Chapter 6 - Ashes on the PorchTap. Tap. Tap.
The sound of shattering glass echoed faintly through the live audio feed on my phone.
"No," I gasped, bolting upright in bed, a sharp spasm of pain shooting across my abdomen.
On the screen, Vanessa wasn't just breaking a window—she was pouring a clear liquid across the wooden welcome mat and the base of the front pillars.
Gasoline.
She had lost her mind. Ryan’s panic had trickled down to her, and realizing that the video evidence existed, they had decided on a scorched-earth policy. If the house burned down with the local server inside, the digital evidence would vanish in the inferno.
I scrambled to dial 911 with shaking fingers, my eyes glued to the screen.
"Maya! Wake up! Wake up!" I shook my sister’s shoulder frantically.
Maya bolted upright, blinking away sleep. "What? What's wrong? Are you bleeding?"
"The house," I choked out, thrusting the phone into her face. "Vanessa is burning the house down to destroy the server."
Maya’s eyes went wide as saucers. She grabbed her own phone, hitting redial on the local precinct while shouting instructions to the dispatcher. "Yes, 1424 Oakridge Lane! Arson in progress! The suspect is on the property right now!"
On the hospital screen, the screen flickered as Vanessa struck a long-stemmed match.
The porch erupted in a violent, orange roar of flames.
Vanessa stumbled back, shielding her face from the sudden heat, a manic, hysterical laugh escaping her lips as she turned and sprinted toward her parked car at the edge of the driveway.
She thought she had won. She thought she had incinerated my only weapon.
What neither Ryan nor Vanessa understood about modern technology, however, was that a smart home doesn't just store data locally.
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When the local server melted into slag, the automated off-site cloud backup had already finished uploading the entire high-definition file to three separate secure servers overseas.
The fire was real. But the evidence was already bulletproof.
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