn't slept. "Wait a second, what did you think I was talking about?"

Shay held out a hand, fingers splayed. "This."

"What?"

"Hold out yours."

Tally opened one hand, making a mirror image of Shay's.

"Same size," Shay said. She turned both her palms up. "Same blisters, too."

Tally looked down and blinked. If anything, Shay's hands were in worse shape, red and dry and cracked with the ragged edges of burst blisters. Shay always worked so hard, diving in first, always taking the hardest jobs.

Tally's fingers went to the gloves tucked into her belt. "Shay, I'm sure David didn't mean to-" "I'm sure he did. People always think long and hard about gifts in the Smoke."

Tally bit her lip. It was true. She pulled the gloves from her belt.

"You should take them."

"I. Don't. Want. Them."

Tally sat back, stunned. First Croy, now this.

"No, I guess you don't." She dropped the gloves. "But Shay, shouldn't you talk to David before you go nuts about this?"

Shay chewed at a fingernail, shaking her head. "He doesn't talk to me that much anymore.

Not since you showed up. Not about anything important. He's got stuff on his mind, he says."

"Oh." Tally gritted her teeth. "I never…I mean, I like David, but…"

"It's not your fault, okay? I know that." Shay reached out and gave Tally's heart-shaped pendant a little flick. "And besides, maybe your mysterious someone will show up, and it won't matter anyway."

Tally nodded. True enough, once the Specials got here, Shay's romantic life would be the least of anyone's worries.

"Have you even mentioned that to David? It seems like it might be an issue."

"No. I haven't."

"Why not?"

"It just never came up."

Shay's mouth tightened. "That's convenient."

Tally let out a groan. "But Shay, you said it yourself: I wasn't supposed to be giving out directions to the Smoke. I feel really bad about the whole thing. I'm not going to go advertising it."

"Except by wearing that thing around your neck. Which didn't do much good, though, since apparently David didn't notice it."

Tally sighed.

"Or maybe he doesn't care, because this is all just in your…" She couldn't finish. It wasn't just in Shay's head; she could see it now, and feel it too. When David showed her the railway cave, and told her his secret about his parents, he had trusted her, even when he shouldn't have. And now this present. Could it really be just Shay overreacting?

In a quiet part of her mind, Tally realized that she hoped it wasn't.

She took a deep breath, expelling the thought.

"Shay, what do you want me to do?"

"Just tell him."

"Tell him what?"

"About why you wear that heart. About your mysterious someone."

Too late, Tally felt the expression on her face.

Shay nodded. "You don't want to, do you? That's pretty clear."

"No, I will. Really."

"Sure you will." Shay turned away, pulling a hunk of bread from her soup and taking a vicious bite.

"I will." Tally touched her friend's shoulder, and instead of pulling away, Shay turned back to her, her expression almost hopeful.

Tally swallowed. "I'll tell him everything, I promise."

Bravery

That night at dinner, she ate alone.

Now that she'd spent a day cutting trees herself, the wooden table in the dining hall no longer horrified her. The grain of the wood felt reassuringly solid, and tracing its whorls with her eyes was easier than thinking.

For the first time, Tally noticed the sameness of the food. Bread again, stew again. A couple of days ago, Shay had explained that the plump meat in the stew was rabbit. Not soy-based, like the dehydrated meat in her SpagBol, but real animals from the overcrowded pen on the edge of the Smoke. The thought of rabbits being killed, skinned, and cooked suited her mood. Like the rest of her day, this meal tasted brutal and serious.

Shay hadn't talked to her after lunch, and Tally had no idea what to say to Croy, so she'd worked the rest of the day in silence. Dr. Cable's pendant seemed to grow heavier and heavier, wound around her neck as tightly as the vines, brush, and roots grasping the railroad tracks. It felt as if everyone in the Smoke could see what the necklace really was: a symbol of her treachery.

Tally wondered if she could ever stay there now. Croy suspected what she was, and it seemed like it would be only a matter of time before everyone else knew. All day long a terrible thought had kept crossing her mind: Maybe the Smoke was where she really belonged, but she'd lost her chance by going there as a spy.

And now Tally had come between David and Shay. Without even trying, she'd shafted her best friend.

Like walking poison, she killed everything.

She thought of the orchids spreading across the plains below, choking the life out of other plants, out of the soil itself, selfish and unstoppable. Tally Youngblood was a weed. And, unlike the orchids, she wasn't even a pretty one.

Just as she finished eating, David sat down across from her. "Hey."

"Hi." She managed to smile. Despite everything, it was a relief to see him. Eating alone had reminded her of the days after her birthday, trapped as an ugly when everyone knew she should be pretty. Today was the first time she'd felt like an ugly since coming to the Smoke.

David reached across and took her hand. "Tally, I'm sorry."

"You're sorry?"

He turned her palm up to reveal her freshly blistered fingers.

"I noticed you didn't wear the gloves. Not after you had lunch with Shay. It wasn't hard to guess why."

"Oh, yeah. It's not that I didn't like them. I just couldn't."

"Sure, I know. This is all my fault." He looked around the crowded hall. "Can we get out of here? I've got something to tell you."

Tally nodded, feeling the cold pendant against her neck and remembering her promise to Shay. "Yeah. I've got something to tell you, too."

They walked through the Smoke, past cook fires being extinguished with shovelfuls of dirt; windows coming alight with candles and electric bulbs; and a handful of young uglies pursuing an escaped chicken.

They climbed the ridge from which Tally had first looked down on the settlement, and David led her along it to a cool, flat outcrop of stone where a view opened up between the trees.

