Free Perfect Specimen by Kate Donovan

me.”
    Lizzie groaned, expecting another retelling of how Durgan had demolished them all in the last tournament.
    But Randy seemed determined to keep them on task. Pacing again, he told them, “Okay, here are the basics. This guy Ga’rag is from a race of cloners—”
    “Humanoids, but with gills. Right?” Skywalker interrupted. “How cool is that?”
    “Exactly.” Randy’s green eyes sparkled. “According to the diary—which is hearsay, since we can’t trust anything this creep tells Sara—the Ra-ahlian race used to be like us, meaning they had babies the old-fashioned way. Then they discovered cloning and figured it gave them better control over the product, so they banned sexual reproduction. The women thought they were nuts, and tried to form their own colonies with some willing guys, but the male-dominated government wiped them out.”
    “And they call themselves males?” Durgan laughed. “I’m trying to get more sex in my life, not less.”
    “Talk about delusional,” Lizzie drawled. “Dream on, loser.”
    The guys laughed. Then Randy explained. “Ga’rag claims they had already evolved past the pleasures of the flesh, even before they perfected cloning. All brain, no bod, apparently. Like Skywalker here. So they were happy for centuries. Then an abnormality started showing up. In virtually all of them.”
    “Because by now, they’re all clones?” she asked.
    “Exactly. So they spread out across the galaxy, looking for generic material to reboot their DNA. Ga’rag comes here, scopes out medical records for healthy parents, IDs three newborn baby girls with great genes, and decides to test them. To see if they’ve got what it takes—physically and emotionally—to help him save Ra-ahl. The first thing he did was kill Sara’s mom in childbirth—”
    “That makes sense,” Skywalker interrupted. “The mom would be the first one to notice problems.”
    “Right. Maternal instinct. Meanwhile, the dad did his best, but hired a series of babysitters, et cetera. Which gave Ga’rag the opportunity he needed to pay visits to little Sara. And to threaten to kill the dad if she breathed a word to him about it.”
    Lizzie was barely listening to this last bit of supposition. She was still back at Skywalker’s comment—a mom would be the first one to notice something wrong with a daughter.
    Wasn’t Lizzie proof of that? Her mom had survived childbirth, had identified her kid as a freak, and done the only rational thing: ran off with a strange guy and left Lizzie alone with a well-intentioned by inattentive father.
    The parallel was almost chilling.
    Not that Randy and his stupid buddies knew it. Even if Lizzie had shared her painful past with them, which she had not, they were too insensitive to make the connection. Sure, they were up in arms about poor Sara Kent, but that was because she was supposedly such a perfect specimen that an alien had selected her out of all the females on Earth to be the mother of his future babies.
    “He wears a military uniform and calls himself the Overlord and uses a whip on her when she disobeys,” Randy was explaining. “And he planted a device in her nose so he can make it bleed whenever he wants to, even if he’s hiding in another room and spying on her.”
    “But he also wears a lab coat sometimes and calls himself Dr. Ga’rag,” Skywalker told Lizzie and Durgan. “Like he’s her friend. Or impartial. But he’s just playing with her head.”
    “But the way he really manipulates her is with her three daughters,” Randy added.
    “She has children?” Lizzie’s heart sank. “Your message said she made up the story about a husband and kids to scare your brother away.”
    Skywalker’s face lit up. “That’s the best part. And it’s the reason me and Randy think he’s lying about the kids to Sara. He says he removed her eggs and fertilized them with his own stuff to make three babies. But why would a cloner do that? Wouldn’t he just take a