Tav let him.
The city outside had already begun its reconfiguration around the archive's release. From the front seat, Naomi had her phone propped on the dashboard and was reading headlines with the speedscanning technique of a person who had spent years learning to extract signal from noise. Tav could see the screen from the back seat.
ABLATION INTELLIGENCE: THE DOCUMENTS. EXCLUSIVE.
Five years of Lucien's grief and purpose, now public. Elias's name in print in twelve languages by morning. The financial records and the Protocol files and the systematic documentation of what had been done to how many people in the name of what kind of outcome.
"Naomi," Tav said.
She glanced in the rear-view mirror. Her expression blank.
"It's running," she said. "All three outlets confirmed. The wire services picked it up nine minutes ago."
"The secondary sources?"
"Contacted and briefing." "The financial records are leading. They always do — money is legible when everything else seems abstract." She studied the mirror again. "I'm sorry you got shot."
"I appreciate the ordering of those two statements," Alistair said.
"I'm a journalist. Information comes first." But something warmer moved in her expression. "You're both going to be fine."
"Yes," Tav said.
"I need you to be fine," she said. "I have a story to write and I'd prefer my sources to be alive for the follow-up."
"Always with the journalism," Alistair murmured.
"That's what you get for recruiting a journalist." She checked the mirror a third time. "Tav." "Yes."
"Thank you. For letting me be part of this."
The clinic lights appeared at the end of the road.
Tav looked at them. Then at Alistair beside him — the warm worried presence catching the light from the passing streetlamps.
"Thank you," he said to Naomi.
He meant it for more than one thing.
She drove them through the clinic gates, and the next several hours were the work of medicine and management and the body's patient rebuilding of itself, and when Tav emerged from the physician's back room it was past midnight and the archive had been public for two hours and the world was already a different shape.
• • •
• • •
— NAOMI —
The phone call with Naomi at one in the morning, while Tav was in the examination room and Alistair was in the corridor.
"You're at a clinic," she said.
"Yes."
"The secondary location."
"Yes."
"He's being assessed?"
