"Yes."
He turned to her.
"Evelyn," he said. "Why are you helping us?"
She looked at him.
"Because I wrote those reports," she said. "For months. And what I wrote wasn't protocol data." She met his gaze. "It was two people. And Cain wants to delete them."
From above, Alistair's voice in his ear: "Tav. North exit is clear for thirty seconds. Move."
Tav moved.
• • •
— LUCIEN —
Two weeks before the rail station.
The call between Alistair and Lucien happened at two in the morning.
Tav was awake when it happened — in the kitchen with the secondary phone and the operational notes, running the timeline for what they'd learned from the station engagement — and he heard Alistair's voice from the bedroom, low and careful, the register of someone having a conversation they'd been waiting five years to have.
He did not listen.
He made the coffee with the deliberate method and waited. At 2:47, Alistair appeared in the kitchen doorway.
He had the look of someone who had been through something significant and was resettling around the new information — not distressed, recalibrated. The specific reset.
"He's going to come," Alistair said.
"To the safe house?"
"Yes. After."
"He said — he said he's been watching the surveillance feed from the placement for three months. He said he knew you were the right person before I did."
Tav held his gaze.
"How did he know?" Tav said.
"He watched you make coffee for me on day three," Alistair said. "He said you made it like it was for someone you cared about rather than someone you'd agreed to share a kitchen with."
Tav held this.
"He's observant," he said.
"He always was." Alistair crossed to the island. He sat. "I asked him about Elias."
"Yes."
"He talked for twenty minutes." He watched the table. "I'd never — Ablation told me a field accident.
A brief account. I knew the facts of it. I didn't know—" He stopped. "He told me about Elias. Who he was. What he was like."
"He said Elias thought out loud. That the thinking was always good, just — public. He said Elias could be conducting a surveillance and narrating it somehow neither compromised the other."
Tav thought about the crossword. Seven across.
