She studied the wall of her home office, which contained a single photograph — not a professional image, a personal one. A holiday, twelve years ago, before everything that had happened in the years since. Two people on a beach. The kind of photograph that got taken by accident and turned out to be the most accurate image of a moment that had ever been produced.
She thought about what she owed the people in apartment 15C.
Not specifically, not in the abstract. The specific debt: she had written thirty-four reports. She had shaped what Cain saw and what he concluded and therefore what he would do. She was the intermediary between two people and the man who had already decided their future.
She thought about Lucien. About the hotel room. About two days in which she had sat with a young man who was twenty-five and had just learned that his brother was dead, and she had not told him that it wasn't true, because telling him would have endangered the fiction, and the fiction was Ablation's requirement.
She had made that choice.
She had made choices like it, with diminishing conviction, for five years.
She picked up her phone.
She did not call Cain. She did not call anyone in the division.
She wrote a message to an encrypted address she had maintained for three years as a contingency she hoped she'd never need.
The message said: ACCELERATING. PREPARE TO MOVE.
She sent it.
She put the phone down.
She felt, for the first time in three years, something that she was able to identify then as relief.
Not because she had done the right thing. Because she had done a thing and doing it had resolved the paralysis of knowing what was correct and being unable to enact it.
She looked at the photograph.
She thought: better late than wrong.
• • •
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The kitchen held them both in its ambient warmth — the lamp on the counter, the rain outside, the particular stillness of a space in which something important had just been confirmed and both parties were deciding how to proceed with it.
Tav looked at Alistair.
Alistair looked back.
The expression on his face was not guilt. It wasn't the expression of someone caught doing something they knew to be wrong. It was the expression of someone who had been carrying a weight they'd anticipated having to set down, and was now in the moment of setting it down, and was not certain how the ground would feel without it.
"How long?" Tav asked.
"Since before the assignment started." Alistair reached for the card and tucked it away without hurry.
"Ablation placed me. I've been operational for four years." He held Tav's gaze. "Everything about the placement was real. The cover identity is solid. The backstory is constructed but extensively supported."
"But not you."
"No." He said it without inflection. "Not me."
"You knew who I was."
"I was given a name and a general profile. Move-in day was when I knew." "Prescott, OCT, Financial Operations,Cleared Level Four. That's what they gave me. You walked through the door and I confirmed it."
Tav leaned back against the counter.
