Uglies. Part 32

She only knew the name of one big desert on the continent. "Is this the Mojave?"

David shook his head. "This isn't nearly that big, and it isn't natural. We're standing where the white weed started."

Tally whistled. The sand seemed to go forever. "What a disaster."

"Once the undergrowth was gone, replaced by the orchids, there was nothing to hold the good soil down. It blew away, and all that's left is sand."

"Will it ever be anything but desert?"

"Sure, in a thousand years or so. Maybe by then someone will have found a way to stop the weed from coming back. If we haven't, the process will just start all over again."

They reached a Rusty city around daybreak, a cl.u.s.ter of unremarkable buildings stranded on the sea of sand.

The desert had invaded over the centuries, dunes flowing through the streets like water, but the buildings were in better shape than other ruins Tally had seen. Sand wore away the edges of things, but it didn't tear them down as hungrily as rain and vegetation.

Neither of them was tired yet, but they couldn't travel during the day; the desert offered no protection from the sun, nor any concealment from the air. They camped in the second floor of a low factory building that still had most of its roof. Ancient machines, each as big as a hovercar, stood silent around them.

"What was this place?" Tally asked.

"I think they made newspapers here," David said. "Like books, but you threw them away and got a new one every day."

"You're kidding."

"Not at all. And you thought we wasted trees in the Smoke!"

Tally found a patch of sun shining through where the roof had collapsed, and unfolded the hoverboards to recharge. David pulled out two packets of EggSal.

"Will we make it out of the desert tonight?" she asked, watching David coax their last few drops of bottled water into the purifiers.

"No problem. We'll hit the next river before midnight."

She remembered something that Shay had said a long time ago, the first time she'd shown Tally her survival gear. "Can you really pee in a purifier? And then drink it, I mean?"

"Yeah. I've done it."

Tally grimaced and looked out the window. "Okay, I shouldn't have asked."

He came up behind her, laughing softly, placing his hands on her shoulders. "It's amazing what people will do to survive," he said.

She sighed. "I know."

The window overlooked a side street, partly protected from the encroaching desert. A few burned-out groundcars stood half-buried, their blackened frames stark against the white sand.

She rubbed the handcuff bracelets still encircling her wrists. "The Rusties sure wanted to survive. Every ruin I've seen, those cars are always all over, trying to get out. But they never seem to make it."

"A few of them did. But not in cars."

Tally leaned back into his rea.s.suring warmth. The morning sun was hours away from burning off the chill of the desert.

"It's funny. At school, they never talk much about how it happened-the last panic, when the Rusty world fell apart. They shrug and say that all their mistakes just kept adding up, until it all collapsed like a house of cards."

"That's only partly true. The Boss had some old books about it."

"What did they say?"

"Well, the Rusties did live in a house of cards, but someone gave it a pretty big shove. No one ever found out who. Maybe it was a Rusty weapon that got out of control. Maybe it was people in some poor country who didn't like the way the Rusties ran things. Maybe it was just an accident, like the flowers, or some lone scientist who wanted to mess things up."

"But what happened?"

"A bug got loose, but it didn't infect people. It infected petroleum."

"Oil got infected?"

He nodded. "Oil is organic, made from old plants and dinosaurs and stuff. Somebody made a bacterium that ate it. The spores spread through the air, and when they landed in petroleum, processed or crude, they sprouted. Like a mold or something. It changed the chemical composition of the oil. Have you ever seen phosphorus?"

"It's an element, right?"

"Yeah. And it catches fire on contact with air."

Tally nodded. She remembered playing with the stuff in chem cla.s.s, wearing goggles and talking about all the tricks you could do with it. But no one ever thought of a trick that wouldn't kill someone.

"Oil infected by this bacterium was just as unstable as phosphorus. It exploded on contact with oxygen.

And as it burned, the spores were released in the smoke, and spread on the wind. Until the spores got to the next car, or airplane, or oil well, and started growing again."

"Wow. And they used oil for everything, right?"

