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. Cl.u.s.ters 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 pa.s.sed. 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 nan.o.bots. 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 b.u.ms, 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 b.u.ms."

"No. Really?"

"Yeah, really. But street people hear things, too, important things."

"And n.o.body 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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.sumed 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 s.h.a.ggy-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 nan.o.bots controlled by the bar code tattoo.

Jack noticed Grace and Eric for the first time and smiled. "Hey, Eric, who's your 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?

"Not yet!" Katie insisted. "Not yet."

"All right." Kayla turned to Grace. "We're going to tell you about the prophecy. I promise. But there are equally important things you need to know first."

"Like what?" Grace asked. At this point she felt so far over her head that more complex questions seemed beside the point.

"Global-1 has found out you're adopted. They're after your biological father and that's why they're looking for you."

Grace felt as though she were in a dream as she listened to Kayla speak. A bad dream. "Adopted? What are you talking about?"

"You didn't know?" Kayla asked.

"I don't believe you," Grace murmured. She could feel Eric getting closer behind her, backing her with his presence, the rope now invisible between them. He put his hand gently but firmly on her arm, and she was grateful for the support. She hadn't seen this coming and she felt almost faint from the impact.

"I know this is messing with your head," Kayla said to Grace. "You must be feeling the way I did when I discovered I was one of six clones and that I share genes with an actual bird."

Grace acknowledged the comparison with a nod, but she didn't really feel this was the same. And just because Kayla had been through something similar didn't mean this wasn't weird. No, not weird. Earth-shattering.

"So you're saying that my family isn't my family?" Grace asked in an unsteady voice.

"Of course they're your family," Allyson spoke kindly. "But you don't share their genetics. That's all."

"Lots of people are adopted," Eric added softly.

"Yes, but they grow up knowing it. They don't learn it abruptly from strangers at seventeen," Grace objected, fighting the tears that were welling up. And then a sudden memory hit her, changing everything. "Wait a minute! Why are you lying to me?"

"We're not," Kayla insisted. "You were adopted by your parents at birth."

"My parents have a DVD of my birth. I've seen it!"

"I can't explain that, Grace," Kayla admitted.

"All we know is what Decode headquarters has told us," Mfumbe added.

"I'm sorry to have dumped that on you so clumsily," Kayla apologized. Mfumbe returned to the group and stood beside Kayla, resting his hand on her shoulder. "It didn't occur to me that you might not know about your adoption," she added. "I'm sorry."

Grace didn't believe it. They had to be mistaken. "So, basically, you want me to take it on faith that I'm adopted, just because Decode headquarters - wherever and whoever that is - tells you so? Can you understand that I might need a little more proof than that?"

"We have our sources and spies and computer hackers just like Global-1 does. We have to, in order to fight them," Jack said. "The moment you got the bar code tattoo, your DNA flooded into the Global-1 data banks. Apparently they were just waiting for it. You're the child of someone very important to them. They've been watching you and so have we, because we're hacked into their newsfeed and we can follow whatever they're following."

"I get it. Global-1 is evil because of all their surveillance. And then, wait, you go and do the same exact thing?" Grace was angry now, and it felt liberating. "So you sent someone to stalk me. Great. Whoever it was did a great job. I had no idea."

"It was me, Grace," Eric said.

His words. .h.i.t her, battered her. For a moment, she didn't have enough air in her lungs to speak.

"You?" she stammered dryly when her voice returned. She'd never felt so foolish. "Wow," she said with a note of sarcasm. "And all this time I thought we were friends." And had hoped they were more than friends.

"We are friends," Eric insisted, but Grace felt too betrayed to believe him.

"Whatever you say," Grace muttered dismissively, turning her back on him. "Does anyone know who my biological parents are? Just out of curiosity."

"The file says you were born at GlobalHelix," Katie revealed.

Grace's eyes darted to Kayla. "Am I a clone, too?"

"Probably not," Kayla replied. "My file revealed my clone status."

"There was no information like that in your file," Mfumbe said.

"Then why do they have a file on me?" Grace needed to know.

"There's a file on everybody," Jack said. "The thing that made your file important was that it was deeply encrypted. Only the most top secret of all the Global-1 files get that."

"So you have no idea why?" Grace pressed.

What else are you not telling me?

"But we do know that someone has abducted your family - and on the same day you got the bar code tattoo," Katie said with level calm.

Grace realized that the news of being adopted had almost no impact on her, compared to this. Her family was the only family she'd ever known. It wasn't a perfect family. But who had that? No one she knew.

Why wouldn't they have told her she was adopted? It was puzzling. But if that was a question, there were other things that weren't at all questionable. Her family loved her - even pesky Kim and James - she was certain of that much. And at the moment it was what mattered. She loved her family, they loved her - and something had happened to them.

But the cars. The cars were gone. If they'd been abducted, then why were the cars gone?

"Do you know who's responsible for whatever's happened to them?" Grace asked.

"It's probably Global-1," Mfumbe said. "Either they've abducted them or you're family is on the run from them."

So it was still a possibility that they were on the run.

Ultimately, it seemed that Grace's instincts were as informed as Decode's operation.

"I should go back and tell the police all this," Grace suggested, more to gauge their reaction than anything else.

"Global-1 owns the police," Kayla reminded her. "If Global-1 is behind this, the police will never solve your case. And I wouldn't go into any foster home they a.s.sign for you, either."

A threat. It was almost too easy - everything that they said Global-1 would do became something that would happen to her if she didn't cooperate with Decode.

As if he realized this, Eric cautioned, "Kayla. We're not going to let that happen to Grace."

Grace couldn't stop herself. "As far as I'm concerned," she told Eric, "you have nothing at all to do with what happens to me. Get it?" Before he could answer, she turned back to Kayla and asked, "Why, what would they do to me?" She figured she might as well have as full a picture as possible.

"You might be the only one of your family they didn't get," Katie reminded her. "At any rate, they know you're not with the rest of your family. They are probably looking for you, too."

"Ironic, isn't it, that you were right there in the GlobalHelix building and they didn't find you?" Jack commented.