Addis on the Inside Read online

  Addis on the Inside

  By Annabelle Jay

  Jayla is the daughter of morphoid-addicted Addis, and like so many others, she’s been pulled away from her family and placed in a group home called NORCC—the New Orleans Rehabilitation Center for Children. Her parents and those like them are imprisoned in domes across the country… but maybe not for long. Jayla’s sister, Jo, arrives at the orphanage with news of a sinister plan. The Authority plans to gas the domes and kill those within.

  Jayla and her crew of orphan girls—including love interests both old and new—are the only ones who can stop the Authority and save their people. But first, they must escape the NORCC. During their journey, several secrets come to light, including Jayla’s supernatural powers and the depths of the Authority’s depravity. But before she can face her enemies, she’ll have to confront the adversaries within herself.

  For my crew: Christine, Kayleigh, and Katie

  Prologue

  IN THE girls’ building of the New Orleans Rehabilitation Center for Children, or NORCC, we were all sisters. I don’t mean that we loved each other like siblings—most of us kept to ourselves, and those who didn’t had cliques who had their back but would stab anyone else’s—but that we physically looked alike. From our gaunt faces to our brown skin to our raggedy hair, we were all children of the great tragedy that had befallen our world before we were even born.

  Our caretakers called the drug morphoid. We called it The Urge, The Itch, Smoke, Big M, Mo-D, or a slew of other terms we’d picked up on the streets of the inner city. Like a mantle around a planet’s core, the Outskirters, or Outties, lived a life free of the toxic Mo-D that pervaded every breath of air in the center of the city, and none of that air got out. It couldn’t—fifteen years ago, our Outskirters had put a dome around the people in there, and now that wasted space pushed its polluted paw prints against the glass so dirty you couldn’t see the city inside.

  The kids who came from abroad told us the same thing was happening everywhere. Morphoid had consumed city after city like a dog following a trail of bones, and when the crime and poverty that came with a whole population of druggies scared the Outskirters, they simply boxed it up and put it away, along with the addicts, or Addis, inside.

  But the children, the nicer Outskirters had protested. We have to save the children.

  So there we were. Dirty, addicted, alone. Packed into rooms too small to be college dorms but used to house six to ten of us. Perpetually shaking, cold, and desperate to score some Mo-D.

  When one of us smuggled something in, fights broke out and mass chaos consumed the center until the drug was either used or found.

  When one of us miraculously kicked the habit, passed the tests, and impressed an Outtie family, we were adopted. This happened only rarely, because morphoid wasn’t just a drug, it was a way of life.

  Even without The Urge, we were still Addis on the inside.

  Part One—Flame

  Chapter One

  “HAVE YOU seen the new girl?” my best friend, Arla, asked before spooning a large portion of mush into her mouth. In the bowl below, bloated raisins floated like fat Outties in their private pools.

  “I haven’t been down to the third floor in, like, a month. Why, is she cute or something?”

  I pushed my bowl toward Arla, who whip quick lashed out her arm and pulled the second helping of mush close. We called her Disposal because she ate all our leftovers when a particularly bad meal turned our stomachs, and because, as the largest girl in our room, she disposed of people who tried to bother us. After years of this extra feeding, she was the only healthy-looking Addi in the building. We all had expected her to be the first one adopted, but apparently she looked too much like an Outskirter to be interesting. After all, how could they show her off to their Outtie friends at book club or potluck Sunday if she looked like one of them?

  “No, not cute, but it was hard to tell through the dreads and dopey eyes. All the new Addis look the same to me… except this one. There’s something different about her.”

  “Different?” I tried my bread, but when I couldn’t break off a piece with my nails, the roll went into the mush bowl across from me. “Different how?”

  “I don’t know how to put this….” Arla let her mouth hang open while she thought, a habit from her morphoid days. “She looks like you.”

  “Like me?” I glared at her. “I thought you just said she was ‘not cute.’”

