The fury I’d felt in the Resistance hideout returned full force, like a flood wave against the glass enclosure of the dome. The Authorities had taken the things most precious to me, and I wanted them back.
“Did they get her?” someone called from down the street. The rebels must have come looking for us, because suddenly they were all around us like ants around a single crumb.
“No,” Riley answered, “but they got Jo.”
The group exchanged more words—something about being sorry for storming me earlier—but I tuned them out. I didn’t care about their apologies; all I cared about was getting out of that place and saving my sister and my friends. I was especially worried about Jo, who would probably pretend to be me as long as she could.
“We can sneak out tonight,” my father said. Now that he was completely sober, he seemed to have taken on a leadership role. “The machines that count us at sundown will realize we’re gone, but most of us will escape before they’re alerted by the….”
He trailed off as he and the others noticed me walking to the dome edge nearby. At the glass, I rubbed my sleeve against the surface to make a peephole, through which I could see the water of the Mississippi River. Before I had seen pictures in the NORCC library of what water used to look like, the river’s water had seemed blue, but now, in comparison, it was a muddy brown.
“Don’t do it,” Riley whispered. She, the only one brave enough to get close to me, had followed me to the edge. The others hung back in groups, probably fearful that in my anger I would turn them to dust. In all honesty I might have.
“Do what?”
“Destroy the dome. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”
I didn’t need to answer.
“If you take the dome down now, the Authorities will know we’re leaving and shoot us down before we get ten feet from here. Wait a few hours until it gets dark and then bring the dome down, so that by the time they realize it’s gone, we’ll be far away.”
She was right, of course, but her words didn’t make curbing my anger any easier. It paced within me like a lion moving back and forth in its cage, and I wanted to roar my way out of this place. Instead, I removed my hand from the glass.
“Fine. But don’t let any of them”—I nodded toward the group of people—“talk to me, or I might change my mind.”
“Understood.”
In under a minute, the people dispersed. Riley shooed them away like stray cats, missing only the rolled-up newspaper and yowls of hungry felines not unlike the protests of the rebels. “Come back tonight,” she repeated over and over again, “8:00 p.m.”
The minute the last protester turned the corner, a fatigue hit me so strongly that I gripped the nearby metal railing for support.
“Are you okay?” Riley asked as her hand hovered near my arm.
“Just tired.”
“No wonder. It’s late at night, and you’re probably exhausted.”
“It’s night?”
“It’s hard to tell time under the dome—the pollution is much worse than when you lived here—but we Addis learn other ways of keeping track. The sirens, for example; the strength of The Urge, which dissipates in the morning and comes back stronger at night. One or two clocks, the ones that did not rely on batteries or electricity, still work throughout the city. Their owners take good care of them, even when they don’t take care of themselves. Anyway, you need some rest before we storm out of here.”
The idea of rest when the Authorities had my sister and all of my friends seemed so preposterous that I laughed. The noise was hollow and dry, probably a result of all the smoke I’d been inhaling, and it didn’t sound like me at all.
“If you truly want to save them, you need to rest,” Riley insisted. “If you collapse the minute we leave the dome, you won’t do anyone any good.”
She had a point. My muscles felt as if I’d been swimming against the tide of the Mississippi River all day, and most likely my strength would give up sooner than my will.
Reluctantly, I allowed Riley to take my hand like a child and lead me back to her house. The minute I gave in to the idea of sleep, my fingers felt thick and heavy, and I could barely unbutton my shirt.
“Let me,” she said as she undid the six buttons carefully. Underneath my flannel shirt, my tank top was drenched in sweat, so she took that off too. Though showers didn’t work in the dome, citizens collected water in large tubs from the Authorities, and this Riley used to sponge me off. Layers of morphoid that had caked onto my cheek and neck came off with every wipe, but Riley didn’t seem bothered by the temptation.
“How can you…?” I motioned to the morphoid dust.
