I stared at her dumbly. Now that my destructive mood had disappeared, I felt exhausted.
“Why?”
“Because we’re staging a rescue, that’s why.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, or maybe I was just too tired to speak. Riley tucked her hand under my arm and hoisted me up with her shoulder blade.
“I have her,” she spoke into some kind of microphone. “Everybody pull out.”
How a group of Addis had organized a rescue mission with actual technology to assist them was beyond me; at that point, all I cared about was getting to a bed. Riley dragged me out of the lobby and through the doors, where several more Addis with black scarves wrapped around their heads and masks covering their faces waited for us.
“We need to find shelter,” Riley ordered. Perhaps she was the reason their mission had succeeded. “Find us an empty house. Now.”
I don’t remember the walk to the house, but I will never forget the feeling of soft sheets against my dirty skin. Bits of concrete dust and particle board had stuck to my sweat, but I couldn’t stay awake for one more minute, let alone the time it would have taken to shower.
By my head, a stuffed toy elephant missing a plastic eye seemed to wink at me as my eyelids closed and opened and closed.
Close.
Open.
Close.
WHEN I woke five hours later to the unfamiliar sound of a television broadcast, I could not ground myself. I saw the elephant eye, and then the elephant, and then the elephant duvet cover I’d missed the first time, but still, nothing looked familiar. Strangers stared at me from the frames on the gray nightstand—someone else’s wedding and a second picture in which parents balanced their little girl between them.
Where am I? Why am I here?
I threw back the cover, exposing more elephant patterns on the sheets, and hoisted my sore body out of bed.
How did I get out of the Authority building? How did I get here?
The whole night was a blur. I remembered the bracelet and the surge of power, and then nothing but a high-pitched hum. Had I gone temporarily insane? Had my abilities drained me to the point where they had caused brain damage? Or worse, was I even the one in control?
There was one window shrouded in a lacey cover; when I pulled this back, I finally recognized the street as the same one that I left my friends on more than a month ago. Same red doors on all the houses, same boxy architecture with fake columns and red flower boxes where blooms had once been.
In the hallway I fumbled for a switch. The stairs were around a corner, but I found them eventually even without a light—then I remembered that the lights didn’t work here anyway without power. The Authority building had spoiled me.
“I know you’re listening, Jayla,” the voice menaced as I walked downstairs. “I know you’re out there.”
As soon as I heard my name and realized it was Dr. Hayes on the screen, I jumped the last four stairs into the midst of the entire Resistance rescue team, including Riley, my father, and Omar. No Jo and NORCC crew, I noted, though I immediately forgot about them. All eyes stayed locked on the screen, even after my ungraceful landing.
“What’s happeni—” I began, but then I saw the dome.
It wasn’t the New Orleans dome—that I knew by the snowy surroundings and mountainous backdrop. The screen flashed back to the speaker, Dr. Hayes, who looked none too pleased with my disappearance. His eyes were slits of fury, and when he spoke, his mouth barely moved it was so tense. He wore his standard suit and tie, but the outfit was as rumpled as if he’d slept in it; he probably had, considering he’d already gotten back to the Authority building overnight.
“This is Denver Dome,” Dr. Hayes said—or repeated, depending on how many times this broadcast had played before my arrival. “It’s just like yours, only its people are model Addis. They smoke, they sit, they sleep. They have never rebelled, not once. And you, a little girl all the way across the country, have sentenced them to death.”
“No.” I meant to whisper the word, but I yelled it. “No, no, no!”
“I finally have the approval of the government of the United States. Your escape helped me with that, Jayla.” Dr. Hayes smiled, and immediately I wished for his frown. His smile was demonic, and it sent a chill through my body. “They’re scared of you. ‘Kill at will’ were their exact words, I believe. So in a minute, every single citizen in the heart of Denver will die, and no amount of power can change that. Surrender yourself for completion of your testing by midnight three days from now, and you will spare the other domes the same fate.”
I sunk to my knees. Riley and the others around me were speaking, but their words swarmed and then flew away.
On the screen the dome began to fog. The fingers of a smoke fist wrapped themselves around the glass, and when the camera zoomed in on the picture, nothing showed but an opaque white.
For a minute, nothing moved.
Then I saw the hand.
It plastered itself like a starfish on a tank wall. Whoever was recording zoomed in on the fingers, the weight of their tips making five pressure prints of white on the glass. The body hovered somewhere behind the layer of smoke and death; only the hand remained there.
“Don’t blame me,” Dr. Hayes said softly. “You did this. You killed them all.”
Someone should have turned the TV off, but no one moved. Maybe no one could. My legs were roots treed to the floor, and everyone else seemed just as powerless. For at least ten minutes nothing happened but the hand and the fog and the heavy breathing of Dr. Hayes, and then, finally, the fingers disappeared.
My breath was heavy in my chest, stuck in my lungs like two pressurized balloons.
“Turn it off,” Riley ordered, but no one moved.
When the smoke cleared, the camera found the bodies on the ground like a hunter zeroing in on prey. They lay face-forward, having toppled over during the gassing, and had overlapped like the faded Jenga pieces we played with in NORCC.
