TRIGGER WARNINGS: the trigger warnings for this chapter are no joke. They're mentioned, rather than seen on page, but you can see the effects of some, they are there and, if any of this will trigger you, please be safe and walk away from this novella. I have other works that don't have these triggers, and Wattpad is filled with great stories that are safe. Don't risk your mental and emotional well-being for the sake of a story.

So.

TRIGGER WARNINGS: Mentions of violence | torture | slavery | forced body modification.

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On Thursday morning, Quentin woke up with the winter sun in his eyes, shivering from the chilly stone bench underneath him. He'd fallen asleep huddled in on himself in the deserted square, waiting for someone to come find him. No one had.

A joke.

He should have known the invitation was too good to be genuine. How gullible did he have to be to believe "let us worry about the codes"? He was lucky it hadn't been anything more sinister than a prankster making a fool out of him.

His chest wound had closed — the result of an entire night of recharging, cold notwithstanding — but the skin hadn't healed properly, had closed itself into a twisted, raised scar he could feel with the tips of his fingers even wearing his hoodie. An attempt to redirect the nanites to correct it yielded nothing. One more thing Quentin didn't know how to fix.

Then he took in his surroundings and forgot about everything else for a moment. The landscape in front of his eyes was breathtaking in the light of day, making him itch for the camera he no longer carried. This very square had been the centre of Xeygh's attack, buildings left intact as people dissolved where they stood. It must have been horrifying, but that had been seventy years before.

These days vegetation and construction had found a startling way to coexist: the softness of leaves that resisted winter with the sternness of concrete; the bareness of tree branches with the shine of glass that had never stopped self-cleaning. Shapes and textures intermingled, looking less like they were encroaching in one another's space and more like the embrace of a lover.

And the colours... His photography was black and white, but that didn't mean colours were irrelevant. On the contrary, they shone through in contrast, pared down to their bare essence. Here? Colours filled every corner of his vision, vibrant and larger than life against the pale blue of the cloudless sky. Even winter had taken a backseat to allow Quentin to witness this splendour. If this was how the tech district looked like now, Quentin would have paid all the credits still on Ian's traceless card to come back in spring, armed with his camera.

That dream fizzled out into nothingness as soon as it came. He'd be deep underground by spring, if all went according to plan. Most likely dead if even a single thing didn't. The world would have changed, possibly as much as the scenario in front of his eyes, by the time he managed to resurface.

The winter sun did nothing to ward off the icy hopelessness that settled in his core. Left with no other option, Quentin gathered his will to survive like a cloak and started walking, unsure of which direction he'd come the night before.

"Sean of Lyz," a cheerful voice behind him intruded, making him turn on the spot. "Looking good there!"

Quentin froze, mouth agape, staring in the voice's direction. The figure who'd spoken sat on a first-story balcony, legs dangling against the glass. Once, in a former life, he'd have mistaken the friendly tone and the once-over for flirting. Coming from a BioSynth whose mechanism was on display in portions of his neck? One eye ruined but still functioning, despite no longer resembling a human's? A nose that looked like it had been flattened and undergone a haphazard attempt at reconstruction?

All the man was saying was, 'You look like no one's damaged you yet.'

He grimaced, trying to force himself to be less obvious in his staring. "Jax?"

"In the flesh!" Jax jumped down from his balcony to land close to Quentin. "So to speak. Sorry for the frosty night and all, but you looked too whole to be certain." There was something vaguely familiar about him. Had Quentin met him before? "Had to make sure you weren't a human trying to pass yourself off as one of us, but after this many hours, I'm sold."

Talking. Talking helped. "But... Couldn't you tell, in the web?"

"There, yeah, sure. But I had no way of knowing you were you once you got here." He ran a hand through his sandy blond hair, exposing an ear that was essentially a hole in fused flesh. "Not that we get many human visitors, but better safe than sorry. So, what do you say, Sean? Ready to join a club?" Another once-over. "Hmm. We might have to stop calling ourselves the Maimed Misfits if you join, though."

"I... What?" Talking didn't help after all; Quentin was out of his depth.

"Just having a bit of fun with you," Jax clapped him on the back as if they were friends. "You're different from what I expected. Not that I had expectations exactly, but, you know. You're the first fellow 69 I meet, apart from Mia, and no one's like Mia. I guess I thought you'd be more like me and less like a gaping fish."

They were the same model. Was that why Jax felt familiar? Quentin swallowed, preparing to apologise, but Jax beat him to it.

"Don't worry about it. I get that reaction a lot from people who haven't been to the mines. I'll take it over the commiseration and existential dread of the ones who have any day of the week. Come on. Let's get you settled."

