Her Watchman

It was her mouth that made him want her. Her slack lips, plump like her name. Cherry. Open a fraction so he could see the tips of her teeth, catching the light like glass chips in the damp black of her mouth. Maybe it was that name of hers. Layla Cherry. Lewd on his tongue whenever he whispered it, alone with her on the night shift. Lay-la, who lay with him all day and all night, his sleeping beauty. He, Edgar, her Watchman.

He traced his fingertips through the air above her, the length of her leg from toe-tip to hip bone, his bitten-nail touch kept at bay by the anti-tampering sensors. Damn things. He sneered at the row of red eyes in the raised sides of the bed, visualised the beams of their gazes, criss-crossed over her body like the webbing of jealous spiders. At first, he’d planned to steal one of the keycards issued to her doctors, but he’d learned in time that they were fingerprint sensitive. If he’d tried to use one, the spider would’ve known him for an imposter and raised the alarm.

He popped an icy spearmint in his mouth, crushing it between his molars, and smiled. No matter, though; the device was finished now. He could feel it in his pocket, pressed tight to his leg by the fit of his jeans. The sensors would become irrelevant. All he needed was to wait. Until no one was around to see, until the darker depths of his night shift. Tonight.

“Soon, sweet thing,” he said, leaning as low as the spider would allow and breathing his promise, kiss-like, to Layla’s lips. He took a precious second to watch her eyes shift toward him behind the shrouds of their lids, something hot flaring in his chest. Hope. Hope that she felt him there with her.

Still burning, he turned to take up his post at her monitors. He pulled up her analytics, running familiar eyes over the unspooling lines and fluttering bars. All normal. Calling up a menu, he triggered a round of neuromuscular electrical stimulation, raising eager eyes to watch the muscles begin to flutter beneath Layla’s skin. Good Girl. After so many slumbering years, it was a miracle for his precious girl that he’d found her. That he cared for her now. He was keeping her strong.

Casting a wary glance through the glass walls at the other staff manning nearby units, he tapped out a complicated password to his backdoor hack into the system, and opened a window onto Layla’s live dream feed.

“Hmmm,” he said, settling in to watch, “I like this one.”

Layla lay on her back in a poppy field, dressed in a filmy white dress, skimming her arms through the flowers like wings, and sending petals swirling through the air above her. He synced his wireless headphones, catching the edge of her crystalline laugh as the petals drifted down to land on her, gathering in the folds of her dress and in her hair. Strange. When he’d programmed this scenario, it had been a wildflower meadow. A petal settled on Layla’s mouth, and she blew it skyward again. Edgar pressed his palms hard into his thighs. Savouring the sight of her, he called up the controls for her bed’s medication dispensary.

He didn’t have sanctioned access, of course, but he’d spoofed the system into believing his passkeys corresponded to the identity of a Dr who’d retired the previous year. Someone, someday, would notice, but he’d have dissolved into a new identity by then. Such talent. Wasted in a place like this, but he’d long ago been blacklisted from any line of work that might pay more attention to his technical skills, or where he might have acquired them. Here he was a night nurse, and nothing more, as far as anyone knew. He smiled to himself, invisible in the shadows.

He tapped out a string of commands and looked over the screen at Layla’s bed as her intravenous lines came alive. He watched the liquid make its viscous progress down the tube into her arm. Saw the muscles in her thighs tighten as it reached her blood, her toes flexing the slightest fraction, her palms pressing the tiniest bit into the bed.

Someone who didn’t know her as well as he did would miss these, the infinitesimal signs of fear igniting as chemistry caught her up in its grip. Had missed them, in fact. The chemical wasn’t designed to create this effect. It was only supposed to stimulate Layla’s amygdala for neuroimaging tests.

He’d noticed, though, watching with greedy fascination from his post. The rising sounds of panic were for his ears alone, as his secret window on her dreams lay open and hidden at the edge of his screen. He remembered the prickling sweat on the back of his neck as he’d listened to her screams while the doctors worked on, unknowing. Remembered how his heart had hammered on the inside of his chest as if it would escape.

