And stopped.
A thin black wire stretched across the corridor at ankle height, approximately eighteen inches from the floor, secured at both ends to the skirting board with adhesive clips that were professionalquality but applied with a slight angle suggesting installation under time pressure. His gaze tracked from the wire to the doorframe above it and located the compressed mechanism affixed above the lintel: small, sleek, armed.
Not lethal.
A distraction charge. Disorienting but not dangerous. The trigger mechanism was a standard tripwire design with a delay that suggested the person who'd placed it expected it to be encountered by someone moving fast and didn't want them to be able to retreat cleanly.
The kind of trap someone laid when they wanted to know if a space had been entered.
Not Ablation's style.
Different operational signature.
Tav crouched and disabled it methodically, a process that took less than a minute. He removed the wire, pocketed the charge, and continued along the corridor. At the end of it, Voss's office light glowed beneath the door.
And the door lock had been interfered with.
Recent scratch marks near the keyway — the marks of a pick rather than a bump key, which suggested patience. The tension wrench had been at the five-o'clock position, not four. Someone left- handed, or working with their non-dominant hand to avoid leaving a trace.
His hand on the door handle, Tav listened.
From inside: movement. A drawer sliding open. The controlled quiet of someone searching purposefully rather than panicking. Then, very softly: "Oh, come on."
Tav opened the door.
Alistair stood behind the Dean's desk in all black, gloved hands in a filing cabinet, expression of mild professional frustration on his face. He looked up at the sound of the door opening his face shifted into an expression that was partly resignation and partly something much closer to pleased.
"You have to stop appearing in doorways like Victorian architecture," he said, very quietly. "It's aesthetically excessive."
Tav closed the door behind him.
"You set the tripwire," he said.
"You noticed it."
"It was amateur."
Alistair pressed a hand to his chest with the expression of a man sustaining a wound. "That's genuinely hurtful."
Tav crossed to the desk. The files spread across it were financial — foundation accounts, disbursement records, the paper trail that existed specifically because certain transactions needed to be documented and other transactions needed to be documented differently.
"You tampered with the Dean's schedule," Tav said.
"Only by twenty minutes."
"You moved the surveillance window."
"I improved the surveillance window."
Tav looked at him. "You triggered Ablation oversight."
"You're telling me that like it's my fault."
"You compromised the approach."
"I optimized the approach." Alistair closed the filing cabinet with the practiced care of someone leaving no trace, and turned to face Tav with an ease that made the situation — two people standing in an occupied administrator's office at midnight — feel almost conversational. "You were going to come in twelve minutes before he left, which would have given you a three-minute window and a high probability of perimeter visibility from the north staircase. I moved the window to give you four minutes with clear sightlines on both approaches."
A pause.