“Resist temptation?” Riley smiled. “I was one of the first to ever go off morphoid; that’s how I got trusted with guard duty outside the dome. You were the one to make me stop, though you probably don’t remember it. ‘I could never love an Addi,’ you told me. I quit that day.”
“Boy, I had quite the strong personality for a five-year-old,” I said as I slid out of my jeans, and Riley folded them and added them to my pile. Even though I was used to changing in front of other girls, I felt self-conscious being in just my underwear and a bra in front of Riley.
“Tell me about it. If you weren’t bossing someone around, you were sleeping. Of course, once we found out you were special, it all made sense.”
I closed my eyes and enjoyed the feeling of her hands as they washed me. No one had ever been so purposeful in their touch—even my own mother, who was always distracted, or Arla, who didn’t “do the emotion thing.” Of course, now I knew why she always seemed so emotionally unavailable. After a while the self-conscious feeling faded and was replaced by excitement, and I wondered if Riley felt the same way.
After I dried off, Riley loaned me a shirt and then closed her eyes while I changed. The clean fabric felt good against my newly washed skin, and I had the sudden urge to burn my old clothes. They were from NORCC, after all, and even if I had to turn myself into morphoid powder, I would never return to that place.
“Lie down,” Riley told me. She had opened her eyes, though whether while I was changing or after, I did not know.
Once I got into bed, she pulled the sheets up to my neck and tucked them in on both sides. I felt like a guard who had been taken off duty, safe in a cocoon of blankets and knowing someone else would keep watch.
“Aren’t you going to sleep too?” I asked when she didn’t slide in next to me.
“I need to watch the time.” Her eyes kept darting to the slices of light coming in from the door.
“But how will I sleep, knowing that you’re not sleeping at my expense?”
“Trust me,” she said as she put her hand on my forehead and then stroked my hair. “You will.”
In a minute I was fast asleep.
I DREAMED of Jo. Only parts of her showed, like a few puzzle pieces scattered on a game table, but I saw the white eyes, the frowning mouth, the terrier hair. Her voice echoed in my head, as though whatever room she sat in had high ceilings that bounced noise. “No,” she kept repeating. “No, no, no.” Whomever she spoke to must have said something, because Jo’s hand raised as ordered and aimed at something, or someone, in the room. Powder flew everywhere.
Part Three—Smoke
Chapter Twelve
WE MET at the water, our bodies covered and camouflaged like soldiers going into battle. I picked out my father, taller than the others now that he’d lost his Addi slouch, and Omar next to him. Everyone had weapons, from antique guns to the makings for a bomb.
A system of conveying messages through Riley had been established, so whenever I needed to give an order, I would whisper it to her and she would run around the group repeating it: Stand there. Cover your mouths. Don’t open your eyes. Give me a gun. My powers only made more powder, so if I had to kill a guard, I wanted to shoot him head-on. Someone handed me an FNS, a gun that looked old enough to have survived World War III.
“Don’t they search
for guns in here?” I asked Riley as I tested out the weapon.
“Why would they? They don’t care if we kill ourselves. In fact, they hope we do.”
Riley had loaned me some clothes, and I looked even more like a rogue than before. I wore the same combat boots, but black leggings with holes at the knees had replaced my jeans, and a long-sleeved black sweatshirt matched it. My hands were covered by black fingerless gloves, and I disguised my blonde hair with a black hat. I liked the way her clothes smelled—like the lemon soap she used in her sponge baths.
“Ready?” she asked me.
In response I walked over to the glass and put my hand on it like I had before. Taking a short cut through the dome had seemed like a great idea until I was standing in front of a bunch of staring Addis, but I tried to ignore them and focus on the task at hand. Now that I’d slept and had enough energy, I could concentrate on what it actually felt like to make the change. Only my left hand seemed able to do it, and every time, the bracelet glowed. The glass was cold, but my fingers stayed warm as the material against my palm dissolved into morphoid dust.
