Uglies (13 page)

They pulled her to the shore and out of the water, hauling her to the flying machine.

Tally’s lungs felt full of water and smoke. She could hardly take a breath without a wracking cough shaking her whole body.

“Put her down!”

“Where the hell did she come from?”

“Give her some oh-two.”

They flopped Tally onto her back on the ground, which was thick with the white foam. The one who’d carried her pulled off his bug-eyed mask, and Tally blinked.

He was a pretty. A new pretty, every bit as beautiful as Peris.

The man plunged the mask over her face. Tally fought weakly for a moment, but then cold, pure air surged into her lungs. Her head grew light as she gratefully sucked it down.

He pulled the mask off. “Not too much. You’ll hyper-ventilate.”

She tried to speak but could only cough.

“It’s getting bad,” another figure said. “Jenks wants to take her back up.”

“Jenks can wait.”

Tally cleared her throat. “My board.”

The man smiled beautifully and glanced up. “It’s headed over. Hey! Somebody stick that thing to the chopper! What’s your name, kid?”

“Tally.” Cough.

“Well, Tally, are you ready to move? The fire won’t wait.”

She cleared her throat and coughed again. “I guess so.”

“Okay, come on.” The man helped her up and pulled her toward the machine. She found herself pushed inside, where the noise was much less, crowded into the back with three others in bug-eyed masks.

A door slammed shut.

The machine rumbled, and then Tally felt it lift from the ground. “My board!”

“Relax, kid. We got it.” The woman pulled her mask off. She was another young pretty.

Tally wondered if these were the people in the clue. The “fire-bug eyes.” Was she supposed to be looking for them?

“Is she going to make it?” a voice popped through the cabin.

“She’ll live, Jenks. Make the usual detour, and work the fire a little on the way home.”

Tally looked down as the machine climbed. Their flight followed the course of the river, and she saw the fires spreading across to the other shore, driven by the wind of its passage. Occasionally, the craft would shoot out a gout of flame.

She looked at the faces of the crew. For new pretties, they seemed so determined, so focused on their task. But their actions were madness. “What are you guys doing?” she said.

“A little burning.”

“I can see that. But why ?”

“To save the world, kid. But hey, we’re real sorry about your getting in the way.”

They called themselves rangers.

The one who’d pulled her from the river was called Tonk. They all spoke with an accent, and came from a city Tally had never heard of.

“It’s not too far from here,” Tonk said. “But we rangers spend most of our time out in the wild. The fire helicopters are based in the mountains.”

“The firewhats ?”

“Helicopters. That’s what you’re sitting in.”

She looked around at the rattling machine, and shouted over the noise, “It’s so Rusty!”

“Yeah. Vintage stuff, a few pieces of it are almost two hundred years old. We copy the parts as they wear out.”

“But why?”

“You can fly it anywhere, with or without a magnetic grid. And it’s the perfect thing for spreading fires.The Rusties sure knew how to make a mess.”

Tally shook her head. “And you spread fires because…”

He smiled and lifted one of her shoes, pulling a crushed but unburned flower from the sole.

“Because of phragmipedium panthera, ” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“This flower used to be one of the rarest plants in the world. A white tiger orchid. In Rusty days, a single bulb was worth more than a house.”

“A house? But there’s zillions of them.”

“You noticed?” He held up the flower, staring into its delicate mouth. “About three hundred years ago, some Rusty figured a way to engineer the species to adapt to wider conditions. She messed with the genes to make them propagate more easily.”

“Why?”

“The usual. To trade them for lots of stuff. But she succeeded a little too well. Look down.”

Tally peered out the window. The machine had gained altitude and left the firestorm behind. Below were endless fields of white, interrupted only by a few barren patches. “Looks like she did a good job. So what? They’re nice.”

“One of the most beautiful plants in the world. But too successful. They turned into the ultimate weed. What we call a monoculture. They crowd out every other species, choke trees and grass, and nothing eats them except one species of hummingbird, which feeds on their nectar. But the hummingbirds nest in trees.”

“There aren’t any trees down there,” Tally said. “Just the orchids.”

“Exactly. That’s what monoculture means: Everything the same. After enough orchids build up in an area, there aren’t enough hummingbirds to pollinate them. You know, to spread the seeds.”

“Yeah,” Tally said. “I know about the birds and the bees.”

