by Suzanne Weyn
“My birthday?” Grace echoed. “Why should that matter?”
“You’d better come with us,” Eric suggested. “There are some people you should meet.”
“Eric, I’m really scared. What’s this about?” Grace asked.
“There’s no reason to be scared,” Eric assured her. “For what it’s worth, I won’t leave your side. Unless, of course, you ask me to.”
Katie disappeared into the back of the tractor trailer and came back wheeling a motorcycle with two helmets strapped to it. “I have to get this rig out of here,” she explained. “It’s not exactly easy to hide this thing. In case I get stopped, I don’t want them to find you. Eric, take her to the garage.”
“Sure,” Eric agreed as Katie and Mfumbe put down the truck’s back ramp and wheeled the motorcycle down. “Ever ridden on one of these?” he asked Grace.
She shook her head. She was nervous but excited to try it. With the way her day was going, what harm was a motorcycle ride going to do?
Eric handed her one of the helmets. “Climb on behind me and hang on tight to my waist,” he advised.
“See ya back at the ranch,” Katie said as she and Mfumbe returned to the truck’s cab.
“The ranch?” Grace asked. “For real?”
“She’s kidding,” Eric explained. “You’ll see.”
The truck pulled away. Grace and Eric followed and were soon zooming down the roadway. Grace clenched her eyes shut and her arms ached from holding Eric so tightly. Although she’d always wanted to ride a motorcycle, she never thought she’d really get the opportunity. Her parents would never have allowed it. The experience was thrilling and terrifying all at once.
After three blocks, she dared to open her eyes and observe the buildings going by as Eric zipped around corners, eventually turning into an alley between two skyscrapers. At the end of it, a wide garage door stood open. They pulled inside.
Electronic doors closed behind them and the floor they were on began to descend. Grace realized they were inside a large elevator car that was transporting them several levels underground. Finally the car elevator clanked to a jarring stop.
The wall opposite the one they’d entered through opened, revealing an immense underground parking garage. Eric revved the engine and drove slowly into the cavernous space, which was filled with cars, vans, and trucks, including several tractor trailers.
“Where are we?” Grace asked as soon as she and Eric had pulled off their helmets. The elevator left their floor and then returned with Katie and Mfumbe in the truck.
“This is your all-purpose hideout,” Eric said with a grin. “Katie calls it the ranch. Decode trackers can’t find us under here because we’re too deep underground.”
“If a meteor were to hit Earth, do you think we would be safe down here?” Grace questioned, looking around at the immense, dank space with its gray walls and exposed pipes. Every so often the news report about the meteor would pop, unbidden and random, into her head. She wasn’t really worried about it; she simply couldn’t get it completely off her mind.
“What?” Eric asked.
Grace smiled wryly. “Sorry. It’s strange, but in the middle of all this craziness, I can’t stop thinking about the meteor that’s supposed to be heading our way.”
“It’s supposed to pass us, isn’t it?” Eric answered.
“That’s what they’re saying,” Grace agreed.
Eric chuckled with a dark amusement. “I think we have enough other things to worry about right now.”
“Absolutely, but are we deep enough underground to be safe?”
“We’re deep enough to block a satellite signal. That’s all I know,” Eric said. “Don’t worry about the meteor. It seems like there’s one flying by every few years.”
A young woman approached them, walking from across the garage. Grace immediately knew who she was — how could she not? It may have been illegal to have the poster of Kayla Reed openly displayed, because President Waters had declared her an enemy of the state. Still, her image was everywhere, and Grace would recognize the eighteen-year-old’s lean, high-boned face anywhere.
Kayla and Mfumbe faced each other and held hands, clearly a couple. Kayla lay her forehead on Mfumbe’s chest and shut her eyes, as did he. They stood that way for several beats without moving.
“What’s that about?” Grace asked Eric.
“They’re telepaths,” Eric explained. “The early bar code resisters learned to speak with their minds. Many of them still communicate that way.”
“Can you do that?” Grace was afraid the answer would be yes.
“No. It takes too much training. I’d rather be climbing.”
Grace covered her tattooed wrist with her other hand, suddenly ashamed even though the tattoo was supposed to be safe now. It suddenly felt all wrong to be bar coded here in the presence of these resisters.
Lifting her head, Kayla caught Grace’s movement and smiled warmly. “It’s all right,” she said, brushing back her chin-length light brown hair as she broke away from Mfumbe and approached. “You didn’t know, and we didn’t get to you in time.”
“I didn’t know what?” Grace asked.
“You didn’t know not to get the tattoo,” Kayla replied.
Grace waited for Eric to tell Kayla that he had, in fact, warned her. But he kept quiet, kept this secret for her.
Katie and Mfumbe walked toward them. Glancing at her companions, Grace saw that they all wore bar code tattoos on their wrists. “I don’t understand,” she said.
“Oh, this?” Kayla took a plastic bottle of clear mineral oil and a cloth from the large satchel she had slung across her chest. She held out her wrist and poured oil from the bottle onto her tattoo, rubbing it with a cloth. Her wrist was instantly smeared black.
“Hey, those things don’t grow on trees, you know!” Katie objected.
