CHAPTER SEVEN
— NAOMI —
Naomi arrived with coffee and the unerring instinct as she had developed a sixth sense for unresolved tension.
She took one look at the two of them standing in the hallway outside Alistair's bedroom — at the space between them, at the precise inch of distance that had replaced whatever had been happening when she knocked — and said: "Oh, this is significantly worse than I imagined."
Alistair leaned against the doorframe with practiced ease. "You imagined things?"
"Concerning things." She stepped past him into the apartment with the comfortable authority and decided she belonged there. "And apparently I was conservative."
Tav walked back to the living room and Naomi followed, dropping her bag on the kitchen island and surveying the apartment with the bright attention she brought to everything.
"You two look like you either fought or did something considerably more interesting," she observed, "and the fact that neither of you is explaining which makes it considerably more interesting."
"We were having a conversation," Alistair said.
"In a bedroom."
"Conversations happen in bedrooms."
"Not usually at that temperature."
Tav sat on the arm of the couch and Naomi pointed at him immediately.
"You especially. You look like you're deciding something."
"I often look like that."
"You look like you're deciding it about him." She pointed now at Alistair, who was making coffee with the focused efficiency needing something to do with his hands. "Which is new."
"It's not—"
"I've been watching you not watch each other for weeks," Naomi said pleasantly, "and now you're watching each other in a completely different way, so forgive me if I note the change."
Alistair turned with two mugs and the expression of someone who had decided to embrace the situation rather than manage it. "She always like this?"
"Yes," Tav said.
"I find it useful."
"You would."
Naomi accepted the coffee and sat cross-legged on the couch with the proprietorial comfort she considered herself already owed an explanation. She looked between them with the methodical interest of someone assembling information.
"Campus thinks you hate each other," she said.
"Do they," Tav said.
"Based on available evidence, yes. But the available evidence didn't include." She waved her coffee mug vaguely at the air between them. "This. Whatever this is."
"There isn't a this," Alistair said.
"There's absolutely a this. You're both doing it right now. The mutual surveillance thing." She lowered her voice in a mock-confidential tone. "Divorced assassin energy."
The silence that followed was a deep type of silence — not the silence of confusion but the silence of recognition, its own variety of problem.
Naomi's eyes went slightly wider.
"...That was weirder than anticipated," she said slowly.
"She said divorced assassins," Alistair noted to the room at large, with the tone of someone registering an inconvenient truth. "We should discuss how she got there."
"I've been watching the two of you do tactically aware social theatre for weeks. The divorced part is metaphorical." Naomi pointed at Tav again. "You know where he is at all times, don't you."
"No."
"You do. You always turn when he enters rooms before looking toward the door."
"That's—"
"You track his movements in the hallway. You know his morning schedule." She tilted her head.
"How?"
Tav, exercising considerable restraint, said: "I'm observant."
Naomi stared at him.
Then slowly turned to Alistair.
"Is he aware," she said, "that 'I'm observant' is the least ambiguous thing he's said since I met him?"
Alistair studied Tav with an expression that was purely, genuinely delighted.
"Apparently not," he said.
Tav was aware that he had made some kind of error. The nature of it was becoming clearer.
"I pay attention to people in my immediate environment," he said.
"You pay attention to him specifically," Naomi said firmly. "In ways that have nothing to do with proximity and everything to do with—" She made a gesture that was expressive rather than precise.
"Interest," Alistair supplied.
Tav looked at him.
Alistair looked back with the warm, sharp, waiting expression of someone who had been working toward exactly this corner of the conversation and was prepared to enjoy having arrived at it.
"Impossible," Tav said.
"And yet," Alistair said softly. "Here we are."
Naomi collected her bag.
"I am leaving," she announced, "because whatever this is has moved past my capacity for emotional witnessing. Sort it out. Both of you. With actual words, preferably." At the door she paused. "And I say that with genuine affection and moderate terror."
The apartment door clicked behind her.
Silence.
A different type silence from before — lighter, in the way of things that had been named and therefore existed less dangerously as unnamed things. Tav watched the middle distance and considered the situation with the methodical honesty that was his most reliable tool.
"She's perceptive," Alistair said.
"Yes."
"Unsettlingly so."
"Usually."
Alistair crossed the apartment and stopped a few feet away. He wasn't performing now — none of the constructed warmth, none of the bright surface. Just looking at Tav with the honest attention and decided to stop managing the distance.
"You know where I am," he said. "Not because you're operationally aware of your environment.
Because you track me specifically."
"That's surveillance, not—"
"It's not surveillance." Alistair's voice was quiet. "Surveillance is professional. What you do is."
He considered. "Personal."
The word landed somewhere it didn't have a designated place.
Then Tav's phone vibrated.
They both looked at it.
Not from surprise, but the same way soldiers look at ordnance — with recognition.
SURVEILLANCE
WINDOW
MOVED.
CONFIRM
NO
THIRD-PARTY
INTERFERENCE.
Alistair read the message over his shoulder. Said nothing.
Tav found his face carefully. "You went still when I said the Dean's schedule changed."
"Did I."
"Yes."
Another silence. This one with edges.
"Alistair," Tav said. "Why were you assigned to Voss?"
The name detonated quietly between them, and Alistair studied him with something new in his expression: not deflection, not performance. The thing underneath both of those, briefly visible.
