“I don’t really know,” Rain said. “She doesn’t talk to me. She still hangs out with people from the compound. Fallen. Looks after my aunt while my uncle is in prison. I guess Allie’s way has its flaws, if you pretend so long it becomes your reality.”

Rain said it all without flinching. Like it didn’t bother him.

Gilpatrick was silent.

Rain picked up the picture, used his other set of hands to open up the frame, and checked the back, before shaking his head. “I don’t think I’m right.”

“About?”

“It being someone she knew. Unless this predates my joining the family, and I don’t think it does. I don’t recognize this person, and I don’t remember hearing about this.”

Rain set the picture down. Pale skin, bruises, reds and purples in a pale wood frame, next to family pictures and self-portraits.

“That’s going to bug me,” Gilpatrick said.

“I get it,” Rain said, not moving from the dresser. “A lot of stuff bugs me like that.”

There was creak at the stairs. Gilpatrick turned. Victoria’s lawyer friend.

“We’re ready,” Natalie said.

“Got it,” Rain said, from his cousin’s room. “Coming down.”

Gilpatrick waited for Rain, and walked down the stairs with him. Seeing people downstairs, Rain started to pull his mask on, then decided against it.

“No mask?” Gilpatrick asked.

“No point. You’ll see.”

Gilpatrick frowned.

The living room was cast in a red light. Lookout was there, mask on. A movie played without a screen, suspended in the air above a cube that sat on the floor.

It was Breakthrough, in mixtures of civilian clothes and costumes, faces blurred out. They were in a place that looked like the photographs crews had gotten of the space beneath the cracks. Monsters very like Endbringers.

“Oh!” Kenzie said. “Gilpatrick. Should I start from the beginning so you can see?”

“I’m not sure I see the use,” Marcial said. “I’m not really understanding what I’m seeing. Objective?”

“Get to where we can adjust the data.”

“To do what?” Gilpatrick asked.

“We’ll figure it out when we get there. Depends on the situation,” Rain said.

Which sounds really confident, but amounts to ‘I don’t know’, Gilpatrick thought.

“Now tell us the tactics we need,” Marcial said.

Marcial was built more like a model than a soldier, but she had her battle scars—one earlobe was missing, her eyebrow was cut in half by a scar where hair didn’t grow, and her nose was a bit crooked, owing to an old break. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Veteran New York PRT, a squaddie who had probably clocked more hours on battlefields than any of the capes or civilians still in this compound. They would be high-intensity hours, too.