Pretties

'We did not know you were coming. Not for many days.'

Did gods usually call ahead before visiting? 'Oh, sorry,' she mumbled, but her response only seemed to confuse him. Maybe gods weren't supposed to apologize.

'We were confused,' he said. 'We saw your fire, and thought you were an outsider.'

'Yeah, I got that. No harm done.'

He tried to smile, but then frowned and shook his head. 'We still do not understand.'

You and me both.

The man's accent sounded slightly unusual, like someone from another city on the continent, but not from another civilization altogether. On the other hand, he seemed to lack words for the questions he wanted to ask, as if he wasn't accustomed to making small talk with gods. Possibly he was searching for: What the hell are you doing here?

Whatever concept of the divine these people had, Tally evidently wasn't fitting into it very well. And she had a feeling that if they decided she wasn't really a god, that would only leave one other category: outsider.

And outsiders got their heads caved in.

'Forgive us,' he said. 'We don't know your name. I am Andrew Simpson Smith.'

A strange name for a strange situation, she thought. 'I'm Tally Youngblood.'

'Young Blood,' he said, beginning to look a little happier. 'So, you are a young god?'

'Uh, yeah, I guess. I'm only sixteen.'

Andrew Simpson Smith closed his eyes, evidently relieved. Tally wondered if he wasn't very old himself. His earlier swagger seemed to abandon him during his moments of confusion, and he hardly had any beard yet. If you didn't notice the lines and a few pockmarks, his face could almost be an ugly of about David's age, maybe eighteen or so.

'Are you the…leader here?' she asked.

'No. He is headman.' He pointed at the fat hunter with the bloated nose and bleeding knee, the one Tally had knocked down during the chase. The one who'd been totally about to cave her head in with his club. Great.

'I am the holy man,' Andrew continued. 'I learned the gods' tongue from my father.'

'You speak it really well.'

His face broke into a crooked-toothed smile. 'I … thank you.' He laughed, then a look that was almost sly crossed his face. 'You fell, didn't you?'

Tally held her injured wrist. 'Yeah, during the chase.'

'From the sky!' He looked around with a stagey bafflement, spreading his empty hands. 'You have no hovercar. So you must have fallen!'

Hovercar? That was interesting. Tally shrugged. 'Actually, I guess you've got me there. I did fall from the sky.'

'Ahh!' He sighed with relief, as if the world was beginning to make sense again. He called out a few words to the crowd, who murmured sounds of understanding.

Tally found herself beginning to relax. They all seemed much happier now that her presence on earth had a perfectly rational explanation. Falling from the sky, they could deal with. And hopefully young gods were held to different standards of conduct.

Behind Andrew Simpson Smith, the fire exploded to life with a crackle. Tally smelled food, and heard the unmistakable squawk of a chicken being captured for slaughter. Apparently, divine visitation was a good enough excuse for a midnight feast.

The holy man spread one arm toward the fire, and the crowd parted again to open a path toward it. 'Will you tell the story of falling? I will change your words to ours.'

Tally sighed. She was exhausted, bewildered, and injured — her wrist still throbbed. She wanted nothing more than to curl up and sleep. But the fire looked warm and cheery after her soaking under the waterfall, and Andrew's expression was hard to resist.

She couldn't disappoint the whole village. There were no wallscreens here, no newsfeeds or satellite bands, and touring soccer teams were no doubt few and far between. Just like back at the Smoke, that made stories a valuable commodity, and it probably wasn't very often that a stranger dropped in from the sky.

'Okay,' she said. 'One story, but then I'm passing out.'

The whole village gathered around the fire.

The smells of roasting chicken came from long spits held over the flames, and earthen pots were shoved in among the coals, something white and yeasty-smelling gently rising in them. The men sat in the front row, eating noisily, wiping their greasy hands on their beards until they glowed in the firelight. Women tended to the food while littlies ran amok underfoot, the older ones feeding the fire with branches scavenged from the darkness. But when the signal went up that Tally was going to speak, everyone settled down.

Perhaps it was sharing a meal with her, or possibly young gods weren't so intimidating, but many of the villagers now dared to catch her eye, some even gazing unapologetically at her pretty face as they waited for the story Andrew Simpson Smith sat beside her, proudly ready to translate.

Tally cleared her throat, wondering how to explain her journey here in a way that would make sense to these people. They knew about hovercars and pretties, apparently. But did they know about Specials? What about the operation? The Crims? The Smoke?

The difference between bubbly and bogus?

Tally doubted her story would make any sense to them at all.

She cleared her throat again, looking down at the ground to escape their expectant gazes. She felt tired, almost pretty-headed from the night's interrupted sleep. The whole trip from the city to this fireside seemed almost like a dream.

A dream. She smiled at that thought, and gradually the words for her story began to find their way to her lips.

'Once upon a time, there was a beautiful young goddess,' Tally said, then waited as her words were translated into the tongue of the villagers. The strange syllables that came from Andrew's mouth made this firelit setting even more dreamlike, until the story was flowing from her without effort.

'She lived in a high tower in the sky. It was a very comfortable tower, but there was no way down and out into the world. And one day the young goddess decided that she had better things to do than look at herself in the mirror. …'

REVENGE Tally awoke to unfamiliar smells and sounds: sweat and morning breath, a soft chorus of snores and snuffling, the heavy, humid warmth of a small and crowded space.

She stirred in the darkness, and a ripple of movements spread out from her, intertwined bodies shifting to accommodate one another. Beneath the fur blankets, soft, comforting warmth suffused her senses. It felt almost like a pretty dream, except for the overwhelming smell of unwashed humans and the fact that Tally really had to pee.

She opened her eyes. Light filtered through the chimney, which was just a hole in the roof that let smoke out. Judging by the angle of the sun, it was midmorning; everyone was sleeping late. That was no surprise — the feast had lasted until dawn. Everyone told more stories after Tally's was over, competing to see whose tale could keep the sleepy god awake, with Andrew Simpson Smith tirelessly translating the whole time.

When at last they'd let her go to bed, Tally discovered that 'bed' was in fact a foreign concept here. She had wound up sharing this hut with twenty other people. Apparently, in this village, staying warm on winter nights meant sleeping in piles, fur blankets strewn across everyone. It had been weird, but not weird enough to keep Tally awake another minute.

This morning, unconscious bodies lay all around her, more or less clothed, tangled up with one another and with the animal skins. But the casual contact hardly seemed sexual. It was just a way of keeping warm, like kittens in a pile.

Tally tried to sit up, and found an arm wrapped around her. It was Andrew Simpson Smith, snoring softly with his mouth half-open. She pushed his weight away from her, and he turned over without waking, draping his arm over the old man asleep on the other side of him.

As she moved through the semidarkness, Tally began to find the crowded hut dizzying. She had known that