Uglies. Part 19

She shrugged. "I thought they were kind of pretty. I didn't know about the whole superweed thing."

David frowned at Shay. "Didn't you tell heranything in your note?"

Shay flushed. "You told me not to write anything that would give the Smoke away, so I put it in code, sort of."

"It sounds like your code almost got her killed," David said, and Shay's face fell. He turned to Tally.

"Hardly anyone ever makes the trip alone. Not their first time out of the city."

"I'd been out of the city before." Tally put her arm around Shay's shoulder comfortingly. "I was fine. It was just a bunch of pretty flowers to me, and I started with two weeks of food."

"Why did you steal all SpagBol?" Croy asked. "You must love the stuff." The others joined in his laughter.

Tally tried to smile. "I didn't even notice when I pinched it. Three SpagBols a day for nine days. I could hardly stomach the stuff after day two, but you get so hungry."

They nodded. They all knew about hard traveling, and hard work, too, apparently. Tally had already noticed how much everyone had consumed for lunch. Maybe Shay wasn't so likely to get the not-eating disease. She had cleaned her heaping plate.

"Well, I'm glad you made it," David said. He reached across and touched the scratches on Tally's face softly. "Looks like you had more adventures than you're telling us."

Tally swallowed and shrugged, hoping she looked modest.

Shay smiled and hugged David. "I knew you'd think Tally was awesome."

A bell rang across the grounds, and they hurried to finish their food.

"What's that?" she asked.

David grinned. "That's back to work."

"You're coming with us," Shay said. "Don't worry, it won't kill you."

On the way to work, Shay explained more about the long, flat roller coasters called railroads. Some stretched across the entire continent, one small part of the Rusty legacy still scarring the land. But unlike most ruins, the railroads were actually useful, and not just for hoverboarding. They were the main source of metal for the Smokies.

David had discovered a new railroad track a year or so earlier. It didn't run anywhere useful, so he had drawn up a plan to plunder it for metal and build more hoverpaths in and around the valley. Shay had been working on the project since she'd come to the Smoke ten days before.

Six of them took their boards up and out the other side of the valley, down a stream churning with white water, and along a razor-sharp ridge filled with iron ore. From there, Tally finally understood how far up the mountain she'd come since leaving the coast. The whole continent seemed to be spread out before them. A thin bank of clouds below the ridge mirrored the heavier layer overhead, but forests, gra.s.slands, and the s.h.i.+mmering arcs of rivers were visible through the misty veil. The sea of white orchids could still be glimpsed from this side of the mountain, glowing like an encroaching desert in the sun.

"Everything's so big," Tally murmured.

"That's what you can never tell from inside," Shay said. "How small the city is. How small they have to make everyone to keep them trapped there."

Tally nodded, but she imagined all those people let loose in the countryside below, cutting down trees and killing things for food, cras.h.i.+ng across the landscape like some risen Rusty machine.

Still, she wouldn't have traded anything for this moment, standing there and looking down at the plains spread out below. Tally had spent the last four years staring at the skyline of New Pretty Town, thinking it was the most beautiful sight in the world, but she didn't think so anymore.

Lower down and halfway around the mountain, another river crossed David's railroad track. The route there from the Smoke twisted in all directions, taking advantage of veins of iron, rivers, and dry creek beds, but they'd never had to leave their boards. Walking wouldn't be an option, Shay explained, when they came back loaded with heavy metal.

The track was overgrown with vines and stunted trees, every wooden cross-tie in the grip of a dozen tentacles of vegetation. The forest had been hacked away in patches surrounding a few missing segments of rail, but it held the rest firmly in its grasp.

"How are we going to get any of this out?" Tally asked. She kicked at a gnarled root, feeling puny against the strength of the wild.

"Watch this," Shay said. She pulled a tool from her backpack, an arm-length pole that telescoped out almost to Tally's height. Shay twisted one end, and four short struts unfolded from the other like the ribs of an umbrella. "It's called a powerjack, and it can move just about anything."

