A nurse scrambled out from behind a desk. Her scrubs were pink and fitted, with cargo pockets on the pants. Her blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail. At first Archie thought she was going to admonish him for having left the ER, but she was glaring at Susan’s armload of snacks. “You can’t just take all that,” she said to Susan.

Susan rotated a half step and shielded the food. “It was in unlocked cabinets.”

Archie stepped between them. “I need to talk to the boy I came in with,” he said to the nurse. He used his best voice-of-authority, though the sweat suit probably worked against him. The elastic waistband barely stayed up over his hips.

The nurse pulled at her ponytail. “He’s resting.”

“It’s police business,” Archie said, a little more firmly.

Her upper lip tightened. She had the telltale fine lines of a smoker around her mouth. “I’ll have to check with my supervisor.” She turned and hurried off. Her white sneakers didn’t make a sound on the linoleum.

Archie held on to his bag of clothes and waited. If they wouldn’t let him talk to the kid, there wasn’t much he could do about it. He looked back toward Henry’s room, but he could only see Henry’s feet from here. A pair of lumps under a tan blanket. Archie thought he could still hear the machine, though: inhaling, exhaling …

Susan cleared her throat.

Archie glanced over at her. She was still balancing that ridiculous column of juice. The hair was still in her face.

“Room eleven,” she said in a stage whisper.

It took him a second.

She jerked her head in the direction of the nurses’ station, and Archie followed her gaze until he noticed the giant whiteboard hung on the wall. On it were the names and room numbers of every patient on the ward. JOHN DOE, HYPOTHERMIA, ROOM 11.

The kid was still listed as John Doe. It had been two hours since they’d been brought in. It had to be all over the news. But if they didn’t have a name, it meant that the boy hadn’t been claimed.

How does a kid disappear during a flood and nobody notice?

Henry was in room three.

The ICU was horseshoe-shaped. For luck, Archie would have joked, if he’d been feeling lighter-hearted.

He started walking, counting down the dollhouse rooms as he went, Susan on his heels, still with the snacks. There wasn’t a hallway, just a variation in linoleum tile color, a thick black path on the floor where a hallway might have been. Archie glanced in at each bed they passed, finding only slack, unconscious faces. No balloons. No flowers. Unanimated like that, even the people looked the same.

“Next one,” Susan said.

Room eleven.