“Do you have some problem with our government?” Tod demanded.
“I don’t have any problem with America,” Zekeal replied. “I have a problem with Global-1 and their fascist tactics. It’s not the same thing.”
“What’s the president ever done to you?” Tod challenged.
“Global-1 is cheating me out of the rights I have as an American,” Zekeal replied. “They work behind the scenes without letting senators and members of Congress know what’s happening. Loudon Waters isn’t a president — he’s a corporate dictator!”
As Zekeal finished the last word, Tod flung him across the hall, slamming him into the bank of lockers. The football player raised a clenched fist and pulled it back, poised to strike, but Mfumbe leaped onto it.
Two more football players grabbed Mfumbe and threw him into the wall. “Hey!” Kayla shouted. This distracted them for the second required for Mfumbe to slip out of their grasp.
But as Mfumbe jumped back, one of the football players grabbed his shirt and swung him in a wide arc. He hurtled into Kayla, knocking them both across the hall into more lockers. Kayla’s face hit the locker vent and her cheek scraped it as she was tugged to the ground by the weight of Mfumbe’s hand entangled in her backpack.
A sharp whistle blew and the football players jumped back. Zekeal scrambled to his feet, his forehead bleeding.
“What’s going on here?” boomed Mr. Duggan, the science teacher and football coach.
“These guys are disrespecting the United States, sir,” Tod reported breathlessly.
Coach Duggan looked at Zekeal. He spotted the ’zines sprawled across the floor and nodded. “Morrelle, what did I tell you about those things?”
“You said they’d make some people mad, but you didn’t say we weren’t allowed to distribute them,” Zekeal answered.
“My guys, all of you, get out of here. And don’t let me find you fighting on school grounds again!” Coach Duggan snapped at his players, who hurried down the hall away from them. “Morrelle, Taylor, come with me and bring your papers. You, too, Ms. Reed. Come on.”
“We haven’t done anything wrong,” Kayla insisted. She brushed her hand along her cheek and it came up streaked with blood. “Look what they did to me — to us.” Zekeal’s right cheek was already a yellow-tinged purple. Mfumbe pressed his left arm to his chest and winced painfully.
“You can see the nurse after you see the principal,” Mr. Duggan said.
“Those other guys — your team — they’re the ones who should be seeing Mrs. Harmon,” Kayla argued.
Coach Duggan was already walking down the hall, leading them to the principal’s office. Mrs. Harmon met them in her steel-and-glass office.
“Don’t we have the right of free speech?” Zekeal challenged when she told them they could no longer distribute KnotU2.
“You have the right to express your political views as you like,” she replied in her smooth, unflappable way. “But by distributing your paperwork in the hallways, you are disrupting the flow of student traffic, thereby creating a fire hazard, thereby violating school regulations.”
“Oh, come on,” Mfumbe scoffed. “You just want to shut us down. Admit it.”
Kayla noticed the bar code on Mrs. Harmon’s wrist as she continued, “I’ll be frank with you. I personally think your cause is ‘much ado about nothing,’ to quote Shakespeare. Credit cards have tracked our movements now for a half century. Our medical records have long been computerized.”
“Yeah, but then you knew who had your information and you had access to it. Now you don’t even know what they’re saying about you,” Zekeal insisted.
“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about,” Coach Duggan said confidently.
Mrs. Harmon turned to Coach Duggan. “I assume you will speak to your players about our policies regarding fighting in the halls.”
“Definitely,” he promised, though Kayla doubted he’d say anything to them.
“Now, please leave those papers here in my office before you leave,” Mrs. Harmon demanded.
Mfumbe and Zekeal placed their disheveled pile on the principal’s desk. She gave them passes and instructed them to go to the nurse.
“It stinks that you lost all your ’zines,” Kayla said once they were away from the office.
Zekeal and Mfumbe grinned at each other.
“What?” Kayla asked.
The two of them turned and lifted the backs of their shirts. They’d jammed copies of KnotU2 into their pant waistbands.
“Final level!” she cheered. Mfumbe and Zekeal held out their hands to her and she slapped them both.
