Why they were watching two people instead of one.
She watched the gap for a long time.
Then she opened a new browser tab and began searching for the woman with the camera.
It took four hours and two dead ends and one database she wasn't supposed to have access to. At 9:47 p.m. she found her.
She sat back and studied the name on the screen.
"Oh," she said, to the empty reading room.
She looked at the story's shape again.
It was larger than she'd thought. Not double, not triple. An order of magnitude.
She closed the laptop, put it carefully in her bag, and left the library with the long strided walk knowing she found the thing she had been looking for and was now moving toward the decision of what to do with it.
Outside, the city went about its evening business, entirely unaware.
• • •
• • •
The Ablation monitoring archive was a facility on the fourth floor of a building that housed, officially, a logistics company.
Tav had known about it since week three. He had not done anything about it because doing something about it required a kind of access that he'd been building toward, and the building had taken time. The access required: a secondary pass card with the correct encryption layer, a monitoring window of at least twenty minutes in which the facility's internal camera rotation created a viable approach corridor, and a reason to be there that would not be immediately obvious if discovered.
He had the pass card. He had identified the camera rotation. The reason was the drive.
He went in on a Thursday at 2 p.m.
The monitoring archive was the operational memory of the placement. The raw data — biometric, spatial, conversational — was stored in a distributed system, but the analysis and the summary reports were held here, in a server environment he'd identified through the connection pattern of Evelyn's daily uploads.
He moved through the facility quickly.
He had eleven minutes.
The primary server: the summary reports, going back eleven weeks. He copied them to the encrypted device. What Ablation had been told versus what Ablation had been seeing. The gap between the two would be Evelyn's gap — the specific selections she'd been making.
The secondary server: the raw monitoring data.
He didn't take this. He wasn't here for the data.
He was here for the node in the data architecture that connected the placement's monitoring to Cain's personal dashboard — the access path that let Cain see the real-time summaries without going through the standard reporting chain.
He found it.
He exited the facility at 2:17.
In the corridor outside, the logistics company's staff moved through their ordinary business, indifferent.
He walked back toward the university precinct.
He thought about the gap between what Evelyn had reported and what she'd observed. He would read the reports tonight. He would understand what she'd been protecting and why. And he would make a decision about what that meant for what came next.
He thought about Alistair, who had also been building toward something he hadn't told Tav yet. The parallel projects. The independent preparations.
Both of them moving toward the same conclusion through different means.
