iii.

Julie Langford speaks to you like she'd have preferred a trustworthy chimpanzee to have come in your place. By the time you blast your way into the Waterfall Grotto, the roses on the by the water wheel are the last living things in Arcadia not trying to kill you and for some reason this is poignant to you. Your fingernails are blue as saltwater and all it takes it the sight of roses to send all your reckonings to the back of your head.

You splash to your knees in front of the nearest bloom and bury your face against it. You want some tangible exchange for its life, so you let its thorns open little papercut smiles up and down your fingers as you pluck it. "Rosa gallica." Atlas sounds a little hoarse but uncharacteristically patient with the delay. You like to think it's because he knows you well enough by now not to push every one of your fucking buttons when you're leaking this badly. "Bit o' chlorophyll, bit of bee spit, and you get to reinvent the world. Hell of a thing this all is, Jacky."

You cradle the rose in the shell of a frag grenade as you piece the rest of your miracles together. Distilled water from the Farmer's Market. Enzymes from apiary. The bees drunkenly kiss your cheek when you dispense the smoke and turn on the splicer you send back into the cloud to die. The air poisons and intoxicates you like aersoled rotgut.

Before you clear the air, you take Julie Langford out to the Hills to settle her in the shadow of a dying maple. Even as you commit her the specters of Arcadia continue to clamor for your attention in your periphery. Ignoring them feels a bit like killing them again but that's nothing new. You're a purveyor of gentle massacres. A gravedigger who reburies the dead you kill again.

.

You hear the roar of Atlas' warning the instant the Vector touches home in the console. You're already moving. There's a screech of metal on metal and a asthmatic cackle before something careens across the room at you.

You hit the deck and roll and come up shooting. A body slams into a defunct monitor, sending limbs and machinery crunching across the floor. You reach the door controls by the front desk and for a frantic moment you can't find the button to turn off the hatchway, so you slap it with blood-smeared hands until something depresses and there's a corresponding thunk deep in the walls. "Did you get that door closed?" Atlas sounds harried. You can hear items toppling to the floor on the other side as he rattles around in some kind of cabinet. "Good. That should buy us some time."

You're trembling. You can hear the massive pipes getting to work overhead as the Vector prepares itself in the chamber.

You drop to your knees and sling your makeshift pack off your back. You can already hear the door straining under shuddering impact. Sparks fly and fill the air with an ozone that singes the hairs in your nostrils. "There we go." Atlas sounds satisfied. You jump as something rattles into the fixture next to you. "I've sent you a wee package through the pneumo. It's not much, but every little bit counts."

You don't have time for niceties. The door is beginning to groan and buckle under the strain. You lunge for the pneumo and rip open the door. A fistful of money, presumably for a visit to a health station. A hack tool. Five – no, six proximity mines. You're miserably low on ammunition and liquid nitrogen for your chemical thrower but these kindle a desperate hope in you.

The door shudders and cracks, opening a rent a handsbreadth apart from the frame holding it. You see a baleful eyeball peer through it and fixate on you. "There you are," the lipsticked splicer purrs.

You shovel the supplies into your pack and lunge to your feet. Particles of poisoned air swirl around you as you book it back through the labs, settling onto oil and filament like dust. "You're gonna have to hold them off until that Vector has time to work," Atlas crackles at your side. "They upend that and you might as well kiss all four of our ass cheeks goodbye."

"I can't." Your breath is rocking out of you in coughs. You know he has no patience for anything but a can-do attitude from you but you're also just slightly busy at the moment. "I have to fall back."

"Don't think you'll have much of a choice, boyo. They're coming whether you like it or not."

" No, I mean…" you don't have breath to tell him what you mean. You round the corner and fetch up underneath a console as you tip your forehead into your knees a moment. You can't think. There are lights and noises and metal singing everywhere. You know it's partly due to blood loss and mostly to do with the fact that you haven't taken in untainted oxygen for well over an hour. You have no idea where Atlas is that he isn't suffering like you are but you're glad of it. You can handle being hurt but the thought of him being impacted by your mistakes fills you with panic.

