Specials

by Scott Westerfeld

  But if this war really was her fault, she had to try.

  Tally pulled her hood down over her face and switched the suit to infrared camouflage, then shot toward Town Hall. Hopefully, the hovercraft wouldn’t see her coming against the background heat of cannon fire and explosions.

  As she grew nearer to the disintegrating building, the air shuddered around her, explosive concussions beating against her body. She could feel the searing heat of the fires now, and heard the thunderous sound of floors collapsing one upon another as Town Hall’s hoverstruts began to fail. The armada was destroying the entire building, razing it to the ground, just as she and Shay had done to the Armory.

  With the inferno at her back, Tally pulled level with the hovercraft and followed its descent, looking for some weakness. It was like the first one she’d seen rising up from the Armory: four lifting fans carrying a bulbous body bristling with weaponry, wings, and claws, its dull black armor reflecting nothing of the firestorm behind her.

  It showed scars from recent damage, and Tally realized that Diego must have thrown up some resistance against the armada—a fight that hadn’t lasted very long.

  Though all the cities had given up war, maybe some had given it up more than others.

  Tally glanced down. The landing pad wasn’t far below, the line of littlies inching away from it with maddening slowness. She swore and shot toward the hovercraft, hoping to distract it.

  The machine detected her approach at the last moment, insectlike metal claws reaching out toward the white-hot board. Tally tipped back into a steep climb, but she’d changed course too late. The hovercraft’s claws jammed into her forward lifting fan, which ground to a noisy halt, and she was thrown from the riding surface. Other claws grasped blindly in the air, but Tally in her sneak suit soared over them.

  She landed on the machine’s back, and it tipped wildly, her weight and the force of the hoverboard’s impact almost rolling the craft over backward. Tally waved her arms as she skidded across the armor, her sneak suit’s grippy soles barely keeping her from falling. She bent her knees and grabbed the first handhold she could find, a thin piece of metal sticking up from the hovercraft’s body.

  Her ruined board sailed past—one lifting fan working, the other destroyed, making it spin through the air like a throwing knife.

  As the hovercraft tried to steady itself, the object that had saved Tally suddenly swiveled in her hand, and she jerked away. A little lens glittered at its tip, like an eye-stalk on a crab. She scooted to the center of the machine’s back, hoping it hadn’t seen her.

  Three other camera-stalks pivoted madly around Tally, looking in all directions, searching the sky for more threats. But none of them turned toward her—they were all pointed outward, not back at the hovercraft itself.

  Tally realized that she was sitting in the machine’s blind spot. Its eye-stalks couldn’t turn to see her, and its armored skin had no nerves to sense her feet. Apparently the hovercraft’s designers had never imagined an adversary standing right on top of it.

  But the machine knew something was wrong—it was too heavy. The four lifting fans tilted wildly as Tally shifted from side to side, scrambling to stay on. The metal claws that hadn’t been mangled by her hoverboard swung randomly in the air, searching like a blind insect’s for an opponent.

  Under her extra weight, the hovercraft began to descend. Tally leaned hard toward Town Hall, and the machine began to drift in that direction as it dropped. It was like riding the world’s wobbliest, most uncooperative hoverboard, but gradually she guided it away from the landing pad and the slow-moving line of littlies.

  As Town Hall grew nearer, shock waves from the attack rumbled through the machine. Heat from the burning building began to penetrate her sneak suit, and she felt a film of sweat spring up all over her body. Behind her the littlies seemed to have finally moved clear of the landing pad. All she had to do now was get off the hovercraft without it spotting her and opening fire.

  When the ground was only ten meters below, Tally jumped from the machine’s back, grabbing one of the damaged claws as she sailed past, yanking that side of the machine downward with the force of her fall. The hovercraft spun in midair over her head, lifting fans screeching in an attempt to keep it upright. But it had already tipped too far over; after a brief struggle, her weight on the lifeless claw flipped the machine over and upside down.

  She dropped the short distance, and her crash bracelets stopped her fall, depositing her gently on the ground.

