Addis on the Inside

by Annabelle Jay

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your people.” Omar waved his hand around the room at about twenty people who had gathered. If this was their Resistance, they would fail epically. “They’ve been waiting for you for a very long time.”

  I tried not to let my face betray my doubt. If the Addis wanted to believe that I was some kind of queen, why not let them? In NORCC the girls had needed someone to follow, and the same was true of the Addis. Yet I had to ask myself, as I looked around the room at the dull-eyed group, even if I could turn every Authority into white powder, would I trust the Resistance not to smoke it?

  “Okay,” I said, though I thought, No way in hell I want to get up there and speak.

  Omar and I climbed the few steps to the stage, hammered together with rusty nails probably collected from other structures in the city. Every step he took seemed weighted by an unseen hand pressing down on his shoulders—The Urge, The Itch—and I expected him to fall at any moment. He didn’t, though, and by the time he took the podium, his shoulders had straightened to an almost normal level.

  “Addis of the Resistance,” Omar cried, his voice echoing through the room. Voices hushed. “Our queen, Jayla, has finally returned to us after many years outside the dome. She has come to save us!”

  Cheers went up from the small crowd of onlookers.

  I can’t do this, I thought as their eyes met mine. I can’t give them hope. My resistance of the Authorities was fueled by anger, and right then, all I felt was fatigue. I hadn’t slept in a day, and every cell of my body called out for sleep the way these Addis yearned for Mo-D. Nothing else mattered except for a few hours on a pillow.

  “Do you have a bump?” someone whispered on my right.

  I knew, before I turned, that someone was my father.

  He had gotten so close to his neighbor’s ear that no one else but those two could hear him, yet somehow the sound had traveled to me. Or perhaps I had felt it, the way I sensed the presence of powder on Tree. The sickness was almost tangible, like his dirty wool jacket, and it had stained him gray.

  “Jayla, we welcome you,” Omar finished before stepping back from the podium and giving me the floor.

  Everything around me had become a smoky blur. My heartbeat seemed audible; that was how loud it pumped its furious beat. I stepped up to the podium and opened my mouth, but nothing came out. Nothing could. I clamped my hands to my sides, worried that if I let them do their bidding, I might turn my father to powder before I ever found out the truth about my mother and why she left.

  No one spoke.

  Minutes passed.

  Then, just when the silence had settled on the room as tangible as a fog, I moved. In two steps, I had bounded back across the stage and reached down to take my father’s head between my hands. His hair was greasy and caked in gritty dust, but my hands barely felt the texture. They were searching for something deeper, something burrowed into him like a fishing hook with its barb caught right.

  Stop! Jo yelled in my head. You’ll kill him!

  I didn’t care. The anger had taken over, brown and burning like heated foil, and it would not dissipate until the poison was gone. Through the hands clutching his head I pulled at my father’s mind, strained the addiction from it, and removed it piece by piece. Every urge he’d ever had came through my hands into my own body, until I felt the need so deeply that I fell to my knees. Still, I did not let go.

  Riley lunged at me and pulled me off with sheer weight. My hands grasped for my father’s head but could no longer reach their goal. The Itch flowed through my veins in desperate wanting, making the scene in the NORCC bathroom seem like a trivial matter. Must. Find. Morphoid.

  “I’m free.” The words, soft and uncertain, came from my father. His eyes were clear and focused, and they found mine through the legs that stood between us. “My Jayla has set me free.”

  The room went quiet again. Everyone turned slowly toward the sound, and Riley’s grip on my arms relaxed.

  “She has performed a miracle,” my father continued. “I no longer feel The Urge; my daughter has saved me from that terrible fate. She can save us all.”

  “She can save us all!” someone in the crowd repeated, and then the chant was taken up by the whole room. “She can save us! Jayla can save us!”

  They pressed around me, reminding me of our time in the cave. The air grew as stifled and warm, and I struggled to breathe. Jo tried to fight her way through the crowd, but no one would give an inch, and like a strong tide, they pushed her against the wall.

