He stood and found his jacket. Tav watched him move through the clinic's small space with the quiet efficiency that had been one of the first things — the economy of someone who'd learned to move well through difficult circumstances.
"Alistair," Tav said.
He turned.
Tav said: "I need you to know that regardless of what happens at the apartment, the primary outcome is already achieved. The archive is public. What we're doing now is tidying."
Alistair looked at him.
"Is that what you tell yourself?"
"That's what's accurate."
"Yes." He crossed back to the table and stood in front of Tav. He had something to say and was choosing how to say it. "But it's also true that if those three nodes remain offline, thestory has a hole in it that Cain will use for years. And it's true that Elias's name is in those three nodes' data packets." He held Tav's gaze. "So it's not just tidying."
Tav absorbed this.
"No," he said. "It's not."
"So we go," Alistair said. "Both of us. And we finish it."
He held out a hand.
Tav took it.
• • •
• • •
The node problem had a solution, the problem that had been approached with sufficient preparation: they yielded.
At four in the morning, with the industrial district node confirmed and the university precinct node confirmed and the third node at Blackwood Heights confirmed, and all eighteen showing green on the distribution panel, Tav stood in the service corridor of their former apartment building and thought about what was true.
The apartment itself was two floors above him. Empty now — Cain's team would have swept it within hours of the archive going public, recovering what they could, establishing what had been taken. The apartment that had been a cover identity and had become something that wasn't cover.
He thought about the morning light through the east windows.
He thought about the kitchen.
He thought about five in the morning and the coffee made better than required and the peaceful day beginning with another person in it.
He thought about the day the apartment would have again, sometime, with different inhabitants — the way a space continued after the people who'd given it meaning had moved through it and out.
He thought: I don't need the apartment.
He had been confusing the space with what had happened in it. The space was replaceable. What had happened in it was not.
He thought about this and found that thinking about it clearly made it settle.
"Ready?" Alistair said, from behind him.
Tav turned.
Alistair was standing in the corridor like he had in the small moments when he was fully himself — all warmth, no management, the amber eyes direct and clear.
"Yes," Tav said.
"All three node issues confirmed."
