"Demon!" the people started screaming. "Demon!"
Which is true. Shawn himself did not think so. He stood in front of them and began insulting them instead — a crowd of people clutching at straws in the middle of a disaster, and he told them exactly what he thought of them for it.
Then he told them what Gerard's people had actually been doing. The storeroom. The stacks. The ordinary water in the holy bottles.
The people had lost hope a long time ago, and they could not accept a word of it. They shouted that Shawn was the liar.
Then Aunt Lily came in, and Aunt Lily was radiant.
Aya was well, she told them. Gerard had not lied to them at all. After a whole night of continuous prayer her granddaughter had recovered — and here was the proof of it, here was the miracle they had all been promised.
The naive people believed her instantly. "That's right! Catch the demon, quickly!"
The new nickname suited Shawn perfectly.
But then Aya spoke up.
The one who saved her, she told the whole courtyard, was not their cult representative. It was this strange man here. He gave her the water. If it had not been for that water, she would have died in her bed because of their superstitions.
The people went quiet, and then they went sad, as it came home to them that they had been led around by the nose for weeks.
And at the moment the lie came apart, Gerard shot the girl.
The crowd gasped — a second time, and this time in horror.
"Useless trash!" Gerard shouted from the ground. "She can't even pretend to be a miracle properly — "
And then he stopped, because the girl was not bleeding.
"Are you — " He looked at the pistol in his hand. He had definitely fired it.
Shawn opened his fingers and looked at the bullet lying in his palm. "This could be worth quite a lot of money," he said. "I think I'll keep it."
"Another awakened one." Gerard's face changed. "So that's the same trick he used to block that trash's ability just now."
"It's time to put an end to this farce."
But Gerard began to laugh, madly, and pushed a syringe into his own arm. "Did he really think I came unprepared?"
It was, from the look of what it did to him, the serum Liam had made. The professor had not lied about anything at the end. His work was already everywhere.
Gerard came off the ground at him screaming that he had paid an astronomical price for that immunity booster — and it seems that Shawn does not do well against opponents who are faster than he is. Gerard got his arms around him, carried him over the edge, and took him off the cliff, hoping the two of them would finish together.
All the way down he told his sob story about the unfairness of life, about everything he had been owed and never given.
"He's being too loud!" Shawn was yelling over him. "He's much too loud!"
And speaking of injustice: it was at the precise moment when Shawn was about to die that the system handed him another skill for nothing.
So the very last thing Gerard saw was one more injustice, as Shawn moved back up onto the top of the cliff and left him to it.
Naturally, Shawn concluded from this that he was not merely lucky. He concluded that he was incredible.
When the people saw him standing up there, they screamed that it was witchcraft. It is funny. When Gerard performed his deceitful little tricks they called them miracles, and when Shawn crossed thirty metres of air they called it witchcraft.
And Shawn decided that the girl's abilities could be useful to him. That is the entire reason he decided to help her.
The people started screaming again at that. There was no need to save her. She was the same monster he was. If it had not been for her, Gerard would never have become what he became — and so, in the space of about four minutes, every sin that man had committed was carefully moved onto the woman he had used.
Then the people decided that their prayers would fix someone like Shawn. They surrounded him and prayed over him.
Not even the grave will fix someone like Shawn. He killed all of those people, every one of them, simply because he felt like it.
The girl woke up later and began trying to explain herself.
"You're weak now," Shawn interrupted. "If you want to live, drink water."
"Where is Gerard?"
"He's dead."
She said she wanted to see him one last time.
Then Aya screamed.
Her grandmother had given up entirely. Everything had been a lie, Aunt Lily said, and there was no hope anywhere in it, and then she went off the cliff.
Aya cried for a while. Then she said that her grandmother had chosen to believe those people. She had given in, and she had abandoned her. And Aya was not going to be like her grandmother.
It is a great deal of sense for a child to make on the same afternoon she watched a man take heads off in the street and watched her grandmother step into the air.
At the house afterwards, Jinny said that she had believed Gerard was her saviour, and that all he had ever wanted was to use her for terrible things.
"Before the extreme heat," Shawn said, "Gerard couldn't break into the elite academic circles. And when the apocalypse came, he couldn't become awakened either."
She had been terrified the whole time, Jinny said. At the beginning she had wanted to help people. Before she understood what was happening, she had become an accomplice to the harming of them.
Aya pointed out that she had been completely devoted to that man, and the vile cultist had still ended up shooting her.
Then, for reasons of her own, Jinny wondered aloud whether the rumours about Gerard had been true — that he had preferred men. It is unclear why that occurred to her at that moment, but let it stand.
And Shawn thought: we cannot allow a second Gerard to grow up here. Simply minding my own business in this chaos is not going to be enough.
Then he went out to the people.
"Gerard is dead," he told them. "But he left enormous reserves of water behind him, everything he accumulated from you. I am the one who destroyed his cult. By right I could take every drop of that water for myself, down to the last."
He let that sit for a moment.
"For now, you obey my orders. And I am ready to share this water with you."
Min, standing at the back, wondered what on earth Shawn was up to.
Within a very short time, Shawn had become a complete crook, and people were signing over property agreements in exchange for medicine and water.