This hovercar was larger, but not as comfortable.
The trip was much less pleasant than Tally’s first ridethat day. The strange-looking man flew with an aggressiveimpatience, dropping like a rock to cut between flightlanes, banking as steeply as a hoverboard with every turn.
Tally had never been airsick before, but now she clutchedthe seat restraints, her knuckles white and eyes fixed on thesolid ground below. She caught one last glimpse of NewPretty Town receding behind them.
They headed downriver, across Uglyville, over thegreenbelt and farther out to the transport ring, where thefactories stuck their heads aboveground. Beside a huge,misshapen hill, the car descended into a complex of rectangularbuildings, as squat as ugly dorms and painted thecolor of dried grass.
They landed with a painful bump, and the man led herinto one of the buildings, and down into a murk of yellowbrownhallways. Tally had never seen so much spacepainted in such putrid colors, as if the building weredesigned to make its occupants vaguely nauseated.
There were more people like the man.
They were all dressed in formals, raw silks in black andgray, and their faces had the same cold, hawkish look. Boththe men and women were taller than pretty standard, andmore powerfully built, their eyes as pale as an ugly’s. Therewere a few normal people as well, but they faded intoinsignificance next to the predatory forms moving gracefullythrough the halls.
Tally wondered if this was someplace where peoplewere taken when their operations went wrong, whenbeauty turned cruel. Then why was she here? She hadn’teven had the operation yet. Tally swallowed. What if theseterrible pretties had been made this way intentionally?
When they had measured her yesterday, had they determinedthat she would never fit the vulnerable, doe-eyedpretty mold? Maybe she’d already been chosen to beremade for this strange, other world.
The man stopped outside a metal door, and Tallyhalted behind him. She felt like a littlie again, jerked alongby a minder on an invisible string. All her ugly senior’sconfidence had evaporated the moment she’d seen himback at the hospital. Four years of tricks and independencegone.
The door flashed his eye and opened, and he pointedfor her to go in. Tally realized he hadn’t said a word sincecollecting her at the hospital. She took a deep breath, whichUGLIES 103made the paralyzed muscles in her chest flinch with pain,and managed to croak, “Say please.”
“Inside,” was his answer.
Tally smiled, silently declaring a small victory that shehad made him speak again, but she did as she was told.
“I’m Dr. Cable.”
“Tally Youngblood.”
Dr. Cable smiled. “Oh, I know who you are.”
The woman was a cruel pretty. Her nose was aquiline,her teeth sharp, her eyes a nonreflective gray. Her voice hadthe same slow, neutral cadence as a bedtime book. But ithardly made Tally sleepy. An edge was hidden in the voice,like a piece of metal slowly marking glass.
“You have a problem, Tally.”
“I had kind of guessed that, uh . . .” It was strange, notknowing the woman’s first name.
“Dr. Cable will do.”
Tally blinked. She’d never called anyone by their lastname in her life.
“Okay, Dr. Cable.” She cleared her throat and managedto say more, in a dry voice. “My problem right now is that Idon’t know what’s going on. So . . . why don’t you tell me?”
“What do you think’s going on, Tally?”
Tally closed her eyes, taking a rest from the sharp anglesof the woman’s face. “Well, that bungee jacket was a spare,you know, and we did put it back on the recharge pile.”
104 Scott Westerfeld“This isn’t about some ugly-trick.”
She sighed and opened her eyes. “No, I didn’t think so.”
“This is about a friend of yours. Someone missing.”
Of course. Shay’s disappearing trick had gone too far,leaving Tally to explain. “I don’t know where she is.”
Dr. Cable smiled. Only her top teeth showed when shedid. “But you do know something.”
“Who are you, anyway?” Tally blurted. “Where am I?”
“I’m Dr. Cable,” the woman said. “And this is SpecialCircumstances.”
First Dr. Cable asked her a lot of questions. “You didn’tknow Shay long, did you?”
“No. Just this summer. We were in different dorms.”
“And you didn’t know any of her friends?”
“No. They were all older than her. They’d alreadyturned.”
“Like your friend Peris?”
Tally swallowed. How much did this woman knowabout her? “Yeah. Like Peris and me.”
“But Shay’s friends didn’t wind up pretty, did they?”
Tally took a slow breath, remembering her promise toShay. She didn’t want to lie, though. Dr. Cable would knowif she did, Tally was sure. She was in enough troublealready. “Why wouldn’t they?”
“Did she tell you about her friends?”
“We didn’t talk about stuff like that. We just hung out.
UGLIES 105Because . . . it hurt being alone. We were just into playingtricks.”
“Did you know she’d been in a gang?”
Tally looked up into Dr. Cable’s eyes. They were almostas big as a normal pretty’s, but they angled upward likea wolf’s.
“A gang? How do you mean?”
“Tally, did you and Shay ever go............