Their faces were pale, blank, peaceful.
Drugged.
“Surrender yourself,” Dr. Hayes ordered, “or we will gas every dome in this country until you submit. Surrender yourself or—”
Click.
Chapter Twenty
JO HAD returned, along with Arla, Tree, Tiny, Turf, and several other Addis I didn’t know by name. Apparently my sister had had enough of Dr. Hayes, because she had been the one to hit the Off button.
My whole crew had all found new clothes, probably discovered in the abandoned houses around us, and in their all-black outfits, they looked like a force to be reckoned with. Still, I felt removed from them, like they were on one mountain screaming and I was on the other.
“He’s our grandfather.” I didn’t mean to say that, especially in front of so many people, but I couldn’t control my own mouth.
Jo shrugged. “That’s not going to stop me from killing him. You?”
“No.”
“Good.”
The Addis in the room looked back and forth between us.
“So what’s your plan?”
“Surrender myself so he stops gassing domes?”
“Absolutely not.” This came from Riley, head of the Jayla Rescue Party. “We just got you out of that terrible place.”
“Exactly. And look what happened.” I pointed at the TV screen.
“She’s right, Jayla,” Jo agreed. “You can’t go back there.”
My father chose this time to step in as a wise parent. “Using your powers to supply Addis with Mo-D is just another way of killing them.”
“Then what?” I had lost control of the volume of my voice. “Just let him kill off every Addi one by one? Knowing that it’s my fault they’re dying, my fault they’re Addis in the first place?”
Jo or Riley must have filled them in on Dr. Hayes’s methods because no one seemed surprised.
“Jayla, in the Authority building you did something… different,” Riley said slowly. “Could you show us?
”
The hairs on my arms rose. I didn’t want anyone to know about my new powers, and here Riley was, telling the whole room. Stop being defensive, I thought. If you don’t trust her, this will never work.
Instead of firing back one of my standard retorts, I picked up a pillow on the sofa. Focusing on it like I had the objects in my cell, I felt for its atoms and, beneath them, their parts. Calmly I pictured them in my mind and began to move them, like rearranging puzzle pieces only with the parts able to fit together a million different ways. I could take elements and add them in for an even more difficult puzzle, or remove them to make things simpler.
I could turn the pillow into anything.
Water… or even wine.
After I opened my eyes, I checked the pillow-turned-mug I now held by the handle.
“This is amazing,” they whispered as they passed the mug around the room. “Incredible. A miracle.”
“Are there any limits to your powers?” Riley pressed. She had something in mind. I just couldn’t figure out what it was.
“In terms of changing things to other things? Not that I can tell.”
“Okay, good. Then—”
“Wait. I’m not finished. The changes are not limited by objects, but by me. My physical body. Back at the Authority building, I felt like every object I changed took a little something out of me.”
“Did rest help?”
“Yes. But different objects take different amounts of strength, and I don’t know what would happen if I completely ran out of strength.”
“What takes up the most energy?” Disposal butted in.
“Living things. Like when I cured my dad.” I fingered the strand of white hair. “I think that doing things to humans takes a lot of power, and it affects me. Physically.”
“Thank you,” Riley said, though what she meant by that, I had no idea. I’d been waiting anxiously for her plan, but after I finished explaining my powers, she walked out of the room.
Of course, all the other Addis wanted to offer their plans at the top of their lungs, including turning the entire Authority building into a mound of cake, capturing Dr. Hayes and sticking him in a dome with wild dogs, and transforming all of the morphoid in the world into a stack of dollar bills. Within a minute I was pretty sure some of the Addis in the room had snuck a smoke while I was gone.
To escape their outlandish plans and to satisfy my curiosity, I followed Riley out the front door. She had taken a seat on a red rocking chair on the porch, and I took the accompanying one.
Her eyes stayed locked on the house across the street, and my eyes followed. My mind drifted back to the TV screen, to the hand that would haunt me for the rest of my days. Five fingers wrapped around my life like a noose around a neck, choking everything beautiful and good until it died.
How could I not have predicted Dr. Hayes’s revenge? In the short time I’d known him, he had proved himself unsympathetic, angry, and vengeful. He was a desperate man, thirsting for payback on the Addis no matter what the cost.
“You have a plan, don’t you?” I asked Riley finally. It was not a question. “You just don’t know if it’s safe.”
“For you or for anyone else. And if it doesn’t work, you’re locked back up in the Authority building for who knows how long.”
“Then you’ll just have to stage another daring rescue.”
I said this jokingly, but Riley’s intense stare did not soften. I knew how she felt; even indirectly, deciding what to do with my powers was a burden.
My hand found hers over the armrests. It felt good to touch her, as good as I’d dreamed of for a month in my cell.
“Tell me your plan.”
She told me, and afterward we both sat on the porch for a long time, thinking. So long that the sun came up, a curious face on the lifeless horizon. Riley’s plan was dangerous, reckless even, and nothing guaranteed it would succeed. Nothing guaranteed I would finish it alive.
“I’ll do it,” I finally said. “It’s the only way.”