Deeper down the corridor you hear the hatch finally explode inwards. "Ready or not," Atlas says.

You're ready. You spend one more minute retying the bandage keeping you from bleeding out from your wrist before surging out of hiding. The splicer in the doctor's coat pleads with you that he doesn't intend to harm you, he intends to fix you and that you might feel a slight poke when your organs spill out of your mouth. You dispatch him with the last of your bullets and jam the empty pistol into your waistband. The barrel sears a strip off your hipbone. The lipsicked splicer who'd crooned at you dies with your last electric buck. You don't see the third in time but it sees you. You feel its blow crack the back of your head and you tumble, upsetting a cart of lab samples and smashing vials to the floor.

You blindly seize a fragment and swing it upwards in time to intercept the splicer's tackle. It lodges deep in its eye and it stumbles back with a betrayed sob. A swing with your wrench puts it out of its misery. "So far so good." Atlas sounds exhausted. "Looks like it's about halfway there. Just keep your hand on the throttle."

You can't breathe. You don't have the breath to tell him and this worries you, but there's no time to worry. There's an alcove ahead that's flanked with steaming pipes and a door that looks too bent to function and somehow you need to get out.

You place your back against the wall and clumsily dig into your last first aid kit. No more bullets. Your favorite gun – the machine gun, the most accurate, the one that's saved your life more than any health kit – is neutralized in its makeshift holder on the small of your back. You yearn for its weight in your hands but the wrench soothes you nearly as much. You check your other weapons but it's as expected. You're down to a smear of liquid nitrogen and the proximity mines Atlas sent you. You don't dare ask for more.

You don't realize how long you're taking until Atlas makes a noise. You straighten too quickly and the air converges like a physical force.

You hit the deck on your knees. "What," Atlas says sharply, apparently noticing you. You can't even see a security camera. "What is it."

You gasp it out. "Can't breathe."

"You've taken in a lot of that poison – it's going to take a while for even your souped-up body to kick that out. Won't do you much good if you get plugged before then, though."

You know. You think about getting irritated, but Atlas' tone isn't impatient. It's fulminating, thoughtful. He's looking around for contingency plans and he's very good at it. "Can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm wondering if you shouldn't just hide," Atlas says unexpectedly. "I'm lookin' at these blueprints. That shelter you've found yourself has a crawlspace. Arcadia's chock full of them – gardeners used them to keep all the fertilizer out of sight from the elite who were too good to smell the shit that grew their roses. Won't say it ain't waterlogged but it should keep you."

"I see it." You've found it before but hadn't ventured into it once you'd seen the bodies hanging inside. Nothing inside was enticing enough to let their decaying feet bop you in the face. "You said we can't leave the Vector undefended."

"If you can make it back to her lab and barricade yourself in there, that'd be the ticket, but it's already been breached and that door of hers might as well be made of toothpicks. My guess is that if it's not bleedin' ADAM or EVE, they might just leave it."

"We can't take that chance." It's tempting beyond description to head down into shelter but you know better. You've lived long enough to know that monsters still see you when you pull the covers up over your head. It's enough that he cares enough to try to protect you. It gives you the boost you need.

You lunge back to your feet and break cover with the same dogged momentum. You can hear splicers coming up from the breached hatch and wading through the waterlogged observation deck in search of you. They scream when they spot you sprinting for the stairs.

You can hear Atlas unnecessarily shouting go, go, and of course you go. You fly. A bullet ricochets off the wall and across the back of your calf halfway up and sends you pitching forward, scrambling up another step before a second bullet grazes your shoulder.

Your leg buckles underneath you and your chin slams off the stair. You scoot down several steps on your ass and spit out blood and yank your wrench from your belt, and there's a place in your head that loses gravity then, like the feeling of flight at the peak of a jump. They're starting to swarm up the stairs.