  “Right. I mean… she isn’t. It’s just….”

  Listening to this was painful. Every time someone scored and decided to be generous with their baggie, I reminded myself that this was what morphoid turned me into.

  “Spit it out, Arla.”

  “Her eyes. They’re the same as yours.”

  My fingers went to my baseball cap, pulled low over my dirty-blonde bangs, and then the eyes they hid from view. White irises, unlike any other Addi or Outtie I’d ever met.

  “You sure?”

  “Positive. The color of a brand-new undershirt, or at least they would be without the red veins.”

  Violently, I scraped my chair back from the table. Downcast heads turned up at the sound, but when nothing interesting happened, they returned to their breakfast. One hundred unwanted Addis—plus however many had been brought in that week and caged like animals on the third floor until the doctors and psychologists could determine if they were viable adoption candidates—all fed the same slop day after day.

  Technically we weren’t supposed to leave the mess hall before 9:00 a.m., when classes started on the fifth and sixth floors, but I slipped past the sleeping guard and into the empty hallway without notice. After spending twelve of my seventeen years in NORCC, the longest stay by one kid in all the facility’s history, I knew every cracked tile and every flickering light bulb like the scars on my arms. One year left and I would be sent to work for the Army—unless I was adopted, of course. But what Outtie family wanted a kid with white eyes who looked more like a ghost than a rescued child?

  In the elevator I punched the security code only the guards, teachers, and doctors were supposed to know: 6-6-7-2-2. The headmistress wasn’t very creative, and the numbers spelled out NORCC on a telephone keypad. Arla and I were the only two kids with the code, and we used it to smuggle in supplies from the outside world or get a look at the new kids before Authorities released them into our midst. That’s how we ruled NORCC with every batch of new recruits.

  I pressed 3 and waited for the jolt of the ancient box as it descended to the restricted floors. When the doors opened, I crouched out of sight of the lab windows and crept to the farthest one, where I peered over the edge of the windowsill.

  Behind the glass was a cot covered in sanitary paper that crackled with every movement. On top of the cot sat a girl in a dirty coat so smudged in filth that it looked more brown than green, and jeans two sizes too big held up with a piece of frayed rope. She had her hood up, but her dreads fell out of each side and almost down to her waist.

  Her room had all the usual tools laid out on the doctor’s table: stethoscope, script pad, tongue depressor, reflex hammer, and sterilized containers for the first of many drug tests. Her urine would come back positive for three months, even without a fresh supply; once morphoid had you in its claws, it held you tight.

  As if she sensed my presence, the girl looked up. Her face was long and gaunt, much different than my heart shape, and her lips were thin to the point of invisibility because of her frown. While I looked thin but athletic, she looked wiry to the point of sick. Still, she looked like me, if parts of my cheeks and lips had been wiped away with an eraser and my hair had been darker and rough as a Yorkshire terrier’s.

  Most importantly, she had my eyes. Whi
te as vanilla icing on a birthday cake, back when the birth of a child was something to be celebrated and not feared.

  The girl itched under her coat sleeves, giving me a glimpse of brown skin patched with needle marks and bruises. I’d never seen so many scars; then again, children rarely made it to their late teens without being seized by Authorities. She must have been very crafty to evade the sweeps for so long, I thought as I watched her scratch. Crafty or stupid.

  She noticed my stare, and her eyes rose to meet mine. Her head tilted to the side questioningly, and then recognition bloomed across her face.

  “Jayla?” The glass muffled the sound of her voice, but I knew my name when I heard it.

  “Do I know—” I started to ask, but a door closed somewhere in the back halls of the medical facility. Then the girl’s door opened, and a doctor in a blue lab coat entered. I ducked just in time, and the man never noticed my head as I peeked back over the side to watch what happened next.

  “How are you feeling, Jo?” the doctor asked in a soothing voice. He had the smooth, flawless skin and thick hair of an Outtie, well-fed and well-groomed since birth.

