Hurrying out of the passage from the Metro, Diane McClintock once more felt lost—though in fact she’d come here for a reason. She was here to find Atlas. Even so, she was overcome with a sensation of insubstantiality, of being a mere ghost wandering a palace.
And then, near the blockade at the entrance into Apollo Square, something caught her eye… a poster plastered to the metal wall.
It asked,
Just those three words, under a stylized, heroic image of a stoic, confident, clean-shaven man in rolled-up shirtsleeves and suspenders, fists on his hips, gazing with visionary intensity into the workingman’s future…
The one time she’d seen him, outside the cafe, he’d seemed like an ordinary man—good-looking, sturdy, but ordinary. And yet he was doing an extraordinary thing—risking Ryan’s constables by engaging in flagrant altruism.
At the very least, Atlas must be a charismatic man. Someone who could inspire her—end her feeling of aimlessness…
She turned to the bearded sentry cradling a shotgun at the blockade—a burly, unshaven man in a work shirt and oil-spotted blue jeans. “Listen—could you tell me… I saw him, once—in Pauper’s Drop. Atlas. He was passing out supplies. I’d… I’d like to talk to him. Maybe I could help. When I saw him in Pauper’s Drop, I just…” She shook her head. “I
The sentry looked at her as if deciding whether or not she was sincere. Then he nodded. “I know what you mean. But I don’t know as I can trust you…”
Diane looked around to see if anyone was watching—then she took a wad of Rapture dollars out of her purse. “Please. This is all I could get hold of today. I’ll pay my way in. But I have to see him.”
He looked at the money, swallowed hard—then he reached out, grabbed it, and hid it in an inside coat pocket. “Hold up right here…”
The bearded sentry turned and called out to another, older sentry. They spoke in low tones; the bearded sentry turned and winked at her. The older guard hurried off. The sentry went back to his post, whistling to himself. With one hand he gestured to her:
Had she thrown away her bribe? Maybe she’d thrown away her life—spider splicers watched Apollo Square from high up on the walls. It was nippy, unevenly lit in Apollo Square tonight, and there were dead men rotting not so far away. The smell made her feel sick. She was still slightly drunk, the space around her whirling ever so slowly, and she thought she might throw up if she had to smell the dead bodies much longer.
But she wasn’t leaving. She was going to stick around till the splicers got her—or she got in to see Atlas.
If Ryan didn’t want her, she’d decided, maybe someone else would.
A woman hurried up to the barricade. “Atlas says okay, he’ll see you, McClintock,” said the woman. Diane tried not to stare at the woman’s scarred face—one of her eyesockets was covered over by scar tissue; her brown hair was matted. “Philo, you come on in with us.”
The shotgun-toting Philo nodded and gestured at Diane with the muzzle of the gun. “You go in ahead of me.”
Diane thought about backing out—but she stepped through the scrap-wood gate and followed them across Apollo Square to Artemis Suites. The one-eyed woman stepped over a low pile of trash in the doorway. Diane followed her into the reeking interior of the building.
Stomach lurching as she picked her way through moldy garbage, Diane entered a stairway that zigzagged up a graffiti-tagged concrete and steel shaft. They climbed four stories up, past drunks and groups of grubby children.
Her escorts took her through a doorway and down a carpeted, burn-scarred hall. The little bushy-haired woman never hesitated, and Philo clumped along behind Diane. The lights flickered again.
“Lights might go out,” Philo remarked, his voice a slow rumble. “Ryan’s turned the power off in the building. We got some jerry-rigged, but it ain’t reliable.”
“I got a flashlight,” the woman said. They came to another stairway, and, to Diane’s bafflement, this time they went down. This stairway was relatively clean, occupied only by the occasional bored sentry scratching himself and nodding as they passed.
Down and down they went, farther down than they’d gone up… down to a subbasement passageway.
Here, they passed under steam-shrouded pipes, their feet splashing through puddles, till they came to a small antechamber with a high, water-dripping ceiling. A Securis door was guarded by a grinning, shivering splicer in a ratty sweater and torn trousers, toes sticking out of his decaying shoes. He had the hard-core splicer’s red scrofula on his face, and he juggled three scythelike fish-gutting blades from hand to hand. The curved blades hissed close to the naked lightbulb on the ceiling, missing it by no more than a quarter inch. “Who’s the extra bitch, tittle-tattle tits?” the splicer asked in a scratchy voice, never pausing in juggling the blades.
“McClintock. Atlas says she can go in.”
“Says you, tittle-tattle tits—we’ll fry your bits if that ain’t it! Ha! Go ahead on in!”
The splicer stepped aside, still juggling, and “tittle-tattle tits” opened the Securis door for them. Diane hurried through, eager to get past the splicer.
They were in a lamplit utility area. Pipes and heating ducts came up through the floor near the walls. The room was warm and smelled of cigarette smoke and mildew and brine.
The cigarette was being smoked by a muscular man seated casually behind a battered gray-metal desk. On the desk was a tumbler and a gold cigarette box.
It was he. The man she’d seen outside the cafe. He wore white, rolled-up shirtsleeves, just like in the poster. A good face, she thought, that seemed to emanate trustworthiness.
Two shaggy bodyguards stood behind him, near a ganglion of valves. Both bodyguards wore coveralls and carried tommy guns. One of them had an unlit pipe dangling from the corner of his mouth.
“I’d be Atlas,” said the man at the desk, with an Irish lilt, looking her over with an unsettling frankness. “And you’re one of Ryan’s birds?”
“I’m Diane McClintock. I work… I
He smiled impishly. “You don’t seem certain of what you’re wanting to see, Miss McClintock.”
She sighed and unconsciously brushed her hair into place with her hand. “I’m tired. Had a few drinks. But… I want to know more about you—I mean, you know, in a friendly way. I don’t work with the constables. I’ve seen things. Heard stories… I don’t know what to believe anymore… I just know—once I was passing by Apollo Square and I saw a woman come over the barricades and… one of the splicers working for Andrew…” She didn’t like to remember it. The woman hurrying along, full of life, one moment. The next, a splicer had sent a ball of fire into her—and she’d sizzled away into a blackened corpse, within steps of where Diane stood. “Well the splicer burned her. And the look on her face… like she was trying to tell me something. So tonight…” She sighed. “I don’t know. I’m just so tired right now…”
“Get the lady a chair, you great ejit,” Atlas growled at Philo.
Without a word, Philo brought a metal chair from a corner, and Diane sat down. Atlas pushed the gold box across the desk toward her.
“Cigarette?”
“I’d adore one.” She opened the box and took a cigarette, her hands trembling. Philo lit it for her, and she inhaled gratefully, then blew the silken smoke into the air. “This—this is a real cigarette! Virginia tobacco! And in a gold box! You do yourself well for a revolutionary…”
Atlas chuckled. “Oh, aye. But we took that from one of Ryan’s little storerooms under Rapture. Sure, he brought it in to sell in a little shop—a shop I used to sweep out, once upon a time. I was maintenance, a janitor in Rapture—come here when they sang me a pretty lie—a promise of working in me trade. Ended up a janitor. And later—couldn’t find work doing even that.”
“What was your trade, before?”
