Pretties

by Scott Westerfeld

  “Oh. I really didn’t mean to screw things up for you.”

  “It’s not your fault. I waited too long.” Tally swallowed, wondering if Zane would ever find out what happened. Would he think she’d fallen to her death? Or would he guess that she’d chickened out, like Peris?

  Whatever he thought, Tally saw their future fading out, disappearing like the distant lights of the city behind them. Who knew what Special Circumstances would do to her brain when they caught her again?

  She looked at Peris. “I really thought you wanted to come.”

  “Listen, Tally. I just got caught up in everything. Being a Crim was exciting and you were my friends, my clique. What was I supposed to do? Argue against running away? Arguing’s bogus.”

  She shook her head. “I thought you were bubbly, Peris.”

  “I am, Tally. But tonight is about as bubbly as I want to get. I like breaking the rules, but living out there?” He waved his hand at the wild below them, a cold, unfriendly sea of darkness.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before now?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it wasn’t until we got up here that I realized you guys were so serious about . . . never coming back.”

  Tally closed her eyes, remembering what having a pretty mind was like—everything vague and fuzzy, the world nothing but a source of entertainment, the future nothing but a blur. A few tricks weren’t enough to make everyone bubbly, she supposed; you had to want your mind to change. Maybe some people had always been pretty-heads, even back before the operation had been invented.

  Maybe some people were happier being that way.

  “But now you can stay with me,” he said, putting his arm around her. “It’ll be like it was supposed to be. You and me pretty—best friends forever.”

  Tally shook her head, a sickening feeling sweeping over her. “I am not staying, Peris. Even if they take me back tonight, I’ll find a way to escape.”

  “Why are you so unhappy there?”

  She sighed, looking out over the darkness. Zane and Fausto would already be headed toward the ruins, thinking she wasn’t far behind. How had she let this opportunity slip away? The city always seemed to claim her in the end. Was she really like Peris, somewhere deep inside?

  “Why am I unhappy?” Tally repeated softly. “Because the city makes you the way they want you to be, Peris. And I want to be myself. That’s why.”

  He squeezed her shoulder and gave her a sad look. “But people are better now than they used to be. Maybe they have good reasons for changing us, Tally.”

  “Their reasons don’t mean anything unless I have a choice, Peris. And they don’t give anyone a choice.” Tally shook his hand from her shoulder, staring back at the distant city. A set of winking lights was rising into the air, a fleet of hovercars gathering. She remembered that the Specials’ cars were held aloft by spinning blades, like the Rusties’ ancient helicopters, so they could fly beyond the grid. They must be headed this way, pursuing the final signals of the cuffs.

  She had to get out of this balloon now.

  Before he’d jumped, Fausto had tied off the descent cord, and hot air was spilling from the envelope every moment. But the balloon, superheated as they’d burned off the cuffs, was losing altitude so slowly . . . the ground hardly looked any closer.

  Then Tally saw the river.

  It stretched out below them, catching moonlight like a silver snake, winding out of the ore-rich mountains to make its way toward the sea. On its bed would be centuries’ worth of metal deposits, enough to make her hoverboard fly. Maybe enough to catch her fall.

  Maybe she could get her future back.

  She pulled her board back up onto the rail. “I’m going.”

  “But, Tally. You can’t—”

  “The river.”

  Peris looked down, his eyes wide. “It looks so small. What if you miss?”

  “I won’t.” She gritted her teeth. “You’ve seen those formation bungee jumpers, haven’t you? They’ve only got their arms and legs to guide themselves down. I’ve got a whole hoverboard. It’ll be like having wings!”

  “You’re crazy!”

  “I’m leaving.” She kissed Peris quickly, then threw one leg over the rail.

  “Tally!” He grabbed her hand. “You could die! I don’t want to lose you. . . .”

  She shook him off violently, and Peris took a fearful step back. Pretties didn’t like conflict. Pretties didn’t take risks. Pretties didn’t say no.

  Tally was no longer pretty. “You already have,” she said.