“Sure you do, kid. So the orchids eventually die out, victims of their own success, leaving a wasteland behind. Biological zero. We rangers try to keep them from spreading. We’ve tried poison, engineered diseases, predators to target the hummingbirds…but fire is the only thing that really works.” He turned the orchid over in his hand and held up a firestarter, letting the flame lick into its mouth. “Have to be careful, you know?”

Tally noticed the other rangers were cleaning their boots and uniforms, searching for any trace of the flowers among the mud and foam. She looked down at the endless white. “And you’ve been doing this for…”

“Almost three hundred years. The Rusties started the job, after they figured out what they’d done. But we’ll never win. All we can hope to do is contain the weed.”

Tally sat back, shaking her head, coughing once more. The flowers were so beautiful, so delicate and unthreatening, but they choked everything around them.

The ranger leaned forward, handing her his canteen. She took it and drank gratefully.

“You’re headed to the Smoke, aren’t you?”

Tally swallowed some water the wrong way and sputtered. “Yeah. How’d you know?”

“Come on. An ugly waiting around in the flowers with a hoverboard and a survival kit?”

“Oh, yeah.” Tally remembered the clue: “Look in the flowers for fire-bug eyes.” They must have seen uglies before.

“We help the Smokies out, and they help us out,” Tonk said. “They’re crazy, if you ask me—living rough and staying ugly. But they know more about the wild than most city pretties. It’s kind of admirable, really.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess so.”

He frowned. “You guess so? But you’re headed there. Aren’t you sure?”

Tally realized that this was where the lies started. She could hardly tell the rangers the truth: that she was a spy, an infiltrator. “Of course I’m sure.”

“Well, we’ll be setting you down soon.”

“In the Smoke?”

He frowned again. “Don’t you know? The location’s a big secret. Smokies don’t trust pretties. Not even us rangers. We’ll take you to the usual spot, and you know the rest, right?”

She nodded. “Sure. Just testing you.”

The helicopter landed in a swirl of dust, the white flowers bending in a wide circle around the touchdown spot.

“Thanks for the ride,” Tally said.

“Good luck,” Tonk said. “Hope you like the Smoke.”

“Me too.”

“But if you change your mind, Tally, we’re always looking for volunteers in the rangers.”

Tally frowned. “What’s a volunteer?”

The ranger smiled. “That’s when you pick your own job.”

“Oh, right.” Tally had heard you could do that in some cities. “Maybe. In the meantime, keep up the good work. Speaking of which, you’re not setting any fires around here, are you?”

The rangers laughed, and Tonk said, “We just work the edges of the infestation, to keep the flowers from spreading. This spot is right smack in the middle. No hope left.”

Tally looked around. There wasn’t a glimpse of any color but white as far as she could see. The sun had set an hour ago, but the orchids glowed like ghosts in the moonlight. Now that she knew what they were, the sight chilled Tally. What had he called it? Biological zero.

“Great.”

She jumped out of the helicopter and yanked her hoverboard from the magnetic rack next to the door.

She backed away, careful to crouch as the rangers had warned her to.

The machine whined back to life, and she peered upward into the shimmering disk. Tonk had explained that a pair of thin blades, spinning so quickly that you couldn’t see them, carried the craft through the air.

She wondered if he’d been kidding. It just looked like a typical force field to her.

The wind grew crazed again as the machine reared up, and she held on to her board tightly, waving until the aircraft disappeared into the dark sky. She sighed.

Alone again.

Looking around, she wondered how she could find the Smokies in this featureless desert of orchids.

“Then wait on the bald head until it’s light,” was the last line of Shay’s note. Tally scanned the horizon, and a relieved smile broke onto her face.

A tall, round hill rose up not far away. It must have been one of the places where the engineered flowers had first taken root. The top half of the hill was dying, nothing left but bare soil, ruined by the orchids.

The cleared area looked just like a bald head.

She reached the bald hilltop in a few hours.

Her hoverboard was useless there, but the hiking was easy in the new shoes the rangers had given her, her own so burned that they had fallen apart in the helicopter. Tonk had also filled her purifier with water.

The ride in the helicopter had begun to dry out Tally’s clothing, and the hike had done the rest. Her knapsack had survived the dunking, even the SpagBol remaining dry in its waterproof bag. The only thing lost to the river was Shay’s note, reduced to a soggy wad of paper in her pocket.

But she had almost made it. As she looked out from the hilltop, Tally realized that, except for the burn blisters on her hands and feet, some bruises on her knees, and a few locks of hair that had gone up in smoke, she had pretty much survived. As long as the Smokies knew where to find her, and believed her story that she was an ugly coming to join them, and didn’t figure out that she was actually a spy, then everything was just great.

