Jo hugged me tight, and her tears dampened my shoulder. Neither of us knew what to say, so we said nothing, and eventually she followed the others down the hallway. We were sisters; we didn’t need words.
Finally it was just Riley and me.
“I’m sorry about the elevator,” I said, just in case I never got the chance again.
“Would you have kissed me even if you weren’t high?”
I was about to be locked up for the rest of my life; there was no point in lying now.
“Probably not.”
She shook her head, as though she had known the answer all along.
“But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have wanted to. Now it’s your turn to answer a question: Do you have feelings for me?”
I thought she would shy away from the question, but I should have known better. Riley was not a girl who shied away from anything.
“Of course I do. I’ve loved you since you were a kid performing tricks on a street corner, frowning every time you turned an object. Your parents and their friends loved it, but you knew better. That’s what I remember most about you: in a dome full of followers, you were the only one who thought for yourself.”
“But we were just kids then. We didn’t know what love meant. What about now?”
She frowned. “What do you want me to say, Jayla?”
“I want you to tell me you do have feelings for me—the real me—so that I can say it back to you.”
“What?”
“In case this is my last chance. I’ve been hung up on Disposal this whole time, like an idiot, but you’re really the girl I want—I just couldn’t figure that out until she tried to get back together with me. I hope you’ll forgive me, especially because—”
This time it was Riley who kissed me, and it wasn’t sloppy or messy or drug-induced. It was perfect, all soft lips and firm pressure and fingers through my hair. I never wanted the kiss to end, but eventually, I had to pull away.
“Now go,” I told her. Saying it out loud was harder than it was for all the others combined. “Leave and take the others home.”
Riley leaned in again, but this time she whispered in my ear instead of kissing me. Her hot breath tickled my neck. “Get the bracelet off when they’re not watching. I think it’s holding you back from something even more powerful. I just don’t know what.”
Then her hand pressed against my hip and moved to my pocket. From Dr. Hayes’s camera it would look like she was feeling me up, but I felt something heavy slip in, something she must have kept in her sleeve since the cell.
After she left and I watched every single Addi fighter file out of the building, I took a few steps back toward my cell and shut the door behind me. It closed with an ominous click.
Chapter Fourteen
EVERY DAY was the same. When I woke in the morning, my room was covered in objects, and when I went to sleep at night a blanket of dust surrounded my bed like newly fallen snow. Perhaps the sweeper would have woken me up as he swept the morphoid from beneath my bed, but the process of changing so many objects exhausted me. I don’t just mean I was tired; I mean every cell in my body cried out for a reprieve as the Mo-D process sapped them dry of energy.
And no matter how many times I picked an object up between my cold hands, turning it never got easier.
I did, however, learn more about the turning process. I learned that if I concentrated really hard, I could sense all the atoms that made up an object, from the stable protons and neutrons to the zooming electrons. By focusing even more, like turning the lens of a camera, I could see them.
Sometimes I could even watch my morphoid change take over. I could see the rearrangement of the atoms, a shuffling like billions of cards on a game table. This brought me no pleasure—how could it, when I knew what the change brought?—but at least it was interesting. Outside of the atoms shifting, there wasn’t much to do.
Dr. Hayes allowed me nothing in the rooms except a toothbrush, water bottle, and TV remote that controlled the wall screen. The TV was doctored to only show me one channel of children’s shows from the 1990s and 2000s, with strange costumed creatures and basic animation. Simple Specials, the channel was called.
The cell did have a bathroom, hidden behind a moveable wall, in which I did my business in private or cried there so no one would see me. At least I hoped it was in private. The bathroom was stocked with feminine products and nothing else, but a week later, I was grateful for the plethora of options.
The week after that, Dr. Hayes came with a nurse to evaluate me. He had mentioned when I first arrived that I would be fully checked on a monthly basis—he was too busy with Senate business and campaigning for president to come to the building more than that—and true to his word, he fully checked me.
He looked tired but triumphant. His smile was bigger than before, even though there were dark circles under his eyes. Tough work, being the evil genius of our day.
“Strip down to your underwear,” he ordered.
I must have looked alarmed, though nothing should have shocked me at that point.
“No.”
Dr. Hayes sighed. “I know you’ve never been to a real doctor, but this is standard procedure. I need to check everything to make sure you’re healthy.”
“Thanks for the concern.” My words were sweet, but my tone was biting. I wished I could kill him with my words. If only he would come in here without turning my powers off, I hoped, but he never did.
I stripped down to my purple underwear and bra, the same undergarments I’d walked in with weeks before. They had given me new ones, white grannie panties, but I liked the old ones best and washed them in the bathroom sink every night instead. I felt like me in them, even under the plain white nurse’s outfits they made me wear.
“Bend down and touch your toes.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Are you serious?”
“For God’s sake, Jayla, I just need to check your spine.”
Dr. Hayes actually looked hurt, like I’d questioned his character. I didn’t need to question it; I already knew he was the biggest asshole in the entire world. Still, I did as I was told, and his leathery old-man hands started at my neck and worked their way carefully down the line of my back.
