“I guess you could say that. When she got arrested, I needed someone to… it doesn’t matter. What’s important is, we’re collecting money to help the poor around Rapture. Atlas, he buys canned goods and stuff with it, hands it out…”
Diane snorted. “All this talk of a poor underclass around Rapture. Exaggerated, from what I hear.”
The girl shook her head. “I was there! I had to… to do some pretty awful things. You know. Just to keep going.”
“Really? Is it that bad? There wasn’t any other kind of, um, work?”
“No ma’am.”
“Andrew says there’s plenty of…” Diane let it trail off, seeing the fear on the girl’s face. “Anyway. Donations. Sure—here.” She took a wad of cash from her purse and handed it over. “More power to anyone who pisses off Andrew. But don’t tell anyone it came from me.”
“Oh—thank you!” Margie put the money in her handbag, took out a leaflet. “Read this—it’ll tell all about him…” And then she hurried off into the shadows.
Diane looked at the leaflet’s heading.
Diane smiled, imagining Andrew Ryan’s reaction to seeing the leaflet. She crumpled it up and threw it away. But the words loitered in her mind.
“I wish Ryan would take down that fucking gallows,” Bill McDonagh said as he and Wallace walked by, grimacing at the reek of the dangling corpses. Four bloated, purple-faced bodies, turning slowly in four nooses. Looked like new ones, since last time. It was bloody depressing.
Bill was going to be glad to get his meeting with Sullivan over and hurry home to Elaine and Sophie tonight. A man didn’t feel much like taking a turn in Rapture with this kind of bleakness setting the black dog to snapping at his heels.
“What I can’t figure is,” said Roland Wallace, as he and Bill walked across the trash-strewn floor of Apollo Square, “how Fontaine got all those splicers there to wait for the constables? They’re too loony to recruit—aren’t they?”
Bill chuckled grimly. “You forget, mate, those buggers’ll do anything for ADAM.”
Wallace grunted. “You have a point. So Fontaine bribed them with ADAM. Show up there, take on whoever comes—and the survivors get plenty more…”
“That’s ’ow I figure it, right enough… Here, what’s all this then?”
A big crowd was gathered in front of Artemis Suites—where a man stood on the steps, addressing them.
“Must be that fellow calls himself Atlas,” Wallace said, his voice hushed.
“Oh right—I’ve seen the pamphlets.”
“Started with pirate-radio messages, got people all worked up. Followers leaving graffiti about…” Curious, Bill and Wallace paused on the outskirts of the crowd to listen to Atlas.
At least seventy-five people—most of them seeming to be still human, ostensibly, or not yet far into ADAM—were gathered around this Atlas. He wore maintenance workers’ coveralls. Just one of the people. The man sounded vaguely familiar—but looking closer, Bill decided he didn’t know him. Couldn’t have forgotten a bloke like that, almost movie-star handsome with his lush golden-brown hair and cleft chin.
“Now back home in Dublin we had a saying,” bellowed Atlas, in something like an Irish brogue. “May the cat eat you, and may the devil eat the cat! Isn’t that what’s happened to us, here? You bet it is, boyo! We’ve been eaten alive, twice! First by Rapture and then by Ryan! There’s no
Hoots of agreement from the crowd.
“Aye!” Atlas went on, his voice carrying over all Apollo Square. “We have been lied to, and lied to again! They told us it was all free market here—but what happens? Ryan takes over Fontaine Futuristics! Takes it by force, he does! He starts in with curfews and blockades—turns the place into a police state!”
An approving roar at that. Ryan’s hypocrisy hadn’t gone unnoticed.
“We were
Fists popped up—but they were shaking in agreement. Someone started chanting. “Atlas, Atlas!”
And all the crowd took it up.
Atlas had to thunder the words out to be heard over the rising chant. “And if it’s got to come to a fight— armed with ADAM and armed with guns—then so be it!”
“Like he’s been taking notes from Sofia Lamb,” Bill said in a low aside to Roland Wallace. “But he’s got his own style. More the workingman’s daddy…”
“Why—he’s Huey P. Long!” Wallace said.
“What, that bloke from Louisiana?”
“No—I mean, he’s borrowing from Long’s playbook. The Kingfish they called him, down there in Baton Rouge, king of the southern rabble-rousers. The Kingfish talked exactly like this. Except for the Irish accent. And Atlas tossed in a little Bolshevism…”
Bill shook his head, puzzling over it. “Strange I ’aven’t seen this bloke Atlas before. Been ’ere for years, thought I’d seen every wanker in this big leaky tank of a town.”
Wallace gave him a poke in the ribs with an elbow. “Bill—look up there!”
Bill looked at the ceiling, saw spider splicers creeping across it upside down, coming from three directions—converging right above him and Wallace.
He looked around the edges of the square and saw the telekinetic splicer who’d killed Greavy. She was watching from the wall near the entrance to Artemis Suites.
“They’re closing in on us, Bill.”
“Right; we’ll take the better part of valor and back off—fast. Come on, mate!”
They hurried back the way they’d come. They’d go the long way, through the checkpoint—they both had their ID cards—and then through the transparent passages between buildings to another bathysphere entrance to get where they were going. Or they wouldn’t get there at all.
The splicers didn’t seem intent on pursuing them out of Apollo Square. Which confirmed Bill’s suspicion that they were somehow working for Atlas. They were remaining as his bodyguards…
A word popped into Bill’s mind as they hurried through the passage, striding under a passing pod of dolphins. It was a simple, one-syllable word, summing up what he felt was coming from the inevitable confrontation between this new Kingfish and Andrew Ryan.
More killing. More war. More danger for Elaine and Sophie.
Something had to be done to stop it. Somehow it had to be defused…
A frightening notion came to him. He tried to dismiss it from his mind. But it lingered, whispering to him…
