(A/N: Hey everyone. I know it's been forever since I updated, and I assume most of you thought this story was dead as a doornail. Well, what can I say? College has kept things busy. But I realized recently that I really missed writing and people were still favoriting this, so why not go for another update? Hopefully everyone realizes that I can't promise any regular update schedule, but know that this story isn't dead, just sleeping. I'll keep updating, just as often as I have time and can produce chapters that I am happy with. Thanks for those of you who still actually check this. Keep reviewing and favoriting. You all are awesome.)
Breakfast was awkward.
Rory's mother had left early for her job at the local factory. Despite that, she had managed to prepare a pile of toast that she had left on the table, accompanied by butter and some raspberry jam that appeared to be homemade and was quite delicious.
Rory kept shooting Eleanor questioning glances from across the small table. Eleanor, on her part, endeavored to keep her mouth full as much as possible to avoid a chance for inquiries. Purposefully avoiding eye contact, she glanced out the sliding glass door into the backyard.
It was shaping up to be a beautiful spring day. The sun had begun to peer out from behind the few clouds in bright blue sky. Clothes hung on the line in the small, fenced-in backyard, swaying in the breeze. A circular patch of dirt, devoid of any grass and about five feet in diameter stood in the center of the lawn, the only trace of last night's altercation. Mercifully, neither of the house's other inhabitants seemed to have noticed the oddity.
Last night's altercation had shaken Eleanor. How had Rapture found her so quickly? She had expected them to come looking for her, but not for them to start spreading across the surface. Rapture was the source of ADAM. For an addict to travel so far from its habit was unthinkable.
This was no random encounter, and that chilled Eleanor to the bone. Even with Lamb gone, someone was still down there, pulling the strings. And this unseen hand was intelligent. It understood the value of keeping Rapture a secret from the surface, sending small groups of splicers to move undetected rather than a frontal assault. While Rapture might be more technologically advanced, all it took was for one nuclear missile to find it's way into the Atlantic for Rapture to cease to exist.
The assault had complicated things somewhat. It was obvious, for the Trace's safety, that she couldn't remain in the house. The longer she stayed here, the more likely one of them was to get hurt. She had to find her own place, although how to do that without any money to speak of was a problem in and of itself.
Not only that, but she had to find Tenenbaum to figure out what Mother had done to her, what the voices in her head meant. And, to top it off, now she had to stop Rapture's encroachment on the surface.
Wonderful, thought Eleanor, Why can't I be worrying about normal things for a teenage girl, like…. Damn it, I don't even know what teenage girls worry about!
Rory cleared his throat from across the table, and Eleanor instinctively turned her head to him, gazing questioningly.
"Uh…" began Rory awkwardly, flushing slightly. "I don't want to pry, and I can tell that you don't really want to talk about whatever it was that happened last night, but I just wanted to let you know that, even though we really don't know each other, you can trust me."
He paused, waiting for a reply, but Eleanor said nothing, her face blank, not wanting to betray any information.
"I'm not dense you know," he continued, "I know there's something different about you. God knows it doesn't take much to read the signs. Wearing some sort of diving suit and knocking out a fully-grown man a head taller than you with a single punch? That just screams normal."
And Eleanor could tell that he was telling the truth. She could trust him. He was a decent person, an honest person, someone who would keep his word, transparent to a fault, like Father, so different from the liars and schemers in Rapture.
It would be so easy, to let someone else in, to tell someone else about Rapture, to finally have a person in her life that she could confide in. But no, it was too risky. Just the knowledge would put him in danger. After all the kindness he had shown her, he didn't deserve that as payment.
She smiled sadly, "I'm sorry. After you and your mother were nice enough to take me in for the night, it is ungrateful of me to keep secrets from the two of you. But you can trust me as well, and any secrets that I keep are for your own good."
"But you are right," she said, smiling playfully to cover her anxiety, "I'm no ordinary girl."
Rory blushed at this, turning away. "Uh, we should probably get ready. School starts in half and hour and it's going to take us a bit to get there."
Right. School. That part had slipped Eleanor's mind. She doubted that any surface establishment had much to teach her. She had been tutored by her mother from a young age in philosophy and psychology, and she had supplemented those teachings with her own by disassembling and reassembling various devices she had found throughout Rapture, learning the ins and outs of the advances in biology, chemistry, and electronics that the scientists had made. Still, it didn't hurt to check, and it was one less lie that she would have to tell Mrs. Trace, which would make her feel better.
Rory grabbed his backpack off the front stairs, and walked outside. Eleanor followed him, closing the door behind her with a click. The morning air was slightly chilly, and dew clung to the slightly overgrown grass in the front lawn. The neighborhood was peacefully quiet. Most of the inhabitants had already left for work or school.
Like the Trace's house, most of the neighborhood was in a state of disrepair, with peeling paint, gaps in the roof shoddily patched up with tar, or crooked fence posts. It seemed obvious to Eleanor that most of these buildings belonged to the working class. It wasn't Pauper's Drop, but these buildings had seen better days.
Rory walked over to the old garage, opened the rusted side door with a squeak of the hinges, and retrieved his bike from within. He offered to let her ride on the handlebars, but she declined, preferring to jog briskly beside him while he pedaled lightly, unaware that she probably could have outpaced him regardless of how hard he pedaled.
