Tally reached out toward the door, her hand shaking. If a siren started blaring, everyone would be staring at her and whispering as the wardens arrived and evacuated the tower. It would be a really bubbly end to her career as a Crim.
Some Crim, she thought. She'd be a pretty bogus criminal if she couldn't set off an alarm every once in a while.
She pushed the door open. It didn't make a sound.
Tally stepped into the stairwell. The door closed behind her, muffling the tumult of the party. In the sudden quiet, she could feel her heart pounding in her chest and hear her own breath, still ragged from the chase. The beat of the music seemed to leak under the door, making the concrete floor shudder.
The figure sat on the stairs, a few steps up. "You made it." It was a boy's voice, indistinct behind the mask.
"Made it where? This party?"
"No, Tally. Through the door."
"It wasn't exactly locked." She tried to stare her way through the jeweled eyes of the mask.
"Who are you?"
"You don't recognize me?" He sounded genuinely puzzled, as if he were an old friend, someone who wore a mask all the time. "What do I look like?"
Tally swallowed and said softly, "Special Circumstances."
"Good. You remember." Tally could hear the smile in his voice. He was talking slowly and carefully, as if she were some kind of idiot.
"Of course I remember. Are you one of them? Do I know you?" Tally couldn't recall any individual Specials; in her memory, their faces all ran together into one cruel and pretty blur.
"Why don't you take a look?" The figure didn't move to take off his mask. "Go ahead, Tally."
Suddenly, she realized what was going on here. Recognizing what the costume meant, chasing him across the party, braving the alarmed door - all of it had been a test. Some kind of recruitment. He was sitting there wondering if she would dare pull off his mask.
Tally was sick of tests. "Just stay away from me," she said.
"Tally - "
"I don't want to work for Special Circumstances. I just want to live here in New Pretty Town."
"I'm not - "
"Leave me alone!" she shouted, clenching her fists. The cry echoed off the concrete walls, leaving a moment of silence, as if it had surprised them both. The music from the party drifted through the stairwell, muffled and timid.
Finally, a sigh came through the mask, and he held up a crude leather pouch. "I have something for you. If you're ready for it. Do you want it, Tally?"
"I don't want anything from ..." Tally's voice trailed off. Soft shuffling sounds came from below them. Not the party. Someone was coming up the stairs.
The two of them moved at the same time, peering over the handrail down the narrow stairwell shaft. A long way down, Tally saw flashes of gray silk and hands grasping the rails, half a dozen people climbing the stairs incredibly fast, their footsteps barely audible over the muffled music.
"See you later," the figure said, standing.
Tally blinked. He pushed her aside, spooked by the sight of real Specials. So who was he?
Before his fingers reached the doorknob, Tally snatched the mask from his face.
He was an ugly. A real ugly.
His face was nothing like the costumed fatties done up for the bash, with their big noses or squinty eyes. It wasn't just exaggerated features that made him different; it was everything, as if he were made of some utterly different substance. In those seconds, Tally's pretty-perfect eyesight caught every gaping pore, the random tangles in his hair, the crude imbalance of his disjointed face. Her skin crawled at his imperfections, the tufts of teenage beard, his unsurged teeth, the eruptions on his forehead screaming out disease. She wanted to pull away to put distance between herself and his unlucky unclean, unhealthy ugliness.
But somehow she knew his name...
"Croy?" she said.
FALL
"Later, Tally," Croy said, snatching back his mask. He yanked open the door, and the noise of the party rushed into the stairwell as he darted through, the gray silk of his costume disappearing into the crowd.
Tally just stood there as the door swung closed again, too stunned to move. Like her old sweater, she'd remembered ugliness all wrong: Cray's face was much worse than her mental image of the Smokies. His crooked smile, his dull eyes, the way his sweating skin carried angry red marks where the mask had pressed against it...
But then the door slammed itself shut, and among the echoes Tally heard the footsteps still climbing toward her, real Specials on their way up, and for the first time all day, a clear thought went through her head.
Run.
She pulled open the door and plunged into the crowd.
The elevator was just spilling open, and Tally stumbled into a clique of Naturals plastered with brittle leaves, walking last days of autumn who shed yellows and reds as she shoved through them. She managed to keep her footing - the floor was sticky with spilled champagne - and caught another glimpse of the gray silk.
Croy was headed toward the balcony and the Crims.
She tore after him. Tally didn't want anyone lurking her, panicking her at parties, tangling her memories when she needed to be bubbly. She had to catch Croy and tell him never to follow her again.
This wasn't Uglyville or the Smoke - he had no right to be here. He had no business stepping out of her ugly past.
And there was another reason she was running: the Specials. It had only taken a glimpse of them to put every cell in her body on high alert. Their inhuman speed repelled her, like watching a cockroach skitter across a plate. Croy's movements might have seemed unusual, his Smokey confidence standing out in a party full of new pretties, but the Specials were another species altogether.
Tally burst out onto the balcony just in time to see Croy leap up onto the rail, waving his arms for a precarious moment. Then he got his balance, bent his knees, and pushed off into the night.