  Above, the hovercraft spun sideways toward Town Hall, still careening out of control, claws flailing mindlessly. It crashed into the building’s lowest floor, disappearing into a gout of flame that swept across Tally, her sneak suit reporting malfunctions all across its skin. The scales that had absorbed the explosion rippled to a halt, and Tally smelled her own hair singeing inside the hood.

  As she ran back toward the hospital, fierce concussions shook the earth, knocking Tally’s feet out from under her. Looking back, she saw that Town Hall was finally crumbling. After the long minutes of bombardment, even its alloy skeleton was melting, bowing under the weight of the burning building.

  And it was practically on top of her.

  She rose to her feet again, turning her skintenna on, her head filling with the Cutters’ chatter as they organized the hospital evacuees.

  “Town Hall’s collapsing!” she said, running. “I need help!”

  “What are you doing way over there, Tally-wa?” Shay’s voice answered. “Roasting marshmallows?”

  “Tell you later!”

  “We’re on our way.”

  The rumbling grew, the heat behind her redoubling as tons of burning building collapsed in upon itself. A chunk of fiery debris flew past, setting fire to the motionless slidewalk’s grippy surface as it bounced to a halt. The light behind her brightened, Tally’s flickering shadow stretching out like a giant’s in front of her.

  From the direction of the hospital, a pair of shapes shot into view. Tally waved her arms. “Over here!”

  They swept around her and circled back, the collapsing building silhouetting their black forms.

  “Hands up, Tally-wa,” Shay said.

  Tally jumped into the air, both hands reaching. The two Cutters grabbed her wrists, pulling her away from Town Hall and toward safety.

  “You okay?” Tachs’s voice cried.

  “Yeah, but it’s . . .” Tally’s voice faded. Carried backward, she found herself watching the building’s final collapse in awestruck silence. It seemed to fold into itself, like a balloon deflating, then a vast billowing cloud of smoke and debris gushed outward, like a dark tidal wave swallowing the fiery remains.

  The wave raced toward them, closer and closer. . . .

  “Uh, guys?” Tally said. “Can you go any—?”

  The shock wave broke over the Cutters, full of swirling debris and furious winds, knocking Shay and Tachs from their boards and hurling all three of them to the ground. As she rolled, the burn-damaged scales of Tally’s sneak suit jabbed into her like sharp elbows, until she finally tumbled to a halt.

  She lay on the ground, her breath knocked out of her. Darkness had swallowed them.

  “You guys okay?” Shay asked.

  “Yeah, icy,” said Tachs.

  Tally tried to speak, but wound up coughing; her sneak-suit mask had stopping filtering the air. She pulled it off, the smoke stinging her eyes, and spat out the taste of burnt plastic. “No board, and my suit’s ruined,” she managed. “But I’m okay.”

  “You’re welcome,” Shay said.

  “Oh, yeah. Thanks, guys.”

  “Hang on,” Tachs said. “You hear that?”

  Tally’s ears were still ringing, but a moment later she realized that the barrage of cannon fire had ceased. The quiet was almost eerie. She flicked down an infrared overlay and looked up. A glowing vortex of hovercraft was forming above, like a galaxy gathering itself into a spiral.

  “What are they going to do
now?” Tally asked. “Destroy something else?”

  “No,” Shay said softly. “Not yet.”

  “Before we came here, we Cutters were in on Dr. Cable’s plans,” Tachs said. “She doesn’t want to demolish Diego. She wants to remake it. Turn it into another city just like ours: strict and controlled, everyone a bubblehead.”

  “When things start to fall apart,” Shay said, “she’ll be here to take over.”

  “But cities don’t take each other over!” Tally said.

  “Not normally, Tally, but don’t you see?” Shay turned toward the still-burning wreck of Town Hall. “Runaways running free, the New System out of control, and now the city government in ruins . . . this is a Special Circumstance.”

  BLAME

  The hospital was full of broken glass.