David nodded. "Like those cars down there. They must have been infected as they tried to get out of town."

"Why didn't they justwalk ?"

"Stupid, I guess."

Tally shivered again, but not from the cold. It was hard to think of the Rusties as actual people, rather than as just an idiotic, dangerous, and sometimes comic force of history. But there were human beings down there, whatever was left of them after a couple of hundred years, still sitting in their blackened cars, as if still trying to escape their fate.

"I wonder why they don't tell us that in history cla.s.s. They usually love any story that makes the Rusties sound pathetic."

David lowered his voice. "Maybe they didn't want you to realize that every civilization has its weakness.

There's always one thing we depend on. And if someone takes it away, all that's left is some story in a history cla.s.s."

"Not us," she said. "Renewable energy, sustainable resources, a fixed population."

The two purifierspinged, and David left her to get them. "It doesn't have to be about economics," he said, bringing the food over. "The weakness could be an idea."

She turned to take her EggSal, cupping its warmth in her hands, and saw how serious he looked. "So, David, is that one of the things you thought about all those years, when you imagined the Smoke being invaded? Did you ever wonder what would turn the cities into history?"

He smiled and took a big bite.

"It gets clearer every day."

Familiar Sights

They reached the edge of the desert the next night, on schedule, then followed a river for three days, all the way to the sea. It took them still farther north, and the October chill turned as cold as any winter Tally had ever felt. David unpacked city-made arctic gear of shiny silver Mylar, which Tally wore over her handmade sweater, her only possession left from the Smoke. She was glad she'd dropped off to sleep in it the night before the Specials had invaded, so it hadn't been lost that day like everything else.

The nights spent on board seemed to pa.s.s quickly. On this journey, there were none of Shay's cryptic clues to puzzle through, no brush fires to escape, and no antique Rusty machines descending to scare her to death. The world seemed to be empty except for the occasional ruins, as if Tally and David were the last people alive.

They augmented their diet with fish caught from the river, and Tally roasted a rabbit on a fire she'd built herself. She watched David repair his leather clothes and decided she would never be able to manage a needle and thread well. He taught her how to tell time and direction from the stars, and she showed him how to open the expert software in the boards to optimize them for night travel.

At the sea they turned south, heading down the northern reaches of the same coastal railway that Tally had followed on her way to the Smoke. David said it had once stretched unbroken all the way back to Tally's home city and beyond. But now there were large gaps in the track, and new cities built on the sea, so they had to travel inland more than once. But David knew the rivers, the spurs of the railroad, and the other metal paths the Rusties had left behind, so they made good time toward their goal.

Only the weather stopped them. After a few days' travel down the coast, a dark and threatening mountain of clouds appeared over the ocean. At first, the storm seemed reluctant to come ash.o.r.e, building up its nerve over a slow twenty-four hours, the air pressure changing in a way that made the hoverboards jittery to ride. The storm gave plenty of warning, but when it finally arrived, it was much worse than Tally had imagined weather could be.

She'd never faced the full force of a hurricane, except from within the solid structures of her inland city.

It was another lesson in nature's savage power.

For three days Tally and David huddled in a plastic tent in the shelter of a rock outcrop, burning chemical glowsticks for heat and light, hoping the magnets in the hoverboards wouldn't bring down a lightning strike. For the first hours, the drama of the storm kept them fascinated, amazed at its power, wondering when the next peal of thunder would shake the cliffs. Then the driving rain became simply monotonous, and they spent a whole day talking to each other about anything and everything, but especially their childhoods, until Tally was sure that she understood David better than anyone she'd ever known. On their third day trapped in the tent they had a terrible fight-Tally could never remember about what-that ended when David stormed out and stood alone in the icy wind for a solid hour. When he finally returned, it took him hours to stop shivering, even wrapped in her arms. "We're taking too long,"

he finally said.

Tally squeezed tighter. It took time to prepare subjects for the operation, especially if they were older than sixteen. But Dr. Cable wouldn't wait forever to turn David's parents. Every day the storm delayed them, there was a greater chance that Maddy and Az had already gone under the knife. For Shay, the perfect age for turning, the odds were even worse.

