Pretties, Page 8

  “I thought bubbly was bogus.”

  He smiled and shrugged drowsily.

  Tally smiled back. Zane was extra beautiful when he first woke up. The edges of sleep softened his intense stare, leaving his severe features almost vulnerable-looking, like a lost and hungry boy. Tally never mentioned this fact, of course, or Zane would probably have gotten surge to fix it.

  She made her way to the coffeemaker, stepping over the piles of unrecycled clothes and dirty dishes that occupied every square centimeter of floor. As always, Zane’s room was a wreck. His closet lay half-open, too overflowing to shut properly. It was an easy room to hide things in.

  Sipping her coffee, Tally told the hole in the wall to make their usual skating ensembles: heavy plastic jackets lined with fake rabbit fur; knee-padded pants for bad falls; black scarves; and, most important, thick gloves that reached halfway to their elbows. While the hole was spitting out clothes, she took Zane his coffee, which finally dragged him to consciousness.

  Zane and Tally skipped breakfast—a meal they hadn’t eaten for the last month—and layered up in the elevator down to the front door of Pulcher Mansion, speaking fluent pretty along the way.

  “Did you see the frost, Zane-la? So icy-making.”

  “Winter is totally bubbly.”

  “Totally. Summer is just too . . . I don’t know. Warming or something.”

  “Utterly.”

  They smiled pleasantly at the door minder and went out into the cold, pausing for a moment on the mansion’s front steps. Tally handed Zane her coffee mug and pulled her gloves up inside her sleeves, covering the interface cuff on her left arm with two layers. Then she wrapped that arm with the black scarf to seal the cuff tightly. She took both coffees from Zane, watching steam curl up from the trembling black pools while he did the same with his own gloves.

  When he was done, Tally spoke, not too loudly. “I thought we were supposed to act normal today.”

  “I am acting normal.”

  “Come on. ‘Bubbly is bogus’?”

  “What? Too much?”

  She shook her head, giggled, and pulled him toward the floating rink.

  • • •

  It had been one month since they’d taken the pills, and Tally and Zane weren’t brain-dead yet. The first few hours, though, had been totally bogus. The Specials had searched them and Valentino 317 madly, putting everything they found in little plastic bags. They’d barked a million questions in their grating Special voices, trying to find out why a pair of new pretties would climb the transmission tower. Tally tried to tell them they’d just wanted privacy, but no explanation satisfied the Specials.

  Finally, some wardens showed up with the abandoned interface rings, medspray for Tally’s palms, and muffins. Tally ate her long-delayed breakfast like a hungry dog until all her bubbliness went away, then smiled prettily and asked to be taken to surge for the previous night’s scar. After another really boring hour or so, the Specials let the wardens take her to the hospital with Zane in tow.

  That was mostly it, except for the interface cuffs. The doctors slipped Tally’s on during her eyebrow surge, and Zane awoke the next morning to find himself wearing one. They worked just like interface rings, except they could send voice-pings from anywhere, like a handphone. That meant the cuffs heard you talking even when you went outside and, unlike rings, they didn’t come off. They were manacles with an invisible chain, and no tool Tally and Zane had yet tried could cut them open.

  Unexpectedly, the cuffs also became the fashion item of the season. Once the other Crims saw them, it was all Zane could do to keep everyone from requisitioning their own. He got the hole in the wall to make a bunch of nonworking copies and passed them out. Over the next few weeks, word spread that the cuffs were some new marker of criminality, signifying that you had scaled the transmission tower on top of Valentino Mansion; it turned out that hundreds of new pretties had witnessed Tally’s and Zane’s climb, pinging one another to run to windows and check out the show. Within a few weeks, only the most fashion-missing went around without some kind of metal cuff locked onto their wrists, and minders had to be installed to keep new pretties off the tower.

  People were starting to point out Tally and Zane when they were in public, and there were more Crim wannabees every day. It was like everybody wanted to be bubbly.