You throw your wrench. It hits the first splicer straight in the forehead and knocks it clean off its perch. You're grabbing the wrench out of the air with the Telekinesis plasmid before the splicer even hits the floor. The second it hits your palm you hurl it again, striking the next splicer in the throat just as it claws for your foot. It tumbles against the side of the tunnel with a horrible gurgling groan. You swap the plasmid out with a blink of your eyes and Winter Blast it, blink back the Telekinesis, hurl the wrench. The splicer's head shatters and it drops to join the first at the base of the stairs.

The wrench hits home in your palm. "Joseph Mary and Jesus fucking Christ," Atlas roars. He's laughing with the same guttural abandon you recall from the Medical Pavilion. "That's the most godless fucking brilliant witchcraft I've ever seen in my life. Run, Jack."

You don't have time to speak. There are already noises around the corner. You swipe the blood from your chin and turn onto your belly to take the rest of the stairs on all fours. You manage to make it to your feet for the final sprint to Langford's lab and stumble and fall across the threshold as you reach it. Your empty pistol goes skittering across the floor and there's something loose in your head, something vital that creates a cold vacuum when it leaves. You scramble back up and slap the door closed, dragging the closest desk across it with strength borne of straight-up adrenaline.

You fall back onto your hands and knees and throw up. There's barely anything to purge. Just some popcorn and liquid fear. "Brilliant daft idiot, you're a walking miracle," Atlas says. "I heard a noise. Get to the console. Think the Vector's done cooking in there."

You hack out the rest of the bloody sputum and use the edge of her desk to haul yourself up. The central misting control swirls with gentle green rivers. You see the branching indicators glowing underneath the labels. MARKET. TREE FARM. WATERFALL. "You should see a lever," Atlas says. "Something that says 'disperse' or 'launch' or somesuch. Look for it, quick."

You gasp it out. "'Misting Deployment'?"

"That's it! That's the one! Pull it!"

It isn't until you've slammed it flush to the console and taken a staggering step back in preparation that you understand what it is that you've done. Until now 'Lazarus' has been as abstract as the concept of dying. Nothing ever seems to be permanent in Rapture. You've died half a dozen times and woken up to the cradle of Vita chambers with no explanation as to how you've gotten there. Rapture is in a constant cycle of sleeping and waking and dying and undead living.

Something curls around your ankle. You instinctively grab for your wrench before you realize it's one of the plants from Julie's office. There's a pink blush of petals unfurling from under a cracked console flanking the lab. It brushes the gaping rent in your calf where the bullet bit a chunk out of you, then embraces your shin from behind as if to keep you standing.

You watch it, heart slamming in your ears, until movement catches your periphery. You look to see stardust plumes billowing from the pipes outside the viewscreen. Arcadia shudders and sighs and erupts as spectrums reinvent themselves. Ivy unfurls from the ceiling. Fresh grass and moss and damp bark hit your abused nose with a fresh blow. You reel. The air feels nearly cloying as the oxygen triples.

You're dimly aware of Atlas yelling at your side. "Well done, lad! Take a deep breath and enjoy it!"

You can't. You stand there swaying, sick to your stomach, the back of your hand pressed tightly over your mouth.

"Head over to Rolling Hills and get the Bathysphere. Next stop is Ryan's house. It's time for blood."

You push off the console and meander down the ruined hallway towards the hatch. Outside the laboratory Arcadia continues its slow eruption, unkilling itself in inches as you stumble past the green.

You don't know whether to blame it on disorientation or blood loss, but either way it's the very first time in your tenure at Rapture that you're taken by surprise by a Little Sister. You round the corner towards the center of Arcadia and the shriek ripples through you like electricity. "Mr. Bubbles!" she screams, backpedaling, clutching her needle.

