Chapter 1 - The Man with the Gun
The man who buried my father put a gun against my heart.
"WHO ARE YOU?" Marcus Hale shouted.
"You were at his funeral!" I screamed. "You know exactly who I am!"
Rain ran down my face. I was barefoot in the woods, clutching a stolen birth record, and every line on it said the same impossible thing: I wasn't supposed to exist.
Marcus's hand shook. "I know the name on your blood samples. I don't know whose blood we've actually been taking."
"What samples?"
A siren wailed beneath our feet. The ground shivered, and red lights flickered through the roots of the old oak. Somewhere underground, heavy machinery began to move.
Evelyn, the woman who raised me, twisted out of a guard's grip.
"CLARA, RUN!"
She grabbed his dropped knife and slashed Marcus across the arm. His gun spun into the opening as the dirt split apart. Shots cracked through the trees. I fell backward, still holding the paper.
At the bottom, two lines jumped out at me.
SUBJECT 0B: DUPLICATE STRAIN.
PRIMARY HOST RETAINED.
"Duplicate?" I whispered.
A flare lit the trees. Victoria Voss, the woman whose foundation had paid for my childhood checkups, stood beside a young woman with my face. Same crooked eyebrow. Same gray eyes.
The girl pushed a syringe of blue liquid against her neck. Light spread through the veins of her throat.
"Don't let her reach the shaft!" Victoria screamed. "She's the key!"
The earth gave way.
I dropped into a shaft, struck a hanging safety net, and rolled onto a steel floor. Above me, enormous doors slammed shut. Bright lights snapped on.
Glass tanks stretched into the distance. Women floated behind the glass, some young, some gray-haired. Every one of them had my dead mother's face.
A speaker crackled. "PRIMARY DONOR DNA VERIFIED."
Footsteps rang on a catwalk. A man emerged in the brown jacket from my father's last photograph. He looked thirty-six, exactly as he had twenty-two years ago.
"Dad?"
He stared down at me in horror.
May you like
"Clara," he said, "there were supposed to be two of you."
Then a monitor behind him flashed a third heartbeat.
