Back at Allyson’s apartment that night, Kayla lay flat on the futon couch, her eyes shut, thinking, remembering Kass’s words. The phoenix — the bird that is burned to ashes but rises to live again.
KM-5, Kendra, had called herself the phoenix, but KM-6 was really the one. She was not dead, only hiding. Hiding someplace where they could never find her.
Allyson came in the front door and crossed the room to Kayla. She sat on the edge of the cushion. “Jack is still at Caltech seeing what he can learn about the Drakians your friend, Artie, said are in the area. I hope he doesn’t sneak into the computer room to try to find those algorithms. Helen of Troy can’t get them. The codes are too packed with security — but Jack seems hell-bent on trying, anyway.”
“It means a lot to him,” Kayla remarked. “It means a lot to us all, really.”
“Well, it seems hopeless to me,” Allyson said. “Anyway, I came back to check on you. Are you okay?”
Kayla turned around to her side, swinging her legs onto the floor. “Yeah. It was a little upsetting when Kass started screaming at me to go put out the fire.” At the end of their talk, Kass had become hysterical, as though the horror of what she saw beyond her blindness was more than she could stand. She stood and demanded that Kayla leave and go do what she had to do. Kayla had backed out of the room, stumbling in the dark, relieved to find Jack and Allyson waiting for her outside.
“I was remembering your other clone, the one pretending to be you,” Allyson said. “Did you see the way she kept rubbing her eyes?”
“I figured she was just trying not to cry,” Kayla recalled.
“I don’t think that was it.” Allyson turned on the TV and used the remote to put on the press conference scene that she’d recorded. Zekeal and the fake Kayla stood in front of the crowd. The Kayla clone kept rubbing her eyes. Allyson slowed the action and zoomed in on it. Her eyes were red and irritated but completely dry. “One of the side effects of Propeace12 released by the nanobots is keratoconjunctivitis sicca.”
“I remember reading that, but what is it?”
“I looked it up. It’s dry eye.”
“Dry eye?” Kayla echoed as Allyson’s meaning washed over her. “You’re saying that she’s tranqued up on nanobot-released Propeace12?”
“I’d bet you anything,” Alyson said. “The poor girl probably isn’t sure who she is, she’s so spun around on the stuff.”
“Yet we’re all so different. Why is Kass the only one who is blind? Why is Kendra so violent?”
“Nature versus nurture,” Allyson suggested. “Our genes aren’t the only thing that makes us who we are. Our environments and our parents affect us. You were all raised by different people, under different circumstances, in different homes. Maybe there was something in Kass’s nutrition or in her home or neighborhood that caused her blindness. Or she could have been in an accident.”
“True,” Kayla said. “We also have different degrees of transgenic avian genes.”
“Not only that,” Allyson added. “Genes have multiple tasks. When they began trying to genetically cure sickle cell anemia they discovered that the same gene made people resistant to malaria. By knocking out the disease-causing gene, they could have caused a worse problem. Barbara McClintock proved that genes can even jump around. She won the Nobel Prize for her work with jumping genes. When you start playing around with genes you never really know what will come up.”
“It’s strange,” Kayla said slowly. “The only two of us who are bar-coded — at least that I know of — are Kendra and now Karinda. They were both tattooed against their will. I would have been the third. They were going to tattoo me that night in the hospital after my house burned, but I ran away.”
“It’s as though you all have a gene for hating the bar code. It’s not that strange, I suppose. Studies have shown there’s a gene for almost everything,” Allyson said. “And besides, you all share a bird’s gene. You know the expression ‘free as a bird.’ A fierce longing to be free might be something GlobalHelix never expected you all to inherit from your little brown sparrow.”
“When I was moving your pack, this fell out of it,” Allyson said at breakfast the next morning. She handed Kayla the sketch she’d done of Mfumbe the day they walked along the Hudson River. Emotion clutched at Kayla’s throat as she looked at it, thinking of his voice reading to her from his slim volume of poetry, “Come live with me and be my love.”
They’d beaten him up. Were they now going to kill him with nanobots? Would they kill everyone who was at the march … or at least everyone they’d managed to catch and bar-code? If it appeared too obvious, perhaps they’d release the BC12 virus instead.
Someone knocked on the door. Kayla assumed it would be Jack, who had once again gone out early to see if he could locate the Drakians. Instead, Allyson opened the door to a clean-cut Asian man Kayla didn’t know.
He handed her an underground newspaper. “Your message has been sent with special priority,” he said quietly. “The Arts section of the paper is very interesting today. You should check it out.”
“Thanks,” Allyson said, shutting the door as he left. She went directly to the kitchen table where she opened the paper, shuffling through the pages until she came to the Arts section. There, as she apparently expected, was a letter with the words ALLYSON MINOR, SOMEWHERE IN THE CALTECH AREA, PASADENA, typed on it.