"Shit!" It takes a crucial second for you to realize the profanity is on the radio and not in your head. You do your own backpedal with your hands up in a gesture of peace, but the Big Daddy is already charging at you from where it'd rounded the corner up ahead. "Shit shit shit, I thought you took care of all them damn things down there!"

You have no time to do anything but control the trajectory of your fall as the Big Daddy belts you straight out of kingdom come. You land in the water in roll and for a moment there's no up or down to run away from. There's water in your mouth and ringing in your ears. "Run, Jack!" Atlas hollers. "You don't have the gas for this, you'll have to take care of it later!"

You drag all of your pieces up out of the water. You stumble back up the stairs with the Big Daddy in thunderous pursuit.

"Run straight to the bathysphere! Don't look back!"

It rocks out of you. "I have to take care of this."

"Oh don't you fucking start with me, Jack, we made an agreement—"

"I can't leave her behind."

"She'll be fine! You won't! Tuck your tail for once in your life and run!"

The sight of the Sister's fear-stricken eyes dogs you like smoke. You rush headlong into the Rolling Hills and encounter a startled splicer under an elm. He fumbles for his weapon but for once you're faster. You break his neck with a swing of your wrench and keep going before it even hits the ground. There's an alcove nearly flooded out that you'd avoided until now out of self-preservation. You dive in now, wading up to your waist and hoping that whatever miraculous mechanism that keeps the radio intact will hold true now.

The Big Daddy isn't stupid enough to follow you in, roaring with frustration at the gap in the wall, but it doesn't leave. There are only two ways out and its got more than enough artillery to cover both ends. If it hasn't figured this out it will soon.

You splash over to the nearest barrel and tear into your pack. The proximity mines are thankfully still dry and so is your grenade launcher. You load them in with hands shaking from cold and blood loss. You have one shot at this and it's a fairly uninspiring one. You think about odds and numbers, and then you don't. "I'm going to leave you by the entrance here so you don't get hurt," you tell Atlas, unhooking the radio from your belt and shaking the drops off it. "Wait for me."

"Jack, you can't—"

You lug the grenade launcher up over your shoulder. It's painful to maneuver with one hand but it's worth it to you to protect the radio. It might be winter-proof and water-proof but you're willing to guess it isn't grenade proof.

Evidently losing patience, the Big Daddy roars into the space. You're ready. You lunge out of the opposite end, drop the radio onto the grass the instant you hit dry land, and sprint to put in distance. You hear the fading yell of Atlas' protests that are quickly swallowed up by the concussive thuds of the Big Daddy's pursuit.

You aim as best you can in motion. You blast a mine against a wall, against a tangle of roots, against a decorative hollow boulder. Branches splinter. You swing yourself up blindly on the nearest limb low enough to grab. The jolt nearly tears your arm from its socket but you roll with it as best you can, flipping like a gymnast, twisting as you fly. You aim and shoot mid-air. The proximity mine is slightly off-target but still manages to close the circle as the Big Daddy thunders past it.

You scramble up the tree as far as it can go. You know it's an illusion of distance and a second later the Big Daddy proves it, slamming its enormous gun into the base. It splinters and you nearly plummet but it holds. It won't withstand another blow. You have to make this last shot count.

You shoulder the grenade launcher, aim, and fire your fifth mine. For a panicked moment you think you've missed your mark. Time slows as it arches, blinking, and then curves down to collide with the first mine you'd set.

The reaction is instant. You feel your head crack against the wall adjacent to the tree as the explosion throws you from your perch. You don't feel the pain of hitting the ground as much as you sense the impact. The chain reaction swallows the world. You roll under the protection of your pack and cover your ears and head as Rapture ruptures around you. The air superheats and the tree blasts apart and rips you with shrapnel. Through the barricade you hear an electronic roar that's cut short, and for a while there's silence and smoke, and blood, and white.

