This chapter is a couple of days late due to an unexpected internet outage at my house that took a couple of days to clear up. Still, I'm glad to have it up. Hope you enjoy it!

Elizabeth XV

At the audible snap! of a twig, both she and Jack looked over their shoulders. Her breath caught in her lungs as a man in a wooden mask lunged at the pair, knife raised. Elizabeth's legs moved automatically, overcoming the paralysis of fright to jump backwards and away from this new threat. Their attacker ignored her, going for Jack instead. With his visible shotgun, he must have looked like the bigger threat. The distance was too small for Jack to raise and fire his gun. Instead he was forced to raise it up as a shield, blocking the attacker's knife when he tried to swing downwards at Jack's throat.

""Amateur! Fuckin' amateur!" the man babbled as he struggled with Jack. "GET OUTA MY FUCKIN' OFFICE!"

With a loud grunt, Jack managed to shove him away. He took a few steps back, trying to get the distance to ready his shotgun. Before the attacker could lunge again, Liz hurled the wood mask at the back of the man's head.

"Hey, asshole!"

The attacker -was it a splicer? It didn't look like any of the ones she'd seen before- turned toward Elizabeth. Cocking his head to the side, he sneered, "Hello, beautiful!"

Without warning, he lunged again. This time though, Liz was ready for him. The second he so much as flinched, she pulled her screwdriver out and plunged it into the man's shoulder -stopping him in his tracks. As he howled in pain, Elizabeth kicked him in the stomach, forcing him to double over.

Through the holes of his mask, the man's manic eyes glared at her with a deep, seething hatred. "You're a nobody! Nobody! This is my territory!"

"Not anymore," Jack said. He shouldered his shotgun. BANG!

Her ears rang at the sound of the shotgun blast. Despite her disorientation, Elizabeth could only watch on in shock as the attacker -haven taken a blast square across the back- staggered to his feet and tried to rush for the stairs. Jack swore and went to reload, fumbling with his loose ammo. Liz tried to follow, but the soft, damp ground of Arcadia gave out from under her foot. She dropped to one knee instead, drawing her hand canon and squeezing the trigger three times.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Each bullet hit their target, one clipping the attacker in the side of the neck. He stumbled and staggered, grabbing at the vine and moss-covered walls for support before... finally stumping over and falling hard to the ground. They watched on as he bled out, a dark red pool forming beneath him. She and Jack stood in silence for a moment, panting in unison as their breathing and heart rates finally calmed.

"You think that's it?" he asked, reloading his shotgun once more.

Elizabeth shook her head. "No... He might not be with anyone, but there are definitely more splicers nearby, and they would have heard the gunshots. Let's search the body and move."

He nodded. "I'll clear the surrounding area. Work fast."

With a nod, Liz crouched near the body. She poked at the neck, double-checking that he had no pulse. 'Good and dead. Exactly how I like my splicers.'

She flipped the body over and, after a moment of hesitation, Elizabeth pulled the mask off, revealing a relatively normal looking face. The skin was swollen and misshapen to a degree, unlikely the gaunt and starved look of most splicers, but still identifiable as human. As she was going through the pockets, it occurred to her that the splicer had been wearing a suit. Probably a nice one too. Or, at least, it had been at one time. Now it was covered in dirt and grime, with more holes than fabric.

"You done?" Jack asked, startling Liz out of her thoughts.

"Yeah, sure. I was just..." She glanced back down at the misshapen face. "...wondering who he was, back before everything."

Jack shrugged. "From the way he was babbling on earlier, he was probably an asshole."

'Probably. But does that mean he deserved what happened to him?' Liz shook the thought off. The second she started to think of the splicers as individual people and not a threat was the second it became a lot harder to survive. "Let's go."

They made their way up onto a higher floor, picking off a few more splicers as they went, and scavenging where they could. As Jack searched a hidden crawl space, Elizabeth found another recorder. Turning it over in her hand, she saw the words, 'Julie Langford - Arcadia Closed' scrawled on the back in faded black letters. Curious, she hit the play button and a female voice started to speak.

"Today Arcadia was closed off to all but paying customers. The man hires me to build a forest at the bottom of the ocean, and then turns a walk in the woods into a luxury. Ryan asked, "Should a farmer not be able to sell his food?" "Is a potter not entitled to a profit from his pots?" I started to argue with the man and then I remembered who signed my checks. Only thing worse than a hypocrite is an unemployed one."

"Huh, that's interesting."

"What is?" Jack called, sticking his head out the small crawl space door.

"It looks like Langford wasn't a fan of Ryan's either. She worked with him because she had no choice, but still... If she's still alive, that could be good news for us. We need all the allies we can down here."

