Скотт Вестерфельд - Uglies

Peris…

Tally swallowed, tasting something more bitter than tea in the back of her throat. She tried to remember how Peris had acted when she'd crashed the Garbo Mansion party. She'd been so ashamed of her own face, it was hard to remember anything specific about Peris.

He'd looked so different and, if anything, he seemed older, more mature.

But in some way, they hadn't connected…it was as if he'd become a different person. Was it only because since his operation they had lived in different worlds? Or had it been something more?

She tried to imagine Peris coping out here in the Smoke, working with his hands and making his own clothes. The old, ugly Peris would have enjoyed the challenge. But what about pretty Peris?

Her head felt light, as if the house were in an elevator heading swiftly downward.

"What do the lesions do?" she asked.

"We don't know exactly," Az said.

"But we've got some pretty good ideas," David said.

"Just suspicions," Maddy said. Az looked uncomfortably down into his tea.

"You were suspicious enough to run away," Tally said.

"We had no choice," Maddy said. "Not long after our discovery, Special Circumstances paid a visit. They took our data and told us not to look any further or we'd lose our licenses. It was either run away, or forget everything we'd found."

"And it wasn't something we could forget," Az said.

Tally turned to David. He sat beside his mother, grim-faced, his cup of tea untouched before him. His parents were still reluctant to say everything they suspected. But she could tell that David saw no need for caution. "What do you think?" she asked him.

"Well, you know all about how the Rusties lived, right?" he said. "War and crime and all that?"

"Of course. They were crazy. They almost destroyed the world."

"And that convinced people to pull the cities back from the wild, to leave nature alone," David recited.

"And now everybody is happy, because everyone looks the same: They're all pretty. No more Rusties, no more war. Right?"

"Yeah. In school, they say it's all really complicated, but that's basically the story."

He smiled grimly. "Maybe it's not so complicated. Maybe the reason war and all that other stuff went away is that there are no more controversies, no disagreements, no people demanding change. Just masses of smiling pretties, and a few people left to run things."

Tally remembered crossing the river to New Pretty Town, watching them have their endless fun. She and Peris used to boast they'd never wind up so idiotic, so shallow. But when she'd seen him…"Becoming pretty doesn't just change the way you look," she said.

"No," David said. "It changes the way you think."

They stayed up late into the night, talking with Az and Maddy about their discoveries, their escape into the wild, and the founding of the Smoke. Finally, Tally had to ask the question that had been on her mind since she'd first seen them.

"So how did you two change yourselves back? I mean, you were pretty, and now you're…"

"Ugly?" Az smiled. "That part was simple. We're experts in the physical part of the operation. When surgeons sculpt a pretty face, we use a special kind of smart plastic to shape the bones. When we change new pretties to middle or late, we add a trigger chemical to that plastic, and it becomes softer, like clay."

"Eww," Tally said, imagining her face suddenly softening so she could squish it around to a different shape.

"With daily doses of this trigger chemical, the plastic will gradually melt away and be absorbed into the body. Your face goes back to where it started. More or less."

Tally's eyebrows rose. "More or less?"

"We can only approximate the places where bone was shaved away. And we can't make big changes, like someone's height, without surgery. Maddy and I have all the non-cosmetic benefits of the operation: impervious teeth, perfect vision, disease resistance. But we look pretty close to the way we would have without the operation. As far as the fat that was sucked out"-he patted his stomach-"that proves very easy to replace."

"But why? Why would you want to be ugly? You were doctors, so there was nothing wrong with your brains, right?"

"Our minds are fine," Maddy answered. "But we wanted to start a community of people who didn't have the lesions, people who were free of pretty thinking. It was the only way to see what difference the lesions really made. That meant we had to gather a group of uglies. Young people, recruited from the cities."

Tally nodded. "So you had to become ugly too. Otherwise, who'd trust you?"

"We refined the trigger chemical, created a once-a-day pill. Over a few months, our old faces came back." Maddy looked at her husband with a twinkle in her eye. "It was a fascinating process, actually."

"It must have been," Tally said. "What about the lesions? Can you create a pill that cures them?"

They were both silent for a moment, then Maddy shook her head. "We didn't find any answers before Special Circumstances showed up. Az and I are not brain specialists.

We've worked on the question for twenty years without success. But here in the Smoke we've seen the difference that staying ugly makes."

"I've seen that myself," Tally said, thinking of the differences between Peris and David.

Az raised an eyebrow. "You catch on pretty fast, then."

"But we know there's a cure," David said.

"How?"

"There has to be," Maddy said. "Our data showed that everyone has the lesions after their first operation. So when someone winds up in a challenging line of work, the authorities somehow cure them.

The lesions are removed secretly, maybe even fixed with a pill like the bone plastic, and the brain returns to normal. There must be a simple cure."

"You'll find it one day," David said quietly.

"We don't have the right equipment," Maddy said, sighing. "We don't even have a pretty human subject to study."

"But hang on," Tally said. "You used to live in a city full of pretties. When you became doctors, your lesions went away. Didn't you notice that you were changing?"

Maddy shrugged. "Of course we did. We were learning how the human body worked, and how to face the huge responsibility of saving lives. But it didn't feel as if our brains were changing. It felt like growing up."

"Oh. But when you looked around at everyone else, how come you didn't notice they were…brain damaged?"

Az smiled. "We didn't have much to compare our fellow citizens with, only a few colleagues who seemed different from most people. More engaged. But that was hardly a surprise. History would indicate that the majority of people have always been sheep.

Before the operation, there were wars and mass hatred and clear-cutting. Whatever these lesions make us, it isn't a far cry from the way humanity was in the Rusty era. These days we're just a bit…easier to manage."

"Having the lesions is normal now," Maddy said. "We're all used to the effects."

Tally took a deep breath, remembering Sol and Ellie's visit. Her parents had been so sure of themselves, and yet in a way so clueless. But they'd always seemed that way: wise and confident, and at the same time disconnected from whatever ugly, real-life problems Tally was having. Was that pretty brain damage? Tally had always thought that was just how parents were supposed to be.

For that matter, shallow and self-centered was how brand-new pretties were supposed to be. As an ugly Peris had made fun of them-but he hadn't waited a moment to join in the fun. No one ever did. So how could you tell how much was the operation and how much was just people going along with the way things had always been?

Only by making a whole new world, which is just what Maddy and Az had begun to do.