"We'll get there, don't worry. They measured me every week for a year before I was supposed to turn.

It takes time to do it right."

A shudder pa.s.sed through his body.

"Tally, what if they don't bother to do it right?"

The storm ended the next morning, and they emerged to find that the world's colors had been transformed. The clouds were bright pink, the gra.s.s an unearthly green, and the ocean darker than Tally had ever seen it, marked only by the foam crests of waves and a peppering of driftwood driven into the sea by the wind. They rode all day to make up for lost time, in a state of shock, amazed that the world could still exist after the storm.

Then the railway turned inland, and a few nights later they reached the Rusty Ruins.

The ruins looked smaller, as if the spires had shrunk since Tally had left them behind more than a month before, headed to the Smoke with nothing but Shay's note and a knapsack full of SpagBol. As she and David pa.s.sed through the dark streets, the ghosts of the Rusties no longer seemed to threaten from the windows.

"The first time I came here at night, this place really scared me," she said.

David nodded. "It's kind of creepy how well preserved it is. Of all the ruins I've seen, it looks the most recent."

"They sprayed it with something to keep it up for school trips." And that was her city in a nutsh.e.l.l, Tally realized. Nothing left to itself. Everything turned into a bribe, a warning, or a lesson.

They stowed most of their gear in a collapsed building far from the center, a crumbling place that even truant uglies would probably avoid, packing only water purifiers, a flashlight, and a few food packets.

David had never been any closer to the city than the ruins, so Tally took the lead for once, following the vein of iron that Shay had shown her months before.

"Do you think we'll ever be friends again?" she asked as they hiked toward the river, lugging their boards for the first time the entire trip.

"You and Shay? Of course."

"Even after...you and me?"

"Once we've rescued her from the Specials, I figure she'll forgive you for just about anything."

Tally was silent. Shay had already guessed that Tally had betrayed the Smoke. She doubted anything would ever make up for that.

Once they reached the river, they shot down the white water at top speed, glad to be finally free of the heavy saddlebags. With the spray hitting her face, the roar of water all around her, Tally could almost imagine this was one of her expeditions, back when she was a carefree city kid and not a...

What was she now? No longer a spy, and she couldn't call herself a Smokey anymore. Hardly a pretty, but she didn't feel like an ugly, either. She was nothing in particular. But at least she had a purpose.

The city came into view.

"There it is," she called to David over the churning water. "But you've seen cities before, right?"

"I've been this close to a few. But not much closer."

Tally gazed down at the familiar skyline, the slender trails of fireworks silhouetting the party towers and mansions. She felt a pang of something like homesickness, but much worse. The sight of New Pretty Town had once filled her with longing. Now the skyline was like a vacant sh.e.l.l, all its promises gone. Like David, she had lost her home. But unlike the Smoke, her city still existed, right in front of her eyes-but emptied of everything it had once meant.

"We've got a few hours before sunrise," she said. "Want to take a look at Special Circ.u.mstances?"

"The sooner the better," David said.

Tally nodded, her eyes tracing the familiar patterns of light and darkness surrounding the city. There was time to make it there and back before daybreak.

"Let's go."

They followed the river as far as the ring of trees and brush that separated Uglyville from the suburbs.

The greenbelt was the best place to travel without being seen, and a good ride as well.

"Don't go so fast!" David hissed from behind as she whipped through the trees.

She slowed down. "You don't have to whisper. No one comes here at night. It's ugly territory, and they're all in bed, unless they're tricking."

"Okay," he said. "But shouldn't we be more careful about hoverpaths?"

"Hoverpaths? David, hoverboards workeverywhere in the city. There's a metal grid under the whole thing."

"Oh, right."

Tally smiled. She had been so used to living in David's world, it was good to be explaining things to him for once. "What's the matter," she taunted, "can't keep up?"

David grinned. "Try me."