"Are you ready?" Alistair said.
"Yes," Tav said. "Are you?"
"I've been ready since week four," he said. "Since I confirmed Lucien was alive and understood what he'd been building." He watched Tav. "What I wasn't ready for was all the rest of it."
"The Protocol."
"You," Alistair said.
Tav was quiet.
"The specific and completely unexpected fact of you," Alistair said. "Which I was not prepared for.
Which the profile compatibility matrix had not—" He stopped. "Which was not something I anticipated."
"You anticipated the assignment," Tav said. "Not the content of it."
"Yes." He held the look. "The assignment was supposed to be: move toward releasing the archive.
Manage the proximity with whoever they placed in the apartment. Execute." "The assignment became something else."
"The Protocol worked," Tav said.
"The Protocol worked on two people who were already—" He stopped.
"Already?" Tav said.
"Ready," Alistair said carefully. "The Protocol places people in proximity and catalyzes something. It can only catalyze things that are in potential. And what was in potential between us— " He held the look. "Was not typical."
Tav found his face.
"No," he said. "I don't think it was."
"Whatever happens after," Alistair said, "I want you to know that this — this specific thing, this particular — whatever we are — is the part that I didn't expect and the part that I would choose again."
Tav held the look.
"Yes," he said. "Same."
• • •
• • •
The darkness in the archive room was not complete.
There were two sources of ambient light: the emergency strip along the floor near the exit, which had activated when the main power cut, and the standby indicator on the router in the corner, a small amber pulse that provided perhaps enough light to see shapes but not faces. Not, specifically, to identify anyone who was already in the room when you entered.
Tav had been in the room for forty seconds before the door opened.
He had forty seconds because the perimeter alert that Alistair had placed on the archive building's service entrance had given him a thirty-five-second window, and he had moved through the library
archive's lower level in the blinding darkness of someone comfortable in darkness — which Tav was.
He had been comfortable in darkness since an early assignment that he remembered, the things that change you rather than things that happen to you.
The door opened.
Two people. The movement pattern of trained operatives working in tandem — the close coordination that suggested ongoing partnership rather than recent assignment. Theirposture told him: they expected to find the room empty. They were here to retrieve something from the archive rather than to engage.
