The wait is over! The third book in the Lost Clone YA sci-fi series launches today on Kindle, paperback, and Kindle Unlimited. This fast-paced adventure features mysteries, cool tech, slow-burn romance, and surprising twists. I can’t wait for you to see what happens to Jane and her friends (and enemies) in Book 3!
or keep scrolling for a sneak peek at the first chapter.
P.S. Isn’t that EBook Launch cover amazing?!
Here’s the blurb for The Lost Clone Book 1 in case you haven’t started the series:
Jane is a leftover clone. Created for an unknown purpose, then abandoned at a rundown facility outside Grid City, she has a knack for trouble and a burning desire to find out why she was made.
When a powerful tycoon hires her to replace his son Isaac’s best friend, a girl from the same clone batch as her, Jane jumps at the chance to finally get some answers. All she has to do is convince the charming Isaac that his friend is still alive, without getting too close to him. Stepping into someone else’s life isn’t easy, though, even when you have the same genes.
As Jane struggles to survive at Isaac’s elite private school, she discovers the other clone’s death was no accident—and she might be next. She must solve her batchmate’s murder and unravel the mystery of their origins before the killer comes for her too.
!!!SPOILER WARNING FOR BOOKS 1&2!!!
INSIDER Chapter One
My eyes popped open, and an overwhelming flood of light assaulted my senses. A beam shone directly onto my face, making it impossible to see anything. I felt naked, exposed, as the relentless light scanned every inch of me.
Cold, prickly pain needled my skin, and someone spoke to me from a long way off.
I lost consciousness again.
* * *
The second time I awoke, it was dark. Something mechanical hummed in my ear, and for a wild moment I thought I was back in Dean’s safehouse, waiting for the body scan that would reveal everything.
My hand flew to my sternum. A thick liquid bandage spread across my chest, and another pooled on my belly. Beneath the bandage gunk, my skin felt raw and singed.
In a rush, I remembered the shock-blast from Clementine’s weapon, the echoing stairwell, the fallen bodies. Surprise and pain. Then the last-minute plan to take Janette’s place and Dean holding Rasheed’s shock-Taser to my gut to replicate her injury. He’d disguised me so I could get inside my long-lost sponsor’s headquarters.
My stomach heaved, and I retched, but nothing came up. Inside. I’d wanted to burrow straight to the heart of all my troubles and finally solve the mysteries that had dominated my life. Had it actually worked?
Also, what had I been thinking? I was alone in a strange place, injured and shaken, on the verge of panicking.
No, actually panicking! I tried to sit up, and the Taser wounds on my skin twanged in protest. “Urgh, that hurts,” I muttered through gritted teeth.
“Janette?”
I froze at the sound of the voice.
“It’s okay, Janette.” A heavy hand landed on my shoulder, pressing me down. “You’re home.”
I couldn’t see the speaker in the darkened room. I felt trapped, pinned like a bug beneath their hand. Panic surged through me, numbing my fingers and toes. “What happened?” I choked out.
“We’re still piecing that together,” said the person holding me down—an older man, according to the sound of his crusty voice. “The extraction went badly. The recruit called it in.” He cleared his throat irritably. “The kid tried to carry you all the way here himself on damaged prosthetics. Logan met you on the line and sent him back to school.”
Logan? The line? “Everything’s a blur,” I said, not needing to fake the grogginess in my voice. “I’m, uh, home?”
“Back in your very own room.” He removed his hand from my shoulder, and I sucked in a relieved breath. “Let me get the lights. Tell me if your eyes are sensitive.”
A chair scraped, and the man crossed the room, which only required a handful of steps. Strip lights set around the ceiling began to glow, revealing the rough outline of the room, a crack in one of the ceiling tiles, the stranger’s white lab coat. He brightened the lights slowly, giving me a chance to calm down a little, to remember how to breathe.
“Is something wrong with my eyes?”
“You tell me.” He returned to the bedside and held a digi-pen with a light in it up to my face. “Can you focus on this?”
“Yes.” I followed the pen’s movements, trying to get a better look at him too. Beyond the nimbus of light, I got a vague impression of bushy gray hair and brown skin.
“So far, so good,” he murmured.