Quentin trailed after him, careful not to trip on the overgrown vegetation, trying to gather his scattered wits. "How do you know? That we're the same model?"

Jax looked over his shoulder, eyebrows rising. "You didn't? In the web?"

"I wouldn't know where to look."

Apparently BioSynths could whistle even when half of their neck lacked organic matter. "Oh, boy, that long story of yours keeps getting better. Now I'm really dying to know." A smile made ominous by the skin crinkling to the left of an eye that was barely a glowing orb. "Maybe you'll tell me for Symons day."

"Symons day?"

"A bit of a joke to celebrate that one, but mostly not. Worshipping the creator has its appeal in any culture, right?"

Quentin rifled through his memories faster than he could speak until he found the name. Bishop Symons. The man who'd developed their code, before the war. An idealist. A dreamer. Was he the reason Quentin could appreciate beauty? 'You see beauty everywhere,' he remembered Ian saying, less than a week ago. There'd been so much love in his voice...

Jax mistook the reason for his silence. "It was just a joke, really. You don't have to celebrate, or tell me anything. Anyway, it's months away. Who knows what you'll want to do by then." He led them through a partially caved-in subway entrance, intertwined with vines and weeds alike.

Quentin remembered the city map; the original subway tunnels had been completely sealed off. The new subway, the one people used to go about their lives, had tunnels built from scratch, nowhere close to these. Even branches where the contamination wouldn't have reached had been sealed off. Xeygh's biological weapons had been powerful but with a narrow focus, as if they'd meant to bring only the tech district to its knees. Perhaps they did, and Alyra, Lyz especially, had their restraint to thank for not having lost an entire city's worth of people.

Cold comfort to the tens of thousands who'd lost someone in the attack.

"Damn, you have brooding down to an art form! If I were in the market, I'd totally beg you to teach me that skill so they'd all flock to me." A self-deprecating laugh. "Though I suppose the glowing eye and the neck gears might scare most people off."

"I didn't mean to brood," Quentin focused on the more innocuous part of Jax's meandering speech. The red lights in the subway tunnel made his ruined face even eerier. "It's just... It's been a strange week."

Jax fixed his gaze on Quentin's left hand, where he'd been twisting his wedding ring for comfort. His voice was softer when he asked, "Have someone waiting at home?"

Waiting. Waiting to find him and send him in as nothing but a thing. "No, I... Not anymore."

"Oh, man." Even a glowing orb could display pity. "I'm so sorry for your loss."

"No, it..." It was probably safer to let everyone think Ian was dead, but Quentin couldn't conceive of tempting fate like that. "He's not dead. He just... Didn't know who I was. Wasn't really thrilled to find out."

Another low whistle. "A human? And you married him without telling him? Damn, you really were setting yourself up for heartache, weren't you?"

A door on the tunnel's right side was too vine-free to be a coincidence. Quentin hoped getting there would release him from the obligation of replying, so all he made was a token attempt. "It's..."

"Complicated? Say no more." As expected, Jax led them through the door. "We're here!"

'Here' was a massive complex that had, if Quentin were to guess, once been the subway's control centre. It would have been smaller in any other district, but the tech district would have demanded room for every shiny new toy, at the time, and the income they generated was enough that the city would have let them have it.

The first room served as a small hallway, opening up to the control area proper. Several monitors were piled up on the corner, a testament to the pre-nexus era. There were four other BioSynths in the room, and each, on their own, lent credence to Jax's claim of them naming themselves the Maimed Misfits.

Not one of them still looked human. Skin was peeled off at places, or poorly healed and fused back together; mechanisms were on display. It was hard not to show the revulsion on his face.

"Oh, wow," one of them said, by way of greeting. "I don't know who you are, but I really hope you decide to stick around. We could definitely use someone who can still pass as human."

"Cut him some slack, Clementine," Jax said, before the other BioSynth — Clementine — could say anything else. "Sean just got here. Let's see if he needs to take a piss and eat breakfast before we jump him to be our designated human impersonator, 'kay?"

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They were a strangely united group, despite — or perhaps because of — the body horror. Jax, Clementine, Lara, Alice, and Xavier. Maybe before meeting Ian Quentin would have considered sticking around, seeing what they had to offer. A part of him insisted it would be less lonely than the bunker.

The larger part balked at the idea of becoming one of them. One had a chestplate fused to her torso to keep the organs from falling out her side; another wore a wig, to half cover the back of her exposed skull. Quentin couldn't wrap his mind around having this be his new normal.

He didn't belong here.

A fact made abundantly clear by his current whereabouts, hiding in a bathroom stall after breakfast so he could organise his thoughts.

