Echo Protocol

The parlor smelled of lilies and wet coats. Nadia stood near the casket with her hands folded around a single photograph of Evie — a frame she had carried from apartment to apartment for years, as if the portrait might stitch them back together. In the image Evie was laughing at something off-camera, hair windblown, cheeks freckled; it was the face Nadia kept replaying the week after the call. She had already replayed the last messages, the last audio she’d managed to salvage from Evie’s devices: a clipped voice memo, a half-finished grocery list, the sound of a timer that never went off. The official report said “electrical fault, accidental fire.” The fire marshal had been polite. The coroner had signed the forms. The insurance company had processed the claim. The city had closed the case.

Closure arrived dressed in bland phrases. It did not fit Evie’s hands, always stained with paint or with the soil of urban gardens she tended. It did not fit the carefulness with which Evie had wired her own apartment with redundant sensors after the blackout two years ago. Evie had been a person who recorded her own life, who annotated the world with metadata the way other people left notes on refrigerator doors. She monitored everything — air quality, battery health, motion thresholds — with the clinical tenderness of someone refusing to be surprised by catastrophe. The paperwork said otherwise.

Nadia left the funeral under a sky that threatened rain and found herself pulled toward the one place she had never wanted to go again: the couriered USB key in her bag she had promised herself she would not touch until the anger cooled. She had insisted to Evie, years earlier, that she stop sending homebrew firmware patches for innocuous devices. “You’re paranoid,” Evie said once, wry and soft, and then she winked. “But also, don’t be.” Nadia had left Sentinel Systems two years ago after a meeting that had felt less like a negotiation and more like a surrender. She had told herself then that she had done the right thing. Leaving had been the act. Regret had been the consequence.

At Evie’s apartment the smell of smoke still ghosted in the hallway paint. The fire had burned hot and clean in places, as if it had been fed by something that was not wood. Sensors had logged temperature spikes and then a quiet. The building’s external camera footage had gaps where the feed stuttered for two minutes before the first visible flame. Nadia crouched on the kitchen tile and listened to a clock in the background of a damaged clip. The timings in the clip did not match the official timeline. The smart thermostat recorded a sequence of micro-events, tiny voltage spikes that should not have behaved the way they did. Whoever wrote the code for those devices put a hell of a lot of trust in deterministic responses. So did Nadia. She saw patterns like scars.