Uglies (36 page)

Tally crawled out into the big part of the cave, every muscle stiff, every rock she'd slept on imprinted on her. Through the curtain of the waterfall, dusk was falling. She wondered if she'd ever be able to sleep at night again.

Shay was squatting on a rock, digging into the PadThai, complaining that it wasn't spicy enough. Bedraggled, in dirty party clothes, her hair stuck to her face, she was still stunning. Ryde and Astrix watched her silently, a bit awestruck by her looks. They were two of Shay's old friends who'd run away to the Smoke the time she'd chickened out, so it must have been months since they'd seen a pretty face. Everyone seemed willing to let her go on complaining.

One thing about being pretty, people put up with your annoying habits.

“Morning,” said Croy. “SwedeBalls or VegiRice?”

“Whatever's faster.” Tally stretched her muscles. She wanted to get to the ruins as soon as possible.

•  •  •

When darkness fell, Tally and Croy crept out from behind the waterfall. There was no sign of Specials in the sky. She doubted anyone was searching this far out. Forty minutes from the city on a fast board was a long way.

They gave the all-clear, and everyone rode farther upriver, to a place where the river's course twisted closer to the ruins. A long hike followed, the four uglies sharing the load of boards and supplies. Shay had stopped complaining, settling into a pouty, hungover silence. The walk seemed easy for her. Her wiry fitness from hard work at the Smoke hadn't faded in two weeks, and the operation actually firmed up a new pretty's muscles, at least for a while. Although Shay announced once that she wanted to go home, heading back on her own didn't seem to have entered her mind.

Tally wondered what they were going to do with her. She knew there was no simple fix. Maddy and Az had worked for twenty years to no avail. But they couldn't leave Shay like this.

Of course, the moment she was cured, her hatred for Tally would return.

Which was worse: a friend with brain damage, or one who despised you?

•  •  •

They reached the edge of the ruins after midnight, and boarded down to the abandoned building where Tally and David had camped.

David was waiting outside.

He looked exhausted, the dark lines under his eyes visible even in starlight. But he embraced Tally the moment she stepped from the board, his arms tight around her, and she hugged him back hard. “Are you okay?” she whispered, then felt idiotic. What was he supposed to say to that? “Oh, David, of course you're not. I'm sorry, I—”

“Shhh. I know.” He pulled away and smiled.

Relief flowed through Tally, and she squeezed David's hands, confirming the realness of him. “I missed you,” she said.

“Me too.” He kissed her.

“You two are just so cute,” Shay said, combing her hair with her fingers after the windy ride.

“Hi, Shay.” David gave her a tired smile. “You guys look hungry.”

“Only if you have any non-bogus food,” Shay said.

“Afraid not. Three kinds of reconstituted curry.”

Shay groaned and pushed past him into the crumbling building. His eyes followed her, but without any of the awe still in Ryde's and Astrix's faces. It was as if David didn't see her beauty.

He turned back. “We finally got some luck.”

Tally looked into his lined, fatigued face. “Really?”

“We got that tablet working, the one Dr. Cable was carrying.
Mom was yanking the phone part out so they couldn't track us through it, and she got it to display Cable's work data.”

“About what?”

“All her notes on making pretties into Specials. Not just the physical part”—he pulled her closer—“but also how the brain lesions work. It's everything my parents weren't told when they were doctors!”

Tally swallowed. “Shay . . .”

He nodded. “Mom thinks she can find a cure.”

HIPPOCRATIC OATH

They stayed at the edge of the Rusty Ruins.

Occasionally, hovercars would pass over the crumbling city, threading a slow search pattern across the sky. But the Smokies were old hands at hiding from satellites and aircraft. They placed red herrings across the ruins—chemical glowsticks that gave off human-size pockets of heat—and covered the windows of their building with sheets of black Mylar. And of course the ruins were very large; finding seven people in what had once been a city of millions was no simple matter.

