Uglies (Uglies, #1)

by Scott Westerfeld

“What do you mean? Outside the city completely?” “Yeah.” “That’s crazy. There’s nothing out there.” “There’s plenty out there. Real trees, hundreds of years old. Mountains. And the ruins. Ever been there?” Tally blinked. “Of course.” “I don’t mean on a school trip, Tally.

“Doing what you’re supposed to do is always boring. I can’t imagine anything worse than being required to have fun.” “I can,” Tally said quietly. “Never having any.”

Tally figured that Shay was right about one thing: Being in the city all the time made everything fake, in a way. Like the buildings and bridges held up by hoverstruts, or jumping off a rooftop with a bungee jacket on, nothing was quite real there. She was glad Shay had taken her out to the ruins. If nothing else, the mess left by the Rusties proved that things could go terribly wrong if you weren’t careful.

You’ve seen pretties. They look… wonderful.” “They all look the same.” “I used to think that too. But when Peris and I would go into town, we’d see a lot of them, and we realized that pretties do look different. They look like themselves. It’s just a lot more subtle, because they’re not all freaks.” “We’re not freaks, Tally. We’re normal. We may not be gorgeous, but at least we’re not hyped-up Barbie dolls.”

She’d never seen so many wildly different faces before. Mouths and eyes and noses of every imaginable shape, all combined insanely on people of every age. And the bodies. Some were grotesquely fat, or weirdly overmuscled, or uncomfortably thin, and almost all of them had wrong, ugly proportions. But instead of being ashamed of their deformities, the people were laughing and kissing and posing, as if all the pictures had been taken at some huge party. “Who are these freaks?” “They aren’t freaks,” Shay said. “The weird thing is, these are famous people.”

Nature, at least, didn’t need an operation to be beautiful. It just was.

But city things were disposable and replaceable, as interchangeable as the T-shirt, jacket, and skirt combinations of dorm uniforms. Here, in the Smoke, objects grew old, carrying their histories with them in dings and scratches and tatters.

“We didn’t have much to compare our fellow citizens with, only a few colleagues who seemed different from most people. More engaged. But that was hardly a surprise. History would indicate that the majority of people have always been sheep.

“You really think I’m beautiful.” “Yes. What you do, the way you think, makes you beautiful.”

“They carried electricity from a wind farm to one of the old cities.” Tally frowned. “I didn’t know the Rusties used wind power.” “They weren’t all crazy. Just most of them.” He shrugged. “You’ve got to remember, we’re mostly descended from Rusties, and we’re still using their basic technology. Some of them must have had the right idea.”

At school, they never talk much about how it happened—the last panic, when the Rusty world fell apart. They shrug and say that all their mistakes just kept adding up, until it all collapsed like a house of cards.”

“I wonder why they don’t tell us that in history class. They usually love any story that makes the Rusties sound pathetic.” David lowered his voice. “Maybe they didn’t want you to realize that every civilization has its weakness. There’s always one thing we depend on. And if someone takes it away, all that’s left is some story in a history class.”