He traced the scar with a quivering fingertip; she closed her hand and looked away. “If that were true, Tally, you wouldn’t be out here now. Disobeying orders.”
“Yeah, well, I’m pretty good at the disobeying part.”
“Look at me, Tally.”
“Zane, I’m not sure if that’s a good idea.” She swallowed. “You see . . .”
“I know. I saw your face that night. I’ve noticed how you haven’t looked at me. It makes perfect sense that Dr. Cable would pull something like that—Specials think everyone else is worthless, right?”
Tally shrugged, not wanting to explain that it was worse with Zane than anyone else. Partly because of the way she’d felt about him before, the contrast between now and then. And partly . . . the other thing.
“Try, Tally,” he said.
She turned away, almost wishing for a moment that she wasn’t special, that her eyes weren’t so perfectly tuned to capture every detail of his infirmity. That her mind hadn’t been turned against everything random and average and . . . crippled.
“I can’t, Zane.”
“Yes you can.”
“What? So you’re an expert on Specials now?”
“No. But remember David?”
“David?” She glared at the sea. “What about him?”
“Didn’t he once tell you that you were beautiful?”
A chill went through her. “Yeah, back in ugly days. But how did you . . . ?” Then Tally remembered their last escape, how Zane had gotten to the Rusty Ruins a week before her. He and David had had plenty of time to get to know each other before she’d finally shown up. “He told you about that?”
Zane shrugged. “He’d seen how pretty I was. And I guess he was hoping that you could still see him, the way you had back in the Old Smoke.”
Tally shuddered, a rush of old memories sweeping through her: that night two operations ago when David had looked at her ugly face—thin lips and frizzy hair and squashed-down nose—and said that she was beautiful. She’d tried to explain how it couldn’t be true, how biology wouldn’t let it be true. . . .
But still he’d called her beautiful, even when she was ugly.
That was the moment that Tally’s whole world had started to unravel. That was the first time she’d switched sides.
She felt an unexpected ping of pity for poor, random-faced David. Raised a Smokey, he’d never had the operation, hadn’t even seen any city pretties back then. So of course he might think that ugly Tally Youngblood would be okay to look at.
But after she’d been turned pretty, Tally had given herself up to Dr. Cable just to stay with Zane, and had pushed David away.
“That’s not why I chose you, Zane. Not because of your face. It’s because of what you and I did together—how we freed ourselves. You know that, right?”
“Of course. So what’s wrong with you now?”
“What do you mean?”
“Listen, Tally. When David saw how beautiful you were, he took on five million years of evolution. He saw past your imperfect skin and asymmetry and everything else our genes select against.” Zane held out his hand. “And now you can’t even look at me just because I’m shaking a little?”
She stared at his sickening, quivering fingers. “It’s worse than being a bubblehead, Zane. Bubbleheads are just clueless, but Specials are . . . single-minded about some things. But at least I’m trying to fix the situation. Why do you think I’m out here following you?”
“You want to take me back to the city, don’t you?”
She groaned. “What’s the alternative? Having Maddy try one of her half-baked cures?”
“The alternative is inside you, Tally. This isn’t about my brain damage; it’s about yours.” He slid closer, and she closed her eyes. “You freed yourself once before. You beat the pretty lesions. In the beginning, all it took was a kiss.”
She felt the heat of his body next to her, smelled the campfire smoke on his skin. She turned away, eyes still shut tight. “But it’s different being special—it isn’t just some little piece of my brain. It’s my whole body. It’s the way I see the world.”
“Right. You’re so special no one can touch you.”
“Zane . . .”
“You’re so special you have to cut yourself just to feel anything.”
She shook her head. “I don’t do that anymore.”
“So you can change!”
“But that doesn’t mean . . .” She opened her eyes.
Zane’s face was centimeters from hers, his gaze intense. And somehow the wild had changed him, too—his eyes no longer looked watery and average to her. His stare was almost icy.
Almost special.
She leaned closer . . . and their lips met, warm in the chill of the outcrop’s shadow. The roar of the waves filled her ears, drowning out her nervous heartbeat.
She slid closer, hands pushing inside his clothes. She wanted to be out of the sneak suit, no longer alone, no longer invisible. Arms around him, she squeezed tight, hearing his breath catch as her lethal hands gripped harder. Her senses brought her everything about him: his heart pulsing softly in his throat, the taste of his mouth, the unwashed scent of him cut by the salt spray.
But then his fingers brushed her cheek, and Tally felt their trembling.
No, she said silently.
The tremors were soft, almost nothing, as faint as the echoes of rain falling a kilometer away. But they were everywhere, on the skin of his face, in the muscles of his arms around her, in his lips against hers—his whole body shivering like a littlie’s in the cold. And suddenly Tally could see inside him: his damaged nervous system, the corrupted connections between body and brain.
She tried to blot the image from her mind, but it only grew clearer. She was designed to spot weaknesses, after all, to take advantage of the frailties and flaws of randoms. Not ignore them.
Tally tried to pull away a little, but Zane’s grip on her arm tightened, as if he thought he could hold her there. She broke the kiss and opened her eyes, glaring down at the pale fingers grasping her, a sudden, unstoppable flash of anger rising.