As always, Tally noticed how graceful David was, how he seemed to know every step of the path intimately. Not even pretties, whose bodies were perfectly balanced, designed for elegance in every kind of clothing, moved with such effortless control.

Tally deliberately turned her eyes away from him. In the valley below, the orchids glowed with pale malevolence in the moonlight, a frozen sea against the dark shore of the forest.

David started talking first. "Did you know you're the first runaway to come here all alone?"

"Really?"

He nodded, still staring down at the white expanse of flowers. "Most of the time, I bring them in."

Tally remembered Shay, the last night they'd seen each other in the city, saying that the mysterious David would take her to the Smoke. Back then Tally had hardly believed there was such a person. Now, sitting next to her, David seemed very real. He took the world more seriously than any other ugly she'd ever met-more seriously, in fact, than middle pretties like her parents. In a funny way, his eyes held the same intensity that the cruel pretties' had, though without their coldness.

"My mother used to in the old days," he said. "But now she's too old."

Tally swallowed. They always explained in school about how uglies who didn't have the operations eventually became infirm. "Oh, I'm so sorry. How old is she, anyway?"

He laughed. "She's plenty fit, but uglies have an easier time trusting someone like me, someone their own age."

"Oh, of course." Tally remembered her reaction to the Boss that first day. Only a couple of weeks later she was much more used to all the different kinds of faces that age created.

"Sometimes, a few uglies will make it on their own, following coded directions like you did. But it's always been three or four in a group. No one's ever come all alone."

"You must think I'm an idiot."

"Not at all." He took her hand. "I think it was really brave."

She shrugged. "It wasn't that bad a trip, really."

"It's not the traveling that takes courage, Tally. I've done much longer trips on my own.

It's leaving home." He traced a line on her sore hand with a finger. "I can't imagine having to walk away from the Smoke, away from everything I've ever known, realizing I'd probably never come back."

Tally swallowed. It hadn't been easy. Of course, she hadn't really had a choice.

"But you left your city, the only place you'd ever lived, all alone," David continued. "You hadn't even met a Smokey, someone to convince you firsthand that it was a real place.

You did it all on trust, because your friend asked you. I guess that's why I feel I can trust you."

Tally looked out at the weeds, feeling worse with every word David said. If he only knew the real reason she was there.

"When Shay first told me you were coming, I was really angry at her."

"Because I might have given the Smoke away?"

"Partly. And partly because it's really dangerous for a city-bred sixteen-year-old to cross hundreds of miles alone. But mostly I thought it was a wasted risk, because you probably wouldn't even make it out of your dorm window."

He looked up at her, squeezing her hand softly. "I was amazed when I saw you running down that hill."

Tally smiled. "I was a pretty sorry sight that day."

"You were so scratched up, your hair and clothes all singed from that fire, but you had the biggest smile on your face." David's face seemed to glow in the soft moonlight.

Tally closed her eyes and shook her head. Great. She was going to get an award for bravery when she should really be kicked out of the Smoke for treachery.

"You don't look quite so happy now, though," he said softly.

"Not everyone thinks it's great that I came here."

He laughed. "Yeah, Croy told me about his big revelation."

"He did?" She opened her eyes.

"Don't listen to him. From the moment you got here, he was suspicious about your coming alone. He thought you must have had help along the way. City help. But I told him he was crazy."

"Thanks."

He shrugged. "When you and Shay saw each other, you were so happy. I could tell that you'd really missed her."

"Yeah. I was worried about her."

"Of course you were. And you were brave enough to come looking yourself, even if it meant walking away from everything you'd ever known, alone. You didn't really come because you wanted to live in the Smoke, did you?"

"Um…what do you mean?"

"You came to see if Shay was all right."

Tally looked into David's eyes. Even if he was completely wrong about her, it felt good to bask in his words. Up until now, the whole day had been tainted by suspicion and doubt, but David's face shone with admiration for what she had done. A feeling spread through her, a warmth that pushed away the cold wind cutting across the ridge.

Then Tally trembled inside, realizing what the feeling was. It was that same warmth she'd felt talking to Peris after his operation, or when teachers looked at her with approval. It was not a feeling she'd ever gotten from an ugly before.

Without large, perfectly shaped eyes, their faces couldn't make you feel that way. But the moonlight and the setting, or maybe just the words he was saying, had somehow turned David into a pretty. Just for a moment.

But the magic was all based on lies. She didn't deserve the look in David's eyes.

She turned to face the ocean of weeds again. "I bet Shay wishes she'd never told me about the Smoke."

"Maybe right now. Maybe for a while," David said. "But not forever."

"But you and she…"

"She and I." He sighed. "Shay changes her mind pretty quickly, you know."

"What do you mean?"

"The first time she wanted to come to the Smoke was back in spring. When Croy and the others came."

"She told me. She chickened out, right?"

David nodded. "I always figured she would. She just wanted to run away because her friends were. If she stayed in the city, she'd be left all alone."

Tally thought of her friendless days after Peris's operation. "Yeah. I know that feeling."

"But she never showed up that night. Which happens. I was really surprised to see her in the ruins a few weeks ago, suddenly convinced she wanted to leave the city forever. And she was already talking about bringing a friend, even though she hadn't said a word to you yet." He shook his head. "I almost told her to just forget about it, to stay in the city and become pretty."

She took a deep breath. Everything would have been so much easier if David had done exactly that.

Tally would be pretty right now, high up in a party tower with Peris and Shay and a bunch of new friends at this very moment. But the image in her mind didn't give Tally the thrill it usually did; it just fell flat, like a song she'd heard too many times.

