Addis on the Inside

by Annabelle Jay

  The familiar panic came as soon as my feet touched sewer ground, but I forced myself to breathe. Jo’s life was at stake, and if I fainted, the Addis would fall apart. I was like a statue to them, and if I fell… but I wouldn’t. Deep breath in. Deep breath out. Picture their faces. Picture Jo.

  After the longest few minutes of my life, we reached the spot, the beginning of a long line of Outtie houses and workspaces. We strained against the manhole cover, but eventually I was given the task of removing it.

  “Stand back,” Riley ordered. “Not there. Back farther. Turn away and hold your breath.”

  Once no one but me was at risk of inhaling the falling powder, I pressed my hands against the cold metal and imagined its atoms morphing into Mo-D. The cover gave way immediately, showering me with a puff of white. I’d covered my nose with my black scarf, but some of the morphoid blew into my eyes, and for a second, I was blind.

  “Are you okay?” Riley whispered. Below me, she stomped the remaining morphoid into the sludge on the floor of the pipe.

  “Fine,” I lied. My eyes had begun to tingle, and dots of color spotted my vision. “Let’s go.”

  Without a word we filed out of the sewer and into the basement of the building. Plastic tubs of supplies filled the room from floor to ceiling as far as the eye could see, creating an eerie sense of infinity.

  At the elevator, teams took turns getting in. There were fifty floors, so Riley and I got in first and rode the elevator all the way up to the top floor. We would check fifty and forty-nine, then rendezvous with the group back on the first floor before we exploded our way out of there. Some kind of electrical soft rock played over the elevator speaker, adding a surreal quality to the already strange experience. Plus, I was pretty sure the morphoid on my eyeballs was making me high.

  No, I was definitely sure. As though my body was separate from my mind, I pressed myself into Riley and moved my lips to hers.

  At first she kissed me back. My kiss was sloppy and forceful, but hers was purposeful, and even through the haze I thought, She’s been wanting to do this for a long time. Then she pulled away from me and shoved me backward.

  “Are you high right now?”

  I looked down at my boots.

  “What the hell, Jayla?”

  It was a fair question. I’d assumed I couldn’t get high, but perhaps taking my father’s addiction had changed me. I certainly felt high in that elevator, felt like we were astronauts floating through space with our spacesuits off.

  “Great,” Riley muttered to herself as we arrived at the fiftieth floor. “Just great. You’re high as a fucking kite.”

  Even high I sensed something wrong the second I stepped off the elevator and through the first door. We were in what looked like the medical floor of NORCC, only the examining rooms were cells and those cells were filled with my friends. They seemed to be sleeping, but when I called out to them, they opened their eyes wide and made movements with their mouths.

  “Soundproof,” Riley explained.

  I went to the door of the glass cell closest to me and pressed my hand against the keypad. At first the metal resisted, but eventually it fell to the floor as powder just like the manhole cover. Arla and Tree, who were in the cell I opened, immediately started screaming.

  “It’s a trap!” Arla yelled as the door we’d come through locked shut. My bracelet, which never did anything but emit white light, blinked red. “You need to get out of here before—”

  That’s when I saw her. Arla’s voice became white noise when I turned around and locked eyes with a woman who looked exactly like me. Blonde, with white eyes and brown skin. She had come to the glass and pressed her hands against it, the way I would if I wanted to melt something, but nothing happened. Behind her, piles and piles of morphoid decorated the room.

  “Mom?” I asked.

  “Run,” she mouthed. But when I touched the door nothing happened, and there was nowhere left to go.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “HELLO, JAYLA.”

  The Authorities had dragged me into an empty cell diagonal from my mother, while Riley went in with Arla and Tree. Even through two layers of glass, my mother’s tears were visible as they stained her white shirt dark. The man speaking to me had entered a few minutes later, his black suit a stark contrast to the white walls and white coats of the Authority agents.

  “I don’t think we’ve been introduced.” I held back the urge to spit in his face.

