"The water storage is somewhere behind this," Min said. "I haven't pinned down the exact spot yet."
"I'll get inside," said Shawn. "When you see my signal, make a diversion."
"And how exactly do you intend to carry all that water out?"
"I have my ways."
The man with the machine gun found him inside of four minutes.
"Where's your card?"
Shawn produced a map instead and said, with great sincerity, that the boss had sent him down to check the water stocks.
The man did not believe a word of it. "Is this kid joking with me? Does he think I'm a child, to swallow something like that?"
Shawn is not a very intelligent man, but he is an extremely cruel one. He took the man's head off and ran on down the corridor. Empathy, evidently, was one of the things he had never got around to developing.
The body was found almost immediately. The next man fired a couple of rounds down the passage, and Shawn cut him into pieces. Then more of them came out of nowhere with their weapons up and came at him together, and Shawn went round the corner and pressed himself into the dark. The men scattered past in every direction — and then a hand touched his arm.
It was Lena.
They stayed still until the corridor was empty. "Why are you here?" Shawn asked.
"I was taken," she said. "What are you doing here?"
He ignored that, and he did not show one ounce of regret about anything she had just been through. "Do you know where they keep the water?"
"Yes." She had been made to clean the storage rooms, so she had learned the way. She would take him.
Lena knew the places where there were definitely no cameras, and because of that they reached the vault quickly.
"Find somewhere to hide," Shawn told her. "Wait until I come back."
He took the wall apart and walked calmly into the vault. A great many skills had been handed to this man for nothing at all.
The guard inside spun round. "What's going on out — "
He looked very frightened, though not for long. Shawn killed him without pausing to think about it for a single second.
Lena, waiting outside, decided after a while that he had been gone too long and went to see whether he was still alive. The warehouse was burning by then. She picked up a brick to defend herself with, and when a silhouette came through the smoke she drew back to swing — but it was Shawn.
"It's done," he said.
Once they were out he gave Min the signal, and Min, who had been genuinely surprised that the whole thing had gone off without one problem, set the bottles alight and threw them down. The buildings caught one after another. People ran, and then stopped running, because there was fire in every direction they turned.
Shawn and Lena were making for the exit when Ila appeared in front of them.
"Help me," she said. "Please. I won't blame you — I won't, I swear, for using my name to get the money." And then it all came out of her, everything those men had done, the beatings, all of it.
But Shawn's small ego mattered more to him than any of that. He stood in the smoke and whined about the past like a wounded child, as though he had not been the one who once ran after her wagging his tail. He called her cruel — he, who had killed men in a corridor twenty minutes ago and made a hobby of mocking the starving. He did not notice a thing.
He struck her, hard, and told Lena to keep walking.
There is a great deal more to say about our hero's heartlessness, and no amount of saying it will change one line of him. Ila was a fool to think he would help her.
Hank and his men reached the storage room and found it empty. Not a bottle. Not a pallet. Nothing but a message left on the wall for them to read:
I took the water. Next time I take your life.
"Who did it?" Hank screamed.
"Shawn," Ila said. "It was Shawn. I tried to stop him. It didn't work." And she added that Shawn had said he was going to kill every one of them.
"South gate!" Hank shouted. "All of you, now!"
Min and Shawn stood on the rise and watched the fire they had lit. "Quite a commotion down there," Min said.
At that moment Hank and his entire gang came around the corner and found them. Shawn was holding a torch, and he looked at the men with open satisfaction. The boss wasted no time; he came straight at him — and Shawn dropped the torch on the ground.
The fire went up in a line between them, a wall of it, chest-high and then higher, and Hank stood on the far side of it screaming that he would kill him, that he would find him and kill him.
"Thanks for the points," Shawn said.
He would take those. He always took those.
It rather looks as though the system is building itself a villain.