"You first," he said.
· · ·
· · ·
The first argument happened at six weeks.
Not a significant argument. Not the kind that produced lasting damage or redrew the apartment's social map. The small kind — the kind that revealed the shape of things that had been building below the surface.
It started with the phone.
Tav had been reading in the kitchen when Alistair came in from the bedroom he had been awake for a while thinking about something. He stood in the kitchen doorway, looking at Tav.
"You checked my phone," he said.
Tav set down the book. "Yes."
"Without asking me."
"Your phone was on the table. The screen activated when I walked past. The notification visible contained operational information relevant to the current assignment." He kept his voice even. "I read it."
"You read it."
"Yes."
Alistair looked at him. His expression was doing several things simultaneously: processing what had been read, assessing the implications, and running a separate assessment of Tav that had nothing to do with the phone.
"What did it say?" he asked.
"That Ablation has raised the monitoring frequency on this apartment. Twice-weekly data pulls have become daily." "You've known this for at least two days."
A pause.
"Yes," Alistair said.
"You didn't tell me."
"I was—" He stopped.
"You were deciding what to do with the information before sharing it," Tav said. "Yes. I understand the impulse." He turned to Alistair steadily. "It's the wrong one."
Alistair crossed to the island. He sat on the stool with as someone accepting a conversation they'd been avoiding.
"I wasn't sure how you'd respond," he said.
"To daily monitoring."
"To the confirmation that Cain is actively escalating." He fixed on the table. "I've been watching you for six weeks and I have a reasonable understanding of how you process information. You process it by making decisions. I wasn't ready for you to make decisions about this yet."
Tav held his gaze.
"You were protecting me from information," he said.
"I was managing the timing of the information."
"In service of protecting me from my own response."
Alistair held his gaze. "Yes."
"That's not your call," Tav said.
"I know."
"If you make decisions about what I know and when I know it, I can't make accurate assessments. My assessments become based on a curated picture of the situation." "Which means you're not protecting me. You're compromising my ability to protect us."
Alistair was quiet.
"Yes," he said. "You're right."
"I'm not saying this to win an argument," Tav said.
"I'm saying it because we're in a situation where accurate information is the only thing we have that's actually ours.
Everything else — the apartment, the assignment, the monitoring — is managed by external parties.
But what we know, what we tell each other—" "That has to be the one thing that's clean. "
Alistair watched him.
Something in his expression shifted. Not capitulation — recognition. The look of someone who had been told something accurate about themselves and was deciding to receive it.
"Yes," he said. "Okay."
"All of it," Tav said. "Whatever you know that's relevant, I need to know it at the same time you do."
"Even if you're going to do something I'm not sure about with it."
"Especially then." "Because I'm going to do something with it regardless. The question is whether I'm doing it with complete information or not."
Alistair looked at his hands on the table.
"I know about Lucien," he said.
The kitchen went very still.
"Not everything," Alistair said quickly. "Not — I don't have a way to contact him. I've been trying. But I know he's alive." He looked up. "I've known for four weeks."
Tav held this.
"Four weeks," he said.
"Yes."
"Since week two."
"Since week two." His voice was even. "I found a trace in the Ablation operational network. A monitoring ghost — someone who'd been passively accessing real-time data from the apartment's surveillance feed without being authorized to do so. Someone who wasn't Cain."
"Lucien was watching the surveillance feed."
"I believe so. He — if he knew about the placement, he'd want to know I was safe. He'd find a way to watch." "I've been trying to send a response through the same access point. Letting him know I know he's there."
"Without telling me."
"Without telling you." He held the look. "I'm sorry."
Tav was quiet.
Not processing — he was past the processing.
He had already run the assessment: Alistair had held this for four weeks out of a genuine desire to protect both the approach and Tav from the weight of it.
It was the wrong choice, made for the right reasons, a category he understood because he had made it himself.
"Next time," Tav said.
"Yes."
"When you know something, I know it."
"Yes." "And I need the same from you."
Tav looked at him.
"What do you know that you haven't told me?" Alistair said.
"The surveillance vehicle that's been on the west approach for the last three days isn't Ablation," Tav said. "The technical signature is different. Someone else has eyes on this building."
Alistair found his face.
"How long have you known?"
"Three days."
Alistair's expression held. Then, very slightly, something in it moved toward something that was almost, in different circumstances, a laugh.
"Three days," he said.
"I was assessing the approach."
"Of course you were."
"I didn't want to—" Tav stopped.
"Worry me," Alistair said. "Yes. I see." He held his gaze. "We're both terrible at this."
"We're both trained for contexts where information was a resource to manage rather than to share,"
Tav said.
"Yes." He watched the table. "Same training, different houses."
"Yes."
They sat with the parallel failings.
"The surveillance vehicle," Alistair said.
"It's been there three days. Fixed position, consistent crew rotation, no visible connection to Cain's network architecture." "Someone who knew about the placement before Ablation did."
"Or who knows about the placement because they built it," Alistair said.
Tav studied him.
"Phase Two," Alistair said quietly. "Whatever comes next."
The kitchen was quiet.
"From now on," Tav said.
"From now on," Alistair agreed.
They looked at each other across the kitchen island — the two of them, the one thing between them that was genuinely theirs.
"Tea?" Alistair said.
"Yes," Tav said.
· · ·