Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Where am I?

For perhaps the second time in her mad, disjointed life, Elizabeth found herself floating through a seemingly endless void, her body weightless and ephemeral. It was almost exactly like the time immediately after the baptism, when the multiversal paradox had left her hovering between existence and non-existence… except now she seemed to be headed in a very specific direction.

I'm dead, she remembered dimly. Fontaine killed me. And this is… after.

Somewhere in the infinite darkness, light was beginning to blossom across the emptiness. It was the sort of thing you couldn't witness without experiencing a few spiritual thoughts: maybe this was what it was like to enter Heaven – or maybe she was headed towards reincarnation, and this was what it was like to be reborn. The light bloomed, encompassing and enfolding her in its radiance. For the next few seconds, Elizabeth floated calmly in the midst of the dazzling glow, knowing nothing but its brilliance, waiting patiently for whatever came next. Wherever she was headed, it had to be better than Rapture.

So, it came as something of a shock when the light finally faded – and she found herself in what appeared to be the living room of an extremely gloomy apartment.

And Robert Lutece was shining a flashlight in her eyes.

Elizabeth blinked rapidly as she tried to make sense of the world she'd awoken to. Wherever she was, she was sitting on a ridiculously oversized couch in the corner of the room, surrounded by dilapidated relics of someone else's home: a tattered length of sodden rug, a half-collapsed easy chair, about a dozen dead plants, some old posters in smashed portrait frames, a TV showing nothing but static, and a coffee table clustered with syringes, gun parts and all manner of other junk. Also, the lights appeared to be broken, because everything here was tinged a very peculiar shade of green…

And then realization hit her like a punch in the guts: she was back in Rapture.

Even with her back to the window, there was no mistaking the distinctive emerald glow of the ocean, or the nerve-grinding drip-drip-drip of yet another structural leak. Judging from the décor, she was somewhere in the Mercury Suites – circa 1960.

Somehow, Elizabeth had ended up right back in the hellhole she'd just escaped from, and somehow, she was alive; true, she felt as though she'd just gone five or six rounds with a Handman, but she was well and truly back in the land of the living.

She must have groaned in exasperation, because Robert immediately flicked off the flashlight and glanced over his shoulder into the darkness shrouding the apartment's bedroom. "She's awake," he whispered.

A quick glance behind him revealed that Rosalind was standing there in the gloom, hands clasped behind her back and her face hidden by the shadows. "Let me be the judge of that, dear brother," she said.

"Would it be worth noting she has been through an awful lot in the last few days?"

"So have we. I think we have more of a right to complain than she does."

"Don't you think we should at least wait until she's had time to recover?"

"We've waited long enough, I'm afraid. Now please stand aside; I think it's time we had a very frank and honest conversation with the lady of the hour."

Nodding primly, Robert stepped away from the couch and allowed his counterpart to step into view. Somewhere in the groggy funk surrounding her brain, Elizabeth was dimly aware that the impassive expression was gone from Rosalind's face; now, her normally serene features were locked in what almost looked like a disgruntled frown.

She had just enough time to notice the bucket in Rosalind's hands – before the whole thing was unceremoniously dumped over Elizabeth's head, sending a gallon of ice-cold sea water gushing across her front and down the back of her neck.

With a shriek of alarm, Elizabeth lurched off the couch like a misfired rocket, soaking wet from head to toe.

"There," said Rosalind icily. "Now she's awake."

Elizabeth let out a pained moan; the pain in her head was even worse now. "What was that for?" she demanded. "I'm fully conscious now, okay? Granted, I don't even know how I'm still alive, but-"

"What were you thinking?"

"I… what?"

"After everything we discussed about responsible interdimensional travel, you go and do something like this! I mean, do you have any idea how long we were out looking for you? And after the lecture you gave us on no longer treating you like a child as well!"

"What are you talking about? What did I do?"

There was a stunned pause as the Lutece twins regarded Elizabeth with identically incredulous expressions.

"You can't be serious," said Robert.

"After all the damage you've done?" Rosalind exploded. "All the havoc you caused?"

"You don't remember that?"

"Any of it?"

Elizabeth blinked in confusion, and actually managed to summon up some mild indignation in spite of herself. "Of course I don't remember," she grumbled. "I'm suffering from Tear Sickness, in case you've forgotten."

If anything, the Luteces looked even more confused.

"The consequences of returning to a universe I died in, collapsing a quantum superposition? Losing my powers, becoming an ordinary human? You warned me all about that yourself, remember? It's how I ended up getting trapped in Rapture in the first place."

A distinctly perplexed silence followed, as the two scientists tried to make sense of what they'd just been told. Eventually, the two of them exchanged glances, shook their heads, sighed deeply, and turned back to Elizabeth with looks of weary resignation stamped on their faces.

Robert coughed uncomfortably. "Maybe it would be for the best if you explain exactly what happened," he suggested.

"Or what you think happened," said Rosalind.

"Because, loathe as we are to admit it…"

"We have no idea what you're talking about."

"But you know what happened!" Elizabeth protested. "You were there for the first half."

"Just indulge us, if you please."

And so, Elizabeth – still dripping wet – sat down on the couch and began to explain everything that had happened to her over the course of her visit to Rapture: her initial activities around the metropolis, the steps she'd taken to set a trap for Comstock, her first interview with "Booker," their attempts to seek information from Sander Cohen, the hunt for Sally in the ruins of Fontaine's department store, and Comstock's final death. For the first half of this particular story, the Luteces remained impassive apart from the occasional raised eyebrow, scarcely reacting to even the most brutal moments in the narrative; but when Elizabeth told them all about how the Big Daddy had killed her, the two of them had begun to cast some extremely dubious looks in Elizabeth's direction.

Things only got worse when she continued on to her return to Rapture: granted, she wasn't sentimental enough to mention her dream of Paris and the imaginary Booker, especially now that Rosalind was in full-blown no-nonsense mode, but that didn't do much good. When she explained the loss of her powers, the Luteces went from dubious to just plain sceptical; when she told them of her deal with Fontaine, they started giving her the same faintly condescending looks bestowed upon overimaginative children by long-suffering parents; and when she brought up her dealings with Suchong and her return to Columbia, the two of them reached new heights of confusion.

Indeed, the discovery of Daisy Fitzroy's true motivations prompted an outraged scowl from Rosalind and a thousand-yard stare from Robert, but every time Elizabeth tried to stop and ask questions, they insisted that she finish the story… not that it improved their mood in the long run. Once she got around to the source of her bond with Songbird and the origin of the Little Sisters' pairbond, Rosalind started gently massaging her temples, while Robert could only hide his face in his hands; by the time she reached the part about tracking down the W-Y-K codeword, the two were barely in the mood to react to anything.

Elizabeth concluded her story with her final confrontation with Fontaine, the realization that she'd set the stage for Sally and the Little Sisters to be saved by Jack, and the moment she'd finally died.

When she was finished, Robert threw up his hands and left the room. Meanwhile Rosalind drew a small handheld device from her pocket and – over Elizabeth's stunned protests – began swabbing saliva samples directly from Elizabeth's mouth and inputting them into the machine, grimly nodding over every blip and green light it produced.

A moment later, Robert reappeared, armed with another bucket of water.

This time, Elizabeth actually had a moment to raise her hands in a feeble attempt at self-defence before a second bucketful of ice-cold water hit her square in the face.

"CHRIST!" Elizabeth howled. "What was that for?! I was just reporting the facts!"

"We're very disappointed in you," said Robert sternly.

"Why? In case you didn't notice, I'm the injured party here! I was beaten to death a while ago. Actually, come to think of it, how am I still here? How did you bring me back?

The Luteces said nothing: they just stood there, arms folded, glaring down at her with a mixture of exasperation and outright anger.

"…you didn't bring me back?"

In perfect unison, the twins rolled their eyes.

"Okay then… was it Sally? I mean, it wouldn't be the first time a Little Sister brought someone back to life – it certainly worked for Subject Delta, but-"

The twins shook their heads, once again in unison.

"Alright then, how? How have I come back from the dead?"

This time, there was only a baleful silence.

"…You mean I didn't die at all?"

Once again, Robert hid his face in his hands; Rosalind merely nodded, grimacing furiously.

"Suffice it to say that what you experienced and what actually happened were entirely separate occurrences," she said.

"Wha- you mean I was hallucinating?"

Robert shook his head. "Dreaming might be more appropriate. Hallucinations imply that your perceptions of the world around you were merely distorted-"

"-and from what we've learned so far, you've spent most of the last seventy-two hours completely disengaged from reality," finished Rosalind. "The test I just gave you confirms it: your conscious mind was operating on a completely different narrative than the rest of you, leaving your body, speech and id to their own devices – devices that swung from the merely self-destructive to the openly destructive."

"From the evidence you left behind, we knew you were under the influence of something distinctly psychedelic… but we never expected it would be this powerful. For one thing, you were under the impression that you'd died and lost your powers; is that right?"

"Uh… yes."

"Take a look at your right hand, if you please."

