Her name was Eliza, and she was an agent.
"She really walked into the yard and not one alarm went off?" Min said. "Who is she?"
"I'll deal with her."
Shawn went down. The girl in the road was not particularly surprised to see him coming, and when he was close enough she called him by name. She had the look of someone who had been waiting for this meeting for a while.
"The security system here is surprisingly weak," Eliza said. "It was easy to get past unnoticed."
Shawn did not care about that at all. "Who are you?"
So she told him. She listed her entire life for him — the school she had graduated from, the town she was born in, all of it, in order — and then she added that she was the one who understood him far better than his own country's military did.
"Digging into someone's past isn't difficult these days," Shawn said. "What is your purpose?"
"I didn't come here to fight." She looked up at the building behind him. "He's building a shelter. But how long will a shelter like that last, when the real apocalypse begins?" She let that stand for a second. "He must already know about the Firmament Project. A grand initiative that will change the fate of humanity. Except that it isn't so simple. That project will only allow part of the population to survive."
She waited for him to work it out, and then said it anyway.
"Let him think about how many people those underground sectors can physically hold. The population of his country alone is far too large for them. So once the project is completed, a brutal selection process becomes inevitable. And at that moment, the poor and the powerless are the first ones abandoned."
She was offering him cooperation with her country. Unlike his own, she said, they were trying to save all of humanity.
The naive woman had no idea that Shawn does not care about humanity, or about the poor, or about anyone at all except himself.
She had been sent to make contact with people like him. She also knew, she said, that his own military had already invited him into their project.
"So she wants me to commit treason."
"For the sake of saving humanity."
And Shawn, as always, went capricious as a child and began shouting that he refused to be used as anyone's pawn.
Instead of answering him, Eliza drew a pistol and fired several times.
It did not help her in the slightest. Our hero's reactions being what they are, the bullets ended up in his hand.
"So the rumours are true," Eliza said. "That's exactly what I wanted."
She put on a pair of glasses. Collecting data on his spatial abilities had been her real objective from the start.
"He made a very big splash at that church," she said. "That gave me everything I needed."
Shawn did not like it at all when people dug at him like that. He arranged himself into a pose that he thought looked impressive and informed her that prying into other people's secrets was a disgusting habit.
More disgusting than being petty, selfish, and killing people for entertainment, presumably. That thought would never occur to him.
And Eliza got away without any trouble at all.
Shawn understood that the problems were going to multiply from here. His abilities were far too easy to test. It was worth considering hiding them.
In the morning, builders appeared from somewhere.
"What the hell happened here?" one of them said, staring up at the shot-through walls. "I've never seen anything like it."
"No more questions," Lena told them. "Just do exactly as I say. We need to make sure everything is sound."
As one expects from a genius, Lena needed a few glances at the plans and understood the entire scheme. In a couple of days, miraculously, the house was rebuilt.
Eliza, meanwhile, went back and reported that the recruitment had failed.
There was a man waiting for that report, and standing next to him was Ila. He was not from this country, the man remarked, but he really did like it here.
"What a pity. A talent that refuses to serve me is nothing more than a hindrance." He waved a hand. "Just kill him. It would be merciful. I'd be giving him a very fine way to die."
He turned out to be rather a piece of work himself.
Lena walked down the street that afternoon thinking about logistics. Nothing was moving now; if she wanted supplies she would have to negotiate for them in person, face to face, and pay whatever they asked.
She was so deep in it that she did not see the man until he had hold of her.
Some time later Lena came round in chains, and Ila was sitting next to her.
Her head cleared slowly. Ila watched her come back and said, "So it was you. You're the one who helped Shawn build his shelter."
"You're his ex," Lena said. "You took me to get revenge on him."
"That's right." Ila smiled. "And I'll give you one chance to survive. Bring him here for me and I'll let you go."
"Do you really think a trick that cheap would fool Shawn?"
"You don't need to worry about that. Just tell me whether you'll do it or not."
Unfortunately, Lena refused.
Ila laughed. As soon as she managed to coax him out of that miserable shelter of his, she said, her goal would be achieved — and until then, there was still time, and she could amuse herself with Lena.
But Ila did not get the time.
The wall came in, and a tank came in through it. Behind it came the commander, who, despite everything that had passed between them, had come for Lena anyway.
Ila and her men were taken and driven away. Lena, on her feet again, asked how they had known where to come.
"My mission is to save civilians," the commander said.
Then he sent word to Shawn: the target had been neutralised, and his companion was alive. How Shawn came to hear about any of it in the first place is unclear. They protect people, the commander added, and in exchange for that, they ask for cooperation.
Shawn thought about it for a long time afterwards.
His premonition had been correct. With the undercurrents shifting the way they were, the danger was going to reach the people around him whether he cared about them or not.