Pretties

by Scott Westerfeld

  She nodded, swallowing.

  “We will wait for you, Young Blood.”

  Tally blinked, then hugged him wordlessly. She slid back into the hovercar and started the rotors. As the whine of its engines built, she watched the birds scatter from the clearing, terrified by the roar of the gods’ machine. Andrew backed away.

  The car rose at her first touch on the controls, its power shuddering through her bones. The rotors whipped the treetops around her into a frenzy, but the car rose steadily, under control.

  Tally looked down as the car cleared the trees, and saw Andrew waving up at her, his crooked, gap-toothed smile still hopeful. Tally knew that she would have to return, just like he’d said; she no longer had a choice. Someone had to help the people here escape the reservation, and they had no one else but Tally.

  She sighed. At least one thing was consistent about her life: It just kept on getting more complicated.

  THE RUINS

  Tally reached the sea while the sun was still rising, painting the water pink through the low clouds out on the horizon.

  She angled the machine northward in a slow, even turn. As she’d expected, this out-of-city car had a scary tendency to do whatever Tally asked of it. Her first turn had been sharp enough to bang her head against the driver’s side window. This time, she was taking it easy.

  As the car gradually climbed, she soon spotted the outskirts of the Rusty Ruins. A distance that would have taken a week on foot had shot by in a blur below Tally in less than an hour. When the sinuous shape of the ancient roller coaster came into view, she began to bank the craft inland.

  Landing was the easy part. Tally pulled the emergency bar, the one they taught littlies to use if their driver had a heart attack or passed out. The car brought itself to a halt and began to descend. Tally had picked a flat spot, one of the many giant concrete fields that the Rusties built to park their groundcars in.

  The vehicle settled onto the weed-choked ground, and Tally opened her door the moment the car bumped to a stop. If the other scientists had found the Doctor and made some sort of emergency call, the Specials would already be looking for her. The more distance she put between herself and the stolen hovercar, the better.

  The spires of the ruins rose up before Tally, the tallest about an hour away on foot. She was, of course, arriving almost two weeks after the others. But hopefully they hadn’t given up on her, or maybe they’d left a message of some kind.

  Surely Zane would have stayed, waiting in the tallest building, unwilling to leave while there was still a chance she would show up.

  Unless, of course, their escape had come too late for him.

  Tally shouldered her backpack and started to walk.

  • • •

  The ruined streets were full of ghosts.

  Tally had hardly ever walked in the city before. She had always cruised around on a hoverboard—ten meters up, at least—avoiding the burned-out cars down at ground level. In the last days of Rusty civilization, an artificial plague had spread across the world. It didn’t infect human beings or animals, just petroleum, reproducing itself in the gas tanks of groundcars and jet aircraft, slowly making the infected oil unstable. Plague-transformed petroleum burst into flame when it came into contact with oxygen, and the oily smoke from the sudden fires spread the bacterial spores on the wind, into more gas tanks, more oil fields, until it had reached every Rusty machine across the globe.

  The Rusties really hadn’t liked walking, it turned out. Even after they’d figured out what the plague was doing, panicked citizens still jumped into their funny, rubber-wheeled groundcars, thinking to escape into the wild. If Tally looked hard enough, she could see crumbling skeletons through the smeared windows of the cars jammed onto the ruins’ streets. Only a few of the people back then had been smart enough to walk out, and strong enough to survive the death of their world. Whoever had engineered the plague had definitely understood the Rusties’ weakness.

  “Boy, you guys were stupid,” Tally muttered at the car windows, but calling them names didn’t make the dead Rusties any less ominous. The few intact skulls just stared back at her with empty expressions.

  Farther into the dead city, the buildings grew taller and taller, their steel frameworks rising up like the skeletons of giant and extinct creatures. Tally took a winding path through the narrow streets, looking for the tallest building in the ruins. The huge spire was easy to spot from a hoverboard, but from the ground the city was a tangled maze.