“Did I hit my head?” I hoped acting confused would prompt him to answer my questions without suspicion. If I’d truly made it into my sponsor’s headquarters, I needed answers—fast.
“Not as far as we can tell.” Satisfied with my eye movements, he sat back and gave me an appraising look. He appeared to be in his sixties or seventies, and the fine lines around his brown eyes and broad mouth suggested he laughed often. He had a portable med-tester tucked in the pocket of his lab coat and looked every inch the kindly doctor, not the mustache-twirling mastermind I’d expected to meet at my sponsor’s headquarters.
“What happened to me?” I asked, peeling at a loose corner on my liquid bandage. “The details are fuzzier than a synth-fur coat.”
His bushy eyebrows rose, and I reminded myself to try to sound like Janette.
“You took two shock-Taser blasts during the extraction,” the doctor said. “They appear to have damaged your implant. We’re not sure how that’s going to affect your senses going forward.”
“My senses?”
“Your implant’s nanowires are closely integrated with the pathways that deliver signals from your eyes, ears, and skin to your brain. When you got shot, some of the wires were fried. It’s unclear how much damage that will do to your ability to process various stimuli.”
“Oh. I can hear fine, and my eyes seem okay too.” I shifted on the bed, and sharp, tingling pain shivered across my skin. “My body feels like it’s being stabbed with a thousand tiny needles, though. Is that normal?”
“I’m afraid nothing is normal about your situation, but that is consistent with a shock-Taser injury.”
I nodded—then stopped when it intensified the pinpricks. I was probably in better shape than Janette would have been. My implant’s nanowires had never grown far enough to fully integrate into my sensory nervous system. There was nothing there to fry, which meant I’d get to keep my natural eyesight and hearing.
Not that it would matter if they realized who I was, though. Janette had made it very clear our sponsor would kill anyone who got in their way.
I eyed the doctor warily. “Did you, uh, retrieve the data from my implant? Did you see what happened to me?”
He paused for several moments. Sweat broke out on my forehead, and I dug my fingernails into my palms, fighting another surge of panic.
“Not so far,” he said at last. “We haven’t been able to get any signal at all from your device. It’s possible the damage is permanent.”
I couldn’t tell whether he suspected the damage wasn’t recent. He watched me closely. Was that normal doctor scrutiny or mistrust? These people were aware of my—Jane’s—existence. I had to convince them I was their Janette for long enough to get the information I needed—specifically what this organization actually was and where to find the rest of my batchmates.
Don’t mess this up, Jane, I told myself desperately. This is your only chance.
The doctor continued studying me, waiting. How would Janette react to the news her implant was broken beyond repair? She liked her work, something I still found hard to comprehend. She wouldn’t be happy.
“You can fix it, right?” I touched the bandage on my chest. “I need to get back out there. I was making good progress with—”
“Let’s not worry about that just yet. You need rest and monitoring. We’ll talk about everything when Anna returns.” He shifted in his chair, the cheap metal creaking. “I’m afraid I have to tell you something, J. It’s about Eliza.”
Eliza, the woman I’d known as Clementine. I remembered wrestling with her on the stairs in my dorm—her impressive strength, her fingers digging into my skin, her seizing control of the Taser and setting it to kill. Then the shock as Dean shot her first and her heavy body collapsed on top of me.
I gulped. “What about her?”
“I’m so sorry.” The doctor took my hand, and I tried not to flinch. “Eliza was shot during the extraction. She didn’t make it. She’s gone, J.”
“Oh. I—”
“I know things have been complicated between you two lately.” He squeezed my hand. “It’s okay if you have mixed feelings right now.”
I cast my eyes downward, trying to look conflicted. “Yes.”
“Take all the time you need to process. I hope the fact that you got to work together these past few months will be some consolation. She enjoyed serving as your handler again. She’d never have said so, but you were always her favorite.”
I didn’t speak, trying to remember what I knew of their relationship. Janette must have felt hurt and resentful toward Eliza after she went off to become Janie’s handler, Clementine Davies. But Janette had also loved her enough to throw herself in the way of a Taser blast to protect her.
I wasn’t sorry Clementine was dead. The cold way she’d treated me aside, that woman had used and abandoned two of my batchmates, young girls who just wanted families and identities. She’d discarded them callously, and thinking about it still made me furious.
