The Light in the Deep

by Alcoac

Rapture Noir. Exiled Inspector Teddy Nuckles wasted not a single good thought when he set eye on the lumbering brute clutching a bag of blood on Opening Day of Rapture. He shot him. In the bag, a beautiful woman's severed head. Chief Sullivan orders him to focus on the Fontaine case, but Tenenbaum's autopsy brings up many a puzzle, including a link to German experiments in Poland.

6. Chapter 6

CHAPTER SIX

Siren Alley was the mason's quarter in Rapture, a high-class area where famed architects, such as Simon and Daniel Wales, show off their skills. The area was beautiful with lodgings that demonstrated the architects' artistic styles and shopping centers packed to the gills with upper-class residents, like over in Little Eden Plaza. In fact, Siren Alley was once considered one of the ritziest places in Rapture. Still, even though it had barely opened a few months before, some of the residents already started realizing that the richest citizens of Rapture also had the most expensive tastes.

I had spent the better part of the evening working the bars, restaurants, shops, and hotel lobbies of the Alley with a black and yellow photo of the beauty's head. Tenenbaum had helped me develop it on the quick, and we had cropped it off so it didn't look like the woman was currently body-less. The irony. I hated irony. I hated the lack of momentum, too. If there wasn't any wind blowing, I decided to make my own. I tried to fit in with my best ten-dollar suit, but I still stuck out like a Zulu in Chinatown.

A half hour later I was sitting the private offices of Daniel Wales at the Pearl Hotel. Wales stared at me across his flamboyantly ornate Louis XV desk that I had no idea could even be found in Rapture. It's always the little things. Wales owed me a favor, and I figured he would know something about the skin trade in the deep – at least enough to open the door.

He was in the middle of telling me a fine, upscale establishment such as his would never dream of catering to any type of clientele such as an escort service. I told him to quit the act before I launched him out a port hatch and called it another bathysphere accident. Such accidents were less than rare, a given in the first city at the bottom of the sea. Rapture wasn't built in a day, after all.

"Nux, look, I would love to help you. Emphatically, but I cannot be more clear. There is simply nothing I can do for you in this vein," Wales said as if I believed a word of it.

I gave him my standard stare. "Danny, I'm not asking. She is."

I placed the photo of the beauty on the desk. He picked it up and glanced over the photo quickly. "If she wants to ask she can ask me her…"

In mid-sentence, Wales' words caught in his throat like he'd swallowed a clamshell. His fingers trembled and nearly dropped the photo. He knew something. He knew her. He knew.

"Who is she, Danny?"

"She's my sister."