Of course, that assumed Langford was not only alive, but still sane after all this time. For all they knew, she was leading the wooden masks wearing lunatics.

They moved on, shooting, burning, and blasting their way through splicers and active, hostile machines they came across. More than once, they found themselves fighting with more masked people, each ranting and raving about something or other. Liz couldn't help but wonder if they were the ones setting the traps she and Jack kept finding and needing to disable. Eventually, they came across what must have once been a fancy tea shop. Unlike everywhere they'd come across in their journey so far, the chamber was in near perfect condition, tables still set with napkins perfectly fold. The only real sign of disarray was the overgrown foliage and the layer of dirt and moss that now covered most surfaces.

"Spooky," Booker said, starting Liz with his sudden appearance.

"Arcadia was closed to the public during the war, the riots and fighting may not have effected it ask much as other areas," she reasoned.

Jack stopped his tapping on a nearby jukebox. "Makes sense."

Booker raised an eyebrow at Elizabeth, but she said nothing, it was better to let Jack think she was talking to him than let him know she was crazy.

"You know, it's kinda pretty down here. When we're not fighting for our lives, at least."

Liz saw a little doll seated in of the chairs, a pretty blue bow in it's black yarn hair. She shivered. "Pretty but spooky."

The deeper into Arcadia they pressed, the more anxious Elizabeth felt herself become. Not only because they hadn't come across any Little Sisters, let alone Sally, but also because something... something seemed strange.

"Wait a minute," Elizabeth said, hooking her hand up to stop Jack. She pointed up to one of the security cameras hidden above the doorway. A small red light signaling not only that it was on, but awake and alert. "Doesn't that strike you as odd?"

Jack gave her a confused look. "Odd? I, uh, hate to tell you this Liz, but this entire situation is pretty weird."

"No, I mean there are security systems in place that are in place that require oversight. Not the automated security bots and turrets. Which logically means..."

Jack nodded slowly, understanding what she meant. "That there has to be someone doing the oversight."

"Exactly."

The question was if the person behind the cameras was friend or foe. If they were lucky, it would be Langford, and she'd be able to aid them.

'Maybe she'll let me use the security system to find Sally. Langford might even... No, don't get ahead of yourself like that, Elizabeth. You know it'll only lead to heartache.'

"Yeah, well, we'll find that out soon I guess," Jack said, pumping his shotgun and blowing the security camera away. "I wonder if-"

He winced, cutting his own words off. Jack cradled the side of his head, rubbing fingertips into his temples.

"What's wrong?"

"...It was Atlas. He said that we're close to a way to get to Ryan."

'How is he tracking us?' Elizabeth wondered, glancing up at the smoldering remains of the camera. 'Could Fontaine have access to the remaining security systems of Rapture? I have no doubt that Ryan does, but Fontaine? Could it be that radio? Such a thing is pretty advanced for Rapture, but nothing down here has ever followed the rules so I can't completely discount the possibility.

"Ugh, now that bastard Ryan is yelling at me," Jack said, pointing at his ear.

Curiously, Elizabeth leaned forward to see if she could hear anything. Practically pressing the side of her face into Jack's, she listened for the muffled sound of the man's yammering.

"-a forest. The Parasites claimed that the land belonged to God, and demanded that I establish a public park there. Why? So the rabble could stand slack-jawed under the canopy and pretend that it was paradise earned. When Congress moved to nationalize my forest, I burnt it to the ground. God did not plant the seeds of this Arcadia; I did."

Elizabeth scoffed. "You may have funded the damn thing, but you used other people's brilliance to do so. You think highly of yourself for someone who needs so much help from others."

Jack didn't respond, still rubbing his head.

"Jack?"

"Sorry, all the radio chatter is giving me a headache," he said. "It's just so loud. I feel like I constantly have two people screaming into my skull."

"You could turn it off," Elizabeth suggested. She didn't like the idea of cutting off the most direct line to the enemy -information goes both ways, after all- but if that was how they were being tracked, it might be worth it.

Jack gave her a wide-eyed look. "What? No, not after all the help Atlas has given me. He is my friend! I can't just abandon him!"

"No. No, of course not," Liz said quickly. Damn, that was too much too quickly. She couldn't risk losing Jack's trust. "Then why don't you just... take the earpiece out? That way you'll still be able to hear anyone over it, but it won't be in your head so it shouldn't cause pain."

And, more importantly, Elizabeth would be free to listen to any conversations that were had.

"Is that possible?"

"Yeah, can I see the radio?"

Jack cautiously handed it over. Elizabeth fiddled with the audio jack for a moment, carefully disconnecting a couple of wires, before handing it back over.

"There, that should work."

