She nodded. “Please. You’re the right man for the job.”
And then she explained everything.
• • •
That night, she and David hoverboarded to the very edge of the city, slowing to a halt when the repeater network picked up her skintenna. The three messages from Shay, Peris, and Maddy were still there, waiting for her. Tally flexed her fingers nervously.
“Look at that!” David said, pointing.
The skyline of New Pretty Town was aglow, rockets shooting high and bursting into vast, sparkling flowers of red and purple. The fireworks were back.
Maybe they were celebrating the end of Dr. Cable’s rule, or the new transformations sweeping through the city, or the end of the war. Or perhaps this display marked the final days of Special Circumstances, now that the last Special had run off into the wild.
Or maybe they were just acting like bubbleheads again.
She laughed. “You’ve seen fireworks before, haven’t you?”
He shook his head. “Not very many. They’re amazing.”
“Yeah. Cities aren’t so bad, David.” Tally smiled, hoping that the nightly fireworks displays had returned now that the war was ending. With all the convulsions about to unsettle her city, maybe that one tradition should never change. The world needed more fireworks—especially now that there was going to be a shortage of beautiful, useless things.
As she prepared herself to speak, a shiver of nerves played through Tally. Whether she was a Special-head or not, this message needed to come out icy and convincing. The world depended on it.
Then suddenly, she was ready.
As they stood there watching New Pretty Town glow, their eyes tracking the slow ascent of the rockets and their sudden blossoming, Tally spoke clearly over the water’s roar, letting the chip in her jaw catch her words.
She sent them all—Shay, Maddy, and Peris—the same reply. . . .
MANIFESTO
I don’t need to be cured. Just like I don’t need to cut myself to feel, or think. From now on, no one rewires my mind but me.
Back in Diego, the doctors said that I could learn to control my behavior, and I have. You all helped, in one way or another.
But you know what? It’s not my behavior I’m worried about anymore. It’s yours.
That’s why you won’t be seeing me for a while, maybe a long time. David and I are staying out here in the wild.
You all say you need us. Well, maybe you do, but not to help you. You have enough help, with the millions of bubbly new minds about to be unleashed, with all the cities coming awake at last. Together, you’re more than enough to change the world without us.
So from now on, David and I are here to stand in your way.
You see, freedom has a way of destroying things.
You have your New Smokes, your new ideas, whole new cities and New Systems. Well . . . we’re the new Special Circumstances.
Whenever you push too far into the wild, we’ll be here waiting, ready to push back. Remember us every time you decide to dig a new foundation, dam a river, or cut down a tree. Worry about us. However hungry the human race becomes now that the pretties are waking up, the wild still has teeth. Special teeth, ugly teeth. Us.
We’ll be out here somewhere—watching. Ready to remind you of the price the Rusties paid for going too far.
I love you all. But it’s time to say good-bye, for now.
Be careful with the world, or the next time we meet, it might get ugly.
—Tally Youngblood
LOOK FOR THE FOURTH BOOK IN THE UGLIES SERIES:
SCOTT WESTERFELD
ugliesprettiesspecialsextras
“Are you getting this?” she whispered.
Moggle was already shooting, the shimmer of safety fireworks reflecting from its lenses. Hot-air balloons swayed over the mansion, and revelers screamed down from the rooftops in bungee jackets. It looked like a party back in the old days: self-indulgent and eye-kickingly radiant.
At least, that was how Aya’s older brother always described the Prettytime. Back then everyone had gotten one big operation on their sixteenth birthday. It made you beautiful, but secretly changed your personality, leaving you brain-missing and easily controlled.
Hiro hadn’t been a bubblehead very long; he’d turned sixteen only a few months before the mind-rain had arrived and cured the pretties. He liked to claim that those months had been awful—as if being shallow and vain was such a stretch for him. But he never denied that the parties had been awesome.
Not that Hiro would be here tonight; he was way too famous. Aya checked her eyescreen: the average face rank inside was about twenty thousand. Compared with her older brother, the people at this bash were total extras.
