“How much for the cat?” he asked.
Mr. Dodds was not to be deterred. “That little beast’s not a suitable pet for a nice boy like you, laddie. Vile temper it’s got.”
From the cage behind him came a hiss.
“Don’t believe a word he says.” The cat was sitting at the front of the cage, grasping the bars with its paws. “I’ve never bitten anyone.” It paused, then growled, “Well, no one that didn’t deserve to be bitten.” It gave Mr. Dodds a hard look, then turned imploring eyes to Ben. “You have to get me out of here—”
A heavy hand fell on Ben’s shoulder. He looked up to find the pet shop owner beaming at him benevolently. It was an unsettling sight. “Tell you what, laddie,” said Mr. Dodds, drawing Ben away from the cat’s cage. “I’ll do you a special deal on the fish: two for the price of one—how’s that? Can’t say fairer, can I? Mind you, I’ll go out of business if I keep letting my better nature get in the way!” The beam became a full, open grin. Mr. Dodds’s teeth were remarkably sharp, Ben noticed: more like a dog’s teeth than a human’s. Or even a shark’s…
“No, sir, Mr. Dodds, I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want the fish anymore, I want the cat. It’s”—he searched for a persuasive description—“really pretty.”
“Pretty?” The cat fairly squawked with indignation. “You might leave a chap a bit of dignity! Pretty, indeed. Bast’s teeth! How’d you like it if I called you pretty, eh?”
Mr. Dodds was frowning now, and his polite smile looked less than sincere. “Sorry, laddie, but you can’t have the cat,” he said through gritted teeth. “I’ve promised it elsewhere, and that’s that.”
“It hasn’t got a sold sign on it,” Ben pointed out reasonably.
The pet shop owner leaned toward him, his face dark with blood. “Now look here, laddie: This is my shop and I shall sell my stock to whomsoever I please. And I do not please to sell you this cat. All right?”
A terrible wail came from behind them. Everyone in the shop stopped what they were doing and stared. The cat was writhing around the cage, clutching its stomach and howling bloody murder. Ben ran to the side of the cage.
“What’s wrong?”
The little cat winked at him. “Don’t worry, I’ve a few tricks of my own up my fur….” Its voice rose in an earsplitting shriek.
Mr. Dodds glowered down at it. Then he bent down till his face was on a level with the cat’s and said quietly to it, “Don’t think this will save you. I know your game.”
A young woman carrying a baby in the crook of her arm looked very shocked at this hard-heartedness. She whispered something to her husband, who tapped Mr. Dodds on the shoulder.
“Excuse me,” said the man, “the kitten doesn’t look very well. Shouldn’t you be doing something for it?”
Mr. Dodds gave the man an oily, but forbidding, smile. “Terrible little playactor, this cat,” he said. “It’d do anything for a bit of attention.”
A big, elderly lady with colored spectacles bustled up and joined in. “Nonsense!” she cried. “Poor little thing. Animals always know when there’s something wrong with them.” She stuck a pudgy finger through the bars. The cat rolled weakly onto its side and nudged its head against her hand. “Aaaah,” she said. “They always know when a human is their best chance of survival too.”
Ben saw his chance. “I want to buy it and take it to the vet’s,” he said loudly. “But he won’t let me—keeps trying to sell me some expensive fish instead.”
Quite a crowd had gathered around them now and there was a lot of muttering and shaking of heads. Mr. Dodds looked angry and beset. The cat flashed Ben a knowing look.
“Oh, all right then,” Mr. Dodds said at last, gritting those terrible teeth. He smiled around at the crowd, then dropped an avuncular hand back onto Ben’s shoulder. Ben could feel the man’s fingernails biting into the skin beneath his jacket. They felt as hard and horny as claws. “Have the creature, then.”
