Page 60 of The Quarterlands (Dark Water #4)
Chapter Sixteen
Alex
Alex spent the next few weeks considering how he might report Tyler for Solange’s murder. He had more freedom now than when he’d belonged to Tyler. But he was with Elliot nearly every hour of the day, and the black SUAV followed them everywhere outside the house.
He examined Elliot’s holopad when his houder was out of the room, but it was biolocked.
He left the house to walk to the nearby shops as a test, but the black SUAV followed him immediately.
It seemed that Tyler didn’t quite trust that Alex wasn’t a threat to him – not that Alex would ever expect George Tyler to take anything on trust. He tried giving the SUAV the slip by running down a narrow side street, but within seconds, burly men in the trademark Tyler livery were on his trail. Defeated, he returned to the house.
Another problem occurred to him. How did he even go about reporting it?
He’d always had a vague fantasy about fleeing to Inquisitus and finding Joe, who would recognise him immediately and believe every word he said, but now, several years on from Peter’s murder, he wondered if Joe would recognise him.
He’d seen him only briefly during the most traumatic of circumstances.
He could explain their connection, but just because he’d been there when Peter was killed didn’t mean Joe would believe him.
The more Alex mulled it over, the more impossible it all became.
Anyway, he stood no chance of reaching Inquisitus, so it was all conjecture.
He was so paralysed by his own inaction that he wondered if he’d lost his nerve somewhere along the way. Spain had been a turning point, and he now recognised that he’d experienced a complete breakdown there.
He wasn’t sure he was the same person who’d vowed to seek justice for Solange’s death. Did he have any fight left in him? Maybe he should just accept the life he had now. Being Elliot’s IS wasn’t terrible, and it was certainly far better than belonging to Tyler.
A thought struck him. Had he, somewhere along the way, simply accepted his own servitude?
Was he institutionalised? He thought of Gideon, refusing Madeleine’s offer to pay out his contract because he wanted to be her servant; it had conferred a sense of belonging and proximity to the one person he admired – maybe even loved – above all others.
She’d been placed in a position of being forced to care about his welfare in a way that wouldn’t have happened if he’d simply been her employee.
By remaining her IS, he’d created an illusion of intimacy.
It might have been one-sided and utterly without substance, but it was important to him .
Had Alex accepted the inevitability of his own servitude to the point where he had no other aims and ambitions in life outside of service? It wasn’t as if he’d made a success of his life when he’d been free. Had serving Elliot simply become comfortable and familiar?
He wrestled with these problems for weeks, turning them around in his head.
Elliot didn’t like it when he disappeared inside himself.
Elliot wanted Chris, the fun-loving party boy, to be in evidence at all times, and Alex was starting to find being Chris as difficult to maintain as Gideon’s blank-mask persona.
He looked at himself in the mirror, wearing tight jeans and a loud shirt, the kind of clothes he’d never choose for himself, and he saw Alex staring back, a little glimmer of distaste for the outfit simmering in his eyes.
He’d tried so hard to make Alex disappear, but it seemed that he kept returning.
Maybe it was impossible to truly be someone else forever.
He was stumped. What should he do next? If only he could receive some kind of sign .
Within a few weeks, he got his wish. Elliot loved his holotech, and had a state-of-the-art holoscreen.
One night, as they were watching the news, a familiar image appeared in front of him, and he was suddenly gazing at a man he hadn’t seen in years.
Josiah Raine looked superb, dressed in an elegantly cut suit that accentuated his muscular body and great height.
“Well, hello , darling,” Elliot whistled, ogling the holoimage. “Who is this hunk?”
“Emma James was a much-loved media personality,” Joe announced solemnly. “I promise that I will find the person who killed her.”
“Is it true that one of her indentured servants has gone on the run?” a reporter asked.
“Yes, it is, but I’ll track him down.” Joe spoke straight to the camera in a hard, determined voice. “Bram Janssen won’t be able to hide from me forever. I’ll find him.”
Alex drank in the sight of him. Elliot’s holotech was so good that it was almost as if Joe was right here in the room with them.
Had he recovered from losing Peter? Did he have a new man in his life?
Did he remember Ben Smith? He wanted to watch that clip over and over again, searching for the smallest clues that might answer these questions.
