"Better than she made it sound," Tav said.
"She told me exactly how bad it is," Alistair said.
"She was thorough."
"Yes." He crossed to the table. Stood in front of it. Looked at the wound dressing, the sling, at Tav on an examination table for the second time in one night. "Tav."
"Yes."
"You're going to rest," he said. "Genuinely rest. "
"Yes," Tav said.
"Not operational rest. Actual rest."
"I know what rest is."
"You have a theoretical understanding," Alistair said. "I'm going to provide an empirical example."
Tav watched him.
"All right," he said.
Something in Alistair's expression relaxed fractionally.
"Good," he said.
He helped Tav off the table with care he had been waiting to do this since the staircase.
They left the clinic.
• • •
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
RELEASE: TOTAL.
The notification came through on Lucien's distributed network at 22:09, confirmed across all eighteen nodes, and the first thing Tav was aware of — through the fog of blood loss and managed pain and the altered shift of consciousness that came with the latter — was Alistair exhaling.
Not a breath. A exhalation. The kind that happened when a body had been holding something for a long time and had finally received permission to release it.
The clinic was forty minutes outside the city, which gave Tav forty minutes to be still and let the shock response do its work and watch Alistair's face in the vehicle's dim interior.
The sequence of emotions visible in Alistair Keaton's expression when he was not managing his presentation was unlike most people's emotional sequences. Most people moved through feelings in the conventional order — shock, then processing, then resolution. Alistair moved through them simultaneously, multiple registers operating in parallel, so that watching his face was like watching several conversations happen in the same room.
Right now: relief. Genuine and specific, the relief of completion. And underneath it: the way someone who had been afraid — not of the mission, not of Ablation, but of something personal — and had found the fear had not resolved in the worst possible way.
He'd been afraid Tav wouldn't make it out of the staircase.
Tav knew this the way he knew everything about Alistair — through the accumulated evidence of careful observation. The pattern of Alistair's breathing since the shot. The way his hands maintained pressure without variance, with the focused steadiness he was giving.
"You can stop doing that," Tav said.
Alistair watched the wound dressing he'd improvised from the clinic kit in the car's boot. "I'll stop when we reach the clinic."
"It's controlled."
"Yes. Because I'm controlling it." He met Tav's eyes. "Let me."
