Pretties u-2

by Скотт Вестерфельд

  Soon, the blaze was hot enough to push her back on her heels, and Tally felt warmth stealing into her bones for what seemed like the first time in days.

  She smiled as she stared into the flames. Nature was tough, it could be dangerous, but unlike Dr. Cable or Shay or Peris — unlike people in general — it made sense. The problems it threw at you could be solved rationally. Get cold, build a fire. Need to get somewhere, walk there. Tally knew she could make it to the ruins, with or without a hoverboard under her. And from there she would eventually find Zane and the New Smoke, and everything would be all right.

  Tonight, Tally realized happily, she was going to sleep well. Even without Zane beside her, she had made it through her first day of freedom in the wild, still bubbly and still in one piece.

  She lay down, watching the fire's embers pulsing beside her, warm as old friends. After a while, her eyelids began to flicker, then to fall.

  Tally was deep in pleasant dreams when the shrieking woke her.

  Hunt

  At first, she thought the forest was on fire.

  There were flames moving through the trees, casting jittering shadows across the clearing, darting through the air like wild, burning insects. Shrieks rose up from every side, inhuman calls strung with meaningless words.

  Tally staggered to her feet and stumbled straight into the remains of her fire. Kicked embers flared to life in all directions. She felt hot needles through the soles of her boots, and almost fell to her hands and knees among the glowing coals. Another shriek came from close by — a high-pitched cry of anger. A human form ran toward her, a torch raised in one hand. The torch hissed and sparked with every step, as if the flame were a living thing impelling its carrier onward.

  The figure was swinging something across its path — a long, polished stick, gleaming in the firelight. Tally leaped back just in time, and the weapon whistled through empty air. She rolled backward on the ground, feeling the sting of the scattered embers in the middle of her back. Jumping to her feet, she spun away, dashing toward the trees. Another figure blocked her path, also brandishing a club.

  His face was obscured by a beard, but even in the jittering torchlight Tally could see that he was an ugly — fat and with a bloated nose, the pale skin of his forehead pocked with disease. He had ugly reflexes, too: The swing of the club was slow and predictable. Tally rolled under the flailing weapon, lashing out with her feet to take his knees out from under him.

  By the time she heard the thump of his body hitting the earth, Tally was up and running again, slashing through branches, angling toward the darkest part of the forest.

  Another chorus of shrieks rose up behind her, the pursuers' torches casting flickering shadows onto the trees ahead. Tally crashed through the undergrowth almost blind, half-falling as she ran, wet branches whipping her face. A vine grasped her ankle, jerking Tally off-balance and throwing her to the ground. She stretched out both hands to catch herself, and felt one wrist bend too far backward with a wrenching burst of pain.

  She cradled the injured hand for a moment, glancing back at the ugly hunters. They weren't as fast as Tally but they ducked and weaved through the forest skillfully, knowing the way through the trees even in darkness. The hovering lights of their torches flowed into place around where Tally lay, the racket from their reedy cries surrounding her once more.

  But what were they? They looked small in stature, and they yelled back and forth in some language she didn't recognize. Like pre-Rusty ghosts risen from the grave…

  Whatever they were, there wasn't time to ponder the question. Tally rose to her feet and made another dash for the darkness, aiming for the gap between two torches.

  The two hunters closed on her as she approached: bearded men, their ugly faces marked with scars and sores. Tally crashed between them, close enough to feel the heat of the torches. A wildly swung club caught her shoulder with a glancing blow, but Tally managed to keep her feet, and found herself stumbling down a hill into blackness.

  The two cried out as they followed her, and more shrieks came from up ahead. How many of them were there? They seemed to be rising up from the ground itself.

  Suddenly, her feet splashed into cold water, and Tally found herself slipping, falling into a shallow creek. Behind, her two closest pursuers tumbled down the slope, their torches spitting out sparks as they bumped trees and branches. It was a wonder the whole forest wasn't aflame.