The scar on his chest begged to differ. Models BSYN21075 and under didn't regenerate the way others did. Their nanites were limited, less powerful; they required more time to move on to the next thing. Some damage was beyond their capabilities at all. During the war, they'd been repaired in factories, sent out into the world good as new. These days, with BioSynth production long since outlawed, no one had the tools or the skill.

Quentin couldn't afford to get damaged. And this group? That invited strangers to join them without knowing the first thing about them except their model number? Didn't seem the most safety conscious he could have found.

He'd lived as a human for ten years; he wasn't ready to lose that. He'd hang around for a few days, make his plans, enjoy the anonymity provided by the same material that had prevented the bioweapons from leaking out — Ian wouldn't be able to find his signal while he was down here — and then be on his way once he could move to the bunker.

Maybe they'd know where he could find some of the cosmetics he needed to look older, or how to acquire a new nexus without using his fingerprints and retinal scan. All information he used to have, but contacts didn't stay in the same spot for ten years if they were worth their salt, and his had been very good.

It still baffled him that he could now think in terms of contacts and disguise techniques without batting an eyelash. Ten years and he'd had more in common with Ian than either of them could have guessed, hiding in his memories.

He dropped his hand from underneath his sweatshirt, allowing himself to stop touching the chest he didn't want to look at; then he flushed the toilet he hadn't used, and walked out the stall intending to wash his hands just for show.

Clementine was waiting by the sink. Designed to look like a woman in her mid twenties, with high cheekbones, full lips painted red, and sleek black hair, it was easy to tell she'd been built to be beautiful. These days, beyond the limp, the flaking skin, and having both arms replaced by a mismatched pair that had nothing to do with one another or with the rest of her skin tone, she just looked tired. "Sean, right?"

"Yeah. And you're Clementine? Nice to meet you."

She offered a smile belied by her next words. "Happy to meet Jax's more recent pet project."

The tone was right, but the content sounded hostile. She must have known it because she rushed to add, "Sorry, that didn't come out right. I was Jax's last pet project, so I just meant to say it's good not to be the new kid on the block anymore. I'm lucky they took me in. You'll feel lucky too, if you decide to stay."

He'd forgotten how good it felt, laughter that wasn't born of panic or grief. "Alright, that's me, told."

She snorted. "You'll find most things I say don't come out exactly the way I want them to. Faulty chip, they told me. It's a bit of a curse. Fucked me up during the war," a half-hearted shrug, a wry twist of red lips. "Everyone else got the high-profile exciting stuff, and I was left playing the cleaning lady."

"You seem to be good at correcting yourself straight after, though," Quentin replied in what he hoped was an encouraging tone. Funny how perceived age influenced his interactions with others now that he'd lived as a human. They were of an age, or she might even be slightly older than him, but he felt like the responsible adult just because of how she looked.

"Meh. I try. Anyway. All this to say: Welcome. I hope you decide to stay. And, if not, I hope you stick around for Saturday's raid at least."

That caught his attention. "Raid?"

Another snort. "Jax will have my head if I spring this on you in the bathroom. Come outside and he'll explain. We won't bite." Her eyes were drawn to his wedding ring as he dried his hands on the towel. "You left a husband behind, right?"

Knowing he'd be told about this raid as soon as he wanted it made getting that information less pressing. It was alright to linger until he was ready to face the freak show outside. "That's... One way of putting it. I'm not ready to talk about it."

"Alright. When you do, if you're still around?" Her gaze met his in the mirror.

"Come to you?"

"No. Jax. He's the one with a girlfriend out there he's trying to rescue. It's not the same, but I think he'd be happy to compare notes with another sap who's hopelessly in love."

What did that make him? Devoted or stupid? "How do you know I'm hopelessly in love?"

"You told Jax your husband wasn't okay with you being a BioSynth, but you're still wearing the ring. That's all the evidence I need."

So cold, to see his entire relationship reduced to a single sentence, yet so accurate it hurt. Quentin would do well to remember each of these BioSynths was highly intelligent and highly skilled — literally built to spy during a war that had lasted two decades. Spy and attack. Weapons. Judging based on anything except that knowledge, whether appearance or speech pattern, was just shooting himself in the foot.

He turned to face her directly, needing something else to think about. "Is it Mia? The girlfriend he's trying to rescue?"

"Yeah," Clementine confirmed, nodding for emphasis. "She's still in the mines, but he doesn't know which ones. He's been trying to find her for three years. You had his hopes up for a while, until you replied to his message. He puts on a brave face, but he's a bit crushed you're not her."

"I can imagine. Were you..." He gestured to her before he could think it over, then pulled his arm back, mortified. What was he thinking, asking something like that? "Nevermind. Stupid question."

