"The safe house," she said. "Lucien's location — it's ready?"
"Yes," Alistair said.
"Then go." She stood and picked up her laptop bag. "I'll have the follow-up pieces running by morning. I'll be in contact when the oversight bodies make their first formal statements." She watched Tav specifically. "Rest. Both of you. Actually rest."
"Naomi," Tav said.
"Yes?"
"The story you were promised."
She looked at him.
"Full access," he said. "When we're ready." "All of it."
Something in her expression changed — the professional layer giving way briefly to something that was simply human: the way someone who has been working toward a thing and has now been told it's theirs.
"All of it," she confirmed.
She left.
The clinic was very quiet.
Alistair finished his coffee and set the cup down and met Tav's eyes in the institutional light of the waiting room.
"Ready?" he said.
Tav held his gaze. At everything that was still here — unchanged by the night's events, unchanged by the shot, unchanged by five years of Lucien's grief finally discharged and a city that would wake up to a different world.
"Yes," Tav said.
• • •
• • •
— LUCIEN —
Lucien had been watching the node confirmations come through on his own screen.
He was in the car — his car, the one he'd been operating out of for three months, the mobile infrastructure he had been living off official record and had learned to be very comfortable with the impermanence that required.
The confirmations appeared one at a time, in the order the distribution had seeded them: Node 1, Node 2, Node 3. The first eighteen minutes had been the longest eighteen minutes of the preceding five years. He had sat in the car and watched the confirmations and thought about the time waiting for something you'd been building toward for longer than you'd expected.
Node 18 had confirmed at 22:09.
He had sat in the car for approximately ninety seconds after that.
Then he had sent a single message to Alistair's encrypted channel: COMPLETE.
He had sat for another thirty seconds.
Then he had driven to the clinical location because Alistair's last message before the upload had indicated that one of them had been shot, and Lucien had five years of experience with information that was abbreviated by operational necessity, and he was not going to wait in a car while his brother and the person his brother was in love with were at a clinic.
He had arrived to find both of them ambulatory and the physician satisfied and Naomi Reyes in the waiting room withcoffee and the expression of a journalist who had filed three articles in two hours and considered this normal.
He had sat down.
He had said: you did it.
