"Good." Something moved in Lucien's face that was the first thing Tav had seen in it that was genuinely warm. "My brother needs that." He watched Alistair. "Someone who doesn't let him defer indefinitely."
"I don't defer—"
"You defer constantly," both Tav and Lucien said simultaneously.
Alistair looked between them.
"Right," he said. "So this is what that's going to be like."
Despite everything — the shoulder, the hour, the weight of the night — Tav felt something that he took a moment to identify.
"The car," Tav said.
"Two blocks north," Lucien confirmed. He watched his brother — the kind of look that compressed several things into a single held gaze. "Take care of each other."
"We will," Alistair said.
He started walking.
Tav fell into step beside him. Behind them, Lucien watched them go.
• • •
• • •
The shot came from above.
Tav registered it as trajectory before sound — the infinitesimal change in air pressure that his body had learned to read over years of operational contexts, the geometry of approach communicating itself in the fraction of a second before the conscious mind arrived at the analysis. A downward angle. Thirdfloor window, east face. Slight left lateral.
The line resolved through the air between him and Alistair and landed on: Alistair. Center mass. Tav moved.
The decision happened below the level of thought. The body had made the calculation before anything like deliberation was possible: the line went through Alistair, and that was not going to happen, and the adjustment required was simple geometry.
He stepped into the line.
The bullet caught him at the left shoulder — the damaged shoulder, the already-compromised shoulder, the location thatthe contractor in the staircase had hit hours earlier. He felt the impact differently from the first hit: more force, a different vector, the structural complaint of bone engaging with something it was not designed to engage with.
He went down.
One knee. The pavement cold against his leg.
He registered: breathing normal. Vision intact. Pain present but categorizable — not the particular edge of arterial damage, not the fluid drain on lung involvement. Bone and muscle.
Significant but manageable.
He registered: Alistair beside him before his second knee touched the pavement. "Tav—"
"I'm here," he said.
He said it because it was accurate and because Alistair's voice required it — not because he was afraid or in extremis, but because the register of that single word needed answering immediately.
Alistair's hands found the wound in the way they always found wounds: without hesitation, with the focused precise efficiency he had been on the receiving end of this care enough times to know how to give it. Both hands. Position correct. The right pressure applied before Tav had fully registered that he needed it.
"It's the same shoulder," Alistair said.
"I know."
"You stepped—"
