"I gotta admit, sweetheart, you ain't an easy broad to pin down."

Fontaine took his time approaching her –– not quite a saunter, but without any immediate hurry or effort. When he slipped his suspenders off his shoulders, Riza noticed for the first time how strangely he was dressed. Unlike just about everyone else in the Manta Ray Lounge, Fontaine was not cutting a dash in a dinner jacket and vaudeville mask. He wore neoprene wadders and a work shirt, his face scruffy, his appearance shabby and unkempt. The part of Riza's mind not immediately preoccupied with formulating a means of escape wondered if Fontaine had come directly from the Fisheries or Futuristics, and why, exactly, he was dressed like a working stiff.

Kimblee had mentioned seeing a Fisheries employee in the dining room –– he had kissed her to shield her from detection. Riza knew, then, that the nameless desk jockey had likely been Fontaine himself, clothed in civvies, looking in on her from the edge of the crowd.

"You don't seem all that surprised to see me here," said Riza, not taking her eyes from Fontaine but keeping her hands below the surface of the desk, his incriminating audio diary already halfway under her skirts.

Fontaine moved very slowly, like a lizard who had spent too long in the shade. Instead of acknowledging her observation, he nodded towards the mess of documents and receipts on his desk.

"Like those?" His smirk was irritatingly smug –– like Roy's, if Roy were in the habit of filing his canines to a point. "Turned half my books inside out settin' it up. Figured you'd take the bait."

He had been expecting her. Riza's discontent threatened to balloon into dread, and she found she had to fight the impulse to bolt from the room... or use Edward's hidden weapon on her arm. Fontaine was eight meters away, but closing. While he was still out of range for a sodium thiopental injection, Riza suspected their proximity to each other was liable to change in the very near future, one way or another. She would wait, and in the meantime, try to find some answers.

"I hope you didn't go through all this trouble on my account."

"Trust me, girlie... this ain't for you." Fontaine's smile curled into a sneer. "See anything you like?"

If Fontaine had left evidence of his smuggling laying around for her perusal, then Riza suspected the documents of being little more than chicken feed in the context of the greater enterprise... or, more likely, Fontaine didn't anticipate her making an escape with the evidence in hand.

She swallowed.

"Don't expect me to dance attendance on you, Mr. Fontaine," managed Riza, her cool, clipped tone of voice revealing nothing of the trepidation stewing directly below the surface. She was thankful her mask shielded her expression from Fontaine's critical observation. "What is it that you want?"

He snorted. "Proper little battle-ax, ain't you?"

Riza attempted to steer his attention to the subject of her investigation, hopeful, despite herself, that she could salvage the situation, for Roy's sake if not her own: "Some say you've been providing for the destitute in Rapture's free market society," said Riza, all care and caution, knuckles bone-white around the purloined audio log. "But it seems to me as though you're using these charity scams to boost your public image in opposition to Andrew Ryan's... and to fashion yourself an army against him."

Fontaine barked a laugh. "Solidarity angle's smart, ain't it? Poorhouses and breadlines? High-grade bunko. And they really buy into the whole song and dance. They're so desperate for an ounce of kindness, it don't even occur to 'em that Rapture just ain't their town anymore. Though your boss," he spat the word, as though he would have liked to call Roy something far fouler, "going after Ryan all cockeyed like he is, seems to labor under this... misimpression that Rapture's his for the takin'."

Riza's ribs ached, fear suddenly pressing down on her like a stone, leaving her breathless. She could feel Fontaine's malevolence in the turgid air all around her, swelling under the derma of his friendliness.

Suddenly, Fontaine raised his shoulders. "But I ain't got time for men like Mustang beatin' swords into plowshares. You, on the other hand... you're far more interestin'."

Several scenarios had raced through Riza's mind over the course of the last few minutes, none of them pleasant. What she had not anticipated, however, was Fontaine parking himself on the corner of his desk, rolling up his shirtsleeves, and looking as though he was ready to talk business.

