"You track his movements in the hallway. You know his morning schedule." She tilted her head.
"How?"
Tav, exercising considerable restraint, said: "I'm observant."
Naomi stared at him.
Then slowly turned to Alistair.
"Is he aware," she said, "that 'I'm observant' is the least ambiguous thing he's said since I met him?"
Alistair studied Tav with an expression that was purely, genuinely delighted.
"Apparently not," he said.
Tav was aware that he had made some kind of error. The nature of it was becoming clearer.
"I pay attention to people in my immediate environment," he said.
"You pay attention to him specifically," Naomi said firmly. "In ways that have nothing to do with proximity and everything to do with—" She made a gesture that was expressive rather than precise.
"Interest," Alistair supplied.
Tav looked at him.
Alistair looked back with the warm, sharp, waiting expression of someone who had been working toward exactly this corner of the conversation and was prepared to enjoy having arrived at it.
"Impossible," Tav said.
"And yet," Alistair said softly. "Here we are."
Naomi collected her bag.
"I am leaving," she announced, "because whatever this is has moved past my capacity for emotional witnessing. Sort it out. Both of you. With actual words, preferably." At the door she paused. "And I say that with genuine affection and moderate terror."
The apartment door clicked behind her.
Silence.
A different type silence from before — lighter, in the way of things that had been named and therefore existed less dangerously as unnamed things. Tav watched the middle distance and considered the situation with the methodical honesty that was his most reliable tool.
"She's perceptive," Alistair said.
"Yes."
"Unsettlingly so."
"Usually."
Alistair crossed the apartment and stopped a few feet away. He wasn't performing now — none of the constructed warmth, none of the bright surface. Just looking at Tav with the honest attention and decided to stop managing the distance.
"You know where I am," he said. "Not because you're operationally aware of your environment.
Because you track me specifically."
"That's surveillance, not—"
"It's not surveillance." Alistair's voice was quiet. "Surveillance is professional. What you do is."
