Uglies (8 page)

Shay smiled. “I know. I just had to ask again before I…” She pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to Tally.

“What’s this?” Tally opened it up and saw a scrawl of letters. “When did you learn to write by hand?”

“We all learned while we were planning to leave. It’s a good idea if you don’t want minders sniffing your diary. Anyway, that’s for you. I’m not supposed to leave any record of where I’m going, so it’s in code, kind of.”

Tally frowned, reading the first line of slanted words. “‘Take the coaster straight past the gap’?”

“Yeah. Get it? Only you could figure it out, in case someone finds it. You know, if you ever want to follow me.”

Tally started to say something, but couldn’t. She managed to nod.

“Just in case,” Shay said.

She jumped onto her board and snapped her fingers, securing her knapsack over both shoulders.

“Good-bye, Tally.”

“Bye, Shay. I wish…”

Shay waited, bobbing just a bit in the cool September wind. Tally tried to imagine her growing old, wrinkled, gradually ruined, all without ever having been truly beautiful. Never learning how to dress properly, or how to act at a formal dance. Never having anyone look into her eyes and be simply overwhelmed.

“I wish I could have seen what you would look like. Pretty, I mean.”

“Guess you’ll just have to live with remembering my face this way,” Shay said.

Then she turned and her hoverboard climbed away toward the river, and Tally’s next words were lost on the roar of the water.

When the day came, Tally waited for the car alone.

Tomorrow, when the operation was all over, her parents would be waiting outside the hospital, along with Peris and her other older friends. That was the tradition. But it seemed strange that there was no one to see her off on this end. No one said good-bye except a few uglies passing by. They looked so young to her now, especially the just-arrived new class, who gawked at her like she was an old pile of dinosaur bones.

She’d always loved being independent, but now Tally felt like the last littlie to be picked up from school, abandoned and alone. September was a crappy month to be born.

“You’re Tally, right?”

She looked up. It was a new ugly, awkwardly exploding into unfamiliar height, tugging at his dorm uniform like it was already too tight.

“Yeah.”

“Aren’t you the one who’s going to turn today?”

“That’s me, Shorty.”

“So how come you look so sad?”

Tally shrugged. What could this half-littlie, half-ugly understand, anyway? She thought about what Shay had said about the operation.

Yesterday they’d taken Tally’s final measurements, rolling her all the way through an imaging tube.

Should she tell this new ugly that sometime this afternoon, her body was going to be opened up, the bones ground down to the right shape, some of them stretched or padded, her nose cartilage and cheekbones stripped out and replaced with programmable plastic, skin sanded off and reseeded like a soccer field in spring? That her eyes would be laser-cut for a lifetime of perfect vision, reflective implants

inserted under the iris to add sparkling gold flecks to their indifferent brown? Her muscles all trimmed up with a night of electrocize and all her baby fat sucked out for good? Teeth replaced with ceramics as strong as a suborbital aircraft wing, and as white as the dorm’s good china?

They said it didn’t hurt, except the new skin, which felt like a killer sunburn for a couple of weeks.

As the details of the operation buzzed around in her head, she could imagine why Shay had run away. It did seem like a lot to go through just to look a certain way. If only people were smarter, evolved enough to treat everyone the same even if they looked different. Looked ugly.

If only Tally had come up with the right argument to make her stay.

The imaginary conversations were back, but much worse than they had been after Peris had left. A thousand times she’d fought with Shay in her head—long, rambling discussions about beauty, biology, growing up. All those times out in the ruins, Shay had made her points about uglies and pretties, the city and the outside, what was fake and what was real. But Tally had never once realized her friend might actually run away, giving up a life of beauty, glamour, elegance. If only she’d said the right thing. Any thing.

Sitting here, she felt as if she’d hardly tried.

Tally looked the new ugly in the eye. “Because it all comes down to this: Two weeks of killer sunburn is worth a lifetime of being gorgeous.”

The kid scratched his head. “Huh?”

“Something I should have said, and didn’t. That’s all.”

The hospital hovercar finally came, settling onto the school grounds so lightly that it hardly disturbed the fresh-mown grass.

