Peris and Fausto went over to smell it. They’d never been out of the city, except for school trips to the Rusty Ruins. They certainly hadn’t gotten as far as the Smoke, where everyone had to work all day making stuff, and growing (or even killing) their own food, and everyone stayed ugly after their sixteenth birthday. Ugly until they died, even.
Of course, the Smoke didn’t exist anymore, thanks to Tally and Special Circumstances.
“Hey, I know, Tally!” Shay said. “Let’s go as Smokies tonight!”
“That would be totally criminal!” Fausto said, his eyes full of admiration.
The three looked at Tally, all of them thrilled with the idea, and even though another nasty ping went through her, she knew it would be bogus not to agree. And that with a totally bubbly costume like a real-life Smokey sweater to wear, there was no way anyone would vote against her, because Tally Youngblood was a natural Crim.
BASH
The bash was in Valentino Mansion, the oldest building in New Pretty Town. It sprawled along the river only a few stories high, but was topped by a transmission tower visible halfway across the island. Inside, the walls were made of real stone, so the rooms couldn’t talk, but the mansion had a long history of giant and fabulous bashes. The wait to become a Valentino resident was at least forever.
Peris, Fausto, Shay, and Tally walked down through the pleasure gardens, which were already bubbling with people headed to the bash. Tally saw an angel with beautiful feathered wings that must have been requisitioned months ago, which was so cheating, and a bunch of new pretties wearing fat-suits and masks that gave them triple chins. A mostly naked clique of Bashers were pretending to be pre-Rusties, building bonfires and drumming, establishing their own little satellite party, which was what Bashers always did.
Peris and Fausto kept arguing about exactly when to light themselves on fire again. They wanted to make an entrance but also save their sparklers for the other Crims. As they got closer to the mansion’s noise and glimmer, Tally’s nerves started to jump. The Smokey costumes didn’t look like much. Tally wore her old sweater and Shay a copy, along with rough pants, knapsacks, and handmade-looking shoes that Tally had described to the hole in the wall, remembering someone wearing them in the Smoke. For unbathed authenticity they had rubbed dirt into their clothes and faces, which had seemed bubbly during the walk down, but now just felt dirty.
At the door were two Valentinos dressed up as wardens, making sure no one got inside without a costume. They stopped Fausto and Peris at first, but laughed when the two set themselves on fire, waving them through. They just shrugged at Shay and Tally, but let them in.
“Wait till the other Crims see us,” Shay said. “They’ll get it.”
The four pushed through the crowds and into a total confusion of costumes. Tally saw snowmen, soldiers, thumbgame characters, and a whole Pretty Committee of scientists carrying facegraphs. Historical figures were everywhere in crazy clothes from all over the world, which reminded Tally how different from one another everyone used to look back when there were way too many people. A lot of the older new pretties were dressed in modern costumes: doctors, wardens, builders, or politicians—whatever they hoped to become after having the middle-pretty operation. A bunch of firefighters laughingly tried to extinguish Peris’s and Fausto’s flames, but only succeeded in annoying them.
“Where are they?” Shay kept asking, but the stone walls didn’t answer. “This is so missing. How do people live here?”
“I think they carry handphones all the time,” Fausto said. “We should have requed one.”
The problem was that in Valentino Mansion you couldn’t just call people by asking—the rooms were old and dumb, so it was like being outside. Tally placed one palm against the wall as they walked, liking how cool the ancient stones felt. For a moment, they reminded her of things out in the wild, rough and silent and unchanging. She wasn’t really dying to find the other Crims; they’d all be looking at her and wondering how to vote.
They wandered the crowded hallways, peeking into rooms full of old-timey astronauts and explorers. Tally counted five Cleopatras and two Lillian Russells. There were even a few Rudolph Valentinos; it turned out the mansion was named after a natural pretty from back in the Rusty days.
