Cavendish was capable of something like that. He was strong and brutal. He might be pretending to be surprised.
“Me?
“You definitely had the door locked?”
“Goddamn right it was locked! Hey—there’s something else…” He pointed at the opposite wall.
Sullivan looked—and saw words written in blood:
“Lamb!” Sullivan muttered. Ryan could jail the woman, but she was still a thorn in his side.
He snorted, shaking his head. “Love to all!”
Jasmine Jolene had a very comfortable apartment in Olympus Heights, almost as close to the surface of the sea as the council’s conference room. Sipping his martini, Ryan felt a certain pride. A chandelier gleamed; a picture window and the intricately framed skylight offered views into the sea. Turning to gaze out the broad window, Ryan could just make out the red of sunset, the setting sun adding a muted crimson to the iridescent scales of a school of big blue-fin tuna sweeping by.
He glanced at the bedroom door, wondering what was keeping Jasmine. He’d left her lolling on the enormous pink-plush bed, with its pink-satin headboard.
There was a kitchen, a Frigidaire stocked with food, and a liquor cabinet with the best brandies and wines. Andrew Ryan had given Jasmine all this. He had provided for her. The small salary Sander Cohen gave her for her rather clumsy, poorly attended performances in the Fleet Hall would not have paid for much more than Artemis Suites. But she earned her luxuries—Andrew Ryan saw to that, once or twice a month, and with some vigor for a man his age.
He tightened his red silk bathrobe and sipped his martini. Feeling the alcohol, he frowned and put the drink down on the flamboyantly carved side table. That would have been his third martini. He hadn’t been much of a drinker before coming to Rapture. He’d kept it to a minimum until recently. But it seemed to be creeping up on him.
The complainers had opportunities to make a good life in Rapture. They simply did not have the
The graffiti was still out there:
And,
Slogans. It started with slogans. Then it became Communist revolution. Mass murder of real workingmen by parasites.
And indeed—who was Atlas? Sullivan’s intel suggested the name was a pseudonym for some Red organizer. Some would-be Stalin…
Something was going out of balance. The top was spinning, left, right, left, right, wobbling, about to fall…
“Um, Andrew darling, there’s something I need to tell you…”
He turned to see Jasmine, looking rather more full-figured than usual in a pink negligee. She wore pink slippers with little gold puffs on the toes. She patted her golden hair nervously, though she’d already spent some considerable time brushing and grooming after their lovemaking. “What is it, my dear?”
“I…” She licked her lips, and her gaze wandered restlessly to the big window. Her thick black eyelashes batted. She’d always blinked rather too much. “Um…”
There was something she wanted to tell him. She was afraid to, he realized. “Come, come, Jasmine, I won’t bite, what is it? Out with it!”
She chewed a lip, hesitated, started to say something, then shook her head. She looked around with a quiet desperation—then pointed at the corner of a window. “Um—those. Snail things or… whatever they are.”
He looked at the lower edge of the window. Some spiny crustacean was creeping across a corner of the glass outside. “You wish to have your window cleaned of those things? I’ll try and get a crew up here when you’re at work. You know how they like to stare in at you when you’re home.”
“You can’t tell where they’re looking in those big dark helmets. Scary ol’ big daddies, I call ’em.”
“Is there something else you wanted to tell me, Jasmine?”
She closed her eyes, pursed her lips, and shook her head. He could see she’d made up her mind not to tell him.
Ryan opened his arms to her—and she came to him. He enfolded her in a warm embrace, and they gazed out the window, where the light was fading, the shadows of the deep rising with the coming of night…
PART THREE
The Third Age of Rapture
But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all “We died at such a place”; some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left.
15
“So… if I volunteer to be a test subject for these plasmid experiments,” said the man with the scars on his wrists, “I’ll be let out of here…” Carl Wing shrugged. “Sure, I got that part—but won’t I just end up locked up in some other place in Rapture?”
Sofia Lamb hesitated. She was sitting with a therapy subject in the small, overlit, metal-walled Persephone infirmary, and as the lank-haired, nervous little man in the prisoner’s jumpsuit looked trustingly at her, she suddenly wanted a cigarette. She’d given up smoking, but right now she would’ve paid a great many Rapture dollars for a single smoke. But he was looking at her with his sad green eyes, and she had to respond. “Um—
The words died on her lips. She just couldn’t go on. It all sounded so hollow. She was proposing to play Sinclair’s game and send this man to be an experimental subject. And she thought about Eleanor—her own child,
