In the apartment, the men who had not left the building since the military arrived readied their weapons.
Armed soldiers came down the stairwell after them, and Shawn killed every one of them.
Building defence protocol activated. Residents are asked to remain in their premises and await further instructions.
The soldiers outside were not going to give up that easily. They started firing on the buildings themselves.
The old man and Aya got under a table together.
"How can this be?" the old man said. "Weren't these soldiers supposed to be helping us with the reconstruction?"
And just as the guns were about to bring the walls down, Shawn appeared in the road.
The residents, who had been told to stay in their rooms, all came to their windows to watch instead. Shawn was yelling by then, and it was genuinely frightening — they had started shooting at his apartment complex, and nobody can reasonably blame him for what he did about it.
"We're surrounded by residential blocks," the commander said. "We can't risk civilian lives."
This was said while his guns were putting holes in buildings full of civilians.
"If he insists on sheltering this fugitive, there may not be much I can do right now. But I will withdraw every military resource from this site. Without our help it is only a matter of time before that building comes down on top of him."
Shawn answered him by pulling the equipment out of his storage. Crates of it. Modules. Panels. Cable drums. All of it stacked up in the road in thirty seconds.
"Components for the fortress upgrade," Shawn said, contented as a cat. "The loading area happened to be right next to the hospital, so I made a small detour on the way back."
He had, in short, stolen the materials from the army.
"I'll collect the rest myself," he added. "And as for assembly — I'll handle that from now on."
So that is what a spatial ability means, the commander thought, watching the crates. It isn't just a weapon. It's a logistics corps.
"I'm warning him for the last time," he said aloud. "The heat is going to grow, and grow. When it does, the complete collapse of the cities becomes inevitable — mass chaos, uncontrolled fires, full-scale rioting. And beyond that, foreign forces have already begun crossing our borders to strip whatever resources this country has left."
Shawn said nothing.
"To counter that, and to ensure the survival of our citizens, the state is launching an initiative on a scale never attempted before. The Firmament Project. Multiple layers of thermal insulation. Entire cities sealed underground." The commander's voice had changed; he believed in this. "Humanity will live below, and see the sky only through domed ceilings. Underground residential complexes, completely isolated from the extreme heat, and all citizens relocated into them to survive. The engineering is astronomical and the time is impossibly short. It is a desperate race against the temperature, and for the survival of our people we have no other option."
He looked at the crates in the road.
"That project requires spatial abilities. Abilities like his."
But Shawn cares about his own skin and nothing else, and the people did not come into it, and he refused.
He had the nerve, on top of it, to point out the hypocrisy of the military — a man who proves his own arrogance again every few hours.
And at the same time he laid out the rules by which he intended to play. They do not touch him. He does not touch them.
The soldiers withdrew, promising to come back in a couple of days.
Min had watched the commander go that far, and thought about it for most of the evening, and came to Shawn at night. Shawn was already sitting up waiting for him.
"I'll tell you everything I know," Min said.
He had been in the weapons department. During a routine escort he had noticed a shipment going to the wrong address — and these were not ordinary weapons. They were key technologies designed specifically for operation at extreme temperatures. The recipient was a foreign power.
He had intended to expose the entire operation. What happened instead was that he was arrested. So he took some of the guns and ran, and those were the guns he had later sold to Shawn.
"That batch that went abroad," Shawn said slowly, "was almost certainly the key equipment for the Firmament Project."
"The truth about that project is that — "
"Stop."
Min stopped. "What is it?"
"Someone is watching us."
Shawn went to the window and looked down. There really was an unfamiliar girl standing in the street below.