Free The Bar Code Tattoo by Suzanne Weyn Page B

gaze, but only a little. A larger part of her was too fascinated with this situation and this person to be overly self-conscious.
    The woman beckoned and Kayla sat across thefire from her. “I’ve felt you calling me, so I called to you,” the woman said in a smooth, deep voice.
    “I … called you?” Kayla questioned. What was she talking about? She didn’t even know who this was.
    “My name is Eutonah. You want to know about the soul.”
    Kayla breathed in sharply. “How did you know that?” she asked.
    “We’re all part of the same dream. Those who know how to listen can hear,” Eutonah replied. “The soul is the original being — what the being was before it entered the earthly plane, what it will be again when the earthly plane is done with.”
    Kayla felt as if she were in a dream. It was the same as a dream, where something made no sense and yet seemed perfectly logical at the same time. “How do you know it’s there?” she asked. “The soul, I mean. There’s no proof it even exists.”
    “You are your soul. There is no it other than you.”
    “Where am I?”
    “Remember this place,” Eutonah said. “Imprint it in your mind’s eye so that your internal guidance will enable you to find it again when you need to. Remember the white face.” Getting up, she walked off down a dirt trail until she disappeared into a pine forest.
    The icy wind blew up the back of Kayla’s shirtand she shivered again. The wind blew so hard and cold that she squeezed her eyes shut …
    … and was back in the warehouse, the helmet on her head. “Where did I go?” she asked, lifting it from her head. “I met an amazing woman. I was in the mountains somewhere.”
    August took the helmet from her and examined its readout. Mfumbe looked on with him. “I never saw these numbers before,” August said.
    “ What numbers?” Kayla asked.
    “The numbers on the helmet tell what virtual reality site you’ve been at. It sounds like you traveled to the Adirondack Mountains. A lot of resistance groups live around there,” Zekeal told her.
    The Adirondacks? Kayla remembered that her father had maps of the Adirondacks at the time he died. Her mother had thought he was planning a vacation. “Why would resisters go to the Adirondacks?” she asked.
    “It’s easy to hide up in the mountains,” Mfumbe explained, “and they’re close to Canada. If things really went bad, you could get into Canada inside a day. Canada doesn’t have the bar code yet.”
    “Yeah, but these numbers are new. It’s a site we’ve never been to before,” August said. He looked to Kayla. “What exactly did you see?”
    She described the location and the woman.
    “I’ve heard about Eutonah. She’s a Cherokee shaman and a bar code resister.” Allyson said. “She was putting out articles warning against the barcode when the thing was still in Asia. There’s a mystical angle to everything she writes. The article I read was about how you can resist the bar code with your mind.”
    “How do you do that?” Nedra asked, clearly skeptical.
    “Well, according to Eutonah, we all have undeveloped telepathic and telekinetic powers,” Allyson said. “She claims we can all learn to access those abilities.”
    “So what are we supposed to do, float the bar codes off everyone’s wrist with our brain waves?” Nedra scoffed.
    Allyson stayed cool. “She says the power of our minds is so powerful it’s atomic. And it’s true. We’re atoms. That’s what we’re made of.”
    Kayla closed her eyes and imagined Gene Drake deflecting the guards’ bullets with the power of his mind. If only he’d been able to. Then maybe he could have closed down the post office and they would have brought in reporters. Then he’d have told the world what he knew about the bar code.
    “That’s just nuts.” Nedra spat out the words. “I don’t believe you even saw her, Kayla. You probably just read an article and dreamed up the whole thing to get