She said nothing in response. There was nothing left to say.
In the tree to our right, a bird appeared. I had never seen a wild bird—or any animal—in real life, so I squeezed Riley’s hand and pointed excitedly like a tourist in my own city.
“What? The swallow?”
“Purple martin,” I clarified. “I’ve seen them in pictures, but never in real life. They’re the only birds with that coloring: mostly black with a slight blue sheen.”
We watched the purple martin pecking for ants and air insects from his comfortable branch.
“Do you know that back in the early 2000s, people used to use hollowed gourds as homes for purple martins?” I asked Riley.
“No, I guess they forgot to teach me that in the School for Delinquent Druggies. Maybe I learned it in Running from the Authorities, but I can’t quite recall.” She was teasing me, but since I had always found animal behavior fascinating, I didn’t stop talking.
“It’s true. They were a population dependent on humans, and they lived in colonies right near them in the gourds and nest boxes they set up.”
“Like domes?” Riley said, and then looked at the purple martin with sudden interest.
“I guess. But in the winter, they flew away to South America to breed. They only came back to visit North America in the spring, and then flock back down in the fall.”
The purple martin made a pew pew sound and then took flight. As he got farther away, he became a dot like a pinhole on the fabric of the sunrise sky. At his departure I had the sudden desire to be closer to Riley, to let her hold me and tell me that everything was going to be okay. The feeling was unfamiliar and unwelcome. But it didn’t matter anyway; Riley stared off into the distance, her eyes hard and focused, and never even noticed my slow inching toward her.
“Purple martins are idiots.” Riley’s voice was angry, a tone usually coming from my side of our conversations.
“Why?”
“Because they come back. If I ever fly out of here, I’m never stepping foot in Louisiana ever again.”
The pinprick became a speck of dust and then disappeared.
“Maybe they’re just really smart,” I thought out loud. “Maybe the few birds we see are spies, checking out the situation. When it’s safe to come back, they’ll all return.”
“What if it’s never safe to come back?”
I kept looking at the sky, even though I couldn’t see the bird anymore.
“Think of it this way. Other more aggressive birds used to kill the purple martins. Probably still do, wherever they are. Other swallows and starlings. But every animal has a predator.”
“So you’re saying…?”
“Dr. Hayes may be our starling. But I’m his fox.”
Chapter Twenty-One
UPON REENTERING the house, the first thing I noticed was the smells: garlic, onions, tomatoes, okra, and the cool smell of filé powder ground from sassafras leaves. Gumbo, my favorite dish.
“Who’s cooking?” I asked Jo as I climbed over the legs of sleeping Addis.
“Dad. Apparently along with his sobriety came a desire for cooking Creole foods, and he’s been collecting ingredients from the drop-offs for weeks just to make this one dish. I’m not sure where he found the filé powder; probably stole it from the Authority building when he was supposed to be rescuing you.”
I followed my nose to the kitchen, where Dad stood at the stove making a roux with flour and oil. In a few minutes he would spoon the roux into the okra mixture, thickening it into a slush. I remembered these moves from the kitchen at NORCC, though their gumbos were straight out of a bag.
Focusing on his dish, my dad didn’t hear me come in. His brown skin glowed under the sweat from the stove’s heat, and every few seconds, he swiped at his forehead with his sleeve. He had showered, finally, so his hair was no longer fused with city grime and scalp oil, and he must have borrowed a clean shirt from the drawers upstairs. Amazing how someone could wipe the addiction
off themselves like marker lines from a whiteboard.
“It smells good,” I said.
He startled and dropped the wooden spoon on the floor. Flecks of tomato and oil flew across the linoleum, but neither of us moved to wipe them off.
“Thanks, Jayla. This was how your mom made it, right when she arrived in the dome. Before… you know.”
“Yeah.”
Dad opened a nearby drawer and took out another spoon.
“Dr. Hayes is our grandfather,” I blurted out. Why did I keep repeating that?
My dad dropped the spoon again, but this time, I caught it. After sliding it back under the thickening layer of gumbo, I continued.
“He’s the one who made her do it. Come to the dome, have children, test them for powers. Leave us. It was all revenge for his other daughter, Mom’s half sister, Gretchen, getting killed by an Addi.” My voice grew louder and angrier with every word.
“How do you know all this? From your powers?”
“A nurse told me. I think… I think Dr. Hayes killed her for it.”
Dad went back to stirring the gumbo. He seemed to be thinking, though about what, I had no idea. Seeing him pensive was so odd that he looked like an entirely different person.
“Your mother mentioned a half sister once,” he said finally.
“Really?”
“She didn’t say her name, just said she was different than us. I didn’t know she meant Outtie different. She said she had met Gretchen a few times, during her father’s visits to the inner city on government checkups. Back then the government took care of the Addis, though now that I know who her father was, I think doctors like Hayes abused that power more often than not. Anyway, her father brought the girl to visit Darlena and her mother, probably without Gretchen’s mother’s knowledge. They brought gifts, your mother said: fresh fruit, chocolate, little trinkets. A china doll that looked so much like Gretchen that Darlena named her that.”
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