Other cliques had organized theme costumes—teams of Jocks carrying hockey sticks and wobbly on hoverskates, Twisters as sick puppies wearing big cone-shaped plastic collars. And of course the Swarm was everywhere, all jabbering to one another on their interface rings. Swarmers had skintennas surged into them so they could call one another from anywhere, even inside Valentino Mansion’s dumb walls. The other cliques always made fun of the Swarm, who were afraid to go anywhere except in giant groups. They were all dressed as houseflies with big bug eyes, which at least was sense-making.
No other Crims appeared among the tumult of costumes, and Tally began to wonder if they’d all ditched the party rather than vote for her. Paranoid thoughts began to plague her, and she kept catching glimpses of someone lurking in the shadows, half-hidden by the crowds, but always there. Every time she turned around, though, the gray silk costume slipped out of sight.
Tally couldn’t tell whether it was a boy or a girl. The figure wore a mask, scary but also beautiful, its cruel wolf eyes glinting in the low, flickering party lights. The plastic face jarred something in Tally, a painful memory that took a moment to gel.
Then she realized what the costume was supposed to be: an agent of Special Circumstances.
Tally leaned back against one of the cool stone walls, remembering the gray silk coveralls that Specials wore and the cruel pretty faces they were given. The sight made her head spin, which was the way Tally always felt when she thought back to her days in the wild.
Seeing the costume here in New Pretty Town didn’t make any sense. Besides herself and Shay, hardly anyone had ever seen a Special. To most people they were just rumors and urban legends, blamed whenever anything weird happened. Specials kept themselves well hidden. Their job was to protect the city from outside threats, like soldiers and spies back in the days of the Rusties, but only total criminals like Tally Youngblood ever met them in person.
Still, someone had done a pretty good job on the costume. He or she must have seen a real Special at some point. But why was the figure following her? Every time Tally turned, it was there, moving with the terrible and predatory grace she remembered from being hunted through the ruins of the Smoke on that awful day when they had come to take her back to the city.
She shook her head. Thinking of those days always brought up bogus memories that didn’t fit together. The Specials hadn’t hunted Tally, of course. Why would they? They’d rescued her, bringing her home after she’d left the city to track down Shay. The thought of Specials always left her spinning, but that was just because their cruel faces were designed to freak you out, the same way that looking at regular pretties made you feel good.
Maybe the figure wasn’t following her at all; maybe it was more than one person, some clique all dressed the same and spread out across the party, which made it feel like one of them was lurking her. That idea was a lot less crazy-making.
She caught up with the others, and joked with them as they searched for the rest of the Crims. But as Tally kept one eye out for figures in the shadows, she slowly became sure that it wasn’t a clique. There was always exactly one, not talking to anybody, totally lurking. And the way the figure moved, so gracefully . . .
Tally told herself to calm down. Special Circumstances had no reason to follow her. And it made no sense for a Special to come to a costume party dressed as a Special.
She forced a laugh from herself. It was probably one of the other Crims playing a joke on her, one who’d heard Shay’s and Tally’s stories a hundred times and knew all about Special Circumstances. If so, it would be totally bogus to go all brain-missing in front of everyone. Better to ignore the fake Special altogether.
Tally looked down at her own costume, and wondered
if the Smokey clothes were helping to freak her out. Shay had been right: The smell of the old, handmade sweater brought back their time outside the city, days of backbreaking work and nights staying warm by the campfire, mingled with memories of the aging ugly faces that still brought her awake screaming sometimes.
Living in the Smoke had totally done a job on Tally’s head.
No one else mentioned the figure. Were they all in on the joke? Fausto kept worrying that his sparklers were going to run out before any of the other Crims saw them. “Let’s see if they’re in one of the spires,” he said.
“At least we can call them from a real building,” Peris agreed.
Shay snorted and headed toward the nearest door. “Anything to get out of this bogus pile of rocks.”
The party was spilling outside, anyway, expanding beyond the ancient stone walls. Shay led them toward a party spire at random, through a cluster of Hairdos with beehive wigs, each with its own swarm of bumblebees, which were really micro-lifters painted yellow and black in holding patterns around their heads.
