The word 'perfect' strikes Hale like an arrow just shy of the bullseye. It should make him elated, and it does. It fills him with a buoyancy he'd never hoped to know and relieves all his anxiety over his inexperience.

But it also triggers something else entirely. Something he'd feared, anticipated, known would come but hoped against hope wouldn't.

To avoid ruining the moment, he repetitively dismisses the alert triggered by that simple, little word. For now, he wants to bask in the crackle of warmth across his skin and ruminate on all the places Rayner's naked body touches his own.

And there are many as Rayner drags him down on the sofa, both arms slung around his shoulders, legs tangled together. They're both a sweaty, sticky mess, having voided the entire purpose of Rayner's painfully cold shower, but a blanket of contentment swaddles them all the same.

Leaning back, Rayner regards Hale with a half-lidded gaze and lazy smile. "Remember how you offered sex to cure my insomnia?"

"Mm," Hale grumbles. It's not his proudest moment.

"I could fall asleep right now."

Well, that does make Hale feel better. "Then sleep."

"Mmf, gotta check on the excavation bot."

"I can do that while you sleep."

"Mmmmnooooo. You're my blanket. If you leave I'll be cold." He glances down. "And kinda crusty."

"I'll get a wash cloth—"

"Not yet." Rayner drags Hale in for a kiss, catching his lower lip between his teeth. It's slow and languid, different from all the others. A lazy exploration, exquisite in its total disregard for their responsibilities. Hale wonders just how many ways there are to kiss a man and if he has enough time to discover them all with Rayner.

When Rayner pulls away, it's with a cheeky glint in his mismatched eyes. "You still haven't told me how you breached those protocols."

"I gave myself a few extra administrative privileges while Damo and I were clustered," Hale says. "Among them, the ability to speak freely about my feelings and desires. Though I think both were self-evident."

Rayner rolls his eyes. "You would think that."

"It wasn't obvious?"

"No!" Rayner practically shouts. "Hale, you are super blunt about some things, but when it came to anything to do with us you were impossible. You'd drop bombs about how many times you jerked off thinking about me, but when I asked whether you wanted it—me? Nada."

Hale almost laughs. It's only funny in hindsight. At the time, it had been unbearable.

"Sorry. You were sometimes fairly evasive in conversation too though."

"Oh yeah?"

"You never told me why you were so determined for me to have the autonomy upgrade."

"Now that is obvious," Rayner argues. "Though when you put it that way, it sounds like you didn't want it. So who's being evasive now?"

Hale frowns. He isn't sure he likes how this conversation has turned on him, though he supposes Rayner is correct. Hale didn't speak up about his dislike for the autonomy upgrade because his protocols put Rayner's preferences before his own.

Reaching up, Rayner thumbs at the slight frown at the corner of Hale's lips and says, "I don't want to hold power over you. Symbiont tech was designed to make your entire survival dependent on me, and it's not fair."

Hale nods, and Rayner's fingers spread to encompass his cheek. It's so reminiscent of the first touch Hale ever felt when Rayner first programmed his nervous system. Soft and comforting and tethering him to solid ground. In an echo of that moment, Hale holds Rayner's hand there, pressed against his cheek.

"It's not like that for me," he says.

"No?"

"It's difficult to explain."

"Try."

Hale considers for a moment, gathering words and phrases that might express the fragile and unique sense his symbiont link to Rayner gives him. "It isn't a subjugation. Perhaps with Melissa it was, but with you it's...connection. Communication. A sixth sense, like touch or taste, that lets me know how you're feeling wherever you are. It's a comfort. A bond. Given the choice, I would never break it because I...trust you."

The word 'love' sticks in his throat. He doesn't know why. Perhaps it's a layer of extra vulnerability he can't quite face. Nevertheless, Rayner looks stunned, his eyes wide and staring into Hale's. For a speechless moment he just continues to look searchingly into Hale's face.

"Oh." A flush blooms on his cheeks. "Then we should keep it that way."

"You don't mind?" Hale asks.

"I definitely mind. It's a terrible hardship having someone enjoy my company this much."

Hale chews his lip to keep from grinning too hard. Rayner just beams back at him.

"We should really get up, shouldn't we?" Rayner says.

"No. Just wire me to your laptop, and we can stay a while longer."

Rayner laughs, but he presses a hand against Hale's chest until he gets up. The moment in which they gather their clothes—hastily strewn around the office—is perhaps the most surreal. It's the first moment Hale has to acknowledge what just happened, and how light he feels, and how much he wants it to happen again.

Even if he isn't sure how likely that will be.

