Title: Michael 21Published by: Kindle Direct Publishing
Release Date: 2019
Genre: Romance, Science Fiction
Pages: 296
When Luna, a young caretaker at a cloning facility, falls for a defective clone, she must choose between completing her father’s life work or helping the boy she loves to survive.
After her parents’ death in a terrorist attack, fifteen-year-old Luna escapes the pain by throwing herself into work at her father’s hospital. In an experimental nursery, she meets the clone of a young boy whose heart will stop at the age of eighteen. The only hope for the original boy is if researchers flip the right genetic switch in a clone whose growth is accelerated from birth to adult in three months.
The clone, Michael, is a wild, defiant child, but her father’s partner discovers Luna is the only person to whom the Michael clones respond. After witnessing the twentieth clone die, a despondent Luna searches for a reason to continue to risk her heart. But the 21st Michael clone turns out to be more than Luna expects—more trusting, more alive, and more in love with her than the ones before. Unfortunately, their time together is running out.
Luna vows to help him escape the sterile Institute to live his last day to the fullest before his heart stops. However, the person who can provide the tech she needs to escape is Jorge, the boyfriend she ran out on five years earlier, and he wants another chance to win her heart. Can Luna decide where her heart is leading her before time runs out?
Chapter 1
Michael 20
Ashen skin. Labored breathing. Chills.
Luna recognized the symptoms. She’d seen them nineteen times before.
As she watched, the blue tinge of Michael’s pale lips grew more pronounced, and he clenched his teeth together to control the chattering. His eyelashes fluttered, and he rubbed them shut with trembling fingertips before his hand stopped to rest on the stubble of his cheek.
Luna’s efforts to comfort him wouldn’t change anything, but still she tried. With a wave of her hand, she signaled to the nurse who waited in a chair across the room. “Please bring Michael a warming blanket.”
A tightening around her lips was the nurse’s only display of impatience, although Luna knew that some of the Institute’s staff resented being ordered around by a 20-year-old girl without a nursing degree. Thankfully, most of the nurses appreciated her help.
The woman stood and walked around the examination table where Luna and Michael lay face-to-face. She stopped at the fabric printer built into the wall of the stark hospital examination room and tapped a screen. With a whirr, the machine ejected a thin, shiny smartex blanket. Luna helped the woman adjust the blanket over both her and Michael.
“Warm.” The fabric shimmered and heated at Luna’s command.
At the sound of Luna’s voice, Michael’s eyes blinked open. The midnight of his pupils accentuated the shadows under his dark lower lashes. The warm hues of his face were gone, washed with the purples and grays of a fading sunset.
He clutched Luna’s hand tighter with both his large ones.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Luna said. She leaned her forehead against his and stroked his cool cheek with her free hand. A day’s worth of hair growth scratched her fingertips even though she’d watched 18-year old Michael shave an hour earlier. Only a couple weeks ago, a fresh-into-puberty Michael had shown off his first whiskers.
She allowed her fingertips to linger near his lips a second too long before she forced them away. Even near death, Michael had that effect on her. He leaned his face into Luna’s hand, and then he winced.
“Michael?”
Michael patted her hand, but his eyelids stayed closed. “Tell me … a story.”
It was just like Michael to try to comfort and distract her, although she was his caregiver.
“What kind of a story?”
“You know ... how much … I like green.”
“I know, Michael. Don’t talk more. Save your energy.”
A shake of his head told her he wasn’t finished with his thought.
“What is ... more … than like?” Every phrase required its own shallow breath.
“What is more than like?” Luna repeated. “Do you mean what word means ‘more than like'?”
Michael’s chin dipped in a tiny nod, although his eyes remained a sealed tomb. Luna hesitated. She knew the answer, but the question surprised her. In the previous five years, she had answered thousands of questions. Never that one.
But Michael was dying. Why hold back now?
“L-ove.” Her voice cracked. “Love means ‘more than like.’”
“Love,” Michael repeated. “Love.” His chin trembled as he spoke. “Tell me ... a story ... about love.”
Thousands of stories had likewise passed her lips, but Luna fought to remember one about love. Michael usually preferred stories about animals, although almost every story he liked began the same way, “Once upon a time there was a green garden …” or forest, or jungle, as long as it was green.
Luna only owned two hardcopy books, and they were her most valued possessions: her father’s copy of Frankenstein and her mother’s Bible, with Luna’s family genealogy chart in the front.