But with Elliot around, he was denied the chance.
Joe’s pursuit of the hapless Bram Janssen, however, went on for weeks, and he became a national celebrity in the process. There were articles about him everywhere, although as he didn’t give any interviews, they were largely conjecture or downright made up.
It became Alex’s guilty pleasure to source every single news report and magazine article mentioning Joe by name. On one memorable occasion, Joe even scored the lead story on The Daily Lowdown , the biggest news and gossip site.
The Hunky Hunter of a Missing Indie Taking the UK by Storm! screamed the headline. At some point after that, without anyone really knowing when or how, Joe simply became known as “the indiehunter”.
The more he learned, the more uneasy Alex became. The Joe he knew had been helping indies escape the country at great personal cost. But this Joe seemed cold and ruthless in tracking them down. Had Peter’s murder turned him against all indentured servants? God, he hoped not.
He searched for a glimpse of the Joe he’d met, the sharp, funny man who’d bantered with his husband, but he couldn’t see any sign of him.
Joe looked cold and brusque, and whenever the press button-holed him, he invariably replied with one of the cutting remarks that were fast becoming his trademark.
What if Joe really had become the indiehunter?
This kept Alex up at night, fretting, because in every version of his fantasy of bringing Tyler down, it was Joe who was his instrument of justice.
A few days later, when Alex didn’t achieve one of the top three positions in an indie show for the first time, Elliot threw a major tantrum.
“It’s because you’re getting flabby,” he accused, pinching a non-existent roll of flesh on Alex’s midriff.
Alex was as lean as ever, but it was true he’d lost muscle definition. He never worked out these days, and he hadn’t done his yoga for some time.
“That’s it,” Elliot declared. “I’m taking you to a gym.
” True to his word, he found one nearby, complete with a gruff personal trainer whose obvious heterosexuality was, Alex was sure, the main reason why he’d been chosen.
Elliot had no problem with Alex having sex with other men for his enjoyment, but he definitely didn’t want it happening behind his back.
D’Angelo Clarke was a burly guy in his thirties who tried to engage Alex in conversation that was almost entirely limited to females he found “sizzling”, whether they be girls working out, celebrities, or the virtually naked women who gyrated constantly on the music holovids that played in the gym 24/7.
Alex would have had little enough to say to D’Angelo at the best of times, but as Chris, he knew they had nothing in common, so he kept his replies short and non-committal and never initiated conversations.
He was sure D’Angelo found him unsatisfactory, but that didn’t bother him in the slightest. He still found working out tedious, but he welcomed the time away from navigating Elliot’s petulant demands and childish behaviour.
For the first few sessions, Elliot drove him to the gym, hung around watching him work out, then drove him back again after. However, Alex could see that was starting to pall, even when there were attractive men working out alongside him for Elliot to ogle.
One morning, Elliot was so excited over breakfast that Alex could tell he had something planned. He even waved aside his morning blow job, which Alex usually delivered while Elliot was eating his toast and reading the holonews.
“No, no, I have something to show you,” Elliot announced, grabbing Alex’s arm excitedly and dragging him outside. “A present!”
Elliot was still in his bath-robe – he rarely bothered getting dressed before noon. “Close your eyes,” he squealed, and Alex obliged, though he didn’t trust Elliot to lead him safely across the manicured front lawn, so he did peek a little on the way.
They arrived on the street, and Elliot clapped his hands together. “You can open them now. Look! ”
Alex did as he was told, and his stomach somersaulted in shock because there, parked by the side of the road, was a sleek, shiny maroon duck, all wrapped up in a giant pink bow.
And she wasn’t just any duck. She was his duck.
The Destiny. The one he’d designed, that had got him into all this trouble in the first place.
Yet, he couldn’t bring himself to hate her.
She was beautiful, his first-born child, and he loved her.
He ran a finger along her gleaming metal side, remembering all the milestones along the way that had led to her difficult birth.
“It’s the Destiny duck,” Elliot cooed. “The one everyone’s talking about. The must-have duck of the year. I bought her for you.”
He’d bought her so he didn’t have to drive Alex to the gym anymore, but Alex didn’t care. He couldn’t wait to get inside and drive. Elliot programmed the biokey to his metrics, and they both climbed in.