  “Like shit,” the girl said, each word a punch of anger.

  “Do you want more antimorph?” the doctor asked as he pointed to her drip, which I knew from experience was flooding her system with a drug that counteracted the morphoid in her body. The drug was painful and would increase the scratching for several days before it began to fade.

  “I want to go home.”

  Home. The word echoed in my head. For most Addi kids, home was just a concept we read about in books or, when books were scarce, invented in our nightly stories. Home was not inside the dome. Home was nowhere.

  “You are home,” the doctor said without blinking.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Sure you are. Here you’ll be fed, clothed, and housed until you find an even better home with an Outtie family who will love you.” This dialog was scripted, and every new recruit heard the same lines.

  “Or thrown into the Army and used for target practice,” Jo grumbled.

  “Now, Jo—”

  “Spare me the lines, Doc.”

  “Fine. But I’m turning up your antimorph. Lie down and close your eyes; this might hurt for a while.”

  Jo lay back on the cot and did as she was told. Maybe she’d run out of steam, or maybe the antimorph was too much for even a raging lion like her, but her eyes closed and her limbs relaxed into a sleeping position almost instantly. The doctor checked her vitals, then went out the way he’d come.

  Her arm fell off her chest and hung like a pendulum swaying in a slight breeze. There, on her wrist, was the same silver bracelet that I wore around my own. So that I’ll always find you, a voice repeated in my head, though I didn’t know whose voice it was.

  Maybe, when she woke up from the nightmares brought by antimorph, Jo could tell me.

  Chapter Two

  WHEN I went down to the third floor during breakfast the next day, Jo wasn’t there. In her place was a different girl, younger, with normal eyes and no spirit left to break. I went back up to the mess hall, but no Jo there either.

  “I can’t find her,” I told Arla as I sat back down in my seat. Our places in the cafeteria were law; if anyone so much as looked at my spot, Arla would need to remind them who ran the place.

  “They’ll bring her up, don’t worry.” Arla had saved me a tray, which she now slid across the table. “No one gets out, remember?”

  No one but us, NORCC’s two longest residents. And who would want to get out, anyway? Besides the convenience store across the street where Arla and I bought snacks with money stolen from the guards’ pockets, there was nothing out there for miles. Even if we could make it to the Outtie city, we’d be spotted and brought back immediately with no chance to buy the chocolate bars and bags of chips that kept us in charge.

  “Good point.” I pulled at my hoodie, almost new except for the stain on the right sleeve. As the oldest in NORCC, I got first dibs on new clothing shipments. “It’s just so weird, that’s all. Where could she be?”

  As if I’d summoned her, Jo entered the cafeteria with four other new recruits. The chatter stopped, and we all scoped out the ratty kids for first dibs on who we wanted in our crew. Two kids were only three or four, and they joined the other preschoolers at the plastic tables on the left side of the room. They would go up to the sixth floor, where all the little kids were kept, until they were adopted that weekend.

  Two of the catches were fifth or sixth level, and they got picked up immediately by one of the crews their age from the eighth floor. Cheers went up from that crew’s table, along with table pounding and whistles.

  Another ninth-floor crew leader, Leah, stood to approach Jo, but I stepped in her way.

  “You just got someone,” Leah whined as she rubbed a hand nervously over her neck and through her short black hair. “Remember, that redhead with the acne on her face.”

  “I remember,” I said, not backing down. “So what?”

  “So it’s my turn.”

  I took two steps so that Leah’s face was only inches from mine. “You’ll get the next one, but this girl is Royalty.”

  Leah turned and ran her eyes over Jo. Then she backed up a foot and put her head down like a chastised dog. “Fine. She looks weird anyway.”

  I didn’t move until Leah had returned to her table, just in case she got any ideas and tried to knife me. Such things had been known to happen, and I’d been sent to the infirmary three times with such wounds in the past year alone. Once, when I’d found some morphoid hidden under the flap of the sanitary napkin disposal container in the handicapped bathroom and flushed it, a girl in the next dorm over tried to strangle me in my sleep.