You come around to the sounds of the Little Sister weeping. It's the other sound that freezes your blood. You scrabble blindly from the cover of your pack to find your grenade launcher emptied of the last mine. Somehow it must have deployed when you'd fallen from the tree. Somewhere the clock is ticking.

"Jack." Across the room Atlas is yelling fit to rupture the radio. "Jack, get out of there!"

The Little Sister is huddled in a heap by the smoking wreckage, screaming with sobs into her arms. You fly. The terror on her face ratchets up into panic when you grab her up against you, lugging her bodily across the rucked-up cobblestones. Your boots slip-slide in blood and ash and she screams no, no, mister no. You still can't tell where the mine is but every instinct in you tells you it's closer than what either of you can survive.

Oil and dew squeak under your boot and you go down. You turn your body just in time to spare the girl the collision with the floor. Something cracks in your side and she screams as if she'd broken instead. You lunge back up and stumble the rest of the distance to the nearest hole in the wall. You feel bad when she again shrieks, this time with honest pain, as your too-hasty shove barks the top of her head against the upper lip of the entrance. "Go," you tell her, and despite everything she flails for you, catching your blood-soaked sleeve by chance.

You seize her hand in one of yours and use the other to catch the side of her head. The slug vaporizes and steams out of her in a billow rather than a ribbon, making her arch with a soundless scream. Her eyes are the green of March. The green of regrowth. "Go," you rasp, and the girl nods. You shove her forward as she turns tail and wait until you can no longer see the flailing soles of her feet through the shadow.

Atlas is screaming over the radio. You rescue him on the flight across the Hills. You don't hear the explosion when it happens but it's shades of blood and copper. Into a sea of specters and bone.

.

"—damn it! Damn it!"

You stir and breathe out smoke.

"God damn it, would you answer me, would you kindly answer me—"

"I'm," and that's all you get because you're coughing and there's no more air to spare for anything else, even knee-jerk responses.

"For god's sake." The consonants blur as Atlas's voice drops half an octave in relief. "Oh for god's sake. For god's sake Jack."

Grass is sticking into your ear. You move it to clear it and feel your head explode.

"Where the hell are you? What're you doing?"

You grasp a hank of it in your fist to ground yourself in your galaxy as space undulates beneath you. You're unattached planets and muffled starlight. You are darkness that shrieks. "Talk to me." You can hear items slamming on the other end as he rifles through the materials on his desk. There's a rattle of paper, maybe a map. "Tell me where you are."

"M'all right."

"What d'you mean, you're 'all right'? You're off the feed, where the fuck are you?"

"Hills," you whisper.

There's a palpably frustrated pause. "What hills." Atlas's voice comes in much calmer this time. It's fake patience but it's preferable to honest screaming. "Talk to me, boyo. Where are you."

"Arcadia."

"Yes, I know that, Jacky. Where in Arcadia?"

Tea Garden? No. You struggle to form coherent thoughts. The grass is sweeter than how you'd left it. The air feels like it's grazing your lungs and exiting without truly hitting the mark. "Lift your head." Atlas's voice softens, but the fine edge remains present underneath. "Stay with me. Lift your head and look around for a sign. Can you do that for me?"

You curl in on yourself. You blink a smear of neon away.

"You pass out and I can't protect you. D'you understand? You fall asleep and you're bait. You have to look for a sign and tell me where you are so I can help you."

There's a blade of grass poking into the corner of your eye. You close it and focus the other one. The leaves on the trees are already regaining their color, multiplying with enough rapidity that the arboretum seems to sigh. The air is densely fragrant and already spotted with pollen. "Keep your eyes open." Atlas is gentle without pity. "Stay awake. Tell me where you are."

The artificial blur in front of you begins to sort itself out. The effort nearly floods you out but the levee holds. The colors line up along the shore.

"What do you see, Jack."

"A sign." Your throat is salt without water. "Flowers. Arcadia Glens."

"What else do you see. What's around you."

