Page 68 of The Dangerous Dance

"Dara," I say.

"Mm."

"Thank you. For the light."

She looks at me. Her eyes do the thing they do when she's feeling something she's decided not to perform. "Always," she says.

I go.

The safehouse is twenty-five minutes from the apartment by train and another eight on foot, and I use all thirty-three minutes to finish preparing what I'm going to say, which is the true version with nothing managed out of it, which is the most frightening thing I've agreed to do in recent memory and which is saying something given the last two months.

I use the key he gave me.

He is at the kitchen table. He has been awake for long enough that the coffee he's made has already been refilled once, which I can tell from the way the cup sits. He looks up when I come through the door, and his expression does several things in rapid sequence that he doesn't manage quickly enough to hide, which tells me more than anything he could say.

Relief first. Then controlled. Then careful.

"You came back," he says.

CHAPTER 22

Liam

I know something is wrong before she says a word.

This is the thing about paying attention to someone for long enough — not surveillance attention, not the professional cataloguing of a target's patterns and tells, but the particular attention that develops when you've sat across from someone at a kitchen table for five days and watched them move through a room and listened to the specific quality of their silences. You develop a fluency. An ability to read the thing under the surface of the thing.

She comes to the compound on a Tuesday afternoon.

I wasn't expecting her. She called an hour before and said she had an update on the Brennan secondary contacts, which is a real and ongoing piece of work, and I said come through, and she came through, and she was — wrong.

Not visibly. Not in any way Conor registered when he met her at the gate, or Mackenzie would have registered if Mackenzie had been here, which she isn't. To anyone else she is exactly what she always presents as — contained, precise, carrying herself with the particular economy of someone who doesn't waste movement. She is doing the face, the controlled one that Mackenzie identified and that I've been tracking since I knew what to look for.

But I know what to look for.

She is too still in her shoulders. The stillness is effortful rather than natural, which means she's maintaining it rather than simply being it, and the difference between those two kinds of stillness is what I've been describing to myself for two months as the space between Nadia performing and Nadia existing. She's performing now, and she's performing well, and she knows I know her well enough to see it, and she is sitting across my desk with the Brennan file open and talking about secondary contact patterns with the fluency of someone who actually knows this material and is using the knowledge as cover for something else.

I let her talk for four minutes.

I watch the case.

She has it in the outer pocket of her coat, which is draped over the arm of the chair. I can see the slight weight of it from where I'm sitting, the particular way the fabric sits differently from the other side. I saw it when she came in. I have been looking at it with the peripheral attention of a man who doesn't want to see the thing he's seeing and is seeing it anyway.

"The March gap in the Brennan data suggests a third contact in the west corridor," she says, and her voice is completely steady, and her eyes are on the file, and her hand moves toward the coat with the specific casualness of someone who has rehearsed the gesture enough times to make it look unrehearsed.

"Nadia," I say.

She stops.

We look at each other.

The file is between us on the desk and the coat is on the arm of the chair and the case is in the pocket and the late afternoon light is coming through the window in the flat grey way of November that has never fully committed to being winter and is still doing the thing where it makes everything look like a held breath.

"What's in the coat," I say.

She is very still.

"Show me," I say.