Uglies

 

Spagbol

She made good time that night.

The track zoomed along beneath her, tracing slow arcs around hills, crossing rivers on crumbling bridges, always headed toward the sea. Twice it took her through other Rusty ruins, smaller towns further along in their disintegration. Only a few twisted shapes of metal remained, rising above the trees like skeletal fingers grasping at the air. Burned-out groundcars were everywhere, choking the streets out of town, twisted together in the collisions of the Rusties' last panic.

Near the center of one ruined town, she discovered what the long, flat roller coaster was all about. In a nest of tracks tangled up like a huge circuit board, she found a few rotting roller-coaster cars, huge rolling containers full of Rusty stuff, unidentifiable piles of rust and plastic. Tally remembered now that Rusty cities weren't self-sufficient, and were always trading with one another, when they weren't fighting over who had more stuff. They must have used the flat roller coaster to move trade from town to town.

As the sky began to grow light, Tally heard the sound of the sea in the distance, a faint roar coming from across the horizon. She could smell salt in the air, which brought back memories of going to the ocean with Ellie and Sol as a littlie.

"Cold is the sea and watch for breaks," Shay's note read. Soon, Tally would be able to see the waves breaking on the shore. Maybe she was close to the next clue.

Tally wondered how much time she'd made up with her new hoverboard. She increased its speed, wrapping her dorm jacket around herself in the predawn chill. The track was slowly climbing now, cutting through formations of chalky rock. She remembered white cliffs towering over the ocean, swarming with seabirds nesting in high caves.

Those camping trips with Sol and Ellie felt as if they'd happened a hundred years ago. She wondered if there was some operation that could make her back into a littlie again, forever.

Suddenly, a gap opened up in front of Tally, spanned by a crumbling bridge. 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.

Tally spun her board sideways into a skid. Her knees bent under the force of braking, her grippy shoes squealing as they slipped across the riding surface, her body turning almost parallel to the ground.

But the ground was gone.

A deep chasm opened up under her, a fissure cut into the cliffs by the sea. Boiling waves crashed into the narrow channel, their whitecaps glowing in the darkness, their hungry roars reaching her ears. The board's metal-detector lights flickered out one by one as Tally left the splintered end of the iron bridge behind.

She felt the board lose purchase, slipping downward.

A thought flashed through her mind: If she jumped now, she could make a grab for the end of the broken bridge. But then the hoverboard would tumble into the chasm behind her, leaving her stranded.

The board finally halted in its slide out into midair, but Tally was still descending. The last fingers of the crumbling bridge wereabove her now, out of reach. The board inched downward, metal-detector lights flickering off one by one as the magnets lost their grip. She was too heavy. Tally slipped off the knapsack, ready to hurl it down. But how could she survive without it? Her only choice would be to return to the city for more supplies, which would lose two more days. A cold wind off the ocean blew up the chasm, goose-pimpling her arms like the chill of death.

But the breeze buoyed the hoverboard, and for a moment she neither rose nor fell. Then the board started to slip downward again....

Tally thrust her hands into the pockets of her jacket and spread her arms, making a sail to catch the wind. A stronger gust struck, lifting her slightly, taking some weight off the board, and one of the metal-detector lights flickered stronger.

Like a bird with outstretched wings, she began to rise.

The lifters gradually regained purchase on the track, until the hoverboard had brought her level with the broken end of the bridge. She coaxed it carefully back over the cliff's edge, a huge shiver passing through her body as the board passed over solid ground. Tally stepped off, legs shaking.

"Cold is the sea and watch forbreaks, " she said hoarsely. How could she have been so stupid, speeding up just when Shay's note said to be careful?

Tally collapsed onto the ground, suddenly dizzy and tired. Her mind replayed the chasm opening up, the waves below smashing indifferently against the jagged rocks.She could have been down there, battered again and again until there was nothing left.

This was the wild, she reminded herself. Mistakes had serious consequences.

Even before Tally's heart had stopped pounding, her stomach growled.

She reached into her knapsack for the water purifier, which she'd filled at the last river, and emptied the muck-trap. A spoonful of brown sludge that it had filtered from the water glopped out. "Eww," she said, opening the top to peer in. It looked clear, and smelled like water.

She took a much needed drink, but saved most to make dinner, or breakfast, whatever it was. Tally planned to do most of her traveling at night, letting the hoverboard recharge in sunlight, wasting no time.

Reaching into the waterproof bag, she pulled out a food packet at random. "'SpagBol,'" she read from the label, and shrugged. Unwrapped, it looked and felt like a finger-size knot of dried yarn. She dropped it into the purifier, which made burbling noises as it came to a boil.