Almost without realizing she was doing so, Elizabeth raised her right hand – and realized with a thrill of shock that her little finger was once again its usual truncated self, complete with the fashionable thimble topping it. For several seconds, she could only stare at it in disbelief: after her first death, she'd almost gotten used to possessing a proper finger instead of the mangled stump she'd had since she was a baby; now, it was back again. And as reality slowly trickled in through the fogbank of exhaustion around her head, she finally noticed something more important:

Her powers were back… though, if Rosalind was right, she'd never lost them in the first place.

"How?" she asked quietly. "I mean, my powers should be gone for good-"

"Because you visited a world where you'd supposedly already died," said Rosalind, faintly condescendingly. "And who exactly told you that was the way interdimensional physics worked?"

"You did."

"In a hallucination – or a dream, whatever you want to call it."

"Whereas in reality, we've returned to the worlds where we died many, many times," said Robert, by now distinctly smug.

"We even interviewed the man who took our funeral photos."

"And he was very shocked to see us alive and well and criticizing his work."

"A fact you should know full well by now: you overheard the conversation between us back in Downtown Emporia."

Elizabeth blushed. A few hours ago, she'd been almost secure in the knowledge that she was doing the right thing – no matter how badly she suffered as a result. But now that she was sitting here, freezing cold and dripping wet, with her head throbbing in agony and the full spotlight of the Luteces' disapproval blazing down on her, those semi-comforting certainties were beginning to evaporate. Now, a surge of embarrassment was sweeping over her, accompanied by a sensation of creeping dread instantly recognizable to anyone who'd ever asked themselves the fatal question "what the hell did I do last night?"

"If nothing I saw was real, then what about Sally?" she asked. "Was she imaginary as well, or-"

"No," said Rosalind. "Sally was quite real."

"Then what happened to her? Is she alive?"

"You're sitting on her."

For the second time since she'd awoken, Elizabeth shot out of her chair. Once she'd had a chance to calm down, she realized that there was indeed something else on the couch almost exactly where she'd been sitting. However, it wasn't a Little Sister; in fact, it wasn't even a human being: it was a battered old poster, creased and crumbled and torn from top to bottom, not to mention pockmarked with stains best left unexplored. More to the point, it also bore the distinctive translucency inherent to items taken from dimensions that no longer existed – just like all the souvenirs Elizabeth had taken from the memory of Columbia.

As was immediately apparent, it was a piece of early 20th century erotica, racy for 1912 but prudish by Rapture's standards: it was a drawing of a woman in an extremely low-cut top, a rather frilly skirt, a pair of fishnet stockings, and a hat that would had been ostentatious even in Columbia. Emblazoned across the lower border was the name "SALLY."

"Ah," mumbled Elizabeth. Suddenly, making eye contact with the Luteces seemed very difficult. "Well, at least I didn't kidnap a Little Sister or anything like that."

"Yes," said Rosalind icily. "Because that would have only been marginally more embarrassing than what you've actually been doing over the last seventy-two hours."

"Was it really that bad?"

The Luteces only glared silently at her.

"Um… I don't suppose either of you know what really happened?"

Rosalind nodded. "Most of it. We've spent the last few days following you through the Tears you left in your wake, so we weren't actually there for any of it, but there were several witnesses. In the meantime…"

Without warning, Robert vanished from the room, rematerializing a moment later at Elizabeth's side with a large glass of effervescent liquid in his hand. "Drink this," he advised.

"What is it?"

"My patented hangover cure. It should help ease the headache and numb the bruising to your face. Now, drink up."

"Hangover?" Elizabeth echoed. "Bruising? What actually happened to me?"

"Drink up and we'll tell you."

Elizabeth sighed and reluctantly downed the glass of cure, immediately shuddering at the foul taste: whatever it was, it bore the eyewatering flavour of lemon and grapefruit juice, along with subtle notes of sparkling water, mouthwash, vinegar, sauerkraut grease and industrial paint thinner. Maybe just a hint of formaldehyde – appropriate, given that she currently felt like a zombie.

"Now then," said Rosalind briskly, drawing her notebook from her pocket once more, "the first report we received came from one Manny D. Weiss, a bartender at the Drowned Leviathan in Fort Frolic, circa 1958…"

Manny wasn't usually a fan of dealing with talkative bar patrons.

After all, most of them didn't have anything interesting to say, and with Fontaine's reign of terror still fresh in the memory, there were plenty of boring people determined to get drunk – and only drunk, sadly. No buyers for the special stock these days.

This girl, though, was different.

The look of her was intriguing enough on its own: the thimble she wore over the stump of her pinkie almost prompted Manny to start asking questions. But in the end, professionalism prevailed: in this business, you only asked, "what'll it be?" and let the customer do the talking, and more importantly, the drinking. And it was in the drinking that this strange girl had begun really drawing attention.

She'd turned up about half an hour ago, sat down at the bar and immediately ordered a glass of Red Ribbon Brandy, then a shot of Old Tom Whiskey, then a tumbler of Chechnya Vodka. Eventually, she'd decided to make use of the cocktail menu, and ordered a Gin Rickey, followed by a Gin and Tonic, then gave up and asked for Moonbeam Absinthe – with a specific request to leave the bottle. Now, she was quite clearly pickled, but the fact that this slip of a thing was still capable of speaking coherently and remaining upright was nothing short of incredible.

Eventually, she'd started talking. Normally, that would have been Manny's cue to turn his brain off, but something in the girl's world-weary tone piqued his interest.

And the things she was talking about…

"My father died this time last year."

"I'm very sorry to hear that, ma'am."

"I drowned him."

"…I beg your pardon."

"Me and almost a dozen of my alternate selves drowned him in a river; it was the only way we could stop Comstock and erase Columbia from history. It was the only way, and he agreed to it… but I miss him. I didn't even know he was my father until half an hour before it happened…"

After that, Manny had been hooked. The girl was quite clearly out of her mind – probably the Plasmid blues, most likely – but instead of spending her time staring at the ceiling and gibbering on about the armada of bloodsucking butterflies descending on Rapture, she told stories: she talked of flying cities, giant mechanical birds, mysterious bulletproof twins with the power to appear and disappear at will, bottled potions that bestowed powers that would have made Plasmids seem mundane, gateways in the fabric of reality, and impossible voyages through time. She'd even claimed to have seen Rapture in the future, though all she could offer on the subject were a few disquieted mutters: "Kashmir," "plane crash," and most prominent of all, "Songbird."

Eventually, Manny's curiosity got the better of him: "What do you do for a living, ma'am?" he asked.

"Not much, these days. I'm trying to find a career, but it's hard when you can't make up your mind where to start looking – and I've got the whole multiverse to choose from. I've tried a little writing, but it's not going anywhere."

"Then, if you don't mind me asking, then how are you paying for ADAM?"

"I'm not. I've never touched ADAM in my life."

Manny's eyebrows thundered into his hairline with a near-audible crash. A non-Splicer on the premises wasn't exactly uncommon these days, but the idea that Baroness Munchausen here had never had a single taste of ADAM in her life was beyond belief.

But perhaps she wasn't a Splicer at all: maybe she was just an ordinary drug addict, probably drinking a lot to make up for the fact that her supply had dried up. After all, she'd said she'd tried a little writing, so maybe she was part of the artist's commune at Dionysus Park; lord only knew those artsy types were always on something. Of course, ADAM was displacing most of the old drugs, so there weren't too many customers asking for them these days… but maybe there was still a small market for it sitting right in front of him…

His eyes narrowed, and he anxiously glanced around the bar. These days, you never knew who might be watching, and his "secret stock" was technically a smuggled item. Granted, it wasn't smuggled from the Surface, but Ryan Security wouldn't care; after all, if they didn't tolerate people trying to poach ADAM slugs direct from the ocean, why would they tolerate his product? And yet… if he could get a repeat customer out of this weird girl, maybe it'd be worth the risk.

Fortunately, the Drowned Leviathan was almost empty, and there didn't appear to be anyone watching from the window. Plus, with customer confidence still recovering from the big Fontaine panic, they wouldn't be disturbed until tomorrow morning.

So, he leaned over the bar and asked, "I don't suppose you're interested in anything stronger?"

As if in answering, the girl held up her fifth glass of absinthe and fixed him with a slightly bleary-eyed stare. "Is there something stronger?" she replied. "I'll take it if you've got it, but I know I wouldn't find Uncle Ewan's Moonshine in this establishment at this point in history, so…"

Without saying a word, Manny slid the antique snuffbox across the bar towards her, flipping it open to reveal the powdered merchandise within.

For a moment, the girl could only boggle in drunken confusion.

"It's pink," she said at last. "Pink and… glowing?"

Manny grinned. "It's called Searuby," he said. "It's made from a special kind of coral that grows around the old Fontaine Futuristics building. It'll take you places weirder than that, believe me."

He felt it germane to avoid mentioning that users tended to get rather mobile when visiting these places and often did things entirely independent of their own conscious minds. The marine biologist who'd sold him his first batch of the drug had mentioned "conscious dream states," "mind/body disconnection," and even "Jekyll and Hyde disorder," all adding up to one of the best commercially-available hallucinogens on the market, so Manny hadn't seen any tangible reason not to sell it – or add any caveats to his sales pitch, for that matter.

