Elizabeth X
The hatch to the maintenance tunnel was hidden. Tucked between some shelves, and a hot water storage tank in a sealed-off boiling and water distillation room, it was easy to miss even with the reflective orange handle. Wiping away the sweat from her brow, Elizabeth pushed the shelves away. The room was hot, uncomfortably so, but she supposed that made sense. Unlike most of the major infrastructure systems in Rapture, this room and its operating systems were still functioning. Tenenbaum had mentioned that this was the source of the safe house's water, so that did make sense.
It also meant that the room was heavily patrolled by the roaming Big Daddies, much to Elizabeth's dismay. She'd waited in the shadows for what felt like hours until there was enough of an opening in these patrols to rush forward to pick the lock of the room and lock herself back inside before being spotted. But just the idea of being that close to any Big Daddy had Elizabeth on edge.
Thankfully, there were no extra surprises inside, and, with the help of a borrowed wrench, the maintenance hatch easily opened.
"It looks like something is finally going my way," she said, setting the hatch door down on the ground.
"Don't jinx it, sweetheart. Our little trip is just getting started," Booker commented.
Liz rolled her eyes and huffed, "Don't remind me." as she climbed through the hatch.
It was a bit of a drop, maybe three or four feet, to the floor of the maintenance tunnel. It was a small, tight space, tall but narrow, and dark; only lit by two small, dim strips of light that lined each side of the floor. Liz clicked on her lighter, a familiar and almost comforting motion by now, and pulled out her radio.
"Tenenbaum? I've made it into the maintenance tunnel."
The radio cracked to life, and, through the static, the older woman responded. "Good. It will be a straight shot forward to a metro trolley track entrance. After that, just follow the tracks to Apollo Square. Then-"
"I know how to get to Suchong's clinic from there," Elizabeth said, cutting her off. "I've been there before."
.
.
.
"You never told me that," Tenebaum said.
Liz bit her lip, suddenly wishing she hadn't said anything. "You never asked. And it was a long time ago."
"...Just be careful. Things will have changed a great deal since your last trip there."
That was the end of the conversation, neither Elizabeth nor Tenebaum had anything else to say.
"You shouldn't be keeping secrets from her," Booker said.
"That is rich coming from you," Liz shot back, surprised by her rush of frustration. "You couldn't even be honest with yourself!"
The ghost of her father gave her a sad look but said nothing and, after a moment, her frustration dissolved.
"Sorry, I didn't mean to snap like that," she said. "I'm just sick of feeling so... powerless, so weak!"
"It's called being human, kiddo," Booker chuckled, soft and sad. "It ain't pretty, it ain't nice, and it ain't easy, but we all learn to deal with it."
"What else can you do?" Elizabeth said, lighting up a cigarette.
'At least the lights are still working. Otherwise, this place would be impossible to navigate,' Liz thought, gazing through the glass of the trolley tunnel at the fallen city.
Looking in from the outside, the city looked beautiful, like an otherworldly paradise. Looking in from the outside, no one would imagine the horror that had... that still were taking place. Andrew Ryan had set out to create a utopia where people could freely pressure their intellectual pursuits without fear of prosecution or judgment. Instead, he'd created a cesspool of greed and cruelty, a true breeding ground of monsters.
"Or maybe that was always his intention?" Elizabeth mumbled as she continued on her way.
Booker shrugged, "Despite what they may say, everyone wants to rule the world. They all want to have the keys to the kingdom, even if they have to create the kingdom themselves."
"Even you?"
"Even me," Booker nodded. "Though my kingdom was a little less... complicated than all of this."
Elizabeth considered asking what Booker's dream kingdom had been. Did he want to be rich? Did he want to be a war hero? Did he want to be left alone to drink himself to death? Or did he just want to live a nice, quiet life with his wife and daughter in some small, quaint house?
She decided to keep her mouth shut. There were more important things to worry about anyway.
