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“Me either.” She smiled, aching to round the table and get close to him again. Of course, she couldn’t. Soon, though, their lives would change. Free would be free. They wouldn’t have to hide their relationship. There would be no more guards or stupid rules to follow.
No one could judge them for how they felt about each other.
“We just have to wait for a little bit,” he reminded her, seeming to know how difficult waiting would be for her. “The time will pass quickly. At least that’s what I tell myself.”
“You’re right. I just want a future with you so badly that I sometimes feel very impatient to start our future together.”
“I feel the same.” His beautiful gaze held hers. “I’ll be thinking about you every minute. It’s what I already do.”
She blinked back tears. “I love you.”
“I love you too.”
Chapter One
The Present
Marisol read over the data one more time. She hadn’t checked that account in nearly a month. At first, she’d done it in desperation, hoping to see a withdrawal or charge on the account. It would prove that the man she loved was still alive. Her hope had faded rapidly after the first year. That’s when he would have run out of clone plasma and needed to purchase more. Then, it had just become a habit. Nothing had changed until that day. Someone had finally accessed it.
It hurt so deeply that she hadn’t been able to touch her dinner. The meal sat cooling on her dining room table from where the housing staff clones had left it for her over an hour before. A small group of them brought her meals, cleaned her home while she was at work, and did her laundry.
No one else was aware of the discrepancy she’d found earlier that day. The missing large sum had been funded through a hidden marketing account, the same one she’d used to pay for the man she loved to escape Clone World.
Only her, Free, and Figures knew how to access that money to prevent it from being flagged. Those funds officially didn’t even exist. She certainly hadn’t used it. That only left two other suspects. At least one of them was still alive. It was the only explanation.
It had taken time, but she’d traced what had been purchased. Her grandfather bought illegal unblanked clones from time to time. Those were clones created with memories from their original human-sourced bodies.
She pretended not to know about the ones in her grandfather’s private collection. It turned her stomach, imagining why he’d want off-the-books female clones created, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it. It horrified her that he probably used them as sex slaves. He sure couldn’t parade them in public or introduce them to the guests.
Her gramps bribed officials at JDJ Clone Corp on Earth to do highly illegal things. He probably also paid off the law authorities, so they didn’t check those shipments coming from the clone factories on Earth. They’d just look the other way if she managed to slip intel to them about his activities or warn him that he had someone leaking information.
Not that she’d do that. Her gramps would have no problem killing the illegally made clones to destroy the evidence if anyone bothered to investigate. It wasn’t like he cared about them or even saw them as living, breathing people with feelings. They were products created to do jobs and nothing more. He didn’t even consider it murder when one was executed for failing to perform the way they were intended.
It was prohibited and punishable by severe prison time to have any clones made with memories still intact from the original source materials. Those would have been living humans. It was considered unnaturally cruel. Those clones would awaken believing they were the same people they’d once been, unaware that they’d died. The shock alone of learning they were now property instead of free individuals would be enough to make their sanity snap.
There were other factors, too. In some cases, the time lapses between their deaths and when they were awoken as a clone could be drastic. Everyone and everything they knew would be long gone in the past. Rumor had it that DJD Clone Corp had been collecting DNA and the brains of certain high-profile individuals for a century.
That would have been anyone the company felt might be historically relevant in the future. Politicians. Celebrities. Entertainers. She knew of one horror novel author her grandfather had purchased a clone copy of with memories. That wasn’t for sex, at least. Her grandfather wasn’t attracted to men. She suspected he was forcing the poor soul into writing more books for his private reading or for some twisted financial gain in the future.
“He’s a monster,” Marisol whispered.
Clone World would be shut down if it ever came to light what the owner of the planet had unblanked ones created. The authorities would terminate all the clones her gramps had bought. Every. Single. One. No matter how much she hated what kind of lives those dozen or so illegal clones lived, it was better than watching all of them be slaughtered just because her gramps broke the law. Over eight hundred clones worked on the planet.
Why would Figures or Free pay for an illegal clone to be made? It had been a female. That was all Marisol had been able to figure out on the payment transaction. It wasn’t like DJD Clone Corp was going to put an unblanked clone purchase in writing to make the crime easily provable. The billing price let her know the truth. A clone with real memories costs almost three times the normal amount of a programmed one. It also proved that at least one male, if not both, was still alive. She blinked back tears.
Free had never contacted her while she was at Barlish station. She’d grieved him, certain that he’d died. One of his fellow clones would have sent word to the station telling what had happened to him otherwise. At least, that had been her assumption. None of them had sent a message to her hotel room. That’s why she’d believed they must have been killed shortly after their escape.
It left only one conclusion to come to after someone had used that account. Free had lied from the beginning, used her, and only pretended to be in love with her. The realization was…painful.
She’d been a fool. One who’d tormented herself with Free’s memory and the shattered dreams of a future they should have had together. The pain in her chest became so intense that it hurt to breathe, and she clutched at the front of her shirt.
A small noise alerted her that someone had entered the other room. No one should have been inside her home. Marisol dropped her arm, ran to the weapon she kept hidden behind a picture frame of her deceased parents, and fisted it. The housing staff had no business being in her home after dinner delivery.
She backed up into the corner behind a tall artificial plant and targeted the doorway to the living room. Four people wearing medic uniforms strolled casually through it, each carrying a blue med bag. Two were males, and two were females. All of them had black hair, but their eye colors varied. They didn’t see her at first, heading toward her bedroom.
“What in the hell are you doing?”
They froze at the sound of her voice.
