“I just don’t get it,” I said as I found some dusty bowls in the cabinet for my father to pour the gumbo into. “I mean, I get why Dr. Hayes was upset, but do you really think he did all of this for revenge?”
“In the beginning? Probably.” My dad wiped off the bowls with a kitchen towel and began serving. “But now? I think it’s fear.”
“Fear?”
“Of the Addis. And of what they could do to the Authority if they got out.”
Jo had come into the kitchen to collect some of the bowls, but she stopped with the first one in her hand.
“They should be afraid,” she said. Her fingers gripped the bowl so tightly that they turned white at the tips. “If I had the chance, I’d kill them all.”
“Then you’d be no better than Dr. Hayes,” I pointed out, though secretly, I agreed with her.
“Then it’s a good thing I’ll never have the chance.” She took another bowl and then headed toward the living room, but at the doorway, she stopped. “But you will.”
At lunch Riley explained our plan to the Addis—our fake plan, that is. While everyone ate several helpings of gumbo, she told them that an attack on the Authority building, led by me, would end in the destruction of the entire building and serve as a message to the Outties to leave the Addis alone.
“Plus,” Riley tempted, “we’ll have the chance to kill Dr. Hayes.”
The Addis around the table and on the living room floor pounded their metal spoons in their lazy version of a war cry, and then Omar and my father launched into logistics. I tuned them out, my mind drifting back to the dome in Denver and Riley’s real plan, until another voice butted in.
You’re leaving tonight, aren’t you?
I looked up and met Jo’s eyes. I wanted to lie to her, but I couldn’t.
Yes.
Is your plan better than this harebrained scheme to storm the building?
Obviously. Storming the building is the worst plan ever. We just need to keep the Addis busy long enough for me to leave.
Will you kill him? Dr. Hayes? Her eyes were like a lion’s, the white pupils locked on a kill.
If I said no, she might have spoiled my plan. Jo wanted Dr. Hayes dead, and she didn’t care what it took to do it. I couldn’t blame her.
If I have to.
She seemed satisfied with that answer and went back to eating. I, on the other hand, had lost my appetite. The gumbo was like mud in my mouth, and swallowing one more bite seemed impossible.
Come on, Jayla, I scolded myself. You need to enjoy this meal.
It will probably be your last.
AFTER LUNCH the Addis sat around and talked in their slow, almost painful way about their plans for the Authority-building battle. Not that night, but the following night, we would make our move. Hearing them talk about it made my stomach turn, whether from guilt or from worry about my own plans, I did not know.
“I’m going to go take a shower,” I told Riley, who was sitting next to me.
She nodded and then jumped back into the conversation. She seemed to have no trouble lying to everyone; then again, she had lived among them a lot longer than I had, and her patience and sympathy had probably run out long ago.
The upstairs bathroom was huge, a porcelain paradise with only glass surrounding the tiled shower. Fake peonies added color to the otherwise whitewashed room, and though I knew they were fabric and plastic, they still made me feel a little bit better. Luckily the Addis who had lived here before they followed morphoid to the city had stocked up on soap, because even after everyone downstairs had showered, there was still an entire bar left over.
I removed my clothes, still dusty from the night before, and piled them on the toilet seat. Then I remembered, too late, that I didn’t have anything to change into. Oh well, I thought as I stepped into the shower. Hopefully no one else will come upstairs until I’m clothed.
The water pounded on my back like a hose against the siding of a house, and grime and concrete ran down my legs and into the drain. The water by my feet turned brown, that was how dirty my skin had been for the past twenty-four hours. I found the soap, which smelled like the ocean, and lathered my body with it.
The glass. The hand. The starfish fingers.
I scrubbed harder and harder at my skin, the surface becoming red almost instantly.
You killed them. You killed them all.
Suddenly, I stopped cold. The glass was steamy, but I could have sworn I’d heard the door click closed despite me having locked it before I got in the shower.
“Hello?” I asked. Through the fog, a form moved toward me.
“Hey.” The voice was Riley’s, and I breathed normally again. “I thought you might need some clean clothes.”
“You’re right. Thanks.”
She didn’t leave, and I didn’t say anything. The only sound was the droplets of water on my skin and the low gurgle of the drain.
“Also… I thought you might need me.”
So she had noticed after all. And as much as I hated the word “need,” I knew she was right.
I couldn’t have explained what happened next. All I knew was I began to sink to my knees—the strength I’d used all morning to keep myself together having disappeared in an instant—and Riley caught me before I hit the floor. I grasped at her like a drowning woman as water and my wet body soaked her shirt and jeans, and she held me close against her chest.
The glass. The hand. The starfish fingers.
My breath quickened, then became a hyperventilating gasp. Water ran down my face and into my mouth, and I breathed it in, choked on it.
You killed them. You killed them all.
“Breathe,” Riley demanded as she patted my wet hair.
I gasped in the heavy shower air, forced it into my lungs until the pressure disappeared. The water had gone cold, and it fell like rain on my naked skin. Riley used her clothed arm to cover me, and we sat like that for a while, cold but alive.