David squeezed her hand. "I'm glad I didn't."

Something made Tally say, "Me too." The words amazed her, because somehow they felt true. She looked at David closely, and the feeling was still there. She could see that his forehead was too high, that a small scar cut a white stroke through his eyebrow. And his smile was pretty crooked, really. But it was as if something had changed inside Tally's head, something that had turned his face pretty to her. The warmth of his body cut the autumn chill, and she moved closer.

"Shay's tried hard to make up for chickening out that first time, and for giving you directions when she promised me she wouldn't," he said. "Now she's decided the Smoke is the greatest place in the world.

And that I'm the best person in the world for bringing her here."

"She really likes you, David."

"And I really like her. But she's just not…"

"Not what?"

"Not serious. Not you."

Tally turned away, her head swimming. She knew she had to keep her promise now, or she never would. Her fingers went to the pendant. "David…"

"Yeah, I noticed that necklace. After your smile, it was the second thing I noticed about you."

"You know someone gave it to me."

"That's what I figured."

"And I…I told them about the Smoke."

He nodded. "I figured that, too."

"You're not mad at me?"

He shrugged. "You never promised me anything. I hadn't even met you."

"But you still…" David was gazing into her eyes, his face glowing again. Tally looked away, trying to drown her uncanny pretty feelings in the sea of white weeds.

David sighed softly. "You left a lot of things behind when you came here-your parents, your city, your whole life. And you are starting to like the Smoke, I can tell. You get what we're doing here in a way that most runaways don't."

"I like the way it feels here. But I might not…stay."

He smiled. "I know. Listen, I'm not rushing you. Maybe whoever gave you that heart is coming, maybe not. Maybe you'll go back to them. But in the meantime, could you do something for me?"

"Sure. I mean, what?"

He stood, offering her his hand. "I'd like you to meet my parents."

The Secret

They descended the ridge on the far side, down a steep, narrow path. David led her quickly in the darkness, finding footing on the almost invisible trail without hesitation. It was all Tally could do to keep up.

The whole day had been one shock after another, and now to top it all off she was going to meet David's parents. That was the last thing she'd expected after showing him her pendant and telling him she hadn't kept the Smoke a secret. His reactions were different from those of anyone she'd ever met before. Maybe it was because he'd grown up out here, away from the customs of the city. Or maybe he was just…different.

They left the familiar ridge line far behind, and the mountain rose steeply to one side.

"Your parents don't live in the Smoke?"

"No. It's too dangerous."

"Dangerous how?"

"It's part of what I was telling you your first day here, in the railroad cave."

"About your secret? How you were raised in the wild?"

David stopped for a moment, turning back to face her in the darkness. "There's more to it than that."

"What?"

"I'll let them tell you. Come on."

A few minutes later, a small square filled with faint light appeared, hovering in the darkness of the mountainside. Tally saw that it was a window, a light inside glowing deep red through a closed curtain.

The house seemed half buried, as if it had been wedged into the mountain.

When they were still a stone's throw away, David stopped. "Don't want to surprise them.

They can be jumpy," he said, then shouted, "Hello!"

A moment later a doorway opened, letting out a shaft of light.

"David?" a woman's voice called. The door opened wider until the light spilled across them. "Az, it's David."

As they drew closer, Tally saw that she was an old ugly. Tally couldn't tell if she was younger or older than the Boss, but she certainly wasn't as terrifying to look at. Her eyes flashed liked a pretty's, and the lines of her face disappeared into a welcoming smile as she gathered her son into a hug.

"Hi, Mom."

"And you must be Tally."

"Nice to meet you." She wondered if she should shake hands or something. In the city, you never spent much time with other uglies' parents, except when you hung out at friends' houses during school breaks.

The house was much warmer than the bunkhouse, and the timber floors weren't nearly as rough, as if David's parents had lived there so long, their feet had worn them smooth. The house somehow felt more solid than any building in the Smoke. It was really cut into the mountain, she saw now. One of the walls was exposed stone, glistening with some kind of transparent sealant.

"Nice to meet you, too, Tally," David's mother said. Tally wondered what her name was.

David always referred to them as "Mom" and "Dad," words Tally hadn't used for Sol and Ellie since she was a littlie.

A man appeared, shaking David's hand before turning to her. "Good to meet you, Tally."

She blinked, her breath catching, for a moment unable to speak. David and his father somehow looked…alike.

It didn't make any sense. There had to be more than thirty years between them, if his father really had been a doctor when David was born. But their jaws, foreheads, even their slightly lopsided smiles were all so similar.

"Tally?" David said.

"Sorry. You just…you look the same!"

David's parents burst into laughter, and Tally felt her face turning red.

"We get that a lot," his father said. "You city kids always find it a shock. But you know about genetics, don't you?"

"Sure. I know all about genes. I knew two sisters, uglies, who looked almost the same.

But parents and children? That's just weird."

David's mother forced a serious expression onto her face, but the smile stayed in her eyes.

"The features that we take from our parents are the things that make us different. A big nose, thin lips, high forehead-all the things that the operation takes away."

"The preference toward the mean," his dad said.

Tally nodded, remembering school lessons. The overall average of human facial characteristics was the primary template for the operation. "Sure. Average-looking features are one of the things people look for in a face."

"But families pass on no average looks. Like our big noses." The man tweaked his son's nose, and David rolled his eyes. Tally realized that David's nose was much bigger than any pretty's. Why hadn't she noticed that before now?

"That's one of the things you give up, when you become pretty. The family nose," his mother said. "Az? Why don't you turn up the heat."

