Quentin woke up on Saturday with a feeling he'd forgotten ever having: the thrill before going on a mission he believed in.

The rest of the Maimed Misfits poured into the control centre, some soaked through from the downpour outside, all in various levels of excitement. This. This was what the rebellion should have been like, but hadn't been — a freedom movement.

He had more in common with these people he'd met two days ago than he remembered having with any rebel during the nearly forty years he'd thought he was fighting for the right thing. Seeing BioSynths being left behind in the name of a common goal, command treating them as if they were expendable, just like the humans had... It had worn him down even before the order to kill Ian came.

This group was reckless, and broken, and loyal, and hopeful, and alive. It almost made Quentin want to forget about new beginnings and join them in their insane quest to rescue their fellow BioSynths.

Almost.

He didn't have it in him to go through another disappointment. The war, the rebellion... It was enough.

'Don't let them change you.' Quentin had no idea what that meant.

"You really need to teach me that brooding thing, man. It's unfair how well you pull it off."

Quentin barked out a laugh. It was impossible to wallow in misery for long around these people. "I would, but you don't have it in you."

"He really doesn't," Clementine quipped, gesturing to Jax's glowing yellow orb with one of her mismatched hands. "Just look at that: all sunshine, no clouds."

☵☲☵

Everything was in place by the time he and Jax got to the apartment. The weapons, the uniform, the nexus that would be their only means of communication until they'd cleared the signal-jamming safety of the old tech district, all neatly laid out.

He fussed with the way the helmet fit on Jax's head a good dozen times, more worried than he'd expected. Maybe it was because he was the only undamaged BioSynth in their midst, but he felt responsible for their safety, and Jax was taking a colossal risk. Quentin was too — Ian had his codes — but they'd chosen to go in past midnight in the hope Ian would already be asleep.

He didn't want to consider Jax coming face to face with Ian, or the inevitable betrayal the merry BioSynth would experience when he realised who the husband Quentin still loved was.

Maybe what drove him wasn't responsibility so much as guilt.

"How long before we go, Broodmaster?"

"Five minutes less than the last time you asked, Sunshine."

Jax threw his head back and laughed, giving Quentin the irrational impression his lopsided neck wouldn't hold. "Sorry man, you just don't make that work the way Clementine does."

"I had an inkling."

Banter made him less likely to climb the walls or to fret over the security flaws in the empty flat. He'd been promised a basement flat, but it was only a basement from the building's front door. From the back it was a plain studio, two stories high, with actual windows people could break in through, and he didn't think just the two of them would be a match for Ian, if it came to that. Not when Quentin would rather shield Ian than allow any harm to befall him, regardless of the implications.

Without thinking, he slid into the web, searching for the security cameras outside their house. Ian's house, he corrected again. Nothing moved. No way to be sure whether he was home, and—

Wait.

He shouldn't have been able to walk in the web at all if his tracking signal had been properly cloaked. Which meant...

They'd been sitting in an uncloaked flat for over two hours already. His gut clenched. "Jax?"

"Yeah?"

"Check the web."

Jax looked at him, startled by the forced lightness in his tone. "We can't access it from here—"

"Check it."

Jax lost his grin for the first time since Quentin had laid eyes on him. "Fuck." He swallowed, the gears in his neck accommodating the fluid motion. "Maybe it's just strange luck?"

"It's not. If I can do it, and you can do it, and neither of us could do it when we got here—"

"—Someone was blocking it to make us think we were safe," Jax finished for him. "And they must be close, if they need to lift the block for themselves. I can't get in touch with any of the Misfits."

They had to get out, but leaving blind might spell their doom faster, and Quentin had another idea. "How good's your hacking?"

"Worse than Clementine's, better than anyone else's."

"Can you access Tracker coms?"

Jax ran a hand across his face. "Man, no one can access Tracker coms, not without a frequency, and they change those every month. We don't have anyone undercover who could—"

"Assume I have this month's frequency for my Tracker." Quentin barely breathed.

"How—"

"Don't ask. Could you do it?"

A nod. "Yeah, sure. I could do a lot with a valid frequency."

Quentin sent him Ian's frequency over the web without a word and watched as Jax worked. This was far beyond Quentin's level of expertise — BioSynths could hold vast amounts of knowledge, but it wasn't infinite, and every area they specialised in came at the expense of another — filling him with newfound respect for Clementine's abilities if she surpassed this as easily as Jax had made it sound.

"This is weird stuff," Jax said, talking in the physical world as if he weren't elbow-deep in code.

"What is?"

"Your Tracker. Nothing's happening on his channel, but he has a trace on him. More than one, actually. We're tracing him too."

"'We'?" The Misfits were onto Ian?

"BioSynths. Can't tell more than that. Let me see if I can hack Central from here."

Quentin nodded, not wanting to occupy too much of Jax's processing power. Jax worked fast, hopping from line to line, from Tracker to Tracker, discarding links and creating new ones from the ground up. "Got it." For a moment, he smiled in triumph.

The next moment, his human-like eye widened, a hand clamping over his mouth. "It's a trap," he whispered. "It's a trap, and I can't warn the others. They're going to make the others fall back and then bomb the tech district."

Quentin was already moving towards the door when Jax pulled him back by the shoulder. "Trackers." His voice was still a whisper. "Three of them, just outside the building, coming in through the front door. Not your Tracker, but they have your codes. We have to go out through the window."

"They'll know," Quentin said, a strange calm descending over him. "If they get here and they find the flat empty, they'll know we know. The others will be dead."

"Okay." Jax nodded, mouth set in a grim line as he handed a gun to Quentin. "We stick it out. Three of them, two of us. I like those odds."