She waited on the hill, exhausted but unable to sleep, wondering if she could really do what Dr. Cable wanted. The pendant around her neck had also survived the ordeal. Tally doubted a little water would have ruined the device, but she wouldn’t know until she reached the Smoke and activated it.

She hoped for a moment that the pendant wouldn’t work. Maybe one of the bumps along the way had broken its little eye-reader and it would never send its message back to Dr. Cable. But that was hardly worth hoping for. Without the pendant, Tally was stuck out here in the wild forever. Ugly for life.

Her only way home was to betray her friend.

A couple of hours after dawn, they came and got her.

Tally saw them hiking through the orchids, four figures carrying hoverboards and dressed all in white.

Broad white hats in a dappled pattern hid their heads, and she realized that if they ducked down into the flowers, they would practically disappear.

These people went to a lot of trouble to stay hidden.

As the party drew close, she recognized Shay’s pigtails bobbing under one of the hats and waved frantically. Tally had planned to take the note literally and wait on the hilltop, but at the sight of her friend, she grabbed her board and dashed down to meet them.

Infiltrator or not, Tally couldn’t wait to see Shay.

The tall, lanky form broke from the others and ran toward her, and the two embraced, laughing.

“It is you! I knew it was!”

“Of course it is, Shay. I couldn’t stand missing you.” Which was pretty much true.

Shay couldn’t stop smiling. “When we spotted the helicopter last night, most people said it had to be another group. They said you’d taken too long, and that I should give up.”

Tally tried to smile back, wondering if she hadn’t made up enough time. She could hardly admit starting four days after her sixteenth birthday.

“I kind of got turned around. Could your note have been any more obscure?”

“Oh.” Shay’s face fell. “I thought you’d understand it.”

Unable to bear Shay blaming herself, Tally shook her head. “Actually, the note was okay. I’m just a moron. And the biggest problem was when I got to the flowers. The rangers didn’t see me at first, and I almost got roasted.”

Shay’s eyes widened as she took in Tally’s scratched and sunburned face, the blisters on her hands, and her patchy, scorched hair. “Oh, Tally! You look like you went through a war zone.”

“Just about.”

The other three uglies walked up. They stood back a bit, one boy holding a device in the air. “She’s carrying a bug,” he said.

Tally’s heart froze. “A what?”

Shay gently took Tally’s board from her and handed it to the boy. He swept his device across it, nodded, and pulled one of the stabilizer fins off. “Here it is.”

“They sometimes put trackers on the long-range boards,” Shay said. “Trying to find the Smoke.”

“Oh, I’m really…I didn’t know. I swear!”

“Relax, Tally,” the boy said. “It’s not your fault. Shay’s board had one too. That’s why we meet you newbies down here.” He held up the bug. “We’ll take it away in some random direction and stick it on a migrating bird. See how the Specials like
South America
.” The Smokies all laughed.

He stepped closer and swept the device up and down her body. Tally flinched when it passed close to the pendant. But he smiled. “It’s okay. You’re clean.”

Tally sighed with relief. Of course, she hadn’t activated the pendant yet, so his device couldn’t detect it.

The other bug was just Dr. Cable’s way of misleading the Smokies, getting them to drop their guard.

Tally herself was the real danger.

Shay stepped up next to the boy, taking his hand in hers. “Tally, this is David.”

The boy smiled again. He was an ugly, but he had a nice smile. And his face held a kind of confidence that Tally had never seen in an ugly before. Maybe he was a few years older than she was. Tally had never watched anyone mature naturally past age sixteen. She wondered how much of being ugly was just an awkward age.

Of course, David was hardly a pretty. His smile was crooked, and his forehead too high. But, uglies or not, it was good to see Shay, David—all of them. Except for a couple of stunned hours with the rangers, she hadn’t seen human faces in what seemed like years.

“So, what’ve you got?”

“Huh?”

Croy was one of the other uglies who’d come to meet her. He also looked older than sixteen, but it didn’t suit him like it did David. Some people needed the operation more than others. He reached out a hand for her knapsack.

“Oh, thanks.” Her shoulders were sore from being strapped to the thing for the last week.

He pulled it open as they hiked, looking inside. “Purifier. Position-finder.” Croy pulled out the waterproof bag and opened it. “SpagBol! Yum!”