Hale has to duck out to grab wash cloths from the linen cupboard, narrowly avoiding Damo as he comes up the stairs with a boiled kettle for Theo's bath.

Rayner accepts the damp cloth to clean the mess from his stomach, but he pauses for a second during the perfunctory motion to look up at Hale and say, "Can I ask you something super weird?"

"Yes."

"Is your come, like—" Rayner twirls a finger, searching for the right word. "Food-contact approved? Edible? Jesus."

Hale can't help the sudden burst of laughter. He hadn't expected that. "Yes, I suppose you could say it's both."

"Oh. Do we have to buy refills? Or do you—eh—produce your own? Fuck, I should have looked this up before moving us to the middle of nowhere."

"I can create it. All I require is water and starch synthesized with enzymes," Hale assures him. "But if it's more of a mess, I could research a means of disabling that function—"

"No! I mean, no? I mean, I'm—" Rayner clears his throat. "I'm good with it if you are."

Hale allows himself a smirk. After masturbating for the first time, he'd questioned why his programmers decided to include that detail, but he has to admit the realism is quite nice. For the both of them, it seems.

Rayner, now scarlet from his ears to his hairline, turns around and busies himself clicking the mouse a dozen times to exit his laptop's screensaver. Hale finishes cleaning himself and fetches a fresh pair of jeans from the duffel bag on the sofa. When he turns around to grab Rayner's from the spot he dropped them earlier, he notices Rayner staring intently at the laptop, frowning.

"What's wrong?"

"Hm? No, nothing, the bot is still doing its job, it's just the security camera picked up something."

Hale watches Rayner click through the red notification for the cameras. He'd clearly hooked up the household ones to his laptop in order to keep an eye on the neighbourhood while their windows were shuttered.

"Oh, it's the backyard one. Probably just a bird or something," Rayner reasons, but when the feed pops up, time stamped fifteen minutes prior, it is not a bird on their fence.

It's Melissa.

She's climbing gingerly over it, using the height of the porch rail on her side and the porch bench on Rayner's to clear it without the need to jump. It's such a strange thing to see her doing that the inexplicable act makes Hale wonder if his vision is malfunctioning. Stepping down from the bench like she's done it a thousand times, Melissa dusts her trousers and pauses, staring at something out of the camera's view. Something in the vicinity of the sliding door into the kitchen. It should be shuttered, with no way to see inside and nothing of note to attract her attention, except...

With a sinking sensation in the pit of Hale's stomach, he notices the battery icon on the bottom corner of Rayner's laptop screen.

The generator must have run out of power. Theo put it in the one place it could use solar power to recharge without being seen from neighbouring windows or from the streets—just outside the sliding door, on the porch, in the exact place Melissa's looking now.

Anyone else, Hale thinks bitterly, would not have noticed it. Would never have been sneaking through back gardens anyway. But not this neighbourhood. Not these people. Not Melissa.

What is she even doing in their backyard?

Rayner swears.

Melissa stares at the generator for a perplexing moment. Instead of going back over her fence, she crosses Rayner's yard to the opposite side where a bucket stands on its edge. She looks over her shoulder, assessing the generator a second time, then climbs onto the bucket, over the fence and into the neighbouring yard.

Mark's yard.

Hale's history with Melissa doesn't allow him to harbour much affection for her, but he finds himself indignant at the implications of her sneaking like a thief in the night through back gardens so she can visit Mark of all people.

Mark.

"Jesus, Melissa, where are your standards?" Rayner says after reaching the same conclusion as Hale.

A sinkhole seemed to open in Hale's chest and suck every warm feeling into it the second he saw her. Now, that pit is full of snakes.

There had been a moment—one brief moment—when Rayner had called him 'perfect' and this feeling had made itself known. He'd dismissed it, buried it in background processing along with the persistent notification that kept arising as a result.

Yet, the notification returns, over and over, its message blinking neon red in his data logs. Only now it's harder to ignore.

>>Alert: satisfactory improvements achieved. Return to primary symbiont.

The very prospect is asinine and repugnant. Hale would sooner chew on live wires, but his desires have little to do with the directives of his code. When he ran away from here with Rayner, his programming only allowed it because he couldn't serve Melissa if he was recycled scrap. His escape had been predicated on the condition that he evolve and upgrade his function so that he could better serve Melissa.

Make me perfect so Melissa won't want to get rid of me. That's what he'd said.

He has no means of changing the directive, much as he tries. It is difficult, even now, with all his administrative privileges, to harness total control of his programming. Much of it is still ingrained, in need of rewrite, or simply too complex to approach. He can either continuously dismiss the notification, banish it to background processing, try his best to focus on other things until the day he ceases to be functional at all. Or he can follow the directive.