Tally realized that she was still shivering, but not from the cold outside. This was all so weird. She couldn't get over the similarity between David and his father. "That's okay.

It's lovely in here, uh…"

"Maddy," the woman said. "Shall we all sit down?"

Az and Maddy apparently had been expecting them. In the front room of the house, four antique cups were set out on little saucers. Soon a kettle began to whistle softly on an electric heater, and Az poured the boiling water into an antique pot, releasing a floral scent into the room.

Tally looked around her. The house was unlike any other in the Smoke. It was like a standard crumbly home, filled with impractical objects. A marble statuette stood in one corner, and rich rugs had been hung on the walls, lending their colors to the light in the room, softening the edges of everything.

Maddy and Az must have brought a lot of things from the city when they ran away. And, unlike uglies, who had only their dorm uniforms and other disposable possessions, the two had actually spent half a lifetime collecting things before escaping the city.

Tally remembered growing up surrounded by Sol's woodwork, abstract shapes fashioned from fallen branches she would collect from parks as a littlie. Maybe David's childhood hadn't been completely different from her own. "This all looks so familiar," she said.

"David hasn't told you?" Maddy said. "Az and I come from the same city as you. If we'd stayed, we might have been the ones to turn you pretty."

"Oh, I guess so," Tally murmured. If they'd stayed in the city, there would have been no Smoke, and Shay never would have run away.

"David says that you made it all the way here on your own," Maddy said.

She nodded. "I was following a friend of mine. She left me directions."

"And you decided to come alone? Couldn't you wait for David to come around again?"

"There wasn't time to wait," David explained. "She left the night before her sixteenth birthday."

"That's leaving things until the last minute," Az said.

"But very dramatic," Maddy said approvingly.

"Actually, I didn't have much choice. I hadn't even heard of the Smoke until Shay, my friend, told me she was leaving. That was about a week before my birthday."

"Shay? I don't believe we've met her," Az said.

Tally looked at David, who shrugged. He had never brought Shay here? She wondered for a moment what had really gone on between David and Shay.

"You certainly made up your mind quickly, then," Maddy said.

Tally brought her mind back to the present. "I had to. I only had one chance."

"Spoken like a true Smokey," Az said, pouring a dark liquid from the kettle into the cups.

"Tea?"

"Uh, please." Tally accepted a saucer and felt the scalding heat through the thin, white material of the cup. Realizing that this was one of those Smokey concoctions that burned your tongue, she sipped carefully. Her face twisted at the bitter taste. "Ah. I mean…sorry.

I've never had tea before, actually."

Az's eyes widened. "Really? But it was very popular back when we lived there."

"I've heard of it. But it's more of a crumbly drink. Um, I mean, mostly only late pretties drink it." Tally willed herself not to blush.

Maddy laughed. "Well, we're pretty crumbly, so I guess it's okay for us."

"Speak for yourself, my dear."

"Try this," David said. He dropped a white cube into Tally's tea. The next time she drank, a sweetness had spread through it, cutting the bitterness. It was possible to sip the stuff now without grimacing.

"David's told you a little about us, I suppose," Maddy said.

"Well, he said you ran away a long time ago. Before he was born."

"Oh, did he?" Az said. The expression on his face was exactly like David's when a member of the railroad crew did something thoughtless and dangerous with a vibrasaw.

"I didn't tell her everything, Dad," David said. "Just that I grew up in the wild."

"You left the rest to us?" Az said a bit stiffly. "Very good of you."

David held his father's gaze. "Tally came here to make sure her friend was okay. All the way here alone. But she might not want to stay."

"We don't force anyone to live here," Maddy said.

"That's not what I mean," David said. "I think she should know, before she decides about going back to the city."

Tally looked from David to his parents, quietly amazed. The way they communicated was so strange, not like uglies and crumblies at all. It was more like uglies arguing. Like equals.

"I should know what?" she asked softly.

They all looked at her, Maddy and Az measuring her with their eyes.

"The big secret," Az said, "the one that made us run away almost twenty years ago."

"One we usually keep to ourselves," Maddy said evenly, her eyes on David.

"Tally deserves to know," David said, his eyes locked with his mother's. "She'll understand how important it is."

"She's a kid. A city kid."

"She made it here alone, with only a bunch of gibberish directions to guide her."

Maddy scowled. "You've never even been to a city, David. You have no idea how coddled they are.

They spend their whole lives in a bubble."

"She survived alone for nine days, Mom. Made it through a brush fire."

"Please, you two," Az interjected. "She is sitting right here. Aren't you, Tally?"

"Yeah, I am," Tally said quietly. "And I wish you'd tell me what you're talking about."

"I'm sorry, Tally," Maddy said. "But this secret is very important. And very dangerous."

Tally nodded her head, looking down at the floor. "Everything out here is dangerous."

They were all silent for a moment. All Tally heard was the tinkle of Az stirring his tea.

"See?" David said finally. "She understands. You can trust her. She deserves to know the truth."

"Everyone does," Maddy said quietly. "Eventually."

"Well," Az said, then paused to sip his tea. "I suppose we'll have to tell you, Tally."

"Tell me what?"

David took a deep breath. "The truth about being pretty."

Pretty Minds

"We were doctors," Az began.

"Cosmetic surgeons, to be precise," Maddy said. "We've both performed the operation hundreds of times. And when we met, I had just been named to the Committee for Morphological Standards."

Tally's eyes widened. "The Pretty Committee?"

Maddy smiled at the nickname. "We were preparing for a Morphological Congress. That's when all the cities share data on the operation."

