Tav watched the drive the night before.
Alistair was asleep on the borrowed flat's narrow couch — genuinely asleep, the deep sleep of someone who had been running on insufficient rest for days and had finally allowed themselves to stop. The rib was managing. He'd eat properly tomorrow.
Tav studied the sleeping form.
The careful breathing, complicated, honest and alive.
Then he studied the drive.
Tomorrow, everything changed.
But for now, the city was quiet, and someone he loved was sleeping safe, and that was its own kind of preparation.
• • •
• • •
The borrowed flat at night had a quality that the borrowed flat in the afternoon didn't have.
In the afternoon it was a workspace — functional, focused, the two of them at their respective tasks. In the evening it became something else: the space that was neither of theirs but had become temporarily inhabited in the genuine sense, the way a space became inhabited when the people in it stopped performing their occupation of it and simply occupied it.
Alistair was at the table with the archive materials. Tav was in the adjacent chair with his laptop, running the node confirmation sequence. The window showed the city in its nighttime version — amber-lit, reduced to its essential movement.
"The third node is in the precinct," Alistair said.
"Yes."
"That's going to be the difficult one."
"Yes." Tav fixed on the screen. "If Cain has eyes on the apartment, the precinct will be covered. We need to approach the third node from a direction that doesn't cross any of the observation points he's likely to have staged."
"The architecture building has a south access that doesn't pass any of the standard approach routes."
Alistair turned a page in the archive. "The hub is in the building's communications infrastructure. The south access opens to the service corridor."
"You've been in the building."
"I spent two months in that building." He turned another page. "In a different capacity." "Do you find it strange? That we were both here for months before we met, building cover identities in the same university, attending different seminars of the same institution?"
"It was designed that way," Tav said.
"I know. But setting aside the design — do you find it strange?"
Tav considered.
"No," he said. "I find it — confirming." He watched the window. "Someone looked at two profiles and calculated that the probability of genuine compatibility was high enough to justify the placement. The overlap in institutional context isn't coincidence. It's the evidence of the calculation."
"Someone chose us for each other," Alistair said.
"Someone calculated we'd choose each other, given the right conditions."
"Is there a difference?"
Tav found his face. "Yes," he said. "We chose." Alistair held the look.
"Yes," he said. "We did."
He returned to the archive. Tav returned to the node sequence.
