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Chapters 21–25

Summary: Chapter 21: Firestorm

Tally wakes to find a huge fire blazing across the landscape. She tries to escape the fire and smoke by traveling on her hoverboard toward the river. She sees the helicopter again and is surprised to see that the helicopter is intentionally causing the fire to spread. Tally is knocked off her board by a gust of wind into the river. The helicopter lands on the rocks and people emerge from the craft and come toward her to rescue her. She notices that they are wearing masks with bug-like eyes. 

Summary: Chapter 22: Bug Eyes

The people driving the helicopter are rangers. They are Pretties, but Tally notices have faster reflexes than regular Pretties. They explain they spread fires on purpose to contain a highly invasive white orchid that has overtaken the landscape. The Rusties genetically engineered the orchid but it became too successful as it destroys everything in its path and creates a monoculture. They have been fighting the species for 300 years. The rangers have a silent agreement with the Smokies to help runaways, and they know she’s one. Tally almost blows her cover by saying she isn’t so excited to go to the Smoke. The rangers drop her off and Tally looks at her next instruction which is to wait on the bald head until it’s light. She finds a hill in the distance with a clear-cut side and waits. 

Summary: Chapter 23: Lies

A group of Smokies disguised in white come to pick up Tally. Tally rushes down the hill, recognizing Shay. They embrace. Shay says they almost gave up on her because she is several days late. Tally lies about how long the trip took to cover up the fact that she left four days after her birthday. One of the Smokies finds a tracking device on Tally’s hoverboard, which Tally realizes was planted there by Dr. Cable as a distraction. The group heads back to the Smoke, passing through a thick old-growth forest. David, Shay’s friend, explains that the old-growth forest stops the orchids from spreading. The orchids only spread where the land was clear-cut. The group sweeps Tally one more time for bugs and finds none. Tally is relieved. Just as they pass out of the forest, they come to a valley where the Smoke is. 

Summary: Chapter 24: The Model

Shay gives Tally a tour of the Smoke. She takes Tally to the library, where Tally meets “the Boss,” a forty-year-old Ugly with pale, wrinkled skin. Shay shows Tally some old magazines full of people from the Rusty Era. Shay explains the thin ones are professional pretties, what readers would call models, but Tally realizes these girls are the ones she was taught about in school who have anorexia, and why the operations started. Tally is so disgusted by what she sees she almost confesses, but Shay interrupts her by asking Tally about her pendant. Tally is coy, so Shay assumes Tally has a secret boyfriend back home. Tally tries again to confess, but the Boss interrupts to scold them for touching the magazines with their dirty hands. 

Summary: Chapter 25: Work

Tally learns more about how the Smoke operates. She’s unnerved that the Smokies kill live trees. She meets three more of Shay’s friends—Croy, Ryde, and Astrix. They ran away only a few months ago, but Tally notices they already seem to have confidence like David. At lunch, everyone asks for gossip from back home and more about her adventure. Tally likes the attention she’s getting so she hypes up her stories. She tells them she hid from the rangers for four days instead of one to cover the fact that she left after her birthday. Later, Shay takes Tally to abandoned railroad tracks to scavenge metal. She shows Tally how to use a powerjack to pull the metal up from the dense thicket of vines and roots. 

Analysis: Chapters 21–25

Tally’s rescuers are Pretties, but not just any Pretties. Tally notices these Pretties exhibit more determination and focus than others. They are also wearing strange uniforms that make them appear to have bug eyes, and are traveling in a contraption Tally has never seen before—a helicopter. They also have a strange job: To purposely set fire to fields of beautiful white flowers. Like many heroes on journeys and adventures into the wild, Tally finds the farther she goes outside the boundaries of what she’s known—both literally and figuratively—the stranger the people, creatures, and landscape are. The rangers, with all their strange complexity, are a metaphor for what lives on the boundaries between the unknown and known.

The landscape is equally complex. As the rangers explain, the fields of white flowers they are burning are white tiger orchids. These flowers were once prized by the Rusties for their beauty and rarity. A scientist figured out how to genetically engineer them so that they’d propagate more easily. But her experiment worked too well—the flowers wipe out almost all other species on their path. What was once rare, is now common. What was once delicate and lovely, is now monochromatic and dull as it spreads a blanket of white across the landscape.

The white orchids are a metaphor for what happens when technology is used to adapt nature toward human ends. Tally’s ride in the helicopter allows her to see a literal representation of what is happening in her cities. The orchids are choking out all other varieties of species, just like the Pretties are choking out all other varieties of beauty. The result is total domination of one flower, and one representation of beauty. The flowers are even more acutely a metaphor for the terrible Pretties, who destroy everything in their path. Scientists have genetically altered the species of flowers, and beauty, toward an end that does not fulfill nature’s plan, but humans’ desire and scheme. The result is destructive and shows how human goals are often at odds with nature. Only one species, the white orchid, and one aesthetic ideal can survive.

When Tally meets the Boss, she’s exposed to her first old Ugly which is a traumatic experience for her. The Boss is forty and has wrinkles and pale skin. Unlike the Middle Pretties, who are similar in age, The Boss doesn’t exude a sense of calm maturity or inspire Tally to want to obey him. He has an irascible nature and scolds Tally and Shay for soiling his magazines with their dirty hands. When she skims through his magazines, she has another dramatic experience seeing an anorexic model for the first time. Tally realizes this is what her teachers have taught her about in school, the dangers of starving the body to reach ideals of beauty, and one of the reasons the operations started. These two experiences are a confirmation of what her society has taught her to fear—she no longer has to wonder if she is doing the right thing by betraying Shay and the Smoke.

However, Tally’s convictions are reaction-based and emotional and later proven misguided, demonstrating how beliefs should be based more on complex thinking. The harm the anorexic models cause to their bodies is similar to the harm caused by the government to people’s bodies once they turn them into Pretties. As Shay explains in graphic detail earlier, the surgeons scrape and file people’s bones until they’re shaped, and though Tally doesn’t realize it now, their brains are harmed. The Boss, for all his irascible nature, does his best to save Tally later, when Special Circumstances raids their camp. Tally learns that not all things are what they seem on the surface, and un-investigated beliefs can be harmful and destructive.

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