She couldn't help but smile as Jack clipped the radio back to his belt. She was now one step closer to prying control of Jack's future away from Fontaine and Ryan.

'And securing your own,' a treacherous voice deep inside reminded her.

The smile fell from Liz's face as guilt pooled in her stomach. She forced it away. 'It is for the best. I don't care what happened to me, I don't even know if I will survive this little adventure, but those Little Sisters deserve a chance. A chance Jack can give them so long as I keep him on the right track.'

"Don't worry, kid. I used you, you used me, and the Luteces used us both," Booker said. "Sometimes that is just the way things are."

Elizabeth didn't answer, just reloaded her gun as they continued picking there way through the overgrown jungle of Arcadia. On the way, they dealt with those assholes in masks and the annoying fucks that were the newly dubbed Houdini Splicers -Jack had been particularly proud of that name. After killing three of them, the sounds of a high pitched, girlish laughter echoed through the chamber, followed by the loud, powerful footsteps of a Big Daddy.

Jack grabbed her hands, pulling her down behind a crumbling pillar so they'd be hidden from sight. Soon enough, a red haired Little Sister emerged from the corner and began harvesting ADAM from the fresh splicer corpses. Hovering close was the massive form of a Big Daddy. This one was different though, taller and larger than the ones they'd killed before and with a strange red coloration. Instead of a drill, this one had a giant rivet gun attached to its arm.

'Must be a different model from the standard bouncer or Delta,' she thought. 'Delta... With everything going on, I'd completely forgotten about him. I wonder what he's doing now? Is he searching for something in particular, or did his default programming kick in, and he's out in Rapture doing repairs and protecting Little Sisters?'

"Hey," Jack whispered, squeezing the hand he still held. "Is that the Little Sister you're looking for? What was her name? Sally?"

'He remembered her name,' Liz thought with a smile. It was a brief smile, but it was there nonetheless. "No," she said sadly. "That's not here."

"Oh... Do you want to fight the big guy then?"

If they risked a fight with the Big Daddy, Jack might have the opportunity to heal another Little Sister. But they also risked losing the precious ammo and health packs they had. More than that, they risked spooking whoever was running the security systems.

"No, not this time. Not now at least. If we must, then we'll fight. For now, I don't want to risk drawing unwanted attention."

Jack didn't look thrilled but nodded. He pointed up at an outcropping of rocks before moving his finger to some narrow beams. "I think we can use those to get by them. So long as we don't get too close or make too much noise, the Daddy shouldn't bother with us."

"I'd rather not take any chance," Elizabeth said. "You lead the way."

Scaling the uneven, unstable rocks while loaded down with guns and everything else. Despite this, Jack maintained his grip on Liz's hand as they climbed and shimmied their way across the mean. He only let go to scoop up some armor piercing rounds before dropping down in front of the door to the next chamber. After checking that the coast was clear, Jack waved her down.

"Umpf!" Elizabeth grunted, rocking up onto her feet and dragging Jack through the door, securing it behind them.

"And we're safe!" Jack said. He pointed to the large growing sign of the Arcadia bathysphere metro station. "And that looks like our next stop."

Before Elizabeth could warn him about tempting fate, there was a loud hissssss! as the vents of the chamber opened and began spewing a thick green gas into the room.

'God, please don't let that be poison!'

Jack's radio crackled to life with Fontaine's voice. "This isn't right... I'm gonna need you to listen to me. I'm no sort of botanist, but I think Ryan has just killed Arcadia. The man put something foul into the air. Bottom of the ocean, boyo. All the oxygen comes from the trees. No trees, no oxygen. Give me a spell to think."

'Fuck! Someone is getting desperate,' Elizabeth thought.

She rifled around her pockets until she found two scraps of fabric, one of which she tossed to Jack and the other she held over her own mouth. She caught Jack's eye and nodded towards the metro door, both rushing towards it and trying to pull it open without any success.

Over the loudspeaker, an inappropriately cheery computerized voice said, "Oxygen levels critical! Lockdown initiated! All bulkhead doors are now sealed! Thank you!"

"Damn city's built to not let anyone out in the event of this kind of emergency. Either we get those trees back, or you're a permanent resident." Fontaine's voice was back, "Listen! Ryan's woman in Arcadia is an old betty named Langford. An okay sort, but not above doing a dirty job for a dollar. If she's still kicking around, I'm sure she's gonna want to save her trees. After all, she planted the damn things. Check her labs!"

'I hate going along with anything Fontaine suggests but we were going to check in on her anyway so...' Elizabeth tugged on Jack's sleeve and pointed to the sign that led the way to Langford's lab. Her companion nodded and, once more, they headed out.