"You read it."
"Yes."
Alistair looked at him. His expression was doing several things simultaneously: processing what had been read, assessing the implications, and running a separate assessment of Tav that had nothing to do with the phone.
"What did it say?" he asked.
"That Ablation has raised the monitoring frequency on this apartment. Twice-weekly data pulls have become daily." "You've known this for at least two days."
A pause.
"Yes," Alistair said.
"You didn't tell me."
"I was—" He stopped.
"You were deciding what to do with the information before sharing it," Tav said. "Yes. I understand the impulse." He turned to Alistair steadily. "It's the wrong one."
Alistair crossed to the island. He sat on the stool with as someone accepting a conversation they'd been avoiding.
"I wasn't sure how you'd respond," he said.
"To daily monitoring."
"To the confirmation that Cain is actively escalating." He fixed on the table. "I've been watching you for six weeks and I have a reasonable understanding of how you process information. You process it by making decisions. I wasn't ready for you to make decisions about this yet."
Tav held his gaze.
"You were protecting me from information," he said.
"I was managing the timing of the information."
"In service of protecting me from my own response."
Alistair held his gaze. "Yes."
"That's not your call," Tav said.
"I know."
"If you make decisions about what I know and when I know it, I can't make accurate assessments. My assessments become based on a curated picture of the situation." "Which means you're not protecting me. You're compromising my ability to protect us."
Alistair was quiet.
"Yes," he said. "You're right."
"I'm not saying this to win an argument," Tav said. "I'm saying it because we're in a situation where accurate information is the only thing we have that's actually ours. Everything else — the apartment, the assignment, the monitoring — is managed byexternal parties. But what we know, what we tell each other—" "That has to be the one thing that's clean."
Alistair watched him.
Something in his expression shifted. Not capitulation — recognition. The look of someone who had been told something accurate about themselves and was deciding to receive it.
"Yes," he said. "Okay."
"All of it," Tav said. "Whatever you know that's relevant, I need to know it at the same time you do."
"Even if you're going to do something I'm not sure about with it."