  Tally got to her feet and dashed down the streambed, thankful for the route it cut through the undergrowth. She stumbled on the slick, rocky bottom, but found herself outpacing the burning eyes that darted along either bank. If she could only reach some sort of open ground, Tally knew that she could outrun the smaller, slower uglies.

  The sound of splashing feet came from behind her, and then a grunt and a stream of curses in their unknown tongue. One of them had fallen. Maybe she was going to make it.

  Of course, her food and water purifier were in her backpack in the clearing, back among the shrieking, club-wielding uglies. Lost.

  She forced the thought from her mind and kept running. Her wrist still throbbed from the fall, and she wondered if it was broken.

  A loud roar rose up before Tally, the stream boiling around her ankles, the ground rumbling. Then suddenly the earth seemed to disappear from under her feet as she ran…

  Flailing through the air, Tally realized too late that the roar was behind her now — she'd run straight off the top of a waterfall. Her flight through emptiness lasted only a moment, then she hit water, a deep, churning pool that wrapped its chill around her, sound suddenly reduced to a low rumble in her ears. She felt herself hurtling downward into darkness and silence, slowly turning head over heels.

  One shoulder brushed the bottom, and Tally pushed herself upward. She came up gasping, clawing at the water until her fingers found a rocky edge. Clinging to it, she pulled herself up into the shallows, on hands and knees, coughing and trembling.

  Caught.

  Torches hovered all around her, reflected in the churning water like swarms of fireflies. Tally raised her eyes and found at least a dozen pursuers glowering down from the stream's steep banks, their pale and ugly faces made even more hideous by the torchlight.

  A man was standing in the stream in front of her — his fat belly and big nose marking him as the hunter she'd knocked over at the clearing. His bare knee was bleeding where she'd kicked it. He bellowed a wordless cry, raising his crude club high into the air.

  Tally stared up at him in disbelief. Was he really going to hit her? Did these people murder total strangers for no reason at all?

  But no blow came. As he stared down at her, fear gradually filled the man's expression. He thrust his torch toward her, and Tally shrank back, covering her face. The man sank to one knee before her, taking a closer look. She dropped her hands.

  His milky eyes squinted in the torchlight, staring in confusion.

  Did he recognize her?

  Warily, Tally watched the thoughts racing across his exaggerated features: growing fear and doubt, and then a sudden realization that something terrible had happened…

  The torch fell from his hand and into the stream, where it was extinguished with a strangled hiss and a puff of foul smoke. The man bellowed once more, this time as if in pain, the same word repeated again and again. He pitched forward, lowering his face almost into the water.

  The others followed, dropping to their hands and knees, their torches falling to sputter against the ground. They all set up the same wailing cry, almost drowning out the roar of the waterfall.

  Tally rose to her knees, coughing a little and wondering what the hell was going on.

  Looking around, she noticed for the first time that all the hunters were men. Their clothes were irregular, far cruder than the Smokies' handmade clothing. They all had unhealthy marks on their faces and arms, and long beards that were matted and tangled. Their hair looked as if they'd never combed it in their lives. They were paler than pretty average,
with the sort of freckly, pinkish skin of those occasional littlies born extra sensitive to the sun.

  None of them stared back at her. Their faces were buried in their hands or pressed to the ground.

  Finally one of them crawled forward. He was thin and horribly wrinkled, his hair and beard white, and Tally remembered from her time in the Smoke that this was what old uglies looked like. Without the operation, their bodies grew decrepit, like ancient ruins abandoned by their builders. He trembled as he moved, either from fear or ill health, and stared closely at her for what seemed an endless time.

  At last he spoke, his wavering voice barely audible above the waterfall. "I know little the gods' tongue."

  Tally blinked. "You what?"

  "We saw fire and thought outsider. Not a god."

  All the others had gone silent, waiting fearfully, ignoring their torches guttering on the ground. Tally saw a bush crackle to life, but the man crouching next to it seemed too paralyzed by fear to move.

