The last picture gave him a moment’s pause. It lay flat, like it had fallen over or been placed face-down. He picked it up—and saw what looked like a crime scene photo. A person, he couldn’t tell who or what gender, with face taking up the entirety of the shot, face swollen to the point the one visible eye wouldn’t open, mottled by bruising and flecks of blood. He wasn’t positive it wasn’t a picture of a corpse, kept among family pictures. Too much rosiness in the complexion to be a body. Probably. It took him a moment to double check, note the girl had a mole by her eyebrow that the person pictured didn’t, to confirm it wasn’t a picture of herself she’d kept.

Given the same simple wooden frame as the rest. Included among the rest, though placed so she couldn’t or wouldn’t see it regularly.

He left the room behind. The bathroom was the next room, a cheap plastic curtain held up around a plastic tub by a loop of metal pipe. The shower itself was a pipe that stabbed upward through the floor, had a bend, and a simple shower head attached. No typical shampoo or soap. Just soap as rough as the rest of the things in this house, and a nearly empty jar of what looked like bacon grease.

There were two rooms at the end of the hallway. One looked to be a guest room. The other—it would be Rain’s. A little workshop table, a bed, a bedside table, and a set of shelves with a few articles of summer clothing on them. Secondhand clothes, by the looks of it. The bed was unmade and had been for a while.

There were no closets or doors in the other rooms, so he didn’t feel the need to enter and check. He did drop down to a crouch, sitting on his ankles, to get a view under the beds.

It was only when he was done that his hand moved away from his gun.

An anxious habit of his, to ‘clear’ a space. He did it when he got home after more than twenty-four hours of being away. He made a point of doing it or having the kids he trusted do it when they were in a new and unfamiliar place, situation allowing.

Nashua, New Hampshire, his squad had run into cage people—eight feet tall, thick around the chest, bearing improvised weapons, they had captured people as power sources, scooping them up, shackling them in fifty places, and using the shackles to position them, leg inside the cage person’s leg, arm inside the cage persons’s arm, head inside the hollow head, peering through the grate-like mouth. Unwilling passengers and power sources who, because humans weren’t eight feet tall, often suffered breakages to all four limbs when the cage people’s limbs bent at different points than the passengers. One of the passengers had been caught within for two and a half days, dehydrated and delirious, with severe damage to all four limbs. Two more had died.