"Yes."
Naomi absorbed this.
She had professional attention that he'd observed since the first time they'd met — the journalism version of what Tav did with operational targets: total, calibrated, filing everything. Except where Tav's attention was clinical, Naomi's was also simply curious. She was interested in people as people rather than as variables.
It was, he found, somewhat unusual.
"The previous pair," she said. "The one before you."
"How did you—"
"I've been doing this for a long time," she said. "You told me the Protocol wasn't new. You told me someone had built an archive. That means there was a previous iteration." She studied him. "What happened to them?"
Tav studied the window. The café outside in its ordinary afternoon. People passing with the ordinary urgency of people with somewhere to be.
"One of them is alive," he said. "In hiding I believe he built the archive." "The other one died."
"How?"
"Ablation decided they were a liability."
Naomi's expression changed.
Not dramatically — a quiet shift, the kind that happened when something abstract became concrete.
She understood what she was looking at now: not a surveillance story, not a financial crimes story, not even an intelligence scandal story. Something that was also a story about people being used and discarded.
"And you," she said.
"We're a liability," Tav said. "Yes."
"Because you chose each other."
"Because the Protocol worked and we chose each other."
She looked at him.
"What do you need from me?" she said.
He looked at her.
He had reached the end of the three rehearsals and was now in territory where the rehearsals hadn't gone — the territory of asking a civilian journalist to accept a significant personal risk in exchange for a story that would change her career and possibly her life.
"I need you to hold the story," he said, "until we give you the archive. And I need you to release it the way we specify — specific outlets, specific sequencing, timed to prevent any single government or institution from suppressing it."
"And in exchange?"
"The full story," he said. "Everything. The Protocol, the previous pair, the financial records, Ablation's entire operational history as documented in the archive." "Your byline."
Naomi held his gaze.
"And the risk?" she said.
"You become a target," he said. "After publication. You'll need to be prepared for institutional pressure, legal action, possibly surveillance." "Possibly physical risk."
"Possibly physical risk," she repeated. "Yes. I'm telling you the accurate version."
He waited, because it was her decision and it deserved the time it needed.
