by Suzanne Weyn
Lee, the gray cat they’d found in the forest, raced out of the trees. He had something in his mouth and was heading for her. “Oh, no!” she gasped. He had a small black-and-white bird, a chickadee.
He laid it at her feet, nearly dead. One of its wings hung limply, unhinged, and it shivered.
“Oh, God. Poor bird,” Mfumbe sympathized, standing beside her. The bird stopped shivering and lay there, still.
Kayla picked up the small creature and covered it in her hands. Walking away from Mfumbe, she imagined her hands becoming warm with her own life energy. She shut her eyes and imagined the energy as being blue, then she directed the stream of blue into the bird. She did this until her knees began to quiver. Still, she kept directing the energy. Streaks of various colors shot like fireworks in the darkness behind her eyelids. Her entire body trembled.
And in her hands something stirred. The smallest fluttering of a wing.
Uncupping her hands, she saw the bird’s chest gently rising and falling.
It looked at her, then righted itself and flew to the nearest branch. After resting there a moment, it rose up and soared through the blue Adirondack sky.
Mfumbe wrapped his arms around her. Completely spent of energy, she slumped against him. “Amazing,” he said softly.
Tears of exhaustion and joy welled in her eyes. Despite her fatigue, she had never felt so strong.
“Where do you suppose he’s going?” Mfumbe said.
“Home,” she replied, somehow certain. “Going home.” The word home resonated inside her and she thought of the song her mother used to sing.
I’m like a bird, I only fly away….
Those words weren’t true for her anymore. She’d found her power and her soul. And her home was inside her. There was no bar code on her wrist, and she felt proud of that. She hadn’t given herself over to anything that would control or diminish her — not to Zekeal, not to Global-1. She’d protected herself and Mfumbe by breaking a branch with her mind, and she would use the power of her mind again.
She looked up at Mfumbe. “All right. I think we can do this,” she said. “I’ll go back. I’ve seen a vision and I see us winning. It’s worth risking everything.”
How I Came to Write The Bar Code Tattoo
THE END IS NEAR! That’s what the flyer in my hands said. In fact, it gave the exact date and time. My friend Mary had just flown in from Texas that day and someone had handed the paper to her in the airport. Now she handed it to me as a joke. “Very funny,” I said.
Later, though, I read it more carefully. The reason for this coming cataclysm, it went on to say, was that the prophecies as laid out in the biblical book of Revelations were about to be fulfilled. The last fulfillment was that Europe was about to be united and everyone would be branded with a bar code. The guideposts of the bar code were equivalent to the mark of the devil. Without the “mark of the devil” no one would be able to buy or sell. That’s what got me thinking. If you couldn’t buy or sell, you’d really be in big trouble.
The date for “the end” came and went. But I was still thinking about buying and selling. The implications led me to write a piece of short fiction that was essentially the story of the Thorn family. But that story made me wonder what kind of info would be contained in the bar code. While I was pondering this, the Human Genome project was going on and — while I was thinking about that — Nelly Furtado was singing her plaintive song on the radio. Suddenly, everything everywhere seemed relevant to the story developing inside me. It all poured itself into Kayla’s journey — and I guess that’s a pretty fair description of the creative process. At any rate, it’s the story of how I came to write The Bar Code Tattoo.
—Suzanne Weyn
Also by Suzanne Weyn
The Bar Code Rebellion
The Bar Code Prophecy
Reincarnation
Distant Waves: A Novel of the Titanic
Empty
The Invisible World: A Novel of the Salem Witch Trials
Copyright © 2004 by Suzanne Weyn. All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
This edition first printing, October 2012
Cover art by Jonathan Barkat / Cover design by Steve Scott
e-ISBN 978-0-545-34263-6
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