  And, clutching her hoverboard, she threw herself into the void.

  Part III

  OUTSIDE

  The beauty of the world . . . has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

  —Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

  DESCENT

  Tally dropped into silence, spinning out of control.

  After the stillness in the balloon, the rush of passing air built around her with unexpected strength, almost tearing the hover-board from Tally’s hands. She held it tightly to her chest, but the wind’s fingers continued to search for purchase, hungry to pry away her only hope of survival. She clasped her hands around the board’s underbelly, kicking her legs, trying to control the spinning. Gradually, the dark horizon steadied.

  But Tally was upside down, looking up at the stars and hanging from the board. She could see the dark orb of the balloon above. Then its flame ignited, giving the envelope a silvery glow against the darkness, like a huge, dull moon in the sky. She guessed that Peris was headed upward to throw off the pursuit. At least he was trying to help.

  His change of heart stung her, but she didn’t have time to worry about it, not while plummeting toward the earth.

  Tally struggled to turn herself over, but the hoverboard was wider than she was—it caught the air like a sail, threatening to pull itself from her grasp. It was like trying to carry a large kite in a strong wind, except that if she lost control of this particular kite, she’d be splattered all over the ground in about sixty seconds.

  Tally tried to relax, letting herself hang there. Something was tugging at her wrist, she realized. Up here in the void, the board’s lifters might be useless for flying, but they would still interact with the metal in her crash bracelets.

  She adjusted her left bracelet to maximize the connection. Her grip on the board made surer, she straightened out her right arm into the rushing air. It was like riding in her parents’ groundcar as a littlie, her hand stuck out a window. Flattening her palm increased the resistance, and Tally found herself slowly beginning to turn over.

  A few seconds later, the hoverboard was beneath her.

  Tally swallowed at the sight of the earth spread out below, vast and dark and hungry. The rushing cold seemed to cut straight through her coat.

  She’d been falling for what felt like forever, but the ground didn’t look any closer. There was nothing to give it scale except the winding river, still no bigger than a piece of ribbon. Tally angled her outstretched palm experimentally, and watched the curve of moonlit water turn clockwise beneath her. She pulled her arm in, and the river steadied.

  Tally grinned. At least she had some control over her wild descent.

  As she fell, the silvery band of river grew in size, first slowly, then faster, the dark horizon of earth expanding like some huge predator advancing toward her, blotting out the starlit sky. Clinging to the hoverboard with both hands, Tally discovered that her outstretched legs could guide her descent, keeping the river directly below her.

  And then in the last ten seconds, she began to realize how large the river was, its surface wide and troubled. She saw things moving in it.

  It grew, faster and faster. . . .

  When the board’s lifters kicked in, it was like a door slamming in her face, flattening her nose and breaking open her lower lip, the taste of blood instantly in her mouth. Her wrists were twisted cruelly by the crash bracelets, and her mo
mentum squashed her against the braking hoverboard, forcing the breath from her lungs like a giant vice. She struggled to pull in a breath.

  The hoverboard was slowing rapidly, but the river’s surface still grew, stretching farther in all directions like a huge mirror full of starlight, until . . .

  Slap!

  The board struck the water like the flat of a giant hand, catching Tally’s body with another battering jolt, an explosion of light and sound filling her head. And then she was underwater, ears filled with a dull roar. She let go of the board and clawed for the surface, her lungs emptied by the impact. Forcing her eyes open, Tally saw only the faintest glimmer of light filtering down through the murky river. Her arms struggled weakly, and the light grew slowly closer. Finally, she broke into the air, gasping and coughing.

  The river raged around her, the swift current kicking up whitecaps in every direction. She dog-paddled hard, the weight of her pack trying to pull her back under. Her lungs sucked in air, and she coughed violently, tasting blood in her mouth.

  Turning from side to side, Tally realized that she hit her mark too well—she was in the dead center of the river, fifty meters from either shore. She swore and kept paddling, waiting for a tug on her crash bracelets.

  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 hover-boards 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 hoverboard 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 air 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.