Specials u-3

by Скотт Вестерфельд

  Tally would have to be very careful from now on.

  Invisible

  Over the next few days, Tally's pursuit of the Crims fell into a steady rhythm.

  The runaways stayed up later each night, their random bodies slowly adjusting to traveling in darkness and sleeping during the day. Soon they managed to ride all night, making camp only when the first rays of dawn broke on the horizon.

  Andrew's position-finder was leading them south. They followed the river to the ocean, then hopped onto the rusting rails of an old high-speed train line. Someone had made the coastal tracks safe for hoverboarding, Tally noticed, with no dangerous gaps in the magnetic field. Wherever the line was broken, buried metal cables kept the Crims from crashing. They never even had to hike.

  She wondered how many other runaways had used this path, and from how many other cities David and his allies were recruiting.

  The New Smoke was certainly farther away than she'd expected. David's parents were originally from Tally's city, and he had always hidden within a few days' travel of home. But Andrew's position-finder had led them halfway to the southern continent, the days visibly growing longer and the nights warmer as they headed south.

  As the coast began to rise into high cliffs, the waves crashing far below faded to a dull roar, and tall grasses choked the ancient train tracks. In the distance huge fields of the white weed glimmered in the sun. The weed was a form of engineered orchid that some Rusty scientist had let loose upon the world. It grew everywhere, leeching the ground of nutrients and choking whole forests in its path. But something about the ocean, perhaps the salt air, kept it away from the coast.

  The Crims seemed to grow used to the routine of travel. Their hoverboarding skills improved, though following them was never a challenge. The steady practice didn't hurt Zane's coordination, but compared to the others he was still unsteady on his board.

  Shay had to be getting farther ahead every hour. Tally wondered if the rest of the Cutters had joined her. Or was she being cautious and traveling alone, waiting until she'd found the New Smoke before calling in reinforcements?

  Every day that the Crims didn't reach their goal, it became more likely that Special Circumstances was already there, and that their entire journey was a cruel joke, just like Shay had said.

  Traveling alone gave Tally a lot of time to think, and she spent most of it wondering if she really was the self-centered monster Shay had described. It didn't seem fair. When had she even had a chance to be selfish? Ever since Dr. Cable had recruited her, other people had made most of Tally's choices for her. Someone was always forcing her to join their side in the conflict between the Smokies and the city. Her only real decisions so far had been staying ugly in the Old Smoke (which hadn't worked out at all), escaping from New Pretty Town with Zane (ditto), and splitting up with Shay to protect Zane (not great so far). Everything else had happened because of threats, accidents, lesions in her brain, and surgery changing her mind for her. Not exactly her fault.

  And yet she and Shay always seemed to wind up on opposite sides. Was that a coincidence? Or was there something about the two of them that always turned them from friends into enemies? Maybe they were like two different species—hawks and rabbits, say—and could never be allies. So who was the hawk? Tally wondered. Out here alone, she felt herself changing again. Somehow the wild made her feel less special. She still saw the world's icy beauty, but something was missing: the sounds of the other Cutters around her, the intimacy of their breathing in the skintenna network. She began to realize that being a Special wasn't just about strength and speed; it was about being part of a group, a clique. Back at camp Tally had felt connected to the others—always reminded of the powers and privileges they shared, and of the sights and smells only their superhuman senses could detect.

  Among the Cutters, Tally had always felt special. But now that she was alone in the wild, her perfect vision only made her feel minuscule. In all its glorious detail, the natural world seemed big enough to swallow her.

  The distant group of runaways weren't impressed or terrorized by her wolflike face and razor fingernails. How could they be when they never even glimpsed her? She was invisible, an outcast fading away.

  She was almost relieved when the Crims made their second mistake.

  They'd stopped to make camp on one side of a tall rocky outcrop, protected from the wind coming off the ocean. The weeds were close here, glowing softly as the sun rose, turning the inland hills as white as sand dunes.

  The Crims unfurled their boards and weighted them down, made a halfway competent fire and ate their meals. Tally watched them drop off to sleep with their usual speed, exhausted from a long day of travel.

