"In a minute." Alistair didn't move. "Stay here a minute."
Tav leaned against the counter and looked out the window at the city below, and Alistair sat at the island and was quiet, and neither of them said anything, and after a while the silence between them felt the way good silences felt: restful.
Then Tav glanced down and noticed it.
Half-covered by the edge of Alistair's jacket.
A black keycard. Matte finish, silver numbering along one edge.
He recognized it immediately.
He'd seen cards exactly like it once before.
His own.
Ablation issue.
Not stolen, not copied — the weight and finish and the Ablation number format were identical to his own clearance card, the one that lived in the hidden pocket of his inside jacket and that he'd never shown to anyone in this apartment.
He looked at Alistair.
Who had, in this moment, relaxed his careful management enough to not notice he'd left it exposed.
The kitchen was warm and quiet and everything Tav had thought he understood about the situation had just shifted on its axis.
"You belong to Ablation," Tav said.
Alistair looked down.
Saw the card.
Closed his eyes for exactly one second.
Then looked up.
"Yes," he said.
• • •
• • •
— EVELYN —
Evelyn filed her thirty-fourth monitoring report for the placement at 6:14 p.m.
She filed it with the same precision she brought to all of her reports: every field completed, every data point sourced, every observation traceable to logged evidence. Her reports were the cleanest in the division. They had been the cleanest since she'd been a junior analyst and had decided that if she was going to write reports about people's lives, she was going to write them well enough that no one could fault the writing even when they could fault the subject.
The thirty-fourth report was, like the thirty-third and the thirty-second, not a complete account of what she'd observed.
She did not think of this as deception. She thought of it as selection. Every report was selection. The question was always what belonged in the report and what belonged in the observer's private understanding of the situation.
What she had not included in any report since week seven: The complicated thing developing in apartment 15C exceeded any previously recorded Protocol result in both speed and depth. The synchronization rate was ninety-three percent. The attachment indicators were genuine rather than performed. The two operatives had stopped managing their proximity and were in it.
What she had written, instead, was: standard attachment development consistent with Protocol parameters.
Which was true in the way that calling a irreplaceable person "an operative" was true.
She closed her laptop.