  “She doesn’t know who you are, sir.” One of the agents snickered.

  “Typical Addi,” said another. “They wouldn’t know the most famous doctor in the world if he… well, if he walked right up to her and said hello.”

  The man in the black suit’s mouth tightened. He seemed displeased, though with his men or with me, I did not know. His hair was white, and up close, his face was older and faded. One of the repercussions of too many rejuvenation serums.

  “I am Dr. Hayes. Perhaps you’ve heard of me?”

  I gave him a blank stare, though the second he said his name, I recognized him. Dr. Hayes, the inventor of morphoid, the man who had so conveniently let his lab notes slip into the wrong hands. Dr. Hayes, now Senator Hayes, likely to be President Hayes if the dome projects that he claimed eased his conscience continued to gain support with the public.

  “Don’t play dumb with me, Jayla,” Dr. Hayes chastised. “You’re smarter than that. You recognize me, and you know why I’m here.”

  My voice shifted into fighter mode. “Because you’re threatened by me?”

  Dr. Hayes laughed, but the sound was hollow and ended in a cough.

  “Can one be threatened by a lab rat in a cage?”

  “When the rat bites as hard as I do.”

  I wrestled with the men holding me back, but they were too strong. Then I tried to turn them to morphoid with my mind, but with my bracelet blinking red, my powers seemed to have disappeared.

  “You, Jayla, are one of my creations, just like that little gadget on your wrist.” Dr. Hayes tapped his own wrist, empty of ornament. “Within range, you turn on when I say to turn on, and off just as quickly. Of course after your mother conveniently ‘lost you’ on her way back, I didn’t need you in range. She was here to make me all the morphoid I required. But now that she’s dying, I’ll need you to fill her steady little shoes.”

  My muscles slackened. I wanted to keep fighting the men, but I also wanted to hear what Dr. Hayes had to say.

  “It’s a gene. Just a few hundred DNA bases that make you what I like to call ‘Morphoid Production Compatible.’ MPC. As long as the gene is preserved in the next generation, and as long as that generation wears these special bracelets of mine, the hungry Addis will never run out of supplies. Well,” he added with a sinister smile, “not until we kill them all.”

  “But Jo—”

  “Not MPC, I’m afraid. Trust me, we’ve tried. It seems you’re the only girl Darlena bred to serve her purpose once she’s gone. Show her, Darlena.”

  My mother had her hands pressed on the glass, but she brought them to her sides and then turned like a robot following instructions. Unlike the blank cells of my friends, items littered Darlena’s floor like a toy shop with all the shelves overturned. One of these, a toy train, she picked up and brought to the glass.

  Poof.

  In the train’s place, powder rained on the cell floor.

  “Every day we go in and sweep it up,” Dr. Hayes said as he surveyed my mother’s work proudly. “Then ship it to the dogs in their domes.”

  “So, if the gene makes us”—I didn’t want to say MPC—“able to do that, then what’s the point of the bracelets?”

  “Focus,” Dr. Hayes said mildly. For the first time, I felt like he was hiding something, though for what purpose, I did not know.

  Dr. Hayes told me to rest before he and the guards left me alone in my cell. Apparently I would be required to start manufacturing morphoid the next day, doubling the supply of the drug available to Addi
s. Drug them before you put them down were his exact words. He also told me not to hope for an escape; the Resistance members had been captured and were being held in the basement until he decided whether he wanted to kill them or not.

  I reached out to Jo with my mind, pounding my unspoken words against the walls, but there was no response. Dr. Hayes must have blocked all of my powers, including telepathy, though he probably didn’t know Jo could have answered.

  The metal bed had a thin mattress even worse than anything I’d slept on thus far, and the chill from the steel made me shiver. The blanket was thin and scratchy, like patchy wool, but at least it warmed me up. Through the glass I watched my mother climb into her own bed, her pale eyes locked on mine. I wished that I could ask her a hundred questions—How were we chosen? Why did you follow his orders? Did you miss us?—but instead they ricocheted around my brain.

