She reached one of the cars and peeked into its open cargo door, finding nothing but pieces of packing foam shifting in the soft breeze. A few more steps brought her to the window of the passenger cabin, also empty. She reached for the door handle.
A man's voice called from behind her.
Tally froze. After two weeks of sleeping rough, her clothes torn and dirty, she might pass for a villager from a distance. But once she turned around, her pretty face would give her away.
The voice called out again in the villagers' language, but it was inflected with a late pretty's gravelly air of authority. Footsteps were coming closer. Should she dive into the hovercar and try to make it away?
The words faded as the man grew closer. He had noticed her city clothes under all the dirt.
Tally turned around.
He was equipped like the others, with field glasses and a water bottle, his crumbly face a picture of surprise. He must have been sitting inside the other hovercar, moving a little slower than the rest of them — that's why he'd caught her.
"Good heavens!" he exclaimed, switching languages. "What are you doing out here?"
She blinked, pausing for a moment, a vacant look on her pretty face. "We were in a balloon."
"A balloon?"
"There was some kind of accident. But I don't remember exactly. …"
He took a step forward, then his nose wrinkled. Tally might look like a pretty, but she smelled like a savage. "I think I saw something on the feeds about balloons going wrong, but that was a couple of weeks ago! You couldn't have been here that…" He looked at her torn clothes, his nose wrinkling again. "But I suppose you have."
Tally shook her head. "I don't know how long it's been."
"You poor dear." Recovering from his surprise, he was now all late-pretty concern. "You're okay now. I'm Dr. Valen."
She smiled like a good pretty, realizing that this must be the Doctor. A bird-watcher probably wouldn't know the villagers' language, after all. This was the man in charge.
"It feels like I've been hiding out forever," she said. "There are all these crazy people out here."
"Yes, they can be quite dangerous." He shook his head, as if still not believing that a young city pretty had survived out here for so long. "You're lucky to have stayed clear of them."
"Who are they?"
"They're…part of a very important study."
"A study? Of what?"
He chuckled. "Now, that's all very complicated. Perhaps I should tell someone we've found you. I'm sure everyone's very anxious to know if you're okay. What's your name?"
"What are you studying out here?"
He blinked, perplexed that a new pretty was asking questions instead of whining about getting home. "Well, we're looking at certain fundamentals of… human nature."
"Of course. Like violence? Revenge."
He frowned. "Yes, in a manner of speaking. But how …?"
"I thought so." All at once, it was becoming clear. "You're studying violence, so you'd need a violent, brutal group of people, wouldn't you? You're an anthropologist?"
Confusion still played across his face. "Yes, but I'm also a doctor. A medical doctor. Are you sure you're all right?"
A realization hit Tally. "You're a brain doctor."
"We're called neurologists, actually." Dr. Valen warily turned to reach for the hovercar door. "But perhaps I should make that call. I didn't get your name."
"I didn't give it."
Her tone stopped him cold.
"Don't touch that door," she said.
He turned to face her again, his late-pretty composure crumbling. "But you're …"
"Pretty? Think again." She smiled. "I'm Tally Youngblood. My mind is very ugly. And I'm taking your car."
The Doctor was quite afraid of savages, it seemed — even beautiful ones.
He meekly allowed himself be locked into the cargo container of one of the hovercars, and handed over the take-off codes to the other. The security was nothing Tally couldn't have tricked herself, but it saved time. And the expression on Dr. Valen's face as he gave her the codes was pretty indeed. He was used to dealing with villagers in awe of his godhood. But one look at Tally's knife and he'd realized who was giving the orders.
The man answered a few more of Tally's questions, until no doubt remained in her mind what this reservation was all about. This had been the place where the operation had been developed, from which the first test subjects had been drawn. The purpose of the brain lesions was to deter violence and conflict, so who better to experiment on than people caught up in an endless blood feud? Like rabid enemies in a locked room, the tribes trapped within the ring of little men would reveal anything you wanted to know about the very human origins of bloodshed.
She shook her head. Poor Andrew. His whole world was an experiment, and his father had died in a conflict that meant precisely nothing.
Tally paused a moment in the hovercar before taking off, familiarizing herself with the controls. They seemed about the same as a city car, but she had to remember that this one wasn't idiotproof — it would fly into a mountain if you told it to. She would have to be careful in the high spires of the ruins.
The first thing she did was put her boot through the communication system; she didn't want the car telling the city authorities where it was.
"Tally!"
She started at the shout, peering out through the front windows. But it was only Andrew, and he was alone. She slid out of the drivers door, waving for him to be silent and pointing at the other car. "I've got the Doctor locked up," she hissed. "Don't let him hear your voice. What are you doing back here?"
He looked at the other hovercar, eyes widening at the thought of a god imprisoned within, and whispered, "I was sent back to see where he was. He said he would be just behind us."
"Well, he's not coming. And I'm about to leave." He nodded. "Of course. Good-bye, Young Blood."
"Good-bye." She smiled. "I won't forget all your help." Andrew was staring into her eyes, the familiar pretty-awed expression coming over his face. "I'll not forget you, either."