True, there'd been a few weird stories about certain users frantically humping the windows in attempts to fuck passing whales, only to wake up claiming that they'd been sprinting merrily across a labyrinth of chocolate built over a lake of honey.

And yes, by it was too late to ask his contact about the negative side-effects, given that the poor bastard had vanished about a month after he'd started dealing, but since nobody had cracked down on Manny's business yet, he had to assume that it wasn't due to the coral. At any rate, so long as this crazy bint came back for more, it was all good in his books.

"…how much?" the woman asked.

"Two hundred per gram."

"Really?"

"Hey, Fontaine Futuristics is now off-limits to most of the work crews – and it's not exactly easy to just steal a diving suit and sneak out, ma'am. In any event, the price is set, take it or leave it."

Sighing deeply, the girl forked over a crisp handful of cash over the counter and accepted the snuffbox, along with a straw. For a moment she hesitated, briefly eyeing her near-empty glass of absinthe – almost like a deep-sea diver taking one last look at the airlock behind him before taking the plunge. Then, she lowered her head to the small hill of glowing pink powder, readied the straw and took a very healthy sniff.

For almost a full minute, there was silence in the bar as the drug took effect. And when the mysterious patron finally lifted her head from the bar, there was a brand-new look of resolve and determination in her wildly dilated eyes.

"I have to find a private detective," she said solemnly.

And without another word, she slipped off her chair and marched unsteadily towards the exit, vanishing out the door and into the neon-studded gloom of Fort Frolic – never to be seen again.

Chapter Text

"Searuby?" Elizabeth echoed.

"That's what he called it."

"I took drugs?!"

"Your grasp of the obvious remains commendable," deadpanned Rosalind.

"Yes, but… drugs in Rapture? Right before the New Years' Eve attacks? Why didn't I realize how dangerous that'd be?"

"In your defence, you were extremely drunk at the time," said Robert.

"Mixing didn't do you any favours, unfortunately."

"Nor did continuing to drink."

"In fact, it may have enhanced the duration of the drug."

"At any rate, I doubt most users end up going on seventy-two hour trips."

Elizabeth sighed. "So, what happened next?" she asked, suspecting that she didn't want to know the answer.

There was a slight pause as Rosalind leafed through her notebook, passing several pages crowded with angry scribblings in the margins before finally finding the next incident. "We received this report from a different Rapture entirely," she explained, "more specifically from the offices of the Rapture Tribune, circa 1952. Multiple witnesses on this one."

"The Tribune? You said I was looking for a private detective. What the hell would I be doing at a newspaper building?"

"I think you may have gotten lost."

"Help! For Christ's sake, someone help! I'm stuck on a bike with a goddamn lunatic!"

"WE'RE GOING ON AN ADVENTURE! WE'RE GOING ON AN ADVENTURE! WE'RE GOING ON AN ADVENTURE! WE'RE GOING ON AN ADVENTURE! WE'RE GOING ON AN ADVENTURE! WE'RE GOING ON AN ADVENTURE!"

"Christ, I heard you the first time!" Stanley wailed plaintively.

But the madwoman's only reply was a high-pitched shriek of laughter, almost drowned out by the roar of the engines and the screams of passers-by.

All around them, chaos reigned: filing cabinets toppled like ninepins, doors exploded open in showers of shrapnel, and terrified journalists scattered in all directions as the motorbike roared down the corridor. By now, they should have hit a corner or found a hallway too narrow to travel down, but whenever an obstacle appeared in the path, the crazy bitch just waved a hand and suddenly the road ahead was clear: corners straightened out, tight hallways ballooned into major thoroughfares, and security systems ceased to exist in a flash of light.

Behind them, the security guards that had been chasing after the bike suddenly collapsed into an undignified heap: a set of mahogany dining chairs had abruptly materialized in their path, ending their forward trajectory in a cacophony of upending furniture. Some of the hacks made a few wild grabs at the bike from the sidelines, only to be repelled by an inexplicable shower of ping-pong balls raining down from nowhere in particular.

"What do you even want from me?" Stanley whimpered. "Is it about what happened back in the office? I swear, I was just looking! That's not a crime, right?"

"I NEED A PRIVATE DETECTIVE!" the madwoman hollered.

"But I'm a reporter!"

"SINCLAIR SOLUTIONS SUBSTITUTE! WE'RE GOING ON AN ADVENTURE! IT'LL BE JUST LIKE OLD TIMES!"

"Oh dear Jesus, don't start that again…"

Stanley Poole's Friday nights weren't normally this action-packed: for one thing, he'd normally have made it as far as Eve's Garden by now. In truth, today's trouble had started about half an hour ago: he'd been finishing up his work for the day and getting ready for a night on the town, when some crazy broad with a thimble on her finger had abruptly burst in and started screaming about private detectives. While Tanner had tried to shoo her away, Stanley had taken a good long look at her for a while, taking in the hills and valleys for as long as he could get away with it.

He'd still been enjoying the view when the woman had turned around and seen him.

Abruptly, she'd started screaming again – and against expectations, had grabbed him by the collar and started dragging him away. Stanley had tried to smack her one, but whoever this dame was, she was definitely a lot stronger than she looked, because she'd immediately knocked him cold with a bottle of vodka.

When he woke up, he was sitting in the sidecar of a motorbike combination, roaring through the Tribune building at high speed.

For the first twenty seconds, he'd done nothing but ask questions, demanding to know who this crazy bitch was, what she wanted with him, where they were going, and how the hell she'd gotten a motorbike into the building – or into Rapture, come to think of it. But the woman wasn't interested in answering: she'd just screamed nonsense at the top of her voice and went on accelerating down the corridors, pausing only to produce fresh bottles of Old Harbinger Beer from seemingly nowhere and down them in a single gulp.

He'd have gladly unbuckled himself and leaped out, even if it meant risking a fatal collision with the nearest wall, but the lunatic had cuffed his arms and legs to the seat for good measure. For the time being, he was quite literally along for the ride.

Up ahead, two security guards lined up at the opposite door and drew their guns; with a thrill of terror, Stanley realized that they weren't just aiming at the madwoman, but at him. This lunatic bitch hadn't just ruined his Friday night and threatened his life, but she'd made him an accomplice in her own crime spree.

He had just enough time to scream for mercy – before the driver waved a hand again, and suddenly the air was thick with hundreds of lush red roses floating aimlessly in mid-air, blocking the road ahead and leaving the two goons with nothing to aim at. A sane human being would have taken the opportunity to get off the bike and start running in the opposite direction as fast as possible, but the woman driving this combination wasn't human or sane: she gunned the engine and accelerated towards the waiting security guards with a whoop of exhilaration, sending them tumbling into the growing dunes of roses.

A moment later, the bike erupted through the front doors of the Tribune building and rocketed down the street at an eyewatering speed. Shop windows blurred past them; pedestrians dived out of the way, screaming bilious expletives; alarms blared from one end of the street to the next.

Up ahead, a gate slammed shut over the nearest access passage, forcing the bike into a violent swerved to the left. Stanley caught a brief glimpse of a brightly-lit shop window – right before the bike's front wheel crashed through it, showering them with broken glass and the contents of the ruined display; then they were inside. By that point, they must have burst a tyre, because the bike had slowed dramatically. Unfortunately, they were moving just slowly enough to avoid hitting the customers but not quite slow enough to avoid hitting the nearest shelving unit. With an almighty crunch, the bike finally ground to a halt in a massive pile of broken shelves and fallen debris.

"We made it!" the madwoman cackled. "Just like the skyline! Haha!"

Stanley took a deep breath and tried not to imagine how close to a heart attack he'd gotten in the last three minutes.

Then, he happened to notice the contents of the shelf they'd just ploughed into, and realized where they were: this was a sex shop – one that Stanley had visited many times on the days when he didn't have the coin for a visit to Fort Frolic.

Great, he thought. Not only do I miss out on a show at Eve's Garden because of this crazy bitch, but she ends up wrecking one of my favourite stores in all of Rapture. Even if they don't have to close because of the damage, they'll never let me back in after this! Where am I supposed to get my weekly dose of spank material now? And more importantly…

"What are you going do to me?" he asked, slightly muffled by the sound of customers and staff fleeing the store en mass.

The woman took a belt from her eighteenth bottle of beer, then turned in her seat and fixed Stanley with a mad stare. "You're gonna help me find a private detective," she slurred, "because I need a private detective, but I can't find a private detective, so you're my private detective for now until we can find a private detective. Got it, private detective?"

"Not even remotely. Also, I'm still a reporter."

"But you're a spy as well. Oh wait, am I too early for that?"

"What are you talking about?"

"So you're interested? You'll help me find 'em?"

"WHO THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO BE HELPING YOU FIND?"

The woman blinked. "I don't know," she mumbled. "No wait, it was Booker Dewitt. No, it was Zachary Hale Comstock. No, it was Anna. But I don't know where any of them live anymore…"

She clambered off the bike, bracing against the ruins of the shelf as she struggled to return to an upright position.

"I lost something," she said vaguely. "I think I lost a lot of things. And I don't know what they were and how to get them back. I'm not sure if I need a private detective or if one of them was a private detective. But there was something else I lost, something from far away; it's a memory, see, something that doesn't really exist anymore..."