Compared to an ugly ranked at half a million, though, they were legends.
“Be careful, Moggle,” she whispered. “We’re not wanted here.”
Aya flipped up the hood of her robe, and stepped out of the shadows.
• • •
Inside, the air was full of hovercams. From Moggle-size all the way down to paparazzi swarms, each cam no bigger than a champagne cork.
There was always plenty to see at tech-head parties, crazy people and kick new gadgets. Maybe people weren’t as beautiful as back during the Prettytime, but parties were a lot more interesting: serious surge-monkeys with snake fingers and medusa hair; smart-matter clothes that rippled like flags in a breeze; safety fireworks skittering along the floor, dodging feet and sizzling incense as they passed.
Tech-heads lived for new technologies—they loved showing off their latest tricks, and kickers loved putting them on their feeds. The endless cycle of invention and publicity bumped everyone’s face rank, so everyone was happy.
Everyone who got invited, anyway.
A hovercam buzzed close, almost low enough to peek in at Aya’s face. She lowered her head, making her way toward a cluster of Reputation Bombers. Here in public they all kept their hoods up, like a bunch of pre-Rusty Buddhist monks. They were already bombing: chanting the name of some random member of the clique, trying to convince the city interface to bump his face rank.
Aya bowed to the group and joined the blur of name-dropping, keeping her ugly face covered.
The whole point of bombing was to dissect the city’s reputation algorithms: How many mentions of your name did it take to crack the top thousand? How quickly did you drop if everyone stopped talking about you? The clique was one big controlled experiment, which was why they all wore the same anonymous outfits.
But Aya figured most Bombers didn’t care about the math. They were just cheaters, pathetic extras trying to talk themselves famous. It was like how they’d manufactured celebrities back in Rusty days, a handful of feeds hyping a few bubbleheads and ignoring everybody else.
What was the point of the reputation economy, if someone was telling you who to talk about?
But Aya chanted away like a good little Bomber, keeping her attention on her eyescreen, watching the view from Moggle’s lenses. The hovercam drifted over the crowd, picking out faces one by one.
The secret clique Aya had discovered had to be here somewhere. Only tech-heads could pull off a trick like that. . . .
She’d spotted them three nights before, riding on top of one of the new mag-lev trains, traveling at insane speeds through the factory district—so fast that all the shots Moggle had taken were too grainy and blurry to use.
Aya had to find them again. Whoever kicked a crazy trick like mag-lev riding would be instantly famous.
But Moggle was already distracted, watching a gaggle of NeoFoodies underneath a pink blob floating in the air. They were drinking from it with meter-long straws, like astronauts recapturing a spilled cup of tea.
NeoFoodies were old news—Hiro had kicked a story about them last month. They ate extinct mushrooms grown from ancient spores, made ice cream with liquid nitrogen, and injected flavors into weird forms of matter. The floating pink stuff looked like an aerogel, dinner
with the density of a soap bubble.
A small blob broke off and floated past. Aya grimaced, smelling rice and salmon. Eating strange substances might be a great way to bump your face rank, but she preferred her sushi heavier than air.
She liked being around tech-heads, though, even if she had to hide. Most of the city was still stuck in the past, trying to rediscover haiku, religion, the tea ceremony—all the things that had been lost in the Prettytime, when everyone had been brain-damaged. But tech-heads were building the future, making up for three centuries of missing progress.
This was the place to find stories.
Something in her eyescreen sent a flicker of recognition through her.
“Hold it, Moggle!” she hissed. “Pan left.”
There behind the NeoFoodies, watching with amusement as they chased down stray bloblets, was a familiar face.
“That’s one of them! Zoom in.”
The girl was about eighteen, classic new-pretty surge with slightly manga eyes. She was wearing a hoverball rig, floating gracefully ten centimeters above the floor. And she had to be famous: A reputation bubble surrounded her, a cohort of friends and groupies to keep extras away.
