Elizabeth IV

Elizabeth crouched down in front of a vent, peering out between the slits into the dim hallway. Somewhere, deep from the stomach of Rapture, distant screams and chaotic shrieks echo through the tunnels and halls. Tenenbaum was right about one thing, however, there were no splicers nearby.

She frowned at the dark smears that stained the walls... then ducked back into the vent when the heavy, lumbering footsteps of an approaching Big Daddy approached. The eerie yellow light from the bioluminescent chemical substance that filled its helmet cast a dim glow that slipped into the vent, causing Liz to go still and hold her breath until it passed. Its massive drill gleamed, even in the minimal lighting, and just the sight of it made her shiver.

Killing Rapture's version of Comstock had been so satisfying at the moment but now it seemed that whenever Liz closed her eyes, she saw him die.

'Can't think about that,' she reminded herself, keeping her eyes glued to the back of the Big Daddy as it rounded a corner out of sight. 'Okay, NOW!'

She unscrewed the vent, swinging herself down to the floor -carefully to move slowly so that the thud of her steel-toed boots against the linoleum didn't attract the attention of anyone or anything- and propped the vent covering back into place.

B-b-bzzzzz!

Her radio crackled to life, the noise startling Liz; her heart pounding, she pressed the button down and raised it, "It's Elizabeth. I've made it out of the safe house. You need to tell me where to head next... and make it quick. Over."

.

.

.

"Tenebaum here," the older woman replied. "You need to turn left and follow the corridor east for roughly seventy-two meters. There you should find another vent that you can use to get to a maintenance elevator; the elevator will likely be out of order but you can still use its shaft to climb down the floor below."

"Roger."

Sticking to the shadows, Liz crept along the wall towards her destination. Her path was, thankfully, clear aside from scattered rubble and debris, but it also stank to high heaven. Due, in no small part to the rotting corpses that dotted the hallway.

Coming across a fairly fresh one -fresh enough that Elizabeth could make out that it... had been a young man, probably late twenties, with pale skin and dark, longish hair. The corpse's skull had been split in two and one-half of his head had been smeared across the ground with all of his teeth busted out, so she couldn't speak much of his features- she knelt by its side, a hand clamped over her mouth and nose in a futile attempt to block the stench of rot, and searched through his pants pockets.

"You almost slapped me the first time you saw me looting a corpse," Booker chuckled, peering over her shoulder. "Oh, how times have changed."

"You grabbed a carton of cigarettes right from that police officer's pocket," Liz replied, rolling her eyes. "They were splattered with his blood and you still lit one up!"

"It was a stressful day."

Elizabeth snorted, plucking a bloodstained cigarette carton and dented, but thankfully still usable lighter, out of the corpse's poked. "I know how that feels."

Then she lit up a cigarette, breathing in the sweet, sweet toxic smoke, and ignored the way Booker clicked his tongue and shook his head in disappointment.

'What does he know anyway?' she thought. 'He smoked like a chimney and no one knows how bad smoking is for you yet. Plus, he is just a figment of my imagination.'

...Well, probably.

Anything was possible.

"Here it is," Elizabeth mumbled to herself, eyeing the narrow doors of the maintenance elevator.

The journey here had nerve-wracking -the loud footsteps of the patrolling Big Daddies echoed through the halls, making it difficult to guess where they were- but uneventful. She'd come across a few more corpses -managing to snag some cash and a couple of bullets off of them- and the vent system didn't quite match up with the blueprints, so it took some crawling around in the dark, dusty, cramped space to reach the maintenance room.

Liz slammed her thumb down on the call button, anxiously bouncing up and down, only for nothing to light up.

"Right, dead."

"Tenebaum did say that was likely," Booker commented.

"Well, excuse me for hoping something would go our way for a change."

"Ha, now that would be nice." The hallucination of her dead father chuckled. "So, how are you planning on getting the elevator door open? With all due respect, you're not strong enough to pry it open by hand."

But before Booker could even finish the question, Elizabeth had already fished a screwdriver out of one of her pockets.