Riza blinked only intermittently, a part of her fearful Fontaine would vanish like a Houdini splicer and reappear behind her with a knife between her shoulder blades. Her every instinct screamed at her to withdraw to the relative safety of Cohen's party. Immediate concerns, however, kept her planted firmly behind Fontaine's desk. "I'm listening."

"Riza... can I call you Riza?"

"No."

"You see, Riza, this leaky bucket of a city is yolked to the free market, same beast that's got Ryan prostratin' himself like some dumb dora catchin' religion –– any one mook's ties to his pals are always a means to an end but never an end in itself. Now, plasmids got me rakin' the kinda scratch that makes Ryan look like he's runnin' a paper route, but it ain't a one-man show. Frau Kraut, for example, over at Point Prometheus? She ain't no crackpot. I got the best workin' for me."

Her ability to read other people may not have been as efficacious as Roy's own, but Frank Fontaine had never struck Riza as the sort to dance around a direct point. He had cultivated a reputation for being ruthlessly efficient, a businessman for whom achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort was the ideal. As she considered his words, Riza cast about for a suitable expression, but finding nothing adequate for her impatience, settled on a tight frown. "If I didn't know any better, Mr. Fontaine, I'd say this sounded like a job proposal."

He inclined his head, almost conspiratorially. "Ryan's might be gettin' a little long in the tooth, but he's gotta point with that Great Chain swindle of his. We all got our hands on the links... even if Fontaine Futuristics... and our work with ADAM, is meanin' to nudge it in some new direction."

"You have the plasmids, Mr. Fontaine. It seems to me as though your influence on the Chain is less of a nudge and more of a yank."

The smile Fontaine forced at the sound of Riza's declaration was splintery, his folded hands tightening almost imperceptibly around each other. "Not all the plasmids, sweetheart."

The silence that fell was thick enough to carve. As Fontaine held her gaze, Riza could see the tautness of his neck muscles and the arch of his clavicle. But underneath his expression, she glimpsed a second face, barely more than a few jagged, suggestive lines, but arranged with a surprising energy and violence: his head turned the other way, his mouth open in a kind of snarl. The two heads pointing in opposite directions gave Fontaine a disturbing sense of movement, and Riza a distinct awareness of the imminent danger the businessman presented.

"At present," Fontaine went on, "while these sad saps might have a slight preference for Ryan's promises of prosperity over my business interests, they ain't arguin' the toss. But I figure that firebug's plasmid would change all that. It's the lynchpin, the means by which this city's stubborn fondness for Ryan's burners and big talk would be cast off, and the rubes raked in as fodder for long cons yet to come..."

Riza glared. "Perhaps you ought to be having this discussion with Roy Mustang, Mr. Fontaine. If it's market competition you're worried about, then––"

Before Riza could finish, Fontaine's hand flew across the desk, snatching a sheet of paper and making Riza flinch. Snickering quietly at her reaction, Fontaine unfolded the document.

"You weren't lookin' hard enough, sweetheart," he confided, flashing her what appeared to be a handwritten transcript, the movement too quick for her to make out the contents. "See, I got it on good authority that if I'm keen to acquire Roy Mustang's plasmid, you're the broad to see."

"Your information was incorrect. I––"

"Berthold Hawkeye. Ring any bells?"

Riza's placid expression fractured, falling and shattering into a thousand pieces, some of them with marks on their empty husks as though Fontaine had torn them from her with his teeth. Riza felt a stirring coming from deep within her belly, voices of caution murmuring against the inside of her head.

"Shortly before dinner on the 17th of February, I informed Professor Hawkeye that an announcement had been made by the BBC... an Allied firebombing had occured in the city of Dresden."