For the first time in a long time, she had a sense she belonged to something.
“Happy birthday to me,” Kayla muttered as she opened her eyes on Saturday morning. This was it. Seventeen, the big day.
The phone rang. “Kayla, it’s Amber!” her mother called from downstairs.
“I’ll be right there,” she yelled. With a sigh, she swung out of bed and down the stairs. “Hi, Amber,” she said, taking the phone from her mother.
Amber sang a few quick bars of “Happy Birthday to You,” then got right to it, as Kayla suspected she would. “Okay, don’t thank me. Your papers have been filed by moi. You are about to become a code-carrying member of the adult world!”
“You filed a bar code application for me?”
In reply, Amber shrieked, a high-pitched hoot of excitement that made Kayla cringe. “I’ll be waiting for you outside my house. Be there at nine sharp.”
Kayla hung up and looked at her mother, who sat at the table staring vacantly into her coffee. Her blankness told Kayla that she’d already taken some of the heavy-duty tranquilizer, Propeace, she’d been stealing from the hospital. She’d lose her job if she got caught. But that wasn’t the main thing worrying Kayla. Was this zombie the person her mother intended to be from now on? Did she plan to live the rest of her life on Propeace?
“What’s up for you today?” Mrs. Reed asked as she continued staring into her cup.
“It’s my birthday,” she said.
Mrs. Reed glanced up, her eyebrows raised with a rare show of interest. “Oh. Happy birthday. Sixteen, right?”
“Seventeen.”
“Whoops,” Kayla’s mom said with a dull, embarrassed laugh. “Time flies.”
“Yeah,” Kayla said.
Back in her bedroom, Kayla examined the delicate blue veins at her wrist. She picked a titanium nail file from her dresser and scratched in a bar code, digging deeply into her skin. A dot of blood blossomed out of a vein, making her cringe. How could such a small wound hurt so much? She clutched her wrist, pressing on the veins.
She’d seen a girl in school who had an attempted-suicide scar across her wrists. The bar code tattoo reminded her of that scar. It was practically in the same spot.
Why couldn’t she just get the bar code and not worry about it? Mrs. Harmon had called it “much ado about nothing.” Was she really making too much of it?
Images of Zekeal and Mfumbe appeared in her mind. They were so confident they were right. What if they weren’t right, though? Maybe the bar code was just a great method of organizing things, proposed by some efficiency expert. Everything was about efficiency these days. It might be obnoxious, but that didn’t necessarily mean there was some sinister plot behind it.
Putting her palms on either side of her head, she shut her eyes and squeezed, as if to push down all these maddening, confusing thoughts. When she opened her eyes again, she took in the things in her room as if seeing them as a stranger might, wondering what they might tell someone about the girl who lived there.
Her open closet was packed sloppily with clothing — she had never been neat — last season’s silvers behind this year’s neon-colored fabrics. Then there was the poster of Ty Zambor, Lunar Tick’s drummer, that Amber had given her and even hung for her. The top of her Lucite dresser was strewn with colored sketching pencils, makeup, her handheld organizer,
and her pocket-sized communo-disc, the two-inch card that connected her to phones, computers, faxes, and scanners. How much longer would her mother be able to pay the monthly fee on that?
Her eyes traveled to the mirror above her dresser and it reflected back a picture of her father. Startled, she sat bolt upright. No! It was only her own reflection that she’d seen.
What a strange trick of shadow and desire, making her think, just for an instant, that she saw her father in the mirror. She stood and stared at her reflection. Why hadn’t she ever noticed before how much she looked like him? The same hazel eyes and wide mouth.
Well, sure, everyone always said she looked like her grandmother, her father’s mother. It made sense that her father looked like his mother as well. She had often wished she’d known Grandma Cathy better, but she’d lived so far away and died ten years ago. It was funny not to know someone from whom you’d inherited so many of the genes that made you … you.
Digital numbers streamed from pole to pole of her clock. 8:45. 8:46. 8:47. Titanium wires that carried them were nearly invisible, making the numbers appear to float in midair.