Every night, Tally watched the influence of the “New Smoke” grow. A lot of uglies had seen the burning message on the night of the escape, or had heard about it, and the nightly pilgrimages out to
the ruins slowly increased, until sparklers wavered atop high buildings from midnight until dawn. Tally, Ryde, Croy, and Astrix made contact with the city uglies, starting new rumors, teaching new tricks, and offering glimpses of the ancient magazines the Boss had salvaged from the Smoke. If they doubted the existence of Special Circumstances, Tally showed them the plastic handcuff bracelets still encircling her wrists, and invited them to try to cut the cuffs off.

One new legend towered above all the rest. Maddy had decided that the brain lesions couldn't be kept a secret anymore; every ugly had the right to know what the operation really entailed. Tally and the others spread the rumor among their city friends: Not just your face was changed by the knife. Your personality—the real you inside—was the price of beauty.

Of course, not every ugly believed such an outrageous tale, but a few did. And some sneaked across to New Pretty Town in the dead of night to talk to their older friends face-to-face, and decided for themselves.

The Specials sometimes tried to crash the party, setting traps for the New Smokies, but someone always gave a warning, and no hovercar could ever catch a board among winding streets and rubble. The New Smokies learned the nooks and crannies of the ruins as if they'd been born there, until they could disappear in a heartbeat.

Maddy worked on the brain cure, using materials salvaged from the ruins or brought by city uglies willing to borrow from hospitals and chem classes. She withdrew from the rest of them,
except for David. She seemed particularly cool to Tally, who felt guilty for every moment she spent with David, now that his mother was alone. None of them ever talked about Az's death.

Shay stayed with them, complaining about the food, the ruins, her hair and clothes, and having to look at all the ugly faces around her. But she never seemed bitter, only perpetually annoyed. After the first few days she didn't even talk about leaving. Perhaps the brain damage made her pliant, or the fact that she hadn't lived in New Pretty Town for long. She still remembered them all as friends. Tally sometimes wondered if Shay secretly enjoyed having the only pretty face in their little rebellion. Certainly, she didn't do any more work than she would have in the city; Ryde and Astrix obeyed her every command.

David helped his mother, searching the ruins for salvage, and taught wilderness survival tricks to any ugly who wanted to learn. But in the two weeks after his father's death, Tally found herself missing the days when it had been just the two of them.

Twenty days after the rescue, Maddy announced that she had found a cure.

•  •  •

“Shay, I want to explain this to you carefully.”

“Sure, Maddy.”

“When you had the operation, they did something to your brain.”

Shay smiled. “Yeah, right.” She looked across at Tally, wearing a familiar expression. “That's what Tally keeps telling me. But you guys don't understand.”

Maddy folded her hands. “What do you mean?”

“I
like
the way I look,” Shay insisted. “I'm happier in this body. You want to talk about brain damage? Look at you all, running around these ruins playing commando. You're all full of schemes and rebellions, crazy with fear and paranoia, even jealousy.” Her eyes skipped back and forth between Tally and Maddy. “That's what being ugly does.”

“And how do you feel, Shay?” Maddy asked calmly.

“I feel bubbly. It's nice not being all raging with hormones. Of course, it kind of sucks being out here instead of in the city.”

“No one's keeping you here, Shay. Why haven't you left?”

Shay shrugged. “I don't know. . . . I'm worried about you guys, I guess. It's dangerous out here, and messing with Specials isn't a good idea. You should know that by now, Maddy.”

Tally took a sharp breath, but Maddy's expression didn't change. “And you're going to protect us from them?” she asked calmly.

Shay shrugged. “I just feel bad about Tally. If I hadn't told her about the Smoke, she'd be pretty right now instead of living in this dump. And I figure eventually she'll decide to grow up. We'll go back together.”

“You don't seem to want to decide for yourself.”

“Decide what?” Shay rolled her eyes, looking at Tally to confirm what a bore this was. The two of them had plowed through this conversation a dozen times before, until Tally had realized there was no convincing Shay that her personality had changed. To Shay, her new attitude was simply the result of growing up, moving
on, leaving all the overheated emotions of ugliness behind.

