Specials

By the time she reached Zane's window, Tally was falling fast, but her fingers shot out and caught the ledge easily. She swung in a wide arc, grippy gloves sticking to the ledge as if glued there, her momentum slowly expending itself as she pendulummed back and forth.

When she looked up, Tally saw Shay perched a meter above, balanced on a tiny ridge of window frame that stuck out no more than a centimeter from the wall. Her gloved hands were splayed behind her like five-legged spiders, but Tally couldn't see how there was enough total friction to hold her weight. "How are you doing that?" she whispered.

Shay giggled. "Can't tell you all my secrets, Tally-wa. But it's a bit slippy up here. Quick, take a listen."

Hanging from one hand, Tally clamped her other gloves fingertips between her teeth. She pulled it off and stretched out a finger to touch the corner of the window. The chips in her hand registered the vibrations there, turning the expanse of glass into one big microphone. She closed her eyes, hearing the noises inside the room with a sudden intimacy, like pressing one ear to a drinking glass against a thin wall. She heard a ping as Shay listened in through her skinte

Zane was talking, and the sound sent a little tremor through Tally. It was so familiar—yet distorted, either by her eavesdropping hardware or the months they'd been apart. She could make out the words, but not what they meant.

"All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away," he was saying. "All new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify …"

"What's he babbling about?" Shay hissed, adjusting her grip.

"I don't know. Sounds like Rusty-talk. Like some old book."

"Don't tell me Zane's…reading to the Crims?"

Tally looked up at Shay in puzzlement. A dramatic reading didn't sound very Crim, actually. Or very anything but random. And yet Zane's voice kept going, droning on about something melting.

"Take a peek, Tally-wa."

Tally nodded, pulling herself up until her eyes cleared the window ledge.

Zane sat in a big, soft-cushioned chair, holding a tattered old paper book in one hand and waving the other around like an orchestra conductor as he declaimed. But where the city interface had placed the other Crims, there was only empty space.

"Oh, Shay," she whispered. "You're going to love this."

"What I'm going to do is fall on your head, Tally-wa, in about ten seconds. What's going on?"

"He's all alone. Those other Crims are just…" She squinted into the gloom outside Zane's reading light. There they were, spread around the room like an attentive audience. "Rings. They're all just interface rings, except for Zane."

Despite Shay's wobbly grip on her perch, she let out a long snicker. "Maybe he's bubblier than we thought."

Tally nodded, gri

"Please."

"Might startle him."

"Startled is good, Tally-wa. We want him bubbly. Now hurry up, I'm starting to slip."

Tally pulled herself higher, getting one knee onto the narrow ledge outside the window. She took a deep breath, then rapped twice, trying to smile without showing the razor sharpness of her teeth.

Zane looked up at the sound, startled for a moment, then his eyes widened. He made a gesture, and the window slid open.

A grin spread across his face.

"Tally-wa," he said. "You've changed."

Zane-la

Zane was still beautiful.

His cheekbones were sharp, his stare hungry and intense, like he was still using calorie purgers to keep himself alert. His lips were as full as any bubblehead's, and as Zane stared at Tally, he pursed them in childlike concentration. His hair hadn't changed at all; she remembered how he'd dyed it with calligraphy ink, turning it a bluish black that was way beyond the Pretty Committee's standards of good taste.

But there was something different about his face. Tally's mind spun, trying to figure out what it was.

"You brought Shay-la with you?" he said as the squeak of grippy shoes came from the window behind Tally. "How happy-making."

Tally nodded slowly, hearing in his voice that he wished she'd come alone. Of course. They had so much to talk about, hardly any of which she wanted to say in front of Shay.

It suddenly seemed like years since she'd seen Zane. Tally felt all the differences in her body—the ultralight bones and flash tattoos, the cutting scars along her arms— as reminders of how she'd changed in the time they'd been apart. Of how different they were now.

Shay gri

"I've got more friends than you think, Shay-la." His eyes swept across the four walls of the room.

Shay shook her head, pulling a small black device from her belt. Tally's sharp ears caught its barely audible hum, a sizzling like wet leaves thrown onto a fire. "Relax, Zane-la. The city can't hear us."

His eyes widened. "You're allowed to do that?"

"Haven't you heard?" Shay smiled. "We're special."

"Oh. Well, as long as it's just us three…" He dropped the book onto the empty chair beside him, where it set Peris's ring jiggling. "The others are off on a little trick tonight. I'm covering, in case the wardens are monitoring us."

Shay laughed. "So the wardens are supposed to believe the Crims have a reading group?"

He shrugged. "It's not real wardens, as far as we can tell, only software. As long as someone's talking, it stays happy."

Tally sat down on Zane's unmade bed slowly, a shiver moving through her. Zane wasn't talking like some clueless pretty at all. And if he was covering for his friends while they did something criminal, then he was still bubbly, still the sort of tricky pretty who could one day become a Special…

She breathed in the familiar scent of him from the bedclothes, wondering what her tattoos were doing—probably spi

But Zane wasn't wearing an interface ring himself, or a bracelet. How were the wardens tracking him?

"Your new face is about a mega-Helen, Tally-wa," Zane said, his gaze traveling the web of flash tattoos on her face and arms. "It could launch a billion ships. But pirate ships, probably."

She smiled at the lame joke, trying to think of something to say. She'd been waiting for this moment for two months, and suddenly all she could do was sit here like an idiot.

But it wasn't just her nerves that were making her word-missing. The more she looked at him, the more Zane looked wrong, somehow, and his voice sounded like it was coming from another room.

"I was hoping you'd come," he added softly.

"She insisted," Shay said, her words whisper-close.

Tally realized why Zane sounded so distant. With no skinte

Shay sat down next to Tally on the bed. "But if you don't mind, you two can be all bubbleheaded some other time." She pulled out the small plastic bag of nano pills that Ho had taken from the ugly boy the night before. "We came about these."

Zane half-rose from the chair and held out his hand for them, but Shay just laughed. "Not so fast, Zane-la. You have a bad habit of taking the wrong pills."

"Don't remind me," he said wearily.