Shots ricocheted off the buildings near us, exploding concrete in all directions. My body wanted to crouch, but I resisted the urge and pressed on, leading my girls like a flock of sheep during a storm. I would get them out of this situation, though whether they would be safer on the other side, I did not know.
More shots came, this time right behind my feet. Apparently I was one of the ones who mattered.
The men adjusted their guns to fire at my friends, and one of the bullets hit Turf in the heel. I watched behind me as she screamed and fell, clutching at air while blood soaked her shoe. Tiny stopped to help, crouching over Turf and telling her to get up before the men could reload.
“Tiny, no!” I warned.
“We have to help her—” Tiny began, but a second bullet found her thigh. She fell too, right next to Turf, and the girls grasped at one another in fear.
What do we do? Jo asked.
I couldn’t think. I couldn’t feel. Shots pounded the walls and the sidewalks, coming closer and closer to Jo and me. Arla and Tree found cover behind a trash receptacle long abandoned by the city system, and Jo and I leaped to follow them.
We need to help them, my sister said, the words yelled in my head even though I wasn’t really hearing them. We’re the ones that matter. They’re aiming for us.
What do you want me to do? I screamed. They have a ton of guns. We have one.
Use your powers. The special ones Dad was talking about.
If we weren’t in such danger, I might have laughed.
Jo, I don’t have special powers. Whatever this “head talk” is, it’s a freak accident. I’m not Superman or something.
Who’s Superm— Shots rang out over her words. Never mind. Just do something!
I tried to think back to my childhood, to whatever time Jo claimed I’d performed my “special” powers, but every memory was a gray blur. Like peering into the woods on a dark night, my flashlight circle did not extend past a few feet around me: Mom. Dad. Jo. Mo-D. Dirty streets. No sleep. Hunger.
The men down the street raised their newly loaded guns and aimed. Time seemed to slow down and almost stop as the triggers swung back with the fingers that pulled them. Bullets flew from the guns’ mouths, slow as a body through water.
“No!” I stepped out from behind the trash bin and put my hand up like I was stopping traffic. White light poured out of my palm and engulfed the bullets, and when the light dimmed, they turned to powder and snowed down on the concrete.
“It’s her,” one of the men said. “The girl we found out here last time and the other one we’ve been looking for. Call headquarters and tell them—”
The men never had the chance to make that call. I turned my light on them, and in an instant, they blew away into dust.
The street went silent.
No one moved.
“So…,” Arla finally said. “That’s new.”
“What the fuck?” I stared down at my hands. Nothing had changed. My palms were still as sweaty as ever. My bracelet, however, had taken on a white glow.
“Is yours doing this?” I asked Jo.
“No.” She held up her wrist. Plain gray metal, same as usual. “Apparently your powers activated it.”
“And what are those powers, exactly?” Arla asked nervously.
“I don’t know.”
As the other girls helped Turf and Tiny to stand, I went over to the two dust piles and crouched. My fingers went into the powder and then brought it to my nose. Even before I smelled it, I already knew what it was.
“Morphoid,” I told the girls when I realized they were staring. “I’m changing things into morphoid.”
Hungrily, my crew approached.
Part Two—Boil
Chapter Seven
NOTHING COULD have been worse, I thought as I dragged Jo away from the morphoid mess I’d created. I finally had the power to save my crew, but doing so would put them in immediate danger. Jo had entered another state as soon as she smelled the powder, and keeping her away took all of my strength.
“Let me go!” she screamed as she whipped her arms and pulled against the strain of her shirt, which I clutched in my hand.
Nearby, Arla was doing the same with Tree. Tiny and Turf were too wounded to fight, so they simply groveled on the ground as though worshipping the smell of Big M. For all I knew, the morphoid floating in the air was landing right on their exposed wounds and getting them high anyway. But Tree was like a bull after it has seen a red scarf, and she bucked and plowed into Arla with all of her strength.
