The first heat of the morning desert awoke Kayla. Coming slowly to consciousness, she realized that she was still outside the cave, lying on the desert dirt. She had the sense that she had washed up on some distant shore within herself — a place inside where nothing was any longer as it had been.
When Kayla asked Dusa to take her out to search for Amber, the Drakian was reluctant to leave the task of producing the fake tattoos. But Jack volunteered eagerly. “We can try the swing-lo.”
Kayla looked at him, not understanding. “The swing-lo?”
He smiled enthusiastically. “Come on. I’ll show you.” She followed him out of the cave and along a craggy rock formation at its side. Behind the out-cropping was a rickety wooden hut. Its door creaked when he pulled it open.
“Oh, God!” Kayla said, gasping when she saw the patched, round metal machine inside. It had no more than a ten-foot circumference. At its center was a cramped seat well where two people could fit side by side. In front was a computer panel — sleek, high tech, and completely out of keeping with the scrapped-together quality of the rest of the craft. “You built this?” Kayla asked.
He beamed with pleasure. “Sure did! It’s an individualized airborne transport. It’s the next big thing.”
“Where did you get the materials?”
“Everybody here knows about it — they bring me stuff when they come into the desert. Like Dusa — she brought me this final-level welder’s torch so I can smooth out some of the rough edges.”
Kayla recalled the flaming billboard. “I saw it,” she said. “It’s powerful. What makes this go?”
“It runs on magnetic repulsion, but I’ve done something I don’t think anyone has done yet with a vehicle this size. I’ve amplified the force so that this baby can really fly.”
“Like George Jetson?” she asked, recalling the old cartoons from her grandfather’s childhood that he had sometimes played for her.
“Yeah, like that,” he agreed, “only I don’t have the glass dome over the driver’s seat, though I suppose it would be easy enough to add. These individual crafts are going to be huge. Everyone’s working on a version of one, but I don’t think anyone’s been able to make them fly like this one can. At least in theory, she should be able to.”
“But you haven’t tested it yet?”
Jack shook his head. “Not with any weight in it.”
“Why do you call it a swing-lo?”
He grinned, seemingly pleased that she’d asked. “Because I’m nuts about that old gospel song you Americans have.” He began belting it out in a melodic, pleasant, strong voice.
“I looked over Jordan and what did I see,
Comin’ for to carry me home!
A band of angels comin’ after me,
Comin’ for to carry me home!
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin’ for to carry me home!
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin’ for to carry me home!”
His comically sincere rendition of the song was meant to be funny, and it made her laugh. “So this is your sweet chariot?”
“Exactly,” he said, grinning even wider, like a proud parent.
“Let’s go, then,” she suggested. “It’s time for a test drive.”
He began kicking the wall of the shed, and for a split second Kayla was startled. She even wondered if she’d upset him somehow. Then she realized it was the only way he could get the craft out of the shed, and she instantly joined in, pounding on the wooden wall with sharp kicks.
With their arms shielding their faces, they flinched as the wall gave way and slammed down on the dry, sandy dirt with a resounding bang, sending up a cloud of dust and pebbles. Freed from its wooden casing, the craft gleamed in the desert sun. “Climb in,” Jack said, handing Kayla a motorcycle helmet.
Thrilled at the prospect of this wild adventure, Kayla put on the helmet and slid in. Jack sat beside her, his fingers flying as he pressed a series of buttons and toggles.
After a brief, initial hesitation, the craft lifted up with a gentle whirring sound. He hit a button and it lunged forward — but then abruptly stopped, throwing them against the computer. Taking a slim, palm-size computer from his back pocket, Jack fed an adjustment into the swing-lo’s circuitry, and the craft lifted once again.
In the next few moments, the swing-lo accelerated to a speed of eighty miles an hour. Kayla knew this from the speedometer readout. Otherwise, without passing trees, houses, or other landmarks, she wouldn’t have guessed they were moving that quickly.
