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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 hit 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 assign 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.
    “I went home early. The only one I told was Terri, my replacement,” Grace recalled.
    “Did anyone else see you