"Big trees. Grass. Hills. I hear water."

"Close or far?"

"Close."

"Bless you, you were nearly to the Metro," Atlas mutters. "You must've taken the long way. I know where you are. Give me a tick, lemme see what I can do."

There's a strand of lavender awakening to your right. When you uncoil to brush bloody fingertips against it, it unfurls with the same aching slowness. Its petals shiver like butterfly wings.

"All right, I'm going to need you to listen carefully." Atlas's voice returns with a curt crackle of static. "I don't want you taking the Bathysphere in that condition. I'm going to have you backtrack. You need to get up and go back through Arcadia Glens. I'm going to lead you to a place where you can hole up for a bit, work that filth out of your lungs."

There's a shadow above you. You flinch away from it too late, but it's only a fern. The plants on the walls are awakening. The earth shivers under your cheek as you reach for it; in the distance you can hear the clank of a Big Daddy hitting a hidey hole, followed moments later by a bottomless, frustrated moan. "I know it hurts, but you've got to get up," Atlas says. "Don't you show them your belly while you still got teeth. You hear me?"

You spread the fingers on your right hand when something nudges between them. A flowering weed. You move your thumb and the stem of it curls at the contact.

"You hear me, boyo?"

The petals shiver under your breath. "Yes."

"That's the spirit. Now would you kindly sit up."

You feel your abdominal muscles tighten in preparation before he even finishes speaking. Your hide is very sorry. The mist in the room begins to settle, lending everything a disorienting waxy sheen. You work yourself up into a sitting position and the individual drops stand out with dazzling clarity.

You lean your head against the wall and struggle not to throw up. "Take it slow." You get the sense that Atlas is distracted but you can't imagine by what. Monitoring the field, maybe. "Let the blood sort itself out in your head. You find a wall? Good. Slow breaths. Easy now."

You breathe.

"Stand up, Jacky, would you kindly."

You heave against the wall as your foot gets underneath you. You nearly fall but you don't. The grit from the wall rummages up your torn nails and stings like salt.

"Take a step forward when you're ready. Head through that door and then wait while I find you. You hearing me?"

You breathe out. Yes.

"Step out. Easy does it. Keep your hand on a wall."

You stumble forwards one step and then the other. Your hand leaves garish smears in the dust. "There you are, I see you," Atlas says, brisk again. "Christ, just like you to collapse in one of Arcadia's— what, three blind spots? I need you to turn right and tell me if you can see another sign down the way that says Arcadia Glens."

It comes out softly. "Tired."

"What?"

You're shaking. Only then do you realize there are tears in your eyes. "I'm tired."

"I know you're tired, lad. I know you're— christ." You don't recognize the tone in his voice. If you didn't know any better, you'd say it was panic. "Christ, Jack. I know you're hurt. I aim to help you, but you have to trust me and keep moving. I need you to head towards that sign. 'Arcadia Glens'. Go right for it. Keep your head up – there're Big Daddies around and god knows what else, and you're in no shape to tangle with anything. I'm going to get you to a place where you can rest a bit, get off your feet. D'you understand?"

You think, briefly, unexpectedly, that you hate him. You hate Atlas. You've been made a murderer a hundred times over for him since falling out of the plane but hearing his concern and fear threatens to carve you into something worse. You'll do a hundred bloodier things for every soft lie and every harsh truth. "Good boy," Atlas mutters when you start to walk again. "Not a thing has to be in your head right now, Jack. It's me steerin'. You just keep moving forward."

You're no longer leaving blood smears but you're making a lot of noise. Splicers aren't terribly intelligent but predators don't need to be intelligent to follow the trail of injured prey. You suspect that while you're not going to die from this, you're not going to live much longer if you keep getting punctured.

"To your right there should be another sign down the way that says Arcadia Glens. Head right for it. Open the door and go down the stairs. When you go through the door at the bottom, head forward a few paces and turn right. You should see viewfinders."

