"And what would you want them to be?"
"Chosen," Tav said. "Not inherited. Not assigned. Chosen."
"Yes," he said. "Same."
The precinct. The buildings. The third node ahead.
"Together," Alistair said.
"Yes," Tav said.
"Whatever it is."
"Whatever it is."
They walked into the precinct.
The sirens started three minutes after they left the building.
Not pursuing them — responding to the cascade that Lucien's network had been building since midnight: the archive, the publication, the anonymous tip that had brought the first police response to
the industrial district station and then to the university precinct and now, apparently, to the area around Blackwood Heights.
Visibility.
The word Lucien had used. Cain operated in darkness. He moved through institutional shadows, made decisions in rooms that didn't officially exist, deployed resources that were never formally authorized. The moment his operations became publicly observable — the moment there were witnesses, police reports, civilian photographs — the nature of what he could do changed fundamentally.
Tav and Alistair walked through the pre-dawn university precinct while the city's emergency services arrived at the building behind them, and the cold air was clean in the way of air after rain, and the upload was complete, and nothing had ended.
He was walking carefully — the ribs responding to the strain of the apartment engagement — and Tav was walking carefully — the shoulder making itself heard with increasing clarity — and they were walking together like two people who had decided on a direction and were moving in it.
The sirens had moved north — chasing a different part of the dispersing chaos — and the precinct was briefly, oddly peaceful. The old stone buildings of the university sat in their amber light as they'd sat for two hundred years, indifferent to the urgency of the people moving through them at any given hour.
"I was a student here," Alistair said. "Ostensibly."
"So was I."
"Did you go to any actual seminars?"
"Three. For cover calibration."
"I went to one." He glanced sideways. "The architecture lecture. Week two."
Tav watched him.
"The architecture building," Alistair said.
They walked.
The city continued its gradual, indifferent arrival at morning — the sky at the horizon beginning its shift from the black of deep night toward the grey that preceded dawn. Ahead of them somewhere, a car horn. Behind them, the sounds of the police response diminishing as it moved to a different grid.
"Where are we going?" Alistair asked.
Tav had been thinking about this since the apartment.
The drive was in his pocket. The archive was complete. The night's operational requirements had been met. Lucien'steam would manage the technical aspects of the distribution from here.
Naomi was already writing. The mechanisms that would hold Ablation accountable were in motion.
