Daniel didn’t let it go.
"So. Neighbour."
"Neighbour," Garrett said, because agreeing was faster than arguing.
"She needed your flat last night."
"She needed an outlet. My flat came with one."
Daniel grinned like he’d found something. "Of course it did."
Garrett checked his phone instead of answering. Not because he expected anything, because checking had turned into a reflex somewhere between the bracelet on the table and the last three days of his life going mildly, suspiciously right.
[POTENTIAL VALUE DETECTED.]
Same line as before. He’d stepped in before Daniel even got close, and the System had logged it, apparently deciding it wasn’t worth paying for.
Fine.
He put the phone away and let Daniel talk about something else until Daniel remembered he had a library book that had been overdue since second year. That bought Garrett a minute alone, which was more than he’d had since Freya walked off looking like she wanted to set something on fire.
He went in to sort out a reading list he’d been ignoring since Thursday. He was three shelves deep, holding a book he had no intention of reading, when he saw her.
She saw him at the same time.
Neither of them moved. It was the kind of pause where two people run the maths on whether the same argument is worth having twice in one day. She ran hers faster. Arms crossed, jaw set, the walk-over-rehearsed look he was starting to recognise.
"They weren’t hurting me," she said. No hello.
"In case you were building a theory. They’re on my course. Wanted me for a group thing I already said no to. Twice."
"Didn’t say they were hurting you."
"You looked like you thought they were."
"You looked uncomfortable."
Her arms dropped half an inch. That one had landed somewhere she wasn’t braced for.
"Being uncomfortable isn’t the same as being helpless."
"Fair."
She looked at him a beat too long, like fair wasn’t the reply her argument had prepared for.
"You really didn’t know I went here?"
"No."
"Two years. Same building."
"I don’t research my neighbours."
"Clearly."
She didn’t leave. That was the part he noticed, not what she said next, but that she stayed standing there instead of walking off with the last word, which was what people usually did with him.
She talked instead about the thing she’d half-broken the night before, some submission she’d rebuilt around a mistake rather than just fixing the mistake underneath it. He didn’t say much. He’d found, at some point, that she talked better when he didn’t fill the gaps.
She was stubborn. Bad at being told anything, even gently. He clocked that early and filed it away. He found it mildly annoying. Going by the look on her face when he said "fair" the second time, she found him mildly annoying back. It seemed to work regardless.
Daniel reappeared, book successfully returned, and stopped two steps short of them.
"Didn’t you two hate each other like... what, an hour ago?"
Neither answered. Freya laughed instead, short and surprised.
"I still haven’t fixed the thing," she said, checking the time and swearing under her breath at what it told her.
"What part?"
She turned the laptop towards him rather than explaining, and that was how he found out. Not from her. From the tab she hadn’t bothered closing, a reading list, a module code stamped HIST across the header, something about the Reformation half-highlighted in yellow.
He didn’t say anything about it. Filed that too.
The actual fault took ten seconds to find. She’d built a workaround for a mistake three steps back instead of fixing the mistake, the way people do when they’ve stared at one screen for six hours and stopped being able to see it properly.
"Try it again." He pointed.
"I already tried that."
"Show me what you did."
She showed him. It still took ten seconds.
"Try it again."
It worked.
She looked at the screen the way you look at a door you’ve been pushing on for an hour before someone points out it opens the other way.
"That’s it?"
"Apparently."
"You’re kidding me."
He wasn’t. He hadn’t done anything clever. He’d just been the second pair of eyes she hadn’t had.
"You’re actually useful sometimes," she said, still staring at the screen.
"Sometimes?"
That got the real laugh. Not the version from the night before.
"Are you always this quiet?"
"I’m talking right now."
"That’s not much of a defence."
He had nothing for that, and the way she looked pleased about it told him she’d clocked the fact she’d won.
Daniel drifted past with a comment about them "bickering like an old couple," earning a look from Garrett and, for the first time, a proper laugh out of Freya instead of an eye-roll. Daniel took the win and left them to it, visibly proud of himself for reasons Garrett wasn’t going to examine.
She went back to the laptop. He didn’t hover this time. Didn’t offer. Sat, answered when asked, said nothing when not. It felt almost boring, the ordinary kind of boring, the kind he was starting to think was the actual point of any of this.
She got stuck again, smaller thing. Asked. He answered. No ceremony. When she finally shut the lid and said, "Done," he said, "Good," and that seemed to cover it for both of them.
She didn’t get up straight away.
"Why do you live alone?" Not pressing, just asking.
He gave her the short version. She noticed there was a longer one underneath it and didn’t go looking for it, which he hadn’t expected from someone he’d known for approximately ninety minutes.
"You’re not as unpleasant as I thought," she said.
"High praise."
She laughed, and his phone went off in his pocket.
He nearly ignored it. Then he looked.
[GENUINE VALUE CREATED.]
[VALUE ACCUMULATION CONFIRMED.]
He read it twice, trying to isolate the one thing that had done it, before working out there wasn’t one thing. The water bottle. The charger. The laptop fix. Sitting there while she worked without making it about him.
None of it was enough on its own. All of it together, apparently, was.
She was digging through her bag for something, entirely unaware her afternoon had just paid him.
[CONTRIBUTION QUALITY: SUFFICIENT.]
[REWARD GENERATED: £10,000.]
[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: CREATE GENUINE VALUE FOR ANOTHER PERSON — COMPLETE.]
Garrett stared at the figure in disbelief.
Ten thousand pounds?
"You’re joking."
He checked the notification again, then opened his banking app.
£10,061.12.
He stared at the balance.
"You’ve got to be joking."
His eyes returned to the System notification. Ten thousand pounds. More money than he’d ever had in his account at once.
He sat there for another second, trying to make sense of it.
"Is this some infinite money glitch?"
His eyes caught the last line in the midst of his disbelief.
Complete.
Not "detected." Not "sufficient." Complete, like something had actually finished rather than just been logged and filed away for later. He’d half expected it to sit there unresolved for another three Chapters of his life, the way everything else about this System had so far.
She left not long after, pausing at the door.
"Garrett?"
"Yeah." He answered as he slid his phone into his pocket.
"See you around, I guess."
"Try not to start another argument before then."
"I wasn’t the one who started it."
"Didn’t say you were."
She shook her head, half a smile on it, and left.
Garrett looked at the phone in his hand, then at the empty space where Freya had been sitting.
For once, he wasn’t thinking about the System.
He put the phone on the side and lay back.
The ceiling lit up gold one more time before he could close his eyes.
[NEW SYSTEM CONDITION DETECTED.]