The phone buzzed a third time.
Alistair sighed with a performative quality that didn't reach his eyes and crouched beside the bed. The movement was economical and precise, and he retrieved the device from somewhere against the far wall — not visible from the door, not visible from the window, not easily accessible from any of the obvious search points. The position had been chosen deliberately.
He watched the screen.
Tav watched the change.
The warmth left Alistair's face entirely. Not gradually — just gone, replaced by a professional blankness that was so different from his usual expression that it looked like looking at a different person. The playfulness, the heat of their exchange, Attention he'd been directing at Tav — all of it cleared in a breath, and what remained was cold and focused and utterly without affect.
It lasted the length of time it took to read a short message.
Then the phone was locked, the warmth reinstated — and Tav had seen the screen clearly enough.
SUBJECT PROXIMITY INCREASING. MONITOR BEHAVIOURAL DEVIATION.
Subject.
Not target. Not mark. Subject — the clinical vocabulary of ongoing observation rather than active operation.
Alistair stood. He watched Tav and offered something between a smile and an acknowledgment.
"Well," he said.
"You're being monitored," Tav said.
"Aren't we all."
The deflection was smoother than usual. Practiced in the last two seconds.
Tav stepped closer. Not a threat — an insistence on proximity, on the distance that made it harder to perform rather than respond.
"You receive regular contact from an unknown number. You respond to it in a way that suggests familiarity rather than alarm. The content is observational and uses terminology that implies you are either the subject of surveillance or —" "— the person conducting it."
Alistair watched him throughout this with his head slightly tilted, as though listening to something that interested him in spite of himself.
"Or both," Tav finished.
"I do like a man who commits to his analysis." Alistair leaned against the desk with loose ease that was, Tav had come to understand, itself a form of vigilance. "Can I ask where this is going?" "Why Ablation assigned me a roommate."
The air changed.
Not visibly. Not with any external sign. But the space between them shifted — the bright, slightly combative energy of their exchange settling into something heavier. More honest. The atmosphere that came from two people standing at the edge of a conversation they'd been circling for days and both recognizing that they'd arrived at it.
"I genuinely don't know what Ablation is," Alistair said.
Tav found his face.
"That one was weaker," he said.
Alistair laughed softly, and despite himself Tav felt the warmth of it land somewhere between his ribs and travel. He was cataloguing these responses now with the grim thoroughness of someone documenting a developing problem: the laugh, the use of his name, the careful way Alistair's hands sometimes moved near him as though making decisions about whether to close a distance.
"What do you build?" Alistair asked quietly, leaning against the desk. He'd asked the same question in the kitchen that first morning, and Tav hadn't answered. He was asking it differently now — softer, less like a gambit.
"Control," Tav said.
The word fell into the room plainly.
Alistair absorbed it. The teasing faded from his expression and left something more careful in its place.
