THEY NEED TO KNOW.
She fixed on the message for a long time.
Then she sent it.
• • •
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
They woke up tangled together.
This was a fact that required a moment to process.
Tav came to consciousness with the ambient inventory he'd woken to every morning since childhood — the sweep of immediate environment, the check for change, the brief register of all variables present — and found one new: warmth pressed against his side, an arm draped loosely across his ribs, breathing that was slow and deliberate in the particular way of someone hovering at the edge of sleep.
He was still. He watched the ceiling. He let the variable register.
Alistair. Alive. Present. Here because they'd both needed the same thing last night, apparently: proximity, the comfort of another person's warmth when the world had recently reminded both of them what it was capable of.
The window showed grey morning light. Rain, still. The city making its distant sounds.
Tav had slept deeply.
He noticed that. He hadn't slept deeply since before he could reliably remember — not without pharmaceutical intervention, not without the artificial deadness. He slept lightly and briefly and with the alert half-presence of someone who expected interruption. He had slept, last night, with theunguarded depth of someone who had felt safe enough to let themselves.
That was, objectively, the most alarming thing that had happened in the last twenty-four hours.
More alarming than the gala. More alarming than the Final Directive message. More alarming than the confirmation of the Protocol's darker history.
Alistair had made him feel safe enough to sleep.
That was a vulnerability of a very specific and very serious kind.
Alistair shifted against him. Made a small sound — almost conscious, not quite — and pressed slightly closer. His breathing remained even.
Tav studied the ceiling and held very still.
"You're thinking so loudly," Alistair murmured, his voice thick with sleep, "that I can hear it." "You're awake."
"Marginally." He didn't move. "You breathe differently when you're thinking about something that worries you."
"How?"
"Shallower. More controlled." He exhaled. "Like you're doing now."
Tav said nothing.
"It's okay," Alistair said. More gently than his usual register. The softness of early morning, he had not yet reinstated the day's calibration.
"What's okay?"
"This." He still didn't move. "You don't have to analyze it right now."
"I'm not analyzing—"
"Tav." A very quiet sound that might have been amusement. "You've been running a systematic threat assessment on the fact that you slept well since approximately thirty seconds after you woke up."
The accuracy of this was, Tav reflected, deeply inconvenient.