“No sign of scoliosis,” he told the nurse, who typed the notes one-handed into a handheld computer. I had never seen an electronic device like that up close before.
“Now sit on the cot,” he ordered, “and open your mouth wide.”
He checked my mouth, ears, nose, and eyes. “Follow the light,” he ordered as my eyes chased the pinprick of yellow around my field of vision. Then he looked my bracelet over, checking for scratches or flaws.
“Check her blood pressure,” he ordered the nurse. “Then take five vials of blood. Four for bloodwork and one for the lab.”
“Yes, doctor.”
At the door, he paused. “It will get easier. When I see you in a month, this will almost seem… normal.”
I had to bite my tongue not to curse at him, and blood filled my mouth.
After he left, the nurse got to work wrapping the blood pressure cuff around my arm and pumping it tight. Then she silently prepared the needle for the bloodwork, and I looked away. Don’t show you’re afraid, I told myself. Stop clenching your hands like that. Stop averting your eyes.
“Your mother hated this part too.” These were the first words the nurse had spoken to me the whole time. I looked at her and took her in—a large woman with breasts the size of watermelons and a belly to match. Her hair was a reddish blonde that she tamed with an outdated headband. She seemed to be in her late sixties, though it was hard to tell. I liked the look of her, healthy and strong, unlike most of the people I’d interacted with over the last month. Come to think of it, the headmistress at NORCC had looked the same way. Was this what all Outties looked like?
“Really?”
“Really.” The nurse skillfully stuck the needle into my arm before I could even flinch. “The first time I st
uck her, she cried. Not because it hurt, but because it scared her so much.”
“Did you know her well, my mother?”
“Of course. I’ve been checking your mother since she was a very little girl.”
This news startled me. Obviously my mother had been here before she met my father if she was meant to breed Dr. Hayes the wonder children he wished for, but the fact that she’d lived here her whole life was astounding.
“Did she… like it here?”
The nurse made a psh sound. “Like it? How could she? The only reason she came back was so Dr. Hayes wouldn’t hunt you down and put you in here with her.”
“Wow. I can’t imagine coming back here for anything.”
“Being a parent changes you. It makes you… act in ways you normally wouldn’t.”
For some reason, I got the feeling we were talking about something else now. I just couldn’t put my finger on what.
The rest of the vials passed in silence. The nurse collected them and labeled them in some kind of code, then placed them carefully into a tray with holes the size of the tubes.
“She didn’t deserve to die,” the nurse whispered suddenly. She had been on her way out the door, but she’d stopped and said this without turning around. “I admire Dr. Hayes and the work he’s done, but Darlena… she was special. I used to think maybe she was a god, sent down to us to purge us of the bad people like the floods did… but now I wonder who will really be standing on the deck when the waters come. Abraham was never meant to kill Isaac.”
Slowly, without a goodbye, she closed the door behind her.
I THOUGHT a lot about the nurse’s words over the next few days as I began to scratch at the bracelet with the metal nail file Riley had given me, which I’d hidden inside a bar of soap. I knew the first reference from my library reading—Noah, from the bible that nobody but historical scholars read anymore—but the part about Abraham and Isaac was still a blank space in my mind. I knew I’d read about them long ago, but their story had not stuck like the flood had.
It wasn’t until a show called Lamb Chop came on the TV that I remembered the tale. Not the tale of Lamb Chop, of course—that disturbing show featured a sock puppet and a ventriloquist, the stuff of children’s dreams and adults’ nightmares—but the tale of the father who took his son up into the mountain in order to sacrifice him at God’s request. The whole thing was meant to be a test, and Abraham passed without actually killing his son.
Abraham was never meant to kill Isaac. Being a parent changes you. It makes you… act in ways you normally wouldn’t.
“Oh no.” I said this out loud, since I’d taken to talking to myself after days without human contact beyond trays of food beneath the door. Then I clasped my hands over my mouth, both to stop myself from saying the words out loud and to keep down the vomit that rose in my throat at the thought.
Dr. Hayes is my grandfather.
Chapter Fifteen
AT NIGHT I scratched at the bracelet with my nail file until my fingers bled. The string of silver was composed of thick links; all I needed was for one to break. The sound of metal on metal drove me mad, like a knife against a bottle or a squeaky wheel. Scratch, scratch, scratch.
During the day I made enough morphoid to feed a whole dome’s appetite.
The nurses pumped me with nutrients so that I wouldn’t collapse, but it happened anyway. I learned the signs: yawning, nausea, blurred vision, ringing in my ears.
All I wanted was for the redheaded nurse to come back. She had answers, and maybe, just maybe, she would give them to me.
Finally, a week later, she returned. In one hand was a bag for my nightly IV drip—an unpleasant solution that made my arms look like Jo’s—and in the other, a tray carrying my dinner: steak, broccoli, rice.
“Here you go, dear,” she said as she balanced the tray on my lap.
The needle sticking had become normal, so I held out my right hand for the drip while my left dug into the steaming rice with a plastic fork. No matter how many delicious meals they brought me, I could always eat more.
“Is this how all Outties eat?” I asked her, waving at the rice with my utensil.