“Okay?” Riley asked me, and I nodded. As okay as I could be, after everything that had happened.
She patted my hair again, and this time, I grabbed her hand and brought it to my mouth to kiss the center of her palm. Then she helped me up, first working me onto my knees and then lifting me under the arms until I stood on my own. My legs were like a child’s, threatening to give out or topple me at any instant, so I clung to the shower railing when Riley stepped out.
The towels were in the linen closet. Once she found two, Riley came back to the shower to wrap one around me and then began to remove her own clothes. Off came the sweatshirt, the T-shirt with an unfamiliar band—the Beatles, whoever they were—stamped on the front, the jeans.
“Do you know who the Beatles are?” I asked Riley to make conversation. The fact that we would both be naked in a minute had just occurred to me.
“Of course. You don’t?”
“No. I may have had an entire library of books at NORCC, but I didn’t have a single song.”
“Wow.” She held the T-shirt up to show me. From behind the shirt, I spotted her black lace underwear and bra, too nice to be Addi, so probably snagged from the drawers in that house. “The Beatles were one of the most famous bands… well, ever. They were an English rock band, and they sang like every song that’s famous from the 1960s. ‘All My Loving’? ‘Hello, Goodbye’? ‘Yellow Submarine’?”
“Yellow Submarine?”
“Maybe it’s better if I don’t try to explain that one. But anyway, you get the point. They were famous.”
Off came the bra and underwear. She removed them from under a towel, but still. All of my worries suddenly faded away beneath the sound of my beating heart, as persistent and loud as the water had been in my ears.
“Where did you hear all of these songs?” My voice cracked a little, but Riley didn’t seem to notice. She seemed to be somewhere else, remembering.
“Back in the dome. There was this abandoned music shop, Louisiana Music Factory, in the French Quarter. You know, 421
Frenchmen Street? Anyway, no one else knew about it, and at first I used to go there and just browse through the old records. For hours I would look at the pictures of the bands and read the song titles, just imagining what the songs would sound like. Then, a few years ago, I found a generator in the basement of the shop. From then on, all I did was listen to music. They had a ton of local stuff, but also the national favorites. When we get out of here, I’ll take you there and play you all my favorite songs.”
“That sounds nice.”
For a second I had forgotten all about being naked with Riley; her story had transported me back to the dome, and to the realization that even though that place felt like a mouse cage, New Orleans was still beautiful. By the time I snapped out of it, she had already gotten dressed in the clothes she had originally brought for me.
“I’ll get you another set,” she said. “Then we should go down and help them plan so they don’t think anything’s wrong.”
“Of course.” I shook my head. Obviously this was not the right time for a hookup, not when people were dying on my account.
Riley left, closing the door behind her, and I sat on the marble counter and waited. And waited. And waited some more.
What’s keeping her? I thought.
Then another voice butted into my thoughts.
Jayla, can you hear me?
Jo?
Run!
From downstairs, I heard the sound of glass windows being smashed.
Chapter Twenty-Two
RILEY RAN back into the bathroom and locked the door behind her. She had managed to find a T-shirt and some leggings before the attack, so they would have to do. I shoved the T-shirt over my head and slid the leggings on, realizing only later that they were inside-out.
“Apparently Dr. Hayes couldn’t wait three days,” she said through deep breaths. “There’s about a hundred Authority guys downstairs gathering everyone up.”
“What should I do?”
“We need to get out of here.”
“But—”
“Get out of here, Jayla. If you stay and help, you might get caught, and then we’re all screwed.”
She was right. Who knew what weapons Dr. Hayes had equipped his soldiers with?
The tree outside the bathroom window, a southern live oak, waited with its large branches and sparse evergreen leaves as though put there for just such an occasion. The live oaks were what filled Audubon Park, which was outside the dome’s enclosure, and they were called “live” because they did not go dormant in the winter like most oaks. As a child I had peered through the dirty dome wall at the beautiful Spanish moss that swayed in a wind I could not feel.
“Hold on,” Riley said as she helped me out the window.
I grasped one of the branches, my body half out the window and half in it, and then swung my right leg to find a foothold in a lower branch. I tested its strength with my toes and then balanced on its round top, feeling the grooves of the bark, and then sent the other foot onto the precarious branch.
Through the oak tree’s limbs, which bent down and then up toward the sky like outstretched arms with half-bent elbows, I climbed. Riley followed behind me, making much less noise than my clumsy almost-falls, and then we both jumped the last three feet to the ground. My legs rejoiced at its solidity, but then the ground grumbled with the motors of twenty cars and vans pulling away from the house.
Riley and I ducked into a bush on the side and then watched as white vehicles and even motorcycles passed our hiding spot. I saw the faces of my friends, their eyes already blank and distant, zoom by as dark blurs among the white faces of the Authorities.
“The best thing you can do to help them is stop Dr. Hayes,” Riley whispered.
“I know. But that doesn’t make watching them leave and doing nothing any easier.”
Riley put her arm around me while we waited a safe length of time before leaving our hideout. From the ground, I gathered a few acorns from the oak tree and observed them, trying to take my mind off the horrific events of the past day. The acorns looked like almonds in shape and color—a dusty dark brown—but were rounder rather than squashed.
