Uglies

 

Hippocratic Oath

They stayed at the edge of the Rusty Ruins.

Occasionally, hovercars would pass over the crumbling city, threading a slow search pattern across the sky. But the Smokies were old hands at hiding from satellites and aircraft. They placed red herrings across the ruins - chemical glowsticks that gave off human-size pockets of heat - and covered the windows of their building with sheets of black Mylar. And of course the ruins were very large; finding seven people in what had once been a city of millions was no simple matter.

Every night, Tally watched the influence of the "New Smoke" grow. A lot of uglies had seen the burning message on the night of the escape, or had heard about it, and the nightly pilgrimages out to the ruins slowly increased, until sparklers wavered atop high buildings from midnight until dawn. Tally, Ryde, Croy, and Astrix made contact with the city uglies, starting new rumors, teaching new tricks, and offering glimpses of the ancient magazines the Boss had salvaged from the Smoke. If they doubted the existence of Special Circumstances, Tally showed them the plastic handcuff bracelets still encircling her wrists, and invited them to try to cut the cuffs off.

One new legend towered above all the rest. Maddy had decided that the brain lesions couldn't be kept a secret anymore; every ugly had the right to know what the operation really entailed. Tally and the others spread the rumor among their city friends: Not just your face was changed by the knife. Your personality - the real you inside - was the price of beauty.

Of course, not every ugly believed such an outrageous tale, but a few did. And some sneaked across to New Pretty Town in the dead of night to talk to their older friends face-to-face, and decided for themselves.

The Specials sometimes tried to crash the party, setting traps for the New Smokies, but someone always gave a warning, and no hovercar could ever catch a board among winding streets and rubble. The New Smokies learned the nooks and crannies of the ruins as if they'd been born there, until they could disappear in a heartbeat.

Maddy worked on the brain cure, using materials salvaged from the ruins or brought by city uglies willing to borrow from hospitals and chem classes. She withdrew from the rest of them, except for David. She seemed particularly cool to Tally, who felt guilty for every moment she spent with David, now that his mother was alone. None of them ever talked about Az's death.

Shay stayed with them, complaining about the food, the ruins, her hair and clothes, and having to look at all the ugly faces around her. But she never seemed bitter, only perpetually annoyed. After the first few days she didn't even talk about leaving. Perhaps the brain damage made her pliant, or the fact that she hadn't lived in New Pretty Town for long. She still remembered them all as friends. Tally sometimes wondered if Shay secretly enjoyed having the only pretty face in their little rebellion. Certainly, she didn't do any more work than she would have in the city; Ryde and Astrix obeyed her every command.

David helped his mother, searching the ruins for salvage, and taught wilderness survival tricks to any ugly who wanted to learn. But in the two weeks after his father's death, Tally found herself missing the days when it had been just the two of them.

Twenty days after the rescue, Maddy announced that she had found a cure.

"Shay, I want to explain this to you carefully."

"Sure, Maddy."

"When you had the operation, they did something to your brain."

Shay smiled. "Yeah, right." She looked across at Tally, wearing a familiar expression. "That's what Tally keeps telling me. But you guys don't understand."

Maddy folded her hands. "What do you mean?"

"Ilike the way I look," Shay insisted. "I'm happier in this body. You want to talk about brain damage?

Look at you all, running around these ruins playing commando. You're all full of schemes and rebellions, crazy with fear and paranoia, even jealousy." Her eyes skipped back and forth between Tally and Maddy. "That's what being ugly does."

"And how do you feel, Shay?" Maddy asked calmly.

"I feel bubbly. It's nice not being all raging with hormones. Of course, it kind of sucks being out here instead of in the city."

"No one's keeping you here, Shay. Why haven't you left?"

Shay shrugged. "I don't know.... I'm worried about you guys, I guess. It's dangerous out here, and messing with Specials isn't a good idea. You should know that by now, Maddy."

Tally took a sharp breath, but Maddy's expression didn't change. "And you're going to protect us from them?" she asked calmly.

Shay shrugged. "I just feel bad about Tally. If I hadn't told her about the Smoke, she'd be pretty right now instead of living in this dump. And I figure eventually she'll decide to grow up. We'll go back together."

"You don't seem to want to decide for yourself."

"Decide what?" Shay rolled her eyes, looking at Tally to confirm what a bore this was. The two of them had plowed through this conversation a dozen times before, until Tally had realized there was no convincing Shay that her personality had changed. To Shay, her new attitude was simply the result of growing up, moving on, leaving all the overheated emotions of ugliness behind.

"You weren't always this way, Shay," David said.

"No, I used to be ugly."

Maddy smiled gently. "These pills won't change the way you look. They'll only affect your brain, undoing what Dr. Cable did to the way your mind works. Then you can decide for yourself how you want to look."

"Decide? After you've messed with my brain?"

"Shay!" Tally said, forgetting her promise to remain silent. "We're not the ones messing with your brain!"

"Tally," David said softly.

"That's right,I'm the one who's crazy." Shay's voice took on the tone of her daily round of complaining.

"Not you guys, who live in a broken-down building on the edge of a dead city, slowly turning into freaks when you could be beautiful. Yeah, I'm crazy all right...for trying to help you!"