  This far from the city, she no longer had to worry about the boards being spotted. Her skintenna hadn't picked up traffic from the wardens for days. But as she settled in for a long day of watching, Tally noticed that one of the boards— Zane's—had been left out in the ocean breeze whipping around the outcrop.

  The board fluttered, and one of the stones weighting its corners rolled off.

  Tally sighed—after a week on the trail, the runaways still hadn't learned to do this right—but inside she felt a ping of eagerness. Fixing this would give her something to do, at least, and maybe make her feel less insignificant. For those few moments she wouldn't be completely alone. She would hear the breathing of the sleeping Crims and take a closer look at Zane. Seeing him still and asleep, untroubled by his shaking, always reminded Tally of why she had made the choices she had.

  She crawled toward the camp, her sneak suit turning the color of the dirt. The sun was rising behind her, but this would be much easier than the riverbank, where all eight boards had gone astray. Zane's hoverboard was still fluttering, another corner having freed itself, but it hadn't leaped into the air just yet. Perhaps its magnetics had found purchase with some underground vein of iron, and were dutifully holding it down.

  When Tally reached the board, it was flapping like a wounded bird, the breeze swirling around it smelling of seaweed and salt. Strangely, someone had left an old leather-bound book open next to the hoverboard. Its pages snapped noisily in the wind.

  Tally squinted. It looked like the one that Zane had been reading, that first night she'd seen him back from the hospital.

  Another corner of the board slipped free, and Tally raised a hand to snatch it before the wind pulled it away.

  But the hoverboard didn't budge.

  Something was wrong here…

  Then Tally saw why it wasn't moving. The fourth corner was tied to a stake, secured against the wind, as if whoever had placed it out here in the breeze had known the stone weights would fail.

  Then she heard something over the fluttering pages of the book—the stupid, noisy book that had obviously been left here to cover other sounds. One of the Crims was breathing less evenly than the others…someone was awake.

  She turned and saw Zane watching her.

  Tally jumped to her feet, whipping off her glove and flicking out her stinger in one motion. But Zane raised one hand: It held a collection of metal stakes and firestarters. Even if Tally somehow made it those five meters and stung him, all that metal would fall clattering to the ground, waking the rest of them.

  But why hadn't he just cried out? She tensed, waiting for him to raise an alarm, but instead he lifted a finger slowly to his lips.

  His sly expression said, I won't tell if you don't.

  Tally swallowed, scanning the other Crims in the darkness. None of them watched through slitted eyes; they were all fast asleep. He wanted to talk to her alone. She nodded, her heart beating fast.

  The two crept out of the camp and around the outcrop, to where the breeze and crash of waves would cloak their words in a steady roar. Now that Zane was moving, his trembling had started again. As he settled himself next to her in the scrubby grass, Tally didn't look at his face. She already felt revulsion threatening to rise up inside her.

  "Do the others know a
bout me?" she asked.

  "No. I wasn't sure myself. Thought I was imagining things." He touched her shoulder. "I'm glad I wasn't."

  "Can't believe I fell for that stupid trick."

  He chuckled. "Sorry to take advantage of your better nature."

  "My what?"

  In the corner of her eye, Tally saw him smile. "You were protecting us that first day, weren't you? Moving the hoverboards out of sight?"

  "Yeah. A warden was about to spot you. Bubbleheads."

  "Thought so. That's why I figured you'd help out again. Our own personal protector."

  Tally swallowed. "Yeah, great. It's nice to be appreciated."

  "So is it just you?"

  "Yeah, I'm all alone." It was true now, after all.

  "You're not supposed to be out here, are you?"

  "You mean am I disobeying orders? Afraid so."

  Zane nodded. "I knew you and Shay had some trick up your sleeves, letting me go. I mean, you didn't really expect me to use that tracker." He reached out and took her arm, his fingers pale against the dull gray of the sneak suit. "But how are you following us, Tally? It's not something inside me, is it?"

  "No, Zane. You're clean. I'm just staying close, watching you every minute. Eight city kids in the wild aren't very hard to spot, after all." She shrugged, still staring out into the crashing waves. "I can smell you too."

