"I suppose I should have known," Maddy said, shaking her head. "This was always a risk, letting a pretty-head treat herself."
"What was?"
"I never explained how the cure worked, did I?" Maddy said. "How the nanos remove the lesions from your brain? They break them down, like the pills that cure cancer."
"So what went wrong?"
"The nanos didn't stop. They went on reproducing, breaking down Zane's brain."
Tally turned to look at the form on the bed. His breathing seemed so shallow, the movement of his chest at the edge of perception.
She faced David. "But you said the cure worked perfectly."
He nodded. "It does. Your other friends are fine. But the two pills were different. The second pill, the one you took, is the cure for the cure. It makes the nanos self-destruct after they finish with the lesions. Without it, Zane's nanos kept reproducing, kept eating away at him. Mom said they stopped at some point, but not before they did a … certain amount of damage."
The sickening feeling in Tally's stomach redoubled as the realization sunk home: This was her fault. She had swallowed the pill that would have kept Zane from this, the cure for the cure. "How much damage?"
"We don't know yet," Maddy said. "I had enough stem tissue to regenerate the destroyed areas of his brain, but the connections that Zane had built up among those cells are gone. Those connections are where memories and motor skills are stored, and where cognition happens. Some parts of his mind are almost a blank slate."
"A blank slate? You mean…he's gone?"
"No, just a few places are damaged," Fausto spoke up. "And his brain can rewire itself, Tally. His neurons are making new connections. That's what he's doing right now. Zane had been doing it all along; he hoverboarded all the way here on his own before he collapsed."
"Rather amazing that he lasted so long," Maddy said, shaking her head slowly. "I think not eating is what saved him. By starving himself, he eventually starved the nanos. They appear to be gone."
"He can still talk and everything," Fausto said. He looked down at Zane. "He's just a little…tired right now."
"It could have been you in that bed, Tally." Maddy shook her head. "A fifty-fifty chance. You just got lucky."
"That's me. Little Miss Lucky," Tally said softly.
Of course, she had to admit to herself that it was true. They'd split the two pills randomly, assuming they were the same. The nanos could have been eating away at Tally's brain all this time instead of Zane's. Lucky her.
She let her eyes close, realizing at last how hard Zane must have worked to hide what was happening to him. All those long silences when they'd been wearing the cuffs, he'd been fighting, struggling to keep his mind together, unsure of exactly what was happening, but risking everything to escape becoming pretty-minded again.
Tally gazed down at him, wishing for a moment it had been the other way around. Anything was better than seeing him like this. If only she'd taken the nano pill, and he had taken the one that…had done what? "Wait a second. If Zane got the nanos, how did my pill cure me?"
"It didn't," Maddy said. "Without the other pill, the anti-nanos you took would have no effect whatsoever."
"But …"
"It was you, Tally," came a soft voice from the bed. Zane's eyes had opened a slit, catching the sunlight like the edges of gold coins. He gave her a weary smile. "You got bubbly on your own."
"But I felt so different after we …" She fell silent, remembering that day — their kiss, sneaking into Valentino Mansion, climbing the tower. But, of course, all those things had happened before they'd taken the pills. Being with Zane had changed her from the beginning, from that first kiss.
Tally remembered how her "cure" always seemed to come and go. She'd had to work to stay bubbly, more like the other Crims than Zane.
"He's right, Tally," Maddy said. "Somehow, you cured yourself. "
Tally stayed at Zane's bedside. He was awake and talking now, and it was easier to be here than dealing with everything that she and David still had to work out. The others left them alone.
"Did you know what was happening to you?"
Zane took a moment before answering. His speech was full of long silences now, almost like Andrew's epic pauses. "I knew that everything was getting harder. Sometimes I had to concentrate just to walk. But I hadn't felt so alive since I'd turned pretty; it was worth it, being bubbly with you. I figured once we found the New Smoke, they could help me."
"They are helping. Maddy said that she put in some new …" Tally swallowed.
"Brain tissue?" he supplied, and smiled. "Sure, blank neurons fresh out of the oven. Just got to fill them up now."
"We will. We'll do bubbly-making things," Tally said, but the promise felt strange in her mouth—"we" meant she and Zane, as if David didn't exist.
"If there's enough left of me to be bubbly," he said tiredly. "It's not like all my memories are gone. It was mostly my cognition centers that were affected, and some motor skills."
"Cognition? You mean like thinking?" Tally said.
"Yeah, and motor skills, like walking." He shrugged. "But the brain's built to take damage, Tally. It's wired so that everything is stored everywhere, sort of. When a part of it gets damaged, things don't get lost, just fuzzier. Like a hangover." He laughed. "A really bad one. On top of which, I'm sore from lying in bed all day. And it feels like I've got a toothache from all this Smokey food. It's just phantom pains from brain damage, Maddy says." He rubbed one cheek with a scowl.
She took his hand. "I can't believe you're so brave about this. It's incredible."
"You should talk, Tally." He struggled to sit up, his movements shaky and infirm. "You managed to cure yourself without getting your brain chewed up. That's what I'd call incredible."
Tally looked down at their clasped hands. She didn't feel very incredible. She felt smelly and dirty, and horrible that she hadn't had the guts to take both pills, which would have prevented all of this from happening. She didn't even have the guts to talk to Zane about David, or vice versa. Which was just pathetic.
"Is it strange, seeing him?" he asked.
She looked at Zane, and he chuckled at her surprise. "Come on, Tally. It's not like I'm reading your mind. I had plenty of warning about this. You told me about the guy the first time we kissed, remember?"
"Oh, yeah." So Zane had been expecting this all along. Tally should have foreseen it herself. Maybe she simply hadn't wanted to face the obvious. "Yeah, it is strange seeing him. I definitely didn't expect to find him waiting for me in the ruins. Just me and him alone."
Zane nodded. "It was interesting, waiting for you. His mother said you wouldn't come at all. That you must have chickened out, because you hadn't really been cured. Like you were just playing along with me, imitating my bubbliness."
Tally rolled her eyes. "She doesn't much like me."
"You don't say?" He grinned. "But David and me figured you'd show up sooner or later. We figured that—" Tally groaned. "So are you guys like friends now?"
Zane took one of his excruciatingly long pauses. "I guess so. He asked me a lot about you when we first got here. I think he wanted to know how being pretty has changed you."
"Really?"
"Really. He was the one who met us when we arrived in the ruins. Him and Croy, camping out and watching for flares. It turns out that those two left the magazines for the city uglies to find, so they'd know the ruins were being visited again." Zane's voice had gotten dreamy, as if he was falling asleep. "At least I finally got to see him again, after chickening out all those months ago." He turned to her. "David really missed you, you know."
"I ruined his life," Tally said softly.
"You didn't do anything on purpose; David understands that now. I told him how when you'd planned to betray the Smoke, it was because the Specials threatened to keep you ugly for life."
"You told him that?" Tally let out a slow breath. "Thanks. I never really had a chance to explain why I'd come to the Smoke, how they'd forced me. Maddy made me leave the same night I confessed everything."