“Tally deserves to know,” David said, his eyes locked with his mother’s. “She’ll understand how important it is.”
“She’s a kid. A city kid.”
“She made it here alone, with only a bunch of gibberish directions to guide her.”
Maddy scowled. “You’ve never even been to a city, David. You have no idea how coddled they are. They spend their whole lives in a bubble.”
“She survived alone for nine days, Mom. Made it through a brush fire.”
“Please, you two,” Az interjected. “She is sitting right here. Aren’t you, Tally?”
“Yeah, I am,” Tally said quietly. “And I wish you’d tell me what you’re talking about.”
“I’m sorry, Tally,” Maddy said. “But this secret is very important. And very dangerous.”
Tally nodded her head, looking down at the floor. “Everything out here is dangerous.”
They were all silent for a moment. All Tally heard was the tinkle of Az stirring his tea.
“See?” David said finally. “She understands. You can trust her. She deserves to know the truth.”
“Everyone does,” Maddy said quietly. “Eventually.”
“Well,” Az said, then paused to sip his tea. “I suppose we’ll have to tell you, Tally.”
“Tell me what?”
David took a deep breath. “The truth about being pretty.”
Pretty Minds
“We were doctors,” Az began.
“Cosmetic surgeons, to be precise,” Maddy said. “We’ve both performed the operation hundreds of times. And when we met, I had just been named to the Committee for Morphological Standards.”
Tally’s eyes widened. “The Pretty Committee?”
Maddy smiled at the nickname. “We were preparing for a Morphological Congress. That’s when all the cities share data on the operation.”
Tally nodded. Cities worked very hard to stay independent of one another, but the Pretty Committee was a global institution that made sure pretties were all more or less the same. It would ruin the whole point of the operation if the people from one city wound up prettier than everyone else.
Like most uglies, Tally had often indulged the fantasy that one day she might be on the Committee, and help decide what the next generation would look like. In school, of course, they always managed to make it sound really boring, all graphs and averages and measuring people’s pupils when they looked at different faces.
“At the same time, I was doing some independent research on anesthesia,” Az said. “Trying to make the operation safer.”
“Safer?” Tally asked.
“A few people still die each year, as with any surgery,” he said. “From being unconscious so long, more than anything else.”
Tally bit her lip. She’d never heard that. “Oh.”
“I found that there were complications from the anesthetic used in the operation. Tiny lesions in the brain. Barely visible, even with the best machines.”
Tally decided to risk sounding stupid. “What’s a lesion?”
“Basically it’s a bunch of cells that don’t look right,” Az said. “Like a wound, or a cancer, or just something that doesn’t belong there.”
“But you couldn’t just say that,” David said. He rolled his eyes toward Tally. “Doctors.”
Maddy ignored her son. “When Az showed me his results, I started investigating. The local committee had millions of scans in its database. Not the stuff they put in medical textbooks, but raw data from pretties all over the world. The lesions turned up everywhere.”
Tally frowned. “You mean, people were sick?”
“They didn’t seem to be. And the lesions weren’t cancerous, because they didn’t spread. Almost everyone had 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 cube into 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 the population would show some kind of symptoms.”
“But they weren’t natural?” Tally asked.
“No. Only post-ops—pretties, I mean—had them,” Az said. “No uglies did. They were definitely a result of the operation.”
Tally shifted in her chair. The thought of a weird little mystery in everyone’s brain made her queasy. “Did you find out what caused them?”
Maddy sighed. “In one sense, we did. Az and I looked very closely at all the negatives—that is, the few pretties who didn’t have the lesions—and tried to figure out why they were different. What made them immune to the lesions? We ruled out blood type, gender, physical size, intelligence factors, genetic markers—nothing seemed to account for the negatives. They weren’t any different from everyone else.”
“Until we discovered an odd coincidence,” Az said.
“Their jobs,” Maddy said.
“Jobs?”
“Every negative worked in the same sort of profession,” Az said. “Firefighters, wardens, doctors, politicians, and anyone who worked for Special Circumstances. Everyone with those jobs didn’t have the lesions; all the other pretties did.”
“So you guys were okay?”
Az nodded. “We tested ourselves, and we were negative.”
“Otherwise, we wouldn’t be sitting here,” Maddy said quietly.
“What do you mean?”
David spoke up. “The lesions aren’t an accident, Tally. They’re part of the operation, just like all the bone sculpting and skin scraping. It’s part of the way being pretty changes you.”
“But you said not everyone has them.”
Maddy nodded. “In some pretties, they disappear, or are intentionally cured—in those whose professions require them to react quickly, like working in an emergency room, or putting out a fire. Those who deal with conflict and danger.”
“People who face challenges,” David said.
Tally let out a slow breath, remembering her trip to the Smoke. “What about rangers?”
Az nodded. “I believe I had a few rangers in my database. All negatives.”