Page 167 of Compromised
"Yes."
"Together."
"They'll want us separate," Tav said. "Standard procedure for related witnesses."
"I know." He met Tav's gaze. "We'll be in the same building."
Tav found his face.
"Yes," he said.
The car moved north.
Outside the windows the city's density giving way to farmland, the flat winter geometry of fields that had been harvested and were now waiting. The sky was lighter here than in the city, a broader expanse of the cool grey of winter mornings, and the road ahead was clear and quiet.
"It's done," Alistair said.
"Yes."
"Actually done."
"Yes." "The inquiry is next. And Cain will resurface — men like him always do. And Phase Two, whatever that is."
"I know." He fixed on the road. "But the archive is out. Elias's name is public. Lucien is alive and accounted for. And we—" He stopped.
"We?" Tav said.
Alistair studied him with the warm, steady, honest expression.
"We chose," he said. "Not Ablation, not the Protocol. We chose." He held the look. "That's done too.
That can't be undone either."
The car moved through the morning.
Tav watched the road ahead and thought about what was true.
The archive: true. Elias: named. Lucien: alive. The choice they'd made in a borrowed flat and a staircase and an ambulance: true and true and true.
"Yes," he said. "That's done."
• • •
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
The safe house was on the coast.
Lucien had not exaggerated its qualities: it was remote and small and built with the unpretentious comfort of a place that had been made for use rather than presentation. Stone walls, low ceilings, a kitchen the size of a sensible decision. The windows faced the sea on three sides, which meant that the sound of it was continuous — not intrusive, present. The ambient sound of something that had been happening long before the people in the building arrived and would continue long after.
Tav stood at the window.
He was aware of several things simultaneously: the wound in his shoulder, which had been downgraded from actively painful to a sustained negotiation; the reflecting light off the water, which was grey and flat and the cold color of November at this latitude; and Alistair, behind him in the kitchen, making the sounds of a person conducting an inventory of available supplies with the thought that food was the immediate priority.
He was also aware — and had been aware since the ambulance, since the words said in the ambulance's clinical white interior — of what had shifted.
Not shifted. Confirmed.
What had been building since a burned-butter morning in an apartment that neither of them had belonged to had been confirmed in a vehicle moving north through winter countryside, and the confirmation was not surprising and not manageable. It simply was. He had said it out loud and it had been received and returned, and the space that had held the unsaid thing was now occupied by something that required a different kind of attention.
