by Suzanne Weyn
October 17, 2025 — Who says people can’t change? Don’t tell that to Kayla Marie Reed! She knows that it’s not so. The 17-year-old with the sunny smile has a lot to be happy about these days, but she’s been through some tough times.
You may have seen her sincere testimony on TV. It concerns the inner journey she’s been on, searching her conscience in regard to the bar code tattoo. In the poignant public service announcement, Kayla Marie recounts how, through rehabilitation counseling provided to her by Global-1 Psychiatric Outreach, she overcame a crippling trauma brought on by her presence at the Putnam Valley Tattooing Center the day that Gene Drake opened fire on innocent citizens.
Before this recovery could take place, however, Kayla became embroiled in the anti–bar code resistance headed by the group calling itself Decode. Breaking ties with friends and loved ones, Kayla Marie joined dissident groups hiding in the mountain ranges of northern New York State. Desperate to find his girlfriend, Tattoo Generation agent Zekeal Morrelle pursued her to the mountains only to be brutally beaten by Kayla Marie and a band of her violent cohorts. The price was high. A blow to Zekeal’s head cost him the sight in his right eye.
“I was so deluded,” Kayla Marie says now, a bit embarrassed and ashamed. “I actually believed at the time that I had psychic powers. I thought I caused a branch to fall on Zekeal’s head by using my mental abilities. How ridiculous!”
“I forgive her,” Zekeal is quick to add. “We’re engaged to be married now. I know we’re young, and we’ll wait a few years before we tie the knot, but we want to be engaged.”
Kayla Marie, who has a lifelong interest in art, has just been named the youth director of Tattoo Generation’s Public Murals Program. She will be in charge of designing and overseeing the painting of murals that depict the convenience and desirability of having a bar code tattoo.
“It is so fulfilling to finally be able to use my art,” Kayla Marie says.
The next day, Kayla left Dusa standing by the famous St. Louis arch so she could meet her contact. He’d give Dusa records of people who were dead, to be used in making fake bar codes.
Kayla walked down by the Mississippi, past a row of seaside restaurants. She shifted her pack on her shoulder. In it was an e-chip Dusa had entrusted to her. “It’s got info on Drakians all over the county,” Dusa had revealed as she’d slipped it into Kayla’s bag. “I don’t want to be carrying it when I meet this guy, just in case he isn’t who he says he is.”
Steamships came into the harbor. For a fee they took tourists for rides on the river. This might be a good time to test the fake bar code she wore to discover if it contained a bank account. She got in line, and to her pleased surprise, her fake rang through with the correct amount for her admittance. Her name rang up as Rose Wahmann.
When she got to the entrance gate, the attendant reached for her backpack. “You’ll need to check that for security reasons,” he said.
Kayla remembered the e-chip. It would make her feel safer if she kept that with her. “Let me just take out my wallet first,” she requested, working the buckles of the pack.
She was reaching into the bag when someone shoved her forcefully from behind. The impact came on the same spot where she’d been hit in Washington. It caused a searing pain to run down her back, dropping her to her knees.
“Hey!” the attendant shouted at the figure who dashed past Kayla. “She has your bag!”
Kayla stood up and took off at full speed in pursuit of the fleeing figure. Despite the pain in her back, she knew she couldn’t lose the e-chip. Whether this was a straightforward mugging or something more deliberate she didn’t know, but she couldn’t let that e-chip get to the wrong people.
She grew closer to the running figure as they raced along the riverside walkway. It was a female in a red hooded sweatshirt and the silver stretch jeans that had come into style. The hood was raised, obscuring the thief’s face and hair.
The thief raced off the walkway, hopping a chain-link fence. Kayla wasn’t sure she could be as agile but spotted a break in the fence several feet farther up. Running through the opening gave her a slight advantage since she was able to close in diagonally on the thief.