“You can’t do this,” I whispered to Jo when she finally collapsed into me, too tired to fight me off anymore. My hand found her hair, and I petted her like a mangy dog. “You can’t go down this path again.”
Tree did not tame so easily, and Arla had to pin down her arms just to keep her on the ground. From there she lifted her and carried her down the street. Once we got a few hundred feet away from the morphoid, Jo calmed down enough that I didn’t have to hold her anymore.
“Sorry,” she said as she looked down at the road.
“It’s not your fault. At least you’re back.” I looked ahead at Tree, who still battled the Mo-D demon pulling her back the way we’d come. “But I don’t think Tree’s going to make it.”
“What did you say?” Arla had overheard me, and she dropped Tree with a thump.
“Arla, listen—”
“We are not leaving her!”
I walked over and put my hand on Arla’s shoulder. Instantly, she calmed.
“Listen to me. Tree was doing Mo-D in NORCC, so she’s the most susceptible to it. Plus, rehab was already harder for her than any of us to begin with. The more time she spends out here, close to the drug her body craves more than anything in the world, the more unstable she’ll be. Going to the dome will drive her mad.”
Arla looked down at Tree, who had taken to begging at her leg for just a taste of that sweet, sweet powder.
“You’re right.” Arla shook Tree’s hands off her leg. “But what can we do? She can’t exactly walk back into NORCC, can she?”
“She’ll stay here and hide until we can come back for her.” I pointed to an abandoned house nearby. “There. If the Authorities find her, they’ll question her, but she’ll sound like a madwoman.”
“I’ll stay too.” This came from Turf, whose leg wound had soaked her pants in blood. “I’m too wounded to walk much farther.”
“Me too,” Tiny admitted. “The last thing I want to do is slow you down.”
“Let’s go inside and think about this,” I suggested. We needed to find cover in case anyone came looking for us, and plus, I was famished.
The house had been abandoned by its Addi owners years before, but besides the mail spilling from the box or the overgrown weeds in the yard, it was impossible to tell the place was abandoned. Inside, the hallway shoes waited for the return of their owners, and through the dining room doorway chairs pulled away from the table made it seem like the family would walk back in and sit down at any moment. Many of the houses on the outskirts of the dome looked like this, I’d heard: pristine, pretty, and deserted.
I scoped out the premises to make sure we were alone. The house must have had children in it, because toys were scattered on the living room floor and peppered the hallway. Upstairs I found three bedrooms, including a pink one with bunk beds and a blue one with a bed shaped like a race car. The master bedroom held only clothes left behind by its owners, clothes I shuffled through and then took downstairs for the blood-soaked girls to change into.
Once I was sure the house was safe, Jo and I scavenged the kitchen for canned goods and found a full supply. Tuna, black beans, and corn would make the perfect snack before we continued our journey, but we couldn’t find the can opener in the perfectly organized drawers, so we used a knife to cut off the top of each can.
So… do you want to talk about what happened back there? Jo asked, her eyes on the knife that cut through the metal like a shark’s fi
n through water. In the living room, the other girls had gone silent; they were probably too exhausted to talk, or too hurt.
No.
Jayla—
What do you want me to say? “Wow, I have magical powers, that’s so cool”? Or “Awesome, I just turned three men into dust”?
No, but—
As far as I can tell, these powers are a curse. No wonder Mom and Dad loved my tricks. I supplied them with never-ending piles of morphoid. I can’t use whatever these abilities are without putting every Addi around me at risk, but not using them could get us killed. I don’t want that responsibility.
Well, you have it, Jo snapped. So get over your “I’m the savior from morphoid” complex and start making the tough calls.
Like what?
Are we leaving the three T’s here? How are they going to protect themselves? How are we going to get into the dome?
“Oh, please.” I, too upset to keep talking in thought-speech, slammed the can of beans down so hard that juice splattered onto the kitchen curtains. “We both know you have a way into the dome.”