Apollo Square was a shadow of its former self. While never as opulent as other areas of the city like Olympus Heights, it had been lively and bustling the times she'd visited while living in Rapture, full of growing families and blue-collar workers determined to make happy, successful lives here. As a hub of transportation throughout Rapture, the area was never quiet or still; no matter the time of day, there were always people coming in or out. Even the last time Liz had been here, when she'd been sent to get Atlas' 'Ace-in-the-Hole', it hadn't been that bad. But now, it was just an empty, blood-soaked battlefield whose soldiers and citizens had abandoned it.
That, or they were no longer alive to care.
Liz pushed herself through the rubble clogging one of the airlock entrances to the district. From her previous visits, she knew that Apollo Square was connected to the Olympus Heights bulkhead by a security checkpoint that was set up here to prevent anyone from entering, or leaving, the district without proper permission and documentation. The most important of the city didn't want the common rabble mixing with them, after all.
Still, in theory, this should have been an excellent way to create a safe area as the city started to fall into chaos. Instead, it had become a convenient prison for Atlas' followers during the civil war. According to Tenenbaum, some managed to escape as the security checkpoint fell but, for others, this would be their grave.
"This place is a dump," Booker commented, looking around at the piles of rubble and rotting garbage.
Liz let out a dry chuckle, "That is what happens when a place is a prison camp and a warzone all in one."
The scars of both Andrew Ryan and Frank Fontaine's manipulations and struggles for power were visible everywhere. On top of the Metro system trolley being destroyed, the entire residential area is in ruins. There were flyers of missing people posted all over the walls, plenty of which had fallen or had been pulled from their place and were now laying, stuck to the damp, dirty ground. The ink of the pictures ran and streaked, smudging and ruining the pictures. Not that it matters much anyway, those people were almost certainly dead.
But the main attraction, so to speak, was the gallows.
The central square of the district, which had been a place for people to meet up, socialize, and picnic during the time Rapture had been thriving, was now home to the grizzly site of public execution by hanging. Even now, three rotting bodies still swung limply beneath a sign reading 'Gene Traitor,' their faces having rotted off. For all Elizabeth knew, those same faces could have once been on one of the many missing person flyers scattered around.
"They must have been slicers," Booker grunted. "No sense in using that term otherwise."
"Do you think they were killed by whoever still had some sanity left?" Elizabeth asked. "Or maybe Fontaine? He was here, trying to build a foothold to get to Ryan?"
"Does it really matter? They're still dead," the ghost of her father said. "But, for what it's worth, I don't think anyone had much sanity left by the end."
"Including us?"
Booker just cocked an eyebrow in her direction and gave an amused huff of laughter. It was a silly question, Elizabeth realized immediately, and she felt her cheeks burn with embarrassment. Of course, they were... Of course, she was mad. She was talking to the hallucination of her dead father, for god's sake!
'They say that crazy people don't wonder if they are crazy,' she thought. 'So where does that leave me?'
"Don't think about it too hard, sweetheart?" Booker said. "If it gives you some peace then what's the harm?"
Liz bit her lip and sighed. When she glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, Booker looked so real. He looked solid and alive, like he was just waiting around for her to finish examining something interesting while they were wandering around Battleship Bay.
But he wasn't real. At the end of the day, her Booker, along with so many other versions of the man, was dead and gone.
At the end of the day, Elizabeth was alone.
"I'm afraid that, someday, I'll forget you aren't real," she admitted. "And then I'll have my heart broken when I lose you all over again."
That got her a small, sad smile. "You won't ever lose me, Elizabeth. Even if you can't see or hear me, I'm always with you."
With those words, Liz was overcome with the urge to hug Booker, to throw herself into her father's arms, but resisted. You couldn't hug a ghost after all, and she didn't want the illusion to be broken just yet.
"Let's get going," she said, pulling out one of the small vials of Eve that Nora had given her. "We don't want to be caught out in the open by a bunch of splicers. I doubt we'll get lucky again."
With the use of Peeping Tom, Elizabeth was able to pick her way across Apollo Square without being seen. As dangerous as it was to move out in the open, the rubble that lined the streets provided ample cover to hide. And, as was so often these days, the darkness was her friend. That being said, it still took over an hour to reach the towering Artemis Suites.
"Just my luck," Liz grumbled, peering over a crumbling halfway at the entrance of the apartment building when a male splicer was pacing around, a club clutched in one hand and a broken bottle that he kept trying to drink from in the other.