When the other customers had drifted out of earshot, Mr. Dodds named his price. Not only did it include all the money Ben had saved for the Mongolian Fighting Fish, it also meant handing over his bus fare. Mr. Dodds took it of him with very bad grace and stomped off into the back of the shop to fetch a cardboard carrier. Ben leaned down to the cat. “I’ve no idea what’s going on here,” he said as sternly as he could manage. “So as soon as we’re out of here you’ve got some explaining to do. It’s taken me weeks to save that cash, and I don’t know what my parents will say when I come back with a talking cat and no fish.”
The cat rolled its eyes. “Just regard it as the first step to saving the world, okay? If it makes you feel any better. Now here he comes, so shut up and behave like a grateful customer.”
Ben did as he was told so well that in the end Mr. Dodds felt obliged to give him two free cans of cat food—“as a goodwill gesture”—and two minutes later Ben was out in the street with a cardboard box in his arms and the two cans balancing precariously on the top. As he walked slowly down Quinx Lane, Ben could feel Mr. Dodds’s eyes boring into his back until he turned the corner onto the High Street, where the bustle of traffic and shoppers made the last half hour feel even more bizarre. Ben was beginning to think he had experienced some sort of fit or waking dream when the box spoke to him.
“Thank you, Ben,” it said, and the unmistakable, gravelly voice was solemn. “You have, literally, saved my life.”
Ben held the box away from him so that he could peer in through the airholes. As if in response, a small pink muzzle emerged, sniffed once or twice, and withdrew again.
“You can talk, then,” Ben breathed. “I thought I might have been imagining it.”
“Everything talks, Ben,” the cat said enigmatically, “but it’s not everyone who can hear.”
Uglies
By Scott Westerfeld
Imagine a world where everyone is ugly until they turn sixteen. Only extreme cosmetic surgery can turn the uglies into pretties, who are then catapulted into Pretty Town, where their only obligation is to look good and have a really great time. Tally can’t wait for the day she turns pretty. Until she discovers there are other worlds, and other people, outside her own.
Uglies is the first book in Scott Westerfeld’s riveting, highly acclaimed Uglies trilogy. The adventure continues in Pretties and Specials.
SCOTT WESTERFELD’S young adult novels include The Secret Hour (a 2004 ALA Quick Pick) and Touching Darkness from the Midnighters trilogy, as well as So Yesterday, which was a 2004 ALA Best Book for Young Adults, and his latest book, Peeps. He alternates summers between Sydney, Australia, and New York City.
Visit www.simonsaysteen.com or www.scottwesterfeld.com for more on Scott Westerfeld, including a Q&A, excerpts, and information on the next two books in the Uglies trilogy.
AVAILABLE NOW
Simon Pulse
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New Pretty Town
The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit.
Of course, Tally thought, you’d have to feed your cat only salmon-flavored cat food for a while, to get the pinks right. The scudding clouds did look a bit fishy, rippled into scales by a high-altitude wind. As the light faded, deep blue gaps of night peered through like an upside-down ocean, bottomless and cold.
Any other summer, a sunset like this would have been beautiful. But nothing had been beautiful since Peris turned pretty. Losing your best friend sucks, even if it’s only for three months and two days.
Tally Youngblood was waiting for darkness.
She could see New Pretty Town through her open window. The party towers were already lit up, and snakes of burning torches marked flickering pathways through the pleasure gardens. A few hot-air balloons pulled at their tethers against the darkening pink sky, their passengers shooting safety fireworks at other balloons and passing parasailers. Laughter and music skipped across the water like rocks thrown with just the right spin, their edges just as sharp against Tally’s nerves.
&nbs
p; Around the outskirts of the city, cut off from town by the black oval of the river, everything was in darkness. Everyone ugly was in bed by now.
Tally took off her interface ring and said, “Good night.”
“Sweet dreams, Tally,” said the room.
She chewed up a toothbrush pill, punched her pillows, and shoved an old portable heater—one that produced about as much warmth as a sleeping, Tally-size human being—under the covers.
Then she crawled out the window.
