"Does he intend to buy the entire building?" Min asked.
"Of course. One floor was never going to be enough for a shelter." Shawn looked up the face of it, all nine storeys. "I'm turning this whole building into my own fortress for the end of the world."
He had his reasons, and they came out of the last life.
As far as Shawn could remember, in that life — when he was even more pathetic than he is now, and survived by some miracle anyway, right up until his girlfriend left him and he died — the temperature had climbed so high that in the end the buildings themselves could not stand it.
He knew a second heat wave was coming, and that it would be far worse than this one. The steel reinforcement in the tower blocks would begin to soften, and the high-rises would come down on top of everyone sheltering in them. That was why a complete reconstruction was not optional.
For the moment, though, people could rest a little. The temperature had dropped for a while, and people came out and walked around freely and enjoyed a comfortable evening, not knowing what was still in front of them.
The heat has temporarily subsided, Shawn thought. If I want to do the building work, now is the best time there will ever be.
But before that, there was something else to sort out.
He went back up to his own apartment, where the orphan was sitting on his floor, and threw her out.
The little girl went on calmly eating her chips. Then she said, "So he's chasing me away. That means he doesn't need my ability any more."
She had understood the entire situation correctly. The little one turned out to be extremely clever.
Shawn could not honestly deny that he needed her. The generators ate a monstrous amount of diesel, and the solar panels lost efficiency in extreme heat. Without the child he was, in the practical sense, useless.
He allowed her to stay as long as she liked. She had not asked permission in the first place.
Then Aya decided she needed to see Jinny about something, and got up and ran upstairs without a word, and Shawn decided he had better see what was going on and followed her.
Jinny's ability is worth an enormous amount in a heat-scorched world, which is exactly why Shawn had housed her in his building — to make it more convenient to use her.
Aya remembered halfway up that she had forgotten Jinny's present, and went back down again. And Shawn, without thinking about it, opened the door of the apartment where Jinny had just come out of the shower, wrapped in a towel.
He got out again very quickly, with Jinny screaming after him that he was a pervert.
"She knew I invited her here," he said through the door. "She won't regret moving in. Or isn't she afraid that I might turn out to be another Gerard?"
"What's there to guess about? He's worse."
She knew perfectly well that he had invited her only because of what she could do. And he could believe whatever he liked, she said — a man can chase every desire he has and still remain, at bottom, a loser.
She was right about that.
Aya came running back with the present, and Jinny stayed on at Aya's side, and took on the work of redistributing the water that had been confiscated from the cult. For Jinny it was a kind of chance at redemption. She could finally help people the way she had wanted to help them in the first place.
Shawn, meanwhile, went on following his desires.
So, seven days after the heat let up: on the second floor of the building lived Jinny and the old man. On the third floor lived Min and Lena. On the fourth floor lived Aya, exactly as Shawn had arranged it. Everybody else had left — where to, in an apocalypse, is anybody's guess — and Shawn had taken their apartments off them.
He used the drop in temperature to rebuild the internal wiring of the whole block. The resources needed to put a security system around an entire building are not something an average man can mobilise any more, and everybody who saw it understood that.
Standing on the roof one afternoon, Shawn watched a group of men come up the road towards his house. They had decided that they could simply take the building and everything in it. They regretted it quickly.
After several such demonstrations of who owned this street, even gangs newly arrived from outside the district learned to keep away from Shawn's hideout.
At the temporary government command centre, an officer was looking at a map.
"Something's wrong. Order in this city is already coming apart, and yet this one residential complex stays unusually calm. That cult was destroyed there recently, wasn't it?"
"Yes, sir. But given the current crisis, they simply don't have the resources to intervene in minor gang squabbles."
"My instincts say it isn't that simple." The extreme heat had destroyed normal civic life everywhere, and in that one area there were far too many anomalies.
"I've found several recordings worth looking at, sir."
He watched the video of Gerard and Shawn going over the edge of the cliff together. And then he watched Shawn standing at the top of it, entirely unharmed, while Gerard went on falling.
That same night two men were sent in on reconnaissance.
They reached the building and reported in. They found the electric trap, disabled it, and got into Shawn's apartment — and met Aya in the corridor.
The girl was half asleep. She looked at the two armed shapes and asked, in genuine surprise, whether she had started hallucinating from too many games.
"Why is there a little girl here?" one of them said.
"It doesn't matter," the leader answered. "We neutralise her."
Aya did not like that at all. She informed them that it was impolite to break into other people's houses in the middle of the night, and then she fried them both.
Afterwards she reasoned that since the world was ending she was unlikely to be arrested for it. Any child would have thought the same.
Hearing the noise, Shawn came out, saw her standing in the corridor, and asked why she was not in her room and did she know what time it was.
"It looks like we have problems," Aya said.