Where was her hoverboard? It should have found her by now.
It had taken so long for the lifters to kick in — Tally had expected to pull up in midair, not hit the river at speed. But after a few moments' thought, she realized what had happened. The river was deeper than she'd anticipated; the minerals on its floor were a long way below her kicking feet. She remembered how hoverboards sometimes got wobbly over the middle of the city river — too far from the mineral deposits for the lifters to work at full strength.
It was lucky the board had slowed her fall at all.
Tally looked around. Too dense to float, the hover-board had probably sunk to the bottom, the raging current carrying her away from it. She turned up her crash bracelets' calling range to a whole kilometer, and waited for the board's nose to push itself above the surface.
Shapes bobbed along in the water all around her, knobby and irregular, like a flotilla of alligators in the fast-moving current. What were they?
Something nudged her…
She spun around, but it was just an old tree trunk — not an alligator, and not her hoverboard. Tally grabbed on to it gratefully, though, already exhausted from paddling. In every direction were more trees, as well as branches, clots of reeds, masses of rotting leaves. The river was carrying all sorts of cargo on its surface.
The rain, Tally thought. Three days of downpour must have flooded the hills, washing all manner of stray matter down into the river, swelling its size and accelerating its current. The trunk she clung to was old and rotted black, but a few strands of green wood showed from a break. Had the flooding ripped it from the ground alive?
Tally's fingers traced where the tree had broken, and she saw that something unnaturally straight had struck it.
Like the edge of a hoverboard.
A few meters away, another log floated, cut with the same sharp edge. Tally's crash-landing had snapped the old, rotten tree in half. Her face was bleeding from the impact; she could still taste blood. So what damage had been done to the hoverboard?
Tally twisted the call controls of her crash bracelets higher, setting them to burn their batteries down. Every second, the current was carrying her farther from where she'd landed.
No hoverboard rose up above the surface, no tugging came at her wrists. As the minutes passed, Tally began to admit to herself that the board was dead, a piece of junk at the bottom of the river.
She switched her bracelets off and, still clinging to the log, began to kick her way toward shore.
The riverbank was slippery with mud, the ground saturated by the rains and the swollen river. Tally waded to shore in a small inlet, struggling through branches and reeds in the hip-deep water. It seemed the flood had collected everything that floated and dumped it in this one spot.
Including Tally Youngblood.
She stumbled up the bank, desperate to reach dry ground, every instinct impelling her to keep moving away from the rushing water. Her exhausted body felt full of lead, and Tally slid back down the slope, becoming covered with mud. Finally, she gave up and huddled on the muddy ground, shaking in the freezing cold. Tally couldn't remember feeling so tired since becoming a new pretty, as if the river had sucked away her body's vitality.
She took the firestarter from her backpack and, with trembling fingers, gathered a pile of washed-up twigs. But the wood was so wet from three days of rain that the firestarter's tiny flame only made the twigs hiss dully.
At least her coat was still working. She turned its heater up to full, not worrying about the batteries, and gathered herself into a ball.
Tally waited for sleep to come, but her body wouldn't stop trembling, like a fever coming on back in ugly days. But new pretties almost never got sick, unless she'd run herself too far down this last month — eating almost nothing, staying out in the cold, running on adrenaline and coffee, with hardly an hour in the last twenty-four when she hadn't been soaking wet.
Or was she finally getting the same reaction from the cure as Zane? Was the pill beginning to damage her brain, now that she was beyond any hope of medical care?
Tally's head pounded, fevered thoughts swirling through her. She had no hoverboard, no way of getting to the Rusty Ruins except on foot. No one knew where she was. The world had been emptied of everything but the wild, the freezing cold, and Tally Youngblood. Even the absence of the cuff on her wrist felt strange, like the gap left behind by a missing tooth.
Worst was the absence of Zane's body next to her. She'd stayed with him every night for the last month, and they'd spent most of every day together. Even in their enforced silence, she had grown used to his constant presence, his familiar touch, their wordless conversations. Suddenly he was gone, and Tally felt as if she'd lost some part of herself in the fall.
She had imagined this moment a thousand times, finally reaching the wild, free from the city at last. But never once had she imagined being here without Zane.
And yet here she was, utterly alone.
Tally lay awake a long time, replaying in her mind those last frantic minutes in the balloon. If she'd only jumped sooner, or had thought to look down before the city grid ran out. After what Zane had said, she shouldn't have hesitated, knowing that this escape was their only chance for freedom together.
Once again, things were screwed up, and it was all her fault.
Finally Tally's exhaustion overpowered her worries, and she drifted into troubled sleep.
Alone
So, there was this beautiful princess.
She was locked in a high tower, one whose smart walls had clever holes in them that could give her anything: food, a clique of fantastic friends, wonderful clothes. And, best of all, there was this mirror on the wall, so that the princess could look at her beautiful self all day long.
The only problem with the tower was that there was no way out. The builders had forgotten to put in an elevator, or even a set of stairs. She was stuck up there.
