Eighteen active video feeds filled the screen.
I stood behind Simone and I looked at them, and I felt my breath shorten, because these were not abstract images. These were driveways I recognized, back doors I had walked past, rooms inside houses where people I did not know were living their ordinary lives, unaware that a camera was watching them through a screen in a truck parked on my street. One feed displayed my own kitchen, the table where Ava and I ate breakfast, the counter where Danielle used to stand in the morning, all of it framed from an angle I did not recognize, an angle that came from inside my own house. Another feed showed Ava's bedroom door, closed, quiet, ordinary, and beneath it a green label in plain text.
HOUSE EMPTY AFTER 9:30 P.M.
A second label sat beneath the first.
PRIMARY RESIDENT WORKS NIGHT SHIFT.
Both were accurate. I work overnight twice a week. Ava is often home alone. Those were not guesses. They were facts, collected and written down and attached to a live image of my daughter's bedroom door, as if my family's schedule were a piece of inventory. My hands began shaking, and I put them in my pockets, and then I took them out again, because hiding the shaking felt like hiding from what I was seeing, and I did not want to hide from it. I wanted to remember it exactly, because I knew I would need to remember it later, when someone asked me what I had seen and when.
Helen moved closer to me then, not touching me, just standing near enough that I could feel her there, and I understood something I had not understood on the roof, or on the curb, or even when Simone removed the box from beneath panel six. Helen had not only protected Naomi. By climbing onto my roof four times, by cutting the power again and again, by refusing to accept the explanations that everyone else had accepted, she had protected Ava too. Every time she damaged the system, the feeds went dark. Every time she broke the array, the cameras stopped transmitting, and the people watching my daughter's bedroom door lost their picture. I had spent nearly two months resenting a vandal, and the vandal had been standing between my daughter and the people who were watching her.
I looked at Helen, and she looked at me, and neither of us said anything, because the driveway was full of police and firefighters and an investigator with a laptop full of other people's living rooms, and some things do not need to be said out loud to be true. She had known. She had acted. She had paid for it with handcuffs on her own street, and she had done it anyway.
Simone kept working through the laptop, and the picture that emerged from the payment records was wider than any of us had expected. A private security company called Meridian Response had purchased detailed household information from BrightCurrent for nearly four years. Four years of schedules, access codes, routines, and camera placements, bought and paid for, recorded in ledgers that Simone read aloud in pieces as she found them. The company was supposed to use the data to design neighborhood security systems, to make homes safer, to build the kind of protection that Helen's son had once tried to build with his original node. That was the stated purpose, written into contracts and proposals, clean and professional and easy to believe.
Instead, someone inside Meridian had sold the schedules and the access codes to burglary crews. The data that was supposed to protect houses had been turned into a catalog for breaking into them, and the people who bought it knew exactly when to come, which door would open, and which alarm would stay silent. The three robbed homes on the fourteen-home list were not accidents, and they were not coincidences. They were the result of a system working exactly as someone had designed it to work, just not for the people who lived inside those houses.
I turned to Travis again, because he was still standing there, and because he was the only person in the driveway who could answer for the part he had played, even if he would not. Simone asked him how long he had known, and he said, in a voice that sounded smaller than it had an hour earlier, that he only installed equipment. He said he did not know how the information was used. He said he was a technician, not a decision maker, and that the cameras and the controllers and the lists were someone else's responsibility.