Riza's blood ran cold when she realized Fontaine was reading directly from the memo in his hand, affecting an accent so distinct from the one tilled from the boroughs of New York that it could have very well been an entirely different person speaking:

"Hawkeye was completely shattered by the news and said that he felt personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, as it was his original discovery which had made the "weapon" possible. He told me that he had originally contemplated suicide when he realized the terrible potentialities of his discovery; I suspect he feels his fears have been realized, and believes he alone is to blame. With the help of considerable alcoholic stimulant, I managed to calm him and we went down to dinner."

Riza Hawkeye tried to fix the warmth inside her, but it was neither embarrassment, nor understanding, nor fear, so remained nameless.

"Accordin' to the ink slingers, 'em eggheads over in New Mexico were buildin' atom bombs," reiterated Fontaine, his uncannily chameleonic voice back to normal; he folded the transcript and slid it into the pocket of his waders, "but what Tom, Dick, and 'Arry don't know is behind closed doors, one of their number was doin' secret work on genetic mutations an' nucleotide sequences."

It was true, affirmed Riza to herself: the primary objective of the Manhattan Project had been the development of atomic weaponry, but well before World War II, her father had been commissioned by the United States government to use the Project Y resources to further his own research. While Fermi was splitting atoms, Berthold Hawkeye was mapping the human genome, studying the role that genetic variations played in disease, physical appearance, athletic ability. Her father had been researching variants of a special protein called alpha-actinin-3, which controlled fast-twitch muscle fibres, the cells responsible for the speedy tensing and flexing of the tissues involved in sprinting or weight-lifting... the heat kinetics of movement, and later, the friction of surface contact...

Riza tried to edge her way around the desk; Fontaine matched her movement for movement. "My compliments to your sniffer dogs, Mr. Fontaine. Most of that information is classified at the highest level."

"Like I said... I got the best. Now then, bein' as you're old man Hawkeye's kid n'all, I figure you're the right person to see about acquirin' that research."

"The last I saw of my father was before my deployment... when he publicly disowned me. He was dead when I returned home from the war." Riza shook her head. "And in any case, he occupied a world all his own... one that held no place for me."

"Don't mistake me, sweetheart, this ain't no five finger discount. I know you're livin' on the breadline. I know that fat fuck Sinclair is featherin' his nest while you're fightin' to keep your head above water." His vitreous eyes flashed as he shifted into and out of the dim light cast by the ocean. "You hand over the genetic code for that plasmid of Mustang's, and I'll make sure you'll never want for nothin' ever again."

"I don't have what you're looking for," Riza ground out.

"You don't, huh?"

"No."

Fontaine's features were like granite. "Say... I were to introduce those two Elric brats to a couple live jumper cables... wouldn't jog your memory none?"

Riza swallowed again. "You'd be wasting your time."

"So that's a no? That's really too bad." Fontaine threw his hands up, shrugging. "Well, sweetheart... can't say I didn't try Ryan's way.

"Now... it's my turn."

Fontaine was big, but he moved like a mako shark through the water, nimble and quick. Riza grunted as he grabbed the strap of her dress, tearing the sleeve seam from the collar, and attempted to wrestle her flat to the desk. Riza bladed her hand and used it to strike Fontaine in the ribs –– he sucked in a breath as Riza tore his intercostal muscles. She heard the click of fractured bone and cartilage grinding against each other. She threw a punch as Fontaine doubled over, leaning into it with the full force of the wind left from his movement. Her fist swept past his head, Fontaine dodging just under the wire; twisting her abdomen, Riza piked her legs to pull them clear, whipping around to face him again.

But Fontaine released her clothes only long enough for his hand to fist in her hair, before bringing her face down sharply to the side of his desk and onto his bent knee. Blood exploded from Riza's nose and her vision shattered. Riza had little more than a split second to spit blood before she was roughly pushed forward on to the desk, her forehead smacking against the wooden surface. Fontaine's hand forced back the surprised yelp from her as it covered her mouth. She felt him pressing himself behind her, his weight holding her down, stopping her from struggling against him. Her muffled cries of protest couldn't escape from behind his palm.

