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Jet watched it again.

The third time.

Herself, walking up the drive toward the front door, dressed all in black, hair a little mussed from the walk, from the wind, from the zombie mask.

Jet slid her knees up and her MacBook closer, resting against the lump of her thighs, padded by the comforter. Lights off, dark except for the screen, except for the video of that Jet, looking into the bucket of Halloween candy, realizing it was empty.

The world was dark behind her, but she glowed from the lights mounted by the front door. Then Jet turned, looking right into the camera, through the screen, staring at this Jet, the one tucked up in bed now. She stuck out her tongue and Jet stuck hers back.

‘Don’t go in,’ Jet muttered darkly, warning her past self as she pulled out her keys and slotted them in the door. The Jet who was still alive, the one who had everything: all the time and all the later s she could ever want. Jet envied her, hated her a little. ‘Don’t go in.’

She didn’t listen.

The door opened and swallowed Jet whole, and it took less than a minute to do it.

The frame froze and the video ended.

Was the killer already inside when Jet had opened the door?

Or did they come in later, when Jet was distracted by her phone and a fucking cookie?

The footage had no answers for her, not the first time she’d watched it, or the second or the third.

The killer never crossed the frame, never set off the motion detector.

Jet turned to the notebook spread open on the pillow beside her.

The writing on the left-hand page was crossed out: Ideas for dog walking app in Boston/other cities.

Many ideas crossed out before that one, half a notebook of them.

On the top of the fresh right-hand page she’d written: Who murdered me?

Underlined. She’d transferred the times and data they’d found on her Apple Watch, and below that she’d asked: Ring doorbell camera – was the killer already inside when I got home?

Now she answered: I don’t know. Dropped the pen.

Outside her door, she heard her parents creeping past on the way to their bedroom. Saw them too, the gloom from their passing feet. One set faltered, two shadows that lingered, blocking the glow under the door. A boundary, between here and there, the living and the dead.

‘Keep going, Mom,’ Jet whispered, not loud enough to be heard. ‘I’m asleep.’

‘She’s asleep, Dianne,’ her dad hissed. ‘Let her sleep.’

The shadows moved on.

Mom had asked her one last time three times since they got back in the house.

So Jet told them she was tired, going to bed.

Because she didn’t want to sit at the dining table and eat lasagna with her parents in the bleach-cleaned air; she wanted a bar of chocolate and she wanted to be alone: to do this.

Log in to her parents’ Ring.com account – got the password from Dad – and see it for herself.

The moment she goes in alive and comes out dead.

Jet skipped ahead to the next video, the next time the motion detector, well, detected motion: 11:05 p.m.

Third time watching this one too.

Billy, hurrying toward the door, pulling his hands out of his pockets, an awful screeching sound that buzzed against Jet’s speakers. Reggie. Screaming.

Reggie from now stirred at the sound, sleeping by Jet’s feet, or trying to.

‘Sorry bud,’ Jet said, turning the volume down, dimming his distress.

The dog wasn’t allowed upstairs, and definitely not on the beds, but this wasn’t the first time Jet had ignored those rules.

‘Hello?’ Billy called on-screen, before he even got close. ‘Mr and Mrs Mason? Jet?’

He reached the front door, knocked his fist against it, the camera fish-bowling his face, distorting his panicked eyes.

‘Hello? Are you OK in there? I – I can hear the dog. Is everything …’ He stopped, cupped his hands to his eyes, peered through the crinkled stained glass of the front door.

He drew back, bent down to the mail slot.

‘Reggie,’ he called through it. ‘Reggie, boy, what’s wrong? Come here. Reggie!’

The howling didn’t stop.

Billy ran his hands through his hair, fingers trapped in the curls.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ he muttered to himself, looking around.

He spotted the doorbell camera, looked right into the lens, into Jet’s eyes, forty-eight hours in the future.

He pressed the button, that annoying chime – doo-di-dooo, you know the one.

‘Is anyone in?’ he asked the camera. ‘Hello, can you hear this? I think something’s wrong. I …’

Billy’s face moved right up to the camera, then beyond it, out of frame. The rustle of the bush as he clambered over it to look through the window, into the living room.

You could hear it. The very moment he spotted Jet, lying there, head bleeding and undone. There was a click in his throat, too mechanical to really sound human, something breaking that might not be so easy to fix. Metal screws and wire mesh wouldn’t do.

‘Oh my god, Jet, no! Jet!’

