Скотт Вестерфельд - Pretties

Finally, some wardens showed up with the abandoned interface rings, medspray for Tally's palms, and muffins. Tally ate her long-delayed breakfast like a hungry dog until all her bubbliness went away, then smiled prettily and asked to be taken to surge for the previous night's scar. After another really boring hour or so, the Specials let the wardens take her to the hospital with Zane in tow.

That was mostly it, except for the interface cuffs. The doctors slipped Tally's on during her eyebrow surge, and Zane awoke the next morning to find himself wearing one. They worked just like interface rings, except they could send voice-pings from anywhere, like a handphone. That meant the cuffs heard you talking even when you went outside and, unlike rings, they didn't come off. They were manacles with an invisible chain, and no tool Tally and Zane had yet tried could cut them open.

Unexpectedly, the cuffs also became the fashion item of the season. Once the other Crims saw them, it was all Zane could do to keep everyone from requisitioning their own. He got the hole in the wall to make a bunch of nonworking copies and passed them out. Over the next few weeks, word spread that the cuffs were some new marker of criminality, signifying that you had scaled the transmission tower on top of Valentino Mansion; it turned out that hundreds of new pretties had witnessed Tally's and Zane's climb, pinging one another to run to windows and check out the show. Within a few weeks, only the most fashion-missing went around without some kind of metal cuff locked onto their wrists, and minders had to be installed to keep new pretties off the tower.

People were starting to point out Tally and Zane when they were in public, and there were more Crim wannabees every day. It was like everybody wanted to be bubbly.

Tally was nervous about the breakthrough, but she and Zane didn't say much on the way to the skating rink. Although their cuffs couldn't hear anything while wrapped up in the heavy winter gear, silence was a habit that had begun to follow them everywhere. Tally had grown used to communicating in other ways: winks and rolled eyes and silently mouthed words. Living in an unspoken conspiracy filled every gesture with significance, charged every shared touch with unspoken meaning.

Inside the glass elevator that carried them up to the floating sheet of ice, looking down on the great bowl of Nefertiti Stadium, Zane took Tally's hand. His eyes flashed, as they did before a sudden, unexpected trick, like a snowball ambush from the roof of Pulcher Mansion. His playful glance was perfectly timed to settle Tally's nerves a little. It wouldn't do for the other Crims to see her anxious, after all.

Most of them were already there, trading in boots for ice skates, finding bungee jackets in the right size. A few newly voted-in Crims were warming up, looking wobbly ankled on the floating ice, the sound of their skates like a library minder telling you to shush.

Shay glided over to gather Tally in a hug, coming to a halt mostly by bumping into her. "Hey, Skinny-wa."

"Hey, Squint-la," Tally retorted, giggling. Ugly nicknames were back in fashion, but Shay and Tally had switched their old names now that Tally was losing weight. Going food-missing sucked, but sooner or later she hoped to be thin enough to slip the cuff from her wrist.

She saw that Shay had wrapped a black scarf around her forearm in solidarity. Shay also sported a version of Tally's flash tattoo, a nest of snakes coiling around one brow and down her cheek. A lot of the Crims had new facial tattoos with heart-rate triggers — you could see at a glance how bubbly they were. Self-heated coffee mugs sent clouds of steam into the air above the pack of Crims, and everyone's tattoos were spinning.

A chorus of hellos rose up as Tally and Zane were spotted, excitement rising in the pack. Peris glided over with a bungee jacket and Tally's usual skates in hand.

"Thanks, Nose," Tally said, kicking her boots off and sitting down on the ice. Here at the rink, hoverskates weren't allowed; real metal blades glittered in the wintry light like daggers. Tally drew her laces up tight. "Got your flask?" she asked Peris.

He pulled it out. "Double vodka."

"Very thawing." Tally and Zane had stopped drinking alcohol, which turned out to make you more pretty-minded than bubbly, but strong spirits had other uses here on the ice.

She held out her gloved hands, and Peris pulled her up, her momentum sending the two of them into a slippery little waltz. Giggling, they steadied themselves against each other.

"Don't forget your jacket, Skinny," he said.

She took it from him and tied the straps. "That would be bogus, wouldn't it?"

Peris nodded nervously.

"Any word from our friends across the river?" she asked, her voice dropping to just above a whisper.

"Not a ping. They're still totally missing."

Tally frowned. Cray's visit was a month ago now, and the New Smokies hadn't shown themselves since. The silence was ominous, unless this was another of their annoying tests. Either way, she was itching to go looking, once she got this stupid cuff off. "How's Fausto going on tricking that hoverboard?"

Peris only shrugged, looking distractedly at the other Crims, who were invading the rink, laughing and screaming, slashing through the little Zambonies that skittered about polishing the ice.

Tally checked the flash tattoo on Peris's forehead — a third eye that blinked with his heartbeat — and looked into his gorgeous eyes, brown and soft and depthless. Peris seemed bubblier than he had a month ago — all the Crims did — but Tally no longer saw improvement in him from day to day. It was so much harder for the rest of them who hadn't had the pills, who weren't half-cured like Tally and Zane. They could get excited in the short term, but it was hard to keep them focused.

Well, the breakthrough would give them a jolt.

"It's okay, Nose. Let's skate." Tally pushed off against the flat of one blade, building up speed as she swept around the rink's outer edge. She looked down through the mottled window of ice underfoot. The hoverlifters that held the floating rink up in the air were easy to see, spaced in a grid a few meters apart and sending out a sunburst of refrigeration tendrils. Much farther below, the broad oval of the sports stadium was visible, softly out of focus like the world through a pretty-minded haze. The stadium lights were coming on, warming up for the soccer game scheduled in forty-five minutes. As always, there would be fireworks before it started, once the crowd was in their seats. Very pretty-making.

The sky above was an uninterrupted expanse of blue, except for a few hot-air balloons tethered to the tallest party spires. When it was airborne, the skating rink was the highest thing in New Pretty Town. Tally could glimpse the entire city spread out below.

She skated after Zane, catching him as he rounded a turn. "Everybody seem bubbly to you?"

"Mostly nervous." He gracefully reversed, skating backward as easily as breathing. His operation-augmented muscles had been freed from pretty timidity and sloth. He could hold a handstand without trembling, climb up to his window in Pulcher Mansion in seconds, and outrun the monorail that brought crumblies from the burbs into the central hospital. He never broke a sweat and could hold his breath for two solid minutes.

Watching him perform these feats, Tally remembered the Rangers who'd rescued her from a brushfire on her journey to the Smoke. Zane was as physically confident as they had been — fast and strong, but without the twitching inhumanity of Special Circumstances agents. Tally was no slouch herself, but somehow the cure had taken Zane's strength and coordination to a new level. She loved gliding across the ice with him, skating circles around the others, being the graceful center of the Crims' motley vortex of flashing blades.