Read Online Mick (The A'rouk Brothers Book 1) by Serena Simpson - Free Book Online

respectable business allowed their goods to sit on the surface of the Earth. There were large buildings up here and massive machines. Jaz never studied how they kept things up in the atmosphere but working on one of those machines would have made her heart beat so fast with fear she was sure she would have died from it. The workers up here had her respect.
    The next level was populated with businesses. If you needed something, you could find it here. Mick merged quickly onto the next level that was the gallery level or the shopping level. Galleries spread out for miles over the city appealing to all to come and try the varieties they offered.
    Jaz had been in several of the different galleries. Each time it was virtual. If she were actually to step foot in a gallery, they might kill her because of her clone status. She was not allowed to mix with the humans like she was one of them. It always surprised her that there weren’t clone only stores, but no one wanted to cater to clones.
    She watched Mick’s hands as he brought them up to the next level. They were once again on a residential level. The traffic was thicker up here. People were trying to get home from whatever their day held. He blended seamlessly with traffic making her feel proud of his skills. She chuckled; she was acting like she taught him to drive.
    “Jaz, do you want to drive for a while?”
    Was he making fun of her? She was a clone; they weren’t allowed behind the wheel of a hover. A frown molded her lips. It never dawned on her before that society treated her like a second-class citizen, but they did. The rules of what she could and couldn’t do were so tight she began to suffocate. Her head dropped to her knees, and she started trying to control her breaths.
    “What’s wrong?” Mick was looking for a place to pull over.
    “I’m fine. Please, keep driving.” Her voice was shallow, but she needed to deal with this on her own. Finally, her heart slowed down, and the realization came back to her that she refused to be that person anymore.
    She sat back in her seat. “I can’t drive. Clones aren’t allowed to learn.”
    “I’ll teach you. There are several unused ranges on the Earth, or I can create a range close to our house. Whatever works better for you.”
    The way he treated her made chest ache. He didn’t apologize for the hell she lived through because he didn’t cause it. Instead, he simply offered to rectify what happened in the best way he could. If she made it through everything that was coming after them, she’d take him up on his offer to teach her to drive.
    They were now on the upper levels, where the truly wealthy lived in very elaborate homes. The beauty of the area took her breath away. Maybe if this had been last week, she would have wished to be one of the ones living here. After what she went through today, the hell the people on Earth lived in, the fact that the wealthy could send an assassin for her and sleep well at night, leached the beauty out of the homes she was seeing. Right now what she saw was superficial, and she didn’t want any part of it.
    Mick took them up another level; it was considered to be the dead level since it was believed to be uninhabitable. Jaz knew from talking to Ash that this was untrue, but they allowed the humans to think that. The level where Mick and his brothers lived was above this one.
    She was shocked when she looked out the front window and caught a shadow in front of them.
    “Mick?”
    “It’s The Darkness; they have been there for a while.”
    She shuddered. Couldn’t she get a break at least one night of good sleep before she had to face another threat to her life?
    The shadow grew larger until a small black spacecraft was hanging in front of them.
    Across the hull of the ship, there was movement. Something she couldn’t name seemed to be slowly crawling over the ship.
    “Mick,” her words were getting stuck in her throat choking her as she tried to get them out. “What is