  Someone else’s strong hands took my shoulders and hiked me up off the ground. I was pulled backward, with my feet dragged along the ground, off the stage and out the side door. My body was propped like a rag doll against the alley wall, the coolness of the metal and brick soothing against my burning back.

  Only when Riley slammed the door and locked it with a fist to the knob did I see my savior’s face.

  “They’ve all gone nuts,” she muttered as she found a piece of metal in the alley trash and used it to reinforce the lock. “One minute they’re praising you, the next they’re rushing you like hunters competing for a single deer. Once an Addi, always an Addi, as they say on the outside—”

  Her voice cut off when she turned to look at me. Her eyes checked me over and then stopped at my head. Not my eyes, but something above them, had taken her attention.

  “Your hair,” she whispered.

  “What?” My hands went to my own head, where my hair had begun to change from the soft hair of a well-groomed Outtie to the bramble of an Addi inside the dome. I felt no leaves or dirt, no rubble or powder. Just my normal hair.

  “It’s white.”

  “What!” My hands continued to search, though what she described, I could not see.

  “Just a few strands in the front. Were they there before?”

  “Was I prematurely graying at the ripe old age of seventeen before now?” I asked sarcastically. Then I found a strand and pulled it in front of my eyes, and sure enough, it was the color of my eyes. “No, I think I would have noticed.”

  “Then it happened when you freed your father.” Riley seemed to be talking more to herself than me, probably because every time she spoke to me, I snapped. “Maybe when you take the poison, you truly take it into yourself. You couldn’t free us all, even if you wanted to.”

  The Urge had returned, stronger than before, and I took my head in my hands as though to physically block it. Suddenly, my hair was the last thing on my mind.

  “What’s happening?” Riley asked.

  “The Urge,” I whispered. I did not need to say more.

  “We have to distract you,” Riley said, her voice shifting into fighter mode. “If you don’t get your mind off of it, The Urge will overwhelm you, especially if you’re not accustomed to so strong a dose.”

  She sat down, and I half expected her to perform the magic tricks of my childhood in the dome—a childhood I had barely remembered until then. Of course I’d been best at the tricks since I could really make things disappear, but the other children in the dome had learned the vanishing of pennies and juggling of balls that became scarves in their final turns. Everywhere you looked, street urchins were pulling mice from their sleeves and raising cups to reveal what lay underneath.

  Instead of performing, Riley kissed me. Her lips were surprisingly soft in a place where most lips were parched or powdery, and their touch chased off all thoughts of my father, or morphoid, or even the revolution.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” I whispered, the fight drawn out of me like morphoid poison.

  “I wanted to.” Her hand went to my hair and found the white strand before tucking it behind my ear.

  Because she liked me? Or because I was the queen, able to save her from her lifelong torture with a flick of my hand? And if one day I couldn’t save her, if my powers disappeared and only love remained, would she vanish as fast as morphoid smoke on a cloudy night? After all, Arla had kissed me for years and then
turned right around and fallen in love with someone else when being my girlfriend no longer had its perks.

  I didn’t voice these doubts, but they probably showed plainly on my face; I had never been one to hide my emotions.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Riley said.

  “I’m not thinking anything.”

  “So you don’t think I like you because you’re the queen?”

  I wanted to lie to her, but I couldn’t. She stood up abruptly. “Riley, wait—”

  Too late. She stepped into a shadow running along the adjacent building, and then she was gone.

  Chapter Eleven

  JO MUST have crept out one of the building’s windows because she reemerged by climbing down the fire escape above me. My sister scurried like a rat, a type of movement most Addi children had learned in their years scavenging for food, and then she dropped the few feet remaining to the alley pavement.

  “Where’s Riley?” she asked as she looked around.

  “Gone.”