Kayla spoke as she continued rubbing away her tattoo. “I need a new press-on. This fake is shot,” she explained calmly. “There’s no more money in the bank account attached to it, and when I tried to use it today, the scanner came up reading DECEASED.”
“Are you kidding?” Mfumbe asked. Distressed, he inspected his own tattoo nervously.
“No joke.”
“That is seriously banged out,” Eric murmured.
This is beyond banged out, Grace thought. Yesterday — this morning — she was working at GlobalHelix headquarters. And now she was in an underground parking garage with the leaders of Decode. Because of years and years of Global-1 messaging, the constant alerts and info blasts the corporation sent to her cell phone, she knew what she was supposed to do: Play along, get information, then turn them in.
Could she do that? Grace felt as though every circuit in her brain was suddenly cross-wired. She liked these people. They spoke to her as though she were one of them. And Eric was one of them, after all. She’d admired him for so long. He was a hero in her school — not to mention this attraction that was between them lately. How could she turn him in?
The answer was that she couldn’t.
Maybe she should just try to get away and not mention them. She could say she was blindfolded or knocked out. But first she had to find out what was going on.
Katie had crossed the wide aisle and climbed into the cab of a tractor trailer. Sitting in the driver’s seat with the door open, she took a metal box from the passenger side and opened it. “This one should be good for a while,” she said, handing Kayla a delicate piece of plastic, resembling cellophane tape, with a bar code imprinted on it.
Kayla took a facecloth from her pack and wet it at a nearby water fountain. Pressing the flexible plastic to her inner wrist, she put the damp cloth over it. When she lifted the cloth, a new bar code tattoo was there on her wrist.
Grace looked to Eric with a questioning expression. “Is your bar code tattoo a fake also?” she asked.
Eric nodded. “We all have fakes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this the other night when we w
ere talking about it?” She remembered how tentative he’d seemed, as though he wanted to reveal something but had decided against it.
“Grace, I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t sure I wanted to involve you in all this.”
“Well, I’m involved now,” Grace said.
“I know. I’m sorry.” Eric’s apology was so sincere it seemed to hurt him. “There are a lot of things I didn’t realize then that I know now.”
“Like what?” Grace demanded.
“We’ll tell you everything we know in a minute,” Katie cut in. Then she turned to Kayla and said, “We’d better tell Jack about your bum fake. That shouldn’t have happened.”
“Is he here?” Kayla asked.
“He’s in the back with Allyson,” Mfumbe said. “They’ve been here all day making changes on the swing-lo.”
“Let’s go talk to him about this,” Katie suggested. “We’ll be right back,” she added, turning to Eric and Grace.
“The swing-lo?” Grace asked Eric as the others walked toward the far end of the garage.
“This garage is where they build them,” he answered.
“But what is it?”
“It’s this cool flying saucer that this guy from Ireland, Jack Kelly, invented. Some mysterious billionaire is funding the thing, so Jack and his business partner, Allyson Minor, are working to get them into production.”
“Why do the others have to talk to them about the fake tattoos?”
“Jack is a genius computer hacker and he works with Decode,” Eric explained. “I heard he’s been writing advanced computer code from the time he was eleven — and he never even went to college. He’s the one who hacks into bank and government files and gets out the information on people who have passed away. A lot of times the dead people have left bank accounts with unclaimed funds in them. Jack is able to convert this info into bar code form and doctor it so the birth dates seem current.”
“So your bar code tattoo has the name of a dead person in it?” Grace asked.
“Yeah,” Eric replied. “It’s not foolproof, but as long as nobody is paying close attention, it enables us to buy stuff and not get arrested for walking around without a bar code.”
Eric took Grace’s hand. All at once, she felt electrified by his touch and soothed by the strength and firmness of his grip. “Come on,” he said gently. “I’ll show you the swing-lo. It’s final level. You’ll like it.”
He led her in the direction that the others had gone. Clusters of people were gathered in different sections of the garage. They spoke in low tones and their discussions appeared serious. Some individuals slept in sleeping bags inside the parked cars, others curled up on the hoods. They looked up sleepily as Eric and Grace passed. A few nodded to Eric, acknowledging that they’d seen him before.
“Who are these people?” Grace asked quietly.
“Some Decode, mostly Drakians.”
“Why do they call themselves Drakians?” Grace asked.
“They admire Gene Drake, the tattooer who got shot for refusing to do more tattoos. The Global-1 cops claimed he was threatening people lined up for the tattoo, but he wasn’t. He and a friend had hacked their way into the Global-1 database and knew that the company was encoding genetics and injecting nanobots. They killed him so he could never tell. They claimed his friend killed himself, but I doubt it. They murdered him.”
Again, Grace felt torn between what she was being told now and what she’d been told for the rest of her life. In the Global-1 version of events, the Drakians were the murderers, stopping at nothing to overthrow order. And looking around, there was something a little disconcerting about their presence — these were not people with jobs, not people with families who lived in houses and paid mortgages. They were so outside the margins, she wondered how they could judge what was in the margins. Especially if they backed their judgment with violence.
But she couldn’t say any of this to Eric, could she? Not here. She knew she was supposed to feel safe, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. It was all too new.
