A Clone’s Mission

CONNOR

Chaos bloomed the second we told the others what the doctor suspected.

Creating clones was too big a concept for any of us to grasp, and it was met with serious doubts. Especially with such dinosaur-minded alphas.

Before we kicked up a fuss for nothing, Doctor Ross asked for some time to verify his hunch, so we gave him ten minutes.

After he left to look over the files from the hard drive in peace, the rest of us in the room watched on while the alphas ordered the detainment of their clones. Alpha Mateo and Alpha Roger took theirs to an interrogation room, but Alpha Dan’s was missing.

It seemed we had a runner.

I glanced at Willow. Her hands were clenched white-knuckle tight as she stood rigid beside me.

“Wait a damn second,” Alpha Dan snapped through the screen. “If ~they’re~ clones, how do we know ~she~ isn’t?”

All eyes, both physical and digital, turned to Willow. She flinched like someone had drawn a gun.

“She’s not,” I said, pulling her onto my lap. “Trust me.”

“Trust you?” The council member scoffed. “You’ve known for weeks that humans have not only learned of our existence but also done experimentation on our kind! This should’ve been reported to the council immediately!”

Murmurs of agreement spread among the others, and I hugged Willow closer to me so that her touch and her wolf could soothe me.

Because I was about to explode.

“I apologize, everyone, really,” I said, deciding it best to play polite by bowing my head slightly, “but we’ve had a lot to deal with, as you know. I’ll do better in the future. I promise.”

Nods of acceptance filled the screen before Alpha Ronan said, “So, about Willow being a clone. How do we know she’s not one?”

“I had the same question,” Doctor Ross said, striding back into my office with a tablet in hand. “And the evidence is written all over her body. She’s riddled with scars. Do your clones have any?”

Alpha Roger’s and Alpha Mateo’s eyes glassed over momentarily before they shook their heads in unison.

“So that’s your first clue,” the doctor continued, “but based on her bloodwork, neural scans, and what’s in these BioBridge files”—he waved the tablet—“I’m confident Willow’s the original.”

Ben leaned forward from his spot by the wall, his brow furrowed. “So Willow’s DNA—alpha DNA—was the first to successfully produce a viable clone?”

“Seems that way.” Doctor Ross both nodded and shrugged. “If I could get my hands on their lead scientist, I could get more answers for you. These spreadsheets only track the results, not the specifics—the whys, the whats, the hows, those I can’t tell you.”

Murmurs once again erupted. Alphas talked over each other as the council rep threw around the terms “genetic theft” and “code violations” and “war.” None of them seemed to notice Willow shrinking deeper into her seat on my lap.

But I did.

“I’ve seen others,” I said, cutting through the noise. “Three. In the last few weeks. At random spots. On the street in Seattle, at a gas station. All three looked exactly like her, except one looked half Willow’s age and another looked twice.”

“I don’t claim to know anything about cloning,” Alpha Mateo said, “but wouldn’t all of them, by nature, have to be younger than Willow?”

“Absolutely,” Alpha Dan interjected. “Sure, maybe they started ‘growing’ them the day Willow came to them, and I bet they kept doing it over the years, so there could be dozens out there. All of them, though, would be younger than Willow.”

“So that begs the question,” the council member said. “How could you have seen one that looked older?”

Silence followed, and then all eyes turned to Doctor Ross.

“Pfft! Don’t look at me!” He held up his palms. “I’m not a genetics expert.”

“Is there anything in the hard drive that could say?” I asked.

“Probably,” the doctor said. “Want to give me a month to sort through it all?”

I didn’t like his tone, but he had a point. We needed to move on. Right when I was about to shift the topic to next steps, Travis scoffed and clicked his tongue.

“Hey, Doc,” Travis said, leaning forward, “any chance they could’ve found a way to accelerate the aging process?”

A collective intake of breath filled the room as the same terrible realization struck us all at once.

“Those fucking assholes,” Ben said, spitting out the words. “They wanted clones, but they didn’t want to wait for them to grow up. But for what pur—”

“They’re making super soldiers.” Travis’s eyes were dark with certainty. “We know GhostBridge trains them to fight from birth.” He glanced at Willow. “We know BioBridge wants to control werewolf shifting. And who knows what else they’re trying to do?

“So think about it. If they can mass-produce an alpha-blood werewolf soldier whose shift is controllable and who could be battle-ready within a year or two”—he scoffed again—“they’d be printing money. They wouldn’t need a volunteer army. They’d grow their own.”

The room exhaled, the weight of truth finally landing.

And it landed hard.

I rubbed the back of my neck, my pulse drumming in my ears. “That email,” I said, “the one warning us to be careful? It wasn’t about Willow. It was about the clones. That’s why they insisted on meeting in person.”