Jo suddenly became busy with the next corn can.
“What’s going on here?” Arla asked. The other girls peered into the kitchen from behind her.
“What’s going on is my dear sister lied to me. She didn’t get caught under the dome. She left it by choice… to find me, I suspect.”
“Your sister?” Arla looked back and forth between us. “You mean… why didn’t you… what the hell, Jayla? You let me believe—”
“This is not the time, Disposal,” I said in the warning tone I only used before I picked a fistfight. “Now, Jo, tell me exactly how you got out of the dome and why.”
Jo finally looked up from the can. “How did you know?”
“Those men recognized you, but I suspected even before that. No Addi would have recovered that quickly unless she’d already been weening herself off Mo-D before she left the dome.”
“Touché. Fine, I’ll tell you, but let’s eat first. This might take a while to explain.”
“You have five minutes.” I stabbed the knife into the next bean can. “If I’m not convinced by then, we find out if these powers work on blood relatives.”
Jo dropped the corn can on the floor. As I stared down at the pile of kernels spread out over the ceramic tile by her feet, an image came to me: mass grave, with bodies piled so high that they made a sphere, plunged into the ground and out of it toward the sky. Or rather, the gray dome that hid where the sky should have been.
Apparently this had all been my dad’s idea. In and out of his drug-induced delirium, he had called out for me and told Jo that she had to find me before it was too late. “Jayla will save us,” he repeated as he plunged the needle in and out. “Jayla will come.”
But I never did, and over the years Jo decided that she would have to bring me back if she hoped to fulfill my dad’s prophecy. Some of the less addicted Addi men had found out about the Authority’s plan to gas the dome and had formed an underground tunnel in and out to ferry people in case an escape was needed. This route Jo used to leave the dome, and once out, she’d been intentionally captured and sent to NORCC. She had expected to go through the process, get adopted, and find me on the outside. “Imagine my surprise,” she said, “at finding Jayla in NORCC after all of those years.”
“So that’s it?” I asked as I set my licked plate on the table. “That’s the whole plan? Find Jayla and bring her back because my druggie dad says she can save everyone from inevitable death?”
“Uh… yeah. That’s it.”
This is what happened when you put a bunch of Addis in charge.
“I’m not going to be your savior,” I told Jo, but even as I spoke the words, I knew I didn’t mean them. I’d spent my time in NORCC being more of my crew’s queen and mother than their friend, and when the time came, I would not be able to resist the urge to do the same for others. I would pin them down when The Urge came calling, and when it left, I would help them back on their feet just to do it all again the next time a baggie got loose. I would give them orders and lead them out of the dome just like I’d led my crew out of NORCC, even if it meant death for all of us. I would be their queen.
“So you’ll do it?” Jo asked, as though she’d been reading my thoughts again.
“I’ll do it.”
Leaving Tree, Turf, and Tiny behind was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. We made them as comfortable as we could, cleaning their wounds with an antiseptic we found and stopping the blood with gauze, but I had a bad feeling we would never see them again. If the wounds and Mo-D didn’t get them, the Authority would.
The departure was hardest on Arla, especially when she said goodbye to Tree. She and I were best friends in the intimate way of secret lovers, but she and Tree were true friends. Ever since Tree arrived in NORCC with her awkward gait and spindly limbs, finally making Arla the second tallest in the facility, they’d been inseparable. Arla and I were already hooking up by then, had been hooking up for a long time, but I knew she and Tree shared something special that Arla and I did not.
“I will see you again,” Arla promised as she pulled a blanket over Tree.
Tree was quiet, still fighting the inner battle that came with every encounter with morphoid, and did not respond. Her eyes had found the curtain on the far side of the room, and they did not divert from it, even when Arla whispered something in her ear that only I could hear:
“I love you, Tree.”
Even though Arla and I had never used those words and probably would not have, hearing them said to someone else still stung. Of course she loved Tree, I realized as Arla took Tree’s hand. She always had.
