Freaks Under Fire - Excerpt Only

Freaks Under Fire (Excerpt Only) - Chapter Two

Freaks Under Fire

Book 3 of the Freaks series

By Maree Anderson

Chapter Two

A human would have been overwhelmed by both the number and magnitude of the tasks ahead—not to mention the necessity of prioritizing them. So it was fortunate that Jay was not human.

Locating the Beta unit she'd recently learned existed sat high on Jay's current list of priorities. Her self-proclaimed "bestie" Caro—fraternal twin of Jay's boyfriend Tyler—would doubtless insist on referring to the Beta as Jay's older sister. In truth, the term twin would be more accurate, given the same human genetic material used to construct Jay, a Gamma unit, had obviously been used during the creation of the Beta: Both Jay and the Beta had been created in the image of a woman named Mary Durham, their creator's deceased wife.

Discounting the nature of any supposed "relationship" between Jay and the Beta for the moment, Jay understood the workings of Caro's mind enough by now to know that Caro would consider the Beta family. Moreover, whether the Beta was labeled sister or twin, and proved fully functional or as defective as the wheelchair in the photo indicated, so far as Caro was concerned family should be at the top of any list—a fact Jay could easily prove by revealing the Beta's existence to Caro and the rest of the Davidson family.

Uncharacteristically, however, Jay remained undecided over whether to tell them. Much depended upon Tyler and Caro's mother Marissa, and her reactions to the events of the past two days. And Jay believed Marissa would hardly be in a forgiving frame of mind given their shared history, and the undoubted trauma of recent events.

Marissa would likely be even less inclined to forgive if she learned that, while she'd lain in a drug-induced slumber, her newborn infant had been kidnapped to use as leverage to get to Jay.

Jay parked the vehicle she'd hired—a hire vehicle had seemed a prudent precaution now that her SUV could be recognized by a certain party—and paused to rub her breastbone, where a too-familiar ache had lodged. Marissa had indicated that she'd liked Jay once upon a time. Before Marissa had understood what Jay truly was. Before she'd understood how deeply her son, Tyler, had fallen for the "glorified calculator" Marissa had once accused Jay of being. And to Jay, it was obvious as udders on a male bovine that, despite the lengths she had taken to keep the Davidsons safe, Marissa would prefer Jay vanished from their lives.

Logically, Jay couldn't find it in herself to blame Marissa for that preference. Strange, therefore, to again experience this unrelenting, throbbing ache—a physical symptom of how much it hurt to know that Marissa, a human Jay had admired from the moment they'd first met, would rather she didn't exist.

Jay snorted a sharp breath through her nostrils. Bah! as Alexander Jay Durham, the man she had called "Father", had liked to say. Emotions, those complex human states that provoked often irrational behaviors, as well as disturbing physical and psychological changes, were at best distracting and inconvenient, and at worst, dangerous. They were insidious things that snuck up on one, and impaired one's ability to make sound judgments. She would be better off without them. And yet....

And yet, even if she could somehow twist time and revert to her state of being before Tyler had wormed his way into her artificial heart and irrevocably altered her, Jay would not. Now she knew a little of what it meant to love, and to be loved, she would not willingly relinquish those feelings—difficult as they could be to live with.

Unfortunately, Jay didn't possess enough data to ascertain whether Alex had designed her in the expectation she would evolve in such a way, or whether it had been a spontaneous, unforeseen development. If only Alex, the one human who might have accurately predicted the far-reaching ramifications of loosing an emotion-fueled cyborg on an unsuspecting world, still lived. If only—