carrying her away from it. She turned up her crash bracelets' calling range to a whole kilometer, and waited for the board's nose to push itself above the surface.
Shapes bobbed along in the water all around her, knobby and irregular, like a flotilla of alligators in the fast- moving current. What were they?
Something nudged her…
She spun around, but it was just an old tree trunk — not an alligator, and not her hoverboard. Tally grabbed on to it gratefully, though, already exhausted from paddling. In every direction were more trees, as well as branches, clots of reeds, masses of rotting leaves. The river was carrying all sorts of cargo on its surface.
The rain, Tally thought. Three days of downpour must have flooded the hills, washing all manner of stray matter down into the river, swelling its size and accelerating its current. The trunk she clung to was old and rotted black, but a few strands of green wood showed from a break. Had the flooding ripped it from the ground alive?
Tally's fingers traced where the tree had broken, and she saw that something unnaturally straight had struck it.
Like the edge of a hoverboard.
A few meters away, another log floated, cut with the same sharp edge. Tally's crash-landing had snapped the old, rotten tree in half. Her face was bleeding from the impact; she could still taste blood. So what damage had been done to the hoverboard?
Tally twisted the call controls of her crash bracelets higher, setting them to burn their batteries down. Every second, the current was carrying her farther from where she'd landed.
No hoverboard rose up above the surface, no tugging came at her wrists. As the minutes passed, Tally began to admit to herself that the board was dead, a piece of junk at the bottom of the river.
She switched her bracelets off and, still clinging to the log, began to kick her way toward shore.
The riverbank was slippery with mud, the ground saturated by the rains and the swollen river. Tally waded to shore in a small inlet, struggling through branches and reeds in the hip-deep water. It seemed the flood had collected everything that floated and dumped it in this one spot.
Including Tally Youngblood.
She stumbled up the bank, desperate to reach dry ground, every instinct impelling her to keep moving away from the rushing water. Her exhausted body felt full of lead, and Tally slid back down the slope, becoming covered with mud. Finally, she gave up and huddled on the muddy ground, shaking in the freezing cold. Tally couldn't remember feeling so tired since becoming a new pretty, as if the river had sucked away her body's vitality.
She took the firestarter from her backpack and, with trembling fingers, gathered a pile of washed-up twigs. But the wood was so wet from three days of rain that the firestarter's tiny flame only made the twigs hiss dully.
At least her coat was still working. She turned its heater up to full, not worrying about the batteries, and gathered herself into a ball.
Tally waited for sleep to come, but her body wouldn't stop trembling, like a fever coming on back in ugly days. But new pretties almost never got sick, unless she'd run herself too far down this last month — eating almost nothing, staying out in the cold, running on adrenaline and coffee, with hardly an hour in the last twenty-four when she hadn't been soaking wet.
Or was she finally getting the same reaction from the cure as Zane? Was the pill beginning to damage her brain, now that she was beyond any hope of medical care?
Tally's head pounded, fevered thoughts swirling through her. She had no hoverboard, no way of getting to the Rusty Ruins except on foot. No one knew where she was. The world had been emptied of everything but the wild, the freezing cold, and Tally Youngblood. Even the absence of the cuff on her wrist felt strange, like the gap left behind by a missing tooth.
Worst was the absence of Zane's body next to her. She'd stayed with him every night for the last month, and they'd spent most of every day together. Even in their enforced silence, she had grown used to his constant presence, his familiar touch, their wordless conversations. Suddenly he was gone, and Tally felt as if she'd lost some part of herself in the fall.
She had imagined this moment a thousand times, finally reaching the wild, free from the city at last. But never once had she imagined being here without Zane.
And yet here she was, utterly alone.
Tally lay awake a long time, replaying in her mind those last frantic minutes in the balloon. If she'd only jumped sooner, or had thought to look down before the city grid ran out. After what Zane had said, she shouldn't have hesitated, knowing that this escape was their only chance for freedom together.
Once again, things were screwed up, and it was all her fault.
Finally Tally's exhaustion overpowered her worries, and she drifted into troubled sleep.
So, there was this beautiful princess.
She was locked in a high tower, one whose smart walls had clever holes in them that could give her anything: food, a clique of fantastic friends, wonderful clothes. And, best of all, there was this mirror on the wall, so that the princess could look at her beautiful self all day long.
The only problem with the tower was that there was no way out. The builders had forgotten to put in an elevator, or even a set of stairs. She was stuck up there.
One day, the princess realized that she was bored. The view from the tower — gentle hills, fields of white flowers, and a deep, dark forest — fascinated her. She started spending more time looking out the window than at her own reflection, as is often the case with troublesome girls.
And it was pretty clear that no prince was showing up, or at least that he was really late.
So the only thing was to jump.
The hole in the wall gave her a lovely parasol to catch her when she fell, and a wonderful new dress to wear in the fields and forest, and a brass key to make sure she could get back into the tower if she needed to. But the princess, laughing pridefully tossed the key into the fireplace, convinced she would never need to return to the tower. Without another glance in the mirror, she strolled out onto the balcony and stepped off into midair.
The thing was, it was a long way down, a lot farther than the princess had expected, and the parasol turned out to be total crap. As she fell, the princess realized she should have asked for a bungee jacket or a parachute or something better than a parasol, you know?
She struck the ground hard, and lay there in a crumpled heap, smarting and confused, wondering how things had worked out this way. There was no prince around to pick her up, her new dress was ruined, and thanks to her pride, she had no way back into the tower.
And the worst thing was, there were no mirrors out there in the wild, so the princess was left wondering whether she in fact was still beautiful … or if the fall had changed the story completely.
When Tally awoke from this bogus dream, the sun was halfway across the sky.
She struggled to her feet, having to pry herself from the sucking embrace of the mud. At some point during the night, her winter coat had run out of charge. Without batteries, it was a cold thing clinging to her skin, still damp from her soaking in the river, and it smelled funny. Tally unstuck the coat from herself and laid it across the broad surface of a rock, hoping that the sun would dry it out.
For the first time in days the sky was cloudless. But in clearing, the air had turned crisp and cold — the warmer weather that had arrived with the rain had departed with it as well. The trees glittered with frost, and the mud under her feet sparkled, its thin layer of rime crackling underfoot.
Her fever had passed, but Tally felt dizzy standing, so she knelt beside her backpack to look through its contents — the sum of everything she possessed. Fausto had managed to gather up some of the usual Smokey survival gear: a knife, water filter, position-finder, firestarter, and some safety sparklers, along with a few dozen packets of soap. Remembering how valuable dehydrated food had been in the Smoke, Tally had packed three months' worth, which was all wrapped up in waterproof plastic, fortunately. When Tally saw the two rolls of toilet paper she'd brought, however, she let out a groan. They were soaked through, reduced to bloated, squishy blobs of white. She placed them on the rocks next to her jacket, but doubted that it was even worth drying them out.
She sighed. Even back in her Smokey days, she'd never gotten used to the leaf thing.