When Tally glanced out at the glowing horizon, her eyes opened wide. She'd never seen dawn from outside the city before. Like most uglies, she was rarely up early enough, and in any case the horizon was always hidden behind the skyline of New Pretty Town. The sight of a real sunrise amazed her.

A band of orange and yellow ignited the sky, glorious and unexpected, as spectacular as fireworks, but changing at a stately, barely perceptible pace. That's how things were out here in the wild, she was learning. Dangerous or beautiful. Or both.

The purifierpinged . Tally opened the top and looked inside. It was noodles with a red sauce, with small kernels of soymeat, and it smelled delicious. She looked at the label again. "SpagBol...spaghetti Bolognese!"

She found a fork in the knapsack and ate hungrily. With the sunrise warming her and the crash of the sea rumbling below, it was the best meal she'd had for ages.

The hoverboard still had some charge left, so after breakfast she decided to keep moving. She reread the first few lines of Shay's note:

Take the coaster straight past the gap, until you find one that's long and flat. Cold is the sea and watch for breaks. At the second make the worst mistake.

If "the second" meant a second broken bridge, Tally wanted to run into it in daylight. If she'd spotted the gap a split second later, she would have ended up so much SpagBol at the bottom of the cliffs.

But her first problem was getting across the chasm. It was much wider than the gap in the roller coaster, definitely too far to jump. Walking looked like the only way around. She hiked inland through the scrubby grass, her legs grateful for a stretch after the long night on board. Soon the chasm closed, and an hour later she had hiked back up the other side.

Tally flew much slower now, eyes fixed ahead, daring only an occasional glimpse at the view around her.

Mountains rose up on her right, tall enough that snow capped their tops even in the early autumn chill.

Tally had always thought of the city as huge, a whole world in itself, but the scale of everything out here was so much grander. And so beautiful. She could see why people used to live out in nature, even if there weren't any party towers or mansions. Or even dorms.

The thought of home, however, reminded Tally how much her sore muscles would love a hot bath. She imagined a giant bathtub, like they had in New Pretty Town, with whirlpool jets and a big packet of massage bubbles dissolving in it. She wondered if the water purifier could boil enough water to fill a tub, in the unlikely event that she found one. How did they bathe in the Smoke? Tally wondered what she'd smell like when she arrived, after days without a bath. Was there soap in the survival kit? Shampoo?

There certainly weren't any towels. Tally had never realized how muchstuff she'd needed before.

The second break in the track came up after another hour: a crumbling bridge over a river that snaked down from the mountains.

Tally came to a controlled stop and peered over the edge. The drop wasn't as bad as the first chasm, but it was still deep enough to be deadly. Too wide to jump. Hiking around it would take forever. The river gorge stretched away, with no easy way down in sight.

"At the second make the worst mistake," she murmured.

Some clue. Anything she did right now would be a mistake. Her brain was too tired to handle this, and the board was short on power, anyway.

Midmorning, it was time to sleep.

But first she had to unfold the hoverboard. The Special who'd instructed her had explained that it needed as much surface area in the sun as possible while it recharged. She pulled the release tabs, and it came apart. It opened like a book in her hands, becoming two hoverboards, then each of those opened up, and then those, unfolding like a string of paper dolls. Finally, Tally had eight hoverboards connected side-to-side, twice as wide as she was tall, no thicker than a stiff sheet of paper. The whole thing fluttered in the stiff ocean breeze like a giant kite, though the board's magnets kept it from blowing away.

Tally laid it flat, stretched out in the sun, where its metallic surface turned jet black as it drank in solar energy. In a few hours it would be charged up and ready to ride again. She just hoped it would go back together as easily as it had pulled apart.

Tally pulled out her sleeping bag, yanked it out of its pack, and wriggled inside, still in her clothes.

"Pajamas," she added to her list of things she missed about the city.

She made a pillow of her jacket, struggled out of her shirt, and covered her head with it. She could already feel a hint of burn on her nose, and realized she had forgotten to stick on a sunblock patch after daybreak. Perfect. A little red and flaking skin should go quite nicely with the scratches on her ugly face.

Sleep didn't come. The day was getting warm, and it felt weird lying there in the open. The cries of seabirds rang in her head. Tally sighed and sat up. Maybe if she had a little more to eat.

She pulled out food packets one by one. The labels read:

SpagBol

SpagBol

SpagBol

SpagBol

SpagBol...

Tally counted forty-one more packets, enough for three SpagBols a day for two weeks. She leaned back and closed her eyes, suddenly exhausted. "Thank you, Dr. Cable."

A few minutes later, Tally was asleep.