Shawn was lying around his apartment doing nothing in particular — though not for long, because that evening Liam came to his door wearing a smile he had clearly put on with his coat.
"So he really does live here." Liam apologised for calling so late. It was unbearably stuffy tonight, he observed, and the sky was covered over; you could not see a single star. He really ought to have changed the turtleneck for a shirt.
Shawn opened the door anyway. "What does the professor need?"
"I heard that Shawn lived here, so I came to see for myself."
So he had tracked him down after all, Shawn thought, and much earlier than expected. But if that was already true, he might as well find out what the man was up to.
"I must admit," Liam said, "I didn't expect our paths to cross again so soon. This is quite an unusual house. Double-glazed windows. A self-contained system." He looked slowly around the hallway. "As though its owner were preparing for the end of the world."
Shawn started spinning yarn immediately. He had simply bought the renovation package on sale, he said. As if anyone could get that many features for less.
"There was something else I wanted to ask," Liam said. "Your neighbour is dead. You know about that, don't you? I examined both bodies. In each case the cervical vertebrae had been severed instantly. With wounds like those you can forget about an ordinary knife."
Shawn decided to play dumb. He is a bad actor, and playing the fool is the only role he has.
"If the professor finds a supplier for a weapon like that," he said, "he should put me in touch."
Liam did not believe one syllable of this worthless performance. "And what would you want such a weapon for?"
"Steaks," said Shawn. "In this heat the refrigerator isn't reliable."
"Nevertheless. I believe both men were killed by the same person."
The professor hinted as broadly as a man can hint, and Shawn went on playing the idiot, and the argument between them was, frankly, rather boring. Shawn let his inhumanity show a little — those people had deserved what they got, he suggested — and the doctor let it be known that he was aware Shawn had been in conflict with them.
"Can the professor remind me," Shawn said, "when exactly I gave him my address?"
Liam produced a photograph. "Shawn knows this man, doesn't he? He is the one who told me where Shawn lives."
The man in the picture did not look at all well. Liam spun his own yarn about it: critical condition, and he had saved his life.
Still playing dumb, the inhuman Shawn thought that the tough bastard probably regretted surviving already.
"At present he's adapting to a new therapy," Liam said. "His body is evolving. He is simply one step ahead of the rest of you."
So the fox meant it, Shawn thought. The professor really is running experiments on living people.
"What is the professor's real purpose? Why did he come looking for me?"
At that moment, in the room behind Liam, the patient woke up, and what came out of him was exactly as furious as his brother had been.
Liam did not so much as turn his head. He held out a syringe instead.
"An immune booster. The heat will continue. The world is going to change. The survival rate of the average person is under ten percent."
"Evolve," Shawn said. "Like the man in his bed?"
"An unnecessary sacrifice. Scientific progress has always required pioneers." Liam's voice never changed. "But Shawn shows the signs of stable evolution. If we cooperate, we may find the key to humanity's adaptation to this new world."
"And if I refuse?"
"He doesn't need to answer tonight." Liam put the syringe away. "The fever won't go away. Infections, illnesses. Let him become my partner. My knowledge and my technology would allow him to live a considerably longer life."
And with that he left.
Shawn stood at the closed door and thought about him. Ironclad psychological stability. Protective instincts of the highest order. Liam was truly not an ordinary man, and he was nothing but trouble; he conducted experiments on living people.
It is funny, because Shawn kills people without thinking about it at all. Now he had decided he needed to get rid of Liam — to do the very same thing the man did, and to go on considering himself a saint while doing it. What hypocrisy.
Meanwhile, in the laboratory, the readouts were steady.
"Vital signs stable. The adrenaline threshold has been exceeded. No sanity as yet."
Liam considered it a success. "They really are perfect catalysts. This one has been reborn. Now it's time for him to complete his first task — bring Shawn here."
Ren had been thinking about their experiments for some time.
"I doubt these experiments will lead humanity to any bright future," she said.
"Activate it."
"We have already crossed a fundamental moral line."
"Ethics." Liam said the word proudly, the way another man says a foreign phrase he has just learned. "When the apocalypse comes, morality becomes a luxury."
He was being a hypocrite about that as well. He had been exactly the same bastard in peacetime; the heat had only removed the last few reasons for hiding it.
He released the thing that had been the young man and sent it out with its orders.
The brute went back towards its own neighbourhood at a heavy trudge. Liam had stated himself that it had no intelligence left, and yet it understood instructions perfectly well, which is one of the several things about that laboratory that do not bear close examination.
Shawn was already waiting for it, standing under a tree with his hands in his pockets. From the look of him he had been standing there for a couple of hours purely for the effect.
The brute stopped in front of him and growled, and out of the growl came words, badly assembled.
"Shawn. You. Die."
Rage: one thousand points.
Its emotions had become far stronger since it stopped being a man. Collection efficiency, Shawn noted with satisfaction, had gone up by at least thirty percent.