“They didn’t get the buzzing sound right,” Fausto said, but Tally could tell he was impressed by the costumes. The sparklers in his hair were sputtering out, and people were looking at him like, huh?
From inside the party tower, Peris called Zane, who said the Crims were all right upstairs. “Good guess, Shay.”
The four of them crammed into the elevator with a surgeon, a trilobite, and two drunken hockey players struggling to stay upright on hoverskates.
“Get that nervous look off your face, Tally-wa,” said Shay, squeezing her shoulder. “You’ll be in, no problem. Zane likes you.”
Tally managed a smile, wondering if that was really true. Zane was always asking her about ugly days, but he did that with everyone, sucking up the Crims’ stories with his gold-flecked eyes. Did he really think that Tally Youngblood was anything special?
It was clear that someone did—as the elevator doors closed, Tally glimpsed gray silk slipping gracefully through the crowd.
LURKER
Most of the other Crims had come as lumberjacks, dressed in plaid and grotesquely muscle-padded, holding big fake chainsaws and glasses of champagne. There were also butchers, a few smokers who’d made their own fake cigarettes, and a hangman with a long noose draped over her shoulder. Zane, who knew a lot about history, had come as some dictator’s assistant who wasn’t totally fashion-missing, all in tight black with a bubbly red armband. He’d done costume surge to make his lips thin and cheeks sunken, which made him look kind of like a Special.
They all laughed at Peris’s costume, and tried to relight Fausto, but only managed to burn a few wisps of his hair, which was totally bogus-smelling. It took an anxious moment for them to figure out Tally’s and Shay’s costumes, but soon the other Crims were crowding in to touch the rough fibers of the handmade sweater and asking if it was itchy. (It was, but Tally shook her head.)
Shay stood close to Zane and got him to notice her new eye surge.
“Think they’re pretty-making?” she asked.
“I give them fifty milli-Helens,” he said.
This went totally missing on everyone.
“A milli-Helen is enough beauty to launch exactly one ship,” Zane explained, and the older Crims all laughed. “Fifty’s pretty good.”
Shay smiled, Zane’s praise lighting her face up like champagne.
Tally tried to be bubbly, but the thought of the costumed Special lurking her was too dizzy-making. After a few minutes, she escaped onto the party spire’s balcony to fill her lungs with cold, fresh air.
A few hot-air balloons were tethered to the spire, hovering like huge black moons in the sky. The Hot-airs riding in one gondola were shooting roman candles at the others, laughing as the safety flames roared across the darkness. Then one of the balloons began to rise, the roar of its burner audible above the party noise, its tether dropping to slap against the spire. It lifted on a tiny finger of flame, finally disappearing into the distance. If Shay hadn’t introduced her to the Crims, Tally figured she would have been a Hot-air. They were always drifting off into the night and landing at random places, calling a hovercar to pick them up from some distant suburb or even past the city limits.
Staring out over the river toward the darkness of Uglyville made Tally’s brain much less spinning. It was strange. Her time in the wild was so fuzzy, but Tally could perfectly remember being a young ugly, watching the lights of New Pretty Town from her dorm window and dying to turn sixteen. She had always imagined herself here on this side, in some high tower, with fireworks going off around her, surrounded by pretties and pretty herself.
Of course, the Tally of those fantasies had usually been wearing a ball gown—not a woolen sweater and work pants, her face smeared with dirt. She fingered a thread working its way free of the weave, wishing that Shay hadn’t found the sweater tonight. Tally wanted to leave the Smoke behind, to escape all the tangled memories of running and hiding and feeling like a betrayer. She hated glancing every minute at the elevator door, wondering if the costumed Special had followed her up here. She wanted to feel totally belonging somewhere, not waiting for the next disaster to strike.
Maybe what Shay kept saying was right, and tonight’s vote would fix all that. The Crims were one of the tightest cliques in New Pretty Town. You had to be voted in, and once you were a Crim, you could always depend on friends and parties and bubbly conversation. No more running for Tally.
