Uglies (39 page)

“It's not going to be a problem,” Shay said. “Anyone who used to hang out with Special Circumstances is a natural Crim.”

A feeling went through Tally when Shay said that, like a ping, but hurting. “Still. I hate not being bubbly.”

“It's Peris and Fausto's fault for not telling us what they're wearing.”

“Let's just wait till they get here. And copy them.”

“They deserve it,” Shay agreed. “Want a drink?”

“I think so.”

Tally was too spinning to go anywhere, so Shay told the breakfast tray to go and get some champagne.

•  •  •

When Peris and Fausto came in, they were on fire.

It was really just sparklers wound into their hair and stuck onto their clothes, making safety flames flicker all over them. Fausto kept laughing because it tickled. They were both wearing bungee jackets—their costume was that they'd just jumped from the roof of a burning building.

“Fantastic!” Shay said.

“Hysterical,” Tally agreed. “But how is that Crim?”

“Don't you remember?” Peris said. “When you crashed a party last summer, and got away by stealing a bungee jacket and jumping off the roof? Best ugly trick in history!”

“Sure . . . but why are you on fire?” Tally asked. “I mean, it's not Crim if the building's really on fire.”

Shay was giving Tally a look like she was saying something bogus again.

“We couldn't just wear bungee jackets,” Fausto said. “Being on fire is much bubblier.”

“Yeah,” Peris said, but Tally could tell he saw what she meant, and was sad now. She wished she hadn't mentioned it. Stupid Tally. The costumes really were bubbly.

They put the sparklers out to save them for the party, and Shay told the hole in the wall to make two more jackets.

“Hey, that's copying!” Fausto complained, but it turned out
not to matter. The hole wouldn't do costume bungee jackets, in case someone forgot it wasn't real and jumped off something and splatted. It couldn't make a real jacket; you had to ask Requisition for anything complicated or permanent. And Requisition wouldn't send any up because there wasn't a fire.

Shay snorted. “The mansion is being totally bogus today.”

“So where'd you get those?” Tally asked.

“They're real.” Peris smiled, fingering his jacket. “We stole them from the roof.”

“So they
are
Crim,” Tally said, and jumped off the bed to hug him.

With Peris in her arms, it didn't feel like the party was going to suck, or that anyone was going to vote against her. His big brown eyes beamed down into hers, and he lifted her up and squeezed her hard. She'd always felt this close to Peris back in ugly days, playing tricks and growing up together. It was bubbly to feel this way right now.

All those months that Tally had been lost in the wild, all she'd ever wanted was to be back here with Peris, pretty in New Pretty Town. It was totally stupid being unhappy today, or any day. Probably just too much champagne.

“Best friends forever,” she whispered to him.

“Hey, what's this thing?” Shay said. She was deep in Tally's closet, poking around for ideas. She held up a shapeless mass of wool.

“Oh, that.” Tally let her arms fall from around Peris. “That's my sweater from the Smoke, remember?” The sweater looked
strange, not like she remembered. It was messy, and you could see where human hands had knitted the different pieces together. People in the Smoke didn't have holes in the wall—they had to make their own things. And people, it turned out, weren't very good at making things.

“You didn't recycle it?”

“No. I think it's made of weird stuff. Like, the hole can't use it.”

Shay held the sweater to her nose and inhaled. “Wow. It still smells like the Smoke. Campfires and that stew we always ate. Remember?”

Peris and Fausto went over to smell it. They'd never been out of the city, except for school trips to the Rusty Ruins. They certainly hadn't gotten as far as the Smoke, where everyone had to work all day making stuff and growing (or even killing) their own food, and where everyone stayed ugly after their sixteenth birthday. Ugly until they died, even.

Of course, the Smoke didn't exist anymore, thanks to Tally and Special Circumstances.

“Hey, I know, Tally!” Shay said. “Let's go as Smokies tonight!”

“That would be totally criminal!” Fausto said, his eyes full of admiration.

The three looked at Tally, all of them thrilled with the idea. Even though another nasty pinglike feeling went through her, she knew it would be bogus not to agree, and that with a totally bubbly costume like a real-life Smokey sweater to wear, there was no way anyone would vote against her, because Tally Youngblood was a natural Crim.

Turn the page for a sneak peek of

SCOTT WESTERFELD'S

thrilling new novel,

CHAPTER 1

The most important email that Darcy Patel ever wrote was three paragraphs long.

The first was about Darcy herself. It skipped the trifling details, her dyed blue-black hair and the slim gold ring in her left nostril, and began instead with a grim secret that her parents had never told her. When Darcy's mother was eleven years old, her best friend was murdered by a stranger. This discovery, chanced upon during an idle web search, both shocked Darcy and made certain things about her mother clearer. It also inspired her to write.

The second paragraph of the email was about the novel Darcy had just finished. She didn't mention, of course, that all sixty thousand words of
Afterworlds
had been written in thirty days. The Underbridge Literary Agency hardly needed to know
that
. Instead, this paragraph described a terrorist attack, a girl who wills herself to die, and the bewitching boy she meets in the afterworld. It promised skulking ghosts and the traumas that haunt families, and little sisters who are more clever than they appear. Using the present tense and short sentences, Darcy set the scene, thumbnailed the characters and their motivations, and teased the conclusion. This was the best of the three paragraphs, she was later told.

