It’s been a while since I posted an excerpt. I figured, Why the hell not?
[Hopefully, the administration still gives me my hard-earned diploma even though I used that dirty, little word.]

From Chapter 2:

Katia interrupted. “Hold on. What the hell kind of name is Mom?Or Adam even? I’ve met a hundred other Katias, Gastons, and all the normal names. Mom and Adam aren’t on the list.”

Adam grinned.

“Mom—Nana—will explain all that. She likes telling the story.”

Before she could object, Adam reentered docent mode. “Now, as I was saying before being so rudely interrupted by Katia-2198-04, these are the private quarters.”

He pointed out his own room, Gaston’s, and those belonging to the other residents. Twelve in all. Only one remained vacant. He explained that the fifth floor contained the rec room and lounge areas where the clones spent most of their time. Katia, aching for a hit of Ambrosia, asked to skip that part of the tour. Adam shrugged, and they descended one story to the third floor. It was laid out the same as the fourth, except the exam room was subdivided into four separate dwellings.

Inside one of them, a wrinkly old man rubbed lotion on his stomach. While the skin stretched taut across it, the rest of him sagged with age. A pair of the infected exited their adjacent rooms. They were identical in appearance down to every last detail: hairline, lush lips, posture, bundled parasites cradled in their arms. The longer Katia looked, the more their subtle differences stood out. One was a man, the other a woman.

Adam explained. “They’re the only clones I’ve ever seen who actually look alike. Usually there’s no issue telling clones apart. That pair is from a batch of duodectuplets. We only have two of the twelve. Some experiment the Surgeons tried with one of the crops. They played around with creating six males and six females with 98% identical genes. The one on the left is Dash-C. Dash-J is on the right.”

Katia kept staring. Not so much at the clone-copies, as at the squirming blankets in their arms. Perhaps there was something to the whole safehouse thing. The parasites were rumored to kill their victims, but this pair of previously infected clones looked alive and well. They even seemed to be doting on the living tumors.

After a slew of revisions using input from both sides of my brain, CPs, betas, and even a pair of agents, this is the [current] opening for FREEBORN.

Katia shuffled down the busy sidewalk in her geriatric shoes. Shoulders and sharp elbows rocked the old woman as the mindless clones around her scurried to some appointment or another. The pulse in Katia’s temples thumped four times faster than the clacking of her copper cane. Wary of the surveillance cameras, even in the crowd, she slowed to a stop and adjusted the scarf securing her gray wig. Though her granny disguise was fake, her Infection was all too real.

Every face that passed wore a government-issued prevention mask. Every set of eyes above those masks posed a threat to Katia’s dangerous ruse. Even though she had taken every precaution—done every prescribed step to prevent it—the dreaded sickness had wormed its way into her blood. Red-hot fear and a hungry, deadly parasite now squirmed together in her gut.

She chanced a peek at the pair of militant Doctors blocking her direct route to the building. Their chrome assault rifles glinted in the sun like surgical blades. Katia had seen the Doctors in action many times: kicking the infected, mocking them, toying with the victims before dragging them kicking and begging to a quarantine center. A single prick from one of the detectors clipped to their belts would immediately unravel her disguise.

Her status would instantly downgrade from a harmless, healthy clone to a diseased punching bag.

Katia hunched extra low. Her lungs burned with stale, recycled breath as she worked her way through the masses and shambled along behind the Doctors. Their gruff laughter bounced off her humped back as she passed. Caught up in some dirty joke, they paid no mind to the rickety, old granny mounting the steps to the ten-story structure.

The woman in Suite 940 held Katia’s last scrap of hope. While the pirate forums referred to the woman as a witch, Katia didn’t believe in such things. The mysterious Ilythia, supposedly, possessed the secret knowledge needed to help the infected survive the horrific final stages of the Infection. With the world slathered in deception, it could be a trap. But Katia’s symptoms intensified with every passing day. Her stomach was already visibly swollen with the bastard parasite eating her alive from the inside out. Soon, she would no longer be able to hide her sickness from the ever-watching eyes.

Fear jabbed her insides as she approached the GeneTag scanner. ID cards, fingerprints, and retina scans were obsolete. This new technology now guarded entry to any building. Katia thought the method suspicious. Stupid, really. With the airborne virus so contagious, why had the idiots in the skyscrapers designed an ID system that required removal of the protective masks?

She slid hers off.

A couple exited the building, swinging wide around the threat of her exposed face. Katia stuck out her tongue and confronted the polished steel panel inset in the wall. Her ragged, fake-old-lady reflection disappeared as the door slid upward and out of sight, revealing the angry mechanized armature. It was like a cyborg’s arm severed from its body, all the flesh boiled away. Clinical and demanding. Rods, hinges and tubing with a singular, selfish mission: to prick.

The hoses plumped, and the hydraulic arm emerged from the wall. Bent at the elbow, wrist maneuvering into position, it aimed itself at Katia’s open mouth like a cobra ready to strike. But it didn’t have a pair of fangs; it only had one—a four inch needle looming shiny and sharp.

Katia squeezed her eyes shut to brace against the coming pain. With a sickening pop she couldn’t get used to, the needle plunged into her tongue. Pain erupted. Hot serum injected. Tangy. Bittersweet. Like molten glass flooding her mouth. The siphon engaged, reversing the flow, and the syringe sucked its rancid fluid back out.

Sirens blared. Strobes flashed.

Infection Detected! Infection Detected! Infection Detected!