  “Come with me,” I told Jo, who followed me back to the table where the crew waited for their introductions. “These are my Royalty crew members. Disposal’s the big one, Turf’s the one with the crazy red hair, Tiny’s the fifteen-year-old, and Tree’s the tall silent one.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Jo said, surprising us with her manners as she stretched out a hand. In the Addi world, we said ’sup or hey.

  “Why you so proper?” Turf asked as Jo sat across from her.

  “My father taught me.” Jo’s eyes got gray and hazy when she said that.

  “Your dad isn’t an Addi?” Tiny asked. Usually we tried to avoid bringing up moms and dads, since Tiny was more desperate to get adopted than anyone else.

  “Course he is.”

  Jo didn’t say more, and we didn’t press. Some of us, myself included, remembered little of our real parents. Just blurs of gray moving around us in the morphoid haze, or occasionally sticking us with their needle. Some of us, like Tree and Disposal, had been abandoned, and kids like that found “parents,” or older kids with morphoid access, in the dome to take care of them.

  “Do you have a nickname?” Jo asked me, maybe wanting to change the subject.

  “Queen.”

  “Queen?”

  “She runs this place,” explained Tiny with the usual amount of awe in her voice. “Jayla’s been here since the very beginning, even before the first dome went up. She helps us get clean and stay clean, even during an outbreak.”

  “Maybe she can help me,” Jo said softly. She held out her hands, which tremored like clappers in the bells of her sleeves.

  “Course she can,” Tiny said confidently. “One time when Tree was getting pummeled by five crews of eighth-floor girls, Jayla broke a window with a fire extinguisher and used one of the glass shards to singlehandedly floor them all. Twenty-five girls in the infirmary for a month, all because Tree scored an eighth of an ounce of morphoid. Well, twenty-six girls if you count Tree going to the nurse for the black eye Jayla gave her when she found out the reason.”

  I handed over my rock-hard bread slice, and with Tiny’s pudding and Tree’s eggs, we made a makeshift meal for Jo. Lunch wasn’t for hours, and she would need her strength if she
hoped not to wind up back in the infirmary during her recovery. By the time the bell rang a minute later, Jo had already scarfed it all down.

  Instead of going to class, I told Jo to follow me. Her first day no one would miss her—most Addis would spend their first day throwing up or feverish—and I had already been through the whole curriculum my first few years at NORCC. Now they let me read books in the library, where I was the only person to enter and leave all day. Most Addis had learned to read too late to enjoy it anyway.

  We let the crowd of girls carry us down the hall, their midmorning energy surging us forward like a flash flood, until we reached the stairs. There I pulled Jo out of the stream and into the dark stairwell, which smelled like the cigarettes I’d smuggled into NORCC, then up five flights to the ninth-floor dorms, which were empty and silent.

  Our room, the one farthest down the hallway, had a Do Not Enter sign nailed to the door. The NORCC headmistress and her minions had keys to every room, of course, but they knew better than to search our dorm. After they’d searched our room during the last raid, Disposal and Tree had broken into the headmistress’s office and broken her entire collection of snow globes. Pieces of the collectibles, specifically the tiny DC monuments and NYC skyscrapers, turned up in the cafeteria’s soups and scrambled eggs for months.

  “You can sleep here,” I said and pointed to the bottom bunk of my bed. “Used to belong to Trix, but she got adopted last week.”

  Jo flopped onto the bed and kicked her shoes off.

  “I haven’t slept in a bed in years,” she said as she stretched her arms over her head. “Maybe never.”

  “Most girls say that when they get here. Give it a few months—you’ll be complaining about the mattresses just like the rest of us.”

  “In a few months, I’ll be gone,” said Jo with conviction.

  “Oh really? How old are you, anyway?”