“You weren't always this way, Shay,” David said.

“No, I used to be ugly.”

Maddy smiled gently. “These pills won't change the way you look. They'll only affect your brain, undoing what Dr. Cable did to the way your mind works. Then you can decide for yourself how you want to look.”

“Decide? After you've messed with my brain?”

“Shay!” Tally said, forgetting her promise to remain silent. “We're not the ones messing with your brain!”

“Tally,” David said softly.

“That's right,
I'm
the one who's crazy.” Shay's voice took on the tone of her daily round of complaining. “Not you guys, who live in a broken-down building on the edge of a dead city, slowly turning into freaks when you could be beautiful. Yeah, I'm crazy all right . . . for trying to help you!”

Tally sat back and crossed her arms, silenced by Shay's words. Whenever they had this conversation, reality became a little unhinged, as if she and the other New Smokies might really be the insane ones. It felt like Tally's horrible first days in the Smoke, when she hadn't known whose side she was on.

“How are you helping us, Shay?” Maddy asked calmly.

“I'm trying to get you to understand.”

“Just like you did when Dr. Cable used to bring you by my cell?”

Shay's eyes narrowed, confusion clouding her face, as if her memories of the underground prison didn't fit in with the rest of her pretty worldview.

“I know Dr. C was horrible to you,” she said. “The Specials are psychos—just look at them. But that doesn't mean you have to spend your whole lives running away. That's what I'm saying. Once you turn, Specials won't mess with you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you won't make trouble anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because you'll be
happy
!” Shay took a couple of deep breaths, and her usual calm returned. She smiled, beautiful again. “Like me.”

Maddy picked up the pills on the table in front of her. “You won't take these willingly?”

“No way. You said they're not even safe.”

“I said there was a small chance something could go wrong.”

Shay laughed. “You
must
think I'm nuts. And even if those pills work, look what they're supposed to do. From what I can tell, ‘cured' means being a jealous, self-important, whiny little ugly-brain. It means thinking you've got all the answers.” She crossed her arms. “In a lot of ways, you and Dr. Cable are alike. You're both convinced you've personally got to change the world. Well, I don't need that. And I don't need those.”

“Okay, then.” Maddy picked up the pills and put them in her pocket. “That's all I have to say.”

“What do you mean?” Tally asked.

David squeezed her hand. “That's all we can do, Tally.”

“What? You said we could cure her.”

Maddy shook her head. “Only if she wants to be cured. These
are experimental, Tally. We can't give them to someone against her will. Not when we don't know if they'll work.”

“But her mind . . . she's got the lesions!”

“Hello,” Shay called. “
She
is sitting right here.”

“Sorry, Shay,” Maddy said mildly. “Tally?”

Maddy pulled aside the Mylar barrier, stepping out onto what the New Smokies called the balcony. It was really just part of the top floor of the building, where the roof had entirely collapsed, leaving sweeping views of the ruins.

Tally followed. Behind her, Shay was already talking about what was for dinner. David came out a moment later.

“So, we give her the pills secretly, right?” Tally whispered.

“No,” Maddy said firmly. “We can't. I'm not going to do medical experiments on unwilling subjects.”

“Medical experiments?” Tally swallowed.

David took her hand. “You can't know for sure how something like this will work. It's only a one-percent chance, but it could screw up her brain forever.”

“It's already screwed up.”

“But she's happy, Tally.” David shook his head. “And she can make decisions for herself.”

Tally pulled her hand away, staring out over the city. A sparkler was already showing on the tall spire, uglies come to gossip and trade. “Why did we even have to ask?
They
didn't get her permission when they did this to her!”

“That's the difference between us and them,” Maddy said. “After Az and I found out what the operation really meant, we realized
we'd been party to something horrible. People had had their minds changed without their knowledge. As doctors, we took an ancient oath never to do anything like that.”