She slid closer, hands pushing inside his clothes. She wanted to be out of the sneak suit, no longer alone, no longer invisible. Arms around him, she squeezed tight, hearing his breath catch as her lethal hands gripped harder. Her senses brought her everything about him: his heart pulsing softly in his throat, the taste of his mouth, the unwashed scent of him cut by the salt spray.
But then his fingers brushed her cheek, and Tally felt their trembling.
No, she said silently.
The tremors were soft, almost nothing, as faint as the echoes of rain falling a kilometer away. But they were everywhere, on the skin of his face, in the muscles of his arms around her, in his lips against hers—his whole body shivering like a littlie's in the cold. And suddenly Tally could see inside him: his damaged nervous system, the corrupted connections between body and brain.
She tried to blot the image from her mind, but it only grew clearer. She was designed to spot weaknesses, after all, to take advantage of the frailties and flaws of randoms. Not ignore them.
Tally tried to pull away a little, but Zane's grip on her arm tightened, as if he thought he could hold her there. She broke the kiss and opened her eyes, glaring down at the pale fingers grasping her, a sudden, unstoppable flash of anger rising.
"Tally, wait," he said. "We can—"
But he hadn't let go. Rage and disgust filled her, and Tally sent a flutter of razor spines rolling across her sneak suit. Zane cried out and pulled back, his fingers and palms bleeding.
She rolled away, springing to her feet and running. She'd kissed him, let herself be touched by him—someone unspecial and barely average. Someone crippled…
Bile rose in her throat, as if the memory of kissing him was trying to tear itself free of her body. She stumbled and fell to one knee, her stomach heaving, the world spinning.
"Tally!" He was coming after her.
"Don't!" She raised one hand, not daring to look up at him. Breathing in the cold, pure sea air, the nausea was beginning to pass. But not if he got any closer.
"Are you okay?"
"Does it look like I'm okay?" A wave of shame whipped through Tally. What had she done? "I just can't, Zane."
She pulled herself up and ran toward the ocean, away from him. The outcrop ended on a chalky cliff, but Tally didn't slow down…
She jumped, barely clearing the rocks below, hitting the waves with a slap, diving down into the icy embrace of the water. The churning ocean spun her around, almost dumping her back on the jagged shore, but Tally pulled herself deeper with a few powerful strokes, until her hands brushed the dark and sandy bottom. The roiling water began to fall back, shifting into a riptide around her. It pulled Tally outward, rumbling in her ears, erasing her thoughts.
She held her breath, letting the ocean claim her.
A minute later Tally let herself break the surface, gasping for air. She was half a kilometer from where she'd started, well offshore and being carried south by the current.
Zane was at the cliff's edge, scanning the water for her, his bleeding hands wrapped in his jacket. After what she'd done, Tally couldn't face him, didn't even want to be seen by him. She wanted to disappear.
She drew down her hood and let the suit take on the rippling silver of the water, let herself be pulled farther away.
Finally, when he'd gone back to camp, Tally swam toward shore.
Bones
After that, the journey seemed to take forever.
Some days, she became convinced the position-finder was nothing but a Smokey trick leading them around the wild forever: crippled Zane struggling to make it through the long nights of travel; psycho Tally alone inside her sneak suit, detached and invisible. Both of them in separate hells.
She wondered how Zane felt about her now. After what had happened, he must have realized how weak she really was: Dr. Cable's feared fighting machine undone by a kiss, sickened by something as simple as a quivering hand.
The memory of it made her want to cut herself, to tear at her own flesh until she had become something different inside. Something less special, more human. But she didn't want to go back to cutting after telling Zane she'd stopped. It would be like breaking a promise to him.
Tally wondered if he'd told the other Crims about her. Were they already planning something—a way to ambush Tally and turn her over to the Smokies? Or would they try to escape, leaving her behind, alone in the wild forever?
She imagined sneaking into camp again while the others were sleeping, and telling Zane how bad she felt. But she couldn't bear to face him. She might have gone too far this time, almost throwing up in his face, not to mention cutting up his hands.
Shay had already given up on her. What if Zane also decided he'd had enough of Tally Youngblood?
Toward the end of two weeks, the Crims came to a halt on a cliff that jutted out high above the sea.
Tally glanced up at the stars. It was well before dawn, and the rail line stretched before them unbroken. But the runaways all jumped from their boards and gathered around Zane, looking down at something in his hand.
The position-finder.
Tally watched and waited, hovering just below the edge of the sea cliff, lifting fans keeping her aloft above the crashing waves. After a few long minutes, she saw camp fire smoke; it was clear the Crims weren't going any farther tonight. She drifted closer and pulled herself onto the cliff.
Circling around in the high grass, she made her way closer to the encampment. Flares of infrared erupted as the Crims heated their meals.
Finally, Tally reached a spot where the wind carried sounds and the smell of city food to her.
"What do we do if no one comes?" one of the girls was saying.
Zane's voice answered. "They'll come."
"How long?"
"I don't know. But there's nothing else we can do."
The girl started talking about their water supply, and the fact that they hadn't seen a river for the last two nights.
Tally sank back into the grass, relieved—the position-finder had told them to stop here. This wasn't the New Smoke, obviously, but perhaps this awful journey was coming to an end soon.
She looked around, sniffing the air, wondering what was special about this place. Among the scents of self-heating meals, Tally smelled something that made her skin crawl…something rotten.
She crawled toward the scent through the high grass, eyes sweeping the ground. The stench grew and grew, finally so strong it almost made her gag. A hundred meters from the camp she found the source: a pile of dead fish, heads and tails and picked-clean spines with flies and maggots crawling all over them.
Tally swallowed, telling herself to stay icy as she searched the area around the pile. In a small clearing, she discovered the remains of an old campfire. The charred wood was cold, the ash all blown away, but someone had camped here. Many people, in fact.
The lifeless fire was in a deep pit, banked against the sea breeze, and built to give off heat efficiently Like all city pretties, the Crims always optimized their fires for light instead of heat, burning through wood carelessly. But this fire had been made by practiced hands.
Tally glimpsed something white among the ashes, and reached in to gently draw it out…
It was a bone, about as long as her hand. She couldn't tell what species it belonged to, but it was marked with small depressions where human teeth had gnawed into the marrow.
Tally couldn't imagine city kids eating meat after only a couple of weeks in the wild. Even the Smokies rarely hunted for food—they raised rabbits and chickens, nothing as big as whatever this bone had come from. And the teeth had left uneven marks; whoever they were, they didn't know a lot about dentistry. One of Andrew's people had probably built this fire.