"Drawing," Alistair said. "Actually drawing, not — the sketchbooks exist everywhere. But the quality of drawing where there's time and good light and you're not doing it between things." He watched the
window. "Reading. Actual reading, not — texts and briefings and operational documentation. Books."
"Cooking. The kind that requires more than twenty minutes."
"Those are the things that require duration," Tav said.
"Yes." He met Tav's eyes. "The things that take the time they need rather than the time available."
"Ablation compresses duration. Every assignment has a timeline. Every resource is the resource available rather than the resource sufficient."
"This assignment has been different," Tav said.
"Yes." Something in Alistair's expression shifted — a fractional adjustment, the straight movement of someone accepting an admission. "This assignment has been very different."
He returned to the kitchen. The cooking proceeded with the quality Tav had come to associate with everything Alistair did with full attention — the unhurried care.
Tav sat at the table and watched, not what he would have done in week one.
In week one he would have found something to occupy his attention. A book, or the laptop, or the operational documentation on the cover identity's postgraduate thesis — something that maintained the appearance.
In week two he sat at the table and watched Alistair cook and found that this was what he wanted to be doing.
"The lamb will take forty minutes," Alistair said, without looking up. "There's wine in the cupboard above the sink, if you want."
"I don't typically drink during assignments," Tav said.
"This assignment has an apartment and a kitchen and apparently a lamb chop dinner on a Tuesday," Alistair said. "The parameters are unusual."
Tav considered this.
He got the wine.
Dinner at the kitchen table was a different quality from the parallel eating they'd done in week one — the careful mutualnon-attention, the deliberate management of shared space. Week two's dinner was something else: two people eating food one of them had cooked with care, at a table, on a Tuesday evening, with the city outside doing its autumn work.
"What did you study?" Alistair said.
"Before Ablation."
"Philosophy," Tav said.
Alistair looked at him. "Genuinely?"
"Yes."
"Which branch?"
"Ethics, primarily. Applied ethics." He looked at his plate. "The question of what we owe each other and on what basis."
"And what did you conclude?"
"I concluded that the frameworks were insufficient for the actual complexity of the cases," Tav said.
"not a satisfying conclusion but was an honest one."
"And Ablation offered—"
"Application," Tav said. "The practical version of the question. What do we owe each other in contexts where the stakes are real and the information is incomplete and the time is compressed." "I thought the application would answer what the theory couldn't."