After winding their way through several more blocks of dilapidated houses, they came upon a fenced-in clearing with a long, three-story building in the center. Composed of brick and stone, with twin spires flanking the large, blue entrance doors, the school appeared to be in better shape than most of the surrounding neighborhoods. Windows lined the exterior, shades shut tight against the morning sun, shielding its inhabitants against the harsh rays. Well-groomed trees and bushes punctuated the well-mown lawn, completing the air of preciseness and order about the place.
Rory dismounted his bike and lead it up the front stairs to a rack to the right of the entrance, where he quickly secured by threading a length of grey iron chain produced from his backpack through both wheels and the frame before securing it with a small combination lock. He walked back, rejoining Eleanor, and both of them walked through the large front doors.
The interior was a flurry of action. Leaf-green lockers flanked both sides of the main hallway that bisected the school, with several smaller hallways branching off on either side. Students went about their day, some bustling through the halls, shoes clicking on the checkered tile floor, while others stood about, sharing the latest pieces of gossip. Motivational posters and signs promoting various extracurricular activities and sports were stuck to the walls, breaking up their monotone white coloring.
With a slight tug on her arm, Rory lead Eleanor away from the main hall and down one of the branching corridors to the office. After a brief lie to the squat, stern woman at the front desk that Eleanor was Rory's cousin from out of town who had come to visit for a while, she was issued a plastic card with the word "Visitor" printed on it that she pinned to the front of her ill-fitting T-shirt.
Classes were about as exciting as Eleanor had predicted. Math was childish. Students worked on calculating the area, volume, and angles of various shapes and figures. Eleanor quickly realized that part of her enhanced reflexes appeared to be enhanced spatial awareness and an intuition for trajectories that allowed her to guess the answer within a small margin of error.
Biology was not only dumbed down to an excessive degree, but the teacher also presented several facts that were undeniably wrong. It appeared that the surface scientists had not yet found out as much about the inner workings of human beings as those in Rapture. Eleanor had though about speaking up, but something made her think that he wouldn't take too kindly to being corrected by a little girl. She spent her time moving the bones on the skeleton in the corner slightly using Telekinesis while reciting them to herself from memory.
While Eleanor had yet to read much literature aside from the various manuals, textbooks, and propaganda leaflets readily available in Rapture, English was surprisingly easy, yet disturbing. Every time a question was presented on a book that she hadn't read, a nagging thought at the back of her head would present the answer.
If she wasn't certain that she had never seen the material, she could have mistaken it as her own memory, but it appeared be another side effect of Mother's attempt to infuse the minds of Rapture into her body through ADAM injections. While helpful, any loss of independence in her mind made her uneasy. The sooner she found the true extent of the effects, the better.
The only subject that held her attention at all was history. While she had done what she could to educate herself after her arrival on the surface, her knowledge of the history of the world after the secession of Rapture was quite incomplete, even with what news she had read. While the teacher presented on the French Revolution, Eleanor flipped through the book, quickly catching up to speed on what she had missed. The end of World War II, the beginning of this so-called Cold War, the fight for racial equality, and the assassination of the surface's last leader, President Kennedy.
It was odd how subjective history was. In these pages, the writers decried the principles of communism and pointed to it as being at fault for many of today's problems, while Eleanor had seen firsthand the evils of a capitalist society. A free economy did not take into account the hungry men, women, and children on the streets any more than communism did. It seemed to Eleanor that strict adherence to either end of the spectrum, regardless of intention, only led to ruin. The best answer seemed to be a moderate approach, somewhere in between.
By lunch, Eleanor had absorbed all that she could from the more than slightly biased book and, with only more irrelevant minutiae waiting for her afterwards, she decided it was her time to leave. Excusing herself to the restroom as Rory walked her to the cafeteria, she climbed out the second story window. Looking both ways to assure that no one was watching, she let herself drop, landing silently crouched on the front lawn.
She felt bad for ditching Rory like that, but she doubted that he would be ok with her just leaving. Besides, it was about time she got to looking for a place to stay for the night. She walked into the city, transitioning from low residential buildings to the tall, looming skyscrapers. She walked past most of the traditional apartment buildings, doubting that they would take her in with a lack of money.
Eleanor headed to the less savory side of town, where graffiti was a normal adornment for the sides of the houses and roofs stopped being made from tile and started being made of whatever had been cheapest at the point of their construction. She hoped to find a project that would let her in with the promise of rent at a later date. As she walked, she passed by a closed off industrial warehouse. Having slept in far worse and deciding that it could be a useful alternative if nothing else was found she decided to investigate.
Tall barbed wire fences enclosed the corrugated steel complex that had long faded from its original color to rust. The padlock to the entrance had been cut off some time after the warehouse's abandonment, and it lay dull and broken on the ground, allowing Eleanor easy access. She found the door similarly unlocked, but so rusted over that she had to push to break the seal and gain entrance.
The interior of the warehouse was lit by a single window on the far side, its panes shattered, the glass littering the floor. Various wooden crates, boxes, and barrels of both wood and metal were stacked high throughout. Shattered beer bottles, cigarette butts, and the occasional needle or condom completed the picture of the place's sordid history.
Eleanor walked through, glancing around at the place. With a little cleaning up, some repairs, and a few air fresheners, maybe this place could be suitable for inhabitance. After all, didn't every superhero need a secret hideout?
A huge fist entered the corner of her vision.
Fuck