When Riza rolled her eyes up, there was a hint of shadow under Fontaine's cheekbones, a sketch of crows-feet around his eyes, a look of hostility too fierce to be simple anger. "What you makin' so much fuss about?" Fontaine grabbed her lower jaw and shook it gently. He flashed his teeth with every exaggerated word: "Remember, sweetheart... I gave you a chance..."

Riza turned her gaze from the table under her cheek, to Fontaine, back to the table. She was aware of the sleeve of her dress sliding free, a tear in the slippery fabric from the shoulder to the middle of her back...

Charmeuse. Too thin... too fragile...

Riza could feel Fontaine's chest heaving over her. He suddenly grabbed both of her hands with one of his own, pinning them down on the back of her own head, which in turn pressed her face down into the hard, unyielding surface of the desk.

"What the fuck is this...?!"

Riza found, in that moment, she didn't know which was worse: the agony of Fontaine's physical assault or the realization of her utter hatred, of her moral certainty that the man had stepped so beyond the bounds of what she could accept that she felt he deserved not just pain, but pain of such brutality, such inhumanity, that it would make Roy Mustang turn from her in shame. She learned, in an instant, the full capacity of her hatred, in a lesson hammered home with her face ground into the wood and her back exposed to the chill evening air.

And, laid bare for Fontaine's scrutiny, a tattoo... her father's research inked on the skin above her cervical and thoracic vertebrae.

Purines and pyrimidines. Pentose sugars. Phosphate groups. The precise mathematical calculations for the insertion or deletion of bases in the genome coding for the alpha-actinin-3 protein.

The genetic cipher for Roy Mustang's flame plasmid.

"The fuck is this, you little bitch!"

Fontaine grabbed her shoulder and flipped her over, until her back was against the desk. Riza's heart pulsed in the pit at the base of her throat as though she was swallowing rocks. Blood filled her mouth from her injured nose, the taste sharp and metallic, like sucking on an old coin. Her skin was ashen and her lips were fixed open in a perpetual yet silent scream. Disorientated from the blow to the nose, more than likely concussed, she wasn't able to roll herself over, to sit up, to push him off. So she kicked her legs against Fontaine's shins and barred her teeth in a snarl, like a trapped animal calling for its mate. For food. For flesh.

Fontaine's blazing amber eyes pulled into a squint when he glared down at her, reminding Riza of the pit vipers from the deserts of New Mexico, around the government compound where she'd grown up.

"Who burnt the damn thing off?"

Several Days Previously

Kimblee gestured towards the workshop at the back of the studio, a small, wood-paneled room where he did the vast majority of his restoration work.

"In there, Miss Hawkeye. And please... remove your clothes."

Kimblee's tone was strange, a mixture of restraint and subtle conviction. He did not make light of the request, nor did he attempt to couch his words in chivalrous courtesy. He wouldn't treat her with disrespect or scorn her dignity by pretending this was to be anything other than what she expected.

In the dark back room of the shop, even the ticking of the clock on the mantlepiece seemed calmer, more measured, like a heartbeat at rest. There must have been a vent in the wall, for Riza felt the air move like cool water; the aromas of cromonese polish and rosewood and poplar, the aromatic smell of the curled wood shavings, suffused the room. A part of her took some small comfort in the scents. Another part of her knew the odors came from natural volatile chemicals in the wood called phenols.

There was an irony there, she supposed.

Riza unbuttoned her shirt, allowing the starchy fabric to slip from her shoulders and gather at her feet in an off-white puddle. She kicked the cloth loose, struggled to turn her gaze down to look at the straps of her undergarments. She touched, in the hollow of two vertebrae, the catch fastening the back of her bra, and quickly slipped the clasp. She extended her arm, turned it back and forth: light jumped and twitched across the glisten of sweat on her skin, and the garment dropped to join her shirt on the floor. The motions were all surreal, vaguely abstract, figurative and byzantine.