It was unnerving to think that these people knew about her. Kayla had said Grace’s name had come up. Why? How? There was so much more she needed to find out. The most important question, of course, was her family’s whereabouts. They’d left so fast that they couldn’t even wait for her! Did they think she’d be better off on her own? Grace knew her parents would never simply take off without serious thought to her welfare. They just weren’t like that.
“Hey, Eric, is that her?” asked a guy who had been reading a newspaper, sprawled across the hood of his car.
Eric gave the guy a quick wave. “Mission accomplished,” he replied.
“Final level!” the guy cheered. Others looked up and there was a wave of applause and cheering.
“Welcome to our home sweet home, Grace!” a young woman called.
Grace nodded and smiled uncomfortably. “Do they all know my name?” Grace whispered to Eric.
“Pretty much,” Eric confirmed. “Drakians pride themselves on constantly knowing things. They have a really great underground spy network. Some of them may look like bums, but a lot of them come from wealthy families, and their parents are super connected. They get top level information just by being around their homes once in a while.”
“And what about the others?” Grace asked.
Eric smiled, as though her question amused him. “They’re bums.”
“No. Really?”
“Yeah, really. But street people hear things, too, important things.”
“And nobody minds that they’re here?” was the most Grace could think to ask. “Do they live here?”
“Hard to say. They come and they go. No one questions it. The same guy who funds the swing-lo owns this garage. He’s completely mysterious. The guys Jack and Allyson speak to are just agents for the guy with the money. He thinks Jack and Allyson are just using the space for their swing-lo business, but since they’re also Decode operatives, Jack and Allyson let us operate out of here.”
They came to a spot where Katie, Kayla, and Mfumbe stood talking to a young man and woman — Grace assumed they were Jack and Allyson. Behind them sat something large and mechanical covered with a bright blue tarp. Grace guessed it must be the swing-lo, though what a swing-lo was, she still had no real idea.
Jack appeared to be in his early twenties, of medium height, with deep blue eyes. Grace couldn’t help but be struck by his movie-star good looks.
Allyson’s most striking feature was her halo of shoulder-length blond curls. Although she was heavier than was fashionable, she had an appealing, open face.
“Someone has out-hacked us,” Jack said raking his hand through his shaggy-cut blond hair. “That’s got to be the only answer.”
“Why my fake and no one else’s?” Kayla questioned.
“Because you’re the most well-known bar code resister. Your story has been all over the papers. Naturally they would look for your fake first,” Jack deduced. “It’s got to be Global-1 that’s doing this.”
“They probably haven’t gotten access to every fake,” Allyson suggested hopefully. She turned to Kayla. “Have the K clones complained of bad fakes?”
“I haven’t heard from them lately,” Kayla replied.
Once again, Grace could hardly believe this was happening. It amazed her that she should find herself among these people she had read about.
Six months earlier Grace had perused a magazine article on Kayla and her five clones, who were like twins, but not exactly, because each of them was increasingly transgenic. Their genes had been spliced with those of sparrows. Kayla was called K-1, with the least amount of bird gene. The one they called Karen was K-6. Heavily autistic and disheveled looking, she had never left the GlobalHelix complex until Kayla and the others liberated her; Karen was the one who had memorized the algorithms that shut down the nanobots controlled by the bar code tattoo.
Jack noticed Grace and Eric for the first time and smiled. “Hey, Eric, who’s yo
ur friend?”
“It’s her, Jack,” Katie said before Eric could introduce Grace. “She’s the one we’ve been telling you about, the one our informant told us to pick up. She’s in big trouble.”
Big trouble? Grace wished someone would give her an answer to what was happening.
Kayla nodded, turning toward Grace. “It sounds like they’re onto you, Grace.”
What were they talking about? “Me? Who’s onto me?”
“Global-1, of course,” Mfumbe told her. “They’ve been waiting for you to turn seventeen for a long time. Something big is going to go down now.”
“Why?” Grace said.
But it was as if she hadn’t said anything.
“Do you really think this is it?” Kayla asked him.
Mfumbe nodded his head emphatically and spread his arms wide in a gesture that said it should be obvious. “It’s all in the prophecy.”
Katie shot Mfumbe a hard look of disapproval. Grace realized he had said something in front of her that Katie hadn’t wanted revealed.
Prophecy?
“Why can’t she know?” Mfumbe challenged Katie. “She’s as deeply involved in this as any of us.”
“Not the prophecy. Not yet,” Katie spoke in a low tense tone that was almost a growl.
Mfumbe turned his back to her and began walking away. “We’re never going to see eye to eye on this, Katie. It’s just that simple.”
Grace longed to ask what this was about, but the atmosphere was so tense she couldn’t find the nerve. Not anymore.
True to his word, Eric was still at her side. She didn’t know how to interpret his silence. Did he know what they were talking about? If so, was he going to tell her later?
“Mfumbe has a good point,” Kayla said to Katie.
“Don’t defend him just because the two of you are together,” Katie snapped.
Kayla drew back, offended by the comment. “That’s not true and you know it! How can she help us with The Bar Code Prophecy if we don’t tell her about it?