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UGLIES 217
“Well, this is a secret. I don’t usually tell people until
they’ve been here for a while. Years. But you seem . . . serious
enough to handle it.”
“You can trust me,” Tally said, then immediately wondered
why. She was a spy, an infiltrator. She was the last
person David should trust.
“I hope I can, Tally,” he said, reaching out to her. “Feel
the palm of my hand.”
She took it, running her fingers over the flesh. It was as
rough as the wood grain of the table in the dining hall, the
skin along his thumb as hard and dry as leather cracking
with age. No wonder he could work all day and not complain.
“Wow. How long does it take to get calluses like that?”
“About eighteen years.”
“About . . . ?” She stopped in disbelief, then compared
the horn of his palm with her own tender, blistered flesh.
Tally could feel it there, the grueling afternoon of real work
she’d put in today, but stretched across a lifetime. “But how?”
“I’m not a runaway, Tally.”
“I don’t understand.”
“My parents were runaways, not me.”
“Oh.” She felt stupid now, but it had never once
occurred to her. If you could live in the Smoke, you could
raise children here too. But she hadn’t seen any littlies. And
the whole place seemed so tenuous, so temporary. It would
be like having a child on a camping trip. “How did they
manage? Without any doctors, I mean.”