“Sure, if you want to call them that. No leadership, no communication. They come, they do their shifts, they leave, and they act as if they’re insulted if we try to ask for details or if they can appoint a liaison. Those thinkers don’t think,” he said.

“And then John Druck, and Mortari, and the organizers on the far side, in Earth Bet—” Heather went on.

Gary checked the timers. His main window was an overhead map of everything with lots marked out and an 8-bit bus ticking along the map millimeter by millimeter. It was supposed to be black, but it was now ticking back and forth, an alarming red.

She leaned close. “Late.”

“Help me out, Heather? See if you can’t find Ari and figure out if he knows where we’re getting tripped up tonight? People keep showing up later and later, and they’re getting processed slower.”

“I think we’re all tired, Gary.”

“Feels like more,” he said. “Find Ari?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Don’t fall asleep.”

“I’ve got coffee.”

A thinker near the main portal relieved the detestable girl with the rats.

The ‘heroes’ did their own thing. Other factions were serving their own leaders. Druck’s labor, Mortari reporting to Wynn. That left a share of maybe twenty or thirty percent who were citizen volunteers, serving under him. He’d organized the volunteers and set the systems in place to train them. The backbone was a team of people that he’d once hoped would be able to go back to Earth B and start cleaning things up enough that they could start resettling it.

He’d hoped they’d be able to go home.

It was the numbers that slipped through his fingers, and drove home how out of reach it all was. Six hundred bodies out of twenty million. Twenty to thirty percent of the three thousand people here were his, or were supposed to be. But so many of them believed in the Shepherds, felt the Shepherds’ views aligned with their own. Gary knew they didn’t.

The lights flickered, spotlights going off, then coming on one at a time, unevenly, as the power came back on. He could hear the distant machinery buck into action as generators came online.

He looked around his tent, spotting his bulky flood flashlight in the moment before the power went out for good.

The generators only ever really bought them a second.

Blind, he went to the flashlight, hitting the button to turn it on. There were battery powered lanterns in one of the totes. People nearby came to him like moths to a candle. He was one of the only proper sources of light. The others were Patrol, officers, and others with flashlights as part of their standard operating gear. Those lights were more for personal use.