“Get close enough to hear them,” Aya whispered. Moggle eased to the edge of the bubble, and soon its microphones caught the girl’s name. Data spilled across Aya’s eyescreen. . . .
Eden Maru was a hoverball player—left wing for the Swallows, who’d been city champions last year. She was also legendary for her lifter mods.
According to all the feeds, Eden had just dumped her boyfriend because of “a difference in ambition.” Of course, that was just code for “she got too famous for him.” Eden’s face rank had hit ten thousand after the championship, and what’s-his-name’s was stuck at a quarter million. Everyone knew she needed to hook up with someone more face-equal.
But none of the rumors mentioned Eden’s new mag-lev riding clique. She must be keeping that a secret, waiting for the right moment to reveal the trick.
Kicking it first would make Aya famous overnight.
“Track her,” she told Moggle, then went back to chanting.
• • •
Half an hour later, Eden Maru headed out.
Slipping away from the Bombers was bliss-making—Aya had chanted the name “Yoshio Nara” about a million times. She hoped Yoshio enjoyed his pointless face rank bump, because she never wanted to hear his name again.
From Moggle’s midair view, Eden Maru was slipping through the door—alone, no entourage. She had to be headed off to meet her secret clique.
“Stay close to her, Moggle,” Aya croaked. All that chanting had left her throat dry. She spotted a drinks tray hovering past. “I’ll catch up in a minute.”
Grabbing a glass at random, Aya guzzled it down. The alcohol sent a shudder through her—not exactly what she needed. She snatched another drink with lots of ice and pushed her way toward the door.
A gaggle of pixel-skins stood in her way, their bodies rippling through colors like drunken chameleons. She slipped among them, recognizing a couple of their faces from the surge-monkey feeds. A little reputation shiver went through her.
Out on the mansion steps Aya spilled the drink out through her fingers, saving the ice cubes. She tipped the glass back into her mouth and started crunching. After the sweltering party a mouthful of ice was heavenly.
“Interesting surge,” someone said.
Aya froze. . . . Her hood had fallen back, revealing her ugly face.
“Um, thanks.” The words came out muffled, and Aya gulped down cold shards of ice. The breeze hit her sweaty face, and she realized how fashion-missing she must look.
The boy smiled. “Where did you get the idea for that nose?”
Aya managed to shrug, suddenly word-missing. In her eyescreen she could see Eden Maru already flying across town, but tearing her gaze from the boy was impossible. He was a manga-head: eyes huge and glistening, his delicate face inhumanly beautiful. Long, tapered fingers stroked his perfect cheek as he stared at her.
That was the weird thing: He was staring at her.
But he was gorgeous, and she was ugly.
“Let me guess,” he said. “From some pre-Rusty painting?”
“Uh, not really.” She touched her nose, swallowing the last few shards of ice. “It’s more, um . . . randomly generated?”
“Of course. It’s so unique.” He bowed. “Frizz Mizuno.”
As Aya returned the bow, her eyescreen displayed his face rank: 4,612. A reputation shiver went through her, the realization that she was talking to someone important, connected, meaningful.
He was waiting for Aya to give her own name. And once she did that, he’d know her face rank, and then his wonderful gaze would turn somewhere more interesting. Even if in some logic-missing, mind-rain way he liked her ugly face, being an extra was simply pathetic.
Besides, her nose was way too big.
She twisted a crash bracelet to call her hoverboard. “My name’s Aya. But I kind of . . . have to go now.”
He bowed. “Of course. People to see, reputations to bomb.”
Aya laughed, looking down at the robe. “Oh, this. I’m not really . . . I’m sort of incognito.”
“Incognito?” His smile was eye-kicking. “You’re very mysterious.”
Her board slipped up next to the stairs. Aya stared down at it, hesitating. Moggle was already half a kilometer away, trailing Eden Maru through the darkness at high speed, but part of her was screaming to stay.
Because Frizz was still gazing at her.
“I’m not trying to be mysterious,” she said. “It’s just working out that way.”
He laughed. “I want to know your last name, Aya. But I think you’re purposely not telling me.”