Josh looked up from his keyboard, his eyes sharp. “Makes sense. Whoever sent it probably knew what was coming.”

“They knew,” I agreed. “And whoever’s behind this, whatever’s left of that operation, they got to the sender before we could.”

WILLOW

The walls were closing in.

The truth was uglier than any nightmare.

Even more devastating was the realization that I hadn’t made it out intact. That they’d kept pieces of me, reused me, manufactured me again and again. And now those pieces were walking, talking, and ~living~ in three different packs—that we knew of.

It wasn’t until Connor mentioned the email that another piece clicked into place.

“Nurse Amy.” I sat up straighter as the words fell out before I could second-guess them. “She sent the email before she broke me out.” I glanced at Josh. “And that’s what the hard drive was—the proof she’d mentioned. It was insurance too.”

The meeting went still for a good minute before Alpha Roger’s voice cut through the contemplative hush.

“Enough talking about the past. We need to get our pups back.” He spoke with grit and purpose. “These clones are the link, and we need to find out what they know. We’ve got ours in interrogation now.” He nodded to someone off camera. “I’ll share the live feed.”

My stomach dropped as the laptop screen switched to a sterile white room, where the girl who looked so freakishly similar to me sat. With tearstained cheeks, she appeared broken and hurt.

I felt sorry for her—more than that, I felt sick. Watching her was watching myself through warped glass. And it made something crawl behind my ribs.

The interrogator leaned forward, his eyes narrowed. “Chloe, why did you come to Crystal Moon?”

Chloe sobbed. “I…I came because I was on a mission to help.”

“Help who? How?”

Her sobs intensified. She shrank, wincing as if expecting a blow. Her ribs heaved with each breath, her tears mixing with snot.

The interrogator growled. “Start from the beginning, Chloe. We’re not playing games!”

“I...I don’t remember from before I woke up. It’s all a blur.” She wrung her hands. “But when I did wake up, there was this woman. She said her name was Matron Lily.”

~Lily.~ That name twisted something ugly in my gut.

“When you woke up?” the interrogator asked, bringing my attention back to the laptop. “Explain that. And Matron Lily? Who’s she?”

“It was like waking up from a deep sleep.” Her voice trembled. “I didn’t know where I was, and I don’t know the exact date. A few months ago, maybe? Matron Lily was kind. She looked after me. Told me I had a purpose.”

“And what was that purpose?”

“She told me”—Chloe looked down at her hands—“that her pack had lost every baby born in the last decade. All gone. Taken. She said I was sent by the Moon Goddess to help bring back the three that Crystal Moon had abducted. That it was divine work.”

That was the lie, then, the big one they’d told her. It seemed that each project had its own story, its own myth to keep us pointed in the right direction. Mine was salvation. Hers was grief.

They’d figured out how to weaponize empathy.

“And you believed that?” the interrogator asked with a scoff.

“Why wouldn’t I? She was basically the only person I knew!” Her hands flew up in a helpless gesture. “Why wouldn’t I trust her?” Her shoulders sagged. “There were others like me, too. They looked exactly like me, so of course we all believed we were created to help.”

“‘Created.’” The interrogator smirked as if he’d caught her in a slip. “So you admit you were created. Do you understand what that means?”

“I didn’t. Not until now.” Chloe wrapped her arms around herself, looking lost. “I thought we were special. Chosen.”

“And how exactly were you supposed to help?”

“We were given a mission: to find the lost children and return them to where they belonged. Each of us was placed in a different pack. We were told to identify the kidnapped children and bring them to the border of the pack land so they could be taken home.”

“So you admit that you came here specifically to abduct pups?”

Chloe’s eyes went wide. “I came to rescue them! She said they weren’t safe here—I didn’t know it was a lie!”

Pursing his lips and nodding, the interrogator stared at her. When she began to squirm, he said, “So, BioBridge grew you in a lab, fed you lies from your first breath, then sent you out to kidnap alpha pups so they could be experimented on. Did I get that right?”

“Bio—what?” Chloe’s brows knitted together. “I don’t know what that is. And what do you mean ‘experimented on’? I don’t—”

“This Matron Lily, she wasn’t a scientist? A doctor?” The interrogator frowned and gave a side-eyed glance toward the camera. When Chloe shook her head, he continued, “You said she had a pack. Did she ever say which? Did she ever give you a name?”

Chloe squinted, her eyes darting left and right before snapping back up to the interrogator. “Iron Ridge. I’m pretty sure I heard that.”

A heavy silence filled all our locations as even the interrogator stilled for a beat.

“Iron Ridge?” Alpha Mateo asked, voicing what we all were clearly thinking. “Who the fuck is Iron Ridge?”