Knuckles on glass. Over and over. The dog screeching louder.

‘Jet!’ Billy screamed. ‘Jet – can you hear me?! Oh my god!’

That break in his voice, raw and grating, like earlier when he walked away from the house and thought Jet couldn’t hear him, crying down the street.

Billy darted back into the frame, past the camera, his jaw set as he eyed the front door.

‘I’m coming, Jet!’

He backed up and kicked out at the lock. The door buckled but didn’t break.

Billy doubled back, five, then six steps, then he charged at the door, shoulder first.

The wood splintered and the door crashed in, Billy rolling in after it, leaving it wide and gaping.

‘Jet! No, no, no! Can you hear me?! Jet!’

The video ended, cutting out his screams.

The next was fifteen minutes later, the paramedics arriving, spiraling red lights on the ambulance.

Jet dragged the cursor, speeding through it.

She’d watched this one most. One cop car, then two, black and white and red and blue.

Jack Finney, removing his hat and holding it over his heart, the chief of police tripping on the front step as he hurried inside.

Fast-forward.

The paramedics coming out again, squeaky wheels as they rolled a stretcher onto the drive.

Jet on top of it, some kind of orange brace around her broken head.

A lifeless arm falling as they turned, finger trailing in the dirt.

‘I’m going with her!’ Billy screamed, and Jet mouthed his lines with him, memorized after the sixth time.

He reemerged, coming out different too. His white-and-brown-check shirt stained red instead, his own glistening handprint over his chest, a smear under one eye.

‘She can’t be alone!’ they said together: Billy yelling, Jet whispering.

‘I’m coming too! So is the dog! No, no, Dad.

I’m not leaving him. Jet wouldn’t want that! ’

Jet smiled sadly, pressing pause, freezing them all in that moment of chaos.

She turned to her notebook, wrote: DNA probably fucked from the rescue, so many people in and out.

Jet shifted, and so did Reggie, the empty chocolate packet crinkling under her elbow.

‘Enough,’ Jet told herself. If she knew it off by heart, then she knew it too well, had watched it too many times. Watching wouldn’t undo it, wouldn’t bring her back to life, and she had a job to do.

There were other motion alerts, earlier that day. Probably nothing important, but Jet thought she should check them at least; it all happened on the day she was murdered.

One at 8:33 p.m. – when they were out at the fair. Jet settled back and pressed play.

Five dark figures. Misshapen and inhuman. Teenagers. Three witches, a werewolf, and a skeleton, ambling up the drive, elbowing each other and giggling.

‘Look at the size of this fucking house!’ the skeleton said, exposed jaw dropping open.

‘It’s the Masons’ house,’ a witch said, switching her broom to the other hand. ‘My mom doesn’t like them. Says they flaunt it.’

Jet snorted. The witch wasn’t wrong.

‘How do you afford a house like this?’ said Skeleton. ‘Is he a cartel leader or something?’

‘Stop watching Ozark, James, it’s becoming your entire personality. And no. He tears down houses and builds giant new ones, like this. Mom thinks it’s ugly.’

Jet liked this one.

It was as though the girl had heard the thought, through time and through the lens. She turned, staring strangely right at Jet.

‘Dave, what are y–’

It appeared faster than Jet could blink, filling the entire screen.

Empty black eyes. A warped white plastic face.

Jet jumped, recoiled from the screen, head slamming into the backboard of her bed.

A searing jolt of pain in her skull.

‘Fuck you,’ Jet hissed at the screen, at the image of Ghostface from Scream, smirking into the camera.

‘Trick-or-treat, bitches,’ the boy said, rattly and deep, enjoying himself too much. He must have hidden behind his friends, snuck around to jump-scare the camera. Little prick.

‘They’re not in,’ Sassy Witch replied, as Ghostface moved back, clearing the view. ‘Look, it says take one.’

The werewolf picked up the bucket and upturned it, emptying the entire thing into his open tote bag. ‘What?’ he sniffed. ‘I think they can probably afford it.’

‘They have a doorbell camera looking right at us, you idiot!’

They all turned to look at the camera, at Jet, sheepish and ghoulish.

‘Run!’ Skeleton yelled, laughing as they all bolted back down the drive and into the night, Werewolf howling at the invisible moon.

‘Fuckers,’ Jet said as the video ended. ‘I wanted some of that.’

A video twenty-two minutes before that: Jet leaving the house for the fair, one hour and eleven minutes after she’d promised Mom she would, calling ‘Bye!’ to Reggie.

