The tertiary position was a apartment on the fourth floor of a building that had been selected eight weeks ago for reasons that were entirely practical: two exits, no direct sightlines from adjacent buildings, a network access point that was registered to a defunct logistics company and had never been flagged in any surveillance architecture Tal had been able to identify. It smelled like paint and disuse, the particular staleness of a space that had been prepared for occupation and then waited, the way safe houses waited, with the patient indifference of places that had no investment in whether the people who came to them stayed or left.
They arrived in two groups, twelve minutes apart, the way they always arrived at new positions, staggered and from different approaches, the way you arrived when the situation required that the building not be seen receiving a group of people all at once.
Kael arrived with Sela.
Aiden arrived with Tal.