Shay twisted the handle again, and the ribs retracted. Then she thrust one end of the jack under a cross-tie. With another twist of her wrist, the pole began to shudder, and a groaning sound came from the wood. Shay's feet slipped backward, but she leaned her weight into the pole, keeping it wedged under the cross-tie. Slowly, the ancient wood began to rise, tearing free from plants and earth, bending the rail that lay across it. Tally saw the struts of the powerjack unfolding underneath the tie, gradually forcing it up, the rail above beginning to pull free of its moorings.

Shay grinned up at her. "I told you."

"Let me try," Tally said, holding out her hand, eyes wide.

Shay laughed and pulled another powerjack from her backpack. "Take that tie there, while I keep this one up."

The powerjack was heavier than it looked, but its controls were simple. Tally pulled it open and jammed it under the tie that Shay had indicated. She turned the handle slowly, until the jack started to shudder in her hands.

The wood began to s.h.i.+ft, the stresses of metal and earth twisting in her hands. Vines tore from the ground, and Tally could feel their complaints through the soles of her shoes, like a distant earthquake rumbling. A metal shriek filled the air as the rail began to bend, pulling free of vegetation and the rusty spikes that had held it down for centuries. Finally, the jack had opened to its full extent, the rail still only half-free from its ancient bonds. She and Shay struggled to pull their jacks out.

"Having fun?" Shay asked, wiping sweat from her brow.

Tally nodded, grinning. "Don't just stand there, let's finish the job."

David

A few hours later, a pile of sc.r.a.p metal stood in one corner of the clearing. Each segment of rail took an hour to get free, and required all six of them to carry. The railroad ties sat in another pile; at least all the Smokies' wood didn't come from live trees. Tally couldn't believe how much they had salvaged, literally tearing the track from the forest's grasp.

She also couldn't believe her hands. They were red and raw, screaming with pain and covered with blisters.

"Looks pretty bad," David said, glancing over Tally's shoulder as she stared at them in amazement.

"Feelspretty bad," she said. "But I didn't notice until just now."

David laughed. "Hard work's a good distraction. But maybe you should take a break. I was just about to scout up the line for another spot to salvage. Want to come?"

"Sure," she said gratefully. The thought of picking up the powerjack again made her hands throb.

Leaving the others at the clearing, they hoverboarded up and over the gnarled trees, following the barely visible track below into dense forest. David rode low in the canopy, gracefully avoiding branches and vines as if this were a familiar slalom course. Tally noticed that, like his shoes, his clothes wereall handmade. City clothing only used seams and st.i.tching for decoration, but David's jacket seemed to be cut together from a dozen patches of leather, all different shades and shapes. Its patchwork appearance reminded her of Frankenstein's monster, which led to a terrible thought.

What if it were made ofreal leather, like in the olden days? Skins.

She shuddered. He couldn't be wearing a bunch of dead animals. They weren't savages here. And she had to admit that the coat fit him well, the leather following the line of his shoulders like an old friend. And it fended off the whips of branches better than her microfiber dorm jacket.

David slowed as they came into a clearing, and Tally saw that they had reached a wall of solid rock.

"That's weird," she said. The railroad track seemed to plunge straight into the mountain, disappearing into a pile of boulders.

"The Rusties were serious about straight lines," David said. "When they built rails, they didn't like to go around stuff."

"So they just wentthrough ?"

David nodded. "Yeah. This used to be a tunnel, cut right into the mountain. It must have collapsed sometime after the Rusty panic."

"Do you think there was anyone...inside? When it happened, I mean."

"Probably not. But you never know. There could be a whole trainload of Rusty skeletons in there."

Tally swallowed, trying to imagine whatever was in there, flattened and buried for centuries in the dark.

"The forest's a lot clearer around here," David said. "Easier to work through. I'm just worried about these boulders collapsing if we start prying rails up."

"They look pretty solid."

"Oh, yeah? Check this out," David said. He stepped off his board onto a boulder, and deftly climbed to a spot that lay shadowed in the setting sun.

Tally angled her board closer and jumped onto a large rock next to David. When her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw that a long s.p.a.ce extended back between the boulders. David crawled inside, his feet disappearing into the darkness.

"Come on," his voice called.

"Um, there isn't really a trainload of dead Rusties in there, right?"

