Uglies (24 page)

“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 noncosmetic 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?”