Gary’s supply was the kind of thing meant to light up work areas. He passed them out until he saw a face he recognized, and then delegated.

“Where’s Ari!?” he called out.

He got mixed, inconsistent answers.

“The Shepherds?”

“Full patrol,” came a nearby report.

He had no idea what that meant. He’d tried asking about terminology before, too.

Up on the tower, Ed had battery power for a floodlight.

“Conserve batteries!” Gary called up. “Only half on at a time, until we know what’s going on!”

His computer had a battery of its own, and the machine it was hooked up to gave it a satellite feed. In a vast sea of darkness, with much of the city unlit at this late hour, people were retreating to Gary’s tent.

It was a primitive instinct, like cavemen retreating to the shelter of the campfire. The instinct made it hard to check his computer.

It couldn’t be easy. The stalled convoy was moving again. If it had stayed put, then at least they could get organized and ready before it appeared.

“We don’t get a break just because it’s dark! Another convoy is coming through, and it looks like eight hundred!” he called out. “There are construction helmets with lights mounted on them in the tent with the barricades! There should be flares! We need enough light that we can point them in the right direction and keep them from driving into anything! Go!”

People ran to do as he’d ordered. Others were moving the opposite direction, clustering closer.

Why wasn’t Mortari leading? Why couldn’t the heroes be here to offer up one of their magical solutions?

As if thinking about them had summoned them, he saw how the girl with the rats was part of the crowd, and her eerily terrible mask with its bent nose was made all the worse by the dim lighting that came from low, below-the-neck angles.

“I’ll help,” she said. “Even though I’m on break.”

Then she turned to go.

When he’d been in fourth grade, an abysmal teacher had left him so stressed out that he’d gotten an ulcer. It was the kind of person he was. He could remember the ambient pain across his stomach, the distended way he’d felt, as if the stress had gathered inside him and was stretching his skin, and he could remember the acid taste in his mouth. That teacher and that experience had shaped him, driving home a distaste for authority figures who couldn’t lead.

He hadn’t had an ulcer since two years ago, but something psychosomatic made him feel echoes of those old sensations and tastes when he was acutely stressed.