“Your compliance is appreciated,” said the house, and went silent. I wted a few seconds to see if it was going to try to evict me from the garage. Nothing happened. I started for the van, moving faster this time—if the house decided I was dawdling, it might decide I was planning to escape, and then things could get really messy, really fast. Use of lethal force by private security systems has been authorized since some jackass in Arizona loaded his house guns with dummy bullets and got himself ripped apart by a pack of starving infected. His estate tried to sue the security firm that managed his defenses, and the security firm turned right around and sued the state, saying they hadn’t been allowed to do the things they had to do if they wanted to keep their client alive.

“Mangum v. Pierce Security v. the State of Arizona,” supplied George. She reached the van a few steps ahead of me, folding her arms as she leaned against the door. “Do you remember where Buffy kept the booster?”

“Hi, George. Nice to see you.” I pressed my thumb against the scanner, letting the van identify me as an authorized driver. The locks clicked open. “So does this mean I’m finally going really crazy?”

She shrugged. Her face still looked wrong without her sunglasses, alien and familiar at the same time. “I think it means you already have a way of coping with things that are too big for you to handle. So Maggie goes into vapor lock, and Mahir shouts at the embassy trying to get a call through to his wife, and you…”

“I see dead people walking around and giving me orders. Great.” I offered her a pained smile as I pulled the van door open. “At least I like having you here. This would get old damn fast if you were Mom.”

George grimaced exaggeratedly. “There’s a bright side to everything.”

“Really? What’s the bright side for Florida? Because I’m really not seeing one.” Our field equipment was piled haphazardly around the van’s interior, stacked on counters and taking up most of the floor space. It would take an hour, maybe more, to get the thing ready for an excursion. I couldn’t blame Maggie and Alaric for putting it away in this condition—they weren’t expecting to leave the house without a lot of notice, and they weren’t field operatives—but I still had to grit my teeth when I saw that the weapon racks hadn’t been properly secured. If we had to run for any reason, we’d all wind up getting killed by our own carelessness.

“If you’re not seeing one, I can’t see it either. You know that.”