“Tally, wait,” he said. “We can—”
But he hadn’t let go. Rage and disgust filled her, and Tally sent a flutter of razor spines rolling across her sneak suit. Zane cried out and pulled back, his fingers and palms bleeding.
She rolled away, springing to her feet and running. She’d kissed him, let herself be touched by him—someone unspecial and barely average. Someone crippled . . .
Bile rose in her throat, as if the memory of kissing him was trying to tear itself free of her body. She stumbled and fell to one knee, her stomach heaving, the world spinning.
“Tally!” He was coming after her.
“Don’t!” She raised one hand, not daring to look up at him. Breathing in the cold, pure sea air, the nausea was beginning to pass. But not if he got any closer.
“Are you okay?”
“Does it look like I’m okay?” A wave of shame whipped through Tally. What had she done? “I just can’t, Zane.”
She pulled herself up and ran toward the ocean, away from him. The outcrop ended on a chalky cliff, but Tally didn’t slow down. . . .
She jumped, barely clearing the rocks below, hitting the waves with a slap, diving down into the icy embrace of the water. The churning ocean spun her around, almost dumping her back on the jagged shore, but Tally pulled herself deeper with a few powerful strokes, until her hands brushed the dark and sandy bottom. The roiling water began to fall back, shifting into a riptide around her. It pulled Tally outward, rumbling in her ears, erasing her thoughts.
She held her breath, letting the ocean claim her.
• • •
A minute later Tally let herself break the surface, gasping for air. She was half a kilometer from where she’d started, well offshore and being carried south by the current.
Zane was at the cliff’s edge, scanning the water for her, his bleeding hands wrapped in his jac
ket. After what she’d done, Tally couldn’t face him, didn’t even want to be seen by him. She wanted to disappear.
She drew down her hood and let the suit take on the rippling silver of the water, let herself be pulled farther away.
Finally, when he’d gone back to camp, Tally swam toward shore.
BONES
After that, the journey seemed to take forever.
Some days, she became convinced the position-finder was nothing but a Smokey trick leading them around the wild forever: crippled Zane struggling to make it through the long nights of travel; psycho Tally alone inside her sneak suit, detached and invisible. Both of them in separate hells.
She wondered how Zane felt about her now. After what had happened, he must have realized how weak she really was: Dr. Cable’s feared fighting machine undone by a kiss, sickened by something as simple as a quivering hand.
The memory of it made her want to cut herself, to tear at her own flesh until she had become something different inside. Something less special, more human. But she didn’t want to go back to cutting after telling Zane she’d stopped. It would be like breaking a promise to him.
Tally wondered if he’d told the other Crims about her. Were they already planning something—a way to ambush Tally and turn her over to the Smokies? Or would they try to escape, leaving her behind, alone in the wild forever?
She imagined sneaking into camp again while the others were sleeping, and telling Zane how bad she felt. But she couldn’t bear to face him. She might have gone too far this time, almost throwing up in his face, not to mention cutting up his hands.
Shay had already given up on her. What if Zane also decided he’d had enough of Tally Youngblood?
• • •
Toward the end of two weeks, the Crims came to a halt on a cliff that jutted out high above the sea.
Tally glanced up at the stars. It was well before dawn, and the rail line stretched before them unbroken. But the runaways all jumped from their boards and gathered around Zane, looking down at something in his hand.
The position-finder.
Tally watched and waited, hovering just below the edge of the sea cliff, lifting fans keeping her aloft above the crashing waves. After a few long minutes, she saw campfire smoke; it was clear the Crims weren’t going any farther tonight. She drifted closer and pulled herself onto the cliff.
Circling around in the high grass, she made her way closer to the encampment. Flares of infrared erupted as the Crims heated their meals.
Finally, Tally reached a spot where the wind carried sounds and the smell of city food to her.
“What do we do if no one comes?” one of the girls was saying.
Zane’s voice answered. “They’ll come.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know. But there’s nothing else we can do.”
The girl started talking about their water supply, and the fact that they hadn’t seen a river for the last two nights.
Tally sank back into the grass, relieved—the position-finder had told them to stop here. This wasn’t the New Smoke, obviously, but perhaps this awful journey was coming to an end soon.
She looked around, sniffing the air, wondering what was special about this place. Among the scents of self-heating meals, Tally smelled something that made her skin crawl . . . something rotten.
She crawled toward the scent through the high grass, eyes sweeping the ground. The stench grew and grew, finally so strong it almost made her gag. A hundred meters from the camp she found the source: a pile of dead fish, heads and tails and picked-clean spines with flies and maggots crawling all over them.
Tally swallowed, telling herself to stay icy as she searched the area around the pile. In a small clearing, she discovered the remains of an old campfire. The charred wood was cold, the ash all blown away, but someone had camped here. Many people, in fact.
The lifeless fire was in a deep pit, banked against the sea breeze, and built to give off heat efficiently. Like all city pretties, the Crims always optimized their fires for light instead of heat, burning through wood carelessly. But this fire had been made by practiced hands.
