I obeyed without thinking, and then I hated myself for obeying, because the house was mine and there was someone in it who did not belong there, and standing outside while that happened felt like a second kind of trespass. But June was right, and I knew she was right, and I backed up with the others until we were standing in a loose half circle on the concrete, watching my own front door.
Simone opened the network map on Travis's laptop. The screen filled with a diagram of connections I did not understand and did not want to understand, lines and labels and pulsing dots representing devices talking to each other inside my home. She scrolled, and then she stopped, and her finger came to rest on a single entry near the top of the list.
"A second device connected to your router at 2:08 this morning," she said. "It is labeled ATTIC RELAY."
I had never placed anything in my attic. I could count on one hand the number of times I had even climbed the pull down stairs up there, and every one of those times had been to store a box I never opened again. The attic was a place I avoided because it was hot in summer and cold in winter and full of dust that made my throat close up. The idea that something had been living up there, quietly, while I slept below it, made me feel sick in a way that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with violation.
Simone turned the tablet so I could see the feed again. The image had changed. It was no longer the driveway. It was my upstairs hallway, seen from behind an air vent, the slats cutting the view into narrow strips of carpet and wall and doorframe. For a long moment nothing moved. Then someone walked through the frame, and only his legs were visible, trousers and shoes moving past the vent with the unhurried pace of a man who believed he was alone.
"There shouldn't be anyone inside," I said, and I heard my own voice shake. "Ava spent the night at a friend's house. I have been alone since Friday evening."
Nobody answered me. On the screen the figure stopped outside Ava's bedroom. The door was closed. A hand appeared near the vent, and in that hand was one of my spare house keys, the kind I kept in the kitchen drawer and never thought about twice. I watched the hand turn the key over between its fingers, casual and practiced, and I felt something cold settle in my stomach, because whoever this was did not need to break in. He already had the means to walk through my house like it belonged to him.
Travis, who had been standing near the road with his arms crossed, looked toward the open front door and said something that made Simone turn her head sharply.
"That is not one of our technicians."
Simone did not look at him. She kept her eyes on the tablet. "Then who is it, Travis? Who has access to the live system?"
He hesitated, and in that hesitation I understood that he knew exactly who it was and had been hoping he would never have to say the name out loud.
"The person who created it."
"Who?" Simone demanded.
On the screen the camera angle shifted again, and now we could see the man kneeling beside a black equipment case. The case bore the Meridian Response emblem, the same emblem I had seen in Helen's mantel photograph, stitched above the pocket of a dark work jacket. He opened the case, and inside, arranged in a neat row, were printed photographs. I recognized Helen first, then Naomi, then Ava, then myself. Four faces, printed on ordinary paper, laid out like a list of tasks.
Helen's photograph had been crossed out in red, a thick line drawn diagonally across her face. Beneath Naomi's photograph was a single word, printed in capital letters: RELOCATE. And beneath Ava's photograph, in the same careful hand, was a time: 9:30 TONIGHT.
I stared at that time until the numbers blurred. Tonight. My daughter's photograph, and a time tonight, and a man I did not know kneeling in my attic with a case full of faces. I tried to speak and could not. Simone put a hand on my arm, steady and firm, and I realized my hands were shaking again.