"The previous burn injuries are more discolored than I anticipated," murmured Kimblee from directly behind her, his eyes drilling holes into the inked crests of her back until her spine wanted to cave in a recoil. "It seems I have some adjustments to make."

Suddenly, Riza felt the full magnitude of her nakedness, her tattooed back no longer shielded from his scrutiny, from his gaze as it sapped the warmth from the air.

When she chanced a glance over one shoulder, Kimblee's expression was too calm to communicate the gravity of what she asked of him –– it seemed unlikely that he was making the connections she wanted him to make, to adopt the grace necessary to release her from the anger and pain she had carried and suffered for so long. Still... even if Riza knew she would find no gentleness or kindness in his provisions of care, she could not imagine Kimblee's quicksilver mind not making at least some note of her anguish, of her silent plea to get the entire ordeal over with as quickly as possible.

Thirty seconds elapsed. Forty. A minute. The time somehow felt longer in her mind, with the distorting effects of the silence and the heady smell of poplar shavings. Even the pendulum in the belly of the clock seemed to slow in its arc, until Riza was struck with the sudden, irrational fear that this was going to last forever.

Maybe, deep down, Kimblee was bobbing serenely in the warm pool of his own thoughts as the moments fell away, as though expecting her, in a sudden fit of panic or fear, to snatch him from his intended actions at the last moment. To save herself.

Which meant he still didn't seem to understand –– or, rather, understood perfectly well, and just didn't care about –– what their dark, silent ceremony portended for her and the legacy of her father's research.

The sudden fury at the thought tightened her chest, stiffening every muscle in her body.

"You're trembling," said Kimblee, with a half-curled smile. His words were soft and honeyed, too sweet for kindness . "Nothing is going to happen to you... nothing you have not already anticipated."

"Don't humor me with your false concern," snapped Riza, crossing her arms in front of her chest. "I'm little more than meat to you."

In her peripheries, Kimblee had made to hand her a block of leather, something to clutch between her teeth. But he paused, then, to slide his gaze in a deliberate, self-indulgent sweep over the curve of her stomach, her breasts, her collar bones, before reconnecting with her now-widened eyes.

"I wasn't aware you wanted to be anything more to me, Miss Hawkeye."

"Don't patronize me. All you need from me is human flesh, a willing test subject."

"And from me, an invitation to Sander's little soirée, as well as this unsightly thing," he traced a curve of her tattoo –– a benzene ring inscribed in red ink, "scrubbed from your skin, no?"

"Is there a problem?"

"No..." he mused, his tone turning wistful: "The last time I burned you, it was with the understanding that I would ask Cohen to leave young Kain Fuery alone. The time before, in exchange for my assistance in getting the Elric brothers apprenticed to Bill McDonagh. Tell me, my dear, when there is nothing left of your back save scars, how do you intend to compensate me for my services?" He lay his hand, palm done, on her spine. "What price are you willing to pay to save Roy Mustang's soul?"

"This is my father's research... my burden to bear, not his." She glared daggers at him. "The business of Rapture is business, Kimblee. This thing between us... it's just another transaction."

"A sort of equivalent exchange, eh? How trite."

"Just get on with it."

"Very well." He handed her the leather block. Riza was forced to remove her arm to place it between her teeth. Unlike before, however, Kimblee had slipped back into the role of objective observor, the most serious and the most hilarious things, the most beautiful and the most abhorent, to him equally considered, calculated, and reconciled. He regarded her with no more yearning than she would a straw mannequin on the firing range.

"Think of your skin as food, Miss Hawkeye," he commanded: Riza's muscles stretched tight with apprehension. "You are little more than a complex assemblage of proteins, fats, carbohydrates. These compounds react differently to the presence of kinetic fiction. The carbohydrates are just sugars, which undergo complete combustion into carbon dioxide and water, releasing energy. The fats burn completely, too, but they have a tendency to melt first. The proteins unravel and get quite sticky when heated..."

Riza felt his open palm grow hot on her skin for only a second. Then Kimblee sighed as the ADAM churned in his bloodstream... before the pain hit her, hard enough to drive the air from her lungs.