He returned his attention to the dream feed. The falling petals were turning black. Layla’s swaying arms had stilled as she watched them, the darkness spreading like spilled ink. Above her, the sky thickened, a thunderhead rolling in to hide the sun. Silent green lightning flickered through it, followed seconds later by the rumbling of a sky god turning over in its sleep. Close in his ears, Edgar could hear Layla’s rapid panting. To this delicious soundtrack, he pulled out his device, laying it on the wireless connection point.

A scream ripped through his headphones, and he closed his eyes, a smile taking hold of his mouth. When he opened them, the pupils wide and black, he pulled up a new window to work on his avatar.

The small, three-dimensional image of himself revolved on the screen. He studied it. The shading of his close-cropped hair had taken the longest. He’d darkened the colour of his eyes, having always hated the limpidness of their true blue, and straightened the gap in front teeth. He frowned. More muscle was needed on the torso. He tapped out some code, then considered the change. Better. He’d kept his 6ft height, but removed the jagged scar across his lower jaw, too suspicious.

The real, pale eyes flickered up to the real Layla. He shrugged, then changed the avatar’s clothes from the jeans and t-shirt he’d worn when scanning himself to a black suit and shirt. He completed the look with a skinny black tie and shiny black leather shoes. He grinned, and with a swift clatter of his broad fingers over the keys, added a dashing silver tie pin. He watched the avatar revolve another full 360, then nodded.

It was good.

He switched his attention back to Layla’s dream, where Layla was falling like a stone through the air, and kicked his feet up on his desk. He leaned back in his chair, enjoying the show and letting his thoughts blunder forward to what would happen that night. When he entered her dreams, when he met her, when he saved her from a nightmare of his own creation. How grateful she would be. How she might show it. How that might feel.

---

Darkness never fell on the coma ward; there was no need for it in a world of endless sleepers. There was the steady greenish glow of the plasma lights in the ceiling of the corridor that ran like a spine down the wing, the units branching off like ribs. The stark blue-white glare of monitor screens. The cruel red of the watchful eyes in each patient’s bed.

The patients themselves never minded, never stirred, but it made the staff sluggish and irritable as Second Shift deepened into the night. All save Edgar, who, bloodshot though his eyes became, found himself smiling at nothing as the seconds dribbled away toward his moment. Layla’s patrons paid more than the others. Her watch was twenty-four hours, not the cut-price midnight shut off most people got. He smiled. His Cherrybomb was special, worth the extra mile.

11.30 pm and Second Shift were watching the clocks, glancing around for people higher up the food chain, wondering if anyone would notice if they cut out early. The guy on the unit across from Layla’s poked his head through one side of the glass doors. Edgar popped out an earbud.

“Hey, uh… I… my kids are—”

“I won’t tell if you won’t,” Edgar said, smiling more at the groaning whimpers of fear shivering through his remaining earbud than at the companionship of favours. If only this idiot, chatting Edgar up, had known. Edgar’s insides turned over at the joke of it.

“You’re the best, mate. Bad luck, you, eh? Getting the posh one with the full cover.”

“Yeah,” Edgar barely remembered in time to turn his smile into a grimace to match his words, “bad luck me.”

The guy withdrew his head, grabbed his things and slipped off, flinging Edgar a cheerful salute on the way.

He was alone with her, at last. Pulling up the specs for his device, he went over them digit-by-digit one last time. Nothing amiss, not a single piece of code out of place or incorrect. Everything perfect. He rubbed sweating palms on his jeans, then jerked to his feet, incapable of staying still a second longer, and paced over to Layla’s bed. He watched her, the rise and fall of her chest, the lidded flutter of her dreaming eyes. His own eyes consumed every inch of her face, the black lashes stark against her cheeks, the ring of tiny nodes that circled her forehead and disappeared into the sheet of red hair laid out on the pillow.

The human brain is so fond of self-deception, of creating a preferable inner vision of ourselves. The line of our waist, the texture of our skin. But he’d seen how Layla displayed herself in the dream. She knew herself. His hands tightened on thin air as he thought it, as if they already held her. Because that was what made her special; that she appeared as she was, without deception. He knew that to touch her in the dream would be to feel her as truly as if he were to defy the sensors and… He found himself drifting, leaning down as if she’d reached out to take him by the back of his neck. He pulled himself upright. Patience. Delicious anticipation. Between her self-knowledge and his technology, he would know her. Soon.