“You really like nature, don’t you?” Riley asked. She was probably trying to distract herself too.
“I guess.”
“Like you know what kind of tree this is and everything?”
“Of course. Don’t you?”
Riley shook her head. “You’re the only Addi I know who would. Think about it. We’ve spent our entire lives in a desolate wasteland without a single green thing living in it. Nature is not exactly a familiar force.”
“Right. Well, me too, but….” I moved two acorns in my palm like lucky dice. “Now that I know what my powers are, I wonder if deep down….” My thoughts felt heavy, like slogging through a lake filled with mud, but the truth was right there on the other side.
“Deep down what?”
“I always knew.” Using my other hand, I cupped the acorn in my palm. My eyes closed involuntarily as I focused on the seed, and then opened again when my top hand came off. There, in my palm, was a seedling.
“How did you do that?”
I shrugged. “I can turn anything into anything. My powers can draw from the oxygen in the air, the water in the air, the nutrients in the soil below my feet. They can focus deep into the atoms of whatever I touch and rearrange them. I think… I think this is what my powers were originally meant for.”
I held out the seedling, and Riley took it delicately.
“You’re amazing,” she whispered as her fingers felt the newly sprouted leaves.
“No.” I looked down at my hands. “I’m a pawn. I just can’t figure out whose.”
The second acorn lay heavy with waiting. Again, I sprouted the seedling, but this one I planted right into the dirt. Beyond the new plant were thousands of acorns just waiting to be turned, like the many Addi faces just waiting to be helped.
I can’t save them all, I thought as we walked away from the house, more acorns crunching to their death below my feet. I can’t even save myself.
Chapter Twenty-Three
BREAKING INTO Congress was even worse than breaking into the Authority building. The capitol, which had once been centered in Baton Rouge but moved to New Orleans in the late 2000s, was still the tallest capitol in the United States. With one main building plus the two limestone wings transported across the state during the remodeling, the building was a fearsome sight—as it was meant to be.
“We can’t go from below,” Riley said from her crouched position in the congressional bushes, “because the larger sewer doesn’t run all the way and we won’t fit in the smaller pipes. If we go straight on, the guards will gun us down before we can say ‘Revolution.’”
I peered through the leaves at the building, and then, farther on, the empty part of the city that stood between us and the stretch of Outtie homes built during the Great Migrations into the safe lands of the suburbs.
“What about that way?” I pointed at the main entrance, which sat behind a guarded gate.
“Uh… did you not hear what I said about armed guards? We can’t just walk in and say, ‘Hey, we’re here to take down Congress, can you please not shoot us?’”
“I don’t mean we should just walk in. I mean we should drive in.” I cocked my head at a repair van approaching the gate. “We just need to hitch a ride on one of those.”
We walked the opposite direction from which we had come, all the way down the road until the first bend under tree cover. Riley climbed one of the trees to get a better look, while I waited behind the trunk for the first passerby.
About ten minutes later, a white van with the words Ralph’s Rug Cleaners plastered on the side door approached. When the wheels passed in front of me, I focused my powers on the left tire and rearranged the atoms to make the tire valve disappear. The feat was harder because the van was moving at sixty miles an hour and the valve stem that held it was just a small piece, but I closed my eyes and
locked on with all my strength. Then I deflated the tire instantly, so that one minute the van was driving along fine, and the next it tilted and then lay still on the ground like a wounded animal.
“Nice work,” Riley whispered.
The van driver, an old Outtie with waxy wrinkles on his face and thinning white hair on his pale head, got out to investigate. He wore a blue uniform with the red letters RRC sewn on the back and his name, Corey, on the front left breast pocket, along with black worker’s boots.
“I’m not going to kill him,” I whispered to Riley when she dropped down next to me, though she hadn’t asked me. She didn’t have to.
“Fine. Then what’s your plan?”
While Corey examined the tire and scratched his balding head, I reached up and unwound a vine from its hold on the tree branch above me. When I closed my eyes, I pictured the vine and then imagined changing it into a rope. In my hands, the weed grew scratchy and tough.
“Take his uniform off and then use this to tie him up.” I handed over the rope, which Riley tested by pulling it taut between her hands. “I’ll check the back for something to gag him with.”
On my way around the van, I missed a step and stumbled into the aluminum side. I hadn’t tripped on anything, but my leg had given out; though I hadn’t felt the strain of the last few object changes, apparently my body had.
“You okay back there?” Riley called, and I lied and said I was.
In the back of the van were one ancient vacuum, one red deep carpet cleaner, and about a hundred bottles labeled “Miracle Deep Cleaning Carpet Shampoo.” Simple products for a simple task, unlike the expensive robots, hulking control-operated gadgets, probably used by most people nowadays. I had never actually seen a robot—Outties didn’t waste their inventions on us—but one of my friends who’d been unadopted and sent back to NORCC had told me that they were everywhere. Robot vacuums, TVs that spoke back to you, computers the size of a fingernail that projected their images on any flat surface.
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