Amber would be waiting for her. She had to decide.
Out in the hall, her mother shuffled by and, in a low voice, sang a song from the early days of the century, the days when she had been a young woman. “I’m like a bird, I only fly away….” The bedroom door swung shut behind her.
Kayla pulled on her hot-pink, stretch one-piece suit and finished the look with black boots. She grabbed her silver solar jacket from the closet and snapped out the wrinkles before she slid into it. Checking her image in the mirror, she put on silver lipstick and black eyeliner.
That’s good, she approved her look.
No sad songs for her. No suicide. No beatings in the school hall. She would fit in, go along, and be okay. Life was too difficult to do it any other way.
In ten minutes she was out of the house, heading toward Amber, who waited in her tidy, well-clipped front yard and waved when she saw Kayla. “Final level!” her friend cheered. “You have not looked so hot since … well, you know … your dad and all. Never mind. Seventeen is going to be the beginning of the new Kayla. I just know it.”
“Thanks.”
“Promise me you’ll dress like this on Monday at school. You’ll have the guys dragging their tongues along the hall after you.”
“Ew!” Kayla laughed at the bizarre image.
“You know what I mean, Kayla.”
What would Kayla say to Mfumbe and Zekeal when she showed up with the tattoo on Monday? She admired Mfumbe and liked him. She wanted him to like her. And Zekeal … she couldn’t stop thinking about him. She tried so hard not to because Nedra was always pressed up next to him. There was no chance anything could happen between them as long as Nedra and he were so tight.
Still … Zekeal’s face might pop into her mind at any time, even when she didn’t want it to. No matter how hard she tried to banish the picture, she was powerless over it.
But she couldn’t let him make this decision for her. She had no respect for girls who let their crushes rule their lives. “Come on. Let’s go do this thing,” she said to Amber, her voice quavering.
They were about to leave when Amber’s parents burst out of the front door. Mrs. Thorn was crying while Mr. Thorn stormed angrily toward his sleek silver lite-engine Jaguar.
“What’s the matter?” Kayla asked Amber as Mrs. Thorn trailed tearfully after her husband.
Amber rolled her eyes. “You don’t even want to know. They’ve been at it all morning. It’s about that new house, the one across town that we were supposed to buy.”
Kayla nodded. “The one with the thermal indoor pool and the Virtual Reality Holograph deck in the rec room? Yeah, I remember. I can’t wait to try it out.”
“Well, you might have to wait a while because something’s gone wrong with the deal. Mom’s flipping because our house is already sold and she doesn’t know if they’ll be able to get into the new one.”
“What went wrong?” Kayla asked.
“Something’s screwy with Dad’s bar code. The mortgage company rejected him when he applied for the mortgage. They scanned it and suddenly the deal was off. This morning they just got the news that a second bank turned him down, too.”
“But your dad has a good job,” Kayla said. Amber’s family had always been better off than Kayla’s. They weren’t exactly rich, but Amber usually got whatever she wanted.
“I know he does. That’s what’s so weird. They tried Mom’s bar code but something’s up with that, too. The people are due to move into our house next week. My parents tried to put them off, but they insist on moving in.”
“Where will you live?”
Amber shrugged. “I guess we’ll go to a motel or maybe get a room in the new skycomplex outside town.” Mr. Thorn’s car screeched out of the driveway and onto the street. At the top of the drive, Mrs. Thorn buried her face in her hands and cried.
“Should you go see if she’s okay?” Kayla asked.
Amber stood a minute, shifting from foot to foot, uncertain what to do. “She’ll be all right,” she decided. “Mom gets hysterical, but she always calms down.”
They headed for the post office at the center of the transbusiness district. It would take about ten minutes to get there on foot. Even though mail was no longer delivered there, everyone still called it the post office.
As they walked, Kayla wondered what the scanner had picked up in the Thorns’ bar codes. What secret had the bank uncovered? She glanced side-long at Amber. Was it something Amber knew and wasn’t telling? Or was she as clueless as Kayla had been about her own father’s secret troubles?