The only catch was, no one could join who hadn’t been totally tricky in their ugly days, with good stories to tell about sneaking out and hoverboarding all night and running away. Crims were pretties who hadn’t forgotten being uglies, who still enjoyed the practical jokes and criminal tricks that made Uglyville, in its own way, bubbly.
“What would you give the view?” It was Zane, suddenly next to her, looking all of his two-meter maximum pretty height in the ancient black uniform.
“Give it?”
“A hundred milli-Helens? Five hundred? Maybe a whole Helen?”
Tally took a steadying breath, looking down at the dark river. “I’d give it none. It’s Uglyville, after all.”
Zane chuckled. “Now, Tally-wa, there’s no reason to be nasty about our ugly little brothers and sisters. It’s not their fault they aren’t as pretty as you.” He pushed a stray lock of Tally’s hair back around her ear.
“Not them, the place. Uglyville is a prison.” The words felt wrong in her mouth, too serious for a bash.
But Zane didn’t seem to mind. “You escaped, didn’t you?” He stroked the sweater’s strange fibers, like the rest of them kept doing. “Was the Smoke any better?”
Tally wondered if he wanted a real answer. She was nervous about saying something bogus. If Zane thought Tally was missing, vetoes would rain down no matter what Shay and Peris had promised.
She looked up into his eyes. They were a shimmering metallic gold, reflecting the fireworks like tiny mirrors, and something behind them seemed to pull at Tally. Not just the usual pretty magic, but something that felt serious, as if the bash around them had disappeared. Zane always listened raptly to her Smoke stories. He’d heard them all by now, but maybe there was something more he wanted to know.
“I left the night before my sixteenth birthday,” she said. “So I wasn’t exactly escaping Uglyville.”
“That’s right.” Zane released her from his gaze and looked out across the river. “You were running from the operation.”
“I was following Shay. I had to stay ugly to find her.”
“To rescue her,” he said, then trained his golden eyes on her again. “Was that really it?”
Tally nodded carefully, last night’s champagne spinning her head. Or maybe tonight’s. She looked at the empty glass in her hand and wondered how many she’d had.
“It was just a thing I had to do.” As she said the words, Tally knew that they sounded bogus.
“A special circumstance?” Zane asked, his smile wr
y.
Tally’s eyebrows lifted. She wondered what tricks Zane had pulled back when he was an ugly. He didn’t tell that many stories himself. Though he wasn’t that much older than her, Zane never seemed to have to prove that he was a real Crim, he just was.
Even with his lips thinned by costume surge, he was beautiful. His face had been sculpted into more extreme shapes than most, as if the doctors had wanted to push the Pretty Committee’s specs to the limit. His cheekbones were as sharp as arrowheads underneath his flesh, and his eyebrows arched absurdly high when he was amused. Tally saw with sudden clarity that if any of his features were shifted a few millimeters he would look terrible, and yet at the same time it was impossible to imagine that he had ever been an ugly.
“Did you ever go to the Rusty Ruins?” she asked. “Back when you were . . . young?”
“Almost every night, last winter.”
“In winter?”
“I love the ruins covered with snow,” he said. “It makes the edges softer, adding mega-Helens to the view.”
“Oh.” Tally remembered traveling across the wild in early autumn, how cold it had been. “Sounds totally . . . freezing.”
“I could never get anyone else to come with me.” His eyes narrowed. “When you talk about the ruins, you never mention meeting anyone there.”
“Meeting someone?” Tally closed her eyes, finding herself suddenly balance-missing. She leaned against the balcony rail and took a deep breath.
“Yeah,” he said. “Did you ever?”
The empty champagne glass slipped from her hand and tumbled into the blackness.
“Look out below,” Zane murmured, a smile on his lips.
A tinkling crash rose up from the darkness, surprised laughter spreading from it like ripples from a stone in water. It sounded a thousand kilometers away.
Tally took in more breaths of the cold night air, trying to regain her composure. Her stomach was doing flip-flops. It was so shaming to be like this, about to throw breakfast after a few lousy glasses of champagne.
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