Her eyes lit up. "I think I left it in another Rapture. I gotta go check!"

And with that, the woman snapped her fingers, and before Stanley's astonished eyes, the air before them tore open, splitting down the middle to reveal a vast luminescent rift in the fabric of reality. Not even stopping to answer questions, the woman stepped through the hole in the air and snapped her fingers again. A moment later, the glowing portal was gone…

…leaving Stanley alone in one of Rapture's seediest sex shops, still handcuffed to the sidecar, covered in broken glass and fallen porno mags. And judging by those angry shouts in the distance, Ryan Security wasn't far away.

"Jesus," Elizabeth groaned.

"Luckily, no-one was seriously hurt. However, the Tribune was running a number of rather interesting articles on you by the time we arrived. Someone apparently managed to get a few photographs of you before you escaped – inevitable, given that you were trying to kidnap someone at a newspaper office."

"Oh God."

"You could afford to relax, you know."

"How can I relax? I got high and crashed a motorcycle into a porno store and now you tell me my face has been splattered all over the front page of a major newspaper! People are going to collect clippings of this, preserve it in scrapbooks, hang it on walls – for all I know, Jack will end up seeing them when he comes to Rapture. And what about Stanley Poole? Assuming I haven't changed the future by doing this, he's going to survive the civil war, and in the event that Subject Delta doesn't kill him, he's probably going to be rescued and cured of ADAM sickness… and what'll happen when the time comes for the survivors of Rapture to tell their stories? Everyone's going to hear about the time some drunken, drug-addled madwoman kidnapped a reporter and ram-raided a sex shop!"

"One of the many benefits of dimensional travel," said Robert. "If you don't like one universe, move onto the next."

"You did exactly that, incidentally," added Rosalind with a smirk. "Our next witness report came from Fort Frolic, this time in 1960."

"What the hell would I have been doing there?"

"By then, your dream-narrative was well and truly in play, so I would imagine you thought that you and Comstock were searching for information on Sally. As to what your Id thought you were doing… your guess is as good as ours."

"So… who was your witness?"

"You recall meeting a very strange man with a very silly moustache? Bad temper, worse art?"

"Oh shit."

"Dah-duh-dah-DAH-DUM – NO, NO, NO! FOR THE LAST TIME, FITZPATRICK, ALLEGRO! FUCKING ALLEGRO!"

"I'm trying, I'm trying! Just give me a little more time, please!"

"Start playing again, and this time no mistakes!"

"Llllleeet meeeee hhvvv a go!"

There was a deathly pause, as Cohen's spotlight belatedly focussed on the figure lurching down the aisle towards the stage. Whoever this was, she didn't appear to be a Splicer, or else she was hiding her deformities extremely well… though by the looks of that walk and the bottle of Old Tom Whiskey she held in her left hand, she was definitely a little worse for wear.

"What did you say?"

"L-l-let me have a go at that!" the woman drunkenly stammered, waving a purloined theatre programme in the air. "I can play! I've had lllllots of practice. There used to be a piano in the tower…"

"Get out!" Cohen roared. "GET OUT! Fitzpatrick has important work to do, and he can hardly afford to waste time tolerating the attentions of some drunken rube – a rube, I might add, who has no conception of the important role art plays in our daily lives! We are not merely producing music here, young lady: we are sculpting the very contours of LIFE AND DEATH ITSELF!"

"Alright, alright, geez, you don't need to get all uptight about this, man. But as long as I'm here, can I borrow that dynamite?" She pointed vaguely in the direction of the length of explosives draped over the end of Fitzpatrick's grand piano. "I'm gonna need to blow something up. I dunno why, and I don't know what I'm gonna 'splode it with, but I'm just gonna need to blow it up."

"NO! GET OUT!"

"Ah, fair enough. Can I listen to my music while I'm here? It's just that it all gets a bit samey around here these days, y'know?"

"…samey?"

"Yeah. It's not meant as a criticism, but all this plaster and dead bodies and dead bodies coated in plaster and blood and pianos covered in bombs… it's a bit much. You could do something different, you know? Some oil paintings, some murals. I mean, if you fixed the skylights, you even could try painting some frescos, but that might be taking things a bit far."

Somewhere behind the spotlight, Cohen began to silently tremble with rage. Ever since the local Splicer population had learned to respect him and the rest of Rapture had fallen silent, nobody had dared to even hint that his work was anything short of masterful. The Doubters were gone, either dead or cowering in fear from the wrath of a truly inspired artist's genius… but after all this time, it seemed that one had drunkenly stumbled into his theatre.

"So I've just gotta listen to some music now," said the doubter, seemingly oblivious to Cohen's fury.

Then, she snapped her fingers, and a shimmering field of energy began to gather in the air nearby, shaping itself into a perfect oval; bordered by a faint halo of red light, the porthole-shaped anomaly was dull grey and transparent at the centre, tinting everything on the opposite side a dull silvery shade. And from this inexplicable phenomenon… music began to play.

But it wasn't just any music.

It was Anna Culpepper's last album: Ryan's Songbird.

For almost a full minute, Cohen sat there behind the spotlight, unable to believe his ears as the mean-spirited satire rained down on him. It simply wasn't possible for this auditory assault to be real: he'd specifically ordered that Ryan remove that hateful record from the market: as soon as the Culpepper bitch's heart had stopped, every last purchased copy had been tracked down and destroyed. It shouldn't have been possible for it to survive, no matter what Plasmids this lunatic Doubter was using to play it; this had to be in his head – some new challenge arranged by his muse to perfect his work.

But no matter how many times he told himself that the music was just his imagination, it only seemed to grow louder.

Eventually, Cohen couldn't take another second of it. "FITZPATRICK!" he howled. "START PLAYING AGAIN!"

"But-"

"NOW!"

Fitzpatrick set to work on the piano again, bloodied fingers dancing nimbly across the keys as he tried to drown out the obscene sounds of Culpepper's atonal critique, but without much success. Even with the acoustics of the Fleet Hall and the fine state of the grand piano itself, there was only so many ways you could boost the volume before you stopped making music and started making a racket.

"FORTE! FORTISSIMO!"

As Fitzpatrick hammered at the keys in a desperate attempt to outdo his ethereal rival, Cohen reached for the volume control console for the stage's sound systems and turned it up as far as it would go.

If anything, Culpepper's noise only grew louder. By now she was onto the verse in which the moustachioed stableboy rhapsodized about the taste of horse apples, and with only a chorus or two until the song ended and even worse melodies began, Cohen had to take drastic steps.

Muttering less-than-visionary expletives, he teleported himself up into the scaffolding, hurriedly lowered his own PA microphone down to the stage, and then switched on the public address system: immediately, Fitzpatrick's frenzied piano solo was broadcast all over Fort Frolic, including inside the Fleet Hall, amplifying the music tenfold. For about ten heart-stopping seconds, Cohen thought he might have the upper hand, enough to banish this mad phantom…

But then the inexplicable hole in the air shifted position, hovering across the auditorium until it was right above the stage – and Fitzpatrick's microphone was intercepting every note of Culpepper's damnable music.

A moment later, the frenzied playing came to a halt as Fitzpatrick slumped over the piano in a dead faint, the music immediately replaced by a lone atonal bonk as his head glanced off the keyboard in mid-fall – and then entirely by Ryan's Songbird. Suddenly, the album he'd tried so hard to erase was being heard all over Fort Frolic.

With a scream of inarticulate rage, Cohen vanished in another cloud of scarlet mist and reappeared on the stage, fire pouring from his outstretched hands. But the Doubter, whoever she really was or where she'd come from, was nowhere to be found.

And the music was still playing.

"Well, at least he didn't try and follow me through the Tear," Elizabeth mused. "Uh, how was he doing the last time you saw him?"

"He had an itemized list of things he'd like to do to you if you ever showed your face in Fort Frolic again."

"Ah."

"I believe the first was…" Rosalind leafed through her notebook for a moment. "Let me see… oh yes: flay you from the crown of your skull to the tips of your toes with a can opener, then roll your skin up into a quote 'giant meaty phallus' unquote and hammer it 'where the sun doesn't shine'."

"Slightly redundant, given his current address," said Robert cheekily.

"Item number two would involve-"

Elizabeth coughed loudly. "That's enough, thank you! Now, what happened next? I mean, if there's any correlation with my dream, then I might have been aboard a bathysphere."

"More or less correct."

"And?"

"Our next report is from Security Chief Sullivan, in another Rapture – specifically at around the exact point Ryan ordered the bathyspheres locked down…"

"Chief? You're gonna want to see this."

"We're kinda busy here, in case you hadn't noticed. These grease monkeys need people watching their backs, remember?"

"I know but… there's been a disturbance near the western end of the dock."

"So? The engineers have already finished locking down the bathyspheres at that end. If someone really wants to try hijacking a goddamn sub, I'd like to see 'em try! It's not as if they could actually get past this gene-lock thing, right?"

"That's the problem: someone's managed it."

Sullivan blinked, briefly flummoxed. Then, he took to his heels and started running, closely followed by two other deputies.