The third paragraph was pure flattery, because Darcy wanted very much for the Underbridge Literary Agency to say yes to her. She praised the breadth of their vision and paid tribute to their clients' genius, even while daring to compare herself to those illustrious names. She explained how her novel was different from the other paranormals of the last few years (none of which had a smoldering Vedic psychopomp as its love interest).

This email was not a perfect query letter. But it did its job. Seventeen days after pressing Send, Darcy was signed to Underbridge, a flourishing and respected literary agency, and not long after that she had a two-book deal for an astonishing amount of money.

Only a handful of challenges remained—high school graduation, a perilous decision, and parental approval—before Darcy Patel would be packing her bags for New York City.

CHAPTER 2

I met the man of my dreams in an airport, just before midnight a few days into the New Year. I was changing planes in Dallas, and I almost died.

What saved me was texting my mother.

I text her a lot when I'm traveling—when I get to the airport, when the flight's called, and when they make us put our phones away. I know, it sounds like something you'd do with your boyfriend, not your mom. But traveling alone made me nervous even before I could see ghosts.

And trust me, my mother needs to hear from me. A lot. She's always been kind of clingy, but even more so since my father ran off to New York.

So I was walking alone through the mostly vacant airport, looking for better reception. This late at night most of the shops were shuttered and dark, and I'd wandered until reaching another wing of the airport, which was closed off by a metal gate that hung from the ceiling. Through the steel mesh I could see a pair of moving walkways gliding past, empty.

I didn't see the attack begin. My eyes were focused on my phone, watching as autocorrect made war on my spelling. Mom was asking about my dad's new girlfriend, whom I'd just met during my winter break visit. Rachel was lovely, always well dressed, and had the same size feet as me, but I couldn't tell Mom all that.
She has awesome shoes and I get to borrow them
wasn't the right place to start.

My father's new apartment was also amazing, twenty stories up, with floor-to-ceiling windows looking down on Astor Place. His walk-in closet was as big as my bedroom back home, and full of drawers that slid open with a sound like spinning skateboard wheels. I wouldn't want to live there. All that chrome and white leather furniture was cool to the touch and didn't feel like home. But Mom had been right—my father had made a metric fuck-ton of money since leaving us. He was wealthy now, with a doorman building and his own driver and a glittery black credit card that made shop assistants straighten up. (Calling people who worked in stores “shop assistants” was a thing I'd learned from Rachel.)

I was wearing jeans and a hoodie, like always when I fly, but my suitcase was full of shiny new clothes that I'd have to hide when I got back to California. Dad's wealth pissed Mom off for good reason: she supported him through law school and then he bailed on us. I got worked up about it sometimes, but then he'd send some of that wealth my way and I'd get over it.

Sounds pretty shallow, right? Being bought off with money that should've been my mother's? Trust me, I know. Almost dying makes you realize how shallow you are.

Mom had just texted me:
Tell me she's older than the last one. And not a Libra again!

Didn't ask her bitch day.

Um, what?

BIRTHDAY. Autocorrect fail.

Mom was mostly desensitized to my bad typing. The night before, she hadn't even noticed when I'd texted that my father and I were eating raw cock dough for dessert. But when it came to Rachel, no typo went unremarked.

Ha!
Wish you'd asked her THAT!

I decided to ignore that, and answered:
She says hi, by the way.

How sweet.

If you're being ironing, I can't tell. We are TEXTING, mom.

I'm too old for irony. That was sarcasm.

I heard shouts behind me now, back by the security checkpoint. I turned around and headed back toward my gate, but didn't look up from the phone.

I think my planet's about to leave.

OK. See you in three hours, kiddo! Miss you.

You too,
I began to type, but then the world fell into sharp little pieces.

I'd never heard an automatic weapon in real life before. It was somehow too loud for my ears to register, not so much a sound as the air ripping around me, a shudder I could feel in my bones and in the liquid of my eyes. I looked up from my phone and stared.

The gunmen didn't look human. They wore horror movie masks, and smoke flowered around them as they swung their aim across the crowd. At first everyone was frozen with shock. No one ran or tried to hide behind the rows of plastic chairs, and the terrorists seemed in no hurry.

I didn't hear the screams until the terrorists paused to reload.

Then everyone was running, some in my direction, some the other way. A guy my age in a football jersey—Travis Brinkman, as everyone learned later—tackled two gunmen, wrapping his arms around them and spinning with them across the blood-slick floor. If there had only been two terrorists he might have won that fight and spent his life a hero, telling his grandkids the story till they got bored of it. But there were four gunmen in all, and the others still had plenty of bullets.

As Travis Brinkman fell, the first running people reached me. Smoke roiled in their wake, bringing a smell like burning plastic. I'd been just standing there, but the acrid scent snapped my panic and I turned and started running with the crowd.

My phone lit up in my hand, and I stared stupidly at it. There was something I was supposed to do with this glowing, buzzing object, but I'd forgotten what. I still hadn't grasped what was happening, but I knew that to stop running was to die.

But then death was right in front of me—that steel gate stretched across the entire hallway, floor to ceiling, side to side. The closed section of the airport stood behind it, the walkways still flowing. The terrorists had waited for midnight, when we were all trapped in the smallest possible space.

A tall man in a leather biker jacket threw his shoulder against the gate, and the metal rippled. He knelt to claw at the bottom, lifting it a few inches. Others joined him.

I stared at my phone. A text from my mother:

Try to sleep on the plane.

I stabbed at the screen to bring up a number pad. Some part of my brain realized that I'd never called 911 before. As it rang, I turned around to face the gunfire.