Tally and David left at sunset.
Each of them rode two hoverboards. Pressed togetherlike a sandwich, the paired boards could carry twice asmuch weight, most of it in saddlebags slung on the underside.
They packed everything useful they could find, alongwith the magazines the Boss had saved. Whatever happened,there would be no point in returning to the Smoke.
Tally took the river down the mountain carefully, theextra weight swaying below her like a ball and chain aroundboth ankles. At least she was wearing crash bracelets again.
Their journey would follow a path very different fromthe one Tally had taken there. That route had been designedto be easy to follow, and had included a helicopter ride withthe rangers. This one wouldn’t be as direct. Overloaded asthey were, Tally and David couldn’t manage even short distanceson foot. Every inch of the journey had to be overhoverable land and water, no matter how far it took themout of their way. And after the invasion, they would be givingany cities a wide berth.
Fortunately, David had made the journey to and fromTally’s city dozens of times, alone and with inexperienceduglies in tow. He knew the rivers and rails, the ruins andnatural veins of ore, and dozens of escape routes he’ddevised in case he was ever pursued by city authorities.
“Ten days,” he announced when they started. “If weride all night and stay low during the day.”
“Sounds good,” Tally said, but she wondered if thatwould be soon enough to save anyone from the operation.
Around midnight the first night of travel, they left thebrook that led down to the bald-headed hill, and followeda dry creek bed through the white flowers. It took them tothe edge of a vast desert.
“How do we get through that?”
David pointed at dark shapes rising up from the sand,a row of them receding into the distance. “Those used to betowers, connected by steel cables.”
“What for?”
“They carried electricity from a wind farm to one of theold cities.”
Tally frowned. “I didn’t know the Rusties used windpower.”
“They weren’t all crazy. Just most of them.” Heshrugged. “You’ve got to remember, we’re mostlydescended from Rusties, and we’re still using their basictechnology. Some of them must have had the right idea.”
The cables still lay buried in the desert, protected byUGLIES 341the shifting sands and a near-total absence of rainfall. Inspots, they had broken or rusted through, so Tally andDavid had to ride carefully, eyes glued to the boards’ metaldetectors. When they reached a gap they couldn’t jump,they would unroll a long piece of cable David carried, thenwalk the boards along it, guiding them like reluctant donkeysacross some narrow footbridge before rolling it upagain.
Tally had never seen a real desert before. She’d beentaught in school that they were full of life, but this one waslike the deserts she’d imagined as a littlie—featurelesshumps stretching into the distance, one after another.
Nothing moved but slow snakes of sand borne by thewind.
She only knew the name of one big desert on the continent.
“Is this the Mojave?”
David shook his head. “This isn’t nearly that big, andit isn’t natural. We’re standing where the white weedstarted.”
Tally whistled. The sand seemed to go forever. “What adisaster.”
“Once the undergrowth was gone, replaced by theorchids, there was nothing to hold the good soil down. Itblew away, and all that’s left is sand.”
“Will it ever be anything but desert?”
“Sure, in a thousand years or so. Maybe by then someonewill have found a way to stop the weed from coming342 Scott Westerfeldback. If we haven’t, the process will just start all overagain.”
They reached a Rusty city around daybreak, a cluster ofunremarkable buildings stranded on the sea of sand.
The desert had invaded over the centuries, dunes flowingthrough the streets like water, but the buildings were inbetter shape than other ruins Tally had seen. Sand woreaway the edges of things, but it didn’t tear them down ashungrily as rain and vegetation.
Neither of them was tired yet, but they couldn’t travelduring the day; the desert offered no protection from thesun, nor any concealment from the air. They camped in thesecond floor of a low factory building that still had most ofits roof. Ancient machines, each as big as a hovercar, stoodsilent around them.
“What was this place?” Tally asked.
“I think they made newspapers here,” David said.
“Like books, but you threw them away and got a new oneevery day.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not at all. And you thought we wasted trees in theSmoke!”
Tally found a patch of sun shining through where theroof had collapsed, a............