  I’m sorry, she mouthed suddenly, surprising me. I love you.

  Though I didn’t want them to, her words put me right to sleep.

  I WOKE to an alarm bell. The sound was like the changing pitch of a fire engine siren as it passed, only it emanated from a large red light in the center of the ceiling.

  “Hurry!” someone yelled outside of my line of vision.

  Jo appeared, followed by her cellmates Turf and Tiny. She dropped to her knees near my door and pressed her fingers against the lock that held the door shut. Her eyes closed and squeezed, as though my sister was trying to twist open a stubborn jar. Her arm muscles clenched and reclenched. A few grains of morphoid powder slipped through the crack in the door.

  “Come on!” she yelled as Turf and Tiny busted through the door and helped me up.

  “I thought you didn’t have powers?” I asked as I allowed myself to be dragged out of the room.

  “I don’t. Not really, anyway. I think being around you gave me some kind of boost, because if I focus really hard, I can feel a tiny current of power running through my body. It’s exhilarating!”

  Thank God Jo didn’t have those powers all the time, because as a barely recovered addict, she would have been smoking her own Mo-D in no time. Even now she stared at the dust that had been the door lock longingly, and it was my turn to drag her away.

  Outside the cell my bracelet turned white again. I could use my own powers to free Riley, Tree, and Disposal (I vowed to call her that, and not Arla, from now on) in the neighboring cell. When I opened the door, Tree was asleep and Disposal and Riley were in the middle of some deep conversation. Their heads were only inches apart, and they were still whispering when we entered.

  “You’re okay!” Disposal cried as she leaped up from the bed where she and Riley sat and bounded over to hug me.

  “Fine,” I squeezed out through her tight embrace.

  “I’m so sorry about everything,” she said in the most un-Arla-like voice I had ever heard. The Disposal I knew did not speak in this soft, emotional voice, and she definitely did not apologize.

  “Don’t.” I slipped from between her tree-trunk arms. “It’s fine.”

  “Where are the others?” Riley asked.

  “They’re being held downstairs, apparently, until Dr. Hayes decides what to do with them.”

  “Who?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  We still had to free my mother, but when I went to her cell and opened the door, something wasn’t right. Under the thin blanket, her shoulder did not turn to the sound of my voice. When I walked over and touched the mountainous terrain of her body, the skin was too hard, too dense.

  “No.” I shook her again and again. “No, no, no.”

  “What’s wrong?” Jo asked. Then she looked down at the body and touched my mother’s cheek.

  I did the same.

  Cold.

  No. I had finally found her after all these years. I finally understood why she had abandoned me at NORCC, and why she never came back. We were the same, she and I, and finally I had someone to talk to who would truly understand my powers and the trouble they caused.

  “She was sick,” Jo started, already assuring me. I wanted to rip her words from the air and stuff them back in her mouth. “Remember, she’s been in here for years, both before we were born and after, just turning things into morphoid over and over again. That’s why Dr. Hayes was looking for you. You’re the heir. I just don’t think he was counting on needing you so soon.”

  I couldn’t leave her. Jo pulled at my arm, but she could not move me. If we leave her, then my feet are planted on my mother’s grave, I thought. Not this terrible, terrible place. I will not allow it.

  Suddenly, the wall behind my mother’s bed blinked on like a TV. Across the white expanse appeared Dr. Hayes, and he looked very, very angry. His white hair stuck up in several places, as though he had just been sleeping, and though he still wore a tie, it hung crooked.

  “Jayla,” he said in a warning tone. “Don’t you dare step—” His voice stopped abruptly when he saw what we hovered over. “Is that…. Did Darlena…. What happened?”

  “You killed her,” I spat out, the fury in me rising finally out of the sadness. “You did this, and I will do the same to you.”

