Trace (TraceWorld Book 1) Read Online Free PDF

genetically engineered for a short life so children could be taught certain unpleasant realities. It wasn’t just her.
    She always needed to make sure she didn’t become too enamored with this “ability” of hers, lest she end up becoming one of those kooky charlatans taking money from the vulnerable bereaved. She could have done that, taken advantage of people that way. She could have combed the obituaries looking for potential marks, worked her way into their lives, told them how she could connect them to the part of the recently deceased that remained alive. But that would have been impossible for her, she knew, and not just for moral reasons. She couldn’t imagine making things up about the trace experience, certainly not to the point of comforting the bereaved. It wasn’t magical or mystical. It happened, and it always happened the same way, no matter who died.
    A big reason she resisted turning her ability into something mystical was her hope that it might one day be perceived as legitimate. That, she believed, would give it meaning. What she wanted in life, she reflected now as she flipped through channels full of people demanding to be seen, was what most people wanted: to be treated with respect. To live a meaningful life. To do something that mattered—mattered to both herself and other people. She didn’t have to do tracist work, but she believed it was necessary to getting what she wanted, though she wasn’t entirely sure how it would do that. So far it might have even been doing the opposite. It set her apart from other people rather than connecting her to them. Being able to sense someone’s “life energy” might be a positive thing, but the problem was, she could sense it only after it was too late, after it had escaped the body, after that person was gone and unknowable forever. She never knew anything about these people who died except this one thing—this one terribly intimate, essential thing. She could feel what was most alive about a human being only as it ended.
    It made her smile, privately and grimly, whenever someone spouted off the cliché about not knowing what you have until it’s gone. You don ’ t know the half of it , she wanted to say.
    She heard something rustling outside her door, most likely her neighbor from across the hall, Mrs. Lafferty, the one who had given her the plant. Mrs. Lafferty was the neighbor you dreaded having—the one who got you stuck in long conversations by the mailboxes and in the parking lot about nothing even remotely interesting—and you’d hate yourself for feeling that way because she was so well-meaning and (you found out later) had suffered through so much without complaining. Mr. Lafferty, Nola gleaned, had been a hard-core alcoholic for all his adult life and part of his childhood and was now dying of it. It was only a matter of time. His liver was mush. They were only in their late fifties, but Mrs. Lafferty looked a good fifteen years older and Nola couldn’t even imagine what her husband looked like, not having seen him since the day she moved in. She got the idea that he wanted to die at home. She wished for everyone’s sake that he wouldn’t, that he’d go somewhere to get the kind of care he needed. He was running his wife ragged, and as for Nola herself, she had to admit it freaked her out to think she might have to feel his trace one day.
    But Angela Lafferty was lonely and had a kind heart, and even though she could talk nonstop for what seemed like hours, she was never nosy, never asked Nola why she wasn’t married yet or why she never went to Mass if she’d been raised Catholic. And talking to her neighbor would certainly be a good way to keep from recalling what happened that morning in that house. Nola put her pasta bowl down and got up to open the front door.
    It wasn’t Mrs. Lafferty. No one was in the hallway, but on Nola’s welcome mat was a brown paper grocery sack folded over at the top so she couldn’t see what was