Outside, with the night finally turning coal black above her head, Tally instantly felt better. Maybe this was a stupid plan, but anything was better than another night awake in bed feeling sorry for herself. On the familiar leafy path down to the water’s edge, it was easy to imagine Peris stealing silently behind her, stifling laughter, ready for a night of spying on the new pretties. Together. She and Peris had figured out how to trick the house minder back when they were twelve, when the three-month difference in their ages seemed like it would never matter.
“Best friends for life,” Tally muttered, fingering the tiny scar on her right palm.
The water glistened through the trees, and she could hear the wavelets of a passing river skimmer’s wake slapping at the shore. She ducked, hiding in the reeds. Summer was always the best time for spying expeditions. The grass was high, it was never cold, and you didn’t have to stay awake through school the next day.
Of course, Peris could sleep as late as he wanted now. Just one of the advantages of being pretty.
The old bridge stretched massively across the water, its huge iron frame as black as the sky. It had been built so long ago that it held up its own weight, without any support from hoverstruts. A million years from now, when the rest of the city had crumbled, the bridge would probably remain like a fossilized bone.
Unlike the other bridges into New Pretty Town, the old bridge couldn’t talk—or report trespassers, more importantly. But even silent, the bridge had always seemed very wise to Tally, as quietly knowing as some ancient tree.
Her eyes were fully adjusted to the darkness now, and it took only seconds to find the fishing line tied to its usual rock. She yanked it, and heard the splash of the rope tumbling from where it had been hidden among the bridge supports. She kept pulling until the invisible fishing line turned into wet, knotted cord. The other end was still tied to the iron framework of the bridge. Tally pulled the rope taut and lashed it to the usual tree.
She had to duck into the grass once more as another river skimmer passed. The people dancing on its deck didn’t spot the rope stretched from bridge to shore. They never did. New pretties were always having too much fun to notice little things out of place.
When the skimmer’s lights had faded, Tally tested the rope with her whole weight. One time it had pulled loose from the tree, and both she and Peris had swung downward, then up and out over the middle of the river before falling off, tumbling into the cold water. She smiled at the memory, realizing she would rather be on that expedition—soaking wet in the cold with Peris—than dry and warm tonight, but alone.
Hanging upside down, hands and knees clutching the knots along the rope, Tally pulled herself up into the dark framework of the bridge, then stole through its iron skeleton and across to New Pretty Town.
She knew where Peris lived from the one message he had bothered to send since turning pretty. Peris hadn’t given an address, but Tally knew the trick for decoding the random-looking numbers at the bottom of a ping. They led to someplace called Garbo Mansion in the hilly part of town.
Getting there was going to be tricky. In their expeditions, Tally and Peris had always stuck to the waterfront, where vegetation and the dark backdrop of Uglyville made it easy to hide. But now Tally was headed into the center of the island, where floats and revelers populated the bright streets all night. Brand-new pretties like Peris always lived where the fun was most frantic.
Tally had memorized the map, but if she made one wrong turn, she was toast. Without her interface ring, she was invisible to vehicles. They’d just run her down like she was nothing.
Of course, Tally was nothing here.
Worse, she was ugly. But she hoped Peris wouldn’t see it that way. Wouldn’t see her that way.
Tally had no idea what would happen if she got caught. This wasn’t like being busted for “forgetting” her ring, skipping classes, or tricking the house into playing her music louder than allowed. Everyone did that kind of stuff, and everyone got busted for it. But she and Peris had always been very careful about not getting caught on these expeditions. Crossing the river was serious business.
It was too late to worry now, though. What could they do to her, anyway? In three months she’d be a pretty herself.
Tally crept along the river until she reached a pleasure garden, and slipped into the darkness beneath a row of weeping willows. Under their cover she made her way alongside a path lit by little guttering flames.
A pretty couple wandered down the path. Tally froze, but they were clueless, too busy staring into each other’s eyes to see her crouching in the darkness. Tally silently watched them pass, getting that warm feeling she always got from looking at a pretty face. Even when she and Peris used to spy on them from the shadows, giggling at all the stupid things the pretties said and did, they couldn’t resist staring. There was something magic in their large and perfect eyes, something that made you want to pay attention to whatever they said, to protect them from any danger, to make them happy. They were so…pretty.