The driver was a middle pretty, radiating confidence and authority. He looked so much like Sol that Tally almost called her father’s name.

“Tally Youngblood?” he said.

Tally had already seen the flash of light that had read her eye-print, but she said, “Yes, that’s me,” anyway. Something about the middle pretty made it hard to be flippant. He was wisdom personified, his manner so serious and formal that Tally found herself wishing she had dressed up.

“Are you ready? Not taking much.”

Her duffel bag was only half-full. Everyone knew that new pretties wound up recycling most of the stuff they brought over the river, anyway. She’d have all new clothes, of course, and all the new pretty toys she wanted. All she’d really kept was Shay’s handwritten note, hidden among a bunch of random crap.

“Got enough.”

“Good for you, Tally. That’s very mature.”

“That’s me, sir.”

The door closed, and the car took off.

The big hospital was on the bottom end of New Pretty Town. It was where everyone went for serious operations: littlies, uglies, even late pretties from way out in Crumblyville coming in for life-extension treatments.

The river was sparkling under a cloudless sky, and Tally allowed herself to be swept away by the beauty of
New
Pretty
Town
. Even without the nighttime lights and fireworks, the city’s surfaces shone with glass and metal, the unlikely spindles of party towers casting thin shadows across the island. It was so much more vibrant than the Rusty Ruins, Tally suddenly saw. Not as dark and mysterious, perhaps, but more alive.

It was time to stop sulking about Shay. Life was going to be one big party from now on, full of beautiful people. Like Tally Youngblood.

The hovercar descended onto one of the redX s on the hospital roof, and Tally’s driver escorted her inside, taking her to a waiting room. An orderly looked up Tally’s name, flashed her eye again, and told her to wait.

“You’ll be okay?” the driver asked.

She looked up into his clear, soft eyes, wanting him to stay. But asking him to wait with her didn’t seem very mature. “No, I’m fine. Thanks.” He smiled and went away.

No one else was in the waiting room. Tally settled back and counted the tiles on the ceiling.

As she waited, the conversations with Shay in her head came back again, but they weren’t so troubling here. It was too late for second thoughts now.

Tally wished there was a window to look out onto New Pretty Town. She was so close now.

She imagined tomorrow night, her first night pretty, dressed in new and wonderful clothes (her dorm uniforms all shoved down the recycler), looking out from the top of the highest party tower she could find.

She would watch as lights-out fell across the river, bedtime for Uglyville, and know that she still had all night with Peris and her new friends, all the beautiful people she would meet.

She sighed.

Sixteen years. Finally.

Nothing happened for a long hour. Tally drummed her fingers, wondering if they always kept uglies waiting this long.

Then the man came.

He looked strange, unlike any pretty Tally had ever seen. He was definitely of middle age, but whoever had done his operation had botched it. He was beautiful, without a doubt, but it was a terrible beauty.

Instead of wise and confident, the man looked cold, commanding, intimidating, like some regal animal of prey. When he walked up, Tally started to ask what was going on, but a glance from him silenced her.

She had never met an adult who affected her this way. She always felt respect when face-to-face with a middle or late pretty. But in the presence of this cruelly beautiful man, respect was saturated with fear.

The man said, “There’s a problem with your operation. Come with me.”

She went.

This hovercar was larger, but not as comfortable.

The trip was much less pleasant than Tally’s first ride that day. The strange-looking man flew with an aggressive impatience, dropping like a rock to cut between flight lanes, banking as steeply as a hoverboard with every turn.

Tally had never been airsick before, but now she clutched the seat restraints, her knuckles white and eyes fixed on the solid ground below. She caught one last glimpse of
New
Pretty
Town
receding behind them.

They headed downriver, across Uglyville, over the greenbelt and farther out to the transport ring, where the factories stuck their heads aboveground. Beside a huge, misshapen hill, the car descended into a complex of rectangular buildings, as squat as ugly dorms and painted the color of dried grass.

They landed with a painful bump, and the man led her into one of the buildings, and down into a murk of yellow-brown hallways. Tally had never seen so much space painted in such putrid colors, as if the building were designed to make its occupants vaguely nauseated.