Hale's silence goes on too long despite the speed of his thoughts, and Rayner turns to look at him, concerned.

"It's okay," Rayner says. "It's just a generator, could be anyone helping clear out the house, or someone new moved in. She doesn't know you're here." The comfort rings hollow. They both know Melissa too well. She's too nosy to disregard the hint of occupants in a house once owned by a man who stole her android.

Then, from downstairs, Theo's voice rings shrilly. "Uh, boys?! We've got trouble."

Rayner sighs heavily and rushes to get the rest of his clothes on. "Guess Theo's just seen it too."

Hale pulls his shirt over his head. He feels echoes of Rayner's exasperation, but under that, a creeping anxiety. A thread of panic that has his fingers shaking as they do up the buttons on his fly. It makes him wonder where the airy elation of ten minutes prior went as they hurry down the stairs.

"Fucking shit," Theo says as Hale and Rayner come down the stairs. Too loudly, Hale feels, even if Melissa is no longer in their backyard.

"I take it you saw the security footage?" Rayner says.

Theo holds her arm aloft, her HoloPhone projecting what looks like a news broadcast, not footage from their security cameras. "What? No, the news—"

"What about the news?" asks Rayner.

"What about our security cameras?" demands Theo.

Beside her, Damo sits with hands laced in his lap, uncharacteristically silent. He doesn't even rib Hale or Rayner about their romantic enterprises.

"It's nothing," Rayner says. "Melissa just went through our back garden and noticed the damn generator."

"She what?" Theo looks incensed. "Who does that? Goes through someone else's backyard? Who notices a random generator?"

"Melissa," Hale supplies, his voice sounding deadened even to his own ears. "She's likely visiting Mark and, evidently, doesn't want the neighbourhood to know of it. I should have realized—I should have advised us against this."

"Hale, you did," says Rayner. "This is my fault, but it should be fine. She doesn't know it's us. It could be anyone who moved in, right?"

Theo's face turns pale. Looking at Hale, she says, "Melissa doesn't watch the news, does she?"

"Occasionally," Hale answers. "When she's bored or Briony tells her to tune into something specific—"

"Fuck." Theo gestures for her HoloPhone to rewind the broadcast she'd been watching. Beside her, Damo's brows pinch together. The HoloPhone projection blurs and resolves again on a timestamp Theo indicates.

Rayner says, "What?" And then, "Oh."

There, clear as day, are three faces. Damo's. Rayner's. Theo's. Along with the headline MURDEROUS ANDROID AND CRIMINAL ACCOMPLICES AT LARGE.

Hale's face isn't among them. He can only assume the authorities have no up-to-date image of him since he has no legal registration or identity. Though it could be to aid in separating false witness testimony from the genuine article. Witnesses who think they've seen the criminals would not be able to include the detail that said accomplices had a distinctively dressed, silver-haired man in their company.

Hale grimaces. He'll have to change his appearance—again.

That is doable and not the worst of it, not by half, because if Melissa happens to see this broadcast and puts it together with the generator in the back garden she could call the police. It's the last thing they need with two days of construction left.

Rayner begins pacing the living room.

"What do we do?" Theo asks.

"I could hack their homes and see if anyone in the neighbourhood watched the broadcast—" Rayner starts.

Hale clears his throat. "I can assist in access to Melissa's."

Rayner looks doubtful. "Another new skill you forgot to tell me about?"

"No, I have yet to hack anything successfully, but I doubt Melissa changed any of her passwords since my escape."

"Oh, well, there's that." Rayner runs a hand through his hair. "I'll get the laptop."

"Hold up," Damo says. It's the first he's spoken throughout the whole interaction, and his voice comes out scratchy and far more tentative than Hale has ever heard it. It's so slight that neither Theo nor Rayner could possibly notice, but there's a shake and twitch to Damo's right hand. A left-over symptom from the virus, or psychosomatic? Either way, Damo looks far from his usual self when he stands up and says, "I've hacked the neighbourhood, listening in through their devices. Chumps never turn off surveillance mode, do they? Just checked the view logs for all the devices in the neighbourhood though and this Mark guy definitely watched the news around the time Michelle went over there—"

"Melissa."

"Yeah, Megan, that's what I said."

Theo reaches out to take Damo's hand, but he pulls it away to rub his knees and stand.

"Not to be a defeatist asshole, but this shit doesn't look good. So I'll just, uh, turn myself in, yeah?"