"How do you want to approach this?" Booker asked. "Take out this guy and go in through the front. We could barricade the entrance but-"
"No, I'd rather not risk getting caught in a potential bottleneck," Elizabeth said, shaking her head. "I wonder if- There!"
She pointed up at a freight hook that jutted out from the third floor, "That is our way in."
"Huh, just like old times. Is your Sky-Hook ready to go?" Booker commented as he watched Elizabeth fiddle with the device's settings. It hadn't been used for over six months, so the gears were a bit tight. It would have to do though.
"Don't you mean Air-Grabber?" she asked, giving her father a little smile.
Booker snorted, "Constances and variables. What are you going to do about-" he nodded towards the splicer "-him?"
Liz loaded a tranquilizer dart into her crossbow and held it up, "Oh, I got him."
A dart to the neck was all it took for the splicer to hit the ground, completely unconscious.
"Nice shot," Booker said, with a proud grin.
"And gunshot to draw attention," Elizabeth grinned back.
"Maybe I should have given you a gun back when we were running around Colombia."
"I wouldn't have had the guts to shoot anyone back then," Liz said with a dry chuckle. "Let's go."
The magnetic pull of freight hook pulled at the Sky-Hook and yanked Elizabeth through the sky. She grunted when the device connected to the hook, jarring her arm. Bellow her dangling legs, a small ledge provided a way to get through an open window.
'I'm dead if I miss that drop,' she thought. A manic smile crossed her face, "Then so be it."
Her stomach fluttered as she dropped through the air and her knees nearly gave out when she hit the narrow ledge. The force of the fall nearly caused Liz to fall backward of the small platform but she steadied herself with a grip on the frame of the broken window.
"Mmph!"she let out a grunt of pain as the sharp, jagged glass cut into her hands. 'Well, that for sure going to get infected.'
Nevertheless, she hauled through the window and continued on into the dark building.
In a sign that the universe wasn't always cruel, Elizabeth didn't encounter any more splicers on her way to Suchong's lab. She came across a few security automatons, however, each surrounded by dead and rotting corpses. Thankfully, those who set them up must not have anticipated someone approaching from the direction of the window and Liz was able to disable them without much issue.
Suchong's lab was much how she'd last seen it. The outside was dirty, more destroyed, but ultimately the same. Oh, and far bloodier. Even with all of the security cameras and turrets put in place, the clinic still became a cesspool of violence; the waiting room was completely destroyed and the surgery looked like something straight out of a nightmare with all the dried blood smeared about. It also meant that her luck of avoiding splicers ran out.
The fight with the nitro splicer was hard; Elizabeth nearly lost an eye and there were now minor burns up and down her left leg.
But, in the end, he fell with a 'BANG!'
And she went on her way. She had files to find.
"Come on, come on," she mumbled, shuffling through molding and faded files. The fact that she'd even managed to find the files on the Little Sisters in Suchong's secret lab was a miracle in and of itself, but the man's filing system left much to be desired. "You've got to be somewhere around here. Ugh! There are literally hundreds of Little Sisters' files here, it will take forever to find the right one!"
Part of Liz wanted desperately to abandon the search in order to find Sally's fine but she squashed it
"If Delta was the first Big Daddy to successfully bond with a Little Sister, then maybe she if mentioned in his file," Booker suggested. "From there you can cross-reference that name with the Little Sisters' files."
It was a brilliant idea but Liz had to snark, "Cross-reference? Big words there, Booker."
The man chuckled, "Don't look at me. I'm just a manifestation of your subconscious. You know all the answers, kiddo. You just have to find them."
"Yes, and this place has plenty of answers," Elizabeth said, heading deeper into the lab. Maybe she'd set Suchong's corpse on fire and burn the place to the ground after she was done here. 'For all of us. Mr. Ace-in-the-Hole, are you out there? What are you finding? Will we meet? How can you help change Rapture's fate? Can you help change Sally's fate? Subject Delta's fate? My fate?'
Only time would tell.
Not that they had much left.
Not a huge fan of this chapter, it is kind of an awkward in-between chapter but the next two will be much meatier.