Without street regulations or grids to follow, and going at speeds as fast as a hundred miles an hour, Jack quickly brought them to an area of the desert outside Carson City. Hovering there, he typed the name Emily Thorn into his small computer. An address instantly appeared. “Second star to the right and straight on ’til morning,” he pretended to read.
“Okay, Peter Pan, what does it really say?” Kayla pressed.
Looking up from the handheld, he pointed at a trailer off in the distance. “If that’s trailer twelve, Great Basin Desert, maybe that’s it.”
They whirred forward, stopping in front of the dented trailer with duct-tape-patched cracked windows. The door flew open and a skinny woman in a shapeless shift faced them, a wide, crude, metal gun in her hand. “Get lost, alien scum!” she shrieked, cocking the gun.
Kayla lifted in her seat to address the woman. “We’re not aliens, we —”
The woman fired. Kayla and Jack ducked low as a ball of paint bounced off the side of the swing-lo, spraying them with a fine mist of orange. “It’s one of those old paintball guns from back in the last century,” Jack realized, laughter in his voice.
“Well, the swing-lo needed a paint job,” Kayla pointed out as she bent forward, hands over her head.
Jack peeked up and was instantly hit with a splat of red paint before he could bend back down. “Yes,” he said, “and there’s more good news. I saw the name on the mailbox. It seems we’ve found dear Aunt Emily.”
Jack jumped out of the swing-lo and ran a zigzag path, dodging Aunt Emily’s paintball onslaughts. This maneuver gave her a good enough look at him to be convinced that he was not from another planet. When Kayla followed and asked about Amber, Emily Thorn’s face twisted into a snarl of disgust. “A pack of ingrates! The whole family! The bar code knew they were no good. That’s why it turned on them, made their lives a living purgatory! The will of the greater good is being served through the bar code.”
No wonder Amber had felt she had to escape this woman! “Is Amber here?” Kayla pressed.
“Walked off! Just like the rest of them did. My no-good brother was the first to go. Then his rotten boy took off with some biker gang. The mother is in Carson City Hospital. She got a bad case of TMP.”
Jack looked to Kayla. “TMP?”
“Tattoo Mania Psychosis,” she explained quickly and quietly. “People get so desperate to get rid of their bar codes that they burn them off. My friend August did it, but sometimes people burn to death or set themselves on fire accidentally. It’s how my mother died. Global-1 is trying to tell people it’s a form of mental illness.”
“What are you two plotting?!” Emily Thorn shrieked. “Speak up so I can hear you!”
“I was explaining about TMP,” Kayla said apologetically.
“TMP is a terrible form of insanity,” Aunt Emily said, walking toward them. “Losing your mind is a curse on the sinful.”
Jack turned his face away from the ranting woman and rolled his eyes at Kayla. She responded with a quick grimace.
Kayla remembered Amber’s words from her letter: I think I’ll walk off into the desert and keep going until I turn into dry, sandy dirt and blow away. She was becoming more and more worried that Amber had done exactly that. Kayla’s brief experience of the desert had already taught her that this might be a very short walk. “Do you know where Amber went?” she asked Amber’s hostile aunt.
Emily Thorn pointed out into
the vastness of the desert. “She just started walking that way.”
“Where would she be heading?”
“How should I know?” the woman snapped. “Maybe you are alien life-forms, after all. I bet you snuck out of Area fifty-one and you’re here to suck my mind dry so you can get the information you need to make us all your slaves.”
“That’s not it at all,” Jack told her. “We only want to find out what happened to your niece.”
“Wait here,” Emily Thorn barked at him, turning to go into her trailer.
Jack smiled at Kayla, proud of the way he’d smoothed the situation, diverting Emily Thorn with his charm. Kayla wondered how often he used his good looks and engaging smile to get what he wanted.
Emily Thorn emerged from the trailer staggering under the weight of a heavy glass tank. Something was moving inside it. Kayla blinked into the sunlight reflecting off it, not understanding.
