door. 'I can't do that to you, Zane, and I can't do this alone. Maybe if we each took one …'
'What? That's crazy. We don't know how that will—' 'We don't know anything, Zane.'
The pounding stopped, and Tally shushed his reply. Specials weren't just strong and fast, they had the sharp hearing of predators.
Suddenly, a bright light sparked through the gap in the door, throwing wildly jittering shadows into the shack, leaving tracers on Tally's vision. The cutting tool hissed as it burned into the chain, and the smell of molten metal reached her nostrils. The Specials would be inside in seconds.
'Together,' she whispered, handing one of the pills to Zane. With a deep breath she placed the other on her tongue. Bitterness exploded through her mouth, like biting into a seed inside a grape. She swallowed the pill, which trailed an acid taste down her throat.
'Please,' she pleaded softly. 'Do this with me.'
He sighed and took the pill, grimacing at the taste. He stared at her, shaking his head. 'That may have been very stupid, Tally.'
She tried to smile. 'At least we were stupid together.' Leaning forward, she grasped the back of his neck and kissed him. David hadn't come to rescue her. He was either dead or he must not care what happened to her. He was ugly, and Zane was beautiful, and bubbly, and he was here. 'We need each other now,' she said.
They were still kissing when the Specials burst in.
and kisses are a better fate than wisdom
Overnight, the first freeze of winter had come. The trees shone like glass, bare branches alight with icicles. Glittering black fingers stretched across the window, cutting the sky into sharp little pieces.
Tally pressed one hand against the pane, letting the chill leak through the glass and into her palm. The bracing cold made the afternoon light sharper, as brittle as she imagined the icicles outside to be. It focused the part of her mind that still wanted to sink back into pretty dreams.
When she finally pulled her hand away from the window, a fuzzy outline showed its imprint on the glass, then slowly faded.
'Blurry Tally is no more,' she said, then grinned, placing her icy palm against Zane's cheek.
'What the…,' he muttered, stirring just enough to nudge her hand away.
'Wake up, pretty-head.'
His eyes opened a slit. 'Make it dark,' he told his interface cuff.
The room obeyed, opaquing the window.
Tally frowned. 'Another headache?' Zane still sometimes got crippling migraines that could put him out for hours, but they weren't as bad as the first weeks after he'd taken the pill.
'No,' he murmured. 'Sleepy.'
She reached for the manual controls, setting the window back to transparent. 'Then it's time to get up. We'll be late for ice skating.'
He squinted at her through one eye. 'Ice skating is bogus.'
'Sleeping's bogus. Get up and be bubbly.'
'Bubbly is bogus.'
Tally raised one eyebrow, which didn't hurt anymore. She'd been a good pretty and had her forehead all fixed, though she'd memorialized the scar with a flash tattoo: black Celtic swirls just above her eye that spun in time with her heartbeat. For good measure, she'd gotten eye surge exactly like Shay's, backward-running clocks and everything.
'Bubbly is not bogus, lazy-face.' Tally placed her hand against the window again to recharge its iciness. Her interface cuff sparkled in the sun like the frozen trees below, and for the millionth time she searched for any seam in its metal surface. But the cuff seemed to have been forged from one piece of steel, perfectly fitted to the oval of her wrist. She pulled at it softly, feeling the slightest give; she was growing skinnier every day. 'Coffee, please,' she said sweetly to the cuff.
Brewing smells began to percolate into the room, and Zane stirred again. When her hand had grown sufficiently cold, Tally placed it on his bare chest. He flinched but didn't fight back, just squeezed two fistfuls of sheet and took a shuddering breath. His eyes opened, their gold irises shining like the cold winter sun. 'Now that was bubbly.'
'I thought bubbly was bogus.'
He smiled and shrugged drowsily.
Tally smiled back. Zane was extra beautiful when he first woke up. The edges of sleep softened his intense stare, leaving his severe features almost vulnerable-looking, like a lost and hungry boy. Tally never mentioned this fact, of course, or Zane would probably have gotten surge to fix it.
She made her way to the coffeemaker, stepping over the piles of unrecycled clothes and dirty dishes that occupied every square centimeter of floor. As always, Zane's room was a wreck. His closet lay half-open, too overflowing to shut properly. It was an easy room to hide things in.
Sipping her coffee, Tally told the hole in the wall to make their usual skating ensembles: heavy plastic jackets lined with fake rabbit fur; knee-padded pants for bad falls; black scarves; and, most important, thick gloves that reached halfway to their elbows. While the hole was spitting out clothes, she took Zane his coffee, which finally dragged him to consciousness.
Zane and Tally skipped breakfast — a meal they hadn't eaten for the last month — and layered up in the elevator down to the front door of Pulcher Mansion, speaking fluent pretty along the way.
'Did you see the frost, Zane-la? So icy-making.'
'Winter is totally bubbly.'
'Totally. Summer is just too … I don't know. Warming or something.'
'Utterly.'
They smiled pleasantly at the door minder and went out into the cold, pausing for a moment on the mansion's front steps. Tally handed Zane her coffee mug and pulled her gloves up inside her sleeves, covering the interface cuff on her left arm with two layers. Then she wrapped that arm with the black scarf to seal the cuff tightly She took both coffees from Zane, watching steam curl up from the trembling black pools while he did the same with his own gloves.
When he was done, Tally spoke, not too loudly. 'I thought we were supposed to act normal today.'
'I am acting normal.'
'Come on. 'Bubbly is bogus'?'
'What? Too much?'
She shook her head, giggled, and pulled him toward the floating rink.
It had been one month since they'd taken the pills, and Tally and Zane weren't brain-dead yet. The first few hours, though, had been totally bogus. The Specials had searched them and Valentino 317 madly, putting everything they found in little plastic bags. They'd barked a million questions in their grating Special voices, trying to find out why a pair of new pretties would climb the transmission tower. Tally tried to tell them they'd just wanted privacy, but no explanation satisfied the Specials.
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
