Tav fixed on the plate in front of Alistair.
"Eat," Tav said.
Alistair looked at him.
"You've told me," Tav said. "Now I know. We'll deal with it." He met his eyes. "Eat."
Something changed in Alistair's expression.
He picked up the fork.
They ate in the midnight kitchen without speaking further, because the important things had been said and theremaining things could wait until morning. At some point Alistair said: "You make good eggs."
"I make adequate eggs," Tav said.
"You make them the way you make the coffee," Alistair said. "Like it matters."
Tav held his gaze.
"It does matter," he said.
Alistair was quiet.
"Yes," he said. "I know."
They finished eating. Tav washed the plates. Alistair remained on the barstool until he didn't, when he got up and stood and turned to Tav with the expression he sometimes had at this hour — the unmanaged one, where the warmth and the assessment were both visible and neither of them was the full picture.
"Thank you," he said.
"It was eggs," Tav said.
"I know what it was," Alistair said.
He went to bed.
Tav stood in the kitchen after he heard the bedroom door close.
He watched the plates drying on the rack. At the lamp on the table. At the window with the city outside it doing its patient nocturnal work.
He thought: weeks, possibly days.
He thought: then we need to be ready.
He thought: we will be.
He turned off the kitchen lamp and went to bed.
• • •
• • •
Week six produced a development that Tav had not anticipated: Alistair began leaving things in the kitchen.
Not significant things. Small things. A book left on the counter rather than returned to his room. A coffee mug on the drying rack that had been used and washed and left there rather than put away. A pen that had migrated from the table to the window sill over the course of several days by a route that Tav had observed but not noted in any operational document.
He wrote it in the private catalogue.
The items were: a paperback novel, a coffee mug (the second one, the blue one, not the white one he used himself), a pen, a small notebook that was not the sketchbook but was a regular lined notebook, a folded piece of paper that turned out to be a printed confirmation for a library reservation.