  So she terrified them all of a sudden? Were these people crazy?

  "Never gods use fire before. Please understand." His eyes begged her for forgiveness.

  She stood unsteadily. "Um, that's okay. No problem."

  The old ugly rose from his crouch so suddenly that Tally stepped backward, almost toppling back into the churning pool. He yelled a single word, and the hunters repeated it. The cry seemed to release them from their spell; they stood up, stamping out the small fires that had sprung up around their dropped torches.

  Suddenly, Tally felt outnumbered again. "But, hey," she added, "just no more with the…clubs, okay?"

  The old man listened, bowed, and yelled out more words in the unknown language. The hunters sprang into action: Some propped their clubs against trees and split them with a kick; others pounded them against the ground until they shattered, or threw the weapons off into the darkness.

  The old man turned back to Tally, his hands spread open, clearly waiting for approval. His club lay split in two at her feet. The others raised their free hands, empty and open.

  "Yeah," she said. "Much better."

  The old man smiled.

  And then she saw it, the familiar glimmer in his ancient, milky eyes. The same look Sussy and Dex had given her when they'd first seen her pretty face. The same awe and eagerness to please, the same instinctive fascination — the sure result of a century of cosmetic engineering and a million years of evolution.

  Tally looked around at the others, and found all of them shrinking from her gaze. They could barely meet her huge, copper-flecked eyes, almost couldn't stand to face her beauty.

  God, he'd said. The old Rusty word for their invisible superheroes in the sky.

  This was their world out here — this raw, cruel wilderness with its disease and violence and animal struggle for survival. Like these people, this world was ugly. To be pretty was to be from somewhere beyond.

  Out here, Tally was a god.

  Young Blood

  The hunters' camp took about an hour to reach. With torches extinguished, the party followed pitch-black trails and waded down freezing streams, never uttering a word.

  Tally's guides displayed a strange combination of crudity and skill. They were small and slow, a few even disfigured, shuffling along carrying all their weight on one leg. They smelled as if they never bathed, and wore shoes so poor, their feet were scarred. But they knew the forest, moving gracefully through the tangled undergrowth, guiding Tally unerringly through the darkness. The hunters didn't use direction-finders, or even pause to check the stars.

  The suspicions that Tally had nursed the day before were proven right. These hills were laced with human-made paths. The trails she'd only half-glimpsed in daylight now seemed to open up magically in the darkness, the old man who led her taking turns and switchbacks without hesitation. The group moved in a single line, making no more noise than a snake among leaves.

  The hunters had enemies, it seemed. After their cacophonous attack on Tally, she wouldn't have imagined them capable of stealth or cunning. But now they sent signals up and down the line with clicking sounds and birdlike chirps instead of words. They seemed perplexed whenever Tally tripped over an invisible root or vine, and nervous when she let out a string of curses as a result. They didn't like being unarmed, she realized. Perhaps they regretted breaking their weapons at the first sign of her displeasure.

  Tough luck, Tally thought. No matter how friendly the hunters had become, she was glad they'd discarded the clubs, just in case they changed their minds. After all, if she hadn't fallen into the water, washing the day's mud and muck from her pretty face, Tally doubted she would be alive now.

  Whoever the hunters' enemies were, the grudge was serious.

  Tally smelled the village before they reached it. It made her nose wrinkle unhappily.

  It wasn't just the scent of wood smoke, or the less welcome tang of animal slaughter, which she knew from watching rabbits and chickens killed for food back in the Smoke. The smell at the outskirts of the hunters' camp was much worse, reminding Tally of the outdoor latrines the Smokies had used. That was one aspect of camping she'd never quite gotten used to. Mercifully, the smell faded as the village came into sight.

  The camp wasn't big — a dozen huts made of mud and reeds, a few sleeping goats tied to each, the furrows of vegetable plots casting ruffled shadows in the starlight. One big storehouse sat in the middle of everything, but there were no other large buildings that Tally could see.