"In the mines? Worked to the bone and that's why I have weird arms and a limp? Nah," she shrugged again, "the mines are Jax's deal. I got myself a creative Tracker. Fucker kept me for six months. Amped my pain sensors to the max. Even just wearing clothes felt like being on fire. He liked to let me escape so he could catch me again. Cut off my arms for fun, then gave me these when he realised I couldn't go very far without arms."

Quentin gripped the edge of the sink for support. The casual way she spoke about a level of torture he couldn't even begin to grasp, betrayed only by the hatred in her eyes, made it difficult to process the horror of what she'd gone through.

"I can be thick sometimes, but I learn. The last time he let me escape, I let him find me only a couple of blocks away. Had to do this to my leg, so it'd be believable," she waved down and he could see it. The foot twisted at close to 90 degrees. To do that under normal circumstances was macabre; doing it with her pain sensors amped up...

"But he fell for it. Walked up to me like I was no threat. I pulled him to the ground and bashed his head in with a rock, and it was the best day of my life." It was as if she were talking about partying, or skydiving. "Wish I could have killed him, but getting out of there was more important. That's my biggest regret. All the fucker got was plastic surgery and a headache."

Quentin hadn't realised he had a hand covering his mouth, clenched tight, until she patted him on that arm.

"Hey, come on. Sorry, I shouldn't have sprung that on you like that." She was apologising. The notion was bizarre. "I used to be quieter, but Jax got me talking, said it'd help, and I forget, sometimes, that not everyone can listen the way he does."

He didn't realise she was about to do it until he found himself wrapped in a hug that brought unexpected tears to his eyes.

She was a stranger.

A BioSynth.

She'd gone through hell. Yet she'd shown him more humanity and empathy in this one moment than... Than Ian had on the night of the crash. He didn't know what to make of it.

"You're white as a sheet," she said, disentangling herself from him. "Just... Be careful out there if you don't stay, alright? BioSynths like us, we get Trackers like that Connors motherfucker."

Quentin sucked in a breath, his feet rooted to the spot. Connors. He'd... He'd met Connors years ago, in passing, at an event for Trackers Ian couldn't get out of. Handsome, suave, he'd barely said two words to Quentin before Ian had swooped in to cut the conversation short and all but drag him away. Quentin had been about to tease Ian for the uncharacteristic moment of possessiveness when he'd seen the haunted look on his husband's eyes. 'He's a psychopath,' Ian had told him. 'A serial killer in training wheels waiting to graduate to people. I wouldn't have him near an enemy, let alone the love of my life.'

'The love of my life.' How could that be true, when Quentin had been so easy to discard?

Then the rest of what Clementine had said sunk in.

"BioSynths like us. You mean obsolete."

"Yup. We're not valuable. Doesn't matter what state we're in as long as we can dig. We're not lucky enough to get the fuckers who just want to ship us off into slavery without torturing us first."

Ian. That was Ian she was describing as a remorseless slaver. She didn't know he wasn't like that. He was a good man: decent, kind, willing to risk himself to make the world a better, safer place for everyone else.

As long as everyone else was a human being.

Things like Quentin didn't deserve the same consideration.

"Or we get the rookies who don't know which way is up and fuck us up even without trying." She was still speaking. "Except Jax. Jax got lucky. Must have been a mistake in the contracts they hand out or something, but he got a Tracker who just powered him down and shipped him off. Didn't even dent him." A joyless grin. "You saw for yourself how well that turned out for him anyway."

Her mouth continued to move, but Quentin was no longer listening. The last piece of the puzzle clicked into place. That's why Jax was familiar.

Ian's spare room, years ago, before they had a garage, before they'd gotten married, before Quentin had officially moved in.

Ian had been Jax's Tracker. And, just like with the woman in the garage, Quentin hadn't lifted a finger to help.

Freak show? Quentin was the defective, monstrous one.

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Thank you for reading!

This chapter was a lot to write and, I imagine, a lot to take in. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it and, if you feel it's warranted, please hit that Vote button up top.

Ian's day hasn't been without its fair share of revelations either. 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!

This week's recommended novellas are Thaw My Heart, by thatCalamity

Here's the blurb: Stiff and notorious for boring routines, Fern is left alone on the ice when her longtime ice dance partner quits. The Olympic qualifiers begin this season and Fern's Olympic dream won't wait for her to find the perfect partner. Enter Roch, the hot-headed French Canadian with a chip on his shoulder and a tendency to crack under pressure.

And Too Far to Forget by -dreamsinwords

Here's the blurb: Struggling to fulfil his mother's last wish and to hide his feelings for the cook caring for her, Sivanesan Dilin must overcome grief, loss, and doubt to find happiness and love again.