First Watch

The building had nineteen floors and a contract that required exactly one person awake in it at all times. Davi took the contract because it paid for quiet, and quiet was the only thing he had found he could still afford.

The job was simple. Walk the floors once an hour. Note anything. Wake no one, because there was no one to wake. The offices emptied at seven and filled at eight, and in the thirteen hours between they belonged to him and to the hum of the machines that were never turned off.

On his first watch he learned the building’s sounds in order: the lifts settling, the vents breathing, the long tick of the stairwell lights as they cooled. By the third hour he could have told you which floor he stood on with his eyes closed, by the pitch of the silence alone.

On the fourth hour he heard, from the long room on eleven where the desks ran in unbroken rows, the sound of a single chair being pushed back, and the small specific quiet of someone who has just stopped typing to listen for whoever is coming.