The goal of level four seemed clear enough. Protect the family from the intruder. The easiest thing to do, of course, was to lock all the doors, and Nio did that immediately. She found the translucent LOCKS button under security settings and touched BACK DOOR. The icon turned green just as the man in black tried the handle.
“Easy enough,” she said, knowing that it couldn’t possibly be that easy.
While he crept around the side to find another way in, Nio locked the front door and took a moment to familiarize herself with the virtual controls. All of it was adjustable, or so it seemed, from the size of the individual camera screens to their order to the arrangement of the buttons and panels in the control boxes. The list of connected devices inside the house was unreal. The family had apparently bought the top of the line of everything, and it all integrated with the house. The refrigerator, a large commercial machine, kept stock of everything it held and automatically ordered replacements based on usage patterns, eliminating regular trips to the grocery store. Specialty items could be requested from the front screen and usually showed up later that day. The machine even had automatic doors that opened by themselves when it noticed someone’s hands were full, such as with a heavy casserole or cake. Even the kitchen cutting block was “smart.” It not only weighed all the food it touched, it recognized what was being cut, from vegetables to meat, and fed that information to the home’s central processor, which could then calculate the total calories and nutrients. By watching each family member eat, the home could use the information from the cutting block to calculate the calories and nutrient each family member consumed and even warn them if they were in danger of breaching some daily goal. The washing machine and dryer were vertically stacked such that the one could feed the other. Both had internal sensors and could adjust settings based on contents. The dryer was connected at the side to an adjacent machine that folded and pressed clothes as appropriate. The home wasn’t just a home. It was a complete “wellness” companion: butler, entertainer, nutritionist, and personal trainer.
While arranging the controls to her liking, Nio realized there were more cameras than could be displayed in her field of vision, and that the two columns scrolled up and down, which she hadn’t realized.
“Shit.”
She had been waiting for the man in black to reappear, and in the gap of time, he had found a way inside, probably through a side window that she hadn’t been watching.
“Shit, shit!”
He was standing in the hall between the laundry room and the garage. But he wasn’t moving. He simply stood, knife in hand, as if taking a moment to enjoy the transgression and to prepare himself for what was to come. No doubt he could hear the family moving around the house, and he stood and listened.
Nio immediately locked the teenager’s bedroom and the door to the bathroom where the mother was cleaning her child. After touching each, the back and then front door both unlocked. It seemed she could only lock two doors at a time.
“You fuckers!” she screamed. “This isn’t a fucking game!”
But it was a game, a game of four lives.
“Okay.” She took a deep breath. “Calm down. Think.”
There was no phone among her controls and no keyboard either, which meant she had no way to warn the family directly or call for help. She could turn off the furnace or warn them that they were almost out of milk, but she couldn’t tell them there was a tall, armed intruder in their house, creeping toward the front stairs.
She had to get the family to safety, preferably to the police, but that meant she had to make them aware of the intruder without letting him get to any of them.
Nio put her hands to her head. “Okay. Okay, there’s gotta be a way.”
The father was finishing in the kitchen, which was connected to the foyer via a formal dining room. The man in black was creeping toward the stairs, probably looking to take stock of the home’s occupants. As far as he knew, the couple might have a teenage son, for example, who would overpower him if he attacked the father and wasn’t able to subdue him immediately. For a moment, as the man in black moved through the foyer, he was visible to the father, if only the man turned from the sink. Nio saw a phone on the counter behind him. Since the house knew whose phone it was, so did she. If she could just get his attention, he would have an easy way to call for help. But the moment passed too quickly, and the man in black snuck around the balustrade while Nio was scrolling through the long list of devices, trying to find anything useful in the dining room. Only after the he was safely on the stairs did it occur to her.
“Lights. Shit.”
The lights were in a separate list from the devices. In her haste and anxiety, she wasn’t thinking clearly. She turned the dining room chandelier on. The father saw it and turned. It was too late for him to see the man in black, but with luck, she might be able to lead him to the foyer, even though that would lead him away from his phone.
The father wiped his hands on a towel and peered inside the next room. Finding no one, he turned the light off.
Nio turned it on again.
“That’s strange,” the dad said with a bemused look. He had an English accent, indicating Nio had been correct about the location.
“Come on, come on,” she said. “Go toward the stairs.”
