"Knock yourself out," the boy said, and took a step back, leering at them. The expression brought another flash of heat into Tally's cheeks. The boy was smirking at her, amused, like Tally was average and anyone's to think about—like she wasn't special. The uglifying smart plastic on her face began to burn.
This stupid boy thought Tally was here for his entertainment. He needed to find out otherwise.
Tally decided on a new plan.
She stabbed a button on her crash bracelet. Its signal spread through the smart plastic on her face and hands at the speed of sound, the clever molecules unhooking from each other, her ugly mask exploding in a puff of dust to reveal the cruel beauty underneath. She blinked her eyes hard, popping out the contacts and exposing her wolfen, coal black irises to the winter cold. She felt her tooth-caps loosen, and spat them at the boy's feet, returning his smile with unveiled fangs.
The whole transformation had taken less than a second, barely time for his expression to crumble.
She smiled. "Buzz off, ugly. And you"—she turned to the Smokey—"take your hands out of your pockets."
The girl swallowed, spreading her arms out to either side.
Tally felt the sudden rush of eyes drawn to her cruel features, sensed the crowd's dazzlement at the pulsing tattoos that webbed her flesh in scintillating black lace. She finished the arrest script: "I don't want to hurt you, but I will if I have to."
"You won't have to," the girl said calmly, then she did something with her hands, both thumbs turning upward.
"Don't even think…," Tally started, then she saw too late the bulges sewn into the girl's clothes—straps like a bungee jacket's, now moving of their own accord, cinching themselves around her shoulders and thighs.
"The Smoke lives," the girl hissed.
Tally reached out …
…just as the girl shot into the air like a stretched-taut rubber band let go from the bottom. Tally's hand passed through empty space. She stared upward, open-mouthed. The girl was still climbing. Somehow, the bungee jacket's battery had been rigged to throw her into the air from a standstill.
But wouldn't she just fall straight back down?
Tally spotted movement in the dark sky. From the edge of the forest, two hoverboards zoomed over the bash, one ridden by a Smokey dressed in crude skins, the other empty. At the top of the girl's arc, he reached out, hardly slowing as he pulled her from midair onto the riderless board.
A shudder went through Tally as she recognized the Smokey boy's jacket, leather and handmade. In a searing flash from a hoverglobe, her special vision caught the line of a scar running through one of his eyebrows.
David, she thought.
"Tally! Heads up!"
Shay's command pulled Tally from her daze, drew her eyes to more hoverboards shooting over the crowd at just above head level. She felt her crash bracelet register a tug from her own board, and bent her knees, timing the jump for its arrival.
The crowd was pulling away from her, shocked by her cruel-pretty face and the girl's sudden ascent—but the boy who'd been dancing with the Smokey grabbed for her. "She's a Special! Help them get away!"
His try for her arm was slow and clumsy, and Tally flicked out her unspent stinger to stab his palm. The boy pulled his hand back, stared at it with a stupid expression for a moment, then crumpled.
By the time he hit the ground, Tally was in the air. With two hands on the grippy edge of her hoverboard, she kicked her feet up onto its riding surface, her weight shifting to bring it around.
Shay was already on board. "Take him, Ho!" she ordered, pointing down at the unconscious ugly boy, her own mask disappearing in a puff of dust. "The rest of you, with me!"
Tally was already zooming ahead, the chill wind sharp against her bare face, an icy battle cry building in her throat, hundreds of faces looking up at her from the beer-soaked ground, astonished.
David was one of the Smokies' leaders—the best prize the Cutters could have hoped for on this cold night. Tally could hardly believe he had dared come into the city, but she was going to make sure he would never leave again.
She weaved among the flashing hoverglobes, soaring out over the forest. Her eyes adjusted swiftly to the darkness, and she spotted the two Smokies no more than a hundred meters ahead. They were riding low, tipped forward like surfers on a steep wave.
They had a head start, but Tally's hoverboard was special too—the best the city could manufacture. She coaxed it onward, brushing the tips of the wind-tossed trees with its leading edge, smashing them into sudden plumes of ice.
Tally hadn't forgotten that it was David's mother who had invented the nanos, the machines that had left Zane's brain the way it was. Or that it was David who'd lured Shay into the wild all those months ago, had seduced first her and then Tally, doing everything he could to destroy their friendship.
Specials didn't forget their enemies. Not ever.
"I've got you now," she said.
"Spread out," Shay said. "Don't let them cut back toward the river."
Tally squinted into the onrushing wind, running her tongue across the uncovered points of her teeth. Her Cutter board had lifting fans front and back, spinning blades that would keep it flying past the edge of the city. But the Smokies' old-fashioned hoverboards would fall like stones once the magnetic grid ran out. That's what they got for living Outside: sunburn, bug bites, and crappy technology. At some point the two Smokies would have to make a dash for the river and its trail of metal deposits.
"Boss? Want me to call back to camp for reinforcements?" Fausto asked.
"Too far away to get here in time."
"What about Dr. Cable?"
"Forget her," Shay said. "This is a Cutter trick. We don't want any regular Specials taking credit."
"Especially this time, Boss," Tally said. "That's David up there."
There was a long pause, and then Shay's razor-bladed laugh came through the network, running an icy finger down Tally's spine. "Your old boyfriend, huh?"
Tally gritted her teeth against the cold, all the embarrassing dramas of ugly days heavy in her stomach for a moment. Somehow, the old guilt never completely faded. "Yours, too, Boss, I seem to remember."
Shay just laughed again. "Well, I guess both of us have scores to settle. No calls, Fausto, no matter what. This boy is ours."
Tally set a determined expression on her face, but the knot in her stomach remained. Back in the Smoke, Shay and David had been together. But then Tally had arrived and David had decided he liked her better, and the jealousy and neediness that went with being an ugly made a mess of things as usual. Even after the Smoke had been destroyed— even when Shay and Tally were clueless bubbleheads— Shay's anger at that betrayal had never completely disappeared.
Now that they were Specials, ancient dramas weren't supposed to matter anymore. But seeing David had somehow disturbed Tally's iciness, making her suspect that Shay's anger might still be buried deep inside too.
Maybe capturing him would end the trouble between them, once and for all. Tally took a deep breath and leaned forward, urging her hoverboard faster.
The edge of the city was growing closer. Below, the greenbelt changed abruptly into suburbia, the rows of boring houses where middle pretties raised their littlies. The two Smokies dropped to street level, zipping around sharp corners, knees bent and arms out wide.
Tally angled into the first hard turn of the chase, a smile growing on her face as her body flexed and twisted. This was how the Smokies usually got away. Regular Specials in their lame hovercars could only move fast in a straight line. But Cutters were special Specials: every bit as mobile as the Smokies, and every bit as crazy.
"Stick with them, Tally-wa," Shay said. The others were still long seconds behind.
"No problem, Boss." Tally skimmed the narrow streets, only a meter from the concrete. It was lucky that middle pretties were never out this late—if anyone stumbled into the chase, one glancing blow from a hoverboard would turn them into paste.
The tight spaces didn't slow Tally's quarry. She remembered from her own Smokey days how good David was at this, as if he'd been born on a hoverboard. And the girl probably had plenty of practice in the alleys of the Rusty Ruins, the ancient ghost city from which the Smokies launched their incursions into the city.
But Tally was special now. David's reflexes were nothing compared with hers, and all his practice couldn't make up for the fact that he was random: a creature put together by nature. But Tally had been made for this—or remade, anyway—built for tracking down the city's enemies and bringing them to justice. For saving the wild from destruction.