Alana Reyes

Alana Reyes is a biologist. She believes in observable evidence, documented methodology, and the difference between correlation and causation. When she takes a genetic genealogy test out of idle curiosity, she expects to learn about her ancestry. What she learns instead is impossible. The test results show one match: a profile marked as deactivated, created three months earlier, with a birth year of 2024. The relationship category reads *Self (confirmed).* The shared DNA is 99.9% across all tested markers. Alana is thirty-eight years old. The match is for a two-year-old child who shares her exact genetic profile. The child's account is deactivated. The child should not exist. *Inherited* is science fiction horror about biological impossibility, maternal legacy, and the question of what happens when the body turns out to be keeping its own records. It follows Alana as she investigates the anomalous result—contacting the testing company, consulting specialists, discovering a pattern of similar women in her family line who have been documenting the same phenomenon for generations. Because Alana is not the first woman in her family to match herself. She is simply the first to understand what the match means. The novel unfolds through Alana's documented account: the investigation, the family journals she discovers, the women who came before her and wrote down what they experienced without ever understanding the mechanism. It is a story told through the lens of a scientist confronting evidence that doesn't fit any framework she has—but who keeps documenting anyway, because documentation is what biologists do, and because someone will need the record. As Alana learns more about the pattern, she also begins to understand what's happening to her own body. The match with herself isn't just a database error or a genetic anomaly. It's a preview. Something is growing. Something that shares her DNA exactly. And it's been happening to the women in her family for longer than anyone