She turned the light in the foyer on and off, on and off, on and off. In a perfect world, she would’ve sent Morse code, which the father would’ve understood, but like most humans on the planet, Nio didn’t know Morse code, and she doubted the father did either. In fact, when he saw the blinking light, rather than walking to investigate or trying to count dots and dashes, he turned to retrieve his phone, which presumably had an app that controlled the house, probably the very same app on which her own controls were based.
Sure enough, a moment later, he tapped the screen and the lights in the dining room and foyer both went out.
Nio turned them back on again.
“Janie?” he called loudly.
He waited for a moment, but when he got no response, he walked to the hall under the back stairs, where a doorway descended to a storage basement. It seemed he was going to reset the controls.
“Nononono.”
Nio wasn’t sure what that would do. Perhaps that was a fault and would kick her out altogether. She didn’t have multiple lives on this level, which was structurally similar to a tower defense game. Her goal was to save as many of the family members as possible. Presumably she would pass if at least one survived and would lose points for each death. But she couldn’t save any of them if she lost control of the house. She would watch helplessly as a family was slaughtered.
Her adversary, meanwhile, had reached the top of the stairs, where he listened for a moment before making his way to the hall bathroom. The mother was drying the child, a small boy, and the two laughed together loudly. The sound echoed inside the tile-lined room, and they didn’t hear the man in black slowly try the handle.
Nio held her breath.
The lock held, and after a moment, he released the handle just as slowly and made his way down the hall, peering carefully in each open door. He reached the teenager next. She had gotten up from her narrow desk and was moving about, apparently getting ready for school the next day. There was no telling when she would open the door. It was locked, but Nio was sure the fire code demanded that all the doors could be opened manually from the inside. That meant she could keep the man in black out of a room, but she couldn’t lock him inside, nor could she force the family to stay safe inside their individual spaces. If the moving teenager opened her door, she would walk right into the intruder.
Her father, meanwhile, had made his way to the basement, where a large touchscreen control panel was mounted on the wall next to a brand new furnace. With a few easy taps, he reset the system, and Nio’s controls went dark, along with the cameras. She could see, hear, and do nothing.
“Shit.” She waited. “Shitshitshitshitshit.”
Her heart throbbed in her chest.
“Did I just fuck up?” she asked herself softly. “Please tell me I didn’t just fuck up.”
The screens returned, and then the controls. The father was walking back up to the kitchen, testing the app on his phone, making sure everything worked. The mother was—
“Fuck!”
She had wrapped up the child in a towel and was turning for the door, just down the hall from the man in black, who was letting go of the daughter’s locked door. It seemed like he might move on, given a moment, but certainly not if a door opened behind him. Nio quickly scanned the list of connected devices. She hit one, and an electric toothbrush near the sink in the bathroom started buzzing loudly. The mother turned, if only to see what was making the racket. As she stepped to turn off the device, the man in black crept down the back stairs toward the kitchen, where the father was engaged with his phone. He was leaning against the kitchen island with his back to the staircase, reading something that required a slow scroll. Nio could just make out the reflection of the screen in his glasses.
Upstairs, the mother tried the bathroom door and found it locked.
“That’s strange.”
She unlocked it manually, just as Nio had suspected. The man in black heard her. He turned from his perch halfway down the staircase and paused as she carried the boy into his bedroom. The teenage girl must’ve heard them as well, because she slid her headphones around her neck and stepped to her door, nearly ramming her head into it when she discovered it was locked. She cursed, momentarily confused, before unlocking it and storming into her brother’s room.
“Moooooom! Aaron locked my door again!”
She called the father Aaron. That suggested he wasn’t her dad. He was her stepfather, which explained the age difference between the children. The girl was the mother’s by a previous relationship. Photos of a pair of young adults on the mantel downstairs, both older than her, suggested Aaron might’ve had his own children by a previous relationship.
“I’m sure he didn’t do it on purpose,” the girl’s mother said, exasperated. She was trying to get her squirming son into his pajamas, but he was full of energy and trying to play with her by making it as difficult as possible. “The bathroom was locked as well. It only takes one second to—”
“But he’s always doing things like that!”
With the door to the bedroom open, the man in black could hear the argument from his perch. He looked up and down, as if contemplating which way to go, and Nio understood his dilemma. He was likely aware something was amiss. After all, who locks their bathroom and bedroom doors while at home? After all, it clearly wasn’t out of fear. No one seemed worried. If the bathroom door hadn’t been locked, then the man in black would’ve found the wife alone with a small boy. He could’ve used the threat of harm to the boy to get her to submit and bound her with whatever he brought in his pockets. Once subdued, the wife and kid would be leverage on the husband, who would turn suddenly to find a knife at their throats—or worse. In the ensuing shock, the man in black could’ve ordered him to his knees, and the family would be his to play with the entire night.