  All the windows on the Town Hall side had been blown inward by the building’s final collapse. Their shattered remains crunched underfoot as Tally and the other Cutters checked each room for anyone left behind.

  “Got a crumbly up here,” Ho said from two floors above.

  “Does he need a doctor?” Shay’s voice asked.

  “Just a few cuts. Medspray should do it.”

  “Let a doctor take a look, Ho.”

  Tally tuned out the skintenna chatter and peered into the next abandoned hospital room, staring once more through the empty window frames at the glowing wreckage. Two helicopters hovered overhead, spraying foam down onto the fire.

  She could escape now, simply turn off her skintenna and disappear into the chaos. The Cutters were too busy to chase her, and the rest of the city was hardly functioning at all. She knew where the Cutters’ hoverboards waited, and the crash bracelets Shay had given her were keyed to unlock them.

  But after what had happened here tonight, there was nowhere left to go. If Special Circumstances was really behind this attack, running back to Dr. Cable was out of the question.

  Tally would almost have understood if the armada had gone after the new developments, teaching Diego a lesson about expanding into the wild. Whatever else was happening in Random Town, that had to be stopped. Cities couldn’t just start grabbing land whenever they wanted.

  But cities couldn’t just attack each other like this either, blowing up buildings in the middle of town. That was how the insane, doomed Rusties had solved their disputes. Tally wondered how her own city had forgotten the lessons of history so easily.

  On the other hand, she couldn’t bring herself to doubt what Tachs had said, that Dr. Cable’s purpose in destroying Town Hall was to bring the New System to its knees. Of all the cities, only Tally’s had bothered to hunt down the Old Smoke. Only Tally’s would think that a few runaways were worth obsessing over.

  She was beginning to wonder if all cities had Special Circumstances, or whether most were like Diego, willing to let people come and go. Maybe the special operation—the one that had made Tally the way she was—was something Dr. Cable had invented herself. Which would mean that Tally really was an aberration, a dangerous weapon, someone who needed to be cured.

  She and Shay had started this bogus war, after all. Normal, healthy people wouldn’t do something like that, would they?

  The next room was also empty, strewn with the remains of a late meal interrupted by the evacuation. The windows were decorated with curtains stirring in the wind from the distant helicopter. They had been shredded by flying glass, and now they were like tattered white flags waving in surrender. A pile of life-support equipment sat in the corner, still thrumming but disconnected. Tally hoped that whoever was supposed to be attached to all those tubes and wires was still okay.

  It was strange, worrying about some nameless, fading crumbly. But the aftermath of the attack had been head-spinning: People didn’t look like crumblies or randoms anymore. For the first time since Tally had become a Cutter, being average didn’t seem pathetic to her. Seeing what her own city had done had somehow made her feel less special, at least for now.

  She remembered back in ugly days, how living in the Smoke for a few weeks had transformed the way she saw the world. Perhaps coming to Diego, with all its messy discords and differences (and its absence of bubbleheads), had already started to make her a different person. If Zane was right, she was rewiring herself once again.

  Maybe the next time she saw him, things would be different.

  Tally flicked her skintenna to a private channel. “Shay-la? I need to ask you a question.”

  “Sure, Tally.”

  “How is it different? Being cured.”

  Shay paused, and through the skintenna Tally heard her slow breathing and the crunch of glass underfoot. “Well, when Fausto first stuck me, I didn’t even notice. It took a couple of days to realize what was happening, that I was starting to see things differently. The funny thing was, when he explained what he’d done to me, it was mostly a relief. Everything’s less intense now, less extreme. I don’t have to cut myself just to make sense of it all; none of us do. But even though things aren’t as icy, at least I don’t get furious over nothing anymore.”

  Tally nodded. “When they had me in my padded cell, that’s how they described it: anger and euphoria. But right now, I just feel numb.”

  “Me too, Tally-wa.”

