A pause.
The third man looked at him with the expression of someone recalculating a variable.
"The drive," Tav said, "is not in this building. It hasn't been in this building since we arrived. Whatever you think you'll accomplish tonight—" He let that sit. "The archive is already distributed to seventeen secure holding addresses controlled by Lucien Keaton. You could take me off this catwalk and it would still release the moment someone fails to enter the daily renewal code."
"You're lying."
"Test it," Tav said. "Take the shot. See what happens at six a.m. when the renewal window closes."
Silence.
Below them: Alistair had moved slightly, the specific shift of someone who had registered a change in the situation above and was repositioning without looking like repositioning.
"Who sent you," Tav said.
The man held his gaze.
"You'll find out," he said. "When the time comes."
"The time comes when I decide it comes," Tav said.
A pause.
The man lowered the weapon.
Not all the way — the deliberate partial lowering of someone signalling a negotiated pause rather than a concession. He was buying time. Waiting for something.
Tav moved before the something arrived.
The catwalk engagement lasted twenty-two seconds. At the end of it the third man was secured against the balcony rail and the weapon was no longer in the immediate situation. Tav was standing at the north edge of the balcony looking down at the platform.
Alistair was looking up.
The exchange was rapid, total, and completely private. The full assessment running in both directions simultaneously. He's fine. Are you. Yes. Okay.
"We're clear," Tav said.
"Good," Alistair said.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The platform. Tav came through the south catwalk access and Alistair came through the north and they arrived at the station's main level within six seconds of each other, because this was how they moved through spaces now: parallel, triangulating, the coverage instinctive rather than assigned.
Cain's people had formed a semi-circle at the platform's north end.
Eight operatives. Weapons out but positioned for suppression rather than engagement — they wanted containment, not escalation. The sirens outside were still present and growing, and sirens meant witnesses, and witnesses meant that the calculus of what Cain's team could do was being constrained in real time.
Cain stood at the center.
He was watching Tav and Alistair cross the platform toward him.
"You moved together," he said. It was almost an observation rather than an accusation.
"We've noticed that," Alistair said.
Cain looked at them.
"The monitoring data didn't fully capture this," he said. "The reports described the attachment. They didn't convey—"
