Uglies: Part II

“Take the coaster straight past the gap,” she said aloud, an incantation to keep away any Rusty ghosts.

An instant later she saw that the bridge didn’t make it all the way across, and there was no river full of metal deposits beneath it to catch her. Just a precipitous drop to the sea.

A deep chasm opened up under her, a fissure cut into the cliffs by the sea.

Her mind replayed the chasm opening up, the waves below smashing indifferently against the jagged rocks.

Tired, hungry, and desperate to pee, but not falling into oblivion.

She had to make up time, not blunder around in the dark.

Tally’s meals ranged from decent to odious. The worst were SpagBol breakfasts, around sunset, when the mere thought of more noodles made her never want to eat again.

One of the branches was clearly larger, the other more like a broad stream. A “tributary,” she remembered, was the name for a small river that fed into a larger one.

Motion caught her eye, and she spotted a small bird hovering among the flowers, flitting from one to the next to alight on the longest petal, thrusting its beak into one after another.

A ragged wall of flame moved through the flowers, giving off a wave of blistering heat.

Then she spotted a few rays from the setting sun breaching the billows, and she oriented herself.

Her hard-baked shoes were slippery, and her sodden knapsack seemed to weigh a ton.

“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.”

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.

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

She’d never seen any woodlands this raw and inhospitable. Vines dotted with cruel thorns ran through the semidarkness like barbed wire.

Her feet were already chafing in the new shoes.

The gnarled, smaller trees became taller pines, the undergrowth thinning, the brook breaking into occasional rapids.

His milky eyes glared at them as he berated whoever was on the phone, in a rattling voice and waving one claw at them to go away.

Tally popped open the heart pendant, looking down into the little glowing aperture where the laser waited to read her eye-print.

But the others’ faces were rapt. She’d been alone so long, Tally found herself enjoying being the center of attention.

On the way to work, Shay explained more about the long, flat roller coasters called railroads. Some stretched across the entire continent, one small part of the Rusty legacy still scarring the land.

The sea of white orchids could still be glimpsed from this side of the mountain, glowing like an encroaching desert in the sun.

Shay twisted one end, and four short struts unfolded from the other like the ribs of an umbrella.

He stepped off his board onto a boulder, and deftly climbed to a spot that lay shadowed in the setting sun.

She stopped in disbelief, then compared the horn of his palm with her own tender, blistered flesh. Tally could feel it there, the grueling afternoon of real work she’d put in today, but stretched across a lifetime.

And the whole place seemed so tenuous, so temporary.

“I’ll take her over to the trading post,” Shay said. “It’s like a requisition center, Tally. Only when you get something, you have to leave something else behind as payment.”

Flexing her fingers, Tally found that the gloves were soft and pliant, the palms worn pale from years of use.

The saw glanced off metal, sending up a smattering of sparks.

It felt as if everyone in the Smoke could see what the necklace really was: a symbol of her treachery.

They climbed the ridge from which Tally had first looked down on the settlement, and David led her along it to a cool, flat outcrop of stone where a view opened up between the trees.

Tally looked away, trying to drown her uncanny pretty feelings in the sea of white weeds.

“You’ve never even been to a city, David. You have no idea how coddled they are. They spend their whole lives in a bubble.”

Like most uglies, Tally had often indulged the fantasy that one day she might be on the Committee, and help decide what the next generation would look like.

“I found that there were complications from the anesthetic used in the operation. Tiny lesions in the brain. Barely visible, even with the best machines.”
Tally decided to risk sounding stupid. “What’s a lesion?”
“Basically it’s a bunch of cells that don’t look right,” Az said.

His fingers brushed her cheeks where the scratches were almost healed, and ran fleetingly across her lips.

She knew how callused his fingertips were, as hard and rough as wood. But somehow their caress felt soft and tentative.

When her feet reached level ground, she ran, heedless of the dark and silent huts on either side, seeing only the firelight ahead.

She turned to David, her vision spotted with sinuous shapes from staring into the fire.