One of the children came and sat in my lap. I push her off, I shout, 'Get away from me!' I can see the Adam oozing out of the corner of her mouth, thick and green. Her filthy hair hanging in her face, dirty clothes, and that dead glow in her eye... I feel... hatred, like I never felt before, in my chest. Bitter, burning, fury. I can barely breathe. And suddenly, I know, it is not this child I hate. - Bridgette Tenenbaum
"Honestly Mello, it's so cool." Matt grinned, blue sparks flying between his fingers as they trudged through a narrow tunnel made of glass, so that they could see the bright city surrounding them. "I bet you're jealous."
"It's not cool Matt. It was the worst idea you've ever had." Mello replied, sulkily.
"Oh whatever, if I didn't have it then we wouldn't have got any further than the first room." Matt replied, smiling to himself as he admired his hands.
"Hallo? Hallo?" A woman's voice asked through the radio still clutched in Near's hands. She had a thick German accent and the four of them knew instantly that this must be Tenenbaum. "You want to ignore me? Fine then. But I know you are there and soon, Ryan will too. You will not survive Rapture by yourself. Do you even know how to recharge your Plasmids? No, I don't think so. You cannot trust anyone here but you can trust me. If you want to speak to me then only use channel eight, that way no one else will hear us."
Matt looked up at L, who shook his head. They were about to go through the next water-tight door when Tenenbaum started to speak again. L didn't want to risk catching someone's attention so he listened.
"I did some terrible things. But I know what I did was wrong. Now… I am trying to fix them. You do not know the history of Rapture and the civil war that took place and these are things you need to know to understand. The battle between Ryan and Fontaine… And it was all my fault because I discovered the Adam. You are listening now, yes? I know why you do not want to answer. You cannot trust anyone, correct? That is true but if you do not know the facts then you will die here and there will be no one to find your body but the Little Sisters and the Splicers."
There was a pause as the boys hesitated, silently exchanging their thoughts.
"It would be safer not to trust anyone. For all we know, she is the kidnapper." L said, walking ahead.
They entered a dingy room with hardly any lighting and everyone froze. Facing them was an old, dry corpse that was mutilated beyond recognition. Mello prodded Matt, pointing to a shadow moving on a wall. A hacking cough accompanied the shadow, as the figured stumbled around, muttering to itself.
"Stuck up bitches. I'm good looking! Can't they see that?! Steinman will fix me, he will… Then the ladies will be knocking down my door… Hello? You come to laugh at me too?! I know you can hear me." The man yelled, as the shadow moved towards them. Mello and L clutched their weapons as the Splicer came around the corner.
Around his head was a bandage and he resembled the corpse more than he did a live human. His jaw was slack and hanging open and his skin was tight against his skull, sagging underneath the eye that wasn't covered by the bandage. More important than his appearance was the fact he was holding a pistol, which he immediately pointed at L. Before he could pull the trigger Matt reacted with lightening speed, aiming and electrocuting the man who had been standing in a puddle. The electricity skipped across the water as the man shuddered in anguish, yelling agonisingly and died instantly.
Silence clouded over them and Matt looked down at his hand in disgust. "I'm… a murderer."
"You saved my life." L corrected, looking incredibly guilty for the second time. "And… I think… It's either kill or be killed. Whatever happens down here… stays down here. No one else will know. If we want to get out of here alive and rescue the girls then I suppose…"
"You're condoning killing people that aren't in the frame of mind to think rationally." Near murmured.
"Yes I am." L replied. "Because otherwise both you and I would be dead now."
"Listen to me." A voice they recognised as Tenenbaum spoke through the radio. "You must be very afraid. I am afraid too but this is partly my fault. I know this now. This is wrong. But I can help you. You must be here for the girls, yes? I am the only one that can save them now. They are Little Sisters, but I have the power to fix them. You do not have to trust me if you do not wish, but you need the Plasmid I have. We have to meet. I promise you, I will not kill you. If I wanted you to die then it would be better for me to let the Splicers have you. Those girls do not deserve this and bringing children down into this hell is unforgivable. But they are not afraid because they have been destroyed. Their families will never see them again if you do not listen to me now."
L continued to ignore her voice as he stepped warily forward.
"Please, it is important! Even if you do find the girls, you will be killed if you try to take them. You must listen to me. I will tell you everything. Please… I have to make this right."
L stopped in his tracks and considered what she was saying. It was true that not having contact with anyone else was the most sensible thing to do but there was also more chance of them dying without information about Rapture than there was by contact with Tenenbaum. They couldn't have been in Rapture longer than an hour, and already he, Near and Matt could have died. He turned towards the other three, his hands in his pockets.
"What do you want to do?"
"Well personally, I want to speak to her. I want to know more about my hand." Matt replied. Near nodded in agreement. Surprisingly, Mello was the one taking L's question most seriously.
"She didn't sound like she was lying and if we're careful not to give any details away then we stand to gain more than she does. They'll notice the helicopter outside eventually. We may have already been caught by a security camera and we wouldn't know about it. I think we should listen to what she has to say."
L paused, his head falling to one side. He had hoped that one of the others would have found a more valid reason to remain undetected but as he suspected that wouldn't be possible. He turned the dial to the number eight mark and pushed the button in.
"Okay. I'll listen."
"You will? Danke. Where are you at the moment?"
"I can't tell you that. I can't trust you." L replied simply. There was a pause.
