“We must use time wisely and forever realise that the time is always ripe to do right.”

Nelson Mandela

The camp was vast and dusty, the ground churned up by the tens of thousands of feet that passed over it every day. Matterson had disappeared into this mass of humanity, the vulnerable, the exposed, sometime after the firefight in the hidden catacombs of Italy. Trials had yet to figure out where the man had arranged to meet those members of the Organisation he had brought over to his side, so a physical chase was all there was for now.

Matterson's trail was cold, but in a playground such as this Trials was confident he could find him again. Too many susceptible people here, where the vagaries of life can lead to desperation, desperation to despair. This was the perfect hunting ground for someone like him.

The camps had originally been refugee camps, but now they were far more than that. The crises of the continents, of the world, had created a multitude of homeless and unemployed who now mixed and mingled until those dispossessed by war were indistinguishable from those deprived through other means.

Trials moved through this flood of people and took it all in, every small child who had experienced hardships he never would, every suffering mother or father searching for some answer, some solution to a universe set against them. A mass of individuals searching for hope.

How do I fit into it all? he asked himself. What does everything I’ve done mean? Have I, in the end, made a difference?

A battered old pocket-sized TV propped in the corner of a wide tent crackled out its message in a foreign language, but the image was clear enough. The features of Thomas Matthews hung above the newsreader’s shoulder, followed by a photo of Lt. Jessica Cooper and grainy footage of him being escorted up court steps surrounded by flashing cameras.

Trials thought about his old comrades, and hoped they were handling the fallout alright. He thought about his friends, and a pang of guilt and shame that would follow him to the end of his days resurfaced. He thought about all he could have done, and should have done.

He wasn’t sure if he had made a difference yet, but he was sure as hell going to.