  “Quite unfortunate,” Dr. Hayes said, and though he used a false sympathetic voice, his face had become a mask hiding something underneath. Perhaps he had loved my mother, in his own disturbing way. “But at least we have you now.”

  “Send one man in here and I will blow him to dust.”

  “I’m not going to bother turning your powers off to capture you,” Dr. Hayes said. “You’re going to walk yourself back to your cell and close the door like a good little girl.”

  “And why would I do that?”

  “Because you think your life isn’t worth all of theirs.”

  In place of Dr. Hayes was a screenshot of the New Orleans dome.

  “I have the chemicals ready. Just take a step out that door and I’ll gas them all without a second thought. ‘Oh, oops, I’m so sorry, senators, but the domes just happened to malfunction last night, killing thousands of Addis. Oh, you don’t care? Perfect.’”

  “You wouldn’t,” I said, though I didn’t believe it.

  “Of course I would. Want me to show you? I happen to have a few test subjects here on the premises.”

  The screen flashed to a cell holding my father, Omar, and the other Resistance fighters. They sat dejectedly on the floor of an empty room, heads in their hands.

  I had no way out of the deal. Dr. Hayes was right. He might have found my life more valuable than every Addi combined, but he knew I didn’t. I could never leave them behind to die.

  Don’t do it, Jayla, Jo warned in my head. He’ll make you do terrible things, and he’ll never let you go.

  “It’s your choice, Jayla. But you need to make it in five, four, three, two—”

  “All right, I’ll stay. But you let my friends and the others go, and they take my mother’s body with them.”

  Dr. Hayes’s eyebrows came together in a scowl. Two could play this game, and if I was about to spend my whole life in this terrible prison, I would do it on my terms.

  “Or should I turn this whole building into a pile of morphoid?” I asked as I reached my hand over to touch the wall. “I bet I could. Imagine, all that work lost forever. ‘Oops, so sorry, senators, but I turned Dr. Hayes’s entire lab into powder and freed all the Addis last night—’”

  “Fine, you get your demands. You may watch them go free from that cell, but then you must return to yours, close the door behind you, and allow me to turn your powers off again. In the meantime, I’ll send a guard to fix the lock. Do we have a deal?”

  “Deal.”

  The screen returned to the room where the Addis were held. The door nearest them opened, and someone in a white suit gave them instructions that they dutifully followed. Stand up. Walk out this door. Leave the premises.

  “Go,” I told Jo and the others who still stood at the door of the cell. “Leave now, before he changes his mind.”


  “But we can’t leave you,” Disposal said. Her muscles tensed, as though preparing for a brawl. “We can’t—”

  “You’ll carry my mother,” I told her. “You and Tree. Take her back and bury her in the forest outside the dome. Remember the grave’s location but don’t mark it. I don’t want Dr. Hayes digging her up for experimentation or something.”

  “Jayla, I can’t.” Disposal stepped close and put her hands on my face. From around her forearm, I saw Riley tense at the touch. “Please don’t do this. We’ve been together for years. Riley and I talked about it, and she said that she thought you still liked me. I know things got rough for a second, but we can still… if you come with us….”

  I hated the way she spoke, all of the fight and anger drained out of her and only this pleading, begging thing in her place. This was not the Disposal I knew, and I didn’t want her to love me out of pity or fear. Only now that I was about to leave did she want me to stay, and it was far too late.

  “No.” I shook off her hands. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about this, and it’s over, Disposal. Take my mother’s body, bury it, and then tell the person you love how you really feel. You’ve been hiding it for long enough.”

  “But—”

  “Go!” I yelled. “If you ever cared about me, then you will do what I say.”

  Disposal and Tree dutifully picked up the body and carefully carried it out the door. The sheet, still wrapped around my mother, made her look like a mummy. She deserves a queen’s funeral, I thought as they moved down the hall in procession, Tiny and Turf following with their heads down, after staying here all these years and doing her job so that Dr. Hayes would not come find me. But she’ll get an Addi one instead.