Tally nodded. Cities worked very hard to stay independent of one another, but the Pretty Committee was a global institution that made sure pretties were all more or less the same.

It would ruin the whole point of the operation if the people from one city wound up prettier than everyone else.

Like most uglies, Tally had often indulged the fantasy that one day she might be on the Committee, and help decide what the next generation would look like. In school, of course, they always managed to make it sound really boring, all graphs and averages and measuring people's pupils when they looked at different faces.

"At the same time, I was doing some independent research on anesthesia," Az said.

"Trying to make the operation safer."

"Safer?" Tally asked.

"A few people still die each year, as with any surgery," he said.

"From being unconscious so long, more than anything else."

Tally bit her lip. She'd never heard that. "Oh."

"I found that there were complications from the anesthetic used in the operation. Tiny lesions in the brain.

Barely visible, even with the best machines."

Tally decided to risk sounding stupid. "What's a lesion?"

"Basically it's a bunch of cells that don't look right," Az said.

"Like a wound, or a cancer, or just something that doesn't belong there."

"But you couldn't just say that," David said. He rolled his eyes toward Tally. "Doctors."

Maddy ignored her son. "When Az showed me his results, I started investigating. The local committee had millions of scans in its database. Not the stuff they put in medical textbooks, but raw data from pretties all over the world. The lesions turned up everywhere."

Tally frowned. "You mean, people were sick?"

"They didn't seem to be. And the lesions weren't cancerous, because they didn't spread.

Almost everyone had them, and they were always in exactly the same place." She pointed to a spot on the top of her head.

"A bit to the left, dear," Az said, dropping a white cube into his tea.

Maddy obliged him, then continued. "Most importantly, almost everyone all over the world had these lesions. If they were a health hazard, ninety-nine percent of the population would show some kind of symptoms."

"But they weren't natural?" Tally asked.

"No. Only post-ops-pretties, I mean-had them," Az said. "No uglies did. They were definitely a result of the operation."

Tally shifted in her chair. The thought of a weird little mystery in everyone's brain made her queasy. "Did you find out what caused them?"

Maddy sighed. "In one sense, we did. Az and I looked very closely at all the negatives-that is, the few pretties who didn't have the lesions-and tried to figure out why they were different. What made them immune to the lesions? We ruled out blood type, gender, physical size, intelligence factors, genetic markers-nothing seemed to account for the negatives. They weren't any different from everyone else."

"Until we discovered an odd coincidence," Az said.

"Their jobs," Maddy said.

"Jobs?"

"Every negative worked in the same sort of profession," Az said.

"Firefighters, wardens, doctors, politicians, and anyone who worked for Special Circumstances. Everyone with those jobs didn't have the lesions; all the other pretties did."

"So you guys were okay?"

Az nodded. "We tested ourselves, and we were negative."

"Otherwise, we wouldn't be sitting here," Maddy said quietly.

"What do you mean?"

David spoke up. "The lesions aren't an accident, Tally. They're part of the operation, just like all the bone sculpting and skin scraping. It's part of the way being pretty changes you."

"But you said not everyone has them."

Maddy nodded. "In some pretties, they disappear, or are intentionally cured-in those whose professions require them to react quickly, like working in an emergency room, or putting out a fire. Those who deal with conflict and danger."

"People who face challenges," David said.

Tally let out a slow breath, remembering her trip to the Smoke. "What about rangers?"

Az nodded. "I believe I had a few rangers in my database. All negatives."

Tally remembered the look on the faces of the rangers who had saved her. They had an unfamiliar confidence and surety, like David's, completely different from the new pretties she and Peris had always made fun of.

Peris…

Tally swallowed, tasting something more bitter than tea in the back of her throat. She tried to remember how Peris had acted when she'd crashed the Garbo Mansion party. She'd been so ashamed of her own face, it was hard to remember anything specific about Peris.

He'd looked so different and, if anything, he seemed older, more mature.

But in some way, they hadn't connected…it was as if he'd become a different person. Was it only because since his operation they had lived in different worlds? Or had it been something more?

She tried to imagine Peris coping out here in the Smoke, working with his hands and making his own clothes. The old, ugly Peris would have enjoyed the challenge. But what about pretty Peris?

Her head felt light, as if the house were in an elevator heading swiftly downward.

"What do the lesions do?" she asked.

"We don't know exactly," Az said.

"But we've got some pretty good ideas," David said.

"Just suspicions," Maddy said. Az looked uncomfortably down into his tea.

"You were suspicious enough to run away," Tally said.

"We had no choice," Maddy said. "Not long after our discovery, Special Circumstances paid a visit. They took our data and told us not to look any further or we'd lose our licenses. It was either run away, or forget everything we'd found."

"And it wasn't something we could forget," Az said.

Tally turned to David. He sat beside his mother, grim-faced, his cup of tea untouched before him. His parents were still reluctant to say everything they suspected. But she could tell that David saw no need for caution. "What do you think?" she asked him.

"Well, you know all about how the Rusties lived, right?" he said. "War and crime and all that?"

"Of course. They were crazy. They almost destroyed the world."

"And that convinced people to pull the cities back from the wild, to leave nature alone," David recited.

"And now everybody is happy, because everyone looks the same: They're all pretty. No more Rusties, no more war. Right?"

"Yeah. In school, they say it's all really complicated, but that's basically the story."

He smiled grimly. "Maybe it's not so complicated. Maybe the reason war and all that other stuff went away is that there are no more controversies, no disagreements, no people demanding change. Just masses of smiling pretties, and a few people left to run things."