  • • •

  Tally was nervous about the breakthrough, but she and Zane didn’t say much on the way to the skating rink. Although their cuffs couldn’t hear anything while wrapped up in the heavy winter gear, silence was a habit that had begun to follow them everywhere. Tally had grown used to communicating in other ways: winks and rolled eyes and silently mouthed words. Living in an unspoken conspiracy filled every gesture with significance, charged every shared touch with unspoken meaning.

  Inside the glass elevator that carried them up to the floating sheet of ice, looking down on the great bowl of Nefertiti Stadium, Zane took Tally’s hand. His eyes flashed, as they did before a sudden, unexpected trick, like a snowball ambush from the roof of Pulcher Mansion. His playful glance was perfectly timed to settle Tally’s nerves a little. It wouldn’t do for the other Crims to see her anxious, after all.

  Most of them were already there, trading in boots for ice skates, finding bungee jackets in the right size. A few newly voted-in Crims were warming up, looking wobbly ankled on the floating ice, the sound of their skates like a library minder telling you to shush.

  Shay glided over to gather Tally in a hug, coming to a halt mostly by bumping into her. “Hey, Skinny-wa.”

  “Hey, Squint-la,” Tally retorted, giggling. Ugly nicknames were back in fashion, but Shay and Tally had switched their old names now that Tally was losing weight. Going food-missing sucked, but sooner or later she hoped to be thin enough to slip the cuff from her wrist.

  She saw that Shay had wrapped a black scarf around her forearm in solidarity. Shay also sported a version of Tally’s flash tattoo, a nest of snakes coiling around one brow and down her cheek. A lot of the Crims had new facial tattoos with heart-rate triggers—you could see at a glance how bubbly they were. Self-heated coffee mugs sent clouds of steam into the air above the pack of Crims, and everyone’s tattoos were spinning.

  A chorus of hellos rose up as Tally and Zane were spotted, excitement rising in the pack. Peris glided over with a bungee jacket and Tally’s usual skates in hand.

  “Thanks, Nose,” Tally said, kicking her boots off and sitting down on the ice. Here at the rink, hoverskates weren’t allowed; real metal blades glittered in the wintry light like daggers. Tally drew her laces up tight. “Got your flask?” she asked Peris.

  He pulled it out. “Double vodka.”

  “Very thawing.” Tally and Zane had stopped drinking alcohol, which turned out to make you more pretty-minded than bubbly, but strong spirits had other uses here on the ice.

  She held out her gloved hands, and Peris pulled her up, her momentum sending the two of them into a slippery little waltz. Giggling, they steadied themselves against each other.

  “Don’t forget your jacket, Skinny,” he said.

  She took it from him and tied the straps. “That would be bogus, wouldn’t it?”

  Peris nodded nervously.

  “Any word from our friends across the river?” she asked, her voice dropping to just above a whisper.

  “Not a ping. They’re still totally missing.”

  Tally frowned. Croy’s visit was a month ago now, and the New Smokies hadn’t shown themselves since. The silence was ominous, unless this was another of their annoying tests. Either way, she was itching to go looking, once she got this stupid cuff off. “How’s Fausto going on tricking that hoverboard?”

  Peris only shrugged, looking distractedly at the other Crims, who were invading the rink, laughing and screaming, slashing through the little Zambonies that skittered about polishing the ice.

  Tally checked the flash tattoo on Peris’s forehead—a third eye that blinked with his heartbe
at—and looked into his gorgeous eyes, brown and soft and depthless. Peris seemed bubblier than he had a month ago—all the Crims did—but Tally no longer saw improvement in him from day to day. It was so much harder for the rest of them who hadn’t had the pills, who weren’t half-cured like Tally and Zane. They could get excited in the short term, but it was hard to keep them focused.

  Well, the breakthrough would give them a jolt.

  “It’s okay, Nose. Let’s skate.” Tally pushed off against the flat of one blade, building up speed as she swept around the rink’s outer edge. She looked down through the mottled window of ice underfoot. The hoverlifters that held the floating rink up in the air were easy to see, spaced in a grid a few meters apart and sending out a sunburst of refrigeration tendrils. Much farther below, the broad oval of the sports stadium was visible, softly out of focus like the world through a pretty-minded haze. The stadium lights were coming on, warming up for the soccer game scheduled in forty-five minutes. As always, there would be fireworks before it started, once the crowd was in their seats. Very pretty-making.

