The drive was on the table.
It had been there since they came back, sitting in the center of the map between the three circles and the Davan research and the accumulated weeks of everything Site B had built, and nobody had moved it. Not because they were being ceremonial about it. Just because it had landed there and the work had organized itself around it and now it was part of the furniture of the room the way important things became part of the furniture of rooms.
Tal had copied the files to three separate encrypted locations before dawn.
The drive itself was just a drive now.
But nobody moved it.
* * *
The morning after was quiet in the way that mornings after difficult things were quiet: not peaceful, not resolved, just emptied of the specific tension that had been building for weeks and not yet refilled with whatever came next.
