No. The manual. Right now he had to find the manual. It wasn’t on the desk, which threw him for a loop — he’d assumed Ian would have been studying Quentin’s, to know all of his weak spots. But there it was, in a pile on the floor: BSYN21069, the gateway to Quentin’s freedom.

Experience told him to take a few of the others as well, throw Ian of the scent. His husband didn’t have an eidetic memory, but he came close, and if more than one manual went missing it would at least not be definitive proof it had been Quentin behind the break-in. The 62, 77 and 93 ought to do it; Quentin didn’t want to carry more weight than he had to, on his back, lest it tore the hole in his chest further.

His backpack caught on the edge of a metal shelf as he turned, dragging a box of spare SynthNuller charges to the floor. He was lucky the noise it made wasn’t loud enough to—

Inside the house, a light turned on.

Ian was awake. Heart wanting to beat out of his chest — please, not literally, he thought to himself, suppressing hysterical laughter — Quentin abandoned stealth in favour of speed, jumping out the window and darting outside faster than a human could. His four-hour charge wouldn’t last, not with the damage from the crash and this mad dash, but there was no other choice.

He didn’t look back.

Quentin ran down the street, the hole in his chest feeling like it was on fire, until the row of houses gave way to buildings and he was in the city proper; it wasn’t until then that he remembered to turn off street cameras. Ian would definitely know he’d been there, but at least Quentin had escaped. He could get lost in the crowd here. If Ian had followed, he hadn’t been fast enough.

Energy stores depleted, it was only once inside yet another moving train that he felt like he could stop. Ian might have woken up for a number of reasons; he might not even have noticed Quentin being there, much less getting away. He was safe, and he had his manual.

It was a win.

☵☲☵

It was a loss. No matter how he looked at it, it was a loss.

He’d locked himself in the train’s bathroom, scanning every page of the manual so it’d be saved to his memory files, convinced he was one step closer to freedom. It had been a struggle to make himself shut down afterwards, in his seat on the train, when all he’d wanted to do was dive in his newly acquired files and start searching, but he’d done that too. He knew it would do him no favours to wear himself to the brink, especially not with Ian... Yeah.

Long-distance train rides couldn’t be his answer to everything, for about a dozen different reasons that started with Ian would notice the pattern and ended with Quentin simply didn’t have enough credits to sustain that lifestyle. But they’d been good for sleeping, and they were good for him to review his manual, he’d thought.

He’d read it cover to cover, twice, over four different trains. He knew, in theory, what he’d need to do to fix the hole in his chest. That was where the good news ended.

No web cloaking feature.

No info on what factory made his chip.

And BSYN21069 had no appearance-altering abilities.

It was hard to tell which was the more devastating blow of the last two; he couldn’t see a normal future ahead, or anything resembling peace. Even if he managed to flee to a different country — even if Ian hadn’t already sent his photo to every travel hub in existence — this was Ian. He chased normal BioSynths with relentless focus. If his love for Quentin had morphed into hatred? There was nowhere on the planet Ian wouldn’t Track him. Quentin doubted even the heart of a virgin forest would have been enough to shield him from the man he still loved.

Not that Ian would hurt him. No, he didn’t have it in him. His hatred was for Quentin’s makers — Quentin himself didn’t warrant even that much. He’d hunt Quentin, shut him down, and send him in for reprogramming, all without batting an eyelash. Quentin would exist, but not be. A fate worse than death.

A fate he’d doomed the woman in Ian’s garage to that morning. Did he have any right to hope for a better one?