Chapter 9 - The Lights Stayed On All Night
The sconces never went off. That was the first thing I noticed when my eyes adjusted again.
Mr. Moradi had dimmed the overheads hours ago, but the wall sconces stayed warm over the marble, and the bedside lamp threw the same soft circle on the nightstand. Under that light, the cut in the headboard looked darker than before, the edges of the fabric curled back where I had left them. Inside, the yellow padding held its shape around the black boxes.
I stood beside the bed with my hands folded over my apron so I would not touch anything. My name is Elena, and I had worked in that house long enough to know when to keep my hands still.
Guard One stood on the other side of the bed. He had not sat down once. His jacket was off now, his white shirt wrinkled at the shoulders, his gun holstered but visible. Guard Two was gone from the room. The door was shut.
Mr. Moradi sat against the pillows, not lying down. His robe had come loose at the collar and he kept pulling it closed. He looked at the headboard, then at me.
"You've been watching it," he said.
I nodded. "Yes."
We had agreed without saying it. No one would cover the cut. No one would close the room up dark. After Guard Two left, Guard One had dragged the small chair from near the mirror closer to the bed, but he did not sit. He just stood there, arms crossed, eyes moving between the headboard and the door.
I stepped a little closer and bent to look. The two black modules were set down into the padding, snug, the way a stone sits in a ring. Wires ran from them — red, blue, yellow, green — tucked along the seam of the tufting and disappearing under the fabric. Small red lights glowed on each box. Steady. Not blinking.
"They're still on," I said quietly.
Guard One leaned in. "Same as before?"
"Same," I said. "They were on all night under this light. They didn't flicker. They didn't go out when the room got quiet."
Mr. Moradi rubbed his face with his tattooed hand. The ink on his knuckles caught the lamplight. He stared at the lights for a long time before he spoke.
"I heard something," he said.
Guard One looked up. "When?"
"Last night. And the night before." Mr. Moradi's voice was low, hoarse from no sleep. He did not look at either of us. "When the house went silent. No air, no traffic. I sat here and I heard it. A faint buzz. Right behind my head."
My chest tightened. I remembered how he had sat on the edge of the bed that first minute, tense, not leaning back. Like the bed itself had pushed him away.
"From the headboard?" I asked.
He gave a short nod. "I thought it was the lamp. Or my ears. You hear things when you don't sleep."
I glanced at the modules again. The red LEDs held steady, two small points in the dark padding. I listened, but the room had the low hum of the house now — air moving through the vents, a distant refrigerator kick. I could not separate anything else.
"I don't hear it now," Guard One said.
"No," Mr. Moradi said. "It's too early. The house is still awake."
He shifted on the bed and winced. His back had to hurt from sitting upright for hours. I wanted to fluff the pillow behind him out of habit, but I stopped myself. Everything in that bed felt different now.
Guard One pulled out his phone, then put it back without turning it on. "We could kill power to the room," he said. "Flip the breaker. See if the lights die."
"No." Mr. Moradi said it fast.
Guard One frowned. "It would tell us if they're on house power."
"And if they're not?" Mr. Moradi asked. "If they have their own power and we start flipping breakers, what does that do?"
Silence hung there. The sconce light buzzed faintly above us — the normal electric sound of a warm bulb — and for a second all three of us looked up, then back at the headboard.
I spoke before I could talk myself out of it. "Don't pull the wires, either."
Guard One gave me a hard look. "I wasn't going to."
"I know," I said. "I'm just saying it out loud so we all agree. We don't cut power blind. We don't pull anything. The wires are routed through the padding. If we yank one, we won't know what it was holding."
Mr. Moradi watched me. "You think it's fragile."
"I think we don't know enough to touch it," I said. "Last night I cut the fabric and the lights stayed on. That tells me cutting the cover didn't stop it. Pulling more could be different."
Guard One exhaled through his nose. He looked at the modules again, at the neat way the multicolor wiring disappeared under the tufting. Whoever had put them there had taken time. It was not sloppy.
"She's right," Mr. Moradi said finally. "We leave it. We watch."
Guard One uncrossed his arms. "So we just stare at red lights?"
"We confirm what we can," Mr. Moradi said. "They're active. They've been active all night. I heard a buzz when the room was silent. That's what we know. Nothing more."
He said it like he was setting a rule for himself too, not just for us. Do not guess. Do not invent a reason. Just look.
Later, when the house finally quieted, Mr. Moradi asked me to turn off the bedside lamp but leave the sconces on. The room dropped into a warmer dark. The red LEDs looked brighter without the lamp competing. Two steady dots inside the cream fabric.
We stood there — me by the nightstand, Guard One by the foot of the bed, Mr. Moradi still seated against the pillows — and listened.
I held my breath without meaning to. The air vent clicked off. For maybe ten seconds there was almost true silence, and underneath it I thought I caught it: a very faint, even buzz, thin as a thread, coming from the headboard.
Mr. Moradi's eyes met mine in the sconce light. He heard it too. He gave me the smallest shake of his head. Don't speak. Don't move.
Guard One stayed frozen, listening.
The vent kicked back on and covered it. The moment passed. The red lights stayed steady, the wiring untouched in the padding, and none of us reached for it.
May you like
"We don't touch it," Mr. Moradi whispered, more to himself than to us. "Not until we decide."
I nodded, and Guard One nodded after a beat. That was our agreement, made in the warm dark with the lights still on.