"If I'm lucky then there should still be some residual power left in the system," she explained, unscrewing the elevator's control panel. Once, they were gone all it took was a mighty tug to pull it from the wall, exposing the internal wires. "A bit of rewiring and..."

B-b-b-ING!

After a few stuttering creeks and flickering lights, the elevator doors slid open to expose the pitch-black elevator shaft. Elizabeth tentatively peered down the shaft and shivered; at a glance, it looked like it could be a bottomless pit, lit only by the occasional emergency light.

'Huh, I'm surprised Rapture even has that kind of safety measures,' Elizabeth mused, eyeing the distance it would take to jump to the internal ladder.

She turned to Booker. "See you down below."

"Down in the belly of the beast," the man nodded.

Then she leaped towards the ladder.

The inside of an elevator shaft was dark and difficult to maneuver in -too many cables and wires- but, after what seemed like forever, Elizabeth reached the bottom of the shaft. Her boots gave a quiet thud, when she dropped down to the top of the elevator cab.

'Way better than heels.'

"Tenebaum? You there?" she whispered into the radio.

The device crackled to life and it was a moment before she got a response, slower and through more static than before.

"Yes, how far have you've gotten?"

"I'm standing at the bottom of the maintenance elevator shaft. Where do I go from here?"

There was the sound of rustling paper. "No, no, Little Ones, do not play with that. Put that down... Alright, once you exit the cab there should be a vent across the hallway. Climb up into that then you'll need to turn left and travel straight until you reach a fountain. You'll pass a lingerie store and one that sold watches on the way, but if you see a tie shop then you've gone too far. Now, hurry."

The older woman's bluntness made Liz snort, "I'll do my best."

Flicking on the lighter she nicked from the corpse, Elizabeth squinted through the darkness until she found the elevator escape hatch.

Going to pull it open, she was stopped by Booker's voice.

"Maybe you should check if anyone is around?"

Liz looked up, frowning at the concerned look on her father's face. "What do you mean?"

"It's just that... if I were going to lay a trap, then this might be a good place to do it. And, even if there isn't, once you drop down into the elevator, there won't be any cover," Booker explained, tapping the top of the cab with his boot.

Elizabeth gave a soft smile. "Thank you, Booker. That is a good suggestion."

"Eh, well, it is really just your subconscious being worried," he shrugged. "I'm not actually here."

'Thanks for reminding me,' Liz frowned. "Yeah, otherwise I'd ask you to hold this-" she held up the lighter "-for me."

"That, unfortunately, I cannot do."

Fumbling around, Elizabeth pulled one of the syringes from the small silver case that Tenebaum had given her. Pulling off the cap and putting the needle head against one of her veins, she couldn't help but grumble, "This is probably going to give me tetanus."

Despite that very genuine worry, Liz couldn't deny the euphoric rush she experienced as the EVE flooded her veins.

'Easy to see how someone can get hooked to this stuff,' she thought, rolling her body. "Hey, Booker, how did I feel whenever you consumed salts or drank a new vigor?"

"Weird," the man shrugged. "Some of them kind of hurt but mostly it felt like I was getting drunk on lightning. And before you ask, no, I never felt... addicted or anything like that."

"How strange... I wonder what makes us so different?"

Booker had no explanation for that, mostly because Elizabeth didn't know either. So she put that question aside as she activated the power of the Peeping Tom plasmoid. The world blurred and she could see through the floor and walls before her. Though devoid of much life, about fifty feet away, Liz could spot the white shapes of other people scurrying about.

As soon as she established how far the potential threats were, Elizabeth deactivated the ability, already feeling drained. She needed to conserve EVE as much as possible; there was no telling if she'd be able to get her hands on more.

"Pretty close, do you think you can avoid them?" Booker asked.

"I guess we'll see," Elizabeth answered, tapping a broken fingernail against the hand cannon at her hip.

She wasn't eager to kill, or even injure, someone again. Despite how hardened her heart had become, Liz took no pleasure in such things. Everyone's life meant something -they were all stars in the sky- and, when Elizabeth's killed them, their lights were snuffed out.

She didn't want to be responsible for that.

Not to mention, the loud sound of firing a gun would undoubtedly draw more enemies. It would be better to avoid fighting anyone at all.