She continued to pursue the thief onto a narrow street filled with antique shops and hardware stores. The restored storefronts looked as though they were from early in the past century. The girl ducked into an alley, and Kayla followed her in. A flash of the red hood was all she glimpsed as the thief rounded the corner at the end of the alley. Starting to pant heavily, Kayla kept on her trail.
When she emerged from the alley she saw a hint of red dart into a doorway three buildings up on a quiet block of dilapidated, run-down tenements. Kayla continued up the block to the building.
Sucking in gulps of air, she stared at the building with its boarded-up windows. How brave did she feel? She shook off the question. There was no choice but to get that bag back.
She pulled open the splintered purple front door. Inside, the hall was dark, lit only with the filtered sunlight from a filthy side window beside the peeling door. A hideous smell assaulted her, and she saw that some animal had relieved itself in the corner.
Cautiously, she climbed the steep, narrow stairway. In the halls, doors had been removed from their hinges and apartments were empty. The handle of a broken hammer lay on the floor on the first landing, and she stooped to pick it up for protection. It was heavy and had a jagged, broken end that could prove dangerous to anyone coming at her.
She paused on the second-floor landing, clutching her weapon more tightly. Footsteps echoed from above her. Tilting her head slightly, she listened closely. How many people were up there?
As best as she could tell — just one.
Barely daring to breathe, she crept up the remaining stairs and entered another apartment that had been deprived of its front door. Lines of bright sunlight crept through the cracks in the boarded windows, affording her just enough light to see. She was in what had once been the living room and followed the sound of the footsteps toward a shadowy hall.
The thief stood at the far end of the hall digging through Kayla’s pack, impatiently tossing its contents onto the cracked linoleum floor.
Ducking into the empty room nearest her, Kayla peered around the doorway. She’d seen this place before. Where?
As the thief tossed the bag in disgust and pushed back her red hood, Kayla knew exactly where she’d seen it — in her vision!
The girl turned toward a cracked mirror hanging on the wall behind her. As she looked at herself, Kayla saw her, too. Overbleached platinum hair. Heavily made-up eyes and a smear of bloodred lipstick.
And Kayla’s face.
Kayla covered her mouth in surprise, but not in time. The girl heard her involuntary gasp of shock and whirled toward it.
Kayla stepped out into the hall, firmly clenching the broken handle. “You stole my pack,” she said, stepping forward. “I need it back.”
“Take it,” the thief said, belligerently jerking her chin toward the bag. “There’s nothing worth crap in it, anyhow.”
As Kayla grew closer, the girl could see her more clearly. “Wait a minute,” she said, a nervous shake coming into her voice. “I’ve seen you before, it was …”
“In a vision,” Kayla finished.
“Yeah,” the girl agreed softly, staring at Kayla, her black-rimmed eyes widening with every step Kayla advanced. “In my mind I saw you at the steamboat. I saw you, but only from the back. I thought it meant that you had something in your pack that would be worth a lot. That you’d be a good mark. And sure enough, when I went down there today — there you were.”
Kayla asked, “Don’t you notice something else? Can’t you see how alike we are?”
Apparently, the superficial differences between them were all the girl saw. She cocked her head to the side and gazed at Kayla with complete incomprehension.
Kayla went to the girl’s side and faced the mirror. “Look,” she urged. The two faces we
re aligned perfectly beside each other. The girls were the same height, their faces the same shape, their noses had the same slope, their foreheads the same width. If Kayla had wanted to become identical to this other person, all she’d have to do was bleach her hair and pile on makeup. With a quick glance at the girl’s wrist, Kayla saw she had no bar code.
The girl got it. The fact was evident in the amazed, slightly unnerved expression on her face. “This is banged out,” she murmured.
“What’s your name?” Kayla asked.
“Kara.”
Kayla turned to her, disbelief written across her face. Could they be twins separated at birth?
“Where were you born?” Kayla asked.
“Somewhere in Missouri.”
“You don’t know exactly where?”
Kara shook her head. “I don’t remember where my first foster home was. I was in a bunch of them until I split from the last one and went solo.”