"Don't look at me that way."
"What way, Tally?"
"Like a … god. We're just humans, Andrew." He looked at the ground, nodding slowly. "I know."
"Not very perfect humans, some of us worse than you could imagine. We've done awful things to your people for a long time now. We've used you." He shrugged. "What can we do? You are so powerful."
"Yeah, we are." She took his hand. "But keep trying to get past the little men. The real world is huge. Maybe you can get far enough away that the Specials will stop looking for you. And I'll try to…" She didn't finish the promise. Try to do what?
A smile broke across Andrew's face, and he reached out to touch her flash tattoo. "You are bubbly now."
She nodded, swallowing.
"We will wait for you, Young Blood."
Tally blinked, then hugged him wordlessly. She slid back into the hovercar and started the rotors. As the whine of its engines built, she watched the birds scatter from the clearing, terrified by the roar of the gods' machine. Andrew backed away.
The car rose at her first touch on the controls, its power shuddering through her bones. The rotors whipped the treetops around her into a frenzy, but the car rose steadily, under control.
Tally looked down as the car cleared the trees, and saw Andrew waving up at her, his crooked, gap-toothed smile still hopeful. Tally knew that she would have to return, just like he'd said; she no longer had a choice. Someone had to help the people here escape the reservation, and they had no one else but Tally.
She sighed. At least one thing was consistent about her life: It just kept on getting more complicated.
The Ruins
Tally reached the sea while the sun was still rising, painting the water pink through the low clouds out on the horizon.
She angled the machine northward in a slow, even turn. As she'd expected, this out-of-city car had a scary tendenc
y to do whatever Tally asked of it. Her first turn had been sharp enough to bang her head against the drivers side window. This time, she was taking it easy.
As the car gradually climbed, she soon spotted the outskirts of the Rusty Ruins. A distance that would have taken a week on foot had shot by in a blur below Tally in less than an hour. When the sinuous shape of the ancient roller coaster came into view, she began to bank the craft inland.
Landing was the easy part. Tally pulled the emergency bar, the one they taught littlies to use if their driver had a heart attack or passed out. The car brought itself to a halt and began to descend. Tally had picked a flat spot, one of the many giant concrete fields that the Rusties built to park their groundcars in.
The vehicle settled onto the weed-choked ground, and Tally opened her door the moment the car bumped to a stop. If the other scientists had found the Doctor and made some sort of emergency call, the Specials would already be looking for her. The more distance she put between herself and the stolen hovercar, the better.
The spires of the ruins rose up before Tally, the tallest about an hour away on foot. She was, of course, arriving almost two weeks after the others. But hopefully they hadn't given up on her, or maybe they'd left a message of some kind.
Surely Zane would have stayed, waiting in the tallest building, unwilling to leave while there was still a chance she would show up.
Unless, of course, their escape had come too late for him.
Tally shouldered her backpack and started to walk.
The ruined streets were full of ghosts.
Tally had hardly ever walked in the city before. She had always cruised around on a hoverboard — ten meters up, at least — avoiding the burned-out cars down at ground level. In the last days of Rusty civilization, an artificial plague had spread across the world. It didn't infect human beings or animals, just petroleum, reproducing itself in the gas tanks of groundcars and jet aircraft, slowly making the infected oil unstable. Plague-transformed petroleum burst into flame when it came into contact with oxygen, and the oily smoke from the sudden fires spread the bacterial spores on the wind, into more gas tanks, more oil fields, until it had reached every Rusty machine across the globe.
The Rusties really hadn't liked walking, it turned out. Even after they'd figured out what the plague was doing, panicked citizens still jumped into their funny, rubber-wheeled groundcars, thinking to escape into the wild. If Tally looked hard enough, she could see crumbling skeletons through the smeared windows of the cars jammed onto the ruins' streets. Only a few of the people back then had been smart enough to walk out, and strong enough to survive the death of their world. Whoever had engineered the plague had definitely understood the Rusties' weakness.
"Boy, you guys were stupid," Tally muttered at the car windows, but calling them names didn't make the dead Rusties any less ominous. The few intact skulls just stared back at her with empty expressions.
Farther into the dead city, the buildings grew taller and taller, their steel frameworks rising up like the skeletons of giant and extinct creatures. Tally took a winding path through the narrow streets, looking for the tallest building in the ruins. The huge spire was easy to spot from a hover-board, but from the ground the city was a tangled maze.
Then she turned a corner and saw it, chunks of old concrete clinging to the towering matrix of steel beams, the empty windows gazing down at her, jagged shapes of bright sky showing through. This was definitely the place — Tally remembered when Shay had taken her up to its top the first time she'd come out to the Rusty Ruins. There was only one problem.
How was she going to get up?
The innards of the building had long since rotted away. There were no stairs, and hardly any floors to speak of. The steel frame made it perfect for a hoverboards magnetic lifters, but there was no way for a person to climb it without serious mountaineering gear. If Zane or the New Smokies had left a message for Tally, it would be up there, but she had no way of reaching it.
