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Chapters 31–35

Summary: Chapter 31: Pretty Minds

Maddy and Az reveal to Tally that they are cosmetic surgeons. They met when they both served on the Committee for Morphological Standards, an organization that decided what beauty standards should be adopted across cities. While researching anesthesia, Az discovered many Pretties had small lesions on their brains. He and Maddy further investigated and learned that the only Pretties who did not have the lesions were ones who had jobs that required critical thinking and fast reflexes, like firefighters and doctors. Maddy and Az believe the lesions were intentionally put there. Tally asks David why everyone seems so well-behaved once they become a Pretty, and there are no wars or fights. David says it’s obvious—the operation changes the way people think. 

Summary: Chapter 32: Burning Bridges

Maddy and Az explain that they were Pretties, but were able to reverse their surgery by melting the special plastic used in the surgery with a chemical. They haven’t found out how to reverse the brain lesions, though. They say they founded the Smoke as a control group to investigate the effects of the lesions on people’s brains. Tally begins to think about how her parents always seemed a little naïve. David brings Tally back to camp. He explains he couldn’t let her return to the city without knowing the truth first. He tells Tally she’s beautiful, which astounds her. Furthermore, he loves her scars as they indicate she has a story to tell. Tally decides to abandon her mission. To pledge her affection, she tosses the pendant into a campfire. A few hours later, Special Circumstances arrives. 

Part III: Into the Fire

Summary: Chapter 33: Invasion

Special Circumstances invades using hybrid helicopter hovercars. Tally doesn’t have time to put on shoes. She notices these Pretties have superhuman strength and reflexes. Tally escapes to the forest where she finds the Boss hiding. He’s carrying a bag full of magazines and some pepper dust. He doesn’t have as much strength as Tally so he asks her to run away with the magazines, but she has no shoes, so he leaves her with the pepper instead and runs ahead. As Tally watches the Boss lumber away, she is knocked down by a Special and handcuffed with plastic cuffs. Tally blows some of the pepper on her and escapes, but not for long. The pepper dust causes her to cough, and another Special finally catches her.

Summary: Chapter 34: The Rabbit Pen

Tally is brought to a rabbit pen where the other detainees are. The Specials announce her as an armed resistor and her hands are cuffed. Croy, who is also captured, tells Tally he was suspicious when she didn’t show up to breakfast but he trusts her now. Shay also arrives in the pen, bloodied and bruised. Shay points at Tally, saying this is her fault. Croy defends Tally, which angers Shay even more. Shay tells Tally she not only stole her boyfriend but destroyed the Smoke. The Specials begin scanning everyone’s eyes. When they reach Tally, they tell her that Dr. Cable is waiting for her and cut her handcuffs. Now Shay is even more convinced Tally betrayed them. 

Summary: Chapter 35: In Case of Damage

Tally feels confused about how the Specials found them since she destroyed the pendant. She meets Dr. Cable, who asks Tally why she was found among the resistors. Tally, good at quick lies, says she was trying to protect herself from the Smokies. Dr. Cable asks Tally where the pendant is. Dr. Cable tells her the pendant gets activated when it’s destroyed; now Tally knows she called them accidentally. Tally says she hid the pendant in the trading post, so Dr. Cable sends Tally to retrieve it, double cuffing her and sending her off with a guard. Tally brings the guard to the roof, where all the hoverboards are charging. Tally manipulates the guard, confuses him with made-up slang, and makes him fall before she gets him to clip her cuffs apart. She steals a hoverboard and escapes. 

Analysis: Chapters 31–35

Up until this point, Tally has been struggling with her feelings of guilt. She’s at the Smoke on a mission to betray its location and turn over her friend Shay and the others. She’s curries suspicion several times—when she almost lets it slip that she was actually in the white orchid field for one day rather than four; when she touches her locket a few times, rousing Shay’s and David’s interest in the piece, and when Croy finds her trading SpagBol pouches at the trading post. Tally knows she is an imposter, and even compares herself to the white orchids at one point—deceptively beautiful but out to destroy. When David calls her brave, she feels even more guilty, knowing that she has a conflicted sense of her own courage. She wonders if she really is courageous for making it all this way in the wild alone while wearing a pendant that she could activate at any time for help. 

When in Chapter 31, Tally learns about “Pretty Minds,” the true nature of the operations done back home to make people Pretty, her worldview is challenged. The revelation sets her mind ablaze. She struggles with the idea that the city intentionally puts lesions into people’s brains to make them docile. She shuffles through memories of her parents and Peris, remembering how naïve they seemed and unexposed to the outside world. She always thought of their inner peace as a result of maturity, and something that happened because they now fit a socially and biologically dictated norm. David tells her that normalizing behavior is a way not to make people have inner peace, but to make them more controllable. It’s much easier to control a society of meek and agreeable people.

Now, armed with this information, Tally has an even greater challenge to her courage. It’s one thing to survive out in the wild and fend for oneself successfully. This has surely made Tally’s confidence grow. But it’s another thing to have the courage to change one’s beliefs and step outside the norms and dictates that have shaped one’s worldview. These beliefs function in many ways like a mental and emotional safety net that Tally has clung to. As her desire for attention during the meal times and fire circles at the camp show, Tally wants approval and acceptance, and if she follows what Dr. Cable wants her to do, and believes what she is told about beauty and acquiescence, then she’ll have a place in society and be safe. If she believes what David and his parents are telling her, she must act, otherwise she has even more of a disastrous effect on society by killing people’s one chance to escape the tyranny back home.

Tally decides to throw the locket into the fire, a symbolic gesture showing that she’s willing to destroy the false heart society has given her and follow her own. The locket, which is shaped in the form of a heart and made of tough metal and a high-tech eye scan, is a symbol of her former strength, the one that was derived from her society. She sets that heart ablaze, and turns to her own heart, which has been awakened by David’s revelations, as well as his affection for her. Tally’s journey has reached a personal and narrative climax. By throwing the locket into the fire, she’s affirming her sense of individuality, which she has fought for and earned by her travel to the Smoke and interactions with its inhabitants.

Ironically, the bravery that inspires David to pressure his parents into telling Tally the truth about the operations back home is only half-true when they’re at his parent’s cabin. Tally is still very much considering betraying the Smoke at this point. Tally’s bravery is truly complete only when she throws the locket in the fire and makes the difficult decision to sacrifice her former desires for a greater cause. As is often the case with Tally, others perceive her as brave, but she’s not quite there yet—she still has to do the actions that support the potential for bravery that’s within her. This shows how the mind and heart must be aligned for true, effective action to occur.

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