"How?" Tav said.
"Still," Alistair said. "The way someone who has decided that the stillness is the point and everything else is context." He held the look. "You both do it the same way."
"I'd imagine the training—"
"Not the training," Alistair said. "The character. The training produces the technique. The character produces the quality. You both have it."
Tav was quiet.
"He's going to be all right," he said.
"Yes." Alistair studied the floor. "He's been all right for five years. He's going to continue being all right.
He's going to need time. To learn how to be in the world again without the specific parameters of a person who's officially dead."
"That's a learnable thing," Tav said.
Alistair glanced at him.
"I've been learning how to be in the world without the specific parameters of a person who has nothing,"
Tav said. "For approximately three months." He held the look. "It's learnable."
Alistair held the look.
"Yes," he said softly. "I know."
"He'll have you," Tav said. "And the inquiry will give him a public identity again. And Elias will be on the record. He has everything he needs."
"He has everything Elias wanted for him," Alistair said.
Tav held his gaze.
"Yes," he said.
They left the station.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The night after the station.
The borrowed flat was empty by three in the morning — Naomi had gone, with the archive materials, and they had gone through the rapid wind-down of a space that had served a purpose and was now releasing its occupants.
Alistair was quiet in the car.
Not his usual quiet, which was the quiet of someone choosing not to speak because the better thing was doing something else. This was the quiet of someone processing. The depth that followed significant information.
Tav drove.
"He held the station," Alistair said eventually.
"Yes," Tav said.
"He walked in there and stood in the light and — and made himself the point of the conversation." He studied the windshield. "Five years of hiding and he walked into a station full of Cain's operatives and stood in the light."
"He was ready," Tav said.
"Yes." A pause. "He was ready because he'd been building toward it. Everything he built—" He stopped.
