They swept around her and circled back, the collapsing building silhouetting their black forms.
"Hands up, Tally-wa," Shay said.
Tally jumped into the air, both hands reaching. The two Cutters grabbed her wrists, pulling her away from Town Hall and toward safety.
"You okay?" Tachs's voice cried.
"Yeah, but it's …" Tally's voice faded. Carried backward, she found herself watching the building's final collapse in awestruck silence. It seemed to fold into itself, like a balloon deflating, then a vast billowing cloud of smoke and debris gushed outward, like a dark tidal wave swallowing the fiery remains.
The wave raced toward them, closer and closer…
"Uh, guys?" Tally said. "Can you go any—?"
The shock wave broke over the Cutters, full of swirling debris and furious winds, knocking Shay and Tachs from their boards and hurling all three of them to the ground. As she rolled, the burn-damaged scales of Tally's sneak suit jabbed into her like sharp elbows, until she finally tumbled to a halt.
She lay on the ground, her breath knocked out of her. Darkness had swallowed them.
"You guys okay?" Shay asked.
"Yeah, icy," said Tachs.
Tally tried to speak, but wound up coughing; her sneak-suit mask had stopping filtering the air. She pulled it off, the smoke stinging her eyes, and spat out the taste of burnt plastic. "No board, and my suit's ruined," she managed. "But I'm okay."
"You're welcome," Shay said.
"Oh, yeah. Thanks, guys."
"Hang on," Tachs said. "You hear that?"
Tally's ears were still ringing, but a moment later she realized that the barrage of cannon fire had ceased. The quiet was almost eerie. She flicked down an infrared overlay and looked up. A glowing vortex of hovercraft was forming above, like a galaxy gathering itself into a spiral.
"What are they going to do now?" Tally asked. "Destroy something else?"
"No," Shay said softly. "Not yet."
"Before we came here, we Cutters were in on Dr. Cable's plans," Tachs said. "She doesn't want to demolish Diego. She wants to remake it. Turn it into another city just like ours: strict and controlled, everyone a bubblehead."
"When things start to fall apart," Shay said, "she'll be here to take over."
"But cities don't take each other over!" Tally said.
"Not normally, Tally, but don't you see?" Shay turned toward the still-burning wreck of Town Hall. "Runaways running free, the New System out of control, and now the city government in ruins…this is a Special Circumstance."
Blame
The hospital was full of broken glass.
All the windows on the Town Hall side had been blown inward by the building's final collapse. Their shattered remains crunched underfoot as Tally and the other Cutters checked each room for anyone left behind.
"Got a crumbly up here," Ho said from two floors above.
"Does he need a doctor?" Shay's voice asked.
"Just a few cuts. Medspray should do it."
"Let a doctor take a look, Ho."
Tally tuned out the skintenna chatter and peered into the next abandoned hospital room, staring once more through the empty window frames at the glowing wreckage. Two helicopters hovered overhead, spraying foam down onto the fire.
She could escape now, simply turn off her skintenna and disappear into the chaos. The Cutters were too busy to chase her, and the rest of the city was hardly functioning at all. She knew where the Cutters' hoverboards waited, and the crash bracelets Shay had given her were keyed to unlock them.
But after what had happened here tonight, there was nowhere left to go. If Special Circumstances was really behind this attack, running back to Dr. Cable was out of the question.
Tally would almost have understood if the armada had gone after the new developments, teaching Diego a lesson about expanding into the wild. Whatever else was happening in Random Town, that had to be stopped. Cities couldn't just start grabbing land whenever they wanted.
But cities couldn't just attack each other like this either, blowing up buildings in the middle of town. That was how the insane, doomed Rusties had solved their disputes. Tally wondered how her own city had forgotten the lessons of history so easily.
On the other hand, she couldn't bring herself to doubt what Tachs had said, that Dr. Cable's purpose in destroying Town Hall was to bring the New System to its knees. Of all the cities, only Tally's had bothered to hunt down the Old Smoke. Only Tally's would think that a few runaways were worth obsessing over.
She was beginning to wonder if all cities had Special Circumstances, or whether most were like Diego, willing to let people come and go. Maybe the special operation—the one that had made Tally the way she was—was something Dr. Cable had invented herself. Which would mean that Tally really was an aberration, a dangerous weapon, someone who needed to be cured.
She and Shay had started this bogus war, after all. Normal, healthy people wouldn't do something like that, would they?
The next room was also empty, strewn with the remains of a late meal interrupted by the evacuation. The windows were decorated with curtains stirring in the wind from the distant helicopter. They had been shredded by flying glass, and now they were like tattered white flags waving in surrender. A pile of life-support equipment sat in the corner, still thrumming but disconnected. Tally hoped that whoever was supposed to be attached to all those tubes and wires was still okay.
It was strange, worrying about some nameless, fading crumbly. But the aftermath of the attack had been head-spinning: People didn't look like crumblies or randoms anymore. For the first time since Tally had become a Cutter, being average didn't seem pathetic to her. Seeing what her own city had done had somehow made her feel less special, at least for now.
She remembered back in ugly days, how living in the Smoke for a few weeks had transformed the way she saw the world. Perhaps coming to Diego, with all its messy discords and differences (and its absence of bubbleheads), had already started to make her a different person. If Zane was right, she was rewiring herself once again.
Maybe the next time she saw him, things would be different.
Tally flicked her skintenna to a private channel. "Shay-la? I need to ask you a question."
"Sure, Tally."
"How is it different? Being cured."
Shay paused, and through the skintenna Tally heard her slow breathing and the crunch of glass underfoot. "Well, when Fausto first stuck me, I didn't even notice. It took a couple of days to realize what was happening, that I was starting to see things differently. The funny thing was, when he explained what he'd done to me, it was mostly a relief. Everything's less intense now, less extreme. I don't have to cut myself just to make sense of it all; none of us do. But even though things aren't as icy at least I don't get furious over nothing anymore."
Tally nodded. "When they had me in my padded cell, that's how they described it: anger and euphoria. But right now, I just feel numb."
"Me too, Tally-wa."
"And there was one other thing the doctors said," Tally added. "Something about 'feelings of superiority'"
"Yeah, that's the whole point of Special Circumstances, Tally-wa. It's like they always taught us in school, how in Rusty days some people were 'rich'? They got all the best stuff, lived longer, and didn't have to follow the usual rules—and everyone thought that was perfectly okay, even if these people hadn't done anything to deserve it except have the right crumblies. Thinking like a Special is partly just human nature. It doesn't take much convincing to make someone believe they're better than everyone else."
Tally started to agree, then remembered what Shay had yelled at her when they'd split up back on the river. "But you said I was already that way, didn't you? Even back in ugly days."