“Sorry,” she squeaked, and stepped onto the board. “But I have to go after someone. She’s sort of . . . getting away.”
He bowed, his smile broadening. “Enjoy the chase.”
She leaned forward and shot into the darkness, his laughter in her ears.
Eden Maru knew how to fly.
Full-body lifter rigs were standard gear for hoverball players, but most people never dared to wear them. Each piece had its own lifter: the shin and elbow pads, even the boots in some rigs. One wrong twitch of your fingers could send all those magnets in different directions, which was an excellent way to dislocate a shoulder, or send you spinning headfirst into a wall. Unlike when you fall off a hoverboard, crash bracelets wouldn’t save you from your own clumsiness.
But none of this seemed to worry Eden Maru. In Aya’s eyescreen, she was zigzagging through the new construction site, using the half-finished buildings and open storm drains as her private obstacle course.
Even Moggle, who was stuffed with lifters and only twenty centimeters across, was finding it tricky keeping up.
Aya tried to focus on her own hoverboarding, but she was still half-hypnotized by Frizz Mizuno, dazzled by his attention. Since the mind-rain had broken down the boundaries between ages, Aya had talked to plenty of pretties. It wasn’t like the old days, when your friends never talked to you after they got the operation. But no pretty had ever looked at her that way.
Or was she kidding herself? Maybe Frizz’s intense gaze made everyone feel this way. His eyes were so huge, just like the old Rusty drawings that manga-heads based themselves on.
She was dying to ask the city interface about him. She’d never seen him on the feeds, but with a face rank below five thousand, Frizz had to be known for something besides eye-kicking beauty.
But for now Aya had a story to chase, a reputation to build. If Frizz was ever going to look at her that way again, she couldn’t be so face-missing.
Her eyescreen began to flicker. Moggle’s signal was fading, falling out of range of the city network as it followed Eden underground.
The signal shimmered with static, then went dark. . . .
Aya banked to a halt, a shudder passing through her. Losing Moggle was always u
nnerving, like looking down on a sunny day to find her shadow gone.
She stared at the last image the hovercam had sent: the inside of a storm drain, grainy and distorted by infrared. Eden Maru was curled up tight, a human cannonball zooming through the confines of the tunnel, headed so deep that Moggle’s transmitter couldn’t reach the surface anymore.
The only way to find Eden again was to follow her down.
Aya leaned forward, urging her hoverboard back into motion. The new construction site rose up around her, dozens of iron skeletons and gaping holes.
After the mind-rain, nobody wanted to live in fashion-missing Prettytime buildings. Nobody famous, anyway. So the city was expanding wildly, plundering nearby Rusty ruins for metal. There were even rumors that the city planned to tear open the ground to look for fresh iron, like the earth-damaging Rusties had three centuries ago.
The unfinished towers flashed past, the steel frames making her board shudder. Hoverboards needed metal below them to fly, but too many magnetic fields made them shivery. Aya eased back her speed, checking for Moggle again.
Nothing. The hovercam was still underground.
A huge excavation came into sight, the foundation of some future skyscraper. Along its raw dirt floor, puddles of afternoon rain reflected the starlit sky, like jagged slivers of mirror.
In a corner of the excavation she spotted a tunnel mouth, an entry to the network of storm drains beneath the city.
A month ago, Aya had kicked a story about a new graffiti clique, uglies who left artwork for future generations. They painted the insides of unfinished tunnels and conduits, letting their work be sealed up like time capsules. No one would see the paintings until long after the city collapsed, when its ruins were rediscovered by some future civilization. It was all very mind-rain, a rumination about how the eternal Prettytime had been more fragile than it seemed.
The story hadn’t bumped Aya’s face rank—stories about uglies never did—but she and Moggle had spent a week playing hide-and-seek through the construction site. She wasn’t afraid of the underground.
Letting her board drop, Aya ducked past idle lifter drones and hoverstruts, diving toward the tunnel mouth. She bent her knees, pulled in her arms, and plunged into absolute blackness. . . .
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