Vingo replied and the croatoan crawled out of its cramped hiding place.
“What did it say?” Denver said.
“She asked if she was in danger, and says she hid here when the scion probe approached the temple.”
Charlie scoffed. “She? That creature?”
Vingo turned to face him. “Please don’t be disrespectful.”
“Excuse me?”
“Do you think you are the special race and the rest of us are just creatures?”
“I never said that.”
“Male and female genders are not uncommon in the universe. Many are a lot more advanced than Earth, and nearly all have different—”
“They invaded our planet,” Denver said, not being able to resist cutting in at the apparent lecture. “We didn’t want to personalize them during our fight. They were our enemy. Simple as that.”
The croatoan clicked behind Vingo. He turned and listened.
“She says we can stay here for as long as we want,” Vingo said.
“Don’t you need to get to your village?” Layla said.
“The sun rises in less than a unit. We can rest here and wait for nightfall.”
Denver stood and walked over to Vingo, thinking it was time to get things straight between them. “What’s your real story?”
“I don’t know what you mean?”
“I think you do. That’s why you saved us, isn’t it, to provide protection on your way home? We’re nothing but your bloody meat shields!”
“We have common goals. You’re free to leave and go where you wish if your association with me is so difficult.”
“I don’t think so,” Charlie said. “We both want to survive, but the difference is we can’t get home.”
“A possibility exists if you help me,” Vingo said.
“I’m not sure I believe you,” Denver said.
“Believe what you want. I don’t have anything to lose by not showing you a way back to Earth.”
Layla gasped through the intercom. Denver glanced back. Her open-mouthed expression curled into a smile. He wanted to feel the same excitement but couldn’t. The more time he spent with Vingo, the less he trusted him.
Chapter 9
MARIA SLUMPED against the small table and inhaled the black coffee, hoping the 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 reintegrated him to Freetown after they had freed him from an abandoned harvester.
“How do you do it?” Maria asked, turning to face him.
Jason smiled at her and zipped up his farm-issue suit. The collar was frayed and tatty and the front was stained with orange smudges: spills from the root juice some of the Freetowners had started to make.
“Be so devilishly handsome, you mean?”
Yeah, that was Jason. Ben was more reserved.
Although she missed Ben, Jason was still a likeable person. Since she returned to Freetown she’d spent most of her time with Jason, talking about Tredeya, the croatoans, and what it all meant.
“Hell knows,” Jason had said in response to those questions. He knew he was a clone and knew he didn’t have the answers but seemed quite content to continue to exist without knowing.
“You’re not so bad on the eye, I’ll give you that,” Maria said, feeling her mood lift and the barest of smiles creeping onto her lips. “But I mean, how can you be so calm, so… I don’t know the word for it. Grounded, I suppose? All this craziness going on, the truth of who and what we are. It’s just…”
“Crazy as fuck?”
“Yeah,” Maria said with a hearty laugh. Jason was good at releasing tension, bringing levity to her introspection.
Jason poured himself a cup of ‘instant’ coffee and swallowed a mouthful, twisting his face in disgust. “I’ll never get used to this crap,” he said. “I’d rather drink the slop the aliens gave us on the harvester.”