I couldn’t feel the change, exactly, but I felt something in the glass give. Like pressing a button, the very atoms that made up the glass pushed inward at my touch and then blew out the opposite side as morphoid. But earlier, I had dissolved things I wasn’t touching; maybe all I needed to do was concentrate?
I closed my eyes and pictured the side of the dome closest to the water. Like blowing out birthday candles, I imagined the whole side being carried to the water by the wind.
When I opened my eyes, the glass in front of me was gone.
“Good girl,” my dad muttered from somewhere in the back, as though I were a show dog instead of a person. I fought the urge to roll my eyes, or worse.
Even though the side was gone, the Addis followed me from the dome single file. No one spoke, not even to whisper directions; we knew where we were headed. Without the glass, the river smelled like rotting corpses, an Addi rumor said that once the Outties actually had dumped bodies there after the 2090 Massacre. More likely they burned them up into ashes, though the rumor was more dramatic.
We moved down the river along an old brick path with half of the pieces missing and then to the trees where Jo and I had walked. My hands and fingers tensed, ready to destroy any Outties who appeared, but the forest was eerily quiet. Riley followed me, her silent presence like a ghost’s, and then the other Addis snaked behind.
Something snapped a branch on my left. A movement, something white, appeared between two trees, and before I could stop myself, I had turned an innocent white rabbit into a morphoid pile on the ground.
Someone in the group groaned and then fell to her raggedy knees, scooping at the morphoid and sticking it into her pocket. Occasionally she brought a finger up to her nose and sniffed a bit into her nostrils, though whether she was actually snorting it or just inhaling its smell, I’ll never know.
“Leave her,” Riley ordered so I didn’t have to say it.
“No!” the woman shouted, much too loud for our supposedly hushed mission. Back out of her pocket the morphoid went. “I didn’t take any, I promise. I’m strong. I can do this.”
But we were already shuffling away, the sound of her begging becoming just another call of the forest.
My hands went to my pockets, where they were contained like fluttering birds in their cages, and I kept my gaze on the ground. If an Outtie appeared, it would be up to Riley or one of the other archers to shoot them, because I could not take the same chance again. What if all thirty—now twenty-nine—Resistance fighters fell the next time? What if I did?
Our footprints became bulldozers that leveled the grass and broke the sticks in our way, so one Addi at the back was put in charge of covering our tracks. “Fluff the grass,” Riley instructed when we took a water break, “and throw new sticks behind you to cover our trail.” Branches again whipped at our faces and pulled at our clothes, leaving behind small strands of thread that were looked for by a second Addi and collected in his pocket.
It’s useless, I wanted to say. If they try to find us, they will.
But I kept my mouth closed. If covering our tracks and clearing the forest of thread was what it took to keep the Addis busy and confident, then let them do it.
Eventually we reached the road. The houses were just where I’d left them, as undisturbed by human life as they were before. Soon we passed the house where Arla and the others had been captured, and though I wanted to go in and collect their things, I knew I couldn’t carry them. Later, if we got out, we would return.
Arla. I’d been avoiding thinking about her since I’d heard her voice on the speakers, and again, I tried to shove thoughts of her into the back of my mind. Her weakness had gotten Jo caught, and that meant that any feelings I had for her were over. Done. Gone. Or so I told myself, between thoughts of our afternoons in the library or nights when we skipped dinner to be together in the dorm. After so many years together, Arla basically was my past, and any thoughts of NORCC led right to her.
“You okay?” Riley had come up behind me when I’d stopped to stare at the house.
“Fine.”
“It’s the girl, isn’t it?”
I didn’t say anything.
“I had a girlfriend like her once,” Riley volunteered. We’d begun walking again, and I missed a step and almost tripped when she said that.
“You did?” I tried to keep my voice even, not too interested.
“Sure. We’ve all had them.” Riley kicked at a pebble in the street.
