Turns out that report about the Little Sisters Orphanage was—” Sullivan paused, shaking his head sadly. “Well—it was all true.”
They stood outside the “nursery,” looking through the window in the door. A little bare-footed, dark-haired girl in a tattered frock was huddled on a bed, in a corner, staring into space and sucking her thumb.
Ryan let out a long, slow breath. “She’s got a sea slug in her—and she’s producing ADAM?”
“Yep. Apparently, the slugs didn’t produce the stuff fast enough. And using the girls worked to increase the production.” The disgust dripped from Sullivan’s voice.
“Indeed. You’ve confirmed this with Suchong?”
“Yes sir. You want to ask him, we’ve got him under house arrest, just down the hall.” He gave out a sickly grin. “Poetic justice. They’re locked up together, him and Tenenbaum, in one of the rooms they had the kids in.”
“I’ll have a word with them.” Ryan turned away from the door.
“Mr. Ryan?”
Ryan looked at him, frowning. “Yes?”
“What about the kids locked up in there? Do we let ’em out?”
“They are, I believe, actually orphans, yes?”
“Uh—yeah. One way or another.”
“Orphans will need somewhere to stay. Perhaps when we find another way to … to produce ADAM efficiently, we’ll arrange for them to be … adopted. Until then…” He shrugged. “They’re better off here.”
Ryan could see that Sullivan was disappointed by that response. “What do you want from me, Sullivan? These kids will be of use. In time … Well, we’ll see. Do you think we could proceed with our inspection now—Chief?”
“Sure.” Sullivan avoided his eyes. His voice was hoarse. “This way, Mr. Ryan. They’re down the hall…”
Just two doors down, Sullivan unlocked a nearly identical cell. When Sullivan opened the door, Ryan had to step back from the reek of an overflowing chamber pot in the corner of the nursery. Toys were scattered on the floor along with tin plates of half-eaten food.
Brigid Tenenbaum was huddled on the cot in the corner, just like the little girl in the previous cell, but with a buttoned lab coat instead of a frock. She was gnawing a knuckle and the expression on her face was the same as the child’s.
Suchong stood with his back to the door, writing on the wall with crayon in Korean ideograms. He had covered several square yards with the enigmatic writing.
“Suchong!” Ryan barked.
Dr. Yi Suchong turned to Ryan—and he saw that one of the lenses of Suchong’s glasses had been knocked out. There was a purplish mark across that side of his face, and his lip was split.
“Doctor Suchong tried to escape when we raided the place,” Sullivan explained blandly. “Had to crack him one with a truncheon.”
Suchong bowed. “Suchong sorry about writing on walls. A little dissertation. No paper to write on.”
“And what’s the dissertation on?” Ryan asked, nostrils quivering from the stench of the chamber pot.
“Accumulation of harvestable ADAM in splicers,” Suchong said. “Possible methods of extraction.”
“I see. Would you two like to be released from these … quarters?”
Tenenbaum sat up, still gnawing her knuckle, looking at him attentively. Suchong only bowed.
“Then,” Ryan went on, “I’m going to need a loyalty oath. And the understanding that breaking that oath is agreeing to execution. We are in extreme times. Extreme measures are necessary.”
“And…” Tenenbaum’s voice came in a croak. “The Little Sisters?”
Suchong frowned and shot her a warning look.
Ryan shrugged. “They will continue here—we need the … the commodity. In time we’ll find some other way. But it seems you and Fontaine left us with this one for now … And, after all, the children have nowhere to go.”
Sullivan muttered something inaudible. Ryan looked at him. “Something to say, Chief?”
“Oh—no, Mr. Ryan.”
“Very good. Set a guard on this place—but let these two go to their previous quarters and clean up. And see that Suchong gets new glasses.”
Fort Frolic, Poseidon Plaza
1958
Stepping out into Poseidon Plaza, Diane McClintock realized she felt no thrill—felt nothing at all—about winning so much money in the Sir Prize Games of Chance Casino.
She fished in her purse for cigarettes, and it took some looking because her purse was stuffed with the Rapture dollars she’d won, quite improbably, on the higher-priced slot machines. She’d had an amazing run of luck, and it meant nothing to her. It felt like mockery somehow. She couldn’t spend the money on Park Avenue, in New York, where she longed to be.
She lit a cigarette, lingering outside the casino, reluctant to go home. The whirring slots and the agitated people wandering from one game to the next—they were better than no companions. She knew she could spend time with one of Andrew’s friends. But they were hard to bear, after all that’d happened …
“Miss?” It was a woman in a blue dress, a blue velvet cap; she had mousy brown hair, large dark eyes. She clutched a handbag to her. “Miss, my name’s Margie. I was wondering … if you could spare us a donation?”
“Who’s us?” Diane asked, blowing smoke at the ornate ceiling. “You seem to be out here alone. Need money for kids at home?”
“No, I … no. I’m with Atlas’s people…”
“Atlas! I’ve heard about him. Also heard about Robin Hood. I don’t believe in him either.”
“Oh Atlas is real, ma’am …
“Yeah? What’s he like? A good man?”
“Oh yes. I trust him, even more than Doctor…” She broke off, glancing around.
Diane smiled. “More than Doctor Lamb? If that’s who you were going to mention, I don’t blame you for clamming up, Margie. Got traded from one radical ball team to another, huh?”
“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.
YES, SOMEONE CARES! ATLAS KNOWS IT FEELS AS IF NO ONE IN RAPTURE CARES! FIGHT FOR ATLAS! FIGHT FOR THE RIGHTS OF THE WORKINGMAN …
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.
Yes, someone cares …
Apollo Square
1958
“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 craik here, no fun for the workingman, for that is reserved for the swells and their spoiled bettys up in Olympus Heights! Come and start life anew in Rapture, he said! But that was the cat talking to the mouse and the devil talking through the cat!”
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 lured here!” Atlas bellowed. “Lured from a slum in Queens or Dublin or Shanghai or London—to a smaller slum under frigid water! Moving up, we are, right? Moving from living four in a room to living twenty in a room! It’s theft—theft of our future, boyo! Theft of our hope! But there is another way—a way to real hope! A share-the-wealth program! Why should them hypocrites be allowed to accumulate a hundred times, two hundred times, what a workingman earns—when they get it ’cause of our hard work! We work while they sit up there in their penthouses drinking champagne and puffing cigars—imported cigars we ain’t allowed to have! Why shouldn’t every family be given a basic allowance—a thousand, two thousand Rapture dollars, to live on!” Roars of approval at that. His voice rose, and rose again, with every word. “Why should the wealth of Rapture belong only to a greedy few? Now tell me THAT!”
Fists popped up—but they were shaking in agreement. Someone started chanting. “Atlas, Atlas!”
And all the crowd took it up. “Atlas, Atlas, Atlas!”
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!”
“Atlas, Atlas, Atlas, Atlas!”
“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.”
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