He turned to Tav sitting in the waiting room chair.
Something shifted in him.
Not relief exactly — they'd been past the crisis for an hour. Something quieter. the way someone who keeps arriving at the same fact and finding it significant each time.
He crossed the room and handed Tav a coffee.
Their hands touched in the transfer, deliberate and brief, and neither of them commented on it.
"Physician says rest," Alistair said, settling into the adjacent chair.
"The physician said the same thing after the first injury."
"Yes. And you rested for approximately four hours before initiating a rooftop operation."
"The situation required—"
"The situation has now changed." He drank his coffee. "We have a car. Naomi has a publication.
Lucien has a network managing the distribution. The situation no longer requires anything from your shoulder tonight."
Naomi was watching them over her screen with the analyzing expression she wore when she was gathering material.
"Don't," Alistair said.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You have the journalist face."
"This is just my face."
"Your face is doing something questionable right now."
She closed the laptop. "I was going to say that you're both significantly calmer than anyone who has done what you've done in the last six hours should be."
"We're not calmer," Tav said. "We're trained."
"What's the difference?"
He considered.
"Training is a decision made in advance about how to respond to situations that haven't happened yet," he said. "Calm is an emotional state. We're not calm. We're operating on a predetermined response pattern."
Naomi studied Alistair. "Is that true?"
"More or less," Alistair said. "Although I'd argue that after you do it long enough, the predetermined response pattern becomes the calm." "What he's not saying is that the decompression comes later.
Usually at two in the morning when there's nothing left to manage." "And what does that look like?"
A pause.
"Different for everyone," Alistair said. He looked at Tav.
Tav watched the coffee.
"For me," Tav said, "it looks like needing the silence that requires another person to be present." Naomi absorbed this.
Then she looked between them with an expression that had moved past the journalist's assessment into something more personal.
