Specials

"Really, Tally," Dr. Cable said, smiling. "For someone so clever, you're such a little fool sometimes."

Tally lowered her head and closed her eyes. But she was breathing in slowly through her nose, searching the air…

Then she smelled it—the barest scent of blood.

She opened her eyes, and saw Dr. Cable glance down at her hand, mildly a

In the meantime, Tally didn't want Cable wondering how she'd stabbed herself on the "ante

Tally set a look of rage on her face. "You're calling me a fool?"

She lashed out a foot, catching Dr. Cable in the stomach and knocking the breath from her.

The other Specials reacted instantly, but Tally was already in motion, darting toward where she'd heard the injector fall. She landed one foot squarely on its remains, smashing it as hard as she could, then turned the motion into a roundhouse kick that landed on the jaw of the closest pursuer. She leaped up to the first row of seats, ru

"Agent Youngblood," another guard called. "We don't want to hurt you!"

"I'm afraid you'll have to!" She doubled back toward where the first guard lay. The door to the operating theater exploded open then, a swarm of gray silk uniforms storming into the room.

Tally jumped down near the fallen guard, landing once more on the shards of the injector. The other guard in battle gear landed a punch on her shoulder, rolling her back into the first row of seats. She leaped up and threw herself at him, ignoring the mass of Specials descending on her.

A few seconds later, Tally found herself thrown facedown on the floor, her arms pi

More of them piled on, like an elephant sitting on her back. The room grew dim; Tally felt herself being squashed against the edge of consciousness.

"It's okay, Doctor," one of the Specials said. "We have her under control."

Cable didn't respond. Tally craned her neck to see. The doctor was doubled over, still gasping for breath.

"Doctor?" the Special asked. "Are you all right?"

Just give her time, Tally thought. And she'll be much, much better…

Crumbling

Tally watched it all happen from her cell.

The changes came slowly at first. For a few days, Dr. Cable seemed her usual psychotic self when she visited, arrogantly demanding information about what was happening in Diego. Tally was happy to oblige, spi

But decades of vanity and cruelty faded slowly, and time itself seemed to come to a halt inside the four walls of Tally's cell. Cutters weren't designed to live indoors, especially not in tiny spaces, and Tally had to focus most of her strength on not going crazy. She stared at the cell door, filled with despair, fighting the rage that came in waves inside her, always resisting the urge to cut herself with her own fingernails and teeth.

That was how she'd managed to rewire herself for Zane— not cutting anymore—and she couldn't give in to weakness now.

Hardest was when Tally thought about how far below the earth she was, twelve stories down, as though the cell were a coffin buried deep in the ground. As if she had died, but some evil machinery of Dr. Cable's was keeping her conscious even in the grave.

The cell reminded her of the way the Rusties had lived—the rooms in the lifeless ruins small and cramped, their overcrowded cities like prisons reaching toward the sky. Every time the door opened, Tally expected to be put under the knife, to wake up as a bubblehead or as some still more psychotic form of a Special. She was almost glad when it was Dr. Cable ready to interrogate her again— anything was better than being alone in this empty cell.

And finally she began to see that the cure was working…slowly. Gradually Dr. Cable seemed to become less sure of herself, less able to make decisions.

"They're telling everyone my secrets!" she started mumbling one day, ru

"Who is?"

"Diego." Dr. Cable spat the word. "Last night they put Shay and Tachs on the world feeds. Showing their cutting scars and calling me a monster."

"How bogus of them," Tally said.

Dr. Cable glared at her. "And they're broadcasting detailed scans of your body, calling you a 'morphological violation'!"

"You mean I'm famous again?"

Cable nodded. "You're infamous, Tally. Everyone's terrified of you. The New System may have made the other cities nervous, but they seem to think my little gang of psychotic sixteen-year-olds is worse."

Tally smiled. "We were pretty icy."

"Then how did you let Diego capture you!"

"Yeah, that sucked." Tally shrugged. "And it was just a bunch of wardens, too. They had these stupid uniforms that looked like bumblebees."

Dr. Cable stared at her, begi

Zane had. "But you were so strong, Tally. So fast!" Tally shrugged again. "Still am." Dr. Cable shook her head. "For now, Tally. For now."

After two weeks of solitary silence, someone took unexpected mercy on Tally's boredom and the wallscreen in her cell booted up. She was amazed to see how quickly Dr. Cable's grip on the city had slipped. The newsfeeds had stopped reru

Apparently, Maddy's cure had taken hold of Cables mind just in time: The second attack on Diego had never materialized.

Of course, the other cities may have had something to do with that. They'd never liked the New System, but were even less thrilled about the outbreak of an actual shooting war. People had died, after all.

As Dr. Cable's surgical experiments became infamous, Diego's repeated denials that it had attacked the Armory slowly gained credence. The feeds began to question what had really happened that night, especially after a crumbly museum curator who'd witnessed the attack went public with his story He claimed that some sort of Rusty nano had been released, not by an invading army, but by two faceless attackers who'd seemed more young and harebrained than deadly serious.

Then stories sympathetic to Diego began to appear on the local feeds, including interviews with wounded survivors of the Town Hall strike. Tally always hurried to flick past those segments, which usually ended by listing the seventeen people who'd died in the attack—especially the one victim who was, ironically a runaway from this very city.

They always showed his picture, too.

Arguments about the war—and about everything else— began to erupt. The disagreements grew more intense as Tally watched, less polite and measured every day, until the whole debate about the city's future became downright ugly. There was talk of new morphological standards, of letting uglies and pretties mix, even of expansion into the wild.

The cure was taking hold here, just as it had in Diego, and Tally wondered exactly what sort of future she had helped let loose. Were the city pretties going to start acting like Rustles now? Spreading across the wild, overpopulating the earth, leveling everything in their path? Who was left to stop them?