But that wasn’t how it had gone, and now he was at a loss. The two women weren’t a threat, but he may not be able to subdue both of them and the boy. If any of them managed to call the husband, he might find himself outnumbered. As much as Nio needed to keep everyone together for safety, the man in black needed to isolate them. He walked back upstairs and slipped behind the door to the office, which, unlike the kitchen or master bedroom, was somewhere the family wasn’t likely to enter in pairs. If one of the adults came, unsuspecting, they wouldn’t notice him before he had a chance to slip a gag or garrote around their neck. More likely, no one would go in at all, not for a while, meaning he could hide there until they finished their nightly routine and went to bed, or until another opportunity presented itself.
It was a good strategy. It meant there was no way for Nio to make them aware of his presence without also putting someone in immediate mortal danger. She had to change the terms of engagement.
The women continued to argue loud enough for everyone to hear. Apparently, there was tension between stepfather and stepdaughter. Annoyed, Aaron walked past the stairs to the basement and around by the garage to come in the family room, which was at the front of the house, across the foyer from the dining room. He sat on a couch and turned on the large television.
Eventually, the daughter’s pleas bothered her little brother, and he got fussy. Her mother, trying hard to put the boy to bed, got angry and snapped at her daughter in a way that left no retort, and the girl stormed into her room and slammed the door as only a teenager could. At one point, she was no more than four feet from the man in black, but he didn’t move, and Nio locked the girl’s door while she replaced her headphones and pouted on her bed.
Every time everyone changed rooms, Nio had to scroll the video feeds, like a pair of wheels, to make sure she could see everyone at the same time. She could change the order of the screens, but that took a moment, and she wasn’t sure she wouldn’t simply have to change it back again a moment later.
The mother was alone with the boy in his room. His name was Christopher apparently, or so her pleas suggested. The door to his room was wide open, and Nio couldn’t shut it. She could only lock what had been shut, which meant the two were exposed. As if sensing their vulnerability, the man in black stirred. He shifted his weight in the darkness but didn’t immediately move from his hiding place. He was being patient.
But he was thinking about it.
Nio turned off the TV.
“What the . . .”
Aaron turned it back on again, but Nio turned it immediately off and started the sonic toothbrush again, which clattered loudly in the tile-lined bathroom.
“Aaaaron!” the wife called. “Can you turn that off, please?”
Exasperated at his third failed attempt to watch television, Aaron traipsed angrily up the front stairs and pressed the button on the toothbrush with an audible sigh.
“I think something’s wrong with the house,” he said as he walked across the hall to the bedroom.
“Please don’t,” his wife said, pulling the covers over their son, who playfully pulled them off.
“What?” Aaron looked hurt. “You think it’s me?”
Jane gave him a look. “You have been known to press a few buttons.”
Aaron smiled at the double entendre. “That’s clever.” He walked over and kissed her forehead. “That’s why I fell in love with you.”
When the little boy threatened to get up, his father grabbed him and put him back in the bed.
“Why don’t you take a break?” Aaron asked. “I can put this little gremlin to bed.”
He tickled his son, who laughed and said he wasn’t a gremlin.
Jane looked like she was thinking about it.
“Nononono,” Nio said. “No breaks. This is family time. Do it together.”
“All right,” she said with a sigh. “Somewhere in this house,” she declared formally, “there’s a glass of wine with my name on it.”
It was another joke. Nio could see the half-empty glass on the kitchen island, probably left from dinner. The word Mommy had been badly painted on the side.
Nio turned on the television in the living room and immediately ran the volume all the way up. Sitcom laughter roared through the house.
“See?” the husband said. “It’s not me.”
Jane went to turn it off as the daughter burst from her room. She stood in the hall demanding to know what was going on. The man in black was just behind her inside the office. But the girl’s mother was at the far end of the hall, telling her to drop it, while the husband had the boy inside the bedroom. With all of them so close, the man in black decided not to strike. He pressed his back to the wall and stayed put.
The daughter gave her best overly exasperated sigh and slammed her door again. This time, she locked it herself.
Jane walked down the front stairs. A carved wooden sign on the wall next to the door read “Welcome to the Setera’s.” Instead of turning the television off, she simply turned the volume down and walked around the laundry room to enter the kitchen from the back. She got her glass and returned to the couch.