Tally sat down, suddenly exhausted. It was like the tower in her dream, without stairs or elevator, and she'd lost the key, which in this case was her hoverboard. All she could think of was to hike back to the stolen car and fly it up there. Maybe she could bring it close enough beside the building…but who would hold it in a steady hover while she climbed out onto the ancient steel frame?
For the thousandth time, Tally wished that her board hadn't been wrecked.
She stared up at the tower. What if no one was up there? What if, after traveling all this way, Tally Youngblood was still alone?
She got to her feet and yelled as loud as she could, "Heeeey!"
The sound echoed through the ruins, sending a flock of birds into flight from a distant rooftop.
"Hey! It's me!"
Once the echoes faded, there was no sound in answer. Tally's throat felt sore from yelling. She knelt to dig a safety flare out of her backpack. A fire would be pretty obvious down here in the shadows of the cavernous buildings.
She cracked the flare open, holding its hissing flame away from her face, then cried out again. "It's meeeee…Tally Youngblood!"
Something shifted in the sky above.
Tally blinked away the spots that the flare had left in her eyes and stared into the bright blue sky. A shape drifted away from the towering building, a tiny oval that began to grow slowly…
The underside of a hoverboard. Someone was coming down!
Tally tossed the flare onto a pile of rocks, her heart pounding, suddenly realizing she had no idea who was descending to meet her. How had she been so dimwitted? It could be anyone up there on the board. If the Specials had caught the other Crims and made them talk, they would know this was the planned meeting place, and Tally's latest escape was about to come to a sudden end.
She told herself to calm down. It was a hoverboard, after all, and only one. Surely if Specials had been lying in wait, they would have rushed out from every direction in a bunch of hovercars.
In any case, there was no point in panicking. She wasn't likely to escape on foot now. The only thing to do was wait. The safety flare sizzled out to a sputtering death while the hoverboard descended slowly, hugging the metal frame of the building. Once or twice, Tally thought she saw a face peering over the edge, but against the bright sky it could have been anyone.
When it was only ten meters overhead, Tally found the nerve to cry out again. "Hello?" Her voice sounded shaky in her ears.
"Tally…," someone called back, the voice familiar.
The hoverboard settled beside her, and Tally found herself staring into a thoroughly ugly face: the forehead too high, the smile crooked, a small scar cutting a white line through one eyebrow. She stared at him, blinking in the gloom of the broken city.
"David?" she said softly.
Faces
He stared at her, of course.
Even if she hadn't shouted out her name, David knew her voice. And he had been waiting for Tally, after all, so he must have known from the first cry who was down here. But the way he stared at her, it was as if he were seeing someone else.
"David," she said again. "It's me."
He nodded, still speechless. But it wasn't pretty-awe that had caught his tongue — that much Tally realized. His gaze seemed to be searching for something, trying to recognize what the operation had left of her old face, but his expression remained unsure…and a bit sad.
David was uglier than she remembered. In Tally's ugly-prince dreams, his imbalanced features had never been so disjointed, his unsurged teeth never so crooked or discolored. His blemishes weren't as bad as Andrew's, of course. He looked no worse than Sussy or Dex, city kids who'd grown up with toothpaste pills and sunblock patches.
But this was David, after all.
Even after her time with the villagers, many of them toothless and scarred, his face sent a shock through her. Not because he was hideous — he wasn't — but because he was simply…unimpressive.
Not an ugly prince. Just ugly.
All those memories had survived the operation, hidden somewhere inside her brain. But her life among the pretties must have changed something even more profound: the way she saw him, as if this wasn't the same David in front of her anymore.
Neither of them said anything for a while.
Finally, he cleared his throat. "We should probably get moving. They sometimes send patrols out around this time of day."
She looked at the ground. "Okay."
"I've got to do this first." He pulled a wandlike device from one pocket and swept it over her. It stayed silent.
"No bugs on me?" she said.
He shrugged. "Can't be too careful. You don't have a board?"
Tally shook her head. "It got damaged in the escape."
"Wow. Takes a lot to break a hoverboard."
"It was a long fall."
He smiled. "Same old Tally. I knew you'd show up, though. Mom said you'd probably…" He didn't finish.
"I'm fine." She looked up at him, unsure of how much to say. "Thanks for waiting."
They rode his board. Tally was taller than David now, so she stood behind him, hands around his waist. She'd abandoned her heavy crash bracelets before her long trek with Andrew Simpson Smith, but her sensor was still clipped to her belly ring, so the board could feel her center of gravity and compensate for the extra weight. Still, they went slowly at first.
The feel of David’s body, the way he leaned into the turns, was so familiar — even the smell of him set her memories spinning. (Tally didn't want to think about how she smelled, but he didn't seem to have noticed.) She was amazed at how much was coming back; her memories of him seemed to have been ready and waiting, and were all flooding in now that he stood next to her. Here on the board, with David turned away from her, Tally's body cried out to hold him tight. She wanted to take back all the stupid, pretty-minded thoughts she'd had at her first glimpse of his face.
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