Page 131 of Compromised
Alistair glanced. "I see it. Not one of ours." "Not moving."
"Surveillance, not strike. They're watching for us to arrive."
"We've arrived."
"They haven't identified the rooftop access." Tav fixed on the building's face — the access hatch on the eastern wall, visible from the street only at a single angle that the surveillance vehicle's position didn't cover. "We have a window."
Alistair watched him.
In the grey evening light, with the city spread below them and the weight of everything they'd decided visible in the particular expression — not fear, not uncertainty, but the gravity of someone who understood what they were about to do and had arrived at it honestly — he looked entirely like himself. The layers were still there: the warmth and the sharpness and the careful depth. But they'd stopped being management and become simply who he was.
"Ready?" he asked.
Tav considered the question seriously.
He had been ready for things before. He had been ready for missions and objectives and the clinical execution of plans that he'd built alone in empty apartments before he'd understood what empty meant. He had been ready with the cold professional attitude that he had nothing to lose.
This was different.
This was the readiness of someone with something to protect, moving toward a thing that would change everything, choosing it with full knowledge of the cost.
"Yes," he said.
They moved.
The rooftop was accessed through the service hatch on the east face — a maintenance route used by the building's HVAC contractors and unmapped in any accessible building registry. Tav went first.
The hatch opened without resistance, the seal compromised by years of irregular use, and then they were up and through and on the roof with the city spread in everydirection and the wind coming off the river two kilometers north with the cold of water in winter.
The network hub was where Lucien had specified: a utility enclosure near the rooftop's north edge, housing the building's communications infrastructure, its access panel unlocked by the override code that had required three weeks of Lucien's preparation to obtain.
Tav opened the panel.
The hub inside was standard commercial infrastructure — nothing unusual, nothing that would draw attention. The anonymous hardware that kept a city running without anyone thinking about it. The upload interface was the small black socket beside the secondary routing unit, exactly as Lucien had described.
Alistair stood at Tav's side.
The drive now in Tav's hand.
Five years of a man's grief and purpose, compressed into a small flat rectangle of matte black.
"For Elias," Alistair said quietly.
"For Elias," Tav said.
He pressed the drive to the port.
The interface registered the connection. A single LED shifted from amber to green.
UPLOAD INITIATED. COMPLETION TIME: 04:00.
The countdown began.
Below them, the city continued its ordinary business. Traffic moved in the amber-lit streets. People walked between buildings, hunched against the cold. Somewhere in the network of servers that connected this building to eighteen others across six countries, data began moving — patient, unstoppable, the digital equivalent of a stone released from a height.
Tav watched the countdown.
Then at Alistair.
