Addis on the Inside Read online

  “Fifteen, I think. Three years until the Army, but that’s not what I mean.”

  “I know.”

  I slid onto Tree’s bed, which was across the aisle from Jo’s spot, and propped my feet up on the wooden slat at the end. Tree wouldn’t mind, and I wanted to be able to watch Jo’s face when I asked her the question burning within me.

  “You recognized my bracelet,” Jo said before I could ask.

  “I have the same one.”

  My fingers went to the metal that had been stuck on my wrist for as long as I could remember. The headmistress said we could hire someone to cut it off, but the bracelet was comforting in a way I couldn’t explain. When I was a child, the bracelet had slid up and down my arm, but I had grown into it. The thought of removing my one connection to home was like removing a limb.

  “Of course you do. Mom gave them to us before she left, or at least that’s what Dad told me.”

  Mom.

  Frizzy brown hair with food fused into the ends. Mittens with holes at the fingers. A wool hat pulled low over her eyes like a visor, blocking not the sun but us and our loud play. Pocket full of needles.

  Dad.

  Hovered over a sputtering fire. Wrapping us in blankets. Carrying us to our next abandoned building. Using those needles.

  “So you’re saying you’re my sister?”

  “Can’t you remember now?” Jayla asked.

  I tried to think back to the memory of my parents and the child wrapped up next to me. I’m leaving, a voice whispered to me. I can only bring one of you.

  Suddenly, our room felt claustrophobic. I could barely breathe. I clutched at my throat, but nothing was there.

  “She left in the middle of the night,” Jo said, her voice angry. “We thought she took you with her, but apparently, even one daughter was too much of a burden. Probably dropped you right on this doorstep on her way out of New Orleans like a bottle of sour milk or a used-up tissue.”

  I didn’t remember that night, and I didn’t want to, but other memories flooded in, each one filled with stabbings and cries and fear. With desperation. Desire. The room around me grew dark.

  “I need some air,” I got out through heavy breaths.

  “Can you get air in here? The windows look sealed.”

  “For us, nothing is sealed.”

  Jo followed me back into the hallway and up to the final floor, where a keypad prohibited exit to the roof. I punched in the code, and cold air whipped through the crack between the door and the frame as it swung open. The roof was my favorite spot in NORCC, and my crew knew not to bother me when I went up there unless there was an emergency.

  From over the ledge, we could see the outskirts of the Outtie territory and the dome in the center. Every year the dome got darker and darker, cloudier and cloudier, like the sky before a storm. It reminded me of the headmistress’s snow globes before we smashed them, only the particles in the dome never settled.

  “Wow.” Jo peered over the ledge. “I’ve never seen the dome from the outside before.”

  We both watched the dome for a while, thinking. I leaned my elbows on the concrete divider that stood between us and certain death, and Jo did the same. The air smelled pleasant now that the dome was there to keep the stench of Addis inside, and dandelions spotted the grass below. Spring was just around the corner.

  “So why do you want to get back so badly?” I finally asked once my breathing had returned to normal.

  “Dad’s still in there.” It felt weird, her referring to him as our dad when I barely remembered the man.

  “So you want to rescue him?”

  “Of course.”

  “How? No adult Addis are allowed out of the dome.”

  Jo pursed her lips together, and I knew she wouldn’t tell me. Whatever secrets she had, she wanted to keep.

  “Why?” I asked, trying a different angle.

  “You see those tubes?” Jo pointed to the web of plastic tubes sticking out of the dome top like IV drips from patients’ arms. “Those bring oxygen into the dome and filter carbon dioxide and morphoid out on the way back, but they are built for a lot more than that. Once they get the government to sign off on their plan, the Authorities will release poison gas called phosgene into the air.”

  “Wasn’t phosgene used in World War I?” I asked.

  Jo shrugged. In the dome kids didn’t go to school, and though they may have heard war stories from World War III, the 1900s were as blank as a recently wiped whiteboard.