  Then she turned a corner and saw it, chunks of old concrete clinging to the towering matrix of steel beams, the empty windows gazing down at her, jagged shapes of bright sky showing through. This was definitely the place—Tally remembered when Shay had taken her up to its top the first time she’d come out to the Rusty Ruins. There was only one problem.

  How was she going to get up?

  The innards of the building had long since rotted away. There were no stairs, and hardly any floors to speak of. The steel frame made it perfect for a hoverboard’s magnetic lifters, but there was no way for a person to climb it without serious mountaineering gear. If Zane or the New Smokies had left a message for Tally, it would be up there, but she had no way of reaching it.

  Tally sat down, suddenly exhausted. It was like the tower in her dream, without stairs or elevator, and she’d lost the key, which in this case was her hoverboard. All she could think of was to hike back to the stolen car and fly it up there. Maybe she could bring it close enough beside the building . . . but who would hold it in a steady hover while she climbed out onto the ancient steel frame?

  For the thousandth time, Tally wished that her board hadn’t been wrecked.

  She stared up at the tower. What if no one was up there? What if, after traveling all this way, Tally Youngblood was still alone?

  She got to her feet and yelled as loud as she could, “Heeeey!”

  The sound echoed through the ruins, sending a flock of birds into flight from a distant rooftop.

  “Hey! It’s me!”

  Once the echoes faded, there was no sound in answer. Tally’s throat felt sore from yelling. She knelt to dig a safety flare out of her backpack. A fire would be pretty obvious down here in the shadows of the cavernous buildings.

  She cracked the flare open, holding its hissing flame away from her face, then cried out again. “It’s meeeee . . . Tally Youngblood!”

  Something shifted in the sky above.

  Tally blinked away the spots that the flare had left in her eyes and stared into the bright blue sky. A shape drifted away from the towering building, a tiny oval that began to grow slowly. . . .

  The underside of a hoverboard. Someone was coming down!

  Tally tossed the flare onto a pile of rocks, her heart pounding, suddenly realizing she had no idea who was descending to meet her. How had she been so dimwitted? It could be anyone up there on the board. If the Specials had caught the other Crims and made them talk, they would know this was the planned meeting place, and Tally’s latest escape was about to come to a sudden end.

  She told herself to calm down. It was a hoverboard, after all, and only one. Surely if Specials had been lying in wait, they would have rushed out from every direction in a bunch of hovercars.

  In any case, there was no point in panicking. She wasn’t likely to escape on foot now. The only thing to do was wait. The safety flare sizzled out to a sputtering death while the hoverboard descended slowly, hugging the metal frame of the building. Once or twice, Tally thought she saw a face peering over the edge, but against the bright sky it could have been anyone.

  When it was only ten meters overhead, Tally found the nerve to cry out again. “Hello?” Her voice sounded shaky in her ears.

  “Tally . . . ,” someone called back, the voice familiar.

  The hoverboard settled beside her, and Tally found herself staring into a thoroughly ugly face: the forehead too high, the smile crooked, a small scar cutting a white line through one eyebrow. She stared at him, bl
inking in the gloom of the broken city.

  “David?” she said softly.

  FACES

  He stared at her, of course.

  Even if she hadn’t shouted out her name, David knew her voice. And he had been waiting for Tally, after all, so he must have known from the first cry who was down here. But the way he stared at her, it was as if he were seeing someone else.

  “David,” she said again. “It’s me.”

  He nodded, still speechless. But it wasn’t pretty-awe that had caught his tongue—that much Tally realized. His gaze seemed to be searching for something, trying to recognize what the operation had left of her old face, but his expression remained unsure . . . and a bit sad.

  David was uglier than she remembered. In Tally’s ugly-prince dreams, his imbalanced features had never been so disjointed, his unsurged teeth never so crooked or discolored. His blemishes weren’t as bad as Andrew’s, of course. He looked no worse than Sussy or Dex, city kids who’d grown up with toothpaste pills and sunblock patches.

