“Is he? What is his real name?”
“I’m sorry—he’s being cagey about that. Seems like he prefers an alias. Changes ’em around. Sounds like a secret-agent type to me. G-man is what I figure—hell, how’d he get all the info on boats missing in this area, all that stuff, if he didn’t have connections?”
Ryan pinched the bridge of his nose. He was having small, annoying headaches, more and more often. Hearing that there might be a government agent in Rapture made his head redouble its throbbing. “You got anything on him, Chief?”
Sullivan shook his head. “Same impression. I haven’t found out his name either. Easy enough to do. I can take him over to the new facility…”
Ryan snapped his fingers. “Precisely what I had in mind. He’s an outsider. Who knows who he’s affiliated with. We cannot let a random outsider wander about in here, asking questions… Arrest him immediately, Sullivan. And while you’re at it bring in that wretched Lamb woman. Poole here reports she may be connected to our confetti bomber. I’ve had enough of her Marxist babbling. She’s turned half the maintenance workers against me.”
“You want her charged with something?” Sullivan asked.
“No. I want her to simply… disappear. Into Persephone. Let her followers feel abandoned.”
Sullivan nodded. “You got it, Mr. Ryan.”
“Lamb’s got a daughter,” Poole pointed out. “Girl named Eleanor.”
“Does she? Well, find a home for the girl, Sullivan.”
Poole shrugged. “That colored woman, Grace Holloway, looks after her sometimes. She’ll take the kid…”
“Fine, fine,” Ryan said, with a dismissive wave, “let her take the kid. For now. The child may be of use later…”
“Spider Splicers, that’s what they are,” Greavy said.
“Spider
“Splicers, Bill,” Ruben Greavy repeated. “Splicers. That’s the common term for real plasmid addicts.”
Fascinated, Bill watched the two splicers, a man and a woman, moving on all fours along the sides of a tramcar. They were crawling on the wall like bugs, defying gravity. “Seen my share o’ plasmid users,” Bill allowed. “But this… sticking to things like bloody bugs… Going too far, maybe.”
“Going too far is the splicer way,” Greavy said dryly. “They all go rogue in time. They’ve gotten obsessed, this bunch. They’re all about their plasmid splicing. Injecting Fontaine’s mutagens, looking for EVE to activate it…”
Bill McDonagh and Ruben Greavy were standing by the tram tracks in Apollo Square, watching the tram go by. Adhering like geckos to the metal sides of the slowly moving trams, the spider-splicer couple was ordinarily dressed, but their heads and cheeks were knobbed with ugly reddish welts, growths from abusing ADAM and EVE.
Shifting his heavy toolbox from his left hand to his right, Bill reflected on how tempting plasmids were. He could
But Bill knew better. Some could take them and stay more or less sane for a while. But keep taking them —and you eventually went barking mad.
He watched as the male spider splicer grinned clownishly into the tramcar from its roof, head dipping to stare upside down in a window, leering at the passengers cringing back from him. “You lovey snuggle ducks!” he yelled hoarsely. “You little chocolates in this chocolate box of steel!” He cackled something more that Bill couldn’t hear as the tram trundled away from him and Greavy. But he could see the giggling woman reaching in through a window, clutching for someone’s arm…
A gunshot cracked from inside the tram, and smoke drifted out the open window as the female spider splicer jerked her arm back. She screeched in pain and fury, and her splicer partner fired his own gun into the window while clinging upside down. Then the tramcar slipped from sight beyond the kiosks.
Bill sighed and shook his head. “Out of their ever-lovin’ bloody minds, they are!”
“Yes, I suppose so,” Greavy said thoughtfully. “But I think of it as part of a Darwinian process. This madness, these side effects—they’ll die of it, eventually, fighting each other, perhaps. A possibly necessary winnowing in Rapture. Ryan and I knew something of the sort would come—some vector of purging. Eventually plasmids will be developed with fewer side effects. These early users are like guinea pigs…”
Bill glanced at Greavy. He’d never liked the man much, and that sort of comment was one of the reasons. “We’d best get to that inspection You think we should call the constables about that gunfight?”
Greavy shrugged. “There are so many gunfights now, so much antagonism—the constables can’t deal with most of it. Ryan’s attitude is that if two consenting adults want to duel, let them.”
Troubled, Bill led the way across the tracks and down a short stairway. Workers hoisted a big sign into place at the entrance to a new institution built into a leased space. The sign, with silvery metal lettering, read:
Framing the lettering was a relief sculpture, one on each side, of hands reaching down, to pull other hands upward…
“Never thought I’d see that in Rapture,” Bill muttered, as they paused to watch. “A charity!”
“Shouldn’t be here at all,” Greavy said, frowning. “Just makes things worse. Charity trains people to be dependent. It’s in the natural order of things for people to strive and fail—for a good number of them to fall by the wayside, and… you know. Just die. Fontaine’s Center for the Poor!” He snorted skeptically. “What’s that a front for?”
“Anybody else, I’d give ’em the benefit of the doubt,” Bill said. “With Fontaine—I’ve got to wonder what the bastard is up to…”
“Politics,” Greavy murmured. “Political allies. Maybe his own little army—the army of the poor…”
“He’ll have no shortage of poor to draw on,” Bill said as they moved off. “Artemis Suites and Pauper’s Drop are stuffed with blokes out of work—and if they work, they still feel crowded and underpaid. Not everyone can start their own business. And if they do, who’ll clean the toilets?”
“You know where Fontaine gets the money for that charity?” asked Greavy with rhetorical pompousness. “From selling ADAM! And why are a lot of the poor impoverished? Because they’re addicted to ADAM! They’re spending all their money on it! The irony is naturally lost on the hoi polloi…”
They walked to the nearest wall, not far from the entrance to an apartment complex—and almost immediately Bill felt cold water dripping on his head.
He looked up, saw the discoloration high on the wall where it met the big, heavily framed windows arching over the room, several stories up. He admired the Wales brothers’ vision, building big public spaces like this one. The high glass ceiling eased the sense of confinement, gave people access to something like sky. Infused by light filtering green-blue from the surface, the sea was directly overhead. The windows curved down to meet the walls, and through the glass near the ceiling was a rippling vista of other Rapture buildings, light streaming up their towering facades, neon signs blinking.
Another drop of water fell from the ceiling and splashed his shoulder. “Pressure crack,” Bill guessed. “From the look of the puddle it’s been here awhile. Wish I could climb walls like those spider-splicer bastards, get a closer look. Well, I think we’ll have a team go out in the diving suits, apply some sealant, then we’ll see if—” He broke off, staring, as a wrench floated up from his tool kit, as if weightless, and bobbed in the air in front of him.