Tally remembered crossing the river to New Pretty Town, watching them have their endless fun. She and Peris used to boast they'd never wind up so idiotic, so shallow. But when she'd seen him…"Becoming pretty doesn't just change the way you look," she said.

"No," David said. "It changes the way you think."

Burning Bridges

They stayed up late into the night, talking with Az and Maddy about their discoveries, their escape into the wild, and the founding of the Smoke. Finally, Tally had to ask the question that had been on her mind since she'd first seen them.

"So how did you two change yourselves back? I mean, you were pretty, and now you're…"

"Ugly?" Az smiled. "That part was simple. We're experts in the physical part of the operation. When surgeons sculpt a pretty face, we use a special kind of smart plastic to shape the bones. When we change new pretties to middle or late, we add a trigger chemical to that plastic, and it becomes softer, like clay."

"Eww," Tally said, imagining her face suddenly softening so she could squish it around to a different shape.

"With daily doses of this trigger chemical, the plastic will gradually melt away and be absorbed into the body. Your face goes back to where it started. More or less."

Tally's eyebrows rose. "More or less?"

"We can only approximate the places where bone was shaved away. And we can't make big changes, like someone's height, without surgery. Maddy and I have all the non-cosmetic benefits of the operation: impervious teeth, perfect vision, disease resistance. But we look pretty close to the way we would have without the operation. As far as the fat that was sucked out"-he patted his stomach-"that proves very easy to replace."

"But why? Why would you want to be ugly? You were doctors, so there was nothing wrong with your brains, right?"

"Our minds are fine," Maddy answered. "But we wanted to start a community of people who didn't have the lesions, people who were free of pretty thinking. It was the only way to see what difference the lesions really made. That meant we had to gather a group of uglies. Young people, recruited from the cities."

Tally nodded. "So you had to become ugly too. Otherwise, who'd trust you?"

"We refined the trigger chemical, created a once-a-day pill. Over a few months, our old faces came back." Maddy looked at her husband with a twinkle in her eye. "It was a fascinating process, actually."

"It must have been," Tally said. "What about the lesions? Can you create a pill that cures them?"

They were both silent for a moment, then Maddy shook her head. "We didn't find any answers before Special Circumstances showed up. Az and I are not brain specialists.

We've worked on the question for twenty years without success. But here in the Smoke we've seen the difference that staying ugly makes."

"I've seen that myself," Tally said, thinking of the differences between Peris and David.

Az raised an eyebrow. "You catch on pretty fast, then."

"But we know there's a cure," David said.

"How?"

"There has to be," Maddy said. "Our data showed that everyone has the lesions after their first operation. So when someone winds up in a challenging line of work, the authorities somehow cure them.

The lesions are removed secretly, maybe even fixed with a pill like the bone plastic, and the brain returns to normal. There must be a simple cure."

"You'll find it one day," David said quietly.

"We don't have the right equipment," Maddy said, sighing. "We don't even have a pretty human subject to study."

"But hang on," Tally said. "You used to live in a city full of pretties. When you became doctors, your lesions went away. Didn't you notice that you were changing?"

Maddy shrugged. "Of course we did. We were learning how the human body worked, and how to face the huge responsibility of saving lives. But it didn't feel as if our brains were changing. It felt like growing up."

"Oh. But when you looked around at everyone else, how come you didn't notice they were…brain damaged?"

Az smiled. "We didn't have much to compare our fellow citizens with, only a few colleagues who seemed different from most people. More engaged. But that was hardly a surprise. History would indicate that the majority of people have always been sheep.

Before the operation, there were wars and mass hatred and clear-cutting. Whatever these lesions make us, it isn't a far cry from the way humanity was in the Rusty era. These days we're just a bit…easier to manage."

"Having the lesions is normal now," Maddy said. "We're all used to the effects."

Tally took a deep breath, remembering Sol and Ellie's visit. Her parents had been so sure of themselves, and yet in a way so clueless. But they'd always seemed that way: wise and confident, and at the same time disconnected from whatever ugly, real-life problems Tally was having. Was that pretty brain damage? Tally had always thought that was just how parents were supposed to be.

For that matter, shallow and self-centered was how brand-new pretties were supposed to be. As an ugly Peris had made fun of them-but he hadn't waited a moment to join in the fun. No one ever did. So how could you tell how much was the operation and how much was just people going along with the way things had always been?

Only by making a whole new world, which is just what Maddy and Az had begun to do.

Tally wondered which had come first: the operation or the lesions? Was becoming pretty just the bait to get everyone under the knife? Or were the lesions merely a finishing touch on being pretty? Perhaps the logical conclusion of everyone looking the same was everyone thinking the same.

She leaned back in her chair. Her eyes were blurry, and her stomach clenched whenever she thought about Peris, her parents, and every other pretty she'd ever met. How different were they? she wondered.

How did it feel to be pretty? What was it really like behind those big eyes and exquisite features?

"You look tired," David said.

She laughed softly. It seemed like weeks since she and David had arrived there. A few hours of conversation had changed her world. "Maybe a little."

"I guess we'd better go, Mom."

"Of course, David. It's late, and Tally has a lot to digest."

Maddy and Az stood, and David helped Tally up from the chair. She said good-bye to them in a daze, flinching inside when she recognized the expression in their old and ugly faces: They felt sorry for her. Sad that she'd had to learn the truth, sad that they'd been the ones to tell her. After twenty years, maybe they'd gotten used to the idea, but they still understood that it was a horrible fact to learn.

Ninety-nine percent of humanity had had something done to their brains, and only a few people in the world knew exactly what.