The two disappeared around the next bend, and Tally shook her head to clear the mushy thoughts away. She wasn’t here to gawk. She was an infiltrator, a sneak, an ugly. And she had a mission.
The garden stretched up into town, winding like a black river through the bright party towers and houses. After a few more minutes of creeping, she startled a couple hidden among the trees (it was a pleasure garden, after all), but in the darkness they couldn’t see her face, and only teased her as she mumbled an apology and slipped away. She hadn’t seen too much of them, either, just a tangle of perfect legs and arms.
Finally, the garden ended, a few blocks from where Peris lived.
Tally peered out from behind a curtain of hanging vines. This was farther than she and Peris had ever been together, and as far as her planning had taken her. There was no way to hide herself in the busy, well-lit streets. She put her fingers up to her face, felt the wide nose and thin lips, the too-high forehead and tangled mass of frizzy hair. One step out of the underbrush and she’d be spotted. Her face seemed to burn as the light touched it. What was she doing here? She should be back in the darkness of Uglyville, awaiting her turn.
But she had to see Peris, had to talk to him. She wasn’t quite sure why, exactly, except that she was sick of imagining a thousand conversations with him every night before she fell asleep. They’d spent every day together since they were littlies, and now…nothing. Maybe if they could just talk for a few minutes, her brain would stop talking to imaginary Peris. Three minutes might be enough to hold her for three months.
Tally looked up and down the street, checking for side yards to slink through, dark doorways to hide in. She felt like a rock climber facing a sheer cliff, searching for cracks and handholds.
The traffic began to clear a little, and she waited, rubbing the scar on her right palm. Finally, Tally sighed and whispered, “Best friends forever,” and took a step forward into the light.
An explosion of sound came from her right, and she leaped back into the darkness, stumbling among the vines, coming down hard on her knees in the soft earth, certain for a few seconds that she’d been caught.
But the cacophony organized itself into a throbbing rhythm. It was a drum machine making its lumbering way down the street. Wide as a house, it shimmered with the movement of its dozens of mechanical arms, bashing away at every size of drum. Behind it trailed a growing bunch of revelers, dancing along with the beat, drinking and throwing their empty bottles to shatter aga
inst the huge, impervious machine.
Tally smiled. The revelers were wearing masks.
The machine was lobbing the masks out the back, trying to coax more followers into the impromptu parade: devil faces and horrible clowns, green monsters and gray aliens with big oval eyes, cats and dogs and cows, faces with crooked smiles or huge noses.
The procession passed slowly, and Tally pulled herself back into the vegetation. A few of the revelers passed close enough that the sickly sweetness from their bottles filled her nose. A minute later, when the machine had trundled half a block farther, Tally jumped out and snatched up a discarded mask from the street. The plastic was soft in her hand, still warm from having been stamped into shape inside the machine a few seconds before.
Before she pressed it against her face, Tally realized that it was the same color as the cat-vomit pink of the sunset, with a long snout and two pink little ears. Smart adhesive flexed against her skin as the mask settled onto her face.
Tally pushed her way through the drunken dancers, out the other side of the procession, and ran down a side street toward Garbo Mansion, wearing the face of a pig.
Best Friends Forever
Garbo Mansion was fat, bright, and loud.
It filled the space between a pair of party towers, a squat teapot between two slender glasses of champagne. Each of the towers rested on a single column no wider than an elevator. Higher up they swelled to five stories of circular balconies, crowded with new pretties. Tally climbed the hill toward the trio of buildings, trying to take in the view through the eye-holes of her mask.
Someone jumped, or was thrown, from one of the towers, screaming and flailing his arms. Tally gulped, forcing herself to watch all the way down, until the guy was caught by his bungee jacket a few seconds before splatting. He hover-bounced in the harness a few times, laughing, before being deposited softly on the ground, close enough to Tally that she could hear nervous hiccups breaking up his giggles. He’d been as scared as Tally.
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