Uglies (40 page)

People were scattered on the floor, a trail of them. The terrorists had been gunning us down as we ran.

One of them was walking toward me, still a hundred feet away. He looked at the floor, stepping carefully among the fallen bodies, as if he couldn't see well through the mask.

There was a tiny voice in my hand, dulled by my battered ears. “What is the location of your emergency?”

“Airport.”

“We're aware of that situation. Security is responding from on-site and they will be there soon. Are you in a safe location?”

The woman was so calm. Looking back, it always makes me cry to think how calm she was, how brave. I might've been screaming if I were her, knowing what was happening at the other end of the line. But I wasn't screaming. I was watching the gunman walk slowly toward us.

He was shooting the wounded people with a pistol, one by one.

“I'm not safe.”

“Can you get to a safe location?”

I turned back to the gate. A dozen of us were pulling at it now, trying to lift it up. The metal rattled and swayed, but was catching against some kind of lock. The gate wouldn't rise more than a few inches.

I looked for a door, a hallway, a drink machine to hide behind. But the walls stretched away bare and flat.

“I can't, and he's shooting everyone.” We were so calm, just talking to each other.

“Well, honey, maybe you should pretend to be dead.”

“What?”

The gunman looked up from the wounded on the floor, and I could see the glitter of eyes through the two holes in the mask. He was staring straight at me.

“If there's no way to get to safety,” she said carefully, “maybe you should lie down and not move.”

He holstered his pistol and raised the automatic rifle again.

“Thank you,” I said, and let myself fall as the gun roared smoke and noise.

My knees struck the floor with a burst of pain, but I let every muscle go, flopping over onto my face, a dropped rag doll. My forehead hit the tiles so hard that light flashed across my vision, and I felt a sticky warmth on my brow.

My eyelids fluttered once—blood was running into my eyes.

In a stunned heap I lay there, the gun firing again and again, the bullets hissing over me. The screams made me want to curl into a ball, but I forced myself to stay still. I tried to squeeze my own breathing to a halt.

I'm dead. I'm dead.

My body shuddered once, fighting me, demanding deeper breaths.

I don't need to breathe—I'm dead.

The shooting finally stopped again, but worse sounds filled the ringing silence. A woman crying for mercy, someone trying to breathe with torn lungs. In the distance, I heard the pop and crack of pistols.

Then the worst noise of all: tennis shoes squeaking on wet tiles, taking slow, careful steps. I remembered him shooting the wounded, making sure that no one would escape this nightmare.

Don't look at me. I'm dead.

My heartbeat thudded, hard enough to shake the whole airport. But somehow I kept myself from breathing.

The squeak of tennis shoes began to fade, crowded out by a soft roar in my head. My lungs were still now, not fighting anymore, and I felt myself falling softly away from my body, straight through the floor and down toward someplace dark and silent and cold.

It didn't matter if the world was crumbling. I couldn't breathe or move or think, except to remind myself . . .

I'm dead.

Behind my eyelids, vision went from red to black, like spilled ink spreading across my mind. Cold filled me, and my dizziness became a slow swaying, a feeling of stillness.

A long time seemed to pass with nothing happening.

And then I woke up somewhere else.

CHAPTER 3

The manila envelope from the Underbridge Literary Agency was as thick as a college acceptance package. But instead of forms, booklets, and brochures, it contained four copies of the same document—a publishing contract—and a return envelope that was already addressed and stamped.

Darcy Patel had learned all this from an email a week ago, and had read the contract at various stages of its drafting. There was no mystery about the envelope's contents at all. But the act of slicing it open still seemed momentous. She had appropriated her father's Princeton letter opener for the occasion.

“It's here,” she said at her sister's door. Nisha threw her book aside, sprang out of bed, and followed Darcy to her room.

They were quiet going down the hall. Darcy didn't want her father reading through the contract again and offering more legal advice. (For one thing, he was an engineer, not a lawyer. For another, Darcy had an agent already.) But Nisha had to be here. She'd read
Afterworlds
last November, as it was being written, sometimes aloud over Darcy's shoulder.

“Close the door.” Darcy sat at her desk. Her hands trembled a little.

Nisha obeyed and padded in. “Took long enough. When did Paradox say they wanted to buy it? Three months ago?”

“My agent says some contracts take a year.”

“That's seven today, and it's not even noon!”

By mutual agreement, Darcy was allowed to use the phrase “my agent” no more than ten times a day in front of her little sister; any overages cost a dollar each. This seemed generous to everyone concerned.

Darcy faced the envelope, hefting the letter opener in one
hand.

“Okay. Here we go.”

The blade cut smoothly at first, but halfway through it caught on something inside, a staple or a butterfly clip perhaps. It began to stutter, tearing instead of slicing.

Then it was stuck.

“Crap.” Darcy pushed a little harder.

The opener moved again, but in its wake a ragged little filigree of white paper emerged from the slit.

“Smooth, Patel,” Nisha said, now standing directly behind her.

Darcy slid the contracts out. She had torn the top of the first page.

“Great. My agent's going to think I'm a dipshit.”

“That's eight,” Nisha said. “Why do they need all those copies, anyway?”

“I guess it's more official that way.” Darcy checked the rest of the envelope's contents. She hadn't destroyed anything else. “Do you think this one counts, now that it's ripped?”

“With a massive tear like that? Frankly, Patel, I think your whole career is canceled.”

Something sharp levered itself between two of Darcy's ribs, as if the errant letter opener had slipped again. “Don't even say that. And stop calling me by my last name.
Our
last name. It's weird.”