"No." Quentin had always been meant to do this; he just hadn't known it before. For all his posturing and all his rationalisations, he was one of them. He'd never felt a stronger sense of belonging, except in Ian's arms. "If we get caught here, that's it. The others will still be dead. You have to go warn them." Jax opened his mouth as though he would argue, but Quentin cut him off. "It's my codes they have, not yours. It has to be you. Go. I'll buy you time. Find you in the web when this is over."

"What if—"

"Go!" Quentin pushed him towards the window, but there was one more thing left to say. "Wait. There's a bunker."

"A bunker?"

"A bunker with room enough for everyone, and enough credits that you can lie low for a long time. You'll need to find someone who can pass as a human man, to get to the bank account." He walked in the web and sent all information related to the bunker and the cover identity to Jax. It only took a fraction of a second. "Stay safe. Go."

He had enough time to close the window after Jax and to figure out what to use for cover. There was a metal table bolted to the kitchen floor, but it was too small to be of any use. The two chairs weren't any better. Quentin pulled the bathroom door from its hinges, laid it on its side and barricaded himself inside with a clean view of the front door.

Three Trackers, and none of them was Ian?

Let them come. He was ready.

☵☲☵

The first one was out of commission the moment he kicked open the door. An overeager kid no more than twenty. Quentin's sensors were sharp; he shot the kid on his dominant shoulder, in the precise spot that would ensure he'd never again be able to hold a gun with that hand.

"Damn it, Mason, I told you to fall back!" A hand pulled the hapless Mason outside Quentin's line of sight. He knew that voice. Maxine. Not as experienced as Ian, but a decent Tracker who, like Ian, tried to keep the next generation from getting itself killed. Honourable, for whatever that was worth.

"I told you to leave this to the professionals." A smooth male voice that sparked a hint of warning, but Quentin couldn't spare the time to go through his memories now. "This is what happens when you insist on bringing your children to the grownups table. They get hurt."

"Mind your own business."

"This is my business. Take the child and go play mother somewhere else?"

Quentin's sensors flashed as something flew in his direction. Smoke filled the flat, obscuring his sight for the single moment it took for him to activate thermal vision. He didn't need to breathe, but he couldn't shut down his synthetic lungs either, or control the tears flooding his eyes; they hadn't fixed that design flaw until series 97.

Only two figures were inside the flat, and neither was the kid he'd shot, still hiding outside the door. Maxine was the shorter, stockier figure, from what Quentin remembered. Blinking away smoke-induced tears, he aimed for her knee, but missed.

He was a sitting duck in the bathroom, and the gun was hindering more than it was helping. Quentin magnetised his elbow, letting the gun stick to it, and grabbed the door with both hands, brandishing it like a shield. The taller figure was closest to him, approaching the bathroom from the left side. That one got hit in full with the door; it shattered against his frame as he went down.

With no time to check if the man had stayed down, Quentin spun right, where he knew Maxine would be, and grabbed the Nuller from her hand before she could fire. He threw a punch with his left hand, trying to knock her out.

He miscalculated.

After ten years as Quentin, the photographer, he hadn't had the time to get reacquainted with Quentin, the weapon. Weapons threw lethal punches, when they hadn't yet remembered how to control their strength. He felt the sickening crunch of her bones against his knuckles just as the warm spray of blood hit him on the face and a coppery stench overpowered the smell of the smoke. She was dead before she hit the ground.

A Nuller pulse hit him on the back and he knew no more.

☵☲☵

"It's blinking."

Accurate. He was blinking, and the first face he saw belonged to the kid he'd shot. Mason. His wound looked fresh enough that Quentin couldn't have been out for long, but the smoke had cleared.

Quentin tried to turn his head to see who was behind him, but his range of movement was restricted. Something was interfacing with his sensors, keeping him still.

"Quentin Morgan," the voice drawled. "If only your husband could see you now."

The speaker's face came into view a second later.

Connors.

Still one of the most conventionally handsome men Quentin had laid eyes on, as if he weren't the monster who had tortured Clementine and hunted her down over and over for months on end. No trace of whatever damage she'd caused when she'd bashed his head in. 'He's a psychopath,' Ian had warned, his words coming back unbidden.

Quentin was going to die, either here or wherever Connors took his victims to play with.

With no time to mourn the life he'd never get to lead, he deleted every scrap of knowledge of both the bunker and Liam Seaborne from his own memory. He'd never find the Misfits again, if they went to ground, but neither would anyone else through him. They'd be safe.

Then he slid into the web and composed a message.

'No matter how things turned out, I want you to know that I loved you.'

He didn't sign it — there was no need. Ian would know it was him. He wouldn't care, but he'd know.

☰☱☲☳☴☵☶☵☴☳☲☱☰

Thank you for reading!

Uh-oh. That didn't go as planned. I'd love to read your comments on this one, from Quentin's actions to where he ended up. If you feel it's warranted, please hit that Vote button up top.

Expect the next update on Monday, so have a lovely weekend!

Wondering whether Ian really knows but doesn't care? Tune in to SynTracker, BioSynth's companion novella (link on my profile), if you're okay with knowing more than the characters do.

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ONC Rec Time!

Today's recommended novellas are The Uninvited Princess, by JJJ000YYY

Here's the blurb: A naive young princess gets banished to a tower, and is inadvertently trapped with a wizard. Now, she must navigate through a world full of magic while the fury of the king looms over her.

And Factory Reset, by astrophile

Here's the blurb: With only a name and vague memories she can't decipher in her mind, Aura must uncover the truth about who she is and why she can't leave The Sanctuary.