Kayla stepped back quickly into the shadowy station doorway. Could he see her there across the road staring up at him? He didn’t appear to, though she pressed her aching back more firmly against the door, just to be sure.

He was dressed in a jumpsuit, the official Tattoo Gen uniform. One of his eyes was covered with a black patch. Had she done that? According to the article in The Lake Placid News, she and Mfumbe had “brutally attacked” him. In reality, he and the others from Tattoo Gen were the ones who had violently raided their encampment atop Whiteface Mountain. Kayla had been shot and Mfumbe had been trying to protect her when Kayla used her psychic powers to drop a tree limb onto Zekeal. She hadn’t intended to blind him, but obviously she had, in one eye.

Oh, well, she thought coldly. She couldn’t believe he’d ever meant so much to her. Briefly, she wondered if he was still involved with Nedra Harris. The petite fascist was now the national spokesperson for Tattoo Gen. The two of them deserved each other.

Zekeal went back inside just as a GlobalTrak BulletBus came around the corner. Kayla ran across the street to catch it. Her heart skipped a beat with nervous anticipation as, climbing up to the bus’s scanner, she flashed her fake bar code for payment. The scanner beeped her through. It had worked!

The BulletBus traveled silently toward her house, running smoothly on its underground electromagnetic track, passing so many familiar sights. She went by the crummy motel where her best friend, Amber Thorn, had been forced to live after something in her parents’ bar codes had derailed their lives. Unable to get a mortgage, her father fired from his job, even denied fuel for their cars, the Thorns had moved to Nevada to live with a relative, an eccentric aunt who nonetheless possessed a viable bar code tattoo.

The last time she’d received an e-mail from Amber was the previous May. Amber’s Aunt Emily was against modern advances like computers, but Amber had reached Kayla from an Internet address at a cybercafé in Carson City. Apparently, Aunt Emily was driving the family insane with her strict, weird ways. Amber had sounded pretty miserable.

Kayla’s last attempt at communicating with Amber had been in September, on the very day she and Mfumbe had decided to join the Decode March on Washington. It had been her turn to act as runner, and she’d delivered a batch of handwritten letters to one of the Postmen.

The BulletBus continued past Artie’s Art Supply, or at least where Artie’s Art Supply had once been. Now the store was gone and a HealthBurger concession stood in its place. Kayla remembered how she’d shown up for work one afternoon only to discover that the store was locked and that Artie, his wife, and his two little girls, all of whom had lived above the store, were gone. Artie and his wife were not bar-coded. Kayla wondered what had become of them.

After a few minutes, Kayla got off the BulletBus on a residential street of narrow, attached row houses. Before reaching her own home, she came to the house where Gene Drake had lived with Francis and Nate.

She gasped at the sight of a small terrier sitting on the front steps. Gene’s dog! It sat amid bouquets of flowers in front of a door heavily graffitied with various slogans and remarks done by different writers. GENE DRAKE WAS A HERO! GENE DRAKE (1997–2025) HIS SPIRIT LIVES ON. GLOBAL-1 WILL BE UNDONE!!

Some of the bouquets were wilted, even dead, but new ones lay on top. Someone had attempted to rub off the writing, but fresh comments were scrawled over the smear of erasures.

A young boy came around from the back of the house and put a leash on the terrier’s collar. “Stop coming here every day!” he scolded the dog, his voice warm with affection despite his sharp words. “You’re our dog now,” he added as he tugged the dog away from the steps.

Strange, Kayla thought, not for the first time, that an odd character like Gene Drake — heavyset and badly groomed, reeking of cigarette smoke, nervous and uncharismatic — should be so deified and adored after his death.

A red leaf dropped from a nearby maple tree. Then another fluttered to the ground. A wind was blowing them all down, one by one. She watched them fall, forgetting about everything else….

She is standing in a desert, a hot breeze burning her skin. Blue mountains in the far distance. Feelings of hatred. Rage. Murderous thoughts. She will show them all the power of her genius, show what a mind expanded many times beyond its usual dimensions can do. If they want to play God, she can play God, too. They will not cage her, no matter what!

Someone walked up beside her. His presence jolted her back to reality.

“Postal delivery,” said the young man in dark glasses standing beside her. A Postman. He handed her an envelope with the name Kayla Marie Reed written on it.

“How did you find me?” she asked him.

“The kid with the terrier saw you,” he replied as he walked away.

Kayla glanced down at the handwriting on the envelope. It was a script she knew well.

She smiled.