Uglies 2 - Pretties by Scott Westerfeld Read Free Book Online

guess I knew him. From the Smoke. This guy called Croy."
    An odd look passed over Zane's face. His gold eyes stared into the distance, searching for something. A moment later, he nodded. "I knew him too."
    Tally froze, her fork halfway to her mouth. "You're kidding."
    Zane shook his head.
    "But I thought you never ran away," Tally said.
    "No, I didn't." He pulled up his legs and hugged his knees with one long arm, taking a sip of coffee. "Not any farther than the Rusty Ruins, anyway. But Croy and I were friends back when we were littlies, and we lived in the same ugly dorm."
    "That's…funny." Tally finally took the bite of eggs, chewing them slowly The city had a million people in it, and Zane had known Croy. "What are the odds of that?" she said softly.
    Zane shook his head again. "Not a coincidence, Tally-wa."
    Tally stopped chewing, the eggs tasting funny in her mouth, like everything was going to get all spinning again. The world had gone totally missing on coincidences lately.
    "How do you mean?"
    Zane leaned forward. "Tally, you know that Shay lived in my dorm, right? Back when we were uglies?"
    "Sure," she said. "That's how she hooked up with you guys after coming here." Tally paused a moment, then felt a realization starting to fall slowly into place. Memories from the Smoke always came back at a brain-missing pace, like bubbles rising up through some thick, viscous liquid.
    "Out in the Smoke," she said carefully, "Shay introduced me to Croy. They were old friends. So you three all knew one another?"
    "Yeah, we did." Zane grimaced, as if something rotten had crawled into his coffee.
    Tally looked down at her food unhappily. As Zane continued, it was just like the night before, the whole bogus story of the past summer pushing uncomfortably back into her head.
    "There were six of us in my dorm," he said. "We called ourselves Crims back then, too. We did all the usual ugly tricks: sneaking out at night, hacking the dorm minders, coming across the river to spy on new pretties."
    Tally nodded, remembering Shay's stories about before the two of them had met. "And going out to the Rusty Rums?"
    "Yeah, after some older uglies showed us how." He looked up the hill at the towering center of New Pretty Town. "Being out there makes you realize how big the world is. I mean, twenty million people used to live in that old Rusty city. Compared with that, this place is tiny."
    Tally closed her eyes and put her fork onto her plate, her appetite fading. After everything that had happened last night, maybe breakfast with Zane hadn't been such a good idea. Sometimes he seemed to think he was still an ugly, trying to stay bubbly, pushing back against the easy fun of being pretty. That was why he was great at leading the Crims, of course. But one-on-one, he could be dizzy-making.
    "Yeah, but the Rusties all died," she said quietly. "There were too many of them, and they were totally stupid."
    "I know, I know. They almost destroyed the world," he recited, then sighed. "But sneaking out to the ruins was the most exciting thing I'd ever done."

    Zane's eyes flashed as he said this, and Tally remembered her own trips to the ruins, how the empty majesty of the ghost-city had kept every nerve in her body on high alert. The feeling that real danger might be lurking out there, unlike the harmless thrill of a hot-air ascent or a bungee jump.
    She shivered, recalling some of that old excitement as she met Zane's stare. "I know what you mean."
    "And I knew I'd never go there again after the operation. New pretties don't do anything that tricky. So when I got close to turning sixteen, I started thinking about leaving the city, going into the wilderness. At least for a while."
    Tally nodded slowly. She remembered Shay saying the same things back when they'd met, the words that had started her down the path to the Smoke. "And you talked Shay and Croy and the rest of them into coming along?"
    "I tried." He laughed. "At first they thought I was crazy,