“I guess.” She tilted her head. “We eat whatever we want.”
“Wow.” Another large mouthful of rice. “Lucky bastards.”
“Watch your language,” the nurse chastised, but then she cracked a smile. “We are, I guess. We just don’t realize it.”
I wanted a few seconds so the transition wouldn’t seem to abrupt, then asked, “Did my mother have any siblings?”
“Why do you ask?” She kept her eyes on my other arm, where she drew a bit more blood. Apparently my biology was fascinating to the scientists downstairs.
“I just want to know if I have more family. Once you meet one or two, you want to meet them all.”
I lied through my teeth, but the nurse didn’t seem to notice. She was staring at the white wall as though it held a fascinating painting.
“She had a sister. Gretchen.”
“And was Gretchen… an Addi?”
The nurse actually laughed. “Oh no. Gretchen was her half sister, and she was beautiful and healthy. The epitome of an Outtie. I never met her, but I’ve seen TV specials about her.”
“What happened?”
The nurse became suddenly busy with her tools again.
“Is it something very bad?”
“The worst.” She whispered this. “Gretchen was killed by an Addi who wandered into their neighborhood looking for a fix. Guess he thought the little girl in her parents’ yard was lying to him; or maybe he thought she was something entirely different, like a demon. Those Addis…. Oh, sorry.”
“No, you’re right. An Addi looking for a fix is a dangerous thing. So this”—I motioned around the room—“is about revenge?”
“Honey, everything is about revenge. Have you read The Iliad?”
“It was in the NORCC library. So yes.”
“Then think of this as a rewrite. Two sides, multiple layers of revenge, kings… and even the gods are involved.”
She looked pointedly at me.
“Oh, I’m not a god.”
“Girl, we don’t know what you are.”
She had a point. Not that I was a god, but that we didn’t know what I was. After she left me with my IV drip and a book—either Dr. Hayes had changed his policy on entertainment or she had smuggled Gulliver’s Travels in for me—I thought a lot about her words. Sure, my mother and I were tools for revenge, but that was not our original purpose. So what was?
I spent a sleepless night trying to answer that question while scratching away at my bracelet. In the morning, neither had been fixed, and I was so tired I almost fainted when I stood up.
All day I waited for the redheaded nurse to come back. I had even more questions for her: Did Darlena really love my father? Why isn’t Jo MPC? Why am I? Did my mother have any other family? A mother? What’s going on in the dome? Is Dr. Hayes going to get his bill passed in the Senate? Will he win the election?
But I never got the chance to ask those questions.
The redheaded nurse never came back.
Chapter Sixteen
SCRATCH. SCRATCH. Scratch.
Five days until Dr. Hayes comes back.
Chapter Seventeen
SCRATCH. SCRATCH. Scratch.
Four days.
Scratch-scratch-scratch.
Chapter Eighteen
THREE DAYS.
Scratch-scra—
Break.
Part Four—Chase
Chapter Nineteen
THE BRACELET fell to the cell floor with a loud clink. On the linoleum it looked like a snake lying in a dead fishhook, a lifeless S. My wrist had bruises from where the metal had pressed into skin for years, little tire treads that I had never noticed before. Carefully, I rubbed at the pale skin.
Then I felt it.
It was like my old powers had been the steady hiss of a carbonated soda and my new powers
the explosion that came when you twisted too hard. Everything around me exploded in a collage of atoms and, inside of them, the centrifuge of electrons like kids on a spinning carnival ride. Even the neutrons and protons danced around me, a vibrating pulse of life that I felt like a vein at my fingertips.
Holy shit.
My hand found the doorknob. The prison prevented my old powers, but these new powers were a different animal entirely. In my palm, the knob melted into putty and dropped to the floor in globs. The door swung open, and the remains of the knob stuck to the wall behind it, as though ushering me through. Apparently I’d melted the alarm apparatus, because nothing happened except a silent anticipation.
At the next door, the same thing happened. No alarm. No effort to melt the metal knob. It was almost too easy.
I stared at the elevator button. If I pressed it, would it melt like the knob? Using my shirtsleeve, I tapped the button quickly and waited for the atoms to move.
They didn’t, but the elevator did.
I rode the elevator down fifty floors and stepped out to an empty lobby. The equipment for Authority use—turnstiles, metal detectors, welcome desks—made the building seem more like a national monument than an evil headquarters. But that’s what it was, wasn’t it? Everyone who worked here knew about the girl on the fiftieth floor, the work that Dr. Hayes was doing here, and nobody cared.
This time when my anger flared, it did not stay contained.
My hands flew out like wings, and from them my powers grabbed for anything in range I could destroy. The turnstiles melted, the metal detectors fused together, the welcome desk became a pile of charred wood and fake stone.
I would have brought the whole building down on my way out if Riley hadn’t stopped me.
“Stop, Jayla.” The voice came from somewhere behind me, and when I whipped around, she ran toward me. At first she was just an outline, a black figure dressed to fit into the dark, but as she approached, I knew her tomboy lines and piercing gaze sharpened by concern. Maybe fear. “There are Resistance fighters in this building.”
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