  But this was David, after all.

  Even after her time with the villagers, many of them toothless and scarred, his face sent a shock through her. Not because he was hideous—he wasn’t—but because he was simply . . . unimpressive.

  Not an ugly prince. Just ugly.

  And the weird thing was, even as she had these thoughts, her long-suppressed memories were finally flooding back. This was David, who had taught her how to make a fire, how to clean and cook fish, how to navigate by the stars. They had worked side by side, traveled together for weeks on end, and Tally had given up her city life to stay with him in the Smoke—she’d wanted to live with him forever.

  All those memories had survived the operation, hidden somewhere inside her brain. But her life among the pretties must have changed something even more profound: the way she saw him, as if this wasn’t the same David in front of her anymore.

  Neither of them said anything for a while.

  Finally, he cleared his throat. “We should probably get moving. They sometimes send patrols out around this time of day.”

  She looked at the ground. “Okay.”

  “I’ve got to do this first.” He pulled a wandlike device from one pocket and swept it over her. It stayed silent.

  “No bugs on me?” she said.

  He shrugged. “Can’t be too careful. You don’t have a board?”

  Tally shook her head. “It got damaged in the escape.”

  “Wow. Takes a lot to break a hoverboard.”

  “It was a long fall.”

  He smiled. “Same old Tally. I knew you’d show up, though. Mom said you’d probably . . .” He didn’t finish.

  “I’m fine.” She looked up at him, unsure of how much to say. “Thanks for waiting.”

  • • •

  They rode his board. Tally was taller than David now, so she stood behind him, hands around his waist. She’d abandoned her heavy crash bracelets before her long trek with Andrew Simpson Smith, but her sensor was still clipped to her belly ring, so the board could feel her center of gravity and compensate for the extra weight. Still, they went slowly at first.

  The feel of David’s body, the way he leaned into the turns, was so familiar—even the smell of him set her memories spinning. (Tally didn’t want to think about how she smelled, but he didn’t seem to have noticed.) She was amazed at how much was coming back; her memories of him seemed to have been ready and waiting, and were all flooding in now that he stood next to her. Here on the board, with David turned away from her, Tally’s body cried out to hold him tight. She wanted to take back all the stupid, pretty-minded thoughts she’d had at her first glimpse of his face.

  But was it just that he was ugly? Everything else had changed as well.

  Tally knew she should be asking about the others, especially Zane. But she couldn’t bring the name to her lips, couldn’t speak at all. Just standing on the board with David was almost too much.

  She kept wondering why it had been Croy who’d brought her the cure. In Tally’s letter to herself, she had been so certain that David would be the one to rescue her. He was the prince of her dreams, after all.

  Was he still angry that she had betrayed the Smoke? Did he blame her for his father’s death? The same night she’d confessed everything to David, Tally had gone back to the city to give herself up, to become pretty so she could test the cure. She’d never had a chance to explain how sorry she was. They hadn’t even said goodbye to each other.

  But if David hated her, why had he been the one waiting in the ruins? Not Croy, not Zane—David. Her head was spinning, almost like being pretty-minded again, but without the happy part.

  “It’s not far,” David said. “Maybe three hours, traveling tandem like this.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I didn’t think to bring another board. Should have known you wouldn’t have one, since it took you so long to get here.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No big deal. We just have to fly a little slower.”

  “No. I’m sorry. For what I did.” She fell silent. The words had exhausted her.

  He let the board coast to a stop between two towering husks of metal and concrete, and they stood there for a long moment, David still facing away. She rested one cheek on his shoulder, her eyes beginning to burn.

  Finally, he said, “I thought I would know what to say. Once I saw you.”

  “Forgot about the new face, didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t forget, exactly. But I didn’t think it would be so . . . not you.”

  “Me either,” Tally said, then realized her words wouldn’t make sense to him. David’s face hadn’t changed, after all.