Amber wasn’t the type to keep a secret, especially from her best friend. She’d tell if she knew. Had Mr. and Mrs. Thorn known there was something in their bar codes that could hurt them, or had it come as a huge surprise? Would there be a surprise like that lurking in her bar code as well? She couldn’t imagine what surprise could be possible. Bad computer grades? Did that sort of thing show up?
The line outside the post office was only about six people long when they arrived. The sky had clouded. A cold rain began to fall.
“This crashes!” Amber griped, clutching her thin lime-green sweater tightly.
“Let’s go home,” Kayla suggested. An uncomfortable pressure had formed just outside her consciousness, an uneasiness. Maybe it was just her uncertainty about the bar code, maybe only the grimness of the day.
“Don’t worry,” Amber assured her. “The line moves fast. Hey, did your neighbor ever tell you his big top-secret info about the ’too?”
Kayla shook her head. “I haven’t seen him.”
“He’s avoiding you because there is no top-secret info.”
“Maybe,” Kayla agreed.
Small flecks of hail began to fall. The sharp, tiny ice bounced from the ledge of the window just over her head, clicking rapidly. The icy rocks sparkled against the glass. Kayla watched as they bounced in every direction. Sparkling … sparkling …
They move slowly toward the city along with the other people streaming toward it. Something is droning in her ear. A mosquito? No, a fighter jet. It streaks low over the crowd. Sleek and impossibly low. Too low. Her companion clutches her wrist. Something explodes. A blinding ball of fire. Flat on the ground, her face in the dirt, searing heat above her.
Her eyes snapped open. The line had moved quickly and she’d somehow moved along with it. They were only three people away from the door. She grabbed Amber’s arm. “I don’t want to do this. I can’t,” she said, her voice nearly a sob. “We have to go. Please! Now!”
In a moment she would run, with or without Amber.
Kayla tugged on Amber’s arms, trying to yank her from the line. Her friend resisted and smiled at the others on line. “She’s just really banged out about this whole thing,” she explained, embarrassed. Amber placed her hands on Kayla’s shoulders to calm her. “Don’t worry. Everyone does this n
ow. It’s no big deal.”
“I’m not kidding! I’m leaving!” Kayla tore free of Amber’s grip. She darted out into the road, zigzagging through the cars. Amber came after, calling. Kayla turned to her —
A gunshot from inside the post office cracked the quiet.
Amber stopped, frozen.
A second shot.
Three of them.
A pause. Then a fourth.
The last shot blasted through the post office window. Blood sprayed up from inside, streaking the glass.
PUTNAM, NY. APRIL 16, 2025. AFTERNOON EDITION.
This morning, postal worker Gene Drake, 28, was lethally gunned down by Global-1 security guards who opened fire after Mr. Drake destroyed equipment and threatened customers in the Putnam Central Post Office. Mr. Drake was employed at the post office, where he had recently begun administering the bar code tattoo. His actions were apparently an attempt to close down the post office and curtail any further coding.
Screaming loudly, Mr. Drake ripped the bar-coding laser machine from its mount on the desk and hurled it into the wall. He then made death threats toward the people inside and reached for his pocket. At this point, security guards who had come out from the back room deemed Mr. Drake a serious threat to all present and opened fire.
Before joining the post office in late 2024, Mr. Drake had been employed as a tattoo artist at Vincent’s Tattoos, across from the GlobalTrac bullet train station in Peekskill. Globalofficers’ records show that Mr. Drake was given the opportunity to join the post office rather than serve time in prison for illegal tattooing. Drake’s coworkers described him as pleasant to work with, though they claim he had become increasingly withdrawn in recent weeks.
One witness to the scene, Susan Gilardi, 17, of nearby Mt. Kisco, said she was next on line when Drake suddenly demanded that she and the others on line drop to the floor. She says Drake began to scream, “I am an artist, not a cattle brander.” He then turned to the people on the floor and told them they’d be better off dead than tattooed.
Mr. Drake rented a house with two other postal employees, who are currently wanted for questioning in the matter of some Global-1 stolen computer passwords that Mr. Drake had in his possession at the time of the incident.