Jaxson Landry was lucky. He was very lucky.

He had been targeting Marston Kane for three months before he made his move against him at the bar, Two Knuckles.

It had almost gone to shit.

“All that planning, and it almost went bottoms-up over something so stupid,” Jax said to the cold air. He inhaled another deep breath of the cigarette and held it in lungs.

But his plan had worked.

Jax had placed the replica iris film over Marston’s own iris after he blacked out from the clear drug patch that Jax had placed on his skin. The patch would disintegrate before Mars would wake up and Jax would be able to see everything Mars could see. Jax made sure that the replica iris film was as close to Mars’ iris as possible, but he would have to trust his luck on this. He could now track Mars through the new artificial intelligence system being installed throughout the Seven Pillars—and Mars would never know all the valuable information he was sharing.

Jax had to know what Odina and Nova Gnosis were planning against Proxima Borealis, his home. He knew that Marston Kane would be the one to deliver for him.

But the bartender at Two Knuckles had called out Jax’s name to pay his tab before the drug took effect on Mars. Why the shit did you give your real name to the bartender?

Would Mars remember that?

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Jax had been on Earth for eight long years. He had trained for years in the intelligence apparatus on Proxima Borealis, Sector 8. It was a fuck-ton of training too. He was trained more and more, up to the point where he grew restless. Then he got his chance.

Though it had been thirty-one years since Odina escaped to Earth, the clones of Proxima, the Izcir, were growing increasingly concerned at the pace with which the humans were rebuilding. The Izcir needed to know how they were making such advancements, and what they planned to do.

Jax would find out.

He knew what Odina was, and Odina was not what she seemed.

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Jax never thought much about what the clones had done to the humans. Clones were the more advanced species. They bred themselves to be so. They had worked for a thousand years perfecting the cloning process to imprint advanced capabilities into their DNA, and to make themselves immune to their genetically modified virus. They saw themselves as the next step in the evolutionary chain.

They were the transhumans.

Yes, Jax knew the history of what happened and why the clones did what they did. It was part of indoctrination at all Proxima Borealis institutes.

The humans were greedy.

They were egotistical.

They were following the same patterns they always did, as if it was imprinted on their psyche and they couldn’t help themselves.

Clones were first successfully developed on Earth in 2049. Humanity was trying to transcend itself; to fast-forward the evolutionary sequence and enhance themselves into something they considered super-human. For hundreds of years, clones were experimented on and developed until the damn scientists finally achieved what they had strived for. Something super-human.

The rich were the only ones who had been cloned. They were the only ones who could afford it. Though society changed through the hundreds of years of clone-testing, this fact of humanity didn’t.

Then the clones subtly fought back.

Jax snapped out of his deep-thinking state. An alert was beeping from his computer. He had to check on Mars.

Apparently, he had run his operation just in time.