“You got it wrong,” he said. “We put our trust in you when you come to places like this, but I’ve been here for a week and the Shepherds have barely said a word to me. They barely communicated with Ari. They left tonight and I had to send someone after them to try and open channels of communication. I didn’t get a chance, and now dozens are dead.”

“That could be how they operate, let’s not get carried away,” Defiant said.

“No,” Gary said. His voice was firmer. “No.”

“I talked to them,” Dragon said. “They didn’t want to tip anyone off that something was wrong. They thought they would deal with this discreetly.”

“People died! A—a horrendous amount of people died!” Gary Nieves shouted. At ‘horrendous’, his voice cracked like a teenager’s. He’d been a politician, a businessman before that. Had anyone laughed, he wouldn’t have blamed them. He might have stomped off. But there was only silence. When he turned to look, people gave him encouraging nods. He went on, “In Gold Morning. Broken triggers. The monsters you try to keep secret from us. Here.”

“They got it wrong. We’re only human, Gary. We’re trying our best.”

“No. You make yourselves out to be more than human. You have more, you put on costumes and you dress yourselves up, but you know… the Shepherds not talking to any of us and going it alone isn’t an isolated incident.”

“Defiant and I had our reasons. If you’d sit down and talk to us, I could tell you about our ongoing projects, and how we can start making great strides.”

“I don’t want your answers,” Gary Nieves said. “Your solutions—if they worked, if they properly worked for us, then we’d be leap years ahead of the other worlds. Instead? When the power went out and people flocked to the light of the monitors and flashlights, I was left imagining that we were primitives gathered around the light of a fire. That’s where we are.”

“You exaggerate,” Defiant said. Dragon laid a hand on the man’s arm.

“I want to open a dialogue,” Dragon said. “But there are wounded.”

Gary looked at the wounded who were being tended by the paramedics. People that had been on site already, ready for refugees to arrive, and people from nearby areas, who were starting to filter in.

Many were paying a wary eye to Gary and his stand-off with Dragon.