While the courtyard was busy deciding that he was a saint, Liam walked around the corner of the building and found a cat.
Now he understood why the movements on the tracker had been so chaotic. The discovery disappointed him greatly.
In the basement, Liam began his so-called inspection. The heat down there was unbearable even in the dark. He asked the ordinary questions a doctor asks — how long, how bad, since when, any dizziness — and people answered them, one after another, relieved to be asked anything at all.
Only Shawn stood off to the side in a hoodie, in that heat, watching Liam instead of watching the queue.
As expected, Liam collected blood from every single patient under the guise of a routine test.
Shawn was still wondering what the man's actual objective was when the young man he had fought outside came running down the stairs shouting that his brother was hurt, that the wound had gone bad, that the professor had to help him.
Liam was perfectly calm about it. "This is a new broad-spectrum drug. It accelerates healing and fights the infection." He pressed the plunger and stood back. "He'll need to rest for a couple of days."
In general he behaved exactly like a normal doctor. What Shawn noticed was that afterwards, Liam did not look away from the patient once.
The brothers went outside, and Shawn followed them.
"Are you all right?" the young man asked.
His brother had started to shake. The veins came up on his face in dark cords. Then his hands seemed to burst, and his eyes turned red, and whatever was left in his head went out of it. He took his brother by the throat.
"What are you doing? Have you gone mad?"
Something came out of the infected man that was not language, and he threw his own brother to the ground with every ounce of his strength.
And then he saw Shawn, whom he hated more than anyone alive.
He was bigger than he had been ten minutes ago. He came at Shawn like a falling wall — and, surprisingly, all that swollen fury could not lay a finger on one skinny simpleton.
His strength had increased at least threefold. But the joints were locked and stiff, and every attack came in on a perfectly straight line, which is nothing like a normal reaction to any drug.
The era of superhumans was already on its way, and it was arriving through the needles of doctors like Liam.
This one, though, would not live to see it. Liam killed him too. The corpse count on that man's account was getting long, and every one of them died badly.
Earlier, when he had injected the serum, Liam had noted that he had built nanobot locators into it. A malfunction was unlikely. The data flow had been normal one minute before.
Now he stood over the body and wrote up his findings on the spot: the prototype was producing neural collapse through over-stimulation. That should not, however, have been the direct cause of death.
He crouched and studied the wound instead. The cut. Was it the same cut as the one on his door lock? To divide matter that way, with no external equipment and no weapon at all —
He had sensed on the day they met that Shawn was an anomaly, and his assessment had turned out to be correct. This was the one he had been looking for.
Behind him, the younger brother made a sound.
Liam went to him immediately, reporting as he came that the man was seriously injured.
"Professor? What are you doing here — where's my brother? What happened to him?"
Liam said that he was very sorry. Then he asked whether the young man knew this other man, and said that he believed Shawn to be responsible for what had happened to his brother.
That part, at least, was not a lie in the way the rest of it was.
"Do you know where he is? We need to find him before he harms anyone else."
"I know where he lives," the young man said. "I can show you."
"Your injuries matter more at this moment. We'll take you to the laboratory. You'll stay there until you've fully recovered."
The naive boy thanked him.
At the lab he asked, still lying down, how his brother had turned into that thing. Everything had been fine with him. He had taken the injection and been fine, and then he had gone mad.
And as he was saying it out loud, it dawned on him that Liam was not an ordinary doctor at all. He turned his head and looked at the man with real fear.
"An extreme physiological reaction," Liam said. "Serum rejection. We'll carry out a full diagnostic immediately and provide the best available treatment."
"A rejection reaction," the boy mumbled. "But — what about me?"
It was far too late to start doubting. He was already captured; he was not going to be leaving that room. For the sake of science, Liam informed him, and for his own good, he should keep quiet.
The experiment on him had already begun.