  “What do you mean, gone?” Jo stared at me hard. “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” I snapped. Apparently the effects of Riley’s kiss had worn off. “I didn’t say a word.”

  “You probably didn’t have to.” Jo sunk down next to me. Both of us ignored the pounding that had begun on the other side of the door. “Let me guess. She likes you, and you think it’s because you’re a ‘queen’?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Give the girl some credit. She’s been hung up on you for twelve years.”

  Jo scrambled up again now that she’d regained her breath.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “You mean you still don’t recognize her?” Jo seemed so much taller than me from above. “She had to prompt me, but the girl wasn’t my best friend. Mom and Dad didn’t find her curled in my bed when she was supposed to be home….” Jo continued to talk, but I had stopped listening.

  Riley.

  Riri.

  The first girl I had ever loved, though I hadn’t known what love was then.

  “Oh my God.” I buried my head in my hands. “How could I have been such an idiot?”

  “So you do remember. I assumed when you got all weird around her that you still held a flame or something, or that you felt bad for what happened to Mr. Stuffie. Or did you forget that too?”

  Now that she mentioned it, I did remember. Mr. Stuffie had been Riley’s, given to her by her parents right before an Authority raid that ended with seventeen dead and forty wounded. Riley’s parents had been among the seventeen shot right in the street while children fled the Authorities’ grasping, white-gloved hands, but Riley had gotten away and fled to a relative’s alley. Lending Mr. Stuffie, her prized possession, to me had been the greatest act of trust we Addis were capable of, and I had never brought him back.

  “I need to find her,” I said. Jo helped me rise and then kept a shoulder under my arm to prop me up. “Do you know where to look?”

  “Madison. I heard she’s near the dome’s edge, within walking distance of the river, though the glass is too cloudy to see the sea anymore.”

  Madison Street was a long walk from the Resistance stronghold, but Jo seemed to know where we were going, and I was glad for the exercise. By the time we got to St. Louis Cathedral, reduced from its original triple steeples to only one, I could mostly walk on my own. The building had been the oldest Catholic cathedral in use back in the twenty-first century, but now that the Authority or Mo-D had taken the place of religion in the minds of the Outties and Addis, the only visitors were drug dealers peddling morphoid or drugged-out residents looking for shelter for the night. On this, a warmer day, most lay out on the yellowed grass of Jackson Square beneath the watchful eye of the bronze statue of Andrew Jackson on a horse.

  Madison, half a block over, was safer than the exposed Square spots. Riley had set up a curtain between two trash receptacles in an alley there in order to block the view of curious eyes, but when I pushed the curtain back, no one sat in the nest of blankets in the alley.

  Before I could even ask Jo where else to look, a siren sounded somewhere far above us.

  “Is that coming from the dome?” I asked Jo.

  She nodded grimly. “Authority warning. It means they’re coming in to look for children to fill up NORCC for the generous Outties willing to let a druggie into their home.”

  “That or looking for us,” I pointed out. “Those Authority guards recognized us somehow, and that means they may have been watching us in NORCC too.”

  Down the street, someone bolted toward us. A girl, I realized as I saw her black hair streaming behind her, and a quick one at that.

  “Is that Riley?” Jo asked, but by then, the girl had come into focus. Indeed it was Riley, and she was moving faster than I had ever seen a human, Outtie or Addi, move. Her black coat streamed behind her like a train, billowing in the wind her strong legs created.

  “Hide!” she yelled, and probably had been yelling before we saw her. “They’re coming for you!”

  “Me?” I asked, but Jo had already spun me around by the shoulder and hauled me backward. Riley caught up to us in what seemed like a few steps and helped Jo pull me back into the hidden street, then down even farther to the middle of the alley.

  “In here,” she whispered as a searchlight came on at the top of the dome. I had never seen those lights before, even when watching from the NORCC roof.