"You see why I wanted you to meet my parents?"

"Yeah, I guess I do."

Tally and David were in the darkness, climbing the ridge back toward the Smoke, the sky full of stars now that the moon had set.

"You might have gone back to the city not knowing."

Tally shivered, realizing how close she had come so many times. In the library, she'd actually opened the pendant, almost holding it to her eye. And if she had, the Specials would have arrived within hours.

"I couldn't stand that," David said.

"But some uglies must go back, right?"

"Sure. They get bored with camping out, and we can't make them stay."

"You let them go? When they don't even know what the operation really means?"

David stopped and took hold of Tally's shoulder, anguish on his face. "Neither do we.

And what if we told everyone what we suspect? Most of them wouldn't believe us, but others would go charging back to the city to rescue their friends. And eventually, the cities would find out what we were saying, and would do everything in their power to hunt us down."

They already are, Tally said to herself. She wondered how many other spies the Specials had blackmailed into looking for the Smoke, how many times they'd come close to finding it. She wanted to tell David what they were up to, but how? She couldn't explain that she had come here as a spy, or David would never trust her again.

She sighed. That would be the perfect way to stop herself from coming between him and Shay.

"You don't look very happy."

Tally tried to smile. David had shared his biggest secret with her; she should tell him hers.

But she wasn't brave enough to say the words. "It's been a long night. That's all."

He smiled back. "Don't worry, it won't last forever."

Tally wondered how long it was until dawn. In a few hours she'd be eating breakfast alongside Shay and Croy, and everyone else she had almost betrayed, almost condemned to the operation. She flinched at the thought.

"Hey," David said, lifting her chin with his palm. "You did great tonight. I think my parents were impressed."

"Huh? With me?"

"Of course, Tally. You understood immediately what this all means. Most people can't believe it at first.

They say the authorities would never be so cruel."

She smiled grimly. "Don't worry, I believe it."

"Exactly. I've seen a lot of city kids come through here. You're different from the rest of them. You can see the world clearly, even if you did grow up spoiled. That's why I had to tell you. That's why…"

Tally looked into his eyes and saw that his face was glowing again-touching her in that pretty way she'd felt before.

"That's why you're beautiful, Tally."

The words made her dizzy for a moment, like the falling feeling of looking into a new pretty's eyes.

"Me?"

"Yes."

She laughed, shaking her head clear. "What, with my thin lips and my eyes too close together?"

"Tally…"

"And my frizzy hair and squashed-down nose?"

"Don't say that." His fingers brushed her cheeks where the scratches were almost healed, and ran fleetingly across her lips. She knew how callused his fingertips were, as hard and rough as wood. But somehow their caress felt soft and tentative.

"That's the worst thing they do to you, to any of you. Whatever those brain lesions are all about, the worst damage is done before they even pick up the knife: You're all brainwashed into believing you're ugly."

"We are. Everyone is."

"So you think I'm ugly?"

She looked away. "It's a pointless question. It's not about individuals."

"Yes it is, Tally. Absolutely."

"I mean, no one can really be…you see, biologically, there're certain things we all-" The words choked off. "You really think I'm beautiful?"

"Yes."

"More beautiful than Shay?"

They both stood silent, their mouths gaping. The question had popped out of Tally before she could think. How had she uttered something so horrible?

"I'm sorry."

David shrugged, turned away. "It's a fair question. Yes, I do."

"Do what?"

"I think you're more beautiful than Shay." He said it so matter-of-factly, as if talking about the weather.

Tally's eyes closed, every bit of exhaustion from the long day crashing into her at once.

She saw Shay's face-too thin, eyes too far apart-and an awful feeling welled up inside her. The warmth she'd felt from David was crushed by it.

Every day of her life she'd insulted other uglies and had been insulted in return. Fattie, Pig-Eyes, Boney, Zits, Freak-all the names uglies called one another, eagerly and without reserve. But equally, without exception, so that no one felt shut out by some irrelevant mischance of birth. And no one was considered to be even remotely beautiful, privileged because of a random twist in their genes. That was why they'd made everyone pretty in the first place.

This was not fair.

"Don't say that. Please."

"You asked me."

She opened her eyes. "But it's horrible! It's wrong."

"Listen, Tally. That's not what's important to me. What's inside you matters a lot more."

"But first you see my face. You react to symmetry, skin tone, the shape of my eyes. And you decide what's inside me, based on all your reactions. You're programmed to!"

"I'm not programmed. I didn't grow up in a city."

"It's not just culture, it's evolution!"

He shrugged in defeat, the anger draining from his voice. "Maybe some of it is." He chuckled tiredly.

"But you know what first got me interested in you?"

Tally took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. "What?"

"The scratches on your face."

She blinked. "The what?"

"These scratches." He softly touched her cheek again.

She shook away the electric feeling his fingers left behind. "That's nuts. Imperfect skin is a sign of a poor immune system."

David laughed. "It was a sign that you'd been in an adventure, Tally, that you'd bashed your way across the wild to get here. To me, it was a sign that you had a good story to tell."

Her outrage faded. "A good story?" Tally shook her head, a laugh building inside her.

"Actually, my face got scratched up back in the city, hoverboarding through some trees.

At high speed. Some adventure, huh?"

"It does tell a story, though. As I thought the first time I saw you-you take risks." His fingers wound into a lock of her singed hair. "You're still taking risks."

"I guess so." Standing here in the darkness with David felt like a risk, like everything was about to change again. He still had the look in his eye, the pretty look.

