“We were doctors,” Az began.
“Cosmetic surgeons, to be precise,” Maddy said. “We’veboth performed the operation hundreds of times. Andwhen we met, I had just been named to the Committee forMorphological Standards.”
Tally’s eyes widened. “The Pretty Committee?”
Maddy smiled at the nickname. “We were preparing fora Morphological Congress. That’s when all the cities sharedata on the operation.”
Tally nodded. Cities worked very hard to stay independentof one another, but the Pretty Committee was aglobal institution that made sure pretties were all more orless the same. It would ruin the whole point of the operationif the people from one city wound up prettier thaneveryone else.
Like most uglies, Tally had often indulged the fantasythat one day she might be on the Committee, and helpdecide what the next generation would look like. In school,of course, they always managed to make it sound reallyboring, all graphs and averages and measuring people’spupils when they looked at different faces.
“At the same time, I was doing some independentresearch on anesthesia,” Az said. “Trying to make the operationsafer.”
“Safer?” Tally asked.
“A few people still die each year, as with any surgery,”
he said. “From being unconscious so long, more than anythingelse.”
Tally bit her lip. She’d never heard that. “Oh.”
“I found that there were complications from the anestheticused in the operation. Tiny lesions in the brain.
Barely visible, even with the best machines.”
Tally decided to risk sounding stupid. “What’s alesion?”
“Basically it’s a bunch of cells that don’t look right,” Azsaid. “Like a wound, or a cancer, or just something thatdoesn’t belong there.”
“But you couldn’t just say that,” David said. He rolledhis eyes toward Tally. “Doctors.”
Maddy ignored her son. “When Az showed me hisresults, I started investigating. The local committee hadmillions of scans in its database. Not the stuff they put inmedical textbooks, but raw data from pretties all over theworld. The lesions turned up everywhere.”
Tally frowned. “You mean, people were sick?”
“They didn’t seem to be. And the lesions weren’tUGLIES 263cancerous, because they didn’t spread. Almost everyonehad them, and they were always in exactly the same place.”
She pointed to a spot on the top of her head.
“A bit to the left, dear,” Az said, dropping a white cubeinto his tea.
Maddy obliged him, then continued. “Most importantly,almost everyone all over the world had these lesions.
If they were a health hazard, ninety-nine percent of thepopulation would show some kind of symptoms.”
“But they weren’t natural?” Tally asked.
“No. Only post-ops—pretties, I mean—had them,” Azsaid. “No uglies did. They were definitely a result of theoperation.”
Tally shifted in her chair. The thought of a weird littlemystery in everyone’s brain made her queasy. “Did you findout what caused them?”
Maddy sighed. “In one sense, we did. Az and I lookedvery closely at all the negatives—that is, the few prettieswho didn’t have the lesions—and tried to figure out whythey were different. What made them immune to thelesions? We ruled out blood type, gender, physical size,intelligence factors, genetic markers—nothing seemed toaccount for the negatives. They weren’t any different fromeveryone else.”
“Until we discovered an odd coincidence,” Az said.
“Their jobs,” Maddy said.
“Jobs?”
264 Scott Westerfeld“Every negative worked in the same sort of profession,”
Az said. “Firefighters, wardens, doctors, politicians, andanyone who worked for Special Circumstances. Everyonewith those jobs didn’t have the lesions; all the other prettiesdid.”
“So you guys were okay?”
Az nodded.............