He ran his fingers along the bed’s lower edge, searching by feel for the button he wanted. He found it, tracing the round shape with a fingertip as he watched the sleeping woman. He pressed it and returned to his post, standing behind his chair. All three of his screens had filled with a render of Layla’s body; a detailed live three-dimensional scan of what lay beneath her skin. Her bones like white shadows, the flickering rainbow colours of her brain activity, the nested shapes of her organs, all in burgundy and pink. He fixed his eyes on her heart, beating its steady two-part rhythm inside her, and wondered if that heart would love him when they met. He returned to the bed and shut off the scan, glancing at the clock and startling.

It was time.

He stuck his head into the corridor and checked for signs of life. No one was left on the ward but the half-alive. His ears rang with the silent weight of it, and he shut the door on them, turning back to his monitors. He reached into his pocket for the nodes, adhered them to his temples and connected them to his device, then checked the wireless connection between the device and the monitors; full strength, no lag. He turned to the centre monitor and set Layla’s dream feed full screen. Turning to the right-hand screen, he accessed his device and input the commands to start the sequence. A countdown clock appeared. Two minutes, decaying by milliseconds. He sat back and dug in his pocket, pulling out an ampule the size of his pinky finger and decapitating it. Tipping back his head and gaping his mouth, he emptied the vial onto his tongue.

---

Something was wrong.

This wasn’t the room he’d configured. This was an ornate red dining room, with gold filigree in the ceiling and dark wood boards on the floor. A few feet away stood a dining table, laid for ten and groaning with an elegant banquet, thin cream candles throwing golden light over ivory rose centre pieces. He wasn’t standing as he’d planned. He was sitting. Worse than that, he couldn’t move.

Layla wasn’t there. Or was she? There was something behind him. Something stirring. He felt the air it disturbed caress the back of his neck, cool against the sweat beading there. He tried to move his hand but found he couldn’t. He looked down and saw his arm tied to the armrest of a wooden chair, the rough grain scraping the tender skin of his wrist as he strained against the leather strap holding him down. He felt a splinter slide in and grit his teeth against the sting of it.

“It’s nice to meet you, finally,” said a voice he’d never heard in real life. A deeper tone than he remembered from the dream feed. Her lips grazed the shell of his ear, breathing a whisper that soaked like strong spirits into his brain. “You don’t mind, do you? Keeping it warm for me a while?”

“Ke—wh…what are you talking about?”

She came around in front of him, and the sight of her seemed to suck all the blood out of him. She was every fraction as beautiful as he’d known she would be. She was smiling.

“This place,” she said, looking around. “It needs someone. Those are the rules, though I don’t know who made them.”

“I don’t—”

“I’ve been here such a long time.” She leaned down, the weight of her small hands pressing into his knees, heat seeming to rise from her touch up his legs. “At first, I was only waiting.”

His eyes drifted, despite the half-frightened throb of his heart. She wore red silk, low cut. Nothing underneath it, he could see that.

“Waiting… To wake up, for something to change. Then I felt you. Watching.” She lowered herself slowly, kneeling between his feet.

“You knew I was there?” He sounded absurd, like a hopeful child, and shame caught in his throat as he swallowed.

“Then changing things.” She walked her fingertips up his right leg, and he wondered how he hadn’t dissolved already at the feel of her, at the starving look in her eyes.

“That’s how I learned. That things could be changed,” she said. “And now. Here you are.”

“I came for y—”

She flattened her hand on his thigh. “Right. Here.”

He choked on the need to say something. On need itself.

“Edgar,” she said, and volcanoes erupted in his mind at the sound of his name in her mouth. “I need you.”

“You—” he said, but his voice abandoned him.

“I need…” her eyes hardened, as sand turns to glass by a strike of lightning. “This,” she said, as she lunged upward and sealed her lips over his.

---

Edgar’s hands peeled the nodes from his temples. His heel crushed the device under it. His legs walked toward the glass doors of the room, paused in front of a mirror beside them. His head tilted this way and that, his gaze seeming to linger, laughingly, over the scar on his jaw. His mouth formed a smile, his teeth showing a little with their crooked gap. His body turned back to face the bed. His eyes slid over the female figure lying there, though they did not leer.

“Sleep tight, Watchman,” said his voice.