Uglies

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 work everywhere 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 gri

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 Circumstances. 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 out looking for Special Circumstances.

A tingle passed 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 shingles passed 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. Nobody 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 passing 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 Circumstances 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 grass. 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 di

"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 cluster 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 Circumstances 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, shushing David when he started to speak again, the wheels of her brain spi

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 basement. 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 passed 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.