  The village's borders were marked by watch fires and armed guards. Having reached home, the hunters felt safe enough to raise their voices again, shouting the news that they'd brought back a … visitor.

  People began to flow out of the huts, the hubbub growing as the village gradually awoke. Tally found herself at the center of a gathering crowd of curious faces. A circle formed around her, but the adult villagers never pressed too close, as if held back by the force field of her beauty. They kept their eyes averted.

  The littlies, on the other hand, showed more courage. Some actually dared to touch her, darting out to lay a hand on her silvery jacket before retreating back into the crowd. It was strange seeing kids out here in the wild. Unlike their elders, the littlies looked almost normal to Tally. They were too young for their skin to show the ravages of bad nutrition and disease, and, of course, even in the city no one got the operation until they were sixteen. She was used to seeing asymmetrical faces and squinty eyes on littlies, and they were cute, anyway.

  Tally knelt and reached out a hand, letting the bravest of them nervously stroke her palm.

  She also saw women for the first time. Given that almost every man wore a beard, it was easy to tell the sexes apart. The women hung back in the crowd, tending to the smallest littlies and hardly daring a glance at Tally. A few were building a fire on a blackened pit in the middle of town. No men bothered to help them, she noticed.

  Tally dimly remembered learning in school about the pre-Rusty custom of assigning different tasks to men and women. And it was usually women who got the crappy jobs, she recalled. Even some Rusties had doggedly clung to that little trick. The thought gave Tally a queasy feeling in her stomach, and she hoped similar rules didn't apply to gods.

  She wondered exactly where the god idea had come from. Tally had her firestarter and other equipment in her backpack, recovered before she and the hunters had started on their way here. But none of them had seen those miracles yet. All it had taken was one glance. From what she knew of mythology, being divine meant more than having a pretty face.

  Of course, she wasn't the first pretty they'd seen. At least some of them knew Tally's language. They might know something about high technology as well.

  Someone shouted from the outskirts of the throng, and the crowd parted before her, growing silent. A man came into the circle, oddly shirtless in the cold. He walked with an air of unmistakable authority, striding right through Tally's divine force field and to within arm's length. He was almost her height,
a giant among these people. He looked strong as well, wiry and hard, though Tally guessed that his reflexes were no match for hers. In the firelight, his eyes sparkled with curiosity rather than fear.

  She had no idea what his age might be. His face had some of the lines of a middle pretty, but his skin looked better than most of the others'. Was he younger than most of them? Or simply healthier?

  Tally also noticed that he wore a knife, the first metal tool she'd seen. Its handle shone with the matte black of plastic. She raised an eyebrow: The knife had to be city-made.

  "Welcome," he said.

  So he also spoke the gods' tongue. "Thanks. Um, I mean…thank you."

  "We did not know you were coming. Not for many days."

  Did gods usually call ahead before visiting? "Oh, sorry," she mumbled, but her response only seemed to confuse him. Maybe gods weren't supposed to apologize.

  "We were confused," he said. "We saw your fire, and thought you were an outsider."

  "Yeah, I got that. No harm done."

  He tried to smile, but then frowned and shook his head. "We still do not understand."

  You and me both.

  The man's accent sounded slightly unusual, like someone from another city on the continent, but not from another civilization altogether. On the other hand, he seemed to lack words for the questions he wanted to ask, as if he wasn't accustomed to making small talk with gods. Possibly he was searching for: What the hell are you doing here?

  Whatever concept of the divine these people had, Tally evidently wasn't fitting into it very well. And she had a feeling that if they decided she wasn't really a god, that would only leave one other category: outsider.

  And outsiders got their heads caved in.

  "Forgive us," he said. "We don't know your name. I am Andrew Simpson Smith."

  A strange name for a strange situation, she thought. "I'm Tally Youngblood."

  "Young Blood," he said, beginning to look a little happier. "So, you are a young god?"