3:42 p.m. – Jet driving home, parking her truck, returning after a walk with Reggie. It had been a long one, around Billings Park, and again, because she’d been thinking about that app idea.

3:29 p.m. – Sophia leaving the house, baby Cameron balanced on her hip, walking back to her blue Range Rover parked where Jet’s truck normally lived. Must have been on her way out after dropping those Halloween cookies off, leaving them on the kitchen counter with a little note: Love, Sophia xx.

3:24 p.m. – Five minutes before that, a blue Range Rover pulled up into the drive. Sophia emerged, getting baby Cameron from the backseat, holding him against her chest as she approached the door, pulling out a set of keys.

Wait a minute.

Jet paused the video, rewound it. Blinked and watched again.

Where was the plate of cookies? Sophia wasn’t carrying anything other than the baby. So, where the fuck had those cookies come from? She went in and four minutes later she came out, no cookies in either video.

Jet reached for her pen, scribbled: Cookies???

2:21 p.m. – What?! It was Sophia again, leaving the house for the second time – no, the first time actually, because Jet was watching this all in reverse. What was she doing? She’d come to the house two separate times on Friday, just over an hour apart. Why? And where were those damn cookies?

2:14 p.m. The hulking blue Range Rover pulled up again.

Sophia stepped out, went to the backseat.

Picked Cameron up, resting him on her hip.

Reached in for something else, holding it in one hand.

Ah. The plate of cookies, bats and pumpkins sliding around as she tried to balance everything and get the door open.

‘Cameron, don’t fidget,’ she said, flustered.

Cookie mystery solved, then. Because if Jet had been murdered over some fucking magic Halloween cookies, she would have been furious.

Still, why did Sophia come back an hour after dropping them off?

Did she forget the note, thought it was important enough to come back?

Jet didn’t know – she didn’t understand how Sophia’s mind worked anymore.

1:59 p.m. – Jet leaving for her walk, hoisting Reggie up into the cab of her truck, shutting the door as he yipped in excitement.

12:00 p.m. – Mom and Dad leaving on the dot, literally, to go help with the setup for the fair.

‘You got the sign?’ Mom said, walking out, hands full of plastic bags.

Dad grunted, struggling with it.

‘Scott, honestly,’ she tutted. ‘We need to take you to the doctor. You’re getting worse.’

‘I’m fine.’

And that was it. No other motion detected on Halloween, the day she’d died. And no sign of the killer hanging around before.

Jet looked over at her notebook. Crossed out the Cookies??? Nothing. A camera out front recording everyone who came and went, and it had given her nothing.

Jet sighed, blew out her lips. Reggie didn’t like the sound, grumbling to tell her so.

She’d have to sleep too, wouldn’t she? But sleeping felt like a waste of time, and she didn’t have time to waste.

On the Ring dashboard, Jet clicked out of History into the live image the camera was recording now, right now.

The nighttime driveway. Jet’s powder-blue truck out of place against all that darkness, lit only by a sickly orange tinge from the porch lights.

Nothing moved except the wind in the leaves.

Time ticked by, but the world didn’t show it, not from this view.

Past midnight and into a new day. The next day. One day closer to dying.

Dying.

She shouldn’t think about that.

She couldn’t help it.

Would they come for her again, the killer? To finish her off?

Jet studied the live footage, searched every corner for a sign.

Why bother?

Time and that little bone fragment would finish her off for them.

Her curse, their gift.

Her eyes felt strange, a ghostly sheen, like there was another layer she had to see through now. It was probably from staring at the screen too hard. Probably just tired.

Jet hesitated.

Brought up a new tab.

Google.

Symptoms of a brain aneurysm, she typed.

Pressed enter.

The page of results loaded.

‘No, don’t.’

Jet slammed the lid, shoved her laptop away.

She didn’t want to see that.

Her eyes were just tired, that was all.

Jet shuffled down, pulling the comforter up to her chin.

She wanted to stare at the ceiling, to search for answers there, but there was too much pain to put any pressure on the back of her head, on her Frankenstein skull.

She pressed the right side of her head into the pillow.

She never slept this way, ever, facing her bathroom door instead of her window.

But it was the only way that didn’t hurt.

Jet forced her eyes shut, because if they were tired, she must have been too.

Wouldn’t open them. Lay there and waited for sleep.

Not counting sheep. Counting the hours she had left before she died, moving on to the minutes.