"Tav." Alistair was beside him from the right staircase, his hand finding Tav's arm before Tav had completed a full step. The pressure was immediate and practiced. "Stop."
"We need to—"
"Stop." His voice had the way someone who was not discussing it. "Let me see."
"We don't have—"
"Ten seconds." He was already looking, his hands moving with the same efficiency Tav had applied to him twice. Reading the wound with the focused attention he had learned to do this and done it enough times to trust their own assessment. "Through and through. You're bleeding but not catastrophically." He pressed. "Does this—"
"Yes," Tav said. "Let's move."
Alistair found his face.
The corridor was empty. Below them the city was doing its ordinary work. The sirens that Lucien had arranged were somewhere to the north — visible to the building's exterior, creating the pressure that had already moved Cain's sanctioned team into extraction rather than engagement.
"I have you," Alistair said.
Not reassurance. Information.
"I know," Tav said.
They moved.
The ground floor exit opened onto the service alley, and from the service alley they reached the street, and on the street Naomi's borrowed car was running at the curb with the engine on and the door already open because she'd been watching and had seen enough.
Alistair got Tav into the back seat with the careful urgency of someone managing two priorities simultaneously: speed and the fragility of a person who had just been shot in the same shoulder twice.
"Drive," he said.
Naomi drove.
In the back seat, Alistair's hands maintained pressure and his eyes were doing the thing they did when he was managing something very significant — the careful steady of someone choosing to be present rather than reactive.
"You're pale," he said.
"I know."
"Tell me if it gets worse."
"It won't."
"Tell me anyway."
Tav studied him. At the worry that was entirely, undeniablyreal beneath the competence.
"I'll tell you," he said.
Alistair's hands stayed where they were.
The city moved past the windows.
The drive in Tav's jacket pocket: its LED light now steady white, its work complete, its five years of purpose discharged.
They had done it.
He held that thought and let it settle against the pain like something warm.
• • •
