A man from the Ocean Gang was standing in her doorway.
"How did you find my address?" she screamed.
He hit her, and walked in past her, and asked whether she was aware that the money owed to the Ocean Gang fell due today.
"Shawn took it!" Ila screamed. "He took the money, he deceived me — go and find him, take it from him!"
"Your name is written here in black and white," the man said. "She signed. She pays."
Then he told the others to search everything in the flat and bring him anything worth carrying. They went through the rooms breaking as they went, and came back with a couple of handbags and some jewellery, and the boss turned it over with one finger.
"And she calls this payment. This rubbish won't even cover the interest." He and his men had dragged themselves across the city in this hellish heat. They were not leaving empty-handed.
So the men did what such men do, and there is no need to describe it.
Ila tried to explain that Shawn would be here soon, that Shawn would be able to pay them. She got to her phone and called him — but the nasty little coward had already pulled out his SIM card. She called again. And again. Every time, the same recorded voice: the number you have dialled is unavailable.
It took her several attempts to understand that he had abandoned her.
"Shawn's probably busy," she said, with her voice shaking. "He probably can't hear it ringing."
The man threw her phone across the floor. "That spineless little man sold you out. He made you sign those papers so that he would never have to pay a coin of it back."
Shawn sat beside his shelves with a glass of wine and drank it calmly, having sold a girl to those men an hour earlier, and he thought — such a rotten creature — that he was entirely in the right. Nobody had ever taught him a single thing about morals, and it showed.
Afterwards the man asked her what else she had.
"Shawn has supplies," Ila said. "Air conditioning. Cold drinks. Food, mountains of food. It's all at his place." She screamed it. She really had nothing herself, she said, nothing at all, but he had everything at home.
Air conditioning and food, the man thought. It seems we've caught a big fish this time.
He told his men to follow him.
Ila lay where she was and wished Shawn a long and horrible death, and it is difficult to argue with her.
A crowd of bandits went across the district towards Shawn's building, and the person leading them was his aunt. His air conditioner ran twenty-four hours a day, she told them. There were mountains of food in there, and drink as well. The hag led them beautifully. As soon as they had taken the supplies, the boss assured her, there would be something in it for her too.
"Brother Hank is so generous," the naive aunt said. "No wonder he's such a big boss."
She was looking forward to seeing little Shawn brought to his knees.
They reached the house and Hank stopped and looked up at it. "This one has set himself up seriously."
One of his men decided it was his moment. He called out for everybody to watch him take the door down with a single blow — and the instant his foot came over the line he was thrown off it, jerking, by the current. When another genius grabbed him by the arm to pull him clear, the current took him as well.
The others stood and watched with horror on their faces. It appeared to be dawning on them that the food in this building was not going to be easy to take.
Then the loudspeaker came on, and Shawn's voice came out over the courtyard, pleasant as a public announcement.
"Good luck comes. Good luck brings joy and love."
And then he began to torture them, because the live line did not stop at the house. It ran on down the road.
The bandits scattered away from Shawn's walls, and Shawn watched every one of them on his monitors and enjoyed it, and went on talking into the microphone. One step, and they found the hidden grid.
"Stop talking nonsense!" Hank shouted up at the building. "Paying your debts is the law of nature! Give us our money!"
"They found money for the renovations," the aunt shouted, "but not for their debts! How on earth did his parents raise him?"
"The market price of this apartment is four million," Shawn said. "That is more than enough to cover a debt of three and a half. And as for Ila's debt — go to Ila. What does that have to do with me at all?"
Hank could not find a word to say to it. Now only the supplies matter, he thought. Everything else is nonsense. And at last he called up: he was still in a good mood, and it was best to adapt to circumstances, and they should part on good terms; but if Shawn went on looking for trouble he would certainly not be this polite the next time.
Shawn was not going to listen to anything. He put the current through them again, and the system rewarded him for it handsomely.
The crowd was appalled. One day Shawn would become a cruel dictator, and it was becoming clear that the day was not far off.
Hank and his people fled, shouting threats over their shoulders as they went.
Outside it was fifty-two degrees. Inside, Shawn was enjoying life. On the news, multiple deaths from severe heat stroke had been confirmed across the region, and residents were strongly advised to keep their time outdoors to an absolute minimum.
In the residents' chat, everybody was discussing what a rotten human being lived on their stairwell. But empathy and morality were not our hero's thing, so he decided to make them angrier.
He went to the refrigerator, opened it wide, and photographed the shelves — full, stacked, cold — gloating in his heart at the thought of how it would land.
He posted it to the residents' chat. He had not opened a soup kitchen for the poor, he wrote. If anyone wanted something, let them offer something of equal value.
The system, as always, encouraged our hero's bestial behaviour. The storage area expanded to three metres, and another skill was handed to him on a silver platter.
Spatial slicing.
Shawn decided to try it out at once. With one flick of his fingers he chopped an apple in half in the air.
He was becoming more dangerous by the day.