"What did they do to the first pair?" Tav asked.
"A situation was engineered." Alistair's voice was careful. "A crisis. A forced choice. The tense pressure that either drives people apart or confirms they won't let each other go."
"And when they didn't let go."
"Termination." Tav sat with the word.
"And tonight," he said.
"Might have been a test," Alistair said. "Or the beginning of the Final Directive." He met Tav's eyes.
"Or both."
They looked at each other across the apartment.
"What do you want to do?" Tav asked.
It was a simple question. short and direct, without strategy underneath it — just the honest question of what Alistair wanted. Tav had been asking himself the same question for days and had arrived, with the methodical inevitability of someone following a logical chain, at an answer that was clear even if it was not comfortable.
Alistair was quiet.
"I want to know who we are to each other outside the Protocol," he said. "I want to find out what happens when it's not Ablation's experiment but ours." "I want — " He looked directly at Tav.
"I want to choose, rather than be chosen."
"Then we have a problem," Tav said, "because Ablation won't let us."
"No." He smiled faintly — small and real and without any happiness in it. "They won't."
Tav stood.
He crossed to the window and looked out at the city below. The rain on the glass caught the streetlights and dissolved them into fragmented color. He thought about the first pair — their names unknown to him, their faces unimaginable, two peoplewho had been engineered into attachment and then eliminated for taking it seriously.
He thought about what the Final Directive meant.
Then he turned.
Alistair was watching him from the couch with the patient attention he had made his decision and was waiting.
"We're going to need to know who sent that shooter tonight," Tav said. "Yes."
"And we're going to need to know what Ablation actually wants from this protocol — what outcome they're building toward."
"Yes."
"And we're going to need to decide what we do when we find out."
"Yes," Alistair said. And then, more quietly: "Together, I hope."
Tav looked at him.
"Yes," he said.
• • •
• • •
— EVELYN —