  "Oh." He laughed. "Not too bad yet, I hope."

  She shook her head. "I've been in the wild before, Zane. I've smelled worse. But why didn't you … ?" She turned toward him but lowered her gaze, focusing on the zipper of his jacket. "You set a trap for me, but didn't mention it to the other Crims?"

  "I didn't want to panic everybody." Zane shrugged. "If a whole bunch of Specials were following us, there wasn't much they could do about it. And if it was just you, I didn't want the others to know. They wouldn't understand."

  "Understand what?" Tally said softly.

  "That this whole trip wasn't a trap," he continued. "That it was just you. Protecting us."

  She swallowed—of course, it had been a trap. But what was it now? Just a joke? A pointless waste of time? Shay, Dr. Cable, and the rest of Special Circumstances were probably already waiting for them at the Smoke.

  He squeezed her arm. "It's changing you again, isn't it?"

  "What is?"

  "The wild. That's what you always said—traveling to the Smoke that first time, it's what made you what you are."

  Tally turned away to stare out at the ocean, tasting its salt in her mouth. Zane was right—the wild was changing her again. Every time she crossed the wilderness alone, the beliefs the city had instilled in her were shaken up. But this time around, Tally's realizations weren't making her particularly happy. "I'm not sure what I am anymore, Zane. Sometimes I think I'm nothing but what other people have done to me—a big collection of brainwashing, surgeries, and cures." She looked down at her scarred hand, the tattoos flickering brokenly across her palm. "That, and all the mistakes I've made. All the people I've disappointed."

  He traced the scar with a quivering fingertip; she closed her hand and looked away. "If that were true, Tally, you wouldn't be out here now. Disobeying orders."

  "Yeah, well, I'm pretty good at the disobeying part."

  "Look at me, Tally."

  "Zane, I'm not sure if that's a good idea." She swallowed. "You see …"

  "I know. I saw your face that night. I've noticed how you haven't looked at me. It makes perfect sense that Dr. Cable would pull something like that—Specials think everyone else is worthless, right?"

  Tally shrugged, not wanting to explain that it was worse with Zane than anyone else. Partly because of the way she'd felt about him before, the contrast between now and then. And partly … the other thing.

  "Try, Tally," he said.

  She turned away, almost wishing for a moment that she wasn't special, that her eyes weren't so perfectly tuned to capture every detail of his infirmity That her mind hadn't been turned against everything random and average and…crippled.

  "I can't, Zane."

  "Yes you can."

  "What? So you're an expert on Specials now?"

  "No. But remember David?"

  "David?" She glared at the sea. "What about him?"

  "Didn't he once tell you that you were beautiful?"

  A chill went through her. "Yeah, back in ugly days. But how did you … ?" Then Tally remembered their last escape, how Zane had gotten to the Rusty Ruins a week before her. He and David had had plenty of time to get to know each other before she'd finally shown up. "He told you about that?"

  Zane shrugged. "He'd seen how pretty I was. And I guess he was hoping that you could still see him, the way you had back in the Old Smoke."

  Tally shuddered, a rush of old memories sweeping through her: that night two operations ago when David had looked at her ugly face—thin lips and frizzy hair and squashed-down nose—and said that she was beautiful. She'd tried to explain how it couldn't be true, how biology wouldn't let it be true…

  But still he'd called her beautiful, even when she was ugly.

  That was the moment that Tally's whole world had started to unravel. That was the first time she'd switched sides.

  She felt an unexpected ping of pity for poor, random-faced David. Raised a Smokey, he'd never had the operation, hadn't even seen any city pretties back then. So of course he might think that ugly Tally Youngblood would be okay to look at.

  But after she'd been turned pretty, Tally had given herself up to Dr. Cable just to stay with Zane, and had pushed David away.

  "That's not why I chose you, Zane. Not because of your face. It's because of what you and I did together—how we freed ourselves. You know that, right?"