“How long ago was that?” Kayla asked.
“Just before I turned seventeen. I don’t know — March, I think. I remember everything was real muddy the day I took off. It was pouring rain.”
Kara showed Kayla the large empty room where she slept on a fake fur coat she’d found in a Salvation Army donation bin. She showed her the drawings she’d done of her visions. She had a pile of them that she kept in a musty, cobweb-crossed closet. When she pulled them out, she had to brush rodent droppings from their surfaces. “Damn rats,” she muttered without too much agitation. This was how her life was, and she seemed resigned to it.
The pencil drawings were crude, their perspective awkward in places. Yet Kayla thought they indicated a deep natural ability for art. They were vivid in their detail, and their bold lines seemed expressive of the artist’s intense reaction to everything she saw, both the ugly and the beautiful.
“These are unbelievable,” Kayla murmured as she inspected them one by one. Even more than the execution of the drawings, it was their subject matter that held her there, fascinated.
The first was a drawing of a house on fire — Kayla’s house.
“That was a vision I had last spring, sometime around May. I heard a woman shouting, and then this crazy fireball roared up the hall,” Kara recalled with a shiver. “It was different from the vision I’ve been having since I was thirteen. It’s a different house from the one in the other vision.”
“Tell me about the other vision,” Kayla said.
Kara pulled a drawing from the pile and put it on top. It was a pencil drawing of a house burning. A girl of about seven or eight was standing outside it, laughing as flames engulfed the building. The girl bore a striking resemblance to Kara. It could have been Kayla, too.
“Is this you?” Kayla asked, pointing to the girl in the picture.
“I don’t know,” Kara admitted. “In the vision I’m never sure. It seems to be me, and yet I don’t know any of the people I’m thinking about or recognize the house.”
“So much fire,” Kayla noted, half to herself.
Kara nodded, taking the drawings and studying them as if for the first time. “I was banged out about it for weeks, afraid it meant this firetrap dump was going to go up in smoke. I still worry about it.”
“It isn’t your future,” Kayla told her, speaking quietly. “One drawing is of my house. It burned last May.”
“Your house?” Kara asked, stunned.
“Yes, and this other house has a child in it, this laughing child. It’s not my house, and it isn’t this building.”
“I wonder if one of us will have a child who looks like this in the future.”
Kayla studied Kara’s face, now fixed into an expression of almost childlike awe by the full realization that she was staring at a twin. Without the hard expression she’d worn at first, she looked even more like Kayla. And there was clearly a mental connection between them.
“Do you have any idea who your parents are?” Kayla asked cautiously, uneasy about posing such a sensitive question.
Kara laughed bitterly. “At my last foster home they hinted that she was some kind of addict, but I don’t know if that was real or they were just being their evil selves. I had to escape before they made me get that banged-out bar code on my birthday. When you make your life on the street, you don’t need one. I see you don’t have a real one. You can spot the fakes if you know what to look for. They start to flake a little after a while. The real tattoo doesn’t. Why don’t you have one? Not seventeen yet?”
“I turned seventeen on April sixteenth,” Kayla replied.
Kara’s jaw fell. “Me, too! April sixteenth!”
“We must be twins!” Kayla said.
Kara held up three fingers.
“You had a vision of another one of us?” Kayla dared ask. “Was it someone in a desert? Someone … frightening?”
Kara shook her head. “No, I saw someone reading palms. She was good at it, too, because she was like me.”
“What do you mean, like you? Could you see her face?”
“No, it was more like I was thinking her thoughts, looking out of her eyes,” Kara revealed. “But she was a good palm reader because she had the same ability as me.”
“What ability?” Kayla asked.
“I can see the future. She can, too, but she pretends she sees it in palms. She doesn’t. It’s the visions. Her visions come faster than mine.”
