Daniel came back out with the key held up like a trophy, already talking, and stopped a step short of the door when he clocked something in Garrett’s face that hadn’t been there before.
"What happened while I was gone?"
"Nothing."
"You look like you’ve seen a ghost."
"I haven’t."
Daniel narrowed his eyes at him the way he did whenever he suspected he was being managed, which was often, and usually correctly.
Garrett didn’t explain the spider. Not because there was some grand secret buried in it — just that saying the words she panicked because of a spider and I got it off her cardigan out loud made the whole thing sound both smaller and somehow more mortifying than it had felt at the time.
"She looked weird when she left," Daniel said, locking the office door behind them.
"Flustered. Emiliana Vane doesn’t do flustered."
"Maybe she was in a rush."
"Maybe." Daniel clearly didn’t believe that for a second.
[HOST IS CURRENTLY WITHHOLDING INFORMATION.]
I didn’t lie, Garrett thought back.
They cut across the quad on the way back, Daniel still circling the subject like a dog that knew exactly where the treat was hidden and hadn’t yet decided whether digging was worth the effort.
"You’re being weird."
"I’m always weird."
"Weirder than usual, more like. Specific-weird. Something-happened-weird."
"Give it a rest, Daniel."
"Really?"
Garrett didn’t answer that one, mostly because it was accurate, and he’d learned there wasn’t a version of denying it that made him sound less guilty than just staying quiet did.
Someone stepped into their path.
Garrett recognised him before Daniel said anything — one of the two names that had been sitting in his head since the courtyard, the confident one, the one who’d never once had to check whether a room wanted him in it.
Raymond Carter didn’t look at Daniel at all.
"You. Garrett, right?"
Garrett didn’t answer straight away, mostly because the fact that Raymond Carter knew his name at all was, on its own, the first uncomfortable part of this conversation.
"Yeah."
"Thought so." Raymond’s tone stayed pleasant, which was somehow worse than if it hadn’t. "Saw you earlier. Down by Wilkins’ office."
Garrett said nothing.
"You and Emiliana. Alone. For a bit longer than it takes to grab a key, from what I saw." He let that sit a second. "And she left looking like something had actually happened to her. Which is interesting, because nothing usually does."
"I’m just telling you now." Raymond’s voice hadn’t sharpened, exactly — it had just stopped bothering to sound friendly. "Don’t get ideas."
"Ideas about what?"
"You know exactly what."
Garrett did, in fact, know exactly what. That was the uncomfortable part underneath the uncomfortable part. His first reaction wasn’t anger. It was closer to disbelief — the specific kind that comes from being warned off something you’d never seriously believed was on the table in the first place.
"You’re giving me quite a lot of credit."
Raymond didn’t laugh.
"Guys like you don’t get involved with people like her." He said it flatly, like a fact rather than an insult, which made it land harder than if he’d shouted it. "Know your place. Stay in your lane."
Garrett didn’t retaliate. There wasn’t much to retaliate with — the sentence had gone straight for the exact thing he’d already been telling himself since the courtyard, and hearing someone else say it out loud didn’t make it feel more wrong. If anything it felt uncomfortably confirmatory.
He said nothing. That, apparently, was answer enough for Raymond.
Daniel had gone very quiet next to him, the kind of quiet that meant several things were assembling themselves rapidly behind his eyes. He looked at Garrett. Then at Raymond. Then back at Garrett, slower this time, like he was rereading a sentence he’d skimmed the first time round.
"I’m not going to tell you twice," Raymond said, and walked off without waiting to see whether that landed the way he wanted it to.
The second he was out of earshot, Daniel rounded on him.
"What the hell happened?"
"A spider."
Daniel blinked. "A what?"
"There was a spider on her cardigan. I got it off. That’s it."
Daniel stared at him for a long moment, visibly recalibrating, then let out a short disbelieving laugh that had almost no humour in it yet. "You’re telling me Raymond Carter just threatened you over a spider."
"Apparently."
"That’s—" Daniel pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead. "That’s the funniest and most terrifying thing I’ve heard all week."
It took him another few seconds to get past the funny part. Once he did, something more serious settled into his face.
"He wouldn’t bother warning you off if he actually thought you were nothing, Garrett."
Garrett didn’t have anything to say to that either.
He thought about it the rest of the walk home, turning Raymond’s exact wording over more than he wanted to admit — know your place, stay in your lane, waiting for it to land the way it was clearly supposed to.
It didn’t, quite. He kept expecting the old, familiar shrink — the one that had shown up in the courtyard the first time he’d seen the whole hierarchy laid out, Brian’s car, Raymond’s certainty, his own place somewhere well below all of it. Instead there was just a small, unfamiliar itch of a thought, refusing to leave him alone.
If someone like Raymond Carter felt the need to warn him off after one accidental five minutes in a corridor, then either Raymond had badly misjudged the situation, or Garrett had.
He wasn’t sure yet which one bothered him more.
Not confidence. He wasn’t about to start acting like he belonged in that queue. Just something quieter and more stubborn than confidence — the specific itch of not understanding a problem as well as he’d assumed he did.
Chime.
[NEW SOCIAL VARIABLE DETECTED.]
He looked at it.
[RIVAL IDENTIFIED: RAYMOND CARTER. ]
[THREAT LEVEL: MODERATE.]
"That’s reassuring."
[IT WAS NOT INTENDED TO BE. ]
[ADDITIONAL NOTE: HOST HAS SUCCESSFULLY ATTRACTED THE ATTENTION OF A COMPETITOR WITHOUT INTENDING TO.]
Garrett stared at the screen for a moment.
"I hate this objective."
[OBJECTIVE REMAINS ACTIVE.]