Simone disconnected the router from Travis's laptop. I expected something to stop. Instead, everything started at once. The house alarm activated with a shriek that made us all flinch. Every exterior door locked with a series of sharp clicks I could hear from the driveway. The garage door lowered with a grinding hum. The blinds in the living room closed automatically, one after another, like eyelids shutting. And then a synthetic voice announced from inside the house, calm and toneless and utterly wrong in a home that had once held my wife's laughter and my daughter's music.
"SECURITY CONDITION ACTIVE."
Travis backed toward the road. Simone ordered him to stay where he was, and he froze, half turned, like a man caught between two kinds of trouble.
June stared at the house. "What is happening?"
Travis stared at it too, and his face had gone pale under the morning light. "He activated a property hold."
"What does that mean?"
"The house isolates itself."
"He can control the doors?"
"He can control more than that."
As if to prove him right, the smoke detectors began sounding, one after another, a chorus of alarms rolling through the rooms I could not see. I knew those sounds. I had heard them before on ordinary mornings when Ava burned toast or when steam from the shower set off the hallway unit, and they had always been an annoyance, a brief interruption before I waved a towel at the ceiling and life went on. Now they sounded different, not because the tone had changed but because I understood what they were for. They were not warnings. They were instructions. A smoke alarm tells you to leave a room. A carbon monoxide alert tells you to leave a floor. A locked door tells you which way you cannot go. Put them together, in the right order, and a house can herd a person the way a fence herds cattle, not with force but with fear, one alarm at a time, until the person is standing exactly where the cameras can see them best. I thought about all the smart devices I had installed over the years, each one sold to me as safety, each one justified at the time. The alarm system after the divorce, because a single father working nights wanted to know his daughter was protected. The voice assistant in the kitchen, because Ava liked asking it to play music while she did homework. The thermostat that learned our schedule, the garage door I could close from my phone, the indoor camera facing the front hallway that I had pointed at the door so I could check on Ava from work. Every one of them had been a choice I made with good intentions, and every one of them had become a thread in someone else's net. I had not been careless. I had been trusting, and the difference between those two things felt very small standing on my driveway listening to my own house sound its alarms at no one. Then my phone buzzed in my pocket, and I pulled it out with hands that would not stop shaking. The notification glowed on the screen in plain, official letters: CARBON MONOXIDE DETECTED, BASEMENT.
The fire department checked its equipment. The chief, a man I had never spoken to before that morning, studied his readings and then looked up with the careful expression of someone delivering uncertain news.