"I understand. Listen, there is a sea slug that is able to produce Adam. The more Adam you have, the more Plasmids you can have. You will find blue Eve hypos around Rapture, you need these to recharge your Plasmids. Without Adam, we could not have achieved genetic modification and I was the one to discover this. I… I planted the Sea Slug inside the little girls and they were mentally conditioned to take the blood from corpses and drink it, so that the sea slug would regenerate the Adam in the Splicer's blood stream and we could make more. To do this we turned them into Little Sisters. They are always protected by a Big Daddy and if you go near the girls then you will be killed. But I want to save them. So… I created a Plasmid that can reverse the girl's physical conditioning and some of their mental conditioning. It is the best I could do and the only way to save them now. I need to meet you so I can give you this Plasmid."
"No." L replied, defiance in his voice.
"…Perhaps your distrust will serve you well in Rapture. Fine then. I will leave the Plasmid inside a Teddy Bear for you to collect yourself. Do not speak to anyone else. Fontaine and Ryan and even Atlas are using my girls for Adam. They harvest the sea slug and that kills the child. There is only me you can trust."
L turned the radio back onto a neutral channel and handed it over to Near. Mello bent down to look at the dead splicer and pried the pistol from his hand, giving his crowbar to Matt. Matt's attention was elsewhere though, to the blue light coming from around a corner. He walked towards it, making sure he wouldn't be seen by anything and picking up the hypo. 'Eve' was written on it in formal scrawl so he dropped it into his own bag, to Near's disgust.
L picked up a first aid kit that was lying on the ground and then they left the dim room of dead bodies and moved ahead. If they had expected anything dissimilar to what they had already witnessed then they were disappointed. Broken rock lay crumbled on the ground and corpses littered the corners as though someone had tried to tidy the room and pushed all the dead bodies to the side as decoration. Sticky blood stained the floor, leaving footprint marks wherever they stepped.
They stood close to each other for support. They didn't know how long it would take Tenenbaum to hide a teddy bear for them to find or where she was going to put it so they moved fairly quickly – L was conscious that their mission could take a lot of time and they only had a limited amount of food.
Just as they opened a door, leading into another almost identical room they heard a loud, metallic groan and the ground shook beneath their feet. Near looked alarmed and backed away slightly as L crouched down to try and get closer so he could see what he was up against. Matt flexed his fingers, getting ready to fight.
Near immediately recognised the monster as the doll that had washed up on the beach. "I told you so Mello." He muttered, unable to let the opportunity pass. Mello frowned slightly but his focus was on the Big Daddy with its glowing yellow face.
A heavenly voice made them all jump. "Look, Mister Bubbles! It's an Angel."
They knew something was wrong. The voice didn't sound right. It sounded hollow and raspy – not how you would expect a six-year old girl to speak. L moved forward silently, trying to see if the voice that bore a slight resemblance to a child's could really exist in such a dangerous place.
What he saw shattered everything he believed in.
A beautiful little girl in a tattered dress and bare feet stood above a dead body. In her hand was something L had never seen before. The contraption consisted of an oversized syringe with a handle attached and at the end of the syringe was something identical to a baby's bottle made from glass. The child hummed to herself and the corrupted voice echoed around the room. She held the weapon tightly above her head with her petite hands and thrust it into the corpse, piercing through the dead organs.
She pulled the trigger back with her chubby fingers and the bottle was immediately filled with red liquid. Without hesitation or opinion the girl unscrewed the bottle from the syringe and drank the contents, spluttering slightly as she did so. Blood, tissue and other things dripped down her chin and tainted her dress as she wiped it away with the back of her hand. The girl looked up, her whole eyes glowing bright yellow as she reached for the robot's hand.
L had frozen, disturbed. He had already known that this city was beyond anything he could have expected but he had never imagined another human being would have the capabilities to turn a child into a mindless, mutated creature for their own selfish addictions. They had destroyed an innocent child's life – perhaps forever – and created what could only be described as a monster. He couldn't move, his joints locked into place as his mind tried to reject what he had just witnessed. He existed to give justice to innocent humans and catch murderers and other criminals that broke the law. To help humankind. What he saw in that one girl's sightless eyes destroyed everything he stood for.
Near stepped forward, as though in a trance. He wasn't like L – he couldn't believe that what he was seeing was true. He gingerly held out his hand and bent down to the girl's level when he caught her attention.
"Do you need help? We've come to take you back to your family." He spoke in a polite, soothing voice.
"Don't let him hurt me Mister B." The girl begged, croakily. The robot hauled the girl up onto his shoulders and pointed his enormous weapon – a drill for a hand – at Near threateningly, warning him that he would get attacked if he didn't back away.
Near understood and got back to his feet, walking slowly away from the little girl. "What should we do?"
L couldn't find the words to reply. He stared blankly, at nothing in particular. His throat constricted and he forced back tears. The Wammy kids had never seen him so pale.
Mello seemed to understand what L was thinking and answered for him. "Well, we need to find the Plasmid that undoes whatever that bitch did to them. I don't think that Big Daddy thing will let us near the girl as long as it can still protect her so it looks like we'll have to go through that thing first. We should probably look around for some better weapons or set up a trap or something. As much as I hate to admit it, we probably need Tenenbaum right now. She can fix them and knows a lot more than we do. …L?"
L cleared his throat, shaking his head slightly as though trying to clear the image from his mind. "Yes, Mello?" He answered, his voice more emotionless than Mello had ever heard it.
Mello hesitated, wondering how to word what he wanted to say without freaking out the socially-frigid detective. "Are you… alright?" He asked. That was the best he could come up with.
"No, I'm not alright. No half-way decent human would be alright after witnessing that. Clearly we won't find anyone with morals down here." He answered, his head dropping to the side exhaustedly. "I think we're in Hell."