Tally groaned. “You can have it.”

His eyes widened. “I can?”

Shay pulled the knapsack away from him. “No, you can’t.”

“Listen, I’ve eaten that stuff three times a day for the past…what seems like forever,” Tally said.

“Yeah, but dehydrated food’s hard to get in the Smoke,” Shay explained. “You should save it to trade.”

“Trade?” Tally frowned. “What do you mean?” In the city, uglies might trade chores or stuff they’d stolen, but trade food?

Shay laughed. “You’ll get used to the idea. In the Smoke, things don’t just come out of the wall. You’ve got to hang on to the stuff you brought with you. Don’t go giving it away to anyone who asks.” Shay glared at Croy, who looked down sheepishly.

“I was going to give her something for it,” he insisted.

“Sure you were,” David said.

Tally noticed his hand on Shay’s shoulder, touching her softly as they hiked. She remembered the way Shay had always talked about David, kind of dreamily. Maybe it wasn’t just the promise of freedom that had brought her friend here.

They reached the edge of the flowers, a dense growth of trees and brush that started at the foot of a towering mountain.

“How do you keep the orchids from spreading?” Tally asked.

David’s eyes lit up, as if this was his favorite subject. “This old-growth forest stops them. It’s been around for centuries, probably even before the Rusties.”

“It’s got lots and lots of species,” Shay said. “So it’s strong enough to keep out the weed.” She looked at David for approval.

“The rest of this land used to be farms or grazing pasture,” he continued, gesturing back at the expanse of white behind them. “The Rusties had already broken its back before the weed arrived.”

A few minutes into the forest, Tally realized why the orchids were no match for it. The tangled brush and thick trees were knotted together into an impassable wall on either side. Even on the narrow path, she was constantly shoving past branches and twigs, tripping over roots and rocks. She’d never seen any woodlands this raw and inhospitable. Vines dotted with cruel thorns ran through the semidarkness like barbed wire. “You guys live in here?”

Shay laughed. “Don’t worry. We’ve got a ways to go. We’re just making sure you weren’t followed.

The Smoke’s much higher, where the trees aren’t so intense. But the creek’s coming up. We’ll be on board soon.”

“Good,” Tally said. Her feet were already chafing in the new shoes. But they were warmer than her destroyed grippies, she realized, and were better for hiking. She wondered what would have happened if the rangers hadn’t given them to her. How did you get new shoes in the Smoke? Trade someone all your food? Make them yourself? She looked down at the feet ahead of her, David’s, and saw that his shoes did look handmade, like a couple of pieces of leather crudely sewn together. Strangely, though, he moved gracefully through the undergrowth, silent and sure while the rest of them crashed along like elephants.

The very idea of making a pair of shoes by hand boggled her mind.

It didn’t matter, Tally reminded herself, taking a deep breath. Once in the Smoke, she could activate the pendant and be home within a day, maybe within hours. All the food and clothes she would ever need, hers for the asking. Her face pretty at long last, and Peris and all their old friends around her.

Finally, this nightmare would be over.

Soon, the sound of running water filled the forest, and they reached a small clearing. David pulled his device out again, pointing it back toward the path. “Still nothing.” He grinned at Tally. “Congratulations, you’re one of us now.”

Shay giggled and hugged Tally again as the others readied their boards. “I still can’t believe you came. I thought I’d messed everything up, waiting so long to tell you about running away. And I was so stupid, getting into a fight instead of just telling you what I was going to do.”

Tally shook her head. “You’d said everything already, I just wasn’t listening. Once I realized you were serious, I needed a chance to think about it. It just took me a while…every minute, until the last night before my birthday.” She took a deep breath, wondering why she was saying all this, lying to Shay when she didn’t really have to. She should just shut up, get to the Smoke, and get it over with. But Tally found herself continuing. “Then I realized I’d never see you again if I didn’t come. And I’d always wonder.”

That last part was true, at least.

As they boarded higher up into the mountain the creek widened, cutting an archway of trees into the dense forest. The gnarled, smaller trees became taller pines, the undergrowth thinning, the brook breaking into occasional rapids. Shay cried out as she rode through the spray of churning white water.

“I’ve been dying to show you this! And the really good rapids are on the other side.”

Eventually, they left the creek, following a vein of iron over a ridge. From the top, they looked down into a small valley that was mostly clear of forest.

Shay held Tally’s hand. “There it is. Home.”

The Smoke lay below them.