"I did."
"Maybe."
Alistair smiled at that — slow and sharp. "And what do you move like?"
Tav drank the coffee. It was, again, better than it had any reason to be.
"Quietly," he said.
The word landed and sat there between them. Alistair's gaze stayed on him longer than necessary, something moving behind his eyes that Tav couldn't fully parse — heat, maybe, or its precursor. Then his phone buzzed against the countertop and the moment dissolved.
He checked it quickly. Something in his face changed — the warmth draining, a brief and calculated coldness moving in its place. His thumb moved across the screen. Then he locked it and looked back up, and the warmth was reinstated so smoothly that someone less attentive might have thought they'd imagined the interruption.
Tav had caught a glimpse of the screen.
Unknown number. A single line of text.
STATUS CONFIRMED.
"You always watch people this closely?" Alistair asked.
"Yes."
"Should I be concerned?"
Tav set the coffee down. "Depends."
"On?"
"Why Ablation assigned me a roommate."
The kitchen went quiet.
Not the ordinary quiet of an early morning. A abrupt quiet, charged and sudden, like the stillness after a word detonates in conversation. Alistair's hand was still on his locked phone. His expression remained perfectly assembled. But something in the air between them had changed, and they both knew it, and neither of them pretended otherwise.
"No idea what Ablation is," Alistair said easily.
Lie.
Clean, immediate, practiced. The kind that came from repetition rather than performance — a lie that had been ready before the question was asked.
Tav watched him.
Alistair held the look without wavering, his face composed and pleasant and entirely, deliberately opaque.
Two people standing barefoot in a luxury kitchen before sunrise, each pretending not to study the other like a threat.
Tav refilled his coffee and went to stand at the window.
Outside, the city was lightening slowly toward morning, the skyline resolving itself from dark masses into defined shapes, towers emerging from the grey like something being remembered. Below on the streets, the first taxis of the day were moving, the first pedestrians appearing on corners.
Behind him, he heard Alistair set his mug down. Heard him move toward the hallway. Then pause.
"For what it's worth," Alistair said, "the coffee is better if you let it steep a little longer."
Tav didn't turn around.
"I know," he said.
