Free Critical Strike (The Critical Series Book 3) by Colin F. Barnes, Darren Wearmouth, Wearmouth, Barnes Page B

bitter scent would chase away the clone memories of her forebear.
    Ever since she had those first flashbacks to the Roanoke era, her dreams and thoughts had been invaded by flashes of the terrible things the croatoan invaders had performed on her… well, self.
    She looked up at the window in the small Freetown office. Dawn had just broken, bathing the landscape in a warm yellow glow that wasn’t quite strong enough to banish the cold gray of a frosty autumnal morning. The coffee burned her mouth and throat, but she didn’t care; pain was a reminder that although she was a clone she still had feelings—still had her own life.
    Outside of the converted office building that Freetown used as a break room, voices and footsteps belonging to both humans and croatoans echoed through the corridor.
    They were all getting ready to depart Freetown and join Unity.
    Like her clone mother, it seemed Maria had to leave the only place she had considered home for some promised colony of safety. But she had seen the way of life in Unity and it wasn’t all roses and hugs.
    But then without Layla and Denver, what did she have to stay around for?
    The others within Freetown seemed to go about their business as though nothing had happened, as though their sacrifice was just some small thing to acknowledge and then move on.
    The very fact that any of them were able to wake up and breathe should have highlighted that their sacrifice had been worth it and had brought them freedom and life. And yet, all anyone could talk about was what role they would fill in Unity.
    Maria, though, had other ideas.
    She wasn’t going to go to Unity. She couldn’t face confronting more of her clones. If her residual memories of her original self were anything to go by, she didn’t want to have to talk about them with the others—assuming they had the same vivid dreams about being captured and experimented on by croatoan scientists.
    What if Maria was the only one?
    What would that mean?
    She downed the rest of the coffee. The hot liquid burned her throat and stomach, making her gasp. After a while the pain diminished, as it always did. She stood and approached the window, pressing her palms against it.
    One of the harvesters stood just across the square. The thing was huge and bulky, but strangely comforting. She had spent all her formative years there working with her crew, thinking they were doing some noble deed for all of humankind. A generation ship built to take colonists to some faraway planet was a cruel delusion perpetrated by the croatoans.
    In some weird way, she was actually more croatoan than human—at least in her mind. They had created her, imprinted the knowledge they had wanted her to know to carry out a specific role.
    Did they also program her mind to look back on those times, look onto that harvester with a sense of sadness and longing? Ever since Charlie and Denver had ‘freed’ her from its confines she had never felt settled.
    She didn’t belong in this world; she knew that.
    She was an accident, a mistake. One of those small things that even the calculating croatoan council didn’t account for, or even if they did, they didn’t care about the results.
    So what now? she thought. If Unity wasn’t to be her next location and Freetown was deserted, where should she go? What should she do?
    Perhaps that was a question all humans had, she wondered, thinking about children and teenagers, especially those in Unity. If they weren’t pushed into something by their elders or guided by their parents, how would they know what to do with their lives?
    What was the purpose of being alive? At least on the harvester she had a role. So what if it was a lie. Isn’t all of reality a lie?
    The door to the break room opened. A man—a clone of Ben—entered.
    Maria had renamed him Jason on account of being unable to see him as the real Ben… or at least her version of the Ben clone. He had taken to the name willingly when Layla and the others