Free Afterlife by Merrie Destefano

man—and to this day, that information is hidden away in a file somewhere.
    Eighty-two percent of the children belonged to familiesof One-Timers. One life, one child, one spin on the genetic roulette wheel. This group routinely passes their death certificates down to immediate family members.
    Eleven percent came from Stringers, those who were at the end of their line. Usually these were Eight-or Nine-Timers, but a Stringer occasionally quit jumping at life Three or Four. Again, these death certs almost always pass to a spouse or family member.
    Three percent were wards of the state. This was usually the result of a Stringer who left no will. In that case, death cert ownership was contested—maybe somebody in the dead Stringer’s sous-terrain société claimed they had an agreement, or maybe a distant relative suddenly crawled out from hiding behind the Right to Privacy Act. Whatever caused it, the death cert became property of the state until proven otherwise. These certificates often ended up getting tied up in decade-long court battles and, in the end, were almost always doled out to high-ranking government employees.
    That left four percent unaccounted for.
    At first I thought I had made a huge error, that my numbers were wrong and it caused me to check and recheck my calculations.
    Of course, I was only ten at the time, so I’d never heard of the Underground Circus.
    I didn’t know about the dark edges of society: how people longed for children but couldn’t have them, or that the Worldwide Population and Family Planning Law enforced sterilization whenever someone entered puberty. I would learn more about this later, when one of my close friends went missing right before her thirteenth birthday, and consequently, right before she would have been sterilized.
    There was much conjecture among my small group of friends as to whether Sadie Thompson had been taken tobecome someone’s daughter or whether she would be used as an illegal breeder of children herself.
    I never saw Sadie again.
    But the day she went missing was the same day that Russell and Pete and I made a blood pact with one another. We all vowed that nobody would ever get close enough to touch one of our kids.
    Because if they did, there would be a resurrection hell-on-earth to pay.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
    Chaz:
    Some moments freeze forever in your mind, turn into icicle daggers that cover the landscape. I will always remember the cold breeze that swept across the verandah that night, the way it wrapped itself around me and made me hunger for warmth as if heat was a long-forgotten memory, as if it was something that had been stolen from me, something that I would never feel again.
    I stood on the porch, one hand in my pocket, shaping and reshaping the liquid light between my fingers; I faced the unknown, my back to the party, my thoughts still on that upstairs room filled with frightened children.
    An unnatural chill bled into my soul and I pretended that it didn’t matter, focused instead on the dark shapes that moved between wavering, steamy lights. I tried to sense where the danger was, tried to feel the pulse of evil that dared to beat within my family gates.
    In my mind, it became a night of voodoo magic, dark and thick as incense. I could almost hear the gris-gris chants andthe rattle of dry bones. Someone had invited a demon presence into our midst, and I knew that it hadn’t been me.
    Most of the guards had left their assigned posts to form a black shadow cluster on the right side of the front yard. Having no form or shape or substance, it parted as I approached. I unintentionally walked through a patch of night-blooming jasmine, crushing the plants beneath my boots, staining the air with the heavy perfume of death.
    I saw a smaller shape emerge from the testosterone-charged troupe. Feminine and cat-like, it moved toward me, head down. It was a woman. Almost. A Newbie, still sparkling with the radiance that comes from