There were more people like the man.

They were all dressed in formals, raw silks in black and gray, and their faces had the same cold, hawkish look. Both the men and women were taller than pretty standard, and more powerfully built, their eyes as pale as an ugly’s. There were a few normal people as well, but they faded into insignificance next to the predatory forms moving gracefully through the halls.

Tally wondered if this was someplace where people were taken when their operations went wrong, when beauty turned cruel. Then why was she here? She hadn’t even had the operation yet.

Tally swallowed. What if these terrible pretties had been made this way intentionally? When they had measured her yesterday, had they determined that she would never fit the vulnerable, doe-eyed pretty mold? Maybe she’d already been chosen to be remade for this strange, other world.

The man stopped outside a metal door, and Tally halted behind him. She felt like a littlie again, jerked along by a minder on an invisible string. All her ugly senior’s confidence had evaporated the moment she’d seen him back at the hospital. Four years of tricks and independence gone.

The door flashed his eye and opened, and he pointed for her to go in. Tally realized he hadn’t said a word since collecting her at the hospital. She took a deep breath, which made the paralyzed muscles in her chest flinch with pain, and managed to croak, “Say please.”

“Inside,” was his answer.

Tally smiled, silently declaring a small victory that she had made him speak again, but she did as she was told.

“I’m Dr. Cable.”

“Tally Youngblood.”

Dr. Cable smiled. “Oh, I know who you are.”

The woman was a cruel pretty. Her nose was aquiline, her teeth sharp, her eyes a non reflective gray.

Her voice had the same slow, neutral cadence as a bedtime book. But it hardly made Tally sleepy. An edge was hidden in the voice, like a piece of metal slowly marking glass.

“You have a problem, Tally.”

“I had kind of guessed that, uh…” It was strange, not knowing the woman’s first name.

“Dr. Cable will do.”

Tally blinked. She’d never called anyone by their last name in her life.

“Okay, Dr. Cable.” She cleared her throat and managed to say more, in a dry voice. “My problem right now is that I don’t know what’s going on. So…why don’t you tell me?”

“What do you think’s going on, Tally?”

Tally closed her eyes, taking a rest from the sharp angles of the woman’s face. “Well, that bungee jacket was a spare, you know, and we did put it back on the recharge pile.”

“This isn’t about some ugly-trick.”

She sighed and opened her eyes. “No, I didn’t think so.”

“This is about a friend of yours. Someone missing.”

Of course. Shay’s disappearing trick had gone too far, leaving Tally to explain. “I don’t know where she is.”

Dr. Cable smiled. Only her top teeth showed when she did. “But you do know something.”

“Who are you, anyway?” Tally blurted. “Where am I?”

“I’m Dr. Cable,” the woman said. “And this is Special Circumstances.”

First Dr. Cable asked her a lot of questions. “You didn’t know Shay long, did you?”

“No. Just this summer. We were in different dorms.”

“And you didn’t know any of her friends?”

“No. They were all older than her. They’d already turned.”

“Like your friend Peris?”

Tally swallowed. How much did this woman know about her? “Yeah. Like Peris and me.”

“But Shay’s friends didn’t wind up pretty, did they?”

Tally took a slow breath, remembering her promise to Shay. She didn’t want to lie, though. Dr. Cable would know if she did, Tally was sure. She was in enough trouble already. “Why wouldn’t they?”

“Did she tell you about her friends?”

“We didn’t talk about stuff like that. We just hung out. Because…it hurt being alone. We were just into playing tricks.”

“Did you know she’d been in a gang?”

Tally looked up into Dr. Cable’s eyes. They were almost as big as a normal pretty’s, but they angled upward like a wolf’s.

“A gang? How do you mean?”

“Tally, did you and Shay ever go to the Rusty Ruins?”

“Everyone does.”

“But did you ever sneak out to the ruins?”

“Yeah. A lot of people do.”

“Did you ever meet anyone there?”

Tally bit her lip. “What’s Special Circumstances?”

“Tally.” The edge in her voice was suddenly sharp as a razor blade.

“If you tell me what Special Circumstances is, I’ll answer you.”