"Not that I've found. But today might be our lucky day."

Tally rolled her eyes and lowered herself onto her belly. She crawled inside, the cool weight of the rocks settling over her.

A light flicked on ahead. She could see David sitting up in a small s.p.a.ce, a flashlight glowing in his hand.

She pulled herself in and took a seat next to him on a flat bit of rock. Giant shapes were stacked above them. "So the tunnel didn't collapse completely."

"Not at all. The rock cracked into pieces, some big and some small." David pointed the flashlight down through a c.h.i.n.k between where they sat. Tally squinted into the darkness and saw a much bigger open s.p.a.ce below. A glint of metal revealed a segment of track.

"Just think. If we could get down there," David said, "we wouldn't have to pull up all those vines. All that track just waiting for us."

"Just a hundred tons of rock in the way, is all."

He nodded. "Yeah, but it would be worth it." He pointed the flashlight upward at his face, making himself hideous. "No one's been down there for hundreds of years."

"Great." Tally's skin tingled, her eyes picking out the dark fissures all around them. Maybe no human beings had been there for a long time, but lots of things liked to live in cool, dark caves.

"I keep thinking," David said, "the whole thing might tumble open if we could just move the exact right boulder...."

"And not the exact wrong one, the one that makes the whole thing crush us?"

David laughed and pointed the flashlight so that it lit her face rather than his. "I thought you might say that."

Tally peered through the darkness, trying to make out his expression. "What do you mean?"

"I can see that you're struggling with this."

"Struggling? With what?"

"Being here in the Smoke. You're not sure about it all."

Tally's skin tingled again, but not from the thought of snakes or bats or long-dead Rusties. She wondered if David had somehow already figured out she was a spy. "No, I guess I'm not sure," she said evenly.

She caught a glimmer of reflected light from David's eyes as he nodded. "That's good. You take this seriously. A lot of kids come out here and think it's all fun and games."

"I don't think that for a minute," she said softly.

"I can tell. It's not just a trick to you, like it is to most runaways. Even Shay, who really believes the operation is wrong, doesn't get how deadly serious the Smoke is."

Tally didn't say anything.

After a long moment of silence in the dark, David continued. "It's dangerous out here. The cities are like these boulders. They may seem solid, but if you start messing with them, the whole pile could crumble."

"I think I know what you mean," Tally said. Since the day she'd gone to get her operation, she'd felt the ma.s.sive weight of the city looming over her, and had learned firsthand how much places like the Smoke threatened people like Dr. Cable. "But I don't really understand why they care so much about you guys."

"It's a long story. But part of it is..."

She waited for a moment before saying, "Is what?"

"Well, this is a secret. I don't usually tell people until they've been here for a while. Years. But you seem...serious enough to handle it."

"You can trust me," Tally said, then immediately wondered why. She was a spy, an infiltrator. She was the last person David should trust.

"I hope I can, Tally," he said, reaching out to her. "Feel the palm of my hand."

She took it, running her fingers over the flesh. It was as rough as the wood grain of the table in the dining hall, the skin along his thumb as hard and dry as leather cracking with age. No wonder he could work all day and not complain. "Wow. How long does it take to get calluses like that?"

"About eighteen years."

"About...?" She stopped in disbelief, then compared the horn of his palm with her own tender, blistered flesh. Tally could feel it there, the grueling afternoon of real work she'd put in today, but stretched across a lifetime. "But how?"

"I'm not a runaway, Tally."

"I don't understand."

"My parents were runaways, not me."

"Oh." She felt stupid now, but it had never once occurred to her. If you could live in the Smoke, you could raise children here too. But she hadn't seen any littlies. And the whole place seemed so tenuous, so temporary. It would be like having a child on a camping trip. "How did they manage? Without any doctors, I mean."

"They are doctors."

"Huh. But...hang on. Doctors? How old were they when they ran away?"

"Old enough. They weren't uglies anymore. I think it's called being a middle pretty?"

"Yeah, at least." New pretties worked or studied, if they wanted to, but few people got serious about a profession until their middle years. "Wait. What do you mean theyweren't uglies?"