The city in October had a quality that Tav had been noting for three weeks without naming: the amber light, the way the season's change produced a visible shift in how the streets looked at four in the afternoon. He had lived in several cities and they were all different from each other in the ways that places shaped by different geographies and histories were different, but they shared a cool October, the same everywhere: the light deciding to become something more deliberate, the temperature dropping to the point that made people move faster and hold their coats tighter, the city acquiring the serious kind of a place that has finished with summer and is attending to something else.
He sat in the café on the university precinct's eastern side and watched people move through the square outside the window.
He had been in the café for twenty minutes. The cover identity's thesis had a reading list that required library access, but the library's east reading room had been occupied at the exact terminal he needed, and he had decided to wait in the café rather than work at a less useful terminal.
This was accurate and also not the complete account of why he was in the café.
The complete account included the observation, made forty minutes earlier, that Alistair had left the apartment heading east with somewhere specific to be. Not the operational quality — the personal quality. The direct lightness like he has made a social arrangement hes looking forward to.
Tav had noted this and then, twenty minutes later, had found himself heading east.
He was not following Alistair. He was using a café that was in the direction Alistair had been moving.
The distinction was real, if not dramatic. At 4:23, Alistair appeared in the square.
He was not alone.
The person with him was someone Tav had not seen before — which was notable, because he had been systematically cataloguing Alistair's contacts since week one. Tall, dark coat, suspicious.
They were talking.
Tav watched the conversation with the professional attention of someone conducting an assessment rather than the personal attention of someone doing something else, an honest distinction even if the two were not fully separate.
The conversation had the facts of: known to each other, not recently seen, the ease of people who had been close and were recalibrating around a gap.
Not a current contact. A historical one.
At 4:31, Alistair's companion said something and Alistair laughed — the real laugh, not the social one Tav had learned to identify as the cover-identity's warmth. The unperformed warmth, by being genuinely amused by the person in front of you.
Tav looked at his coffee.
He was having a response to this that he declined to name fully, but that was available for naming if he chose to engage with it. He chose not to engage with it. He filed it under information and returned to the thesis reading list on his laptop. At 4:38, Alistair came through the café's door.
He saw Tav at the second pass of the room. Something in his expression shifted — a rapid assessment, the same one he always ran.
He came over.
"You're here," he said.
"Library terminal was occupied," Tav said.
"Yes." He pulled out the adjacent chair. "Do you mind if I—"
"No," Tav said.
Alistair sat. Ordered a coffee. Settled into the chair with the ease of someone who had decided to be in this particular café at this particular time rather than continuing with whatever else had been possible.
"Who was that?" Tav said.
Alistair held his gaze.
"Someone I knew before," he said. "A long time ago. We were at school together."
"Not a current contact."
"No." He held Tav's gaze with the honesty he deployed when he'd decided to be honest.
"A person from before all of this. From the version of me that existed before Ablation."