She ran to the spot and leaned over. Croy was tumbling downward out of sight, his form swallowed by the darkness below. After a sickening moment he reappeared, head over heels, gray silk catching the light of fireworks as he hover-bounced toward the river.
Zane stood beside her, looking down. "Hmm, the invitation didn't say 'bungee jackets required,'"
he murmured. "Who was that, Tally?"
She opened her mouth, but an alarm began to howl.
Tally spun around and saw the crowd parting. The group of Specials were pouring through the stairwell door, slicing their way through confused new pretties. Their cruel faces weren't costumes any more than Cray's ugliness had been, and they were just as shocking to look at. The wolflike eyes sent a chill through Tally, and their advance, as purposeful and dangerous as a hunting cat's, made her body scream to keep running.
At the other end of the balcony she saw Peris, standing frozen next to the rail, awestruck by the spectacle. His safety sparklers were sputtering out at last, but the light on his bungee jacket collar glowed bright green.
Tally pushed toward him through the other Crims, judging the angles, knowing exactly when to jump. For a moment, the world became strangely clear, as if the sight of Cray's ugliness and the cruel-pretty Specials had removed some barrier between her and the world. Everything was bright and harsh, the details so sharp that Tally squinted as if dashing into a freezing wind.
She hit Peris just right, her arms wrapping around his shoulders, her momentum lifting both of them up and over the balcony railing. They tumbled out of the light and into blackness, Peris's costume flaring up one last time in the wind of their descent, the safety sparks bouncing from her face as cool as snowflakes.
He was half-screaming and half-laughing, as if enduring an annoying but invigorating practical joke - cold water over the head.
Halfway down it occurred to Tally that the bungee jacket might not catch them both.
She squeezed harder, and heard Peris grunt as the lifters kicked in. The jacket pulled him upright, almost wrenching Tally's shoulders from their sockets. Her muscles were still powerful from their weeks of manual labor in the Smoke - if anything, the operation had tuned them up - but she barely kept her grip as the jacket absorbed the velocity of their fall. Her arms slipped farther down until they were wrapped around Peris's waist, her fingers painfully entangled in the jacket's straps.
As they came to a shuddering halt, Tally's feet brushed the grass, and she let go.
Peris shot back up into the air, his knee catching Tally's brow and sending her staggering back into the darkness. She lost her footing, landing on a drift of fallen leaves that crunched beneath her.
For a moment Tally lay still. The pile of leaves smelled softly of earth and rot, like something old and tired. She blinked as something trickled into one eye. Maybe it was raining.
She looked up at the party tower and the distant hot-air balloons, blinking and catching her breath. She could make out a few figures peering down from the bright balcony ten stories above. Tally wondered if any of them were Specials.
Peris was nowhere to be seen. She remembered bungee jumping as an ugly, how a jacket would carry you down a slope. He must have bounced down toward the river after Croy Croy. She wanted to say something to him...
Tally struggled to her feet and faced the river. Her head throbbed, but the clarity that had come over her as she'd thrown herself off the balcony hadn't faded. Her heart pounded as a burst of fireworks lit the sky, casting pink light and sudden shadows through the trees, every blade of grass in sharp relief.
Everything felt very real: her intense revulsion at Croy's ugly face, her fear of the Specials, the shapes and smells around her. It felt as if a thin plastic film had been peeled from her eyes, leaving the world with razored edges.
She ran downhill, toward the mirrored band of the river and the darkness of Uglyville. "Croy!"
she cried.
The pink flower in the sky faded, and Tally tripped over the winding roots of an old tree. She stumbled to a halt.
Something was gliding up out of the darkness.
"Croy?" The fireworks had left green spots scattered across her vision.
"You don't give up, do you?"
He was on a hoverboard a meter off the ground, feet spread for balance, looking comfortable.
His gray silks had been replaced with pitch-black, his cruel pretty mask discarded. Behind him, two other black-clad figures rode, younger uglies wearing dorm uniforms and nervous looks.
"I wanted ..." Her voice trailed off. She'd followed him to say, Go away, leave me alone, never come back. To scream it at him. But everything had become so clear and intense...what she wanted now was to hold on to this bright focus. Cray's invasion of her world was a part of that, she somehow knew.
"Croy they're coming," one of the younger uglies said.
"What did you want, Tally?" he asked calmly.
She blinked, uncertain, worried that if she said the wrong thing, the clarity might go away - the barrier would close again.
She remembered what he'd offered in the stairwell. "You had something to give me?"
He smiled, and pulled the old leather pouch from his belt. "This? Yeah, I think you're ready for it.
Only one problem: You'd better not take it from me right now. Wardens are coming. Maybe Specials."
"Yeah, in about ten seconds," the nervous ugly complained.
Croy ignored him. "But we'll leave it for you at Valentino 317. Can you remember that?
Valentino 317."
She nodded, then blinked again. Her head felt light.
Croy frowned. "I hope so." He spun his board around in one graceful movement, and the other two uglies followed suit. "Later. And sorry about your eye."
They darted away toward the river, veering off in three different directions as they disappeared into the darkness.
"Sorry about my what?" she asked softly.
Then Tally found herself blinking again, her vision blurring. She reached up to touch her forehead.