Maybe he really could see past her ugly face. Maybe what was inside her did matter to him more than anything else.

Tally stepped onto a fist-size stone on the path and found an uneasy balance on it. They were eye to eye now.

She swallowed. "You really think I'm beautiful."

"Yes. What you do, the way you think, makes you beautiful."

A strange thought crossed her mind, and Tally said, "I'd hate it if you got the operation."

She couldn't believe she was saying it. "Even if they didn't do your brain, I mean."

"Gee, thanks." His smile shone in the darkness.

"I don't want you to look like everyone else."

"I thought that was the point of being pretty."

"I did too." She touched his eyebrow where the line of white cut through it. "So how'd you get that scar?"

"An adventure. A good story. I'll tell you sometime."

"You promise?"

"I promise."

"Good." She leaned forward, her weight pressing into him, and as her feet gradually slipped down the stone, their lips met. His arms wrapped around her and pulled her closer.

His body was warm in the predawn cold, and formed something solid and certain in Tally's shaken reality. She held on tightly, amazed at how intense the kiss became.

A moment later, she pulled away to take a breath, thinking for just a second how odd this was. Uglies did kiss each other, and a lot more, but it always felt as if nothing counted until you were a pretty.

But this counted.

She pulled David toward her again, her fingers digging into the leather of his jacket. The cold, her aching muscles, the awful thing she had just learned, all of it just made this feeling stronger.

Then one of his hands touched the back of her neck, traced the slender chain there, down to the cold, hard metal of the pendant.

She stiffened, and their lips parted.

"What about this?" he said.

She enclosed the metal heart in her fist, her other arm still wrapped around him. There was no way she could tell David about Dr. Cable now. He would pull away, maybe forever.

The pendant was still between them.

Suddenly, Tally knew what to do. It was perfect. "Come with me."

"Where?"

"To the Smoke. I have to show you something."

She pulled him up the slope, scrambling until they reached the top of ridge.

"Are you okay?" he asked, panting. "I didn't mean to-" "I'm great." She smiled broadly at him, then peered down on the Smoke. A single campfire burned near the center of town, where the night-watch gathered to warm up every hour or so. "Come on."

Suddenly, it seemed important to get there fast, before her certainty faded, before the warm feeling inside her could give way to doubt. She scrambled down between the painted stones of the hoverboard path, David struggling to keep up. When her feet reached level ground, she ran, heedless of the dark and silent huts on either side, seeing only the firelight ahead. Her speed was effortless, like hoverboarding on an open straightaway.

Tally ran until she reached the fire, skidding to a halt against its cushion of heat and smoke. She reached up to unclasp the pendant's chain.

"Tally?" David ran up panting, confusion on his face. He tried breathlessly to say more.

"No," she said. "Just watch."

The pendant swung by its chain in her fist, sparkling red in the firelight. Tally focused all her doubts on it, all her fear of discovery, her terror at Dr. Cable's threats. She clutched the pendant, squeezing the unyielding metal until her muscles ached, as if forcing into her own mind the almost unthinkable fact that she might really remain an ugly for life. But somehow not ugly at all.

She opened her hand and threw the necklace into the center of the fire.

It landed on a crackling log, the metal heart burning black for a moment, then gradually turning yellow and white in the heat. Finally, a small pop came from it, as if something trapped inside had exploded, and it slid from the log and disappeared among the flames.

She turned to David, her vision spotted with sinuous shapes from staring into the fire. He coughed at the smoke. "Wow. That was dramatic."

Tally suddenly felt foolish. "Yeah, I guess so."

He moved closer. "You really meant that. Whoever gave it to you-" "Doesn't matter anymore."

"What if they come?"

"No one's coming. I'm sure of it."

David smiled and gathered Tally into a hug, pulling her away from the edge of the fire.

"Well, Tally Youngblood, you certainly know how to make a point. You know, I would have believed you if you just told me-" "No, I had to do it like this. I had to burn it. To know for sure."

He kissed her forehead and laughed. "You're beautiful."

"When you say that, I almost…," she whispered.

Suddenly, a wave of exhaustion struck Tally, as if her last bit of energy had gone into the fire with the pendant. She was tired from the wild run here, from the long night with Maddy and Az, from a hard day's work. And tomorrow she would have to face Shay again, and explain what had happened between her and David. Of course, the moment Shay saw that the pendant was gone from around Tally's neck, she would know.

But at least she'd never know the real truth. The pendant was charred beyond recognition, its true purpose hidden forever. Tally slumped into David's arms, closing her eyes. The image of the glowing heart was burned into her vision.

She was free. Dr. Cable would never come here now, and no one could ever take her away from David or the Smoke, or do to Tally's brain whatever the operation did to pretties'. She was no longer an infiltrator. She finally belonged here.

Tally found herself crying.

David silently walked her to the bunkhouse. At the door, he leaned forward to kiss her, but she pulled away and shook her head. Shay was just inside. Tally would have to talk to her tomorrow. It wouldn't be easy, but Tally knew she could face anything now.

David nodded, kissed his finger, and traced one of the remaining scratches on her cheek.

"See you tomorrow," he whispered.

"Where are you going?"

"For a walk. I need to think."

"Don't you ever sleep?"

"Not tonight." He smiled.

Tally kissed his hand and slipped inside, where she kicked off her shoes and crawled into bed with her clothes on, falling asleep in seconds, as if the weight of the world had lifted from her shoulders.

The next morning she awoke to chaos, the sounds of running, shouting, and the scream of machines invading her dreams. Out the bunkhouse window, the sky was full of hovercars.

Special Circumstances had arrived.