"Not the part about the previous pair."
A beat.
"No," he said.
"Tell me that part."
Alistair turned the glass in his hands. "You know about the first attempt. The pair that preceded us."
"What I know is that it went wrong. The protocol ran — the proximity, the assignment overlap, the monitoring — and attachment developed. But then." He stopped again, looking for words. "Ablation intervened. The attachment had developed past what they considered a safe operational threshold. The operatives had started making decisions based on each other rather than on the organization."
"That's the purpose of the protocol," Tav said. "Studying how attachment affects decision- making."
"It was supposed to be controlled. Managed. They intervened too late — the attachment was too strong by the time they tried to dissolve it." He looked up. "The dissolution attempt failed."
"And the pair?"
Alistair watched the window.
"Were eliminated," he said.
The word settled.
Tav sat with it.
"Both of them," he said.
"Both of them." His voice was flat but deliberate, the deliberateness of someone saying a difficult thing clearly. "Ablation concluded that the protocol had created a liabilityrather than an asset. Two operatives whose primary loyalty was to each other rather than to the organization. Uncontrollable."
"So they ended it."
"They ended it." He turned to Tav. "And then apparently reconsidered, because here we are." Tav absorbed the full structure of this.
Two operatives. Engineered proximity. Monitored attachment. A Final Directive when the results exceeded acceptable parameters.
"What happens if we pass the evaluation?" Tav asked.
"If attachment develops within manageable parameters, the hypothesis is that we become a more effective operational unit. Paired assets who are loyal to each other within the organization's framework." "Controlled."
"And if we exceed parameters."
"They get the same liability they created last time."
Tav held his gaze.
At Alistair sitting in the lamp light with his tired eyes and his honest face and the close space between them that had been building for three weeks.
"What threshold are we at?" Tav asked.
Alistair watched him steadily.
And something in the look — in the lack of qualification, in the way he didn't deflect or diminish — told Tav the answer before the words arrived.
"Past it," Alistair said softly.
The apartment was warm and the rain was steady and Tav turned to Alistair and understood with the cold clarity of a professional assessment that they were past the manageable threshold and they had been for some time and neither of them had made a decision to stop.
And would not.