Then she remembered Amber’s name for Aunt Emily — Tarantula Woman.
“Get ’em, girls!” Emily Thorn shrieked as she jerked the tank, flinging its contents toward them with surprising strength. Twelve very large tarantulas twitched their furry legs.
“Time to get back in the swing-lo,” Jack said quickly, grabbing her by her arm.
Kayla and Jack spent the rest of the morning and the afternoon searching the desert, hovering just above the desert floor in the paint-spattered swing-lo. They saw nothing but sagebrush tumbling aimlessly along. From time to time Kayla was again struck with the sensation that she was looking out on the ocean. When she reported it to Jack, he nodded.
“Everybody sees that out here,” he told her. “I guess it’s just the heat coming off the land. But, you know, all this was once ocean floor.”
It was amazing to her how much the world could change over time. Was it changing even now? Scientists said the temperature had climbed an average of twenty degrees in the past century. The ocean water was turning acidic, the coral was almost all gone. Would the ocean someday be desert, just as this desert had once been ocean?
“I like to think of the water mirage you’re talking about as the ghost of the ocean that was once here,” Jack said, looking off into the distance.
“A vision of the past rather than of the future,” she remarked. “And maybe it’s something everyone sees because we all share the same past — at least as a species. Mfumbe says all people have the sight. Some just aren’t able to use it yet.”
“Makes sense to me,” Jack agreed.
“My friend Allyson won a scholarship to study advanced genetics at Harvard. She says genes are everything. She believes that genetic technology is the biggest thing in our future.”
“It’s sure one of the biggest things. Look how it’s changed our world. Your genes affect whether you make it in this world no matter what you do or who you are. As long as we’re forced to wear the damn bar code we’re all controlled by the genes we were given at birth. Does she like Harvard?”
“She wound up going to Caltech to study nanotechnology instead,” Kayla told him.
“Microscopic robots! Final level!” Jack said, pounding the dash of the swing-lo excitedly. “Ever read There’s Room at the Bottom? It was written in 1959. This complete genius, Nobel Prize–winning guy, Richard Feynman, wrote it, talking about how machinery could be made really, really, really tiny — molecule-size. In 1959! Can you imagine?!”
“Feynman!” Kayla cried, recalling the name from Allyson’s letter, the one the Postman had delivered to August. “She’s doing research with a professor who studied with Feynman.”
Jack threw his hands up in a gesture of longing. “I would do anything for a chance like that!” The swing-lo veered sharply to the left before he grabbed the control stick again. “What a great thing for her.”
“She had to get a bar code tattoo in order to do it.”
He grimaced, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully. “Maybe not; maybe there are some things I wouldn’t do.”
Hunger and the heat compelled them to turn back toward the cave. Jack promised to take her out again the next day to continue the search. When they arrived at the mouth of the cave, Dusa and Francis were outside. “How high did it go?” Francis asked as they hovered and then landed.
“We stayed only five feet above the ground,” Jack reported as he hopped out. “I didn’t want to push it the first time ’round. It drives smooth and gets great velocity. You can’t beat it for going around the desert.”
Nate came out and showed them a handheld computer. The screen carried the headlines of an online newspaper. “Read page four when you get a chance,” he said. “Some real bad news about David Young.”
“What?” Jack asked, concerned. In seconds he brought up the page. Kayla peered over his shoulder, interested in the story. Before she could see it, though, Dusa stepped up to Kayla and put a hand on her shoulder. “I want to show you something,” she said, heading for the cave and gesturing for Kayla to follow.
She led Kayla to a low table where a file of freshly minted fake bar code tattoos sat in a pile next to a handheld computer. “Yesterday Jack translated the information in these files into bar codes for us,” she said. “He deleted the death dates and any damaging information like health liabilities or criminal records. Today we’ve been printing them out and making them into fake press-ons.”
Kayla’s mind was still on the Decode leader, David Young. “Do you know what bad news Nate was talking about?” she asked.