Tally sat back and crossed her arms, silenced by Shay's words. Whenever they had this conversation, reality became a little unhinged, as if she and the other New Smokies might really be the insane ones. It felt like Tally's horrible first days in the Smoke, when she hadn't known whose side she was on.

"How are you helping us, Shay?" Maddy asked calmly.

"I'm trying to get you to understand."

"Just like you did when Dr. Cable used to bring you by my cell?"

Shay's eyes narrowed, confusion clouding her face, as if her memories of the underground prison didn't fit in with the rest of her pretty worldview.

"I know Dr. C was horrible to you," she said. "The Specials are psychos - just look at them. But that doesn't mean you have to spend your whole lives running away. That's what I'm saying. Once you turn, Specials won't mess with you."

"Why not?"

"Because you won't make trouble anymore."

"Why not?"

"Because you'll behappy !" Shay took a couple of deep breaths, and her usual calm returned. She smiled, beautiful again. "Like me."

Maddy picked up the pills on the table in front of her. "You won't take these willingly?"

"No way. You said they're not even safe."

"I said there was a small chance something could go wrong."

Shay laughed. "Youmust think I'm nuts. And even if those pills work, look what they're supposed to do.

From what I can tell, 'cured' means being a jealous, self-important, whiny little ugly-brain. It means thinking you've got all the answers." She crossed her arms. "In a lot of ways, you and Dr. Cable are alike. You're both convinced you've personally got to change the world. Well, I don't need that. And I don't need those."

"Okay, then." Maddy picked up the pills and put them in her pocket. "That's all I have to say."

"What do you mean?" Tally asked.

David squeezed her hand. "That's all we can do, Tally."

"What? You said we could cure her."

Maddy shook her head. "Only if she wants to be cured. These are experimental, Tally. We can't give them to someone against her will. Not when we don't know if they'll work."

"But her mind...she's got the lesions!"

"Hello," Shay called. "Sheis sitting right here."

"Sorry, Shay," Maddy said mildly. "Tally?"

Maddy pulled aside the Mylar barrier, stepping out onto what the New Smokies called the balcony. It was really just part of the top floor of the building, where the roof had entirely collapsed, leaving sweeping views of the ruins.

Tally followed. Behind her, Shay was already talking about what was for dinner. David came out a moment later.

"So, we give her the pills secretly, right?" Tally whispered.

"No," Maddy said firmly. "We can't. I'm not going to do medical experiments on unwilling subjects."

"Medical experiments?" Tally swallowed.

David took her hand. "You can't know for sure how something like this will work. It's only a one-percent chance, but it could screw up her brain forever."

"It's already screwed up."

"But she's happy, Tally." David shook his head. "And she can make decisions for herself."

Tally pulled her hand away, staring out over the city. A sparkler was already showing on the tall spire, uglies come to gossip and trade. "Why did we even have to ask?They didn't get her permission when they did this to her!"

"That's the difference between us and them," Maddy said. "After Az and I found out what the operation really meant, we realized we'd been party to something horrible. People had had their minds changed without their knowledge. As doctors, we took an ancient oath never to do anything like that."

Tally looked into Maddy's face. "But if you weren't going to help Shay, why did you bother finding a cure?"

"If we knew the treatment would work safely, then we could give it to Shay and see how she felt about it later. But to test it, we need a willing subject."

"Where are we ever going to find one? Anyone who's pretty is going to say no."

"Maybe for right now, Tally. But if we keep making inroads into the city, we might find a pretty who wants out."

"But weknow Shay's crazy."

"She's not crazy," Maddy said. "Her arguments make sense, in fact. She's happy as she is, and doesn't want to take a deadly risk."

"But she's not really herself. Wehave to change her back."

"Az died because someone thought like that," Maddy said grimly.

"What?"

David put his arm around her. "My father..." He cleared his throat, and Tally waited in silence. Finally he would tell her how Az had died.

He took a slow breath before continuing. "Dr. Cable wanted to turn them all, but she was worried that Mom and Dad might talk about the brain lesions, even after the operation, because they'd been focused on them for so long." David's voice trembled, but it was soft and careful, as if he didn't dare put any emotion into the words. "Dr. Cable was already working on ways to change memories, a way of erasing the Smoke forever from people's minds. When they took my father for the operation, he never came back."

"That's awful," Tally whispered. She gathered him into a hug.

"Az was the victim of a medical experiment, Tally," Maddy said. "I can't do the same thing to Shay.

Otherwise, she'd be right about me and Dr. Cable."

"But Shay ran away. She didn't want to become pretty."

"She doesn't want to be experimented on, either."

Tally closed her eyes. Through the Mylar shade, she could hear Shay telling Ryde about the hairbrush she'd made. For days she'd proudly shown the little brush, made of splinters of wood shoved into a lump of clay, to anyone who would listen. As if it were the most important thing she'd ever done.

They had risked everything to rescue her. But they had nothing to show for it. Shay would never be the same.

And it was all Tally's fault. She'd come to the Smoke, and had brought the Specials, leaving Shay an empty-headed pretty, and Az dead.

She took a deep breath. "Okay, you've got a willing subject."

"What do you mean, Tally?"

"Me."