“We’ll watch out for her,” Tiny told Arla.
“Watch out for yourselves.”
Jo, Arla, and I used a backpack from the hallway to carry a few cans of food with us for the journey. The bag had some old-fashioned superhero we didn’t recognize printed on the front, a red and gold metal man with some kind of light emitting from his chest, but I didn’t care. If we didn’t find food for the next few miles, we would need any food we could carry.
As we walked out the front door and down the sidewalk, I looked back over my shoulder. Tiny and Turf peered through the crack in the curtains, their eyes wide and doleful as children after another unsuccessful adoption day. Then a third pair of eyes joined them, much higher up in the split, and a hand waved a solemn goodbye.
Arla never saw it. She kept her eyes locked on the road, on the dome in the distance, even as tears fell from her eyes for the first time in as long as I could remember.
Chapter Eight
FROM THE roof of NORCC, the glass hemisphere stared like an eye, so close you could almost touch the gooey yoke of the cornea, but up close, the mound was like a mountain in the distance that never got closer. We walked and walked, our feet growing sore and blistered, but still the dome hovered playfully out of our grasp.
“Did it take this long the first time?” I asked Jo as I hauled my sack into a better position on my back. Something, a fork maybe, had been worming its way into my skin.
“Of course not,” she snapped. She was least equipped for the journey, being so recently out of rehab, and already had blue circles under her eyes. “The Authorities grabbed me and drove me to NORCC in their fancy van.”
We walked the rest of the way in silence. Jo was too tired to talk, and Arla’s head seemed stuck back at the house with Tree. I never wanted to talk, so the quiet was fine with me.
By nightfall we had almost reached the edge. According to Jo, nightfall was the best time to breach the dome, when the Addi lookouts were alert enough to spot you but not alert enough to shoot you before you could call out an explanation. Plus, the darkness made it harder for Outtie guards to see any transactions between the populations.
“Follow me,” Jo said as she diverted from our path into a little forest on the left side of the dome.
For a few minutes we looked
for what Jo described as a “scenic route.” The trees grew out of rubble that had once been a city street, so we had to climb over roots intertwined with concrete and stone. Branches whipped at our arms and cheeks, their thorns snagging our sweatshirts until holes filled with blood dotted our clothes. Mosquitos, vicious creatures who had been practically exterminated by the Authorities when they heard the rumor that the insects carried Mo-D dependency, now made suicide dives at the exposed parts of our wrists, ankles, and faces. Slap. Slap.
“I can’t take this anymore,” roared Arla as she grabbed the nearest branches and pulled them out of the tree. “Stupid branches, stupid path, stupid mission.”
Jo and I exchanged a look.
“Let me have a minute with her,” I asked.
“Okay, but be quick. The Addis have scouts everywhere in this forest.”
I walked back the way I’d come. Arla had sat down in the middle of the path, a physical refusal to go farther, and was pulling weeds from the dusty dirt.
“Arla,” I said gently as I crouched next to her. “Are you okay?”
“No.” She pulled a dandelion from a few inches away and began ripping off the yellow petals as violently as she could. “They’re defenseless, Jayla. And we just left them there to die.”
“They’re not defenseless.” I put my hand on her shoulder and felt the familiar ridges of her muscles. “They have you.”
Arla raised her chin. “You mean…?”
“Yes. Go back to them. Keep them safe. We’ll come for you when we can.”
She didn’t try to argue with me. She just stood up, energy surging through her like a charged battery, and kissed me on the cheek. Then, without another word, she was gone.
“Uh… where’s Disposal going?” Jo asked when she came back through the trees. The sound of Arla’s heavy footsteps could be heard crunching farther and farther away.
“Where she belongs. It’s just you and me, kid, so I hope you have a—”
I never got to say plan. When I turned to look at Jo, a stranger had an arrow nocked on her bow and pointed directly at Jo’s head.
Addis on the Inside Page 4