B Clones (Clones #1) - Laurann Dohner Page 0,7

deliveries of plasma, but also food and other supplies to keep the resort well stocked.

Then there were the guests.

Clone World was a popular vacation destination with people from Earth. With his bad luck, a large passenger cruiser might happen along. They featured heavy weapons systems to protect humans from attacks. One glance at his unauthorized shuttle and they’d attempt to destroy it.

The last thing Big needed was to have to defend himself against living humans. The authorities would respond to that by beefing up security in the travel lanes. They might even send a few shuttles to specifically seek him out. It might not affect him, since he wouldn’t need to hit another transport for a long while. They’d never find him. But his fellow freed clones would be put at risk. They also had to steal to stay alive. Big wasn’t willing to bring heat down on them.

He hurried to take the last crates of plasma stored on the transport. It was a good amount that would last two clones for years to come.

Gemma was a gift from fate—if he could keep her from having a meltdown once she understood the truth. He’d deal with that after he flew them out of the travel lanes and they were safe.

He pushed the last container into the long hallway he’d created by docking with the transport. He had to close the door behind him to keep anything from floating back into the cargo hold. It finally silenced the annoying droid. He worked his way through the crates and around the corner, braced himself, then started to send the remaining crates straight toward his ship, one at a time. Gemma was out of the way of being hit, he hoped. He sent them easy, just in case, not applying much pressure to get them moving. She’d be able to block them from hitting her with her hands.

His thoughts remained on Gemma as he continued to work. Everyone had heard the horror stories about when JDJ Cryo Corp had first tested clones with their memories intact. The original dozen, as they had been called, had all gone very wrong.

Two clones had killed the employees tending to them in a revenge tactic, or possibly in a fit of blind rage over what had been done to them. None of the dozen had volunteered to become clones. They’d woken, only to learn their fate. That couldn’t have been pleasant.

Big didn’t blame them for the murders. They had the minds of free humans, inside the bodies of clones. They were considered nothing but property. It was no wonder they hadn’t taken that reality without a fight. The company should have foreseen that outcome.

Seven of the original dozen had committed suicide by various means. They couldn’t come to terms with waking inside those new bodies. It had been too much for their minds to comprehend. It probably didn’t help that the humans he’d spent time with hadn’t exactly been compassionate toward clones. Big doubted the dozen had been treated any better. It would be even tougher for them to endure intense verbal abuse and lack of empathy, since they’d once been fully human.

He worried about the female clone he’d just rescued, in that regard. Would she go into shock from learning what had happened to her after her death? She said she wasn’t deeply religious. He hoped she hadn’t been lying.

He’d read that a portion of the failed clones hadn’t wanted to exist anymore, were literally unable, feeling as if they were an abomination, a betrayal of whatever religion they had believed in. Those failed clones had reasoned they no longer had a soul; that they needed to die, even if it meant taking their own lives.

The three clones who’d survived past the first month hadn’t been able to withstand all the changes that had taken place since their original deaths. They ceased to speak or interact with the staff tending to them. Months passed as their mental health deteriorated further and further.

The experiment had been deemed a failure within four months, and once the results were known, a new law had been enacted regarding the manufacturing of clones. All of them were ordered to be blanked of source material memories.

Clones were reprogrammed during growth to teach them a working knowledge of the world they were being born into. Programed memories were implanted to make them mentally stable and to accept the roles they were created to fill. They understood that they were clones. It was the