She stopped directly in front of them.
For about half a second, Garrett’s brain did something it hadn’t done in weeks. It went completely, uselessly blank, the specific kind of blank that comes right before a thought you’re not proud of. She noticed me.
"Daniel?"
Not him.
The half-second collapsed in on itself so fast it left a small, embarrassing dent behind.
"Yeah, hi," Daniel said, doing a passable job of sounding like this happened to him regularly.
"Sorry to just ambush you." She had a folder under one arm and the specific brisk energy of someone running slightly behind her own schedule. "You did that placement thing in the Ashcombe building last year, didn’t you? I need to get into the seminar office, and the woman on the desk won’t let me past reception without someone who actually knows which door it is."
"Room 14," Daniel said immediately. "Yeah, I can take you. Wilkins is normally still in around now."
"You’re a lifesaver."
Garrett stood there processing the full journey he’d just made, from potentially noticed by Emiliana Vane to furniture standing slightly to Daniel’s left, in roughly the time it took her to finish the sentence.
His phone buzzed.
[OPPORTUNITY DETECTED.]
I noticed he thought back at it, which achieved nothing, because the System couldn’t hear thoughts and wouldn’t have cared if it could.
[CLARIFICATION: HOST HAS NOT YET DONE ANYTHING USEFUL.]
He put the phone away.
Daniel waved him along without really asking, the way you wave along a mate who’s just standing there anyway, and Garrett fell into step because he genuinely didn’t have a reason not to.
Which put them in a specific order without either of them arranging it. Emiliana out front, moving fast enough that Daniel had to lengthen his stride to keep pace. Garrett a half-step behind both of them, close enough to hear the conversation, far enough that neither of them had to include him in it.
He watched her from there, not staring, just the ordinary noticing you do of anyone walking in front of you for two minutes. The folder shifting under her arm. Her long moisturized black hair that swept side by side at her back, with a well defined body that nobody could resist staring at. The pace she kept even through a corridor full of people who all seemed to want to slow down and look at her.
Should he say something? Introduce himself, maybe, at some natural gap in the conversation. Every version of that sentence, run forward in his head, sounded worse than the last. She already knew Daniel by name. She had no reason to know his.
[HOST HAS ENTERED THE RARE AND DANGEROUS CONDITION KNOWN AS "THINKING TOO MUCH." ]
Shut up.
[NOTED.]
Daniel dropped back half a pace and lowered his voice, the way you do when you want to say something without it being technically overheard.
"Mate. She stopped for me."
"She needed a key. You know where the key is."
"Garrett...That’s Emiliana Vane. She could’ve asked literally anyone in that corridor but she stopped in front of us."
"Because you were standing there."
"You’re missing the point."
Garrett glanced ahead. She wasn’t listening to either of them. Her phone was out again, thumb moving fast, the folder tucked tighter under her arm like she was doing several things at once out of habit rather than urgency.
Whatever conversation Daniel thought they’d all just had, she clearly hadn’t clocked it as one.
Getting close to her, apparently, wasn’t the same thing as being noticed by her. He’d managed the first part entirely by accident, walking behind a mate who happened to know where a key was kept.
She was moving fast enough by the time they reached the stairwell that Daniel had to say something about it.
"You alright? You’re power-walking."
"Family thing tonight," she said, not slowing down. "I need this sorted before I leave campus, or I’m explaining myself to my dad over dinner, and I’d genuinely rather not."
She said it the way anyone would say it. Mildly harassed, mildly amused at her own situation, nothing performed about it. Not the untouchable version of her the courtyard usually produced. Just someone trying to get one thing off a list before the next thing arrived.
Garrett filed it without deciding what to do with it, the same automatic habit he’d built up over the last few days without quite noticing he was building it.
Room 14 turned out to be down a corridor with worse lighting than the rest of the building, a strip light at the far end doing that specific half-hearted flicker that meant someone would eventually report it and nobody would ever fix it.
"Wait here a sec," Daniel said, already pushing the door open. "I’ll go grab the key from Wilkins."
The door shut behind him.
And that was it. No Daniel. No buffer. Just Garrett standing in a badly lit corridor next to the one person on campus he’d spent the better part of a week being informed, by his own phone, that he was somehow supposed to matter to.
She’d found something on her phone worth frowning at, one shoulder against the wall, weight shifted onto one foot.
Garrett looked at the noticeboard across from them instead. A poster for a society fair three weeks out of date, a lost-property notice for a blue umbrella nobody was ever going to claim. He read it with far more focus than a blue umbrella deserved.
Neither of them said anything.
He almost opened his mouth, then decided against it. The strip light flickered twice more.
It was the flicker, weirdly, that made him look back at her, some part of him checking whether she’d noticed the light doing that too.
She hadn’t. She was still on her phone.
Something moved near her shoulder.
It took him a second to place what he was looking at. A small dark shape working its way out from under the collar of her cardigan, the kind of thing you’d catch out of the corner of your eye and dismiss as a shadow if it hadn’t just moved on its own.
A spider. Probably picked up somewhere outside, the courtyard maybe, all that greenery nobody ever properly cut back.
"Don’t move."
She looked up sharply. "What?"
"There’s something on your cardigan."
She looked down before he’d finished the sentence, found it herself, and whatever composure she’d been running on for the entire morning, dropped out from under her in about half a second.
She recoiled hard enough to hit the wall behind her, one hand already batting at her own shoulder, a short, sharp sound escaping her that had nothing performed in it at all.
Garrett didn’t think about it. He reached over, brushed the spider off her cardigan, and sent it toward the skirting board where it scuttled off into whatever gap in the corridor it had come from in the first place.
For a second, neither of them said anything.
She straightened up off the wall, tugged her cardigan back into place with more force than the fabric strictly needed, breathing like she’d just come off a short sprint rather than survived a spider roughly the size of a five-pence piece.
"Did you..." She stopped. Started again. "Did you just see that?"
"Unfortunately."
She looked at him properly for the first time since Daniel had said her name at the start of the corridor. Not the polite once-over she gave the crowd that usually surrounded her, not the distracted glance she’d given him a minute ago over the top of her phone. She actually looked, like she was recalibrating something.
"That was mortifying," she muttered, mostly to herself, straightening the cardigan a second time even though it didn’t need it. "What the fuck."
Garrett looked away, giving her the two seconds she clearly wanted more than she wanted anything else from him right now.
The door opened. Daniel reappeared with the key and no idea what he’d missed.
"Sorted. Wilkins says just drop it back at reception when you’re done."
"Thanks," Emiliana said, already moving, her voice back to its usual brisk register like the last thirty seconds hadn’t happened. She didn’t look at Garrett again on her way past.
His phone buzzed once she’d turned the corner.
[OBJECTIVE PROGRESS UPDATED.]
[REQUIREMENT 1: BECOME SOMEONE EMILIANA VANE REMEMBERS.]
[STATUS: PROGRESS DETECTED.]
Garrett looked at the screen. Then at the empty corridor where she’d been standing a moment ago. Then back at the screen.
[ADDITIONAL NOTE: HOST’S METHODS REMAIN UNCONVENTIONAL.]