CHAPTER ONE #2
"You watch people," Alistair said, "like you're cataloguing them."
"So do you."
The half-second pause before recovery was small enough to miss if you weren't paying attention.
Tav was paying attention.
"See something you like?" Alistair asked.
"You favor your right shoulder," Tav said, "despite being left-handed."
The silence that followed was brief and very precise.
Then Alistair laughed — genuine amusement, warm and unguarded, the first fully real expression he'd produced since Tav had walked through the door. "Most people lead with a name," he said. "You open with physiological observation. That's distinctive."
"You introduced yourself."
"Fair enough." He leaned back against the counter, arms crossing loosely over his chest. "So. What are we doing about the roommate situation? Because I've already committed emotionally to the left bedroom, and I make very poor decisions when displaced."
Tav picked up the coffee and drank.
It was better than expected.
"You're not touching my kitchen," he said.
A pause.
"That's your first rule?"
"Yes."
Something shifted in Alistair's expression — amusement deepening into something that looked, uncomfortably, like genuine delight.
He studied Tav with those amber eyes that observed too much and gave back too little, and then he said, softly, "I have a feeling you're going to be extremely interesting to live with. "
Tav set the mug down.
"You used my name earlier," he said. "Before I introduced myself."
Alistair went still.
Not dramatically. Not the whole-body freeze of someone caught. Just a stillness in someone who had been in continuous, calculated motion from the moment Tav had entered the apartment — an absence of movement where movement had been continuous.
"Did I?" he said.
"I haven't introduced myself."
The apartment was quiet. Outside, the city hummed its forty-storey distance below. The amber light shifted slightly as clouds moved across the horizon.
"Hm," said Alistair at last. His voice was perfectly composed. His eyes were not.
Tav watched him across the kitchen island and made a series of quick, quiet calculations.
Ablation didn't make mistakes. Which meant Alistair Keaton was one of them.
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The first night.
After the door, after the specificity of having opened it and found the person who was going to be on the other side of it, Tav conducted his standard first-night assessment of the new space: dimensions, exits, the locations of the primary observation points, the metal locks, the acoustic signature of the building.
This was automatic. He had done it in every space he'd occupied operationally since he was twentythree.
The assessment ran in the background of whatever else he was doing — in this case, unpacking the single bag that he'd brought to the apartment, not the full inventory of his possessions but was the inventory he was prepared to leave behind at three hours' notice.
The apartment was well-chosen.
This was the first observation that went beyond the operational.
Well-chosen for the cover identity — the correct neighborhood, the correct building quality, the appropriate distance from the university's various relevant points.
But also well-chosen in a more fundamental sense.
Whoever had selected it had attention to detail that went beyond the purely functional.
The kitchen was good. The windows were well-positioned.
The flat had something a person might genuinely want to live rather than simply be stationed.
He stood at the window at ten past midnight and studied the city below.
He had lived in eleven cities. He had occupied twenty-three separate spaces, ranging from a flat in which the heating was ambient and the windows were painted shut to a safe house that had good
natural light and a kitchen that worked and that he had left at four weeks, which was the shortest he'd stayed anywhere.
This was the first space that had been designed for him to occupy alongside someone else.
The wall between the bedrooms.
He thought about the person on the other side of it.
He had been provided with a profile and the profile had been consistent with the profile in several respects: the cover identity was coherent, the manner was consistent with the educational background, the physical presentation matched.
All of these things could be produced by competent training and some people never went further than that.
But the rings. The left hand. The assessment behind the warmth.
The person on the other side of the wall was not simply implementing a cover identity.
He was — and Tav arrived at this observation carefully, having established that careful observations were important when the observation concerned someone he was going to be living with — a specific person.
Not a constructed one. The construction was present, but it was the surface of something that had been there before the construction.
Tav had been in enough proximity to trained operatives to know the difference.
He stood at the window until midnight became one o'clock, and then he went to bed, and his last thought before sleep was not operational.
It was: interesting.
Very interesting indeed.
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