With that, she pulled the escape hatch open and dropped down into the cab.

The small room was dark but empty aside from some discarded tarps, which was a relief. Snapping the lighter open again, the small flame illuminated the cab. To Elizabeth's relief, the elevator door was opened just enough for her to slip through. But, before stepping out into the open hallway, she crouched down but the entrance and held the lighter out to shine some light on the floor before her.

"Glass," she whispered.

To Liz's dismay, the floor in front of the elevator was covered with bits of broken glass both large and small. The floor itself was linoleum, so walking on it -especially with her steel-toed boots- would make a ton of noise. Sure, the closest people were about fifty feet away and she could easily cross the hallway and be up in the vents before anyone could find her but that would also mean people... splicers would know someone was there. And that would put them on edge.

"Work the problem, kiddo," Booker advised. "How can you muffle the sound of walking on glass? And remember, every second you plan is a second splicers could be getting closer to you."

Elizabeth clicked her tongue, glancing around the elevator for something she could use.

'I could climb back up into the elevator shaft and-' Her eyes fell on the tarp once more and something clicked in her mind. 'Of course.'

She gathered up the tarp, tugging at it something heavy weighed it down. Eventually, she managed to tug it lose... and gagged when the heavy object was revealed to be the withered body of a dead child.

'I'm sorry, kid,' Liz thought, tears forming at the corner of her eyes at the tragic sight. 'You didn't deserve this. No one did.'

"Don't let it distract you," Booker pressed. "Keep going."

"I know, I know," she muttered, leaning through the open doors to drape the tarp over the floor.

The extra layer of padding helped to muffle the sound of breaking glass as Elizabeth walked across it, one hand on her gun and one hand holding the lighter up with her eyes fixed right onto the vent before her. Every sound -ever snap and crack of the glass shards- was painfully loud; every hair on Liz's body was sounding on end as her heart pounded in her ears.

Down in the halls of Rapture proper, away from the deterring protection of patrolling Big Daddies, Elizabeth could hear screaming and insane, manic chattering echoing from the dark hallways. It was nerve-wracking; every step Liz took towards the large vent could potentially be a step some crazed splicer with a gun was getting to her. By the time she got to the wall, her forehead was drenched in sweat.

'Booker wouldn't have bothered with all this sneaking,' Elizabeth thought with a forced smile as she went to work unscrewing the vent grate, trying to make light of the situation. 'He would have just charged one, blasting everyone who got in his way like the bullheaded jerk he was. Or maybe he would have picked them off at a distance with his sniper rifle? Booker could be calculating like that too.'

She felt safer in the vents, though not by much. The grates for them were bigger than they had been for the ones up near the safehouse, so there was a much larger chance that someone would see Liz crawling around in them. Add to that the clunking and thudding of her steel-toed boots against the metal of the vent, and Elizabeth was darkly confident that someone would find her sooner or later.

But for now, Elizabeth just tried to make as little noise as possible, sliding on her belly like a snake and peering out into the halls to check on her progress through the bowels of the ghost city at the bottom of the sea.

She'd passed the lingerie store -now burnt out with a torn-up pair of lady's underwear with dried bloodstains hanging from a pole impaled in the wall above the store's door like some sort of grotesque flag- before she saw the first splicer. This one was once a disheveled older man with red hair... though it may have just appeared red because it looked like, in a fit of insanity, the man had ripped out chunks of his hair leaving open, bleeding wounds on his head. In between incoherent mumbling, the splicer was stuffing his face with semi-rotten food and lightly banging his head on the wall he was slumped against.

"There is nothing you can do for him," Booker -despite not being 'present' at the moment- said, though his voice was sad and full of sympathy. "Keep pressing forward and hope that you can save others later on."

The old Elizabeth would have never done... or thought such a thing. She'd bled empathy for people she had never met before or understood. She'd believed that was goodness, or at least the potential for it, in everyone.

That old Elizabeth had been a fool.

So Elizabeth Comstock or Anna DeWitt or Eliza Dewitt or Belle Comstock or Liz Songbird or whoever she was in this timeline, just hardened her heart and pushed forward.

That mindset would not last long though.