Jaci's Experiment

Love... the grandest experiment of all.

As a young Alvian lab tech, Jaci knows her place in the orderly, emotionless society her race has established on the planet Earth. While preparing a batch of experimental skin patches, she is accidentally exposed to a gene-altering agent. In a matter of days, she's assaulted with raw, primitive, forbidden emotions she has no clue how to handle. If her superiors find out, she's a dead woman. Her only hope is to seek help from the human test subjects held captive in pens below the city.

Before the aliens came, cousins Mike and Dave used their psychic abilities to their advantage in business dealings. Now they use them to stay alive, keeping a sharp telepathic eye out for ways to help themselves and others improve their lot... or escape. Their friendship with Jaci has always been more than simply captives and caretaker. Now that her DNA has changed, their shared resonance is the stuff of legend. Inevitably, Jaci's emotions expose her to deadly Alvian justice. Suddenly she's in the race of her life, seeking the only safety she's ever known... in the arms of her human Resonance Mates.

Jaci couldn’t let on that she’d been accidentally exposed to the experimental therapy. She was only 192nd in the Jaci line on this world, which meant if her superiors found out she’d botched up this badly, she would either be summarily put down or imprisoned. For certain, she’d be demoted. Possibly booted out of the science sector completely.

She wasn’t, and would never have been, among the select group chosen from volunteers for this all-important experiment. She’d only been meant to prepare the skin patches of the new therapy, not take the dose herself. But sloppy handling and fatigue from overwork had caused one of the patches she’d been making to adhere to the bottom of her forearm and she hadn’t noticed until the next day when she’d bathed.

At first she noted the skin patch with her usual detached observation, realizing the patch had turned color from green to blue, indicating the entire dose had been successfully delivered. She remembered thinking through her options clinically, deciding on her best course of action.

The panic didn’t hit until a few days later. Subtle at first, she began to feel things—emotional responses she’d never experienced before in her life. She realized then that her genetics were being manipulated on a molecular level. She was becoming more like her Alvian ancestors, and her new emotions were beginning to display themselves when she least expected it.