"Four days later take the side you despise, and look in the flowers for fire-bug eyes." She sing-songed, then shook her head, "It was part of the instructions I left for a friend of mine to find us."
She shook her head again, running both hands through her hair, it was a nervous habit she'd picked up from Tally, and it had been getting worse as of late, "They were rangers, in a helicopter, burning up the orchids to keep them from spreading, and this is going to be a really long explanation but it all fits together, so bear with me."
She leaned back on her hands again, shifting almost nervously as she sorted everything into place in her mind, "The first thing you have to understand is how the city works, there's three kinds of people, there's the Littlies, which are kids, babies all the way up to eleven, and then there's the Uglies, which are the grade school kids, eleven to sixteen, and then when you turn sixteen you get made Pretty, and then once you're tired of being a new Pretty, you get to be a middle-Pretty and take an aptitude test for a job, and then when you get older you're a late Pretty, maybe somebody's grandparents." A one-shouldered shrug, "Some people don't want to be Pretty, I didn't, for a while, and those are the ones that the Smoke preys on, lures them away from the city and into the wild, a few kids go missing every year, but every city has its runaways and nobody really notices."
This was the most of her story she'd told anyone so far, and she wasn't really sure why she was telling him, except that it seemed like he'd get it, at least a little, "I was the youngest one in my group of friends, and they all went away, and it was just me, until I met Tally." She smiled faintly, "We were supposed to run away together, go find the Smoke." Her expression went stony then, "Things never work out the way they're supposed to around Tally."