  The sky above was an uninterrupted expanse of blue, except for a few hot-air balloons tethered to the tallest party spires. When it was airborne, the skating rink was the highest thing in New Pretty Town. Tally could glimpse the entire city spread out below.

  She skated after Zane, catching him as he rounded a turn. “Everybody seem bubbly to you?”

  “Mostly nervous.” He gracefully reversed, skating backward as easily as breathing. His operation-augmented muscles had been freed from pretty timidity and sloth. He could hold a handstand without trembling, climb up to his window in Pulcher Mansion in seconds, and outrun the monorail that brought crumblies from the burbs into the central hospital. He never broke a sweat and could hold his breath for two solid minutes.

  Watching him perform these feats, Tally remembered the Rangers who’d rescued her from a brushfire on her journey to the Smoke. Zane was as physically confident as they had been—fast and strong, but without the twitching inhumanity of Special Circumstances agents. Tally was no slouch herself, but somehow the cure had taken Zane’s strength and coordination to a new level. She loved gliding across the ice with him, skating circles around the others, being the graceful center of the Crims’ motley vortex of flashing blades.

  “Anything from the New Smoke?” he asked, barely audible over the swoosh of skates.

  “Peris says nothing.”

  Zane swore and took a tight turn, spraying ice on a non-Crim struggling slowly along the side of the rink.

  Tally caught up to him. “We have to be patient, Zane. We’ll get these things off.”

  “I’m tired of being patient, Tally.” He looked down through the ice. The stadium below was teeming, the growing audience awaiting the first game of the intercity play- offs. “How long?”

  “Any minute now,” she said.

  As the words left her mouth the first fireworks exploded below, instantly transforming the rink into a mottled palette of reds and blues. A second later, a tardy boom shuddered up through the ice, followed by a long ahhh of appreciation from the crowd.

  “Here we go,” Zane said with a grin, his irritation erased.

  Tally squeezed his hand and then let him skate away, gliding to a halt in the center of the rink, the farthest point from the supporting hoverstructure around the ice. She raised one hand and waited as the other Crims gathered in a tight pack around her.

  “Flasks,” she said softly, and heard the whisper spread through the pack.

  Flashes of metal caught the sun, and Tally heard the rasp of tops being unscrewed. Her heart was beating fast, her senses sharpened by anticipation. Everyone’s tattoos were totally spinning. She saw Zane gathering speed along the outside of the rink.

  “Pour,” she said softly.

  A liquid sound spread through the pack of Crims, double vodka and straight ethyl alcohol gurgling out. Tally thought she heard a creak, the slightest of complaints from the ice as its freezing point was lowered by the spirits.

  Even in the old days, Zane had always dreamed of pulling something like this, sometimes pouring champagne on the ice while the Crims skated. But the cure had made him serious; he’d even run a test in the small fridge in his room. He’d filled a tray of ice cubes, each one with a slightly different mix of vodka and water, and stuck it in the freezer. The all-water cube had frozen normally, but those with more alcohol in them got slushier and slushier, leaving the final all-vodka cube completely liquid.

  Tally looked down at the layer of spirits slowly spreading across the ice through their skates, melting away the marks of blades and falls. The stadium came into heart-pounding focus, until Tally could see every detail of a rising plume of green and yellow fireworks. When the thunderous boom reached her ears, another ominous creak sounded. The fireworks display was building in intensity, ramping up for the finale.

  Tally raised her hand for Zane.

  He rounded the next turn, then headed toward them, skating hard. She felt a shimmer of panic in the pack around her, like a herd of gazelles spotting some big cat in the distance. A few Crims took last slugs from their flasks, then squirted boxes of orange juice into them to erase the evidence of what they’d done.

  Tally grinned, imagining the pretty befuddlement she would put on for the wardens: We were all just standing there talking and minding our own business, not even skating, and suddenly . . .

