CHAPTER TWENTY
Chaz:
I used to think I was special. Not walk-on-water special, but almost. Sometimes I relive my childhood in an instant, remember the way the entire universe seemed to revolve around me. Then I remember the moment that I realized I wasna€?t a magnificent literati, that I didna€?t actually encapsulate the sun, moon and stars. I learned that there were a thousand others like me scattered across the world, a thousand brighter than the sun and more precious than the moon.
Other children.
Not just the handful that I knew about in New Orleans. One thousand twenty-nine, to be exact, between the ages of one and twenty. Morbidly fascinated with this group of marauders, I learned everything I could about them, then put it all into organized categories. The government took all my statistics when I was done with my projecta€”thank you very much for your hard work, young mana€”and to this day, that information is hidden away in a file somewhere.
Eighty-two percent of the children belonged to families of 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 contesteda€”maybe somebody in the dead Stringera€?s sous-terrain soci??t?? 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 Ia€?d never heard of the Underground Circus.
I didna€?t know about the dark edges of society: how people longed for children but couldna€?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 to become someonea€?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.