They tried to help the fur traders fight the fire with buckets of seawater from the harbor, but there weren’t enough buckets and the flames were spreading fast. In desperation, the crowd turned to Fergus for help.

“Can’t you do something about this?” they begged him.

He tried to say no. He’d promised himself he would refuse. But when their pleas turned to threats, Fergus found himself in an impossible situation.

“Fine then,” he said angrily. “Stand back.”

Once everyone had retreated to high ground, Fergus used all his strength and power to summon a giant wave from the ocean. It crashed into the town and put out all the fires, but as the great surge of water retreated again, it lifted the houses from their foundations and took them along with it. The crowd watched in horror as the whole town was swept into the sea.

Fergus ran for his life. The crowd, furious, chased him through the streets and up into the hills, where he was finally able to evade them by hiding in a snowbank. When they had gone, he got out, frozen to the bone, and stumbled through the wilderness.

After a few hours, Fergus happened upon some men in the woods. It was the captain and his first mate. The captain leaned against the base of a tree, his shirt soaked with blood. He was dying.

Shaw laughed when he saw Fergus. “So they turned on you, too. I suppose that makes us brothers-in-arms.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Fergus said. “I’m not like you. You’re a monster.”

“I’m just a man,” the captain said. “It’s you they consider a monster. And what people think of you is all that really matters.”

“But all I’ve ever tried to do is help people!” said Fergus.

After he’d said it, though, he wondered if it was really true. The ungrateful crowd had been threatening him when he summoned a wave to douse the fires. Had he, in his anger, created a larger wave than was needed? Had a small, dark part of him destroyed the town on purpose?

Maybe he was a monster.

He decided the only thing to do was to seek a life of permanent solitude. Fergus left the captain to die and walked down the hills toward the town. Night was falling as he slipped through the ruined streets, and no one saw him. He looked for a boat at the docks that he might use, but they had all been unmoored and scattered out to sea by the great wave.

He jumped in the water and swam out to something that appeared in the darkness to be a large, flipped-over boat, but it turned out to be one of the town’s wooden houses, floating on its side. He crawled in through the front door, summoned a wave to right the house, and rode it out to sea, due south.

For days he pushed his houseboat farther and farther south, eating fish that flopped through the front door. After a week, he stopped seeing icebergs. After two the weather began to warm. After three weeks, the frost cleared from his windows, the seas grew calm, and a tropical breeze began to blow through the windows.