  “In chemistry class we would have named it carbonyl dichloride,” I continued, my nerves sending me into a nerd spiral.

  “Whatever it’s called, it’s lethal.” Jo frowned at the dome. “The Outties have a law in Congress called the Dome Deconstruction Act, which is just a fancy way of saying they’re going to destroy all the domes and everyone in them. It’s expected to pass at the end of April. The domes are too expensive, and the people inside have become subhuman in the minds of lawmakers. Every Addi in New Orleans knows it because an aid worker source leaked the intel, but no one can do anything about it. Maybe the House of Representatives would have had more heart, but now that they’ve disbanded the House and left only the Senate to make the rules, there’s no stopping them.”

  “They’re going to change the domes into killing machines?” I said, not quite believing her.

  “Change?” Jo scoffed. “That was their plan this whole time.”

  Chapter Three

  AFTER I sent Jo back to our room, I took the elevator to the fifth floor, where the unused library waited for me. I flicked on the light, and after a few blinks, the overhead bulbs hummed to life. No librarian observed from the checkout desk. No students whispered about crushes while they perused the aisles. My book from yesterday, The Catcher in the Rye, lay splayed out on one of the reading tables. It was hard to believe that book had been written over a century ago, before the Golden Age of the 2070s and the destruction that followed the discovery of morphoid.

  I passed the table and went to the shelves, where I’d organized the texts by the date I’d read them. The library collection was small, and half the books filled the bookcases on the left; I hoped to read them all before I left for the Army the next year.

  Several chemistry textbooks lay horizontal on one of the right shelves, and these I carried over to the reading table, along with several beat-up history books that covered the 1900s. Perhaps one of them would have a reference to phosgene, which I couldn’t get off my mind.

  The books were old and yellowed, and many of the essential pages had been ripped out over the years. Those that remained had pencil marks in the margins and highlighter lines within the passages, which I’d learned to overlook by then. I didn’t find any references to phosgene, but I did find an account of morphoid and its popularity in the early 2100s, leading up to the domes.

  Our history teachers had told us a similar story: morphoid had been rare and expensive in its early years, but once demand grew, production spiked, and the drug could be found on any street corner in the city. Those who hadn’t tried Mo-D fled the craze, while the rest descended into the drug-induced haze of The Urge. Twice as addictive as heroin, morphoid’s euphoria was even stronger and longer-lasting than any drug on the market at the time. Most of the Addis in the dome rarely knew how despondent they were supposed to be, since there was so much morphoid in the air.

  What they hadn’t told us, but what I discovered in a now-banned textbook called The Truth about Morphoid—which, had there been a librarian, would have been removed from the shelves instantly—was that morphoid had been originally created for recreational use by wealthy suburbanites. Too expensive to make it on the streets, a single dose of Mo-D sold at $100 a pop, versus the $15 average for heroin. Only with the invention of a cheaper creation process did morphoid enter the mainstream market, around the same time the wealthy patrons realized the side effects and bought out the first supply of available antimorph.

  I slammed the book closed and frown
ed at the picture of a pipe and its emission of gray smoke. How could one drug have brought so much destruction?

  “You okay?” someone asked from behind me. I knew it was Arla, since she was the only girl I allowed in the library and the only one who had any reason to come in the first place.

  “Not really.” I held up The Truth about Morphoid.

  “Did the new girl say something to you that upset you?” Arla asked as she sat down next to me and piled her schoolbooks on the table. Later, I’d have to walk her through every question on her homework sheets, but I didn’t feel like starting right then.

  “You could say that.”

  Arla hesitated, and then she said quickly, “I didn’t like the way she was looking at you.”

  “What way?”

  “Like you were the only flower left in a bulldozed garden. And you were looking at her the same way right back.”

  “Are you jealous?” I teased, and Arla’s face clouded over. She hated when I said things like that, though they were usually true.