Since Michael’s question deserved more of an answer than a horror story could provide, that left The Bible.
Love. A Bible story about love. And green.
Of course.
“In the beginning, in a garden, there lived a man named Adam.”
A ghost of a smile hinted around Michael’s lips.
Luna’s breath caught for a moment before she could continue. “But Adam was alone.”
Michael’s brows creased deeper.
“Are you hurting, Michael?” Luna stroked his forehead to check his temperature.
An impatient shake of Michael’s head urged her on.
“So God gave him a companion, whom he named Eve.”
“Eve,” Michael breathed as the shadow of pain fled from the light which filled his face.
“Yes, and Adam loved Eve.”
Michael’s trust-filled eyes opened and held hers. “Like Michael loves Luna.”
Luna’s heart constricted, and she stifled a gasp, but five years of Institute training forced her expression passive. “I know,” she said automatically.
Michael took a shallow breath before he spoke. “Love … makes me feel ….”
But then he clutched his hands to his chest and groaned. Luna could feel the pounding start in her chest and behind her temples. But for this Michael—the first one to say the words, although they had all loved her—she had to stay strong and not break in front of him.
“Michael, listen to my voice.” The hammering of her heart sped up to match the hurried footsteps which echoed in the hall outside the exam room.
The pulsing in her temples splintered her thoughts. “No! Stay away!” one side of her brain screamed, while the other begged, “Hurry! Finish this. He’s in pain!”
The tapping slowed as the glass doors to the hallway slid open. Although Luna’s back greeted Dr. Malvado, she didn’t need to see him to recognize his footsteps. They played often in her nightmares.
“Michael,” the doctor crooned. “Let’s find out what’s going on.” He sauntered around the examination table into Luna’s line of vision.
The doctor waved once at a sensor on the wall and a larger than life, irregularly-beating image of Michael’s heart hung in the air above Michael and Luna. Below the projection, a glowing marker appeared:
EDEN Institute
Michael 20
29 DEC 2033 9:37.48
Phisoage 18 years
Chronoage 92 days
With a few flicks of his fingers, the doctor rotated the image and zoomed in on a straining valve. The nurse joined the doctor as he flipped through transparent screens of data.
Luna caught a look that flew between them as they studied the scans. The doctor answered the nurse’s unspoken question with a slight shake of his head.
“I see the problem.” Dr. Malvado’s forced cheerfulness hid disappointment. “We’ll have you fixed up in a moment.”
Pain furrowed a crease in Michael’s brow. His expression stabbed Luna’s chest. It twisted and constricted the aching muscle inside. If his condition was contagious, she might think she was dying as well—her heart, like Michael’s, about to explode.
A virtual syringe appeared, projected in the air next to Michael’s heart, the symbol that the computer was preparing medicine. Part of her wished that the medicine was meant for her, rather than Michael, since she knew that the same chemical, destined to bring final relief to Michael, would cause her crippling pain.
Michael’s hand on her cheek pulled her stare from the syringe to his face. The concern in his expression overrode the shard digging into Luna’s chest.
“Don’t ... worry,” Michael whispered.
Luna inwardly cringed. She’d dropped her guard for a moment and caused him additional anxiety. Her practiced mask fell into place: steady gaze, slight smile, and relaxed features.
“I’m not worried, querido. All your pain will be gone in a moment. I promise.” Luna stroked Michael’s face from his cool temple down his pale cheekbones and across his grey lips. He closed his eyes again, and the creases relaxed at her continued touch.
“That should do it,” Dr. Malvado chirped behind Michael as his finger traced a path in the air between the digital syringe and a tube that led to Michael’s projected spinal column. A few seconds later, Michael’s eyes flew open.
Luna could tell when the pain deadener worked because, not only did it kill the pain, it paralyzed as well. All of Michael’s tiny movements stopped—even the wounded butterfly fluttering of his lashes. With the other nineteen clone’s deaths, their eyes had been paralyzed closed at the very moment that the chemical finished its work; but this time, Michael 20’s eyelids were held unblinking open as the euthanizing medicine stopped his sporadic heart. The image shuddered once and then lay still as the display at the bottom of the screen flat-lined.
And for the first time, in twenty times, Luna had to watch the light—and the love—leave Michael’s eyes.