  Riley punched a brick in the wall, and the whole thing swung back to reveal a hovel not unlike my dad’s. The room had a bed with a dirty white sheet and no blankets, a wine crate set up like a table with a single dirty dish atop the slats, two white candles probably stolen from the church, and a dresser with two of the drawers missing. It smelled like Riley, though I had not been aware until that point that I had noticed the scent of burned wax and damp clothes that permeated her.

  Once Jo and I were safely inside, Riley punched the wall on our side, and the room fell into darkness. My sister and I had found the bed, and we huddled together until we felt a third tense body sit down next to us.

  “I heard them,” Riley whispered. “They called you out by name. The Authorities and—”

  A voice interrupted her, but it wasn’t one of ours. It came from somewhere outside the hovel, outside the French Quarter, above the entire Addi area that had once been the inner city of New Orleans. A loudspeaker, perhaps, or a recording.

  “Jayla?” The voice sounded pained. “Jayla… are you out there?”

  I would have recognized Arla’s voice anywhere. How many nights had she called out my name in just that voice, though from a different kind of desperation? And if they had Arla, that meant Tree and the others were in Authority custody too. But something sounded different about her, and as I zeroed in on her voice, I realized what it was: morphoid. They had given her morphoid.

  “If you’re out there… come save us… they are calling you… queen. My queen…. Jayla.”

  I couldn’t bear to listen to her, so I put my hands over my ears and began to hum. Jo and Riley must have caught on, because they joined in, flubbing the notes to an old song by Louis Armstrong called “Potato Head Blues” that had been popular with our parents during the jazz comeback of the early 2100s. First we had found the records and player, and then a few old instruments boxed up in the basement of one of the buildings, perhaps originally meant for a museum exhibit. Some of the women had learned to play them, but the sheet music had been jazz, so now songs like “Shout, Sister, Shout” or “I’ve Found a New Baby” were all we knew of the 1900s. Occasionally you could still hear a lonely saxophone sound slouching down the street, but most of the players had forgotten all about their music.

  Eventually, Arla’s voice stopped. I removed my hands from my ears, and Jo and Riley did the same.

  “Are you okay?” Jo asked me.

  I shivered. Squeezed on the bed with Jo and Riley, I should have been warm, but the sensory input from my body
had disappeared with Arla’s first call of my name. Now that the Authorities had her, they would torture her and the others until she told them everything she knew—about Jo, about my father, and of course, about me. My powers would no longer be a secret, and they would hunt us down, one by one, until they found me.

  “I should turn myself in,” I said finally.

  “No,” both girls said in unison.

  “But Arla and the others—”

  “Would want you to stay here, where you’re safe.”

  I didn’t feel very safe. I felt like a rabbit in a burrow, too afraid to even stick my ears above ground. The room felt small and cramped, though the boney shoulders of the two girls probably didn’t help as they dug into my arms.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I insisted.

  “Fine, but let us check that the coast is clear.” Riley helped Jo up, and together they left me alone in the hovel. Suddenly nervous now that they were out of my sight, I bit at my fingernails. My thoughts raced, jumping between Arla, the other girls, Riley, and Jo. How could I save them all when I couldn’t even save myself?

  A scream sent me scrambling out of the bed. A second later the screech of tires echoed the high-pitched yell I’d heard. I ran out of the hovel and down the alley to Madison, where I saw Riley fall to one knee and nock an arrow in a new bow. Apparently she wore it strapped to her back beneath her big black coat, which explained the size of it.

  Riley aimed at a white van barreling down the street at sixty miles an hour. The first arrow went wide, so she pulled a second arrow from a canister at her waist and aimed again. This one stuck in the back, left tire of the van, but as soon as the wheel turned, the rest of the arrow snapped off and crunched to the ground.

  “It’s not enough,” Riley said to herself as we watched the van swerve from left to right down the road and into the distance. “They’ll make it to their checkpoint.”

  “Fire again,” I called out, not realizing I was yelling.

  “No point. I can’t fire that far—no one can. And besides, they came for you; now they think they have you.”