Already, a million nightmare scenarios were running feverishly through his head: this was the start of a major terrorist attack; he hijacker was fleeing for the surface; there was a major conspiracy to help dissidents flee Rapture en mass; someone was smuggling something into Rapture – or out of it; or worst of all, this was the start of an ambush on the security forces.

Had he been a bit less worried, Sullivan might have started questioning his choice of career again, given that these were scenarios that ordinary police officers shouldn't have to deal with – much less ordinary police chiefs. Of course, Sullivan didn't have the energy to focus on all those quiet, nagging doubts, not when there was an emergency at hand.

It was dark in the bathysphere station: now that the place had been officially closed for business and the last of the protesters had been driven away, the lights were off, the shutters were up, and even the normally illuminated arrivals boards had shut down. Now, the cavernous docking bay sat in stygian darkness, silent except for the distant sounds of the technicians at work on the bathyspheres and Sullivan's own footsteps. However, as he finally skidded to a halt just outside the gateway to the western dock, he realized that the unnatural quiet of the desolate station had been split by the soft rumble of an engine. And as he rounded the corner, he saw it, lit up by the incandescent beams of its own running lights.

A bathysphere was unmoored and in motion, churning through the waters of the dock at an incredible pace. And…

"…the hell?" Sullivan muttered.

At first, he thought it was his imagination, or even his eyes playing tricks on him. But then he and the deputies shone their lights on the rogue bathysphere, and suddenly there was no doubting what they'd just seen.

The bathysphere was yellow.

Someone had painted every inch of the 'sphere's hull a luminescent canary yellow, and, presumably just for shits and giggles, emblazoned a giant blue eagle along its left flank, complete with the legend SONGBIRD ROCKS. And as the bathysphere drifted closer to the edge of the dock, it soon became clear that whoever had stolen the damn sub had also gone to the trouble of painting an insanely detailed pattern all along the rim of the 'sphere's single window, daubing a miniature daisy chain of tiny birds and tiny cages all along the frame.

A closer look at the empty space on the dock revealed that the modifications were very recent: open cans of quick-dry paint, toolboxes, and chunks of unrecognizable machinery lay all around the vacant spot. Whoever done this, they'd been at work for the last couple of hours – meaning that someone out there had been crazy enough to sneak into the station while Sullivan and his men had been at work, risking discovery and worse – all for the sake of decorating a 'sphere before stealing it.

But as strange as all this was, far weirder was the fact the bathysphere itself didn't appear to be going anywhere. It was just coasting around the place in circles, merrily spiralling from one end of the dock to the next.

It wasn't easy for a submersible to do donuts, but somehow, this one was managing it.

Eventually, it stopped just long enough for Sullivan to break out the binoculars and get a good look at the interior: the innards of the 'sphere were a mess of uprooted wall panels, disembowelled cables and empty wine bottles, and at the heart of it all stood a single bedraggled figure armed with a complicated-looking portable control panel bristling with buttons, joysticks and god only knew what else. This was technology that Sullivan had never seen before, even in Rapture, and it had somehow been able to bypass Ryan's infallible gene-lock.

Far more confusing was the woman operating the panel. Even from here, Sullivan could clearly see that the perp was not a hardened criminal: she was a dizzy-looking dark-haired dame with a mad, bloodshot look in her eyes that suggested she probably didn't even know her own name, much less what she was doing. Plus, not only was she holding an open bottle of Tate Merlot under one arm, but there were at least six more unopened bottles lying at her feet. So how could she have managed all this? Either she had an accomplice who'd already fled the area, or this dizzy dame had enough engineering know-how to work out a bypass while completely hammered.

For almost five seconds, the two locked eyes. Then, the mystery woman grinned, hoisted two middle fingers in Sullivan's direction, and turned back to the controls.

And then, without warning, a glowing diamond-shaped hole appeared in the middle of the water, half-submerged in the still waters of the bathysphere station: from this angle, it was difficult to see what lay on the other side of the window, but it was clear that it was clearly big enough to comfortably accommodate the rogue 'sphere. Then, pausing only to unsteadily wave goodbye, the woman punched a button on the control pad in her hands and sent the yellow bathysphere trundling into the hole in the air; a second later, both the window and the sub were gone, leaving only a faint glowing residue in its wake.

There was an awkward silence.

"Are you going to file a report on this?" one of the nearest deputies asked.

Sullivan rolled his eyes. "Yeah, I'm sure that'll go down just great at the next meeting with Ryan. 'Gee, boss, you've either got a long-lost daughter out there, or someone's found a way of mechanically bypassing the gene-lock on the bathyspheres. Where's the 'sphere? Oh, our suspect painted it bright yellow, took it on a joyride around the station, piloted it through a glowing hole in the air and vanished. What do you mean, Persephone?' Christ on crutches, McGill, were you born in a barn?"

"Please tell me I wasn't singing. Tell me I at least had that much dignity."

"Sullivan wouldn't have been able to hear you through the window, so I have to assume that the lyrics of a certain Beatles song were never heard within Rapture at any point."

"Well, that's one small relief. But how the hell did I get past the gene-lock?"

"It involved the desecration of a corpse."

"I'm sorry I even asked. What did I actually do with the bathysphere?"

"Again, you were jumping quite rapidly between different Raptures at this point, so…"

On the 25th of November, 1954, the early-afternoon calm of the Farmer's Market was shattered by a deafening bang as a single garishly-painted bathysphere abruptly materialized about six feet above the pathway and crashed to the ground violently enough to send produce flying off shelves all over the market.

Glass cracked, storefronts collapsed, pedestrians fell flat on their faces, and in the nearby apiary a hive fell over and disgorged a swarm of angry bees, forcing the keepers to evacuate into the market – only adding to the confusion. For good measure, inertia let the downed sub continue moving for at least twenty feet after the initial impact, carving a deep trench in the pathway and sending shoppers fleeing in all directions.

And as the dust finally began to settle, the bathysphere's door creaked open, disgorging a twitching, frenzied-looking figure.

Her hands were drenched in oil and grease, the front of her blouse was a collage of unspeakable stains, her hair looked as though it had been styled with a pitchfork, and there was more than a hint of rabid foam around her lips… and yet, this strange woman's face was lit up by a wild grin, an undefeated smile that only the utterly insane could even attempt to replicate.

Also, she appeared to be armed with a bottle of Arcadia Merlot.

For perhaps a minute, she just stood there, waving her half-empty bottle in the air and giggling with exhilaration – as if she'd just gotten off a roller-coaster.

Then, without warning, she let out a high-pitched cackle of "The Songbird has landed!"

And then, before anyone could ask her name, she was gone.

"God, this keeps getting worse. How could I have done something like this?"

"As we've just established, most of it involves drugs and alcohol," said Robert dryly.

"The rest would seem to involve a death wish," added Rosalind.

Elizabeth hesitated. "What about the Big Daddy in the department store?" she asked. "Was that real?"

"In a word, no. However, we can confirm that you suffered a collision… of sorts. This time, the witness contacted us directly – which was just as well, otherwise we might never have been able to pick up your trail again."

"Directly? Who in Rapture could have been able to contact you directly?"

"Nobody. The owner of the object you collided with wasn't in Rapture at the time. Also, you may notice that you still have several flecks of blue paint under your fingernails."

"Blue? Oh no…"

"Doctor!"

"Elizabeth?"

"Wait, which Doctor are you? 12, right? Or is it 13? I don't know, but you've got the angry eyebrows, and you're all floofy! Floofy grey hair! Floofy!"

"Get your fucking hands out of my hair!"

"Aww."

"Now, why the fuck were you clinging to the side of the TARDIS?"

"I have no idea! I think I was on a pogo stick! You want some Scotch? I just found it!"

"Aw fuck me, not this again! I thought the Luteces agreed to keep you away from the fucking nightclubs!"

"Let's go to Herculaneum, Doctor! I wanna go someplace warm for a change!"

"No! No, no, no! The last thing I want at this point is for us to go to Mount Vesuvius – and then find out that you stole the Time Matrix and want to hide it there with the Pyroviles, or you want to surf down a pyroclastic flow and teleport yourself into the Big Empty or whatever!"

"But I didn't steal the Time Matrix!"

"Well, that's a fuckin' weight off my mind."

"I did steal an Escafil Device, though."

"WHAT?!"

"I was really quiet about it, too; Prince Elfangor won't even know it's gone!"

"Oh Jesus Christ, I am going to get fucking emails about this…"

"Oooh! I love emails! Can I have some too?"

"Oh for fuck's sake, just leave! Even Jaimie didn't cause this much trouble when he got plastered; the most I had to deal with was his attempt to distil whiskey in the fucking swimming pool! Fuck off and sort your life out!"

"Do you still have a waterpark here, by the way?"

"LEAVE! FUCKING VAMOOSE!"

"…can I have a bedtime story?"

"Grrrrr…."

"Please?"

"Alright, alright. This evening's story is the history of early 21st century pre-order culture and the value of season passes as condensed to the space of a single sentence: a bunch of septumless shiteheads wanked onto a plate and called it vanilla custard, then charged double the price of crack cocaine just for the privilege of tasting it. The End. Now hop it."