  “And there was one other thing the doctors said,” Tally added. “Something about ‘feelings of superiority.’ ”

  “Yeah, that’s the whole point of Special Circumstances, Tally-wa. It’s like they always taught us in school, how in Rusty days some people were ‘rich’? They got all the best stuff, lived longer, and didn’t have to follow the usual rules—and everyone thought that was perfectly okay, even if these people hadn’t done anything to deserve it except have the right crumblies. Thinking like a Special is partly just human nature. It doesn’t take much convincing to make someone believe they’re better than everyone else.”

  Tally started to agree, then remembered what Shay had yelled at her when they’d split up back on the river. “But you said I was already that way, didn’t you? Even back in ugly days.”

  Shay laughed. “No, Tally-wa. You don’t think you’re better than everyone else, just that you’re the center of the universe. It’s totally different.”

  Tally forced a laugh. “So why didn’t you cure me? You had the chance, when I was out cold.”

  There was another pause, the faraway whirr of the helicopter filtering through Shay’s skintenna link. “Because I’m sorry about what I did.”

  “When?”

  “Making you special.” Shay’s voice was shaking. “It’s all my fault what you are, and I didn’t want to force you to change again. I think you can cure yourself this time.”

  “Oh.” Tally swallowed. “Thanks, Shay.”

  “And there’s one other thing: It’ll help if you’re still a Special when we go back home to stop this war.”

  Tally frowned. Shay hadn’t explained that plan in detail yet. “How exactly will me being a psycho help?”

  “Dr. Cable will scan us, to see if we’re telling the truth,” Shay said. “It would be better if one of us was still a real Special.”

  Tally came to a halt at the next doorway. “Telling the truth? I didn’t know we were going to talk about this with her. I was imagining something involving hungry nanos. Or grenades, at least.”

  Shay sighed. “You’re being a Special-head, Tally-wa. Violence isn’t going to help. If we attack, they’ll just think it’s Diego fighting back, and this war will only get worse. We have to confess.”

  “Confess?” Tally found herself facing another empty room, lit only by the flickering fires of Town Hall. Flowers were everywhere, their vases shattered on the floor, colorful shards and dead flowers mixing with the broken window-glass.

  “That’s right, Tally-wa. We have to tell everyone that it was you and me who attacked the Armory,” Shay said. “That Diego didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “Oh. Great.” Tally stared out the window.

  The fires inside
Town Hall still glowed, no matter how much foam the helicopters sprayed. Shay had said the wreckage would burn for days, the pressure of the collapsed building creating its own heat, as if the attack had given birth to a tiny sun.

  The awful sight was their fault—the realization kept hitting Tally, as if she would never get used to it. She and Shay had made this happen, and only they could undo it.

  But at the thought of confessing to Dr. Cable, Tally had to fight the urge to flee, to run toward the open windows and jump, letting her crash bracelets catch her. She could disappear into the wild and never be caught. Not by Shay. Not by Dr. Cable. Invisible again.

  But that would mean leaving Zane behind in this battered, threatened city.

  “And if they’re going to believe you,” Shay continued, “it can’t look like anyone’s been messing with your brain. We need to keep you special.”

  Suddenly, Tally needed fresh air. But as she walked toward the window, the sweet scent of dead and dying flowers assaulted her nose like a crumbly’s perfume. Her eyes watered, and Tally closed them, crossing the room using the echoes of her own footsteps.

  “But what will they do to us, Shay-la?” she asked softly.

  “I don’t know, Tally. No one’s ever admitted starting a bogus war before, not as far as I know. But what else can we do?”

  Tally opened her eyes and leaned out the blown-out window. She sucked up fresh air, though it was tainted with the smell of burning. “It’s not like we meant for it to go that far,” she whispered.

  “I know, Tally-wa. And it was all my idea, my fault that you were special in the first place. If I could go alone, I would. But they won’t believe me. Once they scan my brain, they’ll see I’m different, cured. Dr. Cable would probably rather think Diego messed with my head than admit she started a war over nothing.”

  Tally couldn’t argue with that; she could hardly believe herself that their little break-in had caused all this destruction. Dr. Cable wouldn’t take anyone’s say-so without a full brain-scan.