“Is she…?” I looked around.
“Here? God no. She’s probably sitting in her corner getting high as we speak. That’s why we broke up….” Riley trailed off, as though even thinking of the girl sent her into a vortex of memories. Sounded familiar. “I just couldn’t get her Itch to stop scratching.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It was fun while it lasted, and now it’s over. It’s not like she was ‘the one’ or anything.”
“The one?” I couldn’t believe such a dreamy, optimistic phrase had slipped out of Riley’s mouth, and I tried to keep the disdain out of my voice but failed.
“I mean, I don’t think there’s one perfect person for everyone. That’s just dumb. But I think there’s a best person for everyone, and that once you find them, everyone else just seems replaceable.”
Everyone is already replaceable, I almost said. Then I thought of Jo.
“Sounds like a fairy tale to me,” I said instead, though I couldn’t quite get the right level of condescension into my voice this time.
“I’m sure it does. But when it happens to you, you’ll understand.”
We turned left, toward the big white building in the distance that hovered over the Outtie city like a church steeple. There, the Authorities had Jo and Arla, as well as my other friends and any other Addi who’d caught their attention. There, the Authorities made laws that became truths once the right congressmen had been bribed and senators had been scared. One building had never represented so much power—and so much hate—in all of mankind’s existence. Or so the library books told me, in their hidden, coded way. Writing anything negative about the Authorities had been illegal since the late 2080s.
All I wanted to do was make it disappear, a pile of white dust blown away in the wind.
CLOSER TO Authority headquarters, we stopped to make a plan. The Resistance leaders had apparently tried to do this before we left the dome, but in typical Addi style, everyone had talked and no one had listened. Or maybe, I thought, no one had actually thought we’d make it this far.
“I say Jayla blows a hole right through the wall,” said one woman once we got inside a house and settled on the living room furniture and floor. This house was decorated in a more modern style than the last, with metal tables, rectangular couches, and lights made of large white bulbs that no longer worked.
“Better to sneak in the back,” said a man perch
ed on a couch armrest. “Give us the element of surprise.”
“Oh yeah, because the Authorities totally have an unlocked window we can just climb through,” said someone else.
“Then what do you propose, smarty-pants?” returned the man.
The room broke into chaos. Everyone was speaking, and if any Authorities had been within a block of the house, they would have heard us.
“Quiet,” Omar ordered.
Everyone went silent at once.
“Let’s listen to Jayla’s plan.”
Twenty-nine pairs of eyes turned to stare at me. I hated the look in their eyes—desperate hopefulness—as though I were some superhero. They expected me to lead them, my little helpless sheep, but I knew less about the Authority building than they did and even less about how to break into it.
“She wants to go from the sewers,” Riley said, shifting their focus to her. “From below. Jayla will make a hole once we’re directly under the building, and when it’s time to leave, she’ll make another hole to get out. In the meantime, we’ll split up, one team per floor, to find her friends. At the end….” She motioned an explosion with her hands. “Boom.”
“Perfect,” everyone murmured. “So smart.”
We packed up the few belongings we had, and in minutes, we were back on the road. The endless march of feet seemed like refugees moving from city to city, the pounding of soles a repeated message that they would never find home.
When we reached a sewer near the Authority building, we lifted the manhole cover and then slid, one by one, down the rusted metal ladder. Beneath the city, the air smelled like animal waste and algae growing in still water. Most of these sewers no longer worked—the Authority and the Outtie houses that lay beyond were the only ones with running water—which meant they’d lost the scent of human excrement. Even better, the address of each manhole was marked in raised metal along the rim.
I led the way, one of the flickering battery-operated flashlights gripped in my palm, and the others trailed after me. Right behind me was Riley, who seemed to have taken the role of second-in-command-slash-translator for the unapproachable Jayla, and right behind her was my father. Omar took up the rear, helping urge on those in the middle who, without a leader to tether them, would drift away.
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