"But-"

"Goodbye, Elizabeth! The world of sanity is officially closed for business, and I'm pretty sure it's Happy Hour again in whatever bar you were in before you decided to burst in on me, so kindly fuck off and don't darken this door again until you are sober!"

"Oh. What's 'sober?' Is it expensive?"

"FUCK OFF! FUCK RIGHT OFF! MOVE! DISAPPEAR! VANISH!"

"Can you get a message to the Ellimist?"

"…maybe. Why?"

"Because I think that the Drode's really hot. I just think someone needs to know that."

"I'll take it under consideration. Now, move on, please! Thank you, fuckity-bye!"

Chapter Text

"Oh god. Please tell me I didn't end up taking it any further than that."

Rosalind sighed. "Well, we've already found the stolen Escafil Device and returned it to its home dimension, so the Ellimist's taking a very relaxed view of this particular instance of drunken larceny."

"Of course, you still owe Emmet Brown and John Crichton a substantial repair bill, and you shouldn't expect any birthday cards from the Citadel of Ricks anytime soon."

"And the Doctor is still scraping pieces of flux capacitor off the TARDIS."

"And you appear to have taken a slight detour to interview people who currently are or have previously been trapped in time loops."

"Phil Connors…

"Dorothy McShane…"

"One of the alternate Brakebills cliques…"

"Brad Cohen…"

"Nadia Vulvokov…"

"Allistair Peck…"

"And a few others. Some of them complained."

"But other than that navigational slip-up, you kept yourself restricted to Rapture and its many iterations."

Elizabeth sighed in relief. "Well, that's one less embarrassment."

"Unfortunately, you're forgetting one of the key aspects of your powers, Elizabeth."

Robert nodded sagely. "You recall experiencing a dream of Paris during your episode?"

"Yes, but… wait, that actually happened?"

"In a manner of speaking. You suffered a brief bleed-through from your mental narrative into your physical experience."

"But how could I have done that?" Elizabeth asked. "You said I didn't leave Rapture after the TARDIS incident, so how would I have visited Paris?"

"Well," said Rosalind, "at the risk of mangling a well-known proverb, if the prophet won't go to the mountain-"

"-Then the mountain will have to come to the prophet," Robert finished.

"FUCK."

Celebrations in Dionysus Park were in full swing when the disaster began.

In truth, they'd been in full swing for quite some time. With Sofia Lamb arrested and Stanley Poole now in charge of the park, the gala celebration to reopen the facility to the public had been a spectacle beyond imagining and almost beyond cost: veritable rivers of champagne, ton after ton of lobster and black-market steak, live music courtesy of the best bands in Rapture, dancers on loan from Eve's Garden and the Seahorse, and all the drugs that Sofia Lamb's money could buy.

It had only been meant to last from 8 PM to 6 AM, but with most of the guests being full-time residents of the park anyway, nobody had any overwhelming need to leave. So, Stanley had paid the fees for the previous evening's entertainment, brought in a few jukeboxes, hired a trainload of hookers from the seedier end of Fort Frolic, and started the celebration anew.

Now, it was day four, and the gala night festivities showed no signs of stopping: in every single room and gallery of the complex, people were eating, drinking, doing drugs, or screwing each other senseless. Naturally, Stanley was at the heart of the celebrations at the Chase Carousel, half-buried under a paid harem of the most spectacularly spliced prostitutes in all of Rapture, while all around him, guests drunkenly cavorted about the gazelles and lions of Dionysus' Folly, snorting lines of cocaine off the backs of the animals and quaffing from beer steins filled with vodka.

And it was right at the crescendo of the action, with Butcher Pete blaring from the jukebox and almost being drowned out by the ecstatic screams from the carousel, that it all went horribly wrong.

Revellers suddenly found themselves lying not on velvet cushions and silk divans, but on paved streets; stately shopfront windows randomly erupted out of the walls; paintings in the Cohen Collection and the Imago Fine Arts exhibition were replaced by lampposts and exquisitely painted signage. The Arc de Triomphe suddenly materialized in the entrance hall; patrons at the Triton Cinema fled in terror as a huge chunk of the Eiffel Tower suddenly tore through the roof and embedded itself in the floor. Even the coral reef outside began to look uncannily like the bridges crossing the Seine.

Any one of these phenomena would have put an end to the festivities that morning, but it was the sudden arrival of fifty-seven extremely confused Parisians with nosebleeds that finally did the trick. Thankfully, Pierre Gobi had been lured to the party by the promise of black-market wine from the surface, and was able to serve as an interpreter.

Unfortunately, the language barrier wasn't the biggest problem at hand, but rather the simple fact that none of the new arrivals knew how they'd gotten here or even where they were. The realization that they were underwater and likely trapped there for the foreseeable future immediately prompted a panic. Worse still, the revellers around the park didn't take kindly to being interrupted in mid-orgy, either by misplaced architecture or by misplaced peoples, and a fight broke out.

Things only got more confused when Stanley Poole decided he had better places to be and ran for his life wearing nothing but a dog collar and a snorkel, prompting several jumpy Splicers among the crowd to zap him with the Electrobolt Plasmid. The display of inexplicable powers only sparked an even bigger panic among the Parisians, and Stanley had ended up getting a stiletto heel wedged in his groin during the ensuing stampede for the exits.

The sudden arrival of Ryan Security nearly turned the whole thing into a riot.

But amidst the chaos and confusion, a lone woman strolled through it all, seemingly oblivious to the fighting and the panic. Her eyes were wide and unfocussed, her clothes were a mess, and she looked as though she'd just been hit by a train, but for all that, she was still smiling.

And as she drifted past, stunned onlookers swore they could hear her singing La Vie En Rose…

"Do you have any idea how much trouble we went to just to put everything back in its proper place?"

"Or how much effort we had to put into medical attention for all the collateral damage?"

"You could have killed someone!"

"Or worse!"

"You were just lucky nobody went completely mad thanks to Tear Sickness!"

"And even without that, this is going to be all over the newspapers! There were already photographs of the new skyline circulating in Le Monde and Le Figaro by the time we put everything back!"

"A few citizens finding themselves in an underwater city could be dismissed as mass hysteria, but nobody could possibly ignore the Eiffel Tower vanishing!"

"People are going to ask questions, particularly when they notice the water damage!"

"Alright!" Elizabeth burst out. "I'm sorry! Okay? I know it's not going to make anything better, but I am genuinely sorry."

There was an awkward pause.

"So… what happened next?"

Rosalind and Robert sighed in unison and turned to the next page of the notebook. "By this point, elements of your imaginary narrative were starting to leak through to your external behaviour."

"Around this time, you imagined that you met Fontaine."

"Except you couldn't find him in reality, so you settled for the next best thing…"

With Fontaine Futuristic's remaining population all but wiped out, Alex the Great hadn't been expecting too many visitors to the laboratories in the near future, not unless Sofia Lamb thought it was safe enough to send reinforcements up from Persephone.

As such, when he heard footsteps outside his tank, he panicked.

"I SAID I WAS LEAVING, AND I MEANT IT!" he screamed. "YOU DON'T HAVE TO KILL ME, DELTA! I WILL LIVE OUTSIDE!"

There was a surprised pause from outside, followed by the sound of someone knocking on the side of the tank.

"Fontaine?" said a muffled female voice. "Izzat you in there? Yeah, I'd recognize that big baldy head of yours anywhere…"

Alex the Great boggled for a moment, and then lowered himself to the very bottom of the tank, until he was almost at eye-level with the intruder. At once, he found himself face to face with a slim, dark-haired girl no older than twenty, instantly distinguished by her deep blue eyes and misshapen pupils.

"Fontaine!" said the woman. "I've gotta business proposition for ya: it'll be a lot of fun… and it'll get you out of this tank. How did you get in there, anyway? You know what, nevermind, company Jacuzzis get weirder every year. Anyway, about the offer: you in or out?"

Alex's platter-sized eyes narrowed in curiosity. "What did you have in mind?"

"Think of it as a company fishing trip…"

"What happened next?" Elizabeth asked.

Once again, the Luteces sighed in perfect unison and shook their heads in despair.

"What? What's wrong? What did I do next? Come on, you two, don't leave me in suspense."

Without a word of explanation, Rosalind handed over her notebook. "Read from the point I've marked," she instructed.

"But what happened? Why can't you just tell me?"

"Some things are simply too absurd to explain out loud, even for us. Now please read."

Elizabeth wearily accepted the notebook and began silently reading her way through the pedantically neat summary of the event. In total, she made it about two lines before finding the sentence that had beggared the Luteces' tolerance.

"WAIT, WHAT?!"

"I'M A FUCKING MERMAID, BITCH!"

Point Prometheus was a relatively quiet research facility for the most part. With Ryan Industries demanding cheaper, more efficient processes, the scientists didn't have the resources for the same gloriously excessive experiments and equally excessive mistakes that had characterized the early days under Frank Fontaine. True, the Alpha Series was still in production over at the hidden lab outside the newly-condemned FF building, but that was it: everything else – from Plasmid research to Little Sister induction, from mental conditioning to the creation of new protectors like the Bouncers and the Rosies – all took place at Point Prometheus, and all of it under the watchful eye of Andrew Ryan. No more explosions, no more screams, no more demented test subjects chewing their limbs off to escape restraints.

