He still remembered the sounds, and those frantic fights where they had tried to dismantle the things without hurting those within. They’d never caught, found, or heard of the master who had created the things after the incident.

In Manchester, he had checked in regularly with Lucky Break, a kid with powers. Wards were a non-consideration according to the kid, and at sixteen he was old enough to be emancipated and independent, yet too young to take good care of himself. Then-twenty-five, Gilpatrick had tried to offer the best advice he could, while watching the kid ping-pong around the local cape scene.

At an age when many kids were still figuring themselves out, L.B. had been flirting with villains, trying his hand at being a mercenary, and doing odd jobs for odd teams. Gilpatrick had pulled strings when the kid had been brought in for questioning, had let stuff slide or pretended not to know the full story, just to stay close to the kid, because the alternative had been that the boy wouldn’t have any guidance at all.

But Lucky Break found what he was looking for, apparently. Then-seventeen-year-old L.B. got into a relationship with villainess Pirouette, or Pirou for short. Gilpatrick couldn’t know the woman’s age for certain, but between her visible tattoos and how long he’d known she’d had the tattoos, he was comfortable putting her somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty-two to thirty-four. The start of the relationship had coincided with the end of Gilpatrick’s ability to get L.B. to listen to anything he said.

Eight months later, a forensics team was excavating L.B. from a barrel that had been filled with concrete and dropped to the bottom of Massabesic Lake. Gilpatrick hadn’t been able to finish reading the report of what had happened pre-mortem.

No knowing if L.B. had cheated his team and invited reprisal, or if it was connected to Pirou being seen with an ex of hers just weeks after L.B. had first disappeared. No knowing if there was something else he could have said, or if it would have been better for him to take the kid by the shoulders and shake him violently until he came to his senses, or scream at him, beg, or make offer of a couch to sleep on for just a day or a few hours of normal.

Or if being known to exchange a casual ‘hello’ with the guy in the PRT jacket had marked L.B. out as a rat, and doing absolutely nothing at all would have been best.

It made the dark corners of the world feel darker. So Gilpatrick investigated the corners.

He stopped at the girl’s bedroom door again, standing in it, staring out across the room at the picture. More than a moment’s pause, this time. A minute.

“Gil?”