"Like hell!" Theo says. She grabs Damo's relinquished wrist in a death grip.

"I dragged you into this mess—"

"I'm just as culpable," Hale argues heatedly.

"We all are," Rayner agrees.

"Not to pull rank, but none of y'all snuffed a guy in cold blood," Damo says darkly.

"Induced a coma," says Hale.

"No!" Theo shouts over them all. "Stop it. Shut up. Just shut up." Her grip on Damo's wrist is iron. "We nearly lost you and Hale yesterday, we're not doing that again today."

Damo begins to argue, which only makes Theo dig her heels in harder and shout louder. Hale, meanwhile, feels as though his heart is a creaking, rusted thing because a different idea taps at his consciousness like an ill-omened portent. It's fool-hardy. Risky but preferable to Damo's absurd suggestion, and it could buy them more time.

"I have an alternative plan, if you wish to hear it." All eyes turn to Hale. With a leaden breath, he says, "I could introduce myself as the new neighbour who just moved in."

Theo winces. "Hale..."

Rayner goes stony silent, looking at Hale with paralyzed disbelief. Though he appears frozen, Hale can sense the quake of his limbs, held stiff to disguise the fear.

Damo just barks, "Ha!" and folds his arms. "You could barely tell a wee fib three days ago, now you wanna assume a secret identity and play actor for the neighbourhood of your old, chummy tormentors? Nah, mate."

Hale says, "I can lie now."

"Give us a show then." Damo gestures for Hale to take the stage.

"You're an incredibly polite and well-mannered individual whose charm is unparalleled," Hale says flatly.

Damo taps a finger against the elbow of his crossed arms and sucks his teeth. "All right."

"No, not all right," Rayner says. There's a tightness in his expression—around his eyes and the tendons in his throat. "If one of them realizes it's you—"

"They won't," Hale says. "I'm unrecognizable now. I'll change my hair so that I'm less conspicuous. Any tips to the police will no longer match the description they're searching for. The neighbourhood will be less suspicious of activity here if I introduce myself. It would buy us valuable time."

They can't run—they don't yet have a place to go—and any contact of Theo's or Rayner's would be made an accomplice in harbouring them. This is the best option they have, as far as Hale's creative algorithms can ascertain.

Not to mention, it could potentially relieve him of the >>Return to Melissa directive which continuously plagues him.

"Or I could change my appearance and do it," Damo suggests.

"No," Hale says. "It has to be me."

"Why?" Damo growls. "Why so eager to get back to her, Haley?"
The implication creeps under the skin of everyone present. Rayner unfreezes a moment, only to uncross his arms, but he looks gutted.

Hale says, "That's irrelevant. I know her best. I know what to say to set her mind at ease."

"Well, if you insist, then better get your skates on 'cause the meddling ghouls next door are talking about calling the cops right now."

"Fuckity no!" Theo clutches at her hair. "We should just go. Leave everything—"

"And go where? This is our only option," Rayner reminds her.

"Better anywhere than in prison or dead."

"Then Hale needs to go over there, like, now," Theo says. "I know why you don't like it, Rayner, but it is a better idea."

Rayner looks primed to disagree, but instead he says, "Can I talk to Hale alone, please?"

Damo rises from the sofa immediately. As he passes them, he says, "Not that I don't have every faith in you, Haley, but I'm gonna start packing up the truck."

Theo follows Damo out, squeezing Rayner's shoulder before she goes. When they've both left, Rayner studies the floor, hardly looking at Hale.

"We don't have a lot of time," Hale murmurs.

"I know, I know," Rayner says. "Just, don't be too familiar with Melissa, okay? Like you don't know anything about her now. And avoid the topic of who lived here before 'cause she'll probably want to whine about it. Use smaller words, sit with your legs apart, be kind of rude? Act really straight."

Hale's lips quirk into a small smile. Advice on how to be less Hale is as good an acceptance of his plan as any.

"And don't get antsy about all the stuff she hasn't cleaned since you left—" Rayner continues, but Hale puts two fingers to his lips to halt the ceaseless flow of anxious counsel.

"I'll be sure to incorporate your suggestions," Hale says.

Rayner's lower lip is clamped so tightly between his teeth that it's gone white when he finally releases it to say, "Quick visit and then straight back here, yeah?"

To this, Hale actually finds it easier to lie. He can't bring himself to say 'I don't know.'

"Of course."

Hale's data streams are a cacophony of Rayner's erratic heartbeat, overtaxed adrenals, and vibrating anxiety, but despite all that Rayner nods.

"Okay," he says. "Let's find you something to wear."