The rest of the day was uneventful, which didn’t mean Quentin wasn’t perpetually on edge. He kept to populated areas, never in the same spot more than twenty minutes before jumping on the closest public transport and heading somewhere else; head down, hoodie pulled up. Every face he looked at reminded him of Trackers he’d crossed paths with over the years. Made him want to run. But, if Ian was following, Quentin hadn’t spotted him.

Things aligned in Quentin’s favour, for once. The identity he’d set up for himself as Liam Seaborne still held, unchallenged after a decade. Liam had been automatically paying his taxes every year, giving the government no cause to dig deeper.

Quentin would have taken possession of his bank account if that didn’t mean physically going in for a new nexus. No sense in having a flawless identity waiting for him after a decade only to muddle the waters by hacking corners. He had to do this by the book. Make himself look older, grow a beard instead of the stubble he usually wore, do something different with his hair. Obscure his features as best as he could while still looking natural.

That would require time for the beard, and credits for all the cosmetic changes.

Because he was an outdated, obsolete model.

He’d untangled a few more memories that proved it, missions they had passed him over for because he didn’t have what it took. Static. Fixed.

Maybe that was why he loved his photography the way he did — after all, what was he, if not an immutable snapshot of a time that would never return? A memorial to what used to be?

Outdated and obsolete. But Ian used to love him, regardless.

That thought hurt most of all. Everything he’d shown of himself to his husband wasn’t a cover story, a profile, something built to entice. It’d been him. Who he was past the logic and the programming. It’d been the unquantifiable spark that made him a being. And Ian had found something to love there.

Yet one look at his building blocks had been all it had taken for that love to turn to dust.

Could it still be qualified as love, if it was that fickle?

Quentin had been jumping from bus to train to subway without conscious thought for hours now, glancing left and right in fear of crossing paths with the man he still loved. Then he’d taken to walking. And walking. And walking.

It was with a quaint mixture of astonishment and utter inevitability that he found himself straight in the middle of the square in the old tech district.

Here I am. Come find me.