  “So what if I am?”

  I pushed the books aside, scooted onto the table, and swung one of my legs over so that one hung on either side of Arla’s chair. Now I was taller than her, but only by a few inches.

  “I’m your queen,” I reminded her. “I can look at a new girl however I want.”

  Arla stood up so that she was again taller than me. She towered over me like NORCC towered over the empty land that surrounded it, and I remembered why I’d claimed her that first day she arrived from the dome seven years ago. Her shoulders were twice the size of any other girl in NORCC, let alone her tree-trunk arms and thick waist with a NORCC T-shirt stretched over it like a taut canvas.

  “In front of the others you’re my queen, but in here, when no one’s watching, you’re just Jayla to me. And I’m just Arla to you. Feel me?”

  I grabbed her by the waist and pulled her close. “I feel you.”

  She leaned down and kissed me hard, as though she needed to physically claim me.

  “Uh… am I interrupting something?” Jo had found me again, probably with the help of Tiny or Tree, who knew where to find me at most times during the day.

  I pushed Arla away at the sound of Jo’s voice, an act which seemed to irritate Arla even more.

  “Yes, actually,” Arla began. “If you could just fu—”

  “Cool it, Arla.”

  “Me? I’m not the one showing up where I’m not wanted.”

  Luckily, Jo could handle herself. “Disposal, isn’t it? The last I checked, Jayla came up here to read, so the way I see it, she doesn’t want either of us here. I have something extremely important to tell her. What’s your excuse?”

  Arla seemed floored by this, and I thought she and Jo would stand there in a staring contest all day, but eventually she huffed as she picked up her books and stomped off.

  “You aren’t going to tell her I’m your sister?” Jo asked as she took Arla’s seat.

  “I like watching her squirm. Arla’s been my right hand for years, but it’s made her too cocky, and if we’re going to get out of here, we’ll need her loyalty at its highest notch.”

  “You mean you’re coming with me?”

  I hadn’t realized what I’d decided until the words had come out of my mouth, but the call made sense. If the Outties were just going to stick me in an army with orders to gas the Addis in the domes, I had to get out while I could.

  “Seems so. What did you have to tell me?”

  “Nothing. I just wanted to piss Disposal off by pretending I had some big secret to share with you. I could use some help with math, though, if you’ve got a minute and you’re not too busy tutoring your special friend.”

  “She’s not my special friend,” I said, which was half-true. Outside NORCC Arla really would have just been my best friend, but the girl options in the center were limited. Not as limited as the guy options, of course—I pitied the straight girls who pined after every movement behind the glass of the boys’ building—but still.

  “Whatever you say, Sis. Just don’t let your ‘not special friend’ stab me in my sleep, deal?”

  “Deal.”

  Sitting in the library with Jo’s homework sheets in front of us, I forgot for a second where we were or what we faced outside those undecorated facility walls. I was just Jayla, a normal girl, helping her little sister with her homework.

  Then the alarm went off, and the reality of our situation returned full force.

  “What is that?” Jo asked, covering her ears to try to block out the bring-bring-bring of the bell.

  “Morphoid detector. It means someone’s got some Mo-D, and they were dumb enough to smoke it.”

  So much for normal, I thought as I told Jo to lie down on the ground with her hands over her head. Still, if I had to be stuck on the rehab floor for hours while I waited for the headmistress to track down the weakest link in our Addi chain, I couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather be lying next to.

  Chapter Four

  THE SEARCH went on for hours. We were eventually all gathered together in the cafeteria, where I did a quick headcount: 101 girls. That meant the smoker was in the room.

  After I found our table and planted Jo there with the others, I slowly began circling the cafeteria. Like a hound dog searching for its prey, I sniffed the air and sorted through the smells, casting aside body odor, deodorant, and the just-cleaned linoleum. I passed Leah and her crew, then several of the younger crowds, and right past the kids, who couldn’t have afforded the costly price of Mo-D.

  Breakfast from that morning, its cheesy eggs and chocolate pudding, threw my nose off for a while, but eventually I tuned them out like a radio dial and found what I was looking for: morphoid.

  It’s here.

  What is?

  I stopped in my tracks. The first thought had been mine, said in a deep baritone like the announcer of a scary movie, but the second had not come from me at all. My head whipped from table to table, and then eventually landed on my crew and a pair of bashful white eyes.

  Jo?

  Sorry. I meant to tell you first.

  What the hell is going on?

  It’s the eyes. Jo tapped the bridge between them. They’re not just a birth defect. They’re a part of something much bigger, though I’m not sure what.

  The smell of morphoid grew stronger, and I turned away from her to find it. Later there would be time for questions, but for now, I had a more immediate problem. If morphoid ran rampant in the school, the girls would fall on their knees, one by one, in front of a new queen.

  There. Yes. Back in the center of the cafeteria, back through the middle schoolers, back to….

  My table.

  Tree.

  No.

  I looked her in the eyes, but they flickered to the ceiling.

  “Are you holding?” I asked softly so that no one but our table could hear.

  “Jayla, it’s not like that—”

  “Answer me,” I hissed. “Are. You. Holding.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “You know my rules. Now listen and listen closely. I’m going to sit next to you, and you’re going to slip the baggie into the top of my combat boot.”

  “But Jayla—”

  “Now!” This I yelled, my temper flaring at her insubordination, and the other tables around us turned to stare.

  After I sat down, Tree did as she was told. The weight of the small baggie felt like an iron ball around my ankle, especially now that I sat so close to Tree and could smell its scent. My blood pumped faster in anticipation.

  “What are you going to do with it?” Jo whispered after the cafeteria went back to their whispers.

  “What Tree should have done the second she got it.”

  I stood up and approached one of the security guards on duty. They wore uniforms made to imitate police officers’, but in reality, most of them were harmless old women. No men were allowed in NORCC after the Investigation of 2097, when a scandal between
an officer and some of the girls came out, and since then most of the officers hadn’t changed. It was a pretty easy gig, considering we Addis didn’t have anywhere to go.

  “Excuse me, Miss Aggie,” I said to the nearest officer, using my sweetest please-make-an-exception-for-me voice. Yet another perk of being the longest resident: all the officers knew and loved me. “I really need to go to the bathroom.”

  “Headmistress Cain won’t like you leaving the cafeteria,” Miss Aggie said, but her face was already softening into a smile.

  “I know, and the last thing I’d want is to get you in trouble, but you see….” I leaned forward. “It’s an emergency—of the feminine kind.”

  “Oh my.” Miss Aggie imitated my posture, and I smelled her powdery scent. “You mean…?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid if I stay here much longer, everyone will realize it.”

  “You poor dear.” In any other setting, she might have hugged me. “Of course you can go. Just leave your bag here and come back for it once you’re done.”

  “Thank you so much.”

  Before any of the other guards could notice, I was through the door and down the hall. The fourth-floor bathrooms were stalls, so I went to the last one and locked the door before anyone could see me. The bathrooms were always freezing—apparently the heating system did not extend to this part of the building—and I shivered in my thin flannel shirt.

  The baggie had slipped down to my heel, so I fished it out and looked at it. Inside was gray powder the color of ash, perfectly packed like pressed snow. At its purest, morphoid was white, resembling snow even more, but no Addi could afford such unpolluted product. The desire to stick my pinkie in and take a taste was unbearable, an all-consuming lust stronger than anything I’d ever felt. Once the morphoid greed took over, I wouldn’t even remember why I’d ever wanted to flush it.

  Isn’t it beautiful, my mother used to say as she stared down at the aluminum foil holding her Mo-D. My father would hold the lighter below the foil, and then she would use a toilet paper tube to suck up the smoke. The most beautiful thing in the world except my precious girls.