Silas came to Alistair that evening, the way he came when he had something to say.

However, he didn’t lead with it.

He sat down first and waited for Alistair to look up.

He walked up to the table while Due was working on the civic appendix and Elara was at the window, and he sat down across from Alistair with the directness of a man who had learned that when he wanted to say something, he should say it before the moment passed.

"Alistair."

Due was quiet for a moment, then continued as Alistair looked at him:

"When we leave the Oasis of Grain, what does it cost me?"

Hearing this, Alistair set down what he had been reading.

He didn’t ask Silas to clarify. Silas hadn’t come to the table for that. He had come for an answer.

"Tell me what you are asking," said Alistair.

Silas looked at his hands. They were steady. He had decided on the exact words that afternoon.

"Every person who knows me costs the Characteristic. The cost is not a line, it is cumulative. The more people in the world who know the shape of who I am, the less space there is for Absence to exist around me. I have been doing the math on this since the day I joined."

"I know," Alistair replied quietly.

"When we leave the Oasis of Grain and start operating at a continental scale, the number of people who will know me grows faster than I can compensate for. At some point, I don’t know how far out, but at some point, the Absence is going to be gone entirely. I will still have my body, my sword, and my training. Regardless, the Characteristic that made me Silhouette will not be there anymore."

Alistair was quiet.

’He is not afraid. He is not looking for reassurance. He is asking the question because he wants to know the answer, and he wants me to say it out loud so it is in the room with us.’

"Is that a problem?" Alistair asked.

Silas was quiet for a long time.

"I don’t know yet. It was, once. For years, it was the only thing keeping me alive. When I was in that building three years ago, the Characteristic was the difference between being a thing someone could use and being a thing someone could not even find. I learned to love it because it was the only thing that worked in a place where everything else had failed."

"And now?"

"Now, I have other things keeping me alive."

Silas looked toward the window where Elara was standing, then toward the far side of the room where Due was working, then back at Alistair.

"The three of you are not a Characteristic. You do not operate the way one operates. Following that, you are keeping me alive in a way the Characteristic never did, because the Characteristic kept me alive by keeping me separate, and you are keeping me alive by not keeping me separate."

Alistair didn’t speak. He let him finish.

"I am trying to decide whether I am holding onto the Characteristic because it is an asset, or because I am afraid of losing the only tool that worked in a place where everything else had failed. I cannot tell the difference from inside the question. That is why I am asking you."

Alistair was a bit speechless, as he hadn’t expected this.

"When did it start working to have other things?" he asked.

Silas looked at him.

"The night I walked into the camp, and you gave me the real answer instead of the pitch."

A pause.

"I didn’t expect the real answer. I had been rehearsing responses to the pitch in my head for the entire walk-in. I had about six different ways to turn down the pitch depending on how it was delivered. Regardless, you didn’t deliver the pitch. You told me the truth, and by the time I realized I was going to say yes, I had already said it."

Alistair sat with that.

He thought about that night. He remembered the cold, and Silas stepping out of perception at the edge of the camp.

He hadn’t planned what to say. He had simply said the true thing because it was late, he was tired, and the pitch was not going to work on a man like Silas anyway.

"Whatever you decide about the Characteristic," Alistair said, "that is yours to decide. Sun Harvest does not need you invisible. It needs you."

Silas was very still.

"The rest is math," Alistair continued. "Math can wait. You do not have to decide what to do about the Absence tonight, or next week, or before the ritual. You have as long as you need. The only thing I am asking is that when you decide, you tell me, so I can build around whatever you decide."

Silas nodded once.

He didn’t say anything for a moment.

When he did, his voice was the voice of a man who had been carrying something heavy and had just been told he was allowed to set it down for a while.

"Thank you."

"You are welcome."

Silas stood up.

He walked toward the door, then stopped halfway, the way he always stopped when he had one more thing to say and had not decided whether to say it.

He turned back. Not all the way, just a quarter turn.

"For what it is worth," he said, "I think the real answer was the pitch."

Alistair raised a brow.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that night, the real answer was the pitch. You didn’t mean to deliver the pitch. However, the real answer was the pitch. No version of Sun Harvest wants people for what they can do. There is only the version that wants people for who they are, and the ones who can do useful things come along as a side effect. That is the pitch. That is always the pitch. You just didn’t know you were saying it at the time, because you had not said it in words to anyone yet."

He turned back toward the door and kept walking.

The door closed quietly behind him.

Alistair sat at the table for a long time afterward.

He was speechless.

Due didn’t look up from the civic appendix. Elara didn’t turn from the window. Neither of them had been eavesdropping. They had been giving Alistair and Silas the room, and now they were giving Alistair the room to sit with what Silas had said.

Eventually, very quietly, to no one at all, Alistair said, "Yeah."

It was not an answer to anyone.

It was the sound a man makes when he hears himself described accurately for the first time, and has no idea what to do with it.

He reached for the cup of tea in front of him. It had gone cold. He drank it anyway, because the alternative was getting up, and getting up meant the thing Silas had said would come with him into the rest of the night.

Across the room, Due’s pen kept moving. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

The Oasis of Grain was quiet outside. The kind of quiet that only existed for a few weeks more, before leaving.

’He already decided,’ Alistair thought. ’He just hasn’t told me yet.’

His grip tightened on the cup.