"I heard that." Jason's fearless when he meets Daryl's eyes, not out of any well-placed confidence but because he's made such an art of burning away any emotion that isn't frustration and fury away, leaving it to sizzle off him like rain on a desert street. He scorches fear out like the inside of an oven.

And he doesn't care, honestly. The idea that Rick and Daryl could kill him here doesn't fill him with any mortal dread. Death is something that only frightens the animal part of him that keeps him breathing, that yearns for food when it's hungry and sleep when it's tired, but he doesn't have a tight-knit enough philosophy to hold death in any sort of existential importance.

"You've done what, two Games? I grew up watching these and have done a decade working them. Pardon me if I trust my sense of strategy more than I trust yours," he says, and his sneer deepens. "Now, are you going to do as I say and get out, or am I going to have to call security on you?"

He adjusts his glasses and goes back to his work.