“No. I haven’t talked to anyone all day because I’ve been busy with the fake bar code background checks. And listen.” Dusa paused and her eyes shifted uneasily as though she wasn’t a hundred percent sure she wanted to proceed. Then she set her jaw and decided to go on. “I think you should see what I found.”
Kayla leaned closer, suddenly uneasy. “What is it?”
Dusa held up a hand-size metal box with an infrared glow on one side — a scanner. “I’ve been scanning new bar codes to make sure they work and to record the info in them. We keep a log of all the deceased people who’ve contributed to the operation just in case somebody needs to know. While I was scanning, I found something you might be interested in.” She took a fake tattoo from her jeans pocket and scanned it. A name came up on the slim computer monitor lying flat on the table: KATHRYN MARIE REED. BORN JULY 6, 1959.
Kayla stared at the words. “Grandma Cathy?” she wondered.
“The file gave a Los Angeles address and other pertinent information, like a social security number, an insurance provider, a California driver’s license identification number, and the numbers for a bank account containing twenty-six dollars.”
“But my grandmother was Cathy with a C,” Kayla pointed out.
“Did you ever see it on an official document?” Dusa questioned.
Now that Kayla thought of it, she hadn’t. The only time she’d seen it was in her mother’s hand, in photo albums that her mother had labeled with the name Grandma Cathy. It was possible that her mother had gotten it wrong. She was dead before Kayla was born, and Kayla’s father had spoken of her infrequently. But she had lived in Los Angeles and had supposedly died in the psychiatric center she’d been confined to when her schizophrenia became unmanageable.
“There’s no genetic code in this file,” Kayla pointed out.
“She died in 2015. There’s no existing blood sample for her … but they could get a health history from her medical records. Drakians have one genetic history that we put into all the fakes. It swears you’re the picture of perfect health.”
“She was my father’s mother,” Kayla said. “I never knew either of my grandmothers, but everyone said I looked exactly like Grandma Cathy. We had some pictures of her when she was young. She was holding my father in them, but they were too blurry to really tell what she looked like.”
Dusa clicked down the screen, passing more numbers and addresses. “What do you make of this?”
There was a section for listing children. The first one said: JOSEPH REED
. BORN NOVEMBER 15, 1979.
“That’s my father,” Kayla confirmed. “He was an only child.”
“Apparently not.” Dusa moved farther down the screen. “On April 16, 2008 —”
“That’s my birthday!” Kayla said with a gasp.
Dusa nodded. “When she would have been forty-nine years old, Kathryn Marie Reed gave birth to another child, someone named KM-1-6.”
As Kayla was absorbing this strange information, Nate and Jack came in, looking somber. “You’d better read this news story about David Young,” Nate told Dusa, giving her the handheld scanner.
“Before you do that, Dusa,” Jack jumped in, “are we expecting anyone new to come?”
“No. Why?” Dusa replied.
“There’s someone on a motorcycle crossing the desert and heading right for the entrance of the cave.”
Kayla walked with the others to the front of the cave to see who was approaching. The indistinct moving blur on the wavering desert horizon soon became a clearly visible figure. The driver stopped in front of the cave, and they saw that he carried a satchel bursting with paper.
“Postman,” he announced as he approached them with purposeful strides.
“How did you find us?” Dusa demanded, with just a touch of worry in her voice. The Postmen were on their side, but their uncanny ability to track could be unnerving.
“You bought water in Baker,” he replied, and there seemed no need for further explanation.
He called out several names of people in the caves, and each eagerly approached him for their letters. “Is Kayla Reed here?” he asked when he had only one letter left in his hand.
“That’s me!” Kayla cried, hurrying to him. This had to be from Mfumbe. Maybe he was well enough to travel. She hoped he’d sent her a suggestion for a meeting place.
Then she looked at the envelope and knew immediately it was not his handwriting.
Who else would be trying to contact her?
October 16, 2025