She never deserved their love. We all should have had better than this.
Angry tears swam at the corners of my eyes, I hoped enough to feign actual grief. I made a show of wiping them away then adopted Janette’s cool, indifferent mask. “So, when can I get back in the field?”
The doctor patted my shoulder sadly. “We’ll talk about that later. You should rest, and we’ll try again to extract the data from your implant. We have a lot of questions about the two weeks between your last download and your abduction.”
“Right. Questions.” I wasn’t sure how many of those I could answer. I hadn’t spent every minute of the past two weeks with Janette. She’d also done some things in that time that she worried would get us both decommissioned—her fancy sponsor word for killed.
That was what would happen to me if they realized my identity too.
The doctor scraped back his chair and stood. “Try to sleep, and I’ll be back to check on you soon.”
“When?”
He frowned at my anxious tone. “Don’t worry about that, J. Rest, and we’ll talk when Anna is back. She’ll want a full report.”
“Of course. A report.”
He hesitated a moment longer. Had he noticed something amiss, some quirk in mannerisms that didn’t match his expectations? Or did he have more to tell me? I fought to keep my breathing steady, channeling Janette’s poise with all my might.
If the doctor suspected I wasn’t the real Janette, he didn’t say so. He dimmed the lights and left the room, the door clicking shut behind him.
I counted to a hundred, giving him plenty of time to walk away or double back to see if I was following his orders to rest. While I counted, I took in the details of the place Janette had called home between her surveillance missions.
The room was small, with a blue tile floor, clinical white walls, and an en suite bathroom. At first, I thought an external window opened above the bed, which would let me get my bearings, but it was actually a large framed digital poster. My roommate Veronica used to display her favorite art pieces on a similar device. Janette’s was programmed with a series of nature images muted to match the dimmed lights. It switched from a view of a forested mountain in the autumn to a raging waterfall to what I was pretty sure was the Frost-Torrance Nature Reserve between Grid City and Harbortown.
In addition to the creaky metal chair, a portable medbot stood beside the bed—that was what had been humming mechanically when I awoke—and an overstuffed armchair sat in the far corner on a handwoven rug in shades of blue. Beside the chair was a low table made from a recycled robot chassis with a handful of small objects decorating the surface. I didn’t examine the mementoes, aware that cameras might be monitoring me.
The jammer device Dean had given me was nowhere in sight. I wouldn’t risk jamming the cameras in case it attracted attention, but the gadget also had a tracker. Dean had said they’d probably take it from me before bringing me to headquarters, but he’d promised to follow its movements for as long as possible. We had agreed to communicate through my student portal so he could rescue me when I got the information I wanted.
I hoped he was out there somewhere. I’d fallen unconscious in Harbortown and had no idea if I was still there, in Grid City, or somewhere else entirely. I’d feel braver if Dean was nearby, waiting to swoop in and extract me.
He had warned me not to stay more than a few days. Already, I felt the clock counting down. I needed to work quickly.
Hoping the doctor was far enough away, I climbed out of bed, wincing at the prickly pain in my skin. The bandages covering the Taser-blast sites on my chest and belly had some numbing properties, but the rest of me felt as tender as a freshly-plucked chicken. I stretched my arms and rotated my ankles to get a little blood back in my limbs and shake off the lingering grogginess, trying to act natural for the cameras. The bedroom might not have recording devices, since Janette herself was a walking surveillance drone, but the same probably wasn’t true of whatever lay beyond the door.
I tottered over to it, the tile floor cold against my bare feet. Someone had put me in a nightshirt that fell past my knees, the front buttons open to the sternum. I buttoned it over my bandaged wound, noting the cheery oak leaf pattern on the fabric, which wasn’t one I would have expected Janette to pick. I glanced at the scenery pictures cycling through the digital poster, wondering if she was more into nature than I’d realized.
I felt frustrated at how much I still didn’t know about my batchmate. She’d refused to let me get close to her, no matter how hard I tried. The gaps would only become more apparent when I encountered more people who knew her.
My one advantage: Janette was like me. She wouldn’t want to sit around, even while injured. She’d be curious about what had happened during her absence, and like me, she’d want to see what was going on outside this little room. I could use that.
I took a deep breath, summoning my nerve, and reached for the door handle.
Jordan Rivet 