found purchase with some underground vein of iron, and were dutifully holding it down.
When Tally reached the board, it was flapping like a wounded bird, the breeze swirling around it smelling of seaweed and salt. Strangely, someone had left an old leather-bound book open next to the hoverboard. Its pages snapped noisily in the wind.
Tally squinted. It looked like the one that Zane had been reading, that first night she'd seen him back from the hospital.
Another corner of the board slipped free, and Tally raised a hand to snatch it before the wind pulled it away.
But the hoverboard didn't budge.
Something was wrong here…
Then Tally saw why it wasn't moving. The fourth corner was tied to a stake, secured against the wind, as if whoever had placed it out here in the breeze had known the stone weights would fail.
Then she heard something over the fluttering pages of the book—the stupid, noisy book that had obviously been left here to cover other sounds. One of the Crims was breathing less evenly than the others…someone was awake.
She turned and saw Zane watching her.
Tally jumped to her feet, whipping off her glove and flicking out her stinger in one motion. But Zane raised one hand: It held a collection of metal stakes and firestarters. Even if Tally somehow made it those five meters and stung him, all that metal would fall clattering to the ground, waking the rest of them.
But why hadn't he just cried out? She tensed, waiting for him to raise an alarm, but instead he lifted a finger slowly to his lips.
His sly expression said, I won't tell if you don't.
Tally swallowed, scanning the other Crims in the darkness. None of them watched through slitted eyes; they were all fast asleep. He wanted to talk to her alone. She nodded, her heart beating fast.
The two crept out of the camp and around the outcrop, to where the breeze and crash of waves would cloak their words in a steady roar. Now that Zane was moving, his trembling had started again. As he settled himself next to her in the scrubby grass, Tally didn't look at his face. She already felt revulsion threatening to rise up inside her.
'Do the others know about me?' she asked.
'No. I wasn't sure myself. Thought I was imagining things.' He touched her shoulder. 'I'm glad I wasn't.'
'Can't believe I fell for that stupid trick.'
He chuckled. 'Sorry to take advantage of your better nature.'
'My what?'
In the corner of her eye, Tally saw him smile. 'You were protecting us that first day, weren't you? Moving the hoverboards out of sight?'
'Yeah. A warden was about to spot you. Bubbleheads.'
'Thought so. That's why I figured you'd help out again. Our own personal protector.'
Tally swallowed. 'Yeah, great. It's nice to be appreciated.'
'So is it just you?'
'Yeah, I'm all alone.' It was true now, after all.
'You're not supposed to be out here, are you?'
'You mean am I disobeying orders? Afraid so.'
Zane nodded. 'I knew you and Shay had some trick up your sleeves, letting me go. I mean, you didn't really expect me to use that tracker.' He reached out and took her arm, his fingers pale against the dull gray of the sneak suit. 'But how are you following us, Tally? It's not something inside me, is it?'
'No, Zane. You're clean. I'm just staying close, watching you every minute. Eight city kids in the wild aren't very hard to spot, after all.' She shrugged, still staring out into the crashing waves. 'I can smell you too.'
'Oh.' He laughed. 'Not too bad yet, I hope.'
She shook her head. 'I've been in the wild before, Zane. I've smelled worse. But why didn't you … ?' She turned toward him but lowered her gaze, focusing on the zipper of his jacket. 'You set a trap for me, but didn't mention it to the other Crims?'
'I didn't want to panic everybody.' Zane shrugged. 'If a whole bunch of Specials were following us, there wasn't much they could do about it. And if it was just you, I didn't want the others to know. They wouldn't understand.'
'Understand what?' Tally said softly.
'That this whole trip wasn't a trap,' he continued. 'That it was just you. Protecting us.'
She swallowed—of course, it had been a trap. But what was it now? Just a joke? A pointless waste of time? Shay, Dr. Cable, and the rest of Special Circumstances were probably already waiting for them at the Smoke.
He squeezed her arm. 'It's changing you again, isn't it?'
'What is?'
'The wild. That's what you always said—traveling to the Smoke that first time, it's what made you what you are.'
Tally turned away to stare out at the ocean, tasting its salt in her mouth. Zane was right—the wild was changing her again. Every time she crossed the wilderness alone, the beliefs the city had instilled in her were shaken up. But this time around, Tally's realizations weren't making her particularly happy. 'I'm not sure what I am anymore, Zane. Sometimes I think I'm nothing but what other people have done to me—a big collection of brainwashing, surgeries, and cures.' She looked down at her scarred hand, the tattoos flickering brokenly across her palm. 'That, and all the mistakes I've made. All the people I've disappointed.'
He traced the scar with a quivering fingertip; she closed her hand and looked away. 'If that were true, Tally, you wouldn't be out here now. Disobeying orders.'
'Yeah, well, I'm pretty good at the disobeying part.'
'Look at me, Tally.'
'Zane, I'm not sure if that's a good idea.' She swallowed. 'You see …'
'I know. I saw your face that night. I've noticed how you haven't looked at me. It makes perfect sense that Dr. Cable would pull something like that—Specials think everyone else is worthless, right?'
Tally shrugged, not wanting to explain that it was worse with Zane than anyone else. Partly because of the way she'd felt about him before, the contrast between now and then. And partly … the other thing.
'Try, Tally,' he said.
She turned away, almost wishing for a moment that she wasn't special, that her eyes weren't so perfectly tuned to capture every detail of his infirmity That her mind hadn't been turned against everything random and average and…crippled.
'I can't, Zane.'
'Yes you can.'
'What? So you're an expert on Specials now?'
'No. But remember David?'
'David?' She glared at the sea. 'What about him?'
'Didn't he once tell you that you were beautiful?'
A chill went through her. 'Yeah, back in ugly days. But how did you … ?' Then Tally remembered their last escape, how Zane had gotten to the Rusty Ruins a week before her. He and David had had plenty of time to get to know each other before she'd finally shown up. 'He told you about that?'
Zane shrugged. 'He'd seen how pretty I was. And I guess he was hoping that you could still see him, the way you had back in the Old Smoke.'
Tally shuddered, a rush of old memories sweeping through her: that night two operations ago when David had looked at her ugly face—thin lips and frizzy hair and squashed-down nose—and said that she was beautiful. She'd tried to explain how it couldn't be true, how biology wouldn't let it be true…
But still he'd called her beautiful, even when she was ugly.
That was the moment that Tally's whole world had started to unravel. That was the first time she'd switched