As such, the first explosion was heard throughout the labs – as was the "mermaid's" amplified warcry.

Scientists arriving on the scene found the Optimized Eugenics lab flooded by almost five feet of water; for good measure, most of the test subject storage lab had undergone a partial collapse, the floor having caved in under the weight of something massive. Those foolish enough to arrive on the scene found themselves standing on the edge of a ten-foot-deep pool carved in the floor…

…and sitting in the middle of it was a creature that even the most demented of the researchers would have denied responsibility for. To their eyes, it seemed almost like a monstrous embryonic hybrid of human and octopus, a gigantic tentacle-garlanded foetus squatting in the ruins of their lab: sporting livid pink skin, two spindly human arms, an oversized skull and an abdomen that sprouted into a colossal mass of curling, frondlike tentacles, it wasn't a pretty sight.

And it appeared to be singing the Fontaine Futuristics advertising jingle.

However, as the creature swivelled this way and that in search of prey, the astonished scientists realized that there was actually a saddle fastened to the back of the monster's colossal skull… and mounted on it was what appeared to be a human woman. She was dressed in what appeared to be a modified diving suit – much more skintight than any of the variants used for Protector Conversion – and armed with a speargun, a fishing rod, and a megaphone.

Even more incomprehensibly, the bait for said fishing rod was a small blue cube just big enough to encompass a human hand.

"I'm a mermaid, bitch!"  the rider shouted triumphantly. "Now, where's Suchong!"

She brandished the fishing rod in the air, waving the blue box through the air in a spirited if ineffectual attempt at baiting Suchong – who, at that point in time, was being raked over the coals by Andrew Ryan and nowhere near Point Prometheus.

"Get him over here, wherever he is! I don't have all day! Where the fuck is Suchong?"

There was a muffled explosion, as the woman's mount cheerfully overturned one of the specimen storage tanks, casually annihilating a few hundred thousand dollars' worth of research.

"Come on out, Suchong!" the woman called. "I've got a nice fresh genetic mystery for you! The secrets of Andalite morphing technology: it'll make Plasmids look as cheap and shitty as the opium you used to sell back in Korea! Heeeeeeeeere Suchong!" She brandished the speargun with her free hand, absently searching for a target.

"Oh look!" the giant foetus-monster shouted, pointing a tentacle in the general direction of the crowd of scientists. "There's my younger self! Hello there, Dr Alexander!"

Somewhere at the back of the terrified crowd, Gilbert Alexander pulled the collar of his lab coat over his head and did his level best to disappear through the floor tiles.

"What the hell was I thinking?" Elizabeth groaned.

By way of an answer, Rosalind just smirked. "You haven't finished reading yet. You've still got your repeat performances in the Mercury Suites, Apollo Square, and Fontaine Futuristics to enjoy."

"Oh god."

"And then there was the point your tentacled friend started juggling vending machines," added Robert. "According to witness statements, you provided musical accompaniment for most of this routine. We had no idea you were such a fan of Cindi Lauper, by the way."

"Oh god."

"Or perhaps you'd like to read about your trip to Neptune's Bounty? No? Alright then. The two of you almost flooded the entire Lower Wharf area. Alexander ate the entire daily catch while looking for ADAM flowers, all while you sat on his head, eating oysters."

"Oh god."

"Then there was that rather ill-advised attempt to take a ride on the Journey to the Surface at Ryan Amusements. Nobody's quite worked out how you managed to squeeze Alexander into one of those carts, considering that most of the guests fled as soon as they saw him arrive, but we're reasonably sure you taught him how to high-five at some point."

"Reasonably? How do you know if no-one was there to see it happen? What kind of evidence would a high-five lesson leave?"

"You recall those giant animatronic hands meant to represent "The Parasites?" We have it on good authority from the technicians that Alexander broke every single one of them."

"Ooooh god."

"And then there was your mutual visit to the Pink Pearl."

For a moment, Elizabeth could only stare in bewilderment. "You've got to be kidding me," she said at last.

"Most assuredly not," Rosalind replied. "You took Gilbert Alexander's mutated self to Siren Alley, told the local prostitutes that he was, quote 'a big sad octopus,' unquote, and to make him happy at any and all costs."

"And you also hired two of your own," said Robert with a grin. "Dusky Donovan and Sapphire Jenkins were rather surprised by the number of… toys you brought in from other realities."

"Check your pockets if you don't believe us. You spent more than half the holiday money you borrowed."

"We gather you would have spent more, but you left your purse back in the Drowned Leviathan."

"Not that we're judging you for sexual adventurism, you understand."

"It's just that med hypos cost money."

Elizabeth sighed and hid her face in her hands. "Did I do anything remotely laudable in the last seventy-two hours, or is this just going to be more of you raking me over the coals for things I can't remember?"

The Luteces thought for a moment. "There may be one somewhat laudable thing," said Rosalind.

"Alright. Let's hear it, then."

"In that particular reality, Daniel Wales is thinking of renaming the Pearl. The best candidate so far is 'The Salty Octopus." Robert smirked gleefully. "Or possibly 'The Mermaid and Kraken Sandwich.'"

"Robert…"

"Also, the toys you summoned into the building have become immensely popular. I understand Mr Wales is even commissioning a special tentacle-themed set of-"

"ROBERT!"

"Very well then. Once you were finished with your night out in Rapture, you returned Alexander to his home dimension."

"In the event that Tenembaum and Porter are able to affect a rescue and cure him of ADAM sickness, your friend will have some truly fascinating passages to add to his autobiography… not that his memoires wouldn't have been fascinating without them – he did live in Rapture, after all." Rosalind amended.

"And what did I do after that?"

"As near as we can tell from your watch, you were nearing the sixty-hour mark of your high by that point-"

"And from what little Manny was able to tell us, people tend to leave the happy, hyperactive stage of the drug behind towards the end of the high."

"Long periods of confusion, near-lucid anger and depression interspersed with brief moments of faintly desperate exuberance are apparently very common symptoms."

"On the upside, you were much more coherent by this stage."

"On the downside, your decisions were just as nonsensical."

"If not more so."

Elizabeth looked blank. "So what does that up to?" she asked, secretly dreading the answer.

"Some very difficult witnesses…"

"String?" said Andrew Ryan.

"Yeah. Ssssstrinnnng. As much of it as I could find."

"But there must be close to a mile of it in here!"

"So? You're gonna need it, and I know your secretary doesn't have any."

Ryan grimaced, remembering the failed assassination attempt that his last secretary had masterminded; at present, the traitor's decomposing was currently dangling from a spike on the walls of Hephaestus… along with those of Bill and the others.

Bill…

He gave himself a little shake: he couldn't afford to get distracted by regrets, not now that there was an intruder in his office. As pretty as this girl was, this could be another prospective assassin… though judging by those eyes, she could be just a simple madwoman, a Splicer who'd finally lost the battle with her addiction. In either case, she could have been sent by Atlas: maybe she was there to distract him while the real killer – this mystery man from the surface – moved in for the kill. In any case, he had a revolver in his pocket, but even if he couldn't draw in time, he had at least five or six more inches of height and several pounds of muscles more than this doll-like intruder.

"You haven't explained how you got here," he said sternly.

"Oh, you know… I always know my way around, no matter where I am."

The smile on the girl's face wilted. "Except when it matters," she said quietly. "Can't find my dad. Can't find a purpose. Can't find my way home... don't even have a home."

"You're not making sense."

"That's me in a nutshell, isn't it? Nothing makes sense. And that's why I got you all this string."

"Explain yourself."

"You're making a theory, right? You've got ideas about who the assassin is. But if you want to get it to make sense, you're gonna need string."

She gestured vaguely to the few hundred thousand reels of string stacked up against the wall.

"Besides, he's only in Arcadia; you've got plenty of time to put it all together."

Ryan's brow wrinkled. "And you found all of this string for me – and somehow got it and yourself into my office without opening the door, foiling the lock or tripping any of the alarms – all out of the goodness of your heart? You'll pardon me if I remain sceptical, my dear: everyone has an agenda."

The woman shrugged. "I don't know," she said, sounding distinctly lost. "Maybe it's because I feel sorry for the assassin. Maybe it's because I feel sorry for you. Or maybe it's just constants and variables: there's always a man; there's always a lighthouse; there will always be a reunion, and it never ends well."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"Bye, Andy. Sorry about the finger."

And with that, the mystery woman was gone.

"It's time to end this little masquerade. There ain't no Atlas, kid: never was. Fella in my line a work takes on a variety of aliases. Hell, once I was even a Chinaman for six months. But you've been a sport, so I guess I owe you a little honesty. The name's-"

The monologue was suddenly interrupted by an earsplitting burst of noise from somewhere behind him, a long, drawn-out brassy, echoing roar of obnoxious sound that could only have been rendered as BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAART.

Heart hammering, Fontaine turned around with his gun drawn, half expecting to see a soprano Big Daddy bearing down on him. Instead, slumped against the wall behind him was a bedraggled-looking woman armed with what appeared to be some kind of plastic horn; five-foot-five at the most, she barely looked imposing enough to be a surprise, much less a threat. And she wasn't even carrying a weapon

"Oh, for fuck's sake!" the woman slurred. "Either wait for the key to process, up the volume on the radio, or don't bother making these stupid speeches!"

