Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Children of Olive

And then Amal saw the watchers.

They weren't just standing around the perimeter like she had expected. They were integrated.

One stood atop the main watchtower, its silhouette merging with the surveillance equipment, its red eyes glowing alongside the camera lenses. Another was crouched on the roof of the terminal building, its limbs elongated and spider-like, wrapping around the ventilation ducts.

And inside the cages, moving among the people...

Amal gasped.

There were dozens of them. Shadowy, semi-solid figures that walked alongside the living. They didn't push or shove. They simply drifted through the crowd, their bodies passing through the bars, through the turnstiles, through the people themselves.

Every time a watcher passed through a person, the person stumbled slightly. A hand went to a forehead. Shoulders slumped. A face went gray with sudden exhaustion.

"They're feeding," Amal said, the realization hitting her with the force of a physical blow. "They're not just watching. They're feeding."

"Feeding on what?"

"On the exhaustion. On the humiliation. On the waiting." Amal pointed to a young man near the front of the line. He was arguing with a soldier behind standard bulletproof glass. The soldier was shouting, pointing at the man's ID. The young man was trying to explain, his gestures desperate.

Standing directly behind the young man, looming over him, was a watcher.

It was tall, its chest broad and armored with that strange, organic plating. It leaned down, its faceless head almost touching the back of the young man's neck. And as the argument escalated —as the soldier shouted louder, as the young man's humiliation deepened —the watcher's red eyes grew brighter. The air around it seemed to thicken, to darken, as if it was absorbing the emotional energy of the conflict.

"It's an ecosystem," Yasmin breathed. "The checkpoint creates the misery. The watchers feed on it. And maybe..." She looked up at the watchtower. "Maybe they help maintain it."

Amal followed her gaze. The watcher on the tower turned its head.

It saw them.

Across two hundred meters of crowd and concrete, the red eyes locked onto Amal. There was no confusion this time. No ambiguity. It knew she was there. It knew she could see.

81