Part 24 (1/2)

”I didn't tell her everything, Dad,” David said. ”Just that I grew up in the wild.”

”You left the rest to us?” Az said a bit stiffly. ”Very good of you.”

David held his father's gaze. ”Tally came here to make sure her friend was okay. All the way here alone.

But she might not want to stay.”

”We don't force anyone to live here,” Maddy said.

”That's not what I mean,” David said. ”I think she should know, before she decides about going back to the city.”

Tally looked from David to his parents, quietly amazed. The way they communicated was so strange, not like uglies and crumblies at all. It was more like uglies arguing. Like equals.

”I should know what?” she asked softly.

They all looked at her, Maddy and Az measuring her with their eyes.

”The big secret,” Az said, ”the one that made us run away almost twenty years ago.”

”One we usually keep to ourselves,” Maddy said evenly, her eyes on David.

”Tally deserves to know,” David said, his eyes locked with his mother's. ”She'll understand how important it is.”

”She's a kid. A city kid.”

”She made it here alone, with only a bunch of gibberish directions to guide her.”

Maddy scowled. ”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.”

”She survived alone for nine days, Mom. Made it through a brush fire.”

”Please, you two,” Az interjected. ”Sheis sitting right here. Aren't you, Tally?”

”Yeah, I am,” Tally said quietly. ”And I wish you'd tell me what you're talking about.”

”I'm sorry, Tally,” Maddy said. ”But this secret is very important. And very dangerous.”

Tally nodded her head, looking down at the floor. ”Everything out here is dangerous.”

They were all silent for a moment. All Tally heard was the tinkle of Az stirring his tea.

”See?” David said finally. ”She understands. You can trust her. She deserves to know the truth.”

”Everyone does,” Maddy said quietly. ”Eventually.”

”Well,” Az said, then paused to sip his tea. ”I suppose we'll have to tell you, Tally.”

”Tell mewhat ?”

David took a deep breath. ”The truth about being pretty.”

Pretty Minds

”We were doctors,” Az began.

”Cosmetic surgeons, to be precise,” Maddy said. ”We've both performed the operation hundreds of times. And when we met, I had just been named to the Committee for Morphological Standards.”

Tally's eyes widened. ”The Pretty Committee?”

Maddy smiled at the nickname. ”We were preparing for a Morphological Congress. That's when all the cities share data on the operation.”

Tally nodded. Cities worked very hard to stay independent of one another, but the Pretty Committee was a global inst.i.tution that made sure pretties were all more or less the same. It would ruin the whole point of the operation if the people from one city wound up prettier than everyone else.

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. In school, of course, they always managed to make it sound really boring, all graphs and averages and measuring people's pupils when they looked at different faces.

”At the same time, I was doing some independent research on anesthesia,” Az said. ”Trying to make the operation safer.”

”Safer?” Tally asked.

”A few people still die each year, as with any surgery,” he said. ”From being unconscious so long, more than anything else.”

Tally bit her lip. She'd never heard that. ”Oh.”

”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. ”Like a wound, or a cancer, or just something that doesn't belong there.”

”But you couldn't justsay that,” David said. He rolled his eyes toward Tally. ”Doctors.”

Maddy ignored her son. ”When Az showed me his results, I started investigating. The local committee had millions of scans in its database. Not the stuff they put in medical textbooks, but raw data from pretties all over the world. The lesions turned up everywhere.”

Tally frowned. ”You mean, people were sick?”

”They didn't seem to be. And the lesions weren't cancerous, because they didn't spread. Almost everyone had them, and they were always in exactly the same place.” She pointed to a spot on the top of her head.

”A bit to the left, dear,” Az said, dropping a white cube into his tea.

Maddy obliged him, then continued. ”Most importantly, almost everyone all over the world had these lesions. If they were a health hazard, ninety-nine percent of the population would show some kind of symptoms.”

”But they weren't natural?” Tally asked.