One day, the princess realized that she was bored. The view from the tower — gentle hills, fields of white flowers, and a deep, dark forest — fascinated her. She started spending more time looking out the window than at her own reflection, as is often the case with troublesome girls.
And it was pretty clear that no prince was showing up, or at least that he was really late.
So the only thing was to jump.
The hole in the wall gave her a lovely parasol to catch her when she fell, and a wonderful new dress to wear in the fields and forest, and a brass key to make sure she could get back into the tower if she needed to. But the princess, laughing pridefully tossed the key into the fireplace, convinced she would never need to return to the tower. Without another glance in the mirror, she strolled out onto the balcony and stepped off into midair.
The thing was, it was a long way down, a lot farther than the princess had expected, and the parasol turned out to be total crap. As she fell, the princess realized she should have asked for a bungee jacket or a parachute or something better than a parasol, you know?
She struck the ground hard, and lay there in a crumpled heap, smarting and confused, wondering how things had worked out this way. There was no prince around to pick her up, her new dress was ruined, and thanks to her pride, she had no way back into the tower.
And the worst thing was, there were no mirrors out there in the wild, so the princess was left wondering whether she in fact was still beautiful … or if the fall had changed the story completely.
When Tally awoke from this bogus dream, the sun was halfway across the sky.
She struggled to her feet, having to pry herself from the sucking embrace of the mud. At some point during the night, her winter coat had run out of charge. Without batteries, it was a cold thing clinging to her skin, still damp from her soaking in the river, and it smelled funny. Tally unstuck the coat from herself and laid it across the broad surface of a rock, hoping that the sun would dry it out.
For the first time in days the sky was cloudless. But in clearing, the ai
r had turned crisp and cold — the warmer weather that had arrived with the rain had departed with it as well. The trees glittered with frost, and the mud under her feet sparkled, its thin layer of rime crackling underfoot.
Her fever had passed, but Tally felt dizzy standing, so she knelt beside her backpack to look through its contents — the sum of everything she possessed. Fausto had managed to gather up some of the usual Smokey survival gear: a knife, water filter, position-finder, firestarter, and some safety sparklers, along with a few dozen packets of soap. Remembering how valuable dehydrated food had been in the Smoke, Tally had packed three months' worth, which was all wrapped up in waterproof plastic, fortunately. When Tally saw the two rolls of toilet paper she'd brought, however, she let out a groan. They were soaked through, reduced to bloated, squishy blobs of white. She placed them on the rocks next to her jacket, but doubted that it was even worth drying them out.
She sighed. Even back in her Smokey days, she'd never gotten used to the leaf thing.
Tally found her pitiful pile of twigs, and remembered trying to light a fire the night before, too delirious to realize how stupid that would have been. The Special Circumstances hovercars that had come after the balloon would have easily spotted a fire in the darkness.
There was no evidence of pursuit in the sky this morning, but Tally decided to put some distance between herself and the river. Without a working heater in her jacket, she would need to build a fire that night.
But first things first, which meant food.
She trudged down to the river to fill the purifier, dried mud crumbling from her skin and clothing with every step. Tally had never been so dirty in her life, but she wasn't up to bathing in the freezing water, not without a fire to warm her up afterward. Last nights fever might have passed, thanks to her new-pretty immune system kicking in, but she didn't want to take any risks with her health out here.
Of course, Tally realized, it wasn't her own health she should be worrying about. Zane was somewhere out here too, maybe just as alone as she was. He and Fausto had jumped almost at the same moment, but they might have landed kilometers apart. If Zane had one of his attacks on the way to the ruins, with no one to help him…
Tally shook the thought from her head. All she could do right now for Zane or anyone else was get to the ruins herself. And that meant making food, not worrying about things she couldn't control.
The purifier took two fillings before it had strained enough, pure water from the silty inlet to make a meal. She chose a packet of PadThai and set the purifier to boil; the smell of reconstituting noodles and spices soon rose from the gurgling water.
By the time the meal pinged that it was ready, Tally was ravenous.
As she reached the end of the PadThai, she realized there was no longer any point in going hungry, and immediately boiled up a packet of CurryNoods. Starvation might have been useful for getting off the cuffs and staying bubbly, but her cuff was gone, and Tally now had the whole of the wild, dangerous and cold, to keep her bubbly. Not much chance of sinking into a pretty haze out here.
After breakfast, the position-finder offered up its bad news. Tally had to check her calculations twice before she believed the distance she'd traveled the night before. The winds from off the ocean had pushed the balloon a long way east, in the opposite direction from the Rusty Ruins, and then the rivers current had carried her another long distance southward. She was more than a week's journey by foot to the ruins, if she went in a straight line. And straight lines wouldn't come into it: She had to go the long way around the city, staying in the forest to hide herself from searchers in the air.
Tally wondered how long the Specials would bother to keep looking for her. Luckily, they didn't know that her hoverboard had disappeared into the river, so they would assume she was flying, not trudging along on foot. As far as they knew, Tally would have to stay near the river or some other natural vein of mineral deposits.
The sooner she got away from the riverbank, the better.