Realizing she was alone, the man in black slipped from the office and down the back stairs, where he had been perched earlier, to the kitchen. He stopped at the bottom to make sure the room was clear. Then he crept toward the dining room so as to approach the couch from the back where Jane wouldn’t see him.
Nio watched him draw his curved knife.
With no choice, she played her trump card. She rang the doorbell. It would only work once. Once someone answered and found no one there, they were unlikely to bother again, especially that late at night when no one was likely to be calling anyway.
The bell rang and the wife turned her head as the man in black ducked against the dining room wall. She must’ve caught a glimpse of something because she stood and stared with a blank face. With her attention fixed squarely on the dining room, there was nowhere the man in black could go without being seen. Nio began strobing the chandelier, turning it on and off in rapid succession.
Still, Jane Setera was motionless. She didn’t know what to think. Had she seen something?
She looked at the glass of wine.
“It’s not the wine!” Nio screamed.
The TV was on, and Nio turned it off so that the house was nearly quiet. With luck, she would realize her husband was playing with their son upstairs and someone else was controlling the house. In the silence, fear took Jane Setera, whose face went pale. She stepped back, and Nio realized what she saw. With the TV off, the man in black, hiding by a China cabinet, was faintly reflected in the dark of the dining room windows.
“Gotcha!”
He seemed to understand—or perhaps he saw her as well—because he stepped out then. The wife screamed at the top of her lungs.
“Run, you fool!” Nio yelled.
But she didn’t at first, not until the man in black was in the foyer. She dashed toward the back hall and the intruder ran the other way.
Her husband was already storming down the front stairs. “JANE?”
The man in black ran into her in the kitchen and his knife entered her gut. Her eyes went wide as she dropped to the floor. Dark red smeared across the kitchen floor.
“JANE!”
Aaron ran through the dining room and saw the man with the raised knife about to give his wife the finishing strike. Her husband wasn’t athletic by any means, but something animalistic took him and he charged the man in black from the rear, snarling incoherently. The two fell and started a scuffle as the wife dragged herself across the floor, trying to escape. But her strength had left her, and she could do little but drag her legs through a wake of blood.
“Mom?” The daughter came down the stairs then, drawn by the noise.
She screamed at the fighting men.
“C-call,” Jane said weakly. But that was all she had.
The daughter ran upstairs to her room but immediately remembered her brother and dashed around to grab him in his bed. The boy didn’t know what was happening, but he knew it was bad, and he began to cry. The daughter slammed his bedroom door and locked it. But Nio knew it was only a temporary barrier. If the intruder killed the adults, or incapacitated them, it wouldn’t take him long to break in.
Aaron was thrown violently over the kitchen table and seemed to be hurt. He didn’t immediately get up, and the man in black turned to finish Jane. He was angry, Nio could tell. Jane had spoiled it. She had spoiled everything by screaming. Now, he wouldn’t get the thrill of taking the family in secret, one by one. He wouldn’t get to see their surprised faces. He wouldn’t get to savor that moment they realized they weren’t safe in their own home. Everything was ruined.
He strode toward angrily her, passing between the kitchen island and the major appliances. If Aaron hadn’t been laying crumpled on the other side of the table, his attacker might’ve gone the other way. But that way was blocked, which meant Nio could anticipate the intruder’s path. She hit the button marked REFRIGERATOR DOOR, and it opened in front of him. The stainless steel door didn’t hit him very hard, but it surprised him enough that it caused him to stumble back. His hand went out instinctively to get his balance, and he grabbed the top of the infrared stove, which Nio had already engaged in anticipation of the move. He pulled his hand back and screamed in pain as he fell to his ass, cursing in a foreign language.
Nio watched Jane pull herself across the floor. She thought at first Jane was trying to escape, but she wasn’t. She reached the end of the kitchen island, and with whatever strength she had left, lunged up to knock the knife block to the floor. It clattered, and she grabbed one and held it with both hands, shaking and pale from loss of blood. There was little she could do against the man in black, but there was no way Jane was abandoning her children.
Her attacker was on his feet. His fingers hurt, and he put the burnt tips in his mouth.
“C-cold w-w-water,” Jane joked, still holding the knife, which shook with her tremors.
The man in black slammed the fridge shut and held the door so it couldn’t be opened again.
“What kinda crazy house is this?” he asked in a deliberately gravelly voice. He had some kind of accent Nio couldn’t place.
She watched, helpless, as the intruder retrieved his curved blade from the floor.
She was out of tricks.
The family was on their own.