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Chapters 36–40 

Summary: Chapter 36: Run

Tally escapes towards the railroad tracks. She has no shoes on and no crash bracelets. She’s using Croy’s board, which isn’t adapted to her body. The Specials pursue her. Since their hovercars have helicopter blades, they don’t rely on metal as Tally’s board does. They out-maneuver her, but they also overshoot her since they fly so fast. Tally decides to fly low and head to the railroad cave where David had taken her to escape heat detection. She leaves her board flying to make it seem like she fell off. Tally escapes inside the cave. She has no board, no shoes, no water purifier, and no food. Just as she is about to collapse in despair, she hears a voice. It’s David. 

Summary: Chapter 37: Amazing

Tally and David embrace. David says he had taken his hoverboard out early to watch the sunrise when he saw the Specials coming and ran to the cave to hide. Tally describes the dire scene back at the camp. David asks if she saw his parents. Guiltily, she says no. Tally says she wants to rescue everyone from Special Circumstances. David asks her why she knows about Special Circumstances, and she covers up her secret, saying she was brought in after sneaking into Pretty Town. David recalls the story from Shay, but doesn’t recall them getting caught. Tally lies and says she was caught after the fact. David also wonders how Tally was able to clip her cuffs while under the Specials’ watch. David, believing Tally is simply amazing, falls in love with her even more. 

Summary: Chapter 38: Ruin

Tally and David head to camp the next morning. They find everything burned. Tally sees a wolf capture a rabbit from the pen, and she thinks about how quickly things revert to the wild. Tally asks David why they bothered to burn the library. David says they don’t want any record of what life was like before. Tally sees a pile of shoes and realizes Croy left them for her since he watched her escape barefoot, which makes her feel guilty. David and Tally find the Boss in the woods, near his bag of magazines. He has been murdered. Tally sees signs of struggle on his body and realizes that he was likely trying to protect her. Finally, they head to David’s parents’ house. 

Summary: Chapter 39: Maddy and Az

Maddy’s and Az’s home is burned out. Tally notices there are no signs of struggle. There are even teacups still on the table. David’s parents are missing. Annoyed that Tally is still wearing handcuffs, David grabs his father’s knife to cut them off, but the plastic material is too strong. He wonders how she was able to clip them apart herself, and also why she’s wearing two pairs of cuffs. Tally makes up a lie and says she used a rock to break them apart. David doesn’t exactly believe her, but he’s more concerned about his parents. He says his father never leaves his knife behind, so they were likely caught. David grabs his parents’ emergency safety kit and they leave.

Summary: Chapter 40: The Oil Plague

Tally and David ride towards the city together on his board with their gear, leaving the Smoke behind. As they travel over the expanse of ruins of the Rusty civilization, David explains how the Rusty civilization collapsed. He learned from the Boss, who studied their books, that a bacterium was invented that infected their oil. Once the bacterium came in contact with air, it exploded. Everything went up in flames almost all at once, giving the Rusties no time to escape. Tally thinks about how this version of history was never taught in class, that the Rusties were just foolish and overdependent on oil. David warns Tally that every civilization has a weak point, and it doesn’t even have to be an overdependence on a substance, it can be an idea.

Analysis: Chapters 36–40

For all of Tally’s bravery, however, many of her actions are certifiably deceitful and self-serving. She’s able to outwit her guard on the roof of the trading post because of her ability to lie and deceive—a skill that has served her well through her trials. Shay may be an independent thinker and savvy to the inconsistencies, hypocrisies, and insidiousness nature of the beliefs of her society, but Tally is good at perceiving others’ characters and using them to deceive them. Tally is wise to Dr. Cable from the moment she meets her, making calculations about whether they were able to find her coded note in her belongings when they first captured her to gauge how strong they are. Tally sizes up her opponents with skill. She holds her cards close to her chest when Dr. Cable interrogates her, wise enough to be careful not to reveal too much to Dr. Cable early on. She is no naïve child.

Shay, on the other hand, for all her sharpness, doesn’t catch onto Tally’s lies as well as she could. Her trust outweighs her intelligence sometimes, which creates a blindspot to Tally’s deception. She often misconstrues Tally’s intentions, believing her own opinion is right, like when she mistakenly assumes Tally’s locket is from a sweetheart back home and that Tally is feeling guilty about telling him about the Smoke, just like she told Tally about the Smoke. She considers her friend like herself and interprets her actions as such, a characteristic of naturally trusting people. Tally, on the other hand, is less trusting.

It's Tally’s perception of the human character that connects her to Dr. Cable and makes them in some ways, equals. When the Specials come and raid the Smoke, Dr. Cable is waiting patiently for Tally in the library. Tally arrives, and the interrogation begins. Dr. Cable asks Tally why she resisted the Specials. Tally, characteristically, saves herself with a quick lie. She says it’s because she didn’t want to give herself away and be attacked by the Smokies for being a spy; she had to show she was one of them. Dr. Cable asks Tally where the pendant is, and again, Tally comes up with another quick lie: She hid it, to protect it from the Smokies’ sensors, which are all around the camp. Dr. Cable believes her because they share a similar quality—self-preservation. Dr. Cable points out that intelligence often goes hand-in-hand with a strong desire to self-preserve. Dr. Cable may not think Tally is smart, but she does think she has an incredibly sophisticated sense of self-preservation. Dr. Cable knows this quality in herself well, so she readily identifies it in another.

In this way, Dr. Cable and Tally are matched; one being the hero and the other the anti-hero. Both are aimed toward achieving their ends and are highly capable. Dr. Cable doesn’t know, however, that Tally has been armed with experience and information that has changed her so she can no longer be controlled by Dr. Cable’s threats. Tally no longer worries about being ugly, being mature through surgery, or being a good citizen.

This is even truer once Tally learns more about the truth of the Rusties’ civilization and the real reason behind its collapse. Echoing the metaphor in the cave earlier, with the boulders precariously balanced upon one another, held against each other by their weight, the metaphor is once again used to describe Tally’s society at large, as well as the Rusties’. As David explains, the truth about the Rusties’ collapse is that their collapse came from a bacterium that caused oil to catch fire when it came in contact with air. Indirectly, yes, the Rusties’ collapse came from their dependence on oil, since it was everywhere—from its airplanes, cars, and factories—but it was a result of a technologically-engineered bacterium that the whole civilization went up in flames. Once again, it was the tinkering with nature that sparked a catastrophic event. David’s larger point to Tally is that every civilization has a weakness and it doesn’t have to be a substance, like oil—it can be something invisible, like an idea.  It is the weight of ideas, balanced against each other to create a network of convenient lies, which can keep a society together, just like a substance like oil can thread a society together.

Tally’s realization about the true nature of her society is now complete—for all its pretense of indestructibility with the help of technological advances and sophisticated biological understanding of beauty and the way the mind works, it's still vulnerable, like any other society, simply because it’s a construction of the human mind trying to outwit nature.

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