  “Watch out!” Zane cried, and the pack split in half, opening to create a path for him.

  He skated into its center and jumped into the air inhumanly high, eyes and blades flashing, then brought his skates down hard onto the ice, all his weight behind them.

  Zane instantly disappeared from view with a noise like breaking glass, and Tally heard the crack spreading with a sound that built like the shriek of a falling tree out in the Smoke. For a strange split second she was pushed up into the air as a large plate of ice teeter-tottered on the fulcrum of a lifter, but then it snapped in half and Tally was falling, her stomach lurching up into her throat. Gloved hands grabbed her coat from every direction in a moment of group panic, then a whoop rose up as the middle of the rink gave way altogether, icy shards and Crims and Zambonies all tumbling down toward the green grass of the soccer field, ten thousand faces staring up at them in shock.

  Now this was bubbly.

  BOUNCE

  For a moment it was quiet.

  All around her, shattered ice fell without a sound, catching the stadium lights as it spun. Wind tore the war cries from the Crims’ mouths. The crowd below looked up in stunned silence. Tally spread her arms to slow her fall, clutching the precious seconds with cupped fingers. This part of a bungee jump was always like flying.

  Then a burst of light and sound sent Tally spinning, ears pummeled and eyes forced shut by blinding streaks of brilliance. After a few stunned seconds, she shook her head and opened her eyes: Rainbow shards of fire traveled away in every direction, as if Tally were at the center of an exploding galaxy. More booms thundered above her, unleashing a steady rain of incandescence. She realized what had happened. . . .

  The grand finale of the fireworks show had detonated just as the pack of falling Crims had broken through the ice. The timing of the breakthrough had been a little too perfect.

  One sizzling flare clung to her bungee jacket, burning with the cool insistence of safety fireworks, tickling her face with cast-off sparks. Tally flailed her arms to right herself, but the ground was already rushing up, only seconds away. She was still out of control when the straps of the bungee jacket bit into her, bringing her headfirst plummet to a halt a few meters from the ground.

  As the jacket yanked Tally upright and back into the air, she rolled into a ball in case anything big was still falling. The possibility of one of them catching a chunk of ice or a tumbling Zamboni had always been the nervous-making part of this plan. But Tally made the bounce unscathed, and as she reached its apex she heard the ahhh of the crowd’s vast confusion. Th
ey knew something had gone wrong.

  She and Zane had thought about hacking the scoreboard to show a message at this moment, to penetrate the crowd’s pretty haze while their heads were spinning. But then the wardens would know the breakthrough had been planned, which would lead to all sorts of bogus complications.

  The New Smokies would hear about this trick one way or another, and they, at least, would know what it meant. . . .

  The cure had worked. The New Smoke had allies inside the city. The sky was falling.

  • • •

  Tally’s hoverbouncing came to a stop about midfield, on grass littered with broken ice, shuddering Zambonies, giggling Crims, and the few innocent skaters who’d fallen through, no doubt suddenly glad that bungee jackets were required in the rink. She looked around for Zane, and saw that his momentum had carried him down the field and into one of the goals. She ran toward that end, checking on Crims along the way. Everyone’s tattoos were pulsing madly, spinning with the anti-pretty magic of the breakthrough. But nobody was hurt beyond a few bruises or a little singed hair.

  “It worked, Tally!” Fausto said softly as she passed, staring with amazement at a chunk of ice in his hand. She kept running.

  Zane was laughing hysterically, tangled up in the net. When he saw Tally, he cried out a long, “Go-o-o-o-o-al!”

  She thudded to a halt, relieved, and let herself enjoy the bubbliness of everything, the world transformed around her. It was as if she could take in the whole audience at a glance, every expression crystal clear in the unreal sharpness of the stadium lights. Ten thousand faces stared back at her, awestruck and amazed.

  Tally imagined herself making a speech right now, telling them all about the operation, the lesions, the terrible price of being pretty—that lovely meant brainless, and that their easy lives were empty. The bedazzled crowd looked as if they would listen.