Dr. Cable sat back. She folded her hands and nodded. “This city is a paradise, Tally. It feeds you, educates you, keeps you safe. It makes you pretty.”

Tally couldn’t help looking up hopefully at this.

“And our city can stand a great deal of freedom, Tally. It gives youngsters room to play tricks, to develop their creativity and independence. But occasionally bad things come from outside the city.”

Dr. Cable narrowed her eyes, her face becoming even more like a predator’s. “We exist in equilibrium with our environment, Tally, purifying the water that we put back in the river, recycling the biomass, and using only power drawn from our own solar footprint. But sometimes we can’t purify what we take in from the outside. Sometimes there are threats from the environment that must be faced.”

She smiled. “Sometimes there are Special Circumstances.”

“So, you guys are like minders, but for the whole city.”

Dr. Cable nodded. “Other cities sometimes pose a challenge. And sometimes those few people who live outside the cities can make trouble.”

Tally’s eyes widened. Outside the cities? Shay had been telling the truth—places like the Smoke really existed.

“It’s your turn to answer my question, Tally. Did you ever meet anyone in the ruins? Someone not from this city? Not from any city?”

Tally grinned. “No. I never did.”

Dr. Cable frowned, her eyes darting downward for a second, checking something. When they returned to Tally, they had grown even colder. Tally smiled again, certain now that Dr. Cable knew when she was telling the truth. The room must be reading her heartbeat, her sweat, her pupil dilation. But Tally couldn’t tell what she didn’t know.

The razor blade slid back into the woman’s voice. “Don’t play games with me, Tally. Your friend Shay will never thank you for it, because you’ll never see her again.”

The thrill of her small victory disappeared, and Tally felt her smile fade.

“Six of her friends disappeared, Tally, all at once. None of them has ever been found. Another two who were meant to join them chose not to throw their lives away, however, and we discovered a little about what had happened to the others. They didn’t run away on their own. They were tempted by someone from outside, someone who wanted to steal our cleverest little uglies. We realized that this was a special circumstance.”

One word sent ice down Tally’s spine. Had Shay really been stolen ? What did Shay or any ugly really know about the Smoke?

“We’ve been watching Shay since then, hoping she might lead us to her friends.”

“So why didn’t you…,” Tally blurted out. “You know, stop her!”

“Because of you, Tally.”

“Me?”

Dr. Cable’s voice softened. “We thought she had made a friend, a reason to stay here in the city. We thought she’d be okay.”

Tally could only close her eyes and shake her head.

“But then Shay disappeared,” Dr. Cable continued. “She turned out to be trickier than her friends. You taught her well.”

“I did?” Tally cried. “I don’t know any more tricks than most uglies.”

“You underestimate yourself,” Dr. Cable said.

Tally turned away from the vulpine eyes, shut out the razor-blade voice. This was not her fault. She had decided to stay here in the city, after all. She wanted to become pretty. She’d even tried to convince Shay.

But failed.

“It’s not my fault.”

“Help us, Tally.”

“Help you what?”

“Find her. Find them all.”

She took a deep breath. “What if they don’t want to be found?”

“What if they do? What if they were lied to?”

Tally tried to remember Shay’s face that last night, how hopeful she had been. She’d wanted to leave the city as much as Tally wanted to be pretty. However stupid the choice seemed, Shay had made it with her eyes open, and had respected Tally’s choice to stay.

Tally looked up at Dr. Cable’s cruel beauty, at the puke-yellow-brown of the walls. She remembered all the tricks Special Circumstances had played on her today—how they’d kept her waiting for an hour in the hospital, waiting and thinking she would soon be pretty, the brutal flight here, and all the cruel faces in the halls—and she decided. “I can’t help you,” Tally said. “I made a promise.”

Dr. Cable bared her teeth. This time, it wasn’t even a mockery of a smile. The woman became nothing but a monster, vengeful and inhuman. “Then I’ll make you a promise too, Tally Youngblood. Until you do help us, to the very best of your ability, you will never be pretty.”

Dr. Cable turned away.

“You can die ugly, for all I care.”

The door opened. The scary man was outside, where he’d been waiting all along.