"The previous pair," she said. "The one who died."
"Elias."
"His name is in the archive."
"Yes."
"And the person who survived — who built it."
"Lucien." "Alistair's brother."
Naomi looked up.
"He's alive," she said.
"Yes i believe so."
She took a slow breath.
"All right," she said. "Yes. I'm in."
Tav studied her.
"You're not concerned?"
"I'm concerned," she said. "I'm also a journalist who has been looking at the edge of the real story about Dean Voss for four weeks and has been watching it get larger every time I look." She met his eyes. "I didn't become a journalist to cover the stories that were safe. I became a journalist because the unsafe ones are the ones that matter."
Tav held her gaze.
"You remind me of someone," he said.
She watched him.
"Someone who decided that caring about a thing was sufficient reason to do it regardless of the cost," he said.
"Is that a compliment?"
"It's an observation." "It's also a compliment."
Something briefly warm moved in Naomi's expression.
"Tell me everything," she said. "From the beginning." He told her.
• • •
• • •
The café where they'd met was empty now. Tav had returned to the apartment on foot, taking the longer route — a habit when he needed to process, the motion of walking doing something useful to the thinking.
He thought about the conversation.
He had been trained to be careful about information. The discipline of intelligence work was the management of what was known and by whom and in what order, and the failure mode was
uncontrolled release — information reaching people who hadn't been assessed for what they'd do with it.
He had told Naomi Reyes everything.
He thought about why, and found the answer was not complicated: because the timing was correct and she was the correct person. Both of those assessments had run in real time during the conversation and had arrived at the same conclusion. She would do the right thing with the information. She would do it well. And the right thing needed to be done.
