"She's perceptive," he said.
"Most people are, when they're paying attention."
"Most people think they're paying attention and aren't." Alistair tilted his head. "You answered your phone, by the way. The message last night. I saw the notification."
"I'm aware of that."
"You didn't reply to mine."
"You didn't send anything useful."
Alistair smiled. "I asked if you wanted dinner."
"That wasn't useful."
"It was polite."
"I prefer useful."
Something warm moved through Alistair's chest at that, a problem he was going to need to address.
Tav sat across from him with that steady grey regard and the careful, compressed composure. He learned to take up less space then he occupied, and Alistair found himself thinking about the sketchbook in his desk drawer.
The unfinished portrait.
The problem with drawing Tav Prescott was that the interesting part wasn't the perfection of his face — which was, objectively, worth documenting — but his attentive attention, The way concentration looked on someone who treated everything as worth understanding completely or not at all.
"Someone accessed the apartment Thursday," Tav said.
Alistair's focus sharpened.
"You're sure?"
"Yes."
Not I think. Not probably. Yes. Certainty delivered without performance.
Alistair leaned forward slightly. Because this was a problem, if it was someone outside their immediate operational context. He had entered Tav's room Thursday — briefly, carefully, in his absence — and found almost nothing. The space had been meticulous in the way of someone who had deliberately constructed its emptiness: a cover identity's room, not a person's room. Which told him a great deal, but not quite enough.
But if someone else had also entered— "You think it was Ablation?" Alistair said, watching the word leave his mouth like a stone leaving a hand.
The pause that followed was precisely the pause that preceded recalculation.
Tav's eyes locked onto him.
Cold and grey and suddenly very precise.
Alistair smiled — smooth, easy, the professional surface reinstated in the same breath. "Lucky guess?"
The café noise continued around them. Somewhere near the front, someone dropped a cup.
Outside, rain had started against the windows, thin and steady.
Tav leaned forward.
"You know what Ablation is," he said quietly.
Not a question.