“Pfft,” Nisha said to this. She developed new verbal ticks about once a week, which was often useful. The protagonist of
Afterworlds
had borrowed a lot of her eccentric cursing. “Just put some tape on it.”

Darcy sighed, sliding open her desk drawer. A moment later, the contract was taped together, but somehow it looked even more pathetic now. Like a fifth grader's art project: My PubLisHing ContRact.

“It doesn't even seem real anymore.”

“It's a disaster!” Nisha fell backward on Darcy's bed, bouncing in her death throes and pulling the blankets askew. People were always saying how much older Nisha seemed than her fourteen years. If only they knew the truth.

“
None
of this seems real,” Darcy said softly, staring at the torn contract.

Nisha sat up. “You know why that is, Patel? Because you haven't told them yet.”

“I will. After graduation next week.” Or maybe later, whenever Oberlin's deferral deadline was.

“No,
now
. Right after you drop those contracts in the mail.”

“Today?” The thought of her parents' reaction sent a cold trickle down Darcy's spine.

“Yes. Telling them is what makes all of this real. Until then, you're just some little kid daydreaming about being a famous writer.”

Darcy stared at her sister. “You remember I'm older than you, right?”

“So act like it.”

“But they might say no.”

“They can't. You're eighteen. That's, like, an adult.”

A laugh erupted out of Darcy, and Nisha joined in. The idea of the elder Patels recognizing their children's independence at eighteen—or any age—was hilarious.

“Don't worry about them,” Nisha said once they'd recovered. “I have a plan.”

“Which is?”

“Secret.” A crafty smile settled onto Nisha's face, which was about as reassuring as the shredded contract.

It wasn't only her parents' reaction that was making Darcy nervous. There was something terrifying about her plans, something absurd, as if she'd decided to become an astronaut or a rock star.

“Do you think I'm crazy, wanting to do this?”

Nisha shrugged. “If you want to be a writer, you should do it now. Like you keep saying,
Afterworlds
could tank and no one will ever publish you again.”

“I only said that once.” Darcy sighed. “But thanks for reminding me.”

“You're welcome, Patel. But look—that's a binding legal contract. Until your book officially bombs, you're a real novelist! So would you rather blow all that money as a writer in New York City? Or as some freshman churning out essays about dead white guys?”

Darcy dropped her gaze to the torn contract. Maybe it had ripped because she wanted this too much. Maybe her hand would always slip at the last moment, tearing what she desired most. But somehow the contract was beautiful, even in its damaged state. Right there on the first page, it defined her, Darcy Patel, as “The Author.” You couldn't get much realer than that.

“I'd rather be a writer than a freshman,” she said.

“Then you have to tell the elder Patels—
after
those are in the mailbox.”

Darcy looked at the return envelope and wondered if the Underbridge Literary Agency provided stamps for all its authors, or only the teenage ones. But at least it made sending off the contract as easy as walking to the corner, which took less effort than resisting Nisha. If her little sister had a plan, there would be no respite without compliance.

“Okay. At lunch.”

Darcy lifted her favorite pen, and signed her name four times.

DON'T MISS SCOTT WESTERFELD'S NEW SERIES:

“It's a zeppelin!” Alek shouted. “They've found us!”

The wildcount looked up. “An airship, certainly. But that doesn't sound like a zeppelin.”

Alek frowned, listening hard. Other noises, tremulous and nonsensical, trickled over the distant hum of engines—squawks, whistles, and squeaks, like a menagerie let loose.

The airship lacked the symmetry of a zeppelin: The front end was larger than the stern, the surface mottled and uneven. Clouds of tiny winged forms fluttered around it, and an unearthly green glow clung to its skin.

Then Alek saw the huge eyes. . . .

“God's wounds,” he swore. This wasn't a machine at all, but a Darwinist creation!

He'd seen monsters before, of course—talking lizards in
the fashionable parlors of Prague, a draft animal displayed in a traveling circus—but nothing as gigantic as this. It was like one of his war toys come to life, a thousand times larger and more incredible.

“What are Darwinists doing
here
?” he said softly.

Volger pointed. “Running from danger, it would seem.”

Alek's eyes followed the gesture, and he saw the jagged trails of bullet holes down the creature's flank, flickering with green light. Men swarmed in the rigging that hung from its sides, some wounded, some making repairs. And alongside them climbed things that
weren't
men.

As the airship passed, almost overhead, Alek half ducked behind the parapets. But the crew seemed too busy to notice anything below them. The ship slowly turned as it settled into the valley, dropping below the level of the mountains on either side.

“Is that godless thing coming
down
?” Alek asked.

“They seem to have no choice.”

The vast creature glided away toward the white expanse of glacier—the only place in sight large enough for it to land. Even wounded, it fell as slowly as a feather. Alek held his breath for the long seconds that it remained poised above the snow.

The crash unfolded slowly. White clouds rose up in the skidding airship's wake, its skin rippling like a flag in the wind. Alek saw men thrown from their perches on its back, but it was too far away for their cries to reach him, even through the cold, clear air. The ship kept sliding away, farther and farther,
until its dark outline disappeared behind a shroud of white.

“The highest mountains in Europe, and the war reaches us so quickly.” Count Volger shook his head. “What an age we live in.”

“Do you think they saw us?”

“In all that chaos? I'd think not. And this ruin won't look like much from a distance, even when the sun comes up.” The wildcount sighed. “But no cooking fires for a while. And we'll have to set a watch until they leave.”