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.

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.