An inferno blazed from beneath Riza's shoulder blade, as though Kimblee had set a firecracker beneath her skin. She bit hard into the leather block until her teeth ached and her jaw cramped, though there were no screams. The pain shot through her abdomen, and without her realizing it her body folded, curling into something fetal. Kimblee kept his hand over the tattoo, his plasmid –– a combustive combination of electro-bolt, SportsBoost, and some genetic material of his own mysterious fashioning –– making her flesh bubble.

The agony felt endless, though the burning could not have lasted more than ten seconds –– stretching beyond the horizon and spreading around Riza like an oil slick on the ocean's surface. She heaved and moaned as wave after wave of pain frothed over each other, cresting and falling. The pure depth and vastness of it was beyond comprehension, her eyes unable to focus on anything in the room... on the instruments, on the walls or the floor, on Kimblee. Space and time seemed to ripple and swell, her body black and broken like the ocean. Like the dead-tossed waves.

He stopped as suddenly as he began. Riza hadn't eaten for hours and her body had nothing to eject, but that didn't stop it trying. After a few moments, her spasms passed, and she found herself clutching the edge of Kimblee's work table. When his hands found her again, his fingertips were cold with silver sulfadiazine cream, rubbing small circles into the shiny white burn beneath her shoulder blade.

"The chemical products themselves are not promoting at a rate I find sufficient," said Kimblee, clinical and calm –– as cold as the North Atlantic –– in his ministrations. He didn't seem to care about her injuries so much as the results of his experiment. "The self-sustaining fission reaction necessitates further... tweaking."

Riza's words tripped over themselves, tiny and weak, her teeth chattering: "You're a monster, K-Kimblee."

She felt his smile against the back of her neck. "And yet you're the one who asked me to deface your back in the first place. To save yourself from your father's burden... but more importantly, I suspect, to save your beloved superior from having to do this himself." His breath was warm in her ear, lowering to a dulcet murmur. "Throwing stones and all that, Miss Hawkeye. And I have to say...

"There is a lot of glass in Rapture."

"It's gone, Fontaine," snarled Riza. She peered up at him, unblinking, from where he held her down. "The research is useless to you now."

The manic tightness around Fontaine's eyes and his mouth made him look like one of the splicers, like someone in possession of precious few of their wits. Before Riza could muster the strength to wiggle free, however, his hands found her throat.

As his grip tightened, Riza could gasp, but barely. Her heart faltered inside her chest, her body in a panic. Fontaine's face was cold, flat –– a raw, hollow fury quite beyond any anger Riza had known before; he was almost a completely separate creature from the businessman with the greasy smile.

"I'll wring your neck for that, you little bitch," he growled.

Riza thrashed, but her fingernails couldn't reach him. She felt as though she couldn't turn her neck without it snapping in Fontaine's grip. Her eyes were blurring, a wash of red closing in. And Fontaine's words bounded inside her skull, carrying her nearly helpless in their wake.

Nearly helpless.

Riza crumpled, trying to force a sob through a blocked throat, fooling Fontaine into thinking she was losing consciousness. With the last reserves of her strength, Riza pushed the elbow of her right arm close to her ribs, and felt the elastic on the telescoping rail release a small hypodermic filled with sodium thiopental... right into the fatty tissue of Fontaine's arm.

Edward's invention worked perfectly.

Fontaine froze, his face fixed in momentary astonishment, his hands still around her neck, before his legs buckled and he collapsed in a crumpled heap to his office floor.

Riza stood slowly, allowing herself a moment to suck lungfuls of blessed air, her hands brushing the bruising around her neck. Despite the ache in her chest and the hammer blows of her heart, the briny mustiness of Rapture had never tasted so sweet.

Then, with Fontaine's audio log still hidden inside her dress, Riza Hawkeye brushed dust from the desk off her dress, straightened her mask, and made for the elevator.

For Roy.