It's too many instructions. You sway to a stop against the wall as you process.

Atlas goes back to the start and navigates you corner by corner. Arcadia heals and unfurls as you walk. You wonder if it's cruel to have resurrected all the flora down here only to consign it to an underwater burial. "I hear splicers up the path already," Atlas mutters. You can pick up the sound of thick paper continuing to rustle as his moves grow sharper, more purposeful. "Step as light as you can. There should be a crawlspace door down to your right there. I want you open it, get in, and close it behind you. Do it."

It comes out in another rasp. "Tired."

"Just a bit further, Jack. This is the safest place in Arcadia. Splicers are too dumb to duck and the glass is bulletproof. Just in case, though, I want you to bar the crawlspace with something. A tool or a box or what have you. Whatever you find. You shouldn't need it, but let's not take any chances."

You're not sure you're smart enough to know how to duck either. You find the small wooden door at the foot of an unobtrusive alcove and sway in front of it drunkenly, not sure how to get to your knees. Usually you're knocked onto them. It seems like a strange risk to do it yourself. "Jack, I swear to christ if you faint on me after all that, I'm coming down there to kill you myself," Atlas says. "Now would you kindly stop fucking around and crawl through that fucking door."

You fall to your knees. The fucking door screeches horribly as you work it aside, but the splicer sounds farther away now, her shrieks lost under the belching groans of overhead pipes. You work your way inside on shredded knees and lean back onto your heels to pull the door shut behind you. "Very good." Atlas sounds a little blurred with relief again. You realize you'd again mistaken fear for anger. "Very good, Jack. Now bar the door and you'll be done."

There's a bag of fertilizer and a rake within crawling distance. You knock over the latter as you grab the former. It's nearly too heavy for you to maneuver but you manage out of sheer masochism. "Good," Atlas says again when you wedge it in front of the space. "All right, now if you just hang on one more second, I can—"

Your face collides with the hard-packed dirt, and once again Arcadia is specters and static.

.

You're between radio signals for a very long time. You come into focus only when the crawlspace shudders with impact and dust billows down from the ceiling, and despite everything your hand flies for your wrench as you jerk in the dust. "Shh, shh." Atlas's voice is strained, nearly too soft to hear over the com. He sounds exhausted but alert. "Just a Big Daddy. Doesn't even know you're there. Keep still."

Adrenaline slithers through your veins with unpleasant little jolts. You stir restlessly in the dirt, skin swarming, head pounding. The rafters buzz again as the Big Daddy lumbers on overhead, vocalizing in a register so low it makes the windows above you rattle. "Easy." Atlas again, still that same soft pitch. "Go back to sleep. Not time for you to be up and about just yet."

Your lungs feel like they're packed with smoke. You turn your head and bury your mouth against the crook of your elbow to cough. The effort of keeping it quiet makes your body shake. "Jesus, listen to that," Atlas mutters. "Sounds like you've got half the damn ocean in those lungs. Just breathe for a while. The air's packed with oxygen now. That stuff'll work itself out of your lungs in a couple of hours."

The blood has long dried on your jumper. The cuffs are so stiffened with it that you feel them scrape your cheeks when you rub under your eyes. You wait for the command to get back up because Atlas' mercy is always finite. You can count it down like a proximity mine.

It doesn't come. When you stir to try to get up anyway the radio crackles. "Go to sleep."

"Can you see me?"

"Yes."

"I can get up."

"Shut up and go to sleep, Jack, I won't tell you again."

It's the sweetest lullaby you've ever heard in your life. You hate him. Your ribs still feel disconnected but you can sense that there aren't as many things broken as there were before. You hate Atlas. Resentment floats inside you like cigarette smoke. "You're safe for now," Atlas says. "Close your eyes and let your body do its thing."

I hate you. You think, I love you. Gaping empty hunger like a splicer's mouth. Sucking in breath from the air between the rain.