Tally glimpsed something white among the ashes, and reached in to gently draw it out. . . .
It was a bone, about as long as her hand. She couldn’t tell what species it belonged to, but it was marked with small depressions where human teeth had gnawed into the marrow.
Tally couldn’t imagine city kids eating meat after only a couple of weeks in the wild. Even the Smokies rarely hunted for food—they raised rabbits and chickens, nothing as big as whatever this bone had come from. And the teeth had left uneven marks; whoever they were, they didn’t know a lot about dentistry. One of Andrew’s people had probably built this fire.
A shiver went through her. The villagers she’d met thought of outsiders as enemies, like animals to be hunted and killed. And pretties weren’t “gods” to them anymore. Tally wondered how the villagers felt about discovering that they’d lived inside an experiment all their lives, and that their beautiful gods were nothing but human beings.
She wondered if any of the Smokies’ recruits ever thought about getting revenge on the city pretties.
Tally shook her head. The Smokies had trusted Andrew enough to put him in charge of guiding the runaways here. Surely the others they had recruited weren’t homicidal maniacs.
But what if other villagers had learned to escape from their “little men”?
As dawn approached, Tally stayed awake, not bothering with her usual catnaps. She watched the sky for signs of hovercars as always, but she also kept an eye on the inland approach to the cliffs, infrared at full power. The unpleasant rumble in her stomach from seeing the pile of rotten fish never completely went away.
They came three hours after sunrise.
NEW ARRIVALS
Fourteen figures showed in infrared, slowly climbing the lazy inland hills, all but hidden by the long grass.
Tally booted her sneak suit, and felt its scales ripple up to mimic the grass, like the hackles of a nervous cat. The only figure she could see clearly was the woman at the front of the group. She was definitely a villager—clad in skins and carrying a spear.
Tally sank lower into the grass, remembering the first time she’d met the villagers—they’d jumped her in the middle of the night, ready to kill for the crime of being an outsider. The Crims would be fast asleep by now.
If there was any violence, it would happen suddenly, leaving little time for Tally to save anyone. Maybe she should wake up Zane now and tell him what was approaching. . . .
But the thought of how he might look at her, her own disgust mirrored in his eyes, sent her head spinning.
Tally took a deep breath, ordering herself to stay icy. The long nights of traveling—invisible and alone, trying to protect someone who probably didn’t even want her around—had started to make her paranoid. Without a better look, she couldn’t assume that the approaching group posed a threat.
She crawled on hands and knees, moving swiftly in the tall grass, giving the pile of rotten fish a wide berth. A little closer, Tally heard a clear voice ring out across the fields, carrying an unfamiliar tune in the random-sounding syllables of the villagers’ language. The song didn’t sound particularly warlike—more happy, like something you’d sing when your team was winning a soccer game.
To these people, of course, random violence pretty much was a soccer game.
As they grew closer, Tally raised her head. . . .
And breathed a sigh of relief. Only two of the approaching group wore skins. The rest were city pretties—bedraggled and tired-looking, but definitely not savages. The whole group balanced water packs on their shoulders, the bubbleheads hunched under the weight, the villagers carrying it effortlessly. Tally looked into the distance the way they’d come, and saw the glimmer of water from an ocean inlet. They’d only been away on a provisions run.
Remembering how Andrew had detected her, Tally stayed well clear o
f the group. But she was close enough to make out their clothes. The city pretties’ seemed all wrong, totally fashion-missing, or maybe a few years out of style. But these kids hadn’t been out here that long.
Then Tally heard one boy asking how far it was back to camp, and the strangeness of his accent sent a shiver through her. They were from another city, somewhere far enough away that they talked differently. Of course, she was halfway to the equator. The Smokies had been spreading their little rebellion far and wide.
But what were they doing here? she wondered. Surely this little patch of cliff wasn’t the New Smoke. Tally crawled along behind the group, still watching them warily as they approached the sleeping Crims.
Suddenly, she came to a halt, feeling something in her bones—something all around, as if the earth were rumbling under her.
A strange noise came from the distance, low and rhythmic, like huge fingers drumming on a table. It faded in and out for a few moments before steadying.
The others could hear it now. The villager heading up the little party let out a cry, pointing toward the south, and the city pretties all looked up expectantly. Tally could already see it, thundering across the hills toward them, its engines glowing hot in infrared.
She raised herself into a half crouch and started running for her board, the thrumming sound building around her. Tally remembered her first trip into the wild, when she’d gotten a lift to the Smoke in a strange Rusty flying vehicle. The rangers, naturalists from another city, had used old contraptions like this one to fight the white weed.
What were they called again?
It wasn’t until she had made it back to her hoverboard that Tally remembered the name.
• • •
The “helicopter” landed not far from the cliff’s edge.
Twice the size of the one Tally had ridden to the Smoke, it descended with an awesome fury, the whirlwind battering down the grass in a wide circle. The helicopter kept itself aloft with two huge spinning blades that mercilessly beat the air, like huge lifting fans. Even in her hiding place, their sound rattled Tally down to her ceramic bones, her hoverboard bucking beneath her like a nervous horse in the windstorm.