  He turned around carefully on the board and touched her brow. Tally tried to look at him, but couldn’t. She felt her flash tattoo pulsing under his fingers.

  Tally smiled. “Oh, is that freaking you out? It’s just a Crim thing, to see who’s bubbly.”

  “Yeah, a tattoo keyed to your heartbeat. They told me. But I hadn’t imagined one on you. It’s so . . . weird.”

  “It’s still me inside, though.”

  “It feels that way, flying together.” He turned away, tilting the hoverboard forward and into motion.

  Tally held him tighter now, not wanting him to turn around again. This was hard enough without the confused feelings that rose up every time she looked at him. He probably didn’t want to look at her city-made face either, with its huge eyes and animated tattoo. One thing at a time. “Just tell me, David, why did Croy bring me the cure instead of you?”

  “Things got messed up. I was going to come for you when I got back.”

  “Got back? From where?”

  “I was away scouting another city, looking for more uglies to join us, when the Specials came in force. They started to make huge sweeps of the ruins, looking for us.” He took her hand and pressed it to his chest. “My mom decided to get out of town for a while. We’ve been holed up in the wild.”

  “Leaving me stuck in the city,” she said, and sighed. “Maddy wouldn’t have much problem with that, I guess.” Tally had little doubt that David’s mother still blamed her for everything—the end of the Smoke, Az’s death.

  “She didn’t have a choice,” David protested. “There’s never been so many Specials before. It was too dangerous to stay here.”

  Tally took a deep breath, remembering her little chat with Dr. Cable. “I guess Special Circumstances has been recruiting lately.”

  “But I hadn’t forgotten about you, Tally. I’d made Croy promise to bring you the pills and your letter if anything happened to me, just to make sure you had a chance of escaping. When they started to pack up the New Smoke, he figured we might not be back for a while, so he snuck into the city.”

  “You told him to come?”

  “Of course. He was my backup. I never would have left you alone in there, Tally.”

  “Oh.” Dizziness swept over her again, as if the board were a feath
er spinning toward the ground. She closed her eyes and held David tighter, finally grasping the solidness and reality of him, more powerful than any memory. Tally felt something inside herself depart, a disquiet that she’d hardly known was there. The torment in her dreams, the worry that David had forsaken her, had all been over a mix-up, just plans that had gone wrong, like in old stories when a letter arrived too late or was sent to the wrong person, and the trick was not killing yourself over it.

  David had wanted to come for her himself, it turned out.

  “Of course, you weren’t alone,” he said softly.

  Tally’s body stiffened. By now he knew about Zane, of course. How was she supposed to explain that she’d simply forgotten David? It wouldn’t sound like much of an excuse to most people, but he knew all about the lesions—his parents had raised him knowing what being pretty-minded meant. He had to understand.

  Of course, in reality it wasn’t as simple as that. Tally hadn’t forgotten Zane, after all. She could see his beautiful face right now, gaunt and vulnerable, the way his golden eyes had flashed just before he jumped from the balloon. His kiss had given her the strength to find the pills; he had shared the cure with her. So what was she supposed to say?

  The easiest thing was, “How is he?”

  David shrugged. “Not great. But not too bad, considering. You’re lucky it wasn’t you, Tally.”

  “The cure is dangerous, isn’t it? It doesn’t work for some people.”

  “It works perfectly. Your pals have already all had it, and they’re fine.”

  “But Zane’s headaches . . .”

  “More than just headaches.” He sighed. “I’ll let my mother explain it to you.”

  “But what . . .” Tally let her question fade into silence. She couldn’t blame David for not wanting to talk about Zane. At least her unasked questions had all been answered. The other Crims had made it here and had hooked up with the Smokies; Maddy had been able to help Zane; the escape had worked perfectly. And now that Tally had made it to the ruins herself, everything was just fine and dandy. “Thank you for waiting for me,” she said again, softly.