"Lucien is my brother," he said.
He said it very quietly.
"I know," Tav said.
Alistair turned.
Tav met his gaze steadily.
"You knew?" Alistair said.
"I suspected, from the day you went still when I said the name of the previous pair. The surname confirmed it. I was waiting for you to tell me."
Alistair studied him.
"He's dead," he said. "He died five years ago. Ablation told me it was a field accident."
Tav said nothing. Because they both knew, now, that it wasn't.
Alistair turned back to the window.
"So," he said, with the careful steadiness of someone standing in the ruins of a story they'd been told and beginning to understand the shape of what had actually happened. "My brother was the first pair.
And Ablation killed him. And then they put me in the same protocol." "To see if it would work better this time."
His voice was flat. Not broken — controlled — professional management over something that needed holding.
"Yes," Tav said.
Alistair was quiet.
"We're not separating," he said.
"No," Tav agreed.
"We're not running."
"No."
Alistair turned. In the lamp light, his expression was the clearest Tav had ever seen it — stripped of every layer, down to the solid thing underneath. Not angry. Not afraid. Certain.
"Then we need a plan," he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
They fortified the apartment.
It was a specific and deliberate project, undertaken with the focused efficiency of two people who had been trained for exactly this kind of work and were, for possibly the first time, doing it in full awareness of each other's methods.
Forty minutes. Everything available.
Tav's contribution: the portable alarm he retrieved from beneath the false floor of his wardrobe — a panel that Alistair had been looking at for two weeks and had correctly identified as hollow but had not opened, which Tav noted without comment. Three separate sensor arrays positioned at the main entrance, the balcony slider, and the service corridor access panel. A secondary communication channel established through a different network from either of their primary encrypted lines.
Alistair's contribution: the surveillance tap that emerged from a cavity in the base of his bedside lamp — a piece of equipment that was significantly more sophisticated than anything a finance graduate student should have access to, and that Tav looked at before adding it to the perimeter array without comment. A series of environmental adjustments that Tav would not have thought to make: the positioning of furniture relative to the window sightlines, a modification to the balcony door's gap that changed the acoustic signature of anexternal approach, a small motion-reactive element concealed inside the decorative bowl by the front entrance that would give them three additional seconds of warning from a forced entry.
Three seconds was considerable.
When they were finished they stood in the kitchen and fixed on the apartment they'd created, which looked from the outside exactly as it had before and from the inside was a fundamentally different kind of space.