"What the-"

"He can't hear you over the noise of the overloading reactor, you dickhead! All he can hear is some longwinded Bronx drawl going on about incomprehensible horseshit that he couldn't care less about, because you called him when he was standing right in front of the self-destruct mechanism! You've spoiled your own monologue because you couldn't wait until all your chickens have hatched!"

"Huh?"

"Don't give me that! For the last five or six hours you've done nothing but talk, so I'd expect you'd at least be good at monologuing by now – but you're not! You wasted the big reveal!"

Fontaine took a deep breath. "What the fuck are you talkin' about?" he said at last. "And what the fuck is that?" he added, pointing at the plastic horn in the woman's hand.

"It's a vuvuzela – almost as good as making noise as you are, you asshole."

"I don't know who the hell you are-"

"That makes two of us."

"The fuck is that supposed to mean?"

"You should know by now: you've had more identities than hot meals, remember? Oh, and by the way, for someone who used to work at a theatre, your timing is shit."

"How the hell do you know that?!"

"None of your fucking business. See ya later, chrome dome."

Somewhere in the ruins of Rapture, there was the clink of rare bone china and the rattle of rusted tablespoons. There was even a faint aroma of tea wafting from the kettle, only slightly smothered by the stink of salt water and rot.

It didn't matter that the city had gone to hell, that there was no end of the nightmare in sight, and that the fallen paradise was now under the command of a leader who somehow cared even less for its people than the last two. It didn't even matter that the guests at this particular tea party were only tolerated due to mutual delusions – not to mention a generous dose of the Hypnotize Polyp squeezed into each teacup (an addition made by the newest visitor to these private soirees).

To the mind of one Lady Smith, society gatherings would always continue, even among prostitutes and complete strangers.

"Rapture's gone to hell! No place for a pretty young girl like me."

"This ambiance? Strictly sub-par! If any place needed a talented decorator, this would be it!"

"I know, it's terrible. Just terrible. I… I think I can actually see what this place could have been, if only there'd been a little less callousness and a little more foresight. If you look past the rust and the grime, you can actually see the shining promise of what might have been. If only someone had cared without ulterior motives… if only. I can see so many things, but they always start with 'if only.'"

"I used to be beautiful… What happened to me?"

"Baby Jane…"

"I'M AN ACTRESS! I AM!"

"Shhh, it's alright, Baby Jane. I don't know what happened to me either: I used to be so happy, so idealistic… I used to believe in things. I used to dream of revolution, of a better Columbia. Then I had to tear the whole thing out by the roots. I used to dream of Paris, of a world beyond my prison. Now I don't belong anywhere: now I'm in prison all the time."

"Sometimes I drift away and feel I'm back on the old estate… then I open my eyes."

"I know exactly how you feel, Lady Smith. Sometimes, I feel like I'm still exploring Columbia with my dad. Sometimes, I think he'll be just around the corner at any moment: he'll be wondering why I've run on ahead; he'll be smiling while I explore the museums and abandoned shops; he'll be there by my side, after all the years I've been alone in the tower… but then I look behind me… and he's gone."

There was a deep, shuddering pause.

"I haven't had a real family in almost a year. Tell me, Lady Smith. Have… you lost someone too?"

"Three children. Yes, three little angels. All gone now. I wonder if they miss their mommy…"

"Oh my god… I never had a mommyyyyyyyyy…"

Somewhere in the gloom, there issued the sound of an extremely intoxicated woman descending into undignified tears as two heavily medicated Splicers tried to comfort her.

And in the midst of this, a Crawler dropped from the ceiling and asked, "More tea, Ma'am?"

"There's one thing you haven't discussed yet," said Elizabeth. "My injuries."

By way of a reply, Rosalind produced a compact mirror and flicked it open: a quick glance in it revealed that the entire left side of Elizabeth's face was purple with bruises, and she was also sporting a black eye, a burst lip, and what appeared to be the remains of a nosebleed.

"You're fortunate enough to possess a life even more charmed than ours," said Rosalind.

"Along with an atom of quantum invincibility among your many gifts," chimed in Robert.

"But even with that, you're lucky you didn't lose any teeth."

"Or break anything."

"Apart from your dignity, of course."

"But how did I get bruised?" said Elizabeth, pointedly ignoring Rosalind. "I mean, it was kind of inevitable that I'd get hurt at some point, but from the sounds of things I was usually moving too quickly to be attacked. So, who actually managed to land a hit?"

"Let's just say you fell afoul of the Protector line's greatest success stories."

"I thought you said that the run-in with the Big Daddy didn't happen."

"Whoever said anything about Big Daddies?"

"Oh no..."

Leo Hartwig barely managed to suppress a shudder of terror at the sight of the figure below.

It wasn't often that he felt fear these days; truth be told, ever since he'd undergone that great metamorphosis, he hadn't felt much of anything other than rage, triumph, hunger, and occasional lust. These days, as the first and greatest of the Brute Splicers, there wasn't much that could frighten him: everyone in Pauper's Drop turned their eyes to the ground when he walked by, and even the other Brutes didn't dare challenge his prowess – not even those pyromaniac upstarts down in Minerva's Den. If anyone had the balls to answer back, they'd be guaranteed a good tenderizing, and if anyone actually had the temerity to steal from him, they'd be floating in the briny before the day was out. 

The only local who dared look him in the eye or speak their mind in his presence was Gloria, but really, he allowed that out of professional courtesy: Lamb had put Gloria in charge of Pauper's Drop, and now that the two of them were on the same side, it was only fair that he allow her a little leeway. As long as she let him rule the streets and he let her rule the peoples' hearts and minds, everything was rosy between them. Besides, Gloria was old before her time and much too bitter to care about little things like death; God only knew you couldn't terrorize someone who'd probably die wagging her finger at you like some grandmother from hell.

But the Big Sisters were different.

Like Gloria, the Big Sisters couldn't be intimidated. Unlike Gloria, the Big Sisters didn't mind getting their hands bloody, and they had the strength, the speed and the tricks to turn out your lights in five minutes flat; even Brutes like him weren't safe from those. Once, back before he'd joined the Rapture Family, Leo had made the mistake of making a grab for a newly-"orphaned" Little Sister, and though Family-allied Splicers had eventually driven him off before he could get down to business, that hadn't stopped a Big Sister from being sent out to teach him a lesson. The skinny bird had not only managed to doge every single punch he'd flung in his direction, but she'd also broken his right arm and most of his ribs for good measure, before leaving him face-down in a puddle of his own blood and piss. After he'd scraped himself off the street, he'd gone straight to Lamb and declared his allegiance to the Rapture Family: getting an ADAM ration wasn't as rewarding as just going out and stealing it, but it was a damn sight better than risking another beating from one of those girls.

Of course, it wasn't just power that made them so frightening to Leo: the Big Sisters were completely and totally insane – not the pathetic, miserable sort of crazy you'd see in the Crawlers, not the talkatively delusional crazy adopted by most Splicers, nor the fanatical, true-believer-type crazy that was the hallmark of types like Steinman and Wales; it wasn't even the bombastic, self-aggrandizing kind of crazy Sander Cohen had become famous for. No, the Big Sisters' brand of crazy was just pure, animalistic fury: no reasoning, no speech, just ear-splitting metallic screams and rabid attempts to tear you limb from limb.

He'd heard tell that these mad slags had used to be Little Sisters, before they'd grown up and gone off their collective trollies. If that was the case, he didn't want to imagine the way the Big Sister population would start booming once the new little 'uns grew up. After all, it wasn't as if anyone was brave enough or tough enough to cull the pack.

Now there was a Big Sister on patrol in Pauper's Drop, and Leo could only hope that the control Lamb had over her pack of hunting hounds was as real as it seemed. He didn't want to know what one of these crazy bitches would be like if it ever managed to slip the leash.

And it was then – just as he was thanking his lucky stars that he still the pawn shop roof between him and the street – that a woman suddenly appeared out of nowhere and fell into step beside the Big Sister.

She wasn't much to speak of: next to the six-foot-ten Big Sister, she was miniscule, and judging from the look of her, she was more than a little worse for wear. She was dressed in a pair of trousers and boots borrowed from a diving suit, a blouse that might have once been white at some point in the past, and a feather boa – of the kind commonly found around the Pink Pearl. Her hair was a mess, her eyes were frantically watering, she was staggering like a drunken foal, and she appeared to be armed with nothing but a rusty teaspoon. All in all, she couldn't have looked more pathetic without actually missing a leg. Approaching a Big Sister in full health would have been insane; doing the same thing in this state was just plain suicidal.

"Hi," said the woman quietly. "My name's Elizabeth."

The Big Sister reared back in alarm, letting out an ear-splitting shriek of anger.

"Hey, it's okay. I'm not gonna hurt you – how could I? We're the same."

Needless to say, the Big Sister did not seem reassured by this, and elegantly backflipped away, landing on the side of the wall and perching there like a spider, screeching furiously down at the woman – even as the daft bimbo continued to advance on it.

"I mean, we both grew up apart from