Tally packed up her pitiful camp unhappily. Her backpack held more than enough food for the journey, and the hills would be full of ready water after the long rains, but she felt defeated already. From what Sussy and Dex had said, the New Smokies hadn't set up a permanent camp in the ruins. They might leave any day now, and she was a week away.
Her only hope was that Zane and Fausto would stay behind, waiting for her to show up. Unless they thought that she had been captured, or killed by the fall, or had simply chickened out.
No, she told herself, Zane wouldn't think that last one of her. He might be worried, but Tally knew that he would wait for her, however long it took.
She sighed as she tied the still-damp coat around her waist and hoisted her backpack onto her shoulders. There was no point wondering about where the others were; her only choice was to hike toward the ruins and trust that someone would be waiting when she arrived.
Tally had nowhere else to go.
The way through the forest was rugged, every step a battle. Back in the Smoke, Tally had mostly traveled by hoverboard. When she had been forced to hike cross-country, it had been on paths hacked through the trees. But this was nature in the raw, hostile and unrelenting. The dense undergrowth tugged at her feet, trying to trip her, throwing up thick bushes and ankle-twisting roots and impenetrable walls of thorn.
Among the trees, the downpour still echoed. Pine needles sparkled with frost, which the day's heat was slowly changing to water, generating a constant rain of chill, sparkling mist. It was like a magnificent ice palace, with spears of sunlight shooting between the trees, visible in the mist like lasers through smoke. But every time Tally dared disturb a branch, it unloaded its freight of freezing water onto her head.
She remembered traveling to the Smoke through the ancient forest that had been devastated by the Rusties' biologically engineered weeds. At least walking through that flattened landscape had been easier than this dense growth. Sometimes, you could almost see why the Rusties had tried so hard to destroy nature.
Nature could be a pain.
As she walked, the struggle between the forest and Tally began to feel more and more personal. The grasping brambles seemed almost conscious of her, corralling Tally the way they wanted her to go, no matter what her direction-finder said. The dense undergrowth would split open welcomingly offering easy paths that wound pointlessly off her course. Hiking in a straight line was impossible. This was nature, not some Rusty superhighway cutting through mountains and across deserts without any regard for the terrain.
But as the afternoon progressed, Tally slowly became convinced that she was following an actual path, like the nature trails that the pre-Rusties had used a millennium before.
She remembered what David had told her out in the Smoke, that most of the pre-Rusty trails had originally been made by animals. Even deer, wolves, and wild dogs didn't want to fight their way through virgin growth. Just like people, animals stuck to the same paths for generation after generation, forging tracks through the forest.
Of course, Tally had always imagined that animal trails were something that only David could see. Having grown up in the wild, he was practically a pre-Rusty himself. But as the shadows lengthened around her, Tally found her path becoming easier and straighter, as if she had stumbled onto some uncanny fissure in the wild.
A gnawing feeling started in her stomach. The random sounds of dripping trees began to play with her mind, and Tally's nerves began to twitch, as if she was being watched.
It was probably just her perfect new-pretty eyesight helping her spot the subtle marks of animal passage. She must have picked up more skills than she knew out in the Smoke. This was an animal path. Certainly, no people could live out here. Not this close to the city, where they would have been detected by the Specials decades ago. Even out in the Smoke, no one knew of any other communities living outside the cities. Humanity had decided two centuries ago to leave nature alone.
Alone, Tally kept reminding herself. No
one else was out here. Though, oddly, she couldn't decide whether being the only person in the forest made it feel less creepy, or more.
Finally, as the sky was fading to pink, Tally decided to come to a halt. She found an open clearing where the sun had beaten down all day, maybe drying out enough wood for a fire. The brutal hike had raised a sweat — Tally's shirt clung to her, and she'd never once worn her coat — but once the sun set, she knew the air would turn freezing cold again.
Finding dry twigs was easy, and Tally weighed a few small logs in her hand to find the lightest, which would contain the least water. All her Smokey knowledge seemed to have come back, with no scraps of pretty-mindedness remaining after the escape. Now that she was out of the city, the cure had settled over Tally's mind for good.
But she hesitated before putting the firestarter to the pile, paranoia staying her hand. The forest still made its sounds — dripping water, bird cries, the skitterings of small animals among the wet leaves — and it was easy to imagine something watching her from the darkened spaces between the trees.
Tally sighed. Maybe she still was a pretty-head, making up irrational stories about the empty forest. The longer she stayed alone out here, the more Tally understood why the Rusties and their predecessors had believed in invisible beings, praying to placate spirits as they trashed the natural world around them.
Well, Tally didn't believe in spirits. The only things she had to worry about were Specials, and they would be looking along the river, kilometers behind her. Darkness had fallen as she built the fire, and it was already halfway to freezing. She couldn't risk another fever out here in the wild, alone.
The firestarter flicked to life in her hand, and Tally held it to the twigs until a blaze erupted. She nursed the fire along with larger and larger branches until it was strong enough to ignite the lightest of her logs, then banked it with the others to dry them out.
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