Kayla came to join her at the table. Before she got there, she bent to pick up the splayed National News section that had fallen to the floor. The color photo in the lower righthand corner of the third page immediately grabbed her attention.
Unable to take her eyes from it, she laid it on the table for Allyson to see. The picture showed Kayla — someone looking very much like Kayla — dressed in a long cotton nightgown.
She was on the ledge of a flat-roofed building about to go over the edge.
One bare foot was kicked out in front, and the photo caught the moment when the second delicately arched foot left the ledge. The blond hair and billowy nightgown floated, weightless.
The caption below the photo read: “Kayla Marie Reed leaped yesterday from the top of the Global-1 headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, in what has been deemed a suicide. This photo was taken with a telephoto ledge from an adjacent building.”
Karinda Carrington, KM-3, was dead.
Kayla and Allyson both stared at the incredible photo. “She’s trying to fly,” Kayla whispered, too moved by this truth to speak any louder.
October 21, 2025
Allyson, hi.
I hope this finds you. I figure the chances are good since a Caltech address is more than Postmen usually have to go on. I hope you’re well. I got the news about August through someone from the mountains. I know you two were tight friends. I loved the guy like he was my brother. I feel certain that he didn’t do this of his own will. He was too hopeful for that.
I also know because in the last month I have had suicidal thoughts that would never have entered my mind before. Yes, I’m down about a lot of things: I miss Kayla; I’m banged out about what’s happening with Dave Young; I feel weak from the beating I took; and having this bar code on my wrist drives me into a murderous rage sometimes.
But despite it all, I love this life too much to ever want to leave it willingly. And yet, lately, I find I can’t sleep. My thoughts scatter, and I’m unable to focus. Things that once gave me pleasure, like my cartooning, or poetry, or even peppermint gum, now seem empty, devoid of any ability to satisfy me. It’s only through my determination to hang tough and make it through one day at a time that I don’t succumb to the darkness that seems bent on engulfing me.
These days this problem does not seem uncommon. Every day the obituary pages of the paper are filled with death notices of more and more people who have committed suicide. Bridges like the Bear Mountain, the Tappan Zee, and all the Manhattan crossings have guards posted now because there has been such a sudden rash of jumpers. No less a figure than David Young remains on suicide watch, so depressed he’s unable to utter a word.
But there’s hope to be found in the newspapers, too. A lawyer at American Civil Liberties, Nancy Feldman, has noticed that the suicides are predominantly among people who attended the march on Washington in October. She’s demanding an explanation. A doctor named Sarah Alan has returned from Canada and is organizing doctors against the bar code tattoo. Her group is called DOC. Coincidentally, she’s the daughter of the couple who died in the crash while giving Kayla a ride on the Superlink earlier this year.
Speaking of Kayla, she’s my second reason for writing you. I don’t know where she is, and I figure she might have headed to you. If you see her, please tell her that I have left my parents’ home. If I’d stayed, I really would have killed myself. The medicine they were putting in my food was making me muddleheaded. At least my injuries don’t seem too bad anymore.
I got a ride with a friend up the Superlink to the community of bar code resisters in the woods where Kayla and I stayed a while. It was a good move because I have friends there and they’ve been very kind to me. Also the people here, once content to live in seclusion simply avoiding the bar code, have found it increasingly intrusive in their lives since they all have extended family members and friends who have been affected by it. Consequently, they have an increased willingness to fight back. I believe these pockets exist all over the country and that they are all experiencing the same thing. (I’ve heard that such a community exists not far from you in the Santa Monica area.)
Tell Kayla, if you see her, not to give in. A lot of information comes and goes out of these woods nowadays. People suspect that something in the bar code has the potential to turn deadly on you. There is no proof, but the rumble of suspicion is out there. And you, Allyson, since you have the bar code, you should lie low. It seems that your bar code hasn’t caused you any trouble so far. As long as you don’t cause trouble, you’ll be okay. But if anyone sees you with Kayla — or a Drakian named Dusa, if she’s still with Kayla — well, just be careful.
I won’t be easy to find for a while. A group of us are going to Washington to rally around the jail where Dave Young is in the hospital wing. The webcam in his room is active all the time and we’re always going to have someone stationed there making sure he doesn’t harm himself.
I say I’m going but I’m not sure I can make it. Every day this depression really makes everything difficult. I imagine Kayla has abandoned me. I think all this is really hopeless and — never mind.
Tell Kayla I love her and that I always remember the way she saved that bird the day we left the Adirondacks. She’s stronger — and kinder and braver — than she realizes. If you can, please give her the piece of gum I’ve taped to this page. She’ll know what it means. Thanks.
Your true friend always,
Mfumbe