  "Of course. So what's wrong with you now?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Listen, Tally. When David saw how beautiful you were, he took on five million years of evolution. He saw past your imperfect skin and asymmetry and everything else our genes select against." Zane held out his hand. "And now you can't even look at me just because I'm shaking a little?"

  She stared at his sickening, quivering fingers. "It's worse than being a bubblehead, Zane. Bubbleheads are just clueless, but Specials are … single-minded about some things. But at least I'm trying to fix the situation. Why do you think I'm out here following you?"

  "You want to take me back to the city, don't you?"

  She groaned. "What's the alternative? Having Maddy try one of her half-baked cures?"

  "The alternative is inside you, Tally. This isn't about my brain damage; it's about yours." He slid closer, and she closed her eyes. "You freed yourself once before. You beat the pretty lesions. In the beginning, all it took was a kiss."

  She felt the heat of his body next to her, smelled the campfire smoke on his skin. She turned away, eyes still shut tight. "But it's different being special—it isn't just some little piece of my brain. It's my whole body. It's the way I see the world."

  "Right. You're so special no one can touch you."

  "Zane …"

  "You're so special you have to cut yourself just to feel anything."

  She shook her head. "I don't do that anymore."

  "So you can change!"

  "But that doesn't mean …" She opened her eyes.

  Zane's face was centimeters from hers, his gaze intense. And somehow the wild had changed him, too—his eyes no longer looked watery and average to her. His stare was almost icy.

  Almost special.

  She leaned closer…and their lips met, warm in the chill of the outcrop's shadow. The roar of the waves filled her ears, drowning out her nervous heartbeat.

  She slid closer, hands pushing inside his clothes. She wanted to be out of the sneak suit, no longer alone, no longer invisible. Arms around him, she squeezed tight, hearing his breath catch as her lethal hands gripped harder. Her senses brought her everything about him: his heart pulsing softly in his throat, the taste of his mouth, the unwashed scent
of him cut by the salt spray.

  But then his fingers brushed her cheek, and Tally felt their trembling.

  No, she said silently.

  The tremors were soft, almost nothing, as faint as the echoes of rain falling a kilometer away. But they were everywhere, on the skin of his face, in the muscles of his arms around her, in his lips against hers—his whole body shivering like a littlie's in the cold. And suddenly Tally could see inside him: his damaged nervous system, the corrupted connections between body and brain.

  She tried to blot the image from her mind, but it only grew clearer. She was designed to spot weaknesses, after all, to take advantage of the frailties and flaws of randoms. Not ignore them.

  Tally tried to pull away a little, but Zane's grip on her arm tightened, as if he thought he could hold her there. She broke the kiss and opened her eyes, glaring down at the pale fingers grasping her, a sudden, unstoppable flash of anger rising.

  "Tally, wait," he said. "We can—"

  But he hadn't let go. Rage and disgust filled her, and Tally sent a flutter of razor spines rolling across her sneak suit. Zane cried out and pulled back, his fingers and palms bleeding.

  She rolled away, springing to her feet and running. She'd kissed him, let herself be touched by him—someone unspecial and barely average. Someone crippled…

  Bile rose in her throat, as if the memory of kissing him was trying to tear itself free of her body. She stumbled and fell to one knee, her stomach heaving, the world spinning.

  "Tally!" He was coming after her.

  "Don't!" She raised one hand, not daring to look up at him. Breathing in the cold, pure sea air, the nausea was beginning to pass. But not if he got any closer.

  "Are you okay?"

  "Does it look like I'm okay?" A wave of shame whipped through Tally. What had she done? "I just can't, Zane."

  She pulled herself up and ran toward the ocean, away from him. The outcrop ended on a chalky cliff, but Tally didn't slow down…

  She jumped, barely clearing the rocks below, hitting the waves with a slap, diving down into the icy embrace of the water. The churning ocean spun her around, almost dumping her back on the jagged shore, but Tally pulled herself deeper with a few powerful strokes, until her hands brushed the dark and sandy bottom. The roiling water began to fall back, shifting into a riptide around her. It pulled Tally outward, rumbling in her ears, erasing her thoughts.