Kayla realized that it meant that there were four of them, three of whom could see visions of the future. Could the girl in the desert see ahead, too? She moved the picture of the child and the burning house to the bottom of the pile and looked at the next drawing, a desert landscape with a blue tent standing in the middle of the vast desert emptiness. “I’ve had a vision like this, too,” she told Kara. “I saw this same scene in one of them, only I didn’t see the tent.”
“Crazy,” Kara murmured. “I should tell you that I’m pretty sure somebody’s looking for me.”
“Your parents,” Kayla guessed.
“No. I don’t know who it is, but someone tried to grab me the other night when I came back late. Another time before that, two men chased me. I can’t let them get me. I have a feeling they know I have visions.”
Kayla recalled her meeting with Eutonah in the Waters Shed jail. She’d warned her that Global-1 was looking for her — and not just because she didn’t have a bar code tattoo or even for her supposed involvement in her mother’s death in the fire. Why, then? And why were they also searching for this other girl, Kara, who was identical to her?
Suddenly, Kayla’s problems seemed much bigger and more complex than they had been before.
“Thank God you didn’t lose that e-chip,” Dusa said that night when she and Kayla were once again on the East/West CrossLink blasting down the halogen-illuminated superhighway at top speed. “We have to have all that info so we can find one another. If that stuff had gotten into the hands of G-1…” She shuddered, her shoulders quivering. “Turned out my contact was on the level, and I got the records with no problem. But I couldn’t chance having that chip on me in case it was a setup.”
Kayla nodded, but she was only half listening. She couldn’t stop thinking about Kara. She’d left her in that abandoned building, subsisting as a petty thief rather than be bar-coded. There hadn’t been any way to take her along — it would have been too risky.
Although the girl was uneducated and rough, Kayla saw herself in Kara. They were both artistic, loved to draw. Both had an instinctive aversion to the bar code tattoo. And they had seen the same vision, gazing through a stranger’s eyes out into a desert landscape.
As Dusa and Kayla approached a brightly illuminated billboard on the CrossLink, Dusa let out a low, long whistle. “Would you look at that,” she said. “You’re all over the place, kiddo!”
Kayla’s smiling face appeared splashed across the giant sign, hundreds of feet high. Her hair was perfect. Her teeth gleamed with the unnatural incandescence of the digitally retouched. Above her was written: I LOVE
MY BAR CODE TATTOO!
“That makes me want to scream!” Kayla cried. It enraged her that someone was using her image to promote the thing she hated most in the world.
“Scream if you like, but we can do better than that.” Dusa eased the truck off the highway and onto the shoulder. Leaning over, she opened the glove compartment and removed what looked like a foot-long aluminum tube. “Wait here,” Dusa advised as she slipped out of the truck.
Kayla peered out the window as Dusa moved quickly to the sign and scrambled up the ladder to its bottom platform, disappearing into the darkness behind it. She looked at the image of her face and was struck by a thought that made her draw in a quick breath of stunned surprise.
What if this girl wasn’t a digital fake? What if she was another look-alike, the same as Kara? If so, it meant that, at the very least, there were five of them!
Dusa jumped back into the truck, tossed her aluminum bar to the floor, and turned on the engine. “We’d better get going fast,” she said, already pulling onto the CrossLink.
“What did you do?” Kayla asked.
“That tube’s a welder’s torch.” A deeply self-satisfied grin slowly spread across Dusa’s face. “Look out your side mirror.”
Kayla gazed at the billboard’s reflection in the side mirror as a line of flame caught hold and raced up its right side. In seconds, the fiery sign was illuminating the black night sky.
They left the CrossLink and turned onto the old Nevada State Highway 487 and went six more miles to the small town of Baker near the Great Basin Desert. “It’s the largest desert in the United States,” Dusa told Kayla. “The Mojave Desert is to the south of it and so is the Sonoran Desert.”
“It sounds like a whole lot of desert,” Kayla commented.
“More than three times the size of England,” Dusa agreed. “It’s surrounded by the Rocky Mountains on the east and the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the west.”