What remained was: them.
"Lucien's car is staged two blocks north," Tav said.
"I know."
"He'll take us to the safe house."
"I know."
"Four hours north," Tav said. "Coastal."
Alistair glanced at him. "You're narrating an itinerary."
"I'm telling you where we're going."
"I know where we're going." He stepped slightly closer, their shoulders brushing as they walked. The contact was light and deliberate and familiar. "I've known since the warehouse. Since Lucien told us about the safe house."
"You wanted me to confirm it."
"I wanted to hear you say it." "Where we're going. That it's somewhere we're choosing to go." Tav watched the street ahead.
"We're going," he said, "to somewhere quiet. Together. And we're going to figure out who we are when nobody is deciding that for us."
Alistair exhaled slowly.
"Yes," he said. "That."
Above them, the first pale color was appearing at the eastern horizon — the grey-blue of the sky's earliest light, before the sun had committed to arriving but after the night had accepted it was leaving.
The university's tower was a dark shape against it. The streets below reflected it in their wet surfaces.
Tav put his hand in his pocket, found the drive, held it.
Then he turned to Alistair walking beside him in the pre-dawn light with his careful posture and exhaled with ease.
He put the drive away.
"Come on," he said.
• • •
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
— LUCIEN —
Lucien was on the fire escape when they arrived.
He was positioned with his back to the building's wall and a coffee cup cradled in both hands and the deliberate visible position he had chosen to be seen rather than concealed. He watched them cross the street without moving, and in the light of the streetlamp above him his face was similar to Alistair's face at a different age — the same bones, the same vast assessment operating behind the amber eyes — and Tav had a moment of understanding, visceral rather than intellectual, what it must have cost Alistair to be told this person was dead.
Lucien looked at Alistair.
Alistair met Lucien's eyes.
Something passed between them that didn't require words — the acknowledgment of two people who had been through a significant night separately and were now in each other's vicinity again and needed a moment to recalibrate around the fact of that.
"It's done," Alistair said.
"I know." Lucien had the tablet in his coat pocket. He'd been watching the node confirmations come through in real time. "All eighteen. The verification is complete." He studied Tav. "The shoulder."
