This is a familiar pattern, too. Carver shifts to check the corners while Vander works, ready to defend if they’re attacked. You can’t ever let your guard down, not for a second, no matter how safe it seems. If you let your guard down, then you deserve what happens when the enemy comes.

He snorts at that.

“It’s a trap,” he explains, because around here these things apparently need to be spelled out. And that sets his teeth on edge, all these things Carver knows as fundamental truths of the universe but that everyone else gives him strange looks for saying out loud. Like he’s so goddamn unreasonable for wanting to brace for what’s coming. “All of this shit can be taken away.”