Part 33 (1/2)
Tally turned and shot ahead, cutting a zigzag path between the tall poplars, letting her reflexes guide her.
She remembered her two hovercar rides to Special Circ.u.mstances. They'd flown across the greenbelt on the far side of town, then out to the transport ring, the industrial zone between the middle-pretty suburbs and outer Crumblyville. The hard part would be getting across the burbs, a risky place to have an ugly face. Luckily, middle pretties went to bed early. Most of them, anyway.
She raced David halfway around the greenbelt, until the lights of the big hospital sat directly across the river from them. Tally remembered that first terrible morning, yanked away from the promised operation, flown out to be interrogated, her future pulled out from under her. She made a grim face, realizing that this time she was actually going outlooking for Special Circ.u.mstances.
A tingle pa.s.sed through her as they left the greenbelt. A minuscule part of Tally still expected her interface ring to warn her that she was leaving Uglyville. How had she worn that stupid thing for sixteen years? It had seemed such a part of her back then, but now the idea of being tracked and monitored and advised every minute of the day repelled Tally.
”Stick close,” she said to David. ”This is the part where you should whisper.”
As a littlie, Tally had lived in the middle-pretty burbs with Sol and Ellie. But back then her world had been pathetically tiny: a few parks, the path to littlie school, one corner of the greenbelt where she would sneak in to spy on uglies. Like the Rusty Ruins, the neat row houses and gardens seemed much smaller to her now, an endless village of dollhouses.
They skimmed the rooftops, crouching low. If anybody was awake, going for a late-night run or walking a dog, they wouldn't be looking up, hopefully. Their boards barely a hand's breadth above the housetops, the patterns of s.h.i.+ngles pa.s.sed underneath hypnotically. All they encountered were nesting birds and a few cats, who flew or scrambled out of their way in surprise.
The burbs ended suddenly, a last band of parks fading into the transport ring, where underground factories stuck their heads aboveground and cargo trucks drove concrete roads all day and night. Tally lofted her board and gained speed.
”Tally!” David hissed. ”They'll see us!”
”Relax. Those trucks are automatic. n.o.body comes out here, especially at night.”
He stared down at the lumbering vehicles nervously.
”Look, they don't even have headlights.” She pointed down at a giant road-train pa.s.sing below, the only light coming from it a dim red flicker from underneath, the navigation laser reading the bar codes painted onto the road.
They rode on, David still anxious at the sight of moving vehicles below.
Soon, a familiar landmark rose above the industrial wasteland.
”See that hill? Special Circ.u.mstances is just below it. We'll climb up top and take a look.”
The hill was too steep to put a factory on, and apparently too big and solid to flatten with explosives and bulldozers, so it stood out on the flat plain like a lopsided pyramid, steep on one side and sloping on the other, covered with scrub and brown gra.s.s. They skimmed up the sloping side, dodging a few boulders and hardscrabble trees, until they reached the top.
From this height, Tally could see all the way back to New Pretty Town, the glowing disk of the island about as big as a dinner plate. The outer city was in darkness, and below her, the low, brown buildings of Special Circ.u.mstances were lit only with the harsh glare of security lights. ”Down there,” she said, her voice falling to a whisper.
”Doesn't look like much.”
”Most of it's underground. I don't know how far down it goes.”
They stared at the cl.u.s.ter of buildings in silence. From up here, Tally could see the perimeter wire clearly, stretching around the buildings in an almost perfect square. That meant serious security. There weren't many barriers in the city-not that you could see, anyway. If you weren't supposed to be someplace, your interface ring just politely warned you to move along.
”That fence looks low enough to fly over.”
Tally shook her head. ”It's not a fence, it's a sensor wire. You get within twenty meters of it and the Specials will know you're there. Same goes if you touch the ground inside it.”
”Twenty meters? Too high to clear on boards. So what do we do, knock on the gate?”
”There's no gate that I can see. I went in and out by hovercar.”
David drummed his fingers on his board. ”What about stealing one?”
”A hovercar?” Tally whistled. ”That'd be a pretty good trick. I knew uglies who used to go joyriding, but not in Special Circ.u.mstances hovercars.”
”It's too bad we can't just jump down.”
Tally narrowed her eyes. ”Jump?”
”From here. Get on our hoverboards back at the bottom of the hill, zoom up at maximum speed, then jump off from about this spot. We'd probably hit that big building dead center.”
”Dead is right. We'd splat.”
”Yeah, I guess. Even with crash bracelets, our arms would probably yank out of their sockets after a fall like that. We'd need parachutes.”
Tally looked down, plotting trajectories from the hilltop, shus.h.i.+ng David when he started to speak again, the wheels of her brain spinning. She remembered the party at Garbo Mansion, which seemed like years ago.
Finally, she allowed herself to smile.
”Not parachutes, David. Bungee jackets.”
Accomplices
”There's enough time, if we hurry.”
”Enough time to what?”
”To drop by the Uglyville art school. They have bungee jackets in the bas.e.m.e.nt. A whole rack of spares.”
David took a deep breath. ”Okay.”
”You're not scared, are you?”
”I'm not...” He grimaced. ”It's just that I've never seen this many people before.”
”People? We haven't seen anyone.”
”Yeah, but all those houses on the way here. I keep thinking of people living in every single one, all crowded together like that.”
Tally laughed. ”You think the burbs are crowded? Wait until we get to Uglyville.”
They headed back, taking the rooftops at top speed. The sky was pitch-black, but by now Tally could read the stars well enough to know that the first notes of dawn were only a couple of hours away.
Reaching the greenbelt, they turned back the way they'd come, neither of them speaking, concentrating instead on navigating through the trees. This arc of the belt brought them through Cleopatra Park, where Tally threaded the slalom poles for old times' sake. Her instincts twitched as they pa.s.sed the path down to her old dorm. For a split second, it felt as if she could make the turnoff, climb in through her window, and go to bed.
Soon, the jumbled spires of the Uglyville art school rose up, and Tally brought the two of them to a halt.
This part was easy. It seemed like a million years ago that Tally and Shay had borrowed one of the school's bungee jackets for their final trick, Shay's leap onto the new uglies in the dorm library. Tally retraced her steps to the exact window they'd jimmied, a dirty, forgotten pane of gla.s.s concealed behind decorative bushes, and found that it was still unlocked.
Tally shook her head. This sort of burglary had seemed so daring two months before. Back then, the library stunt was the wildest prank she and Shay could dream up. Now she saw tricks for what they were: a way for uglies to blow off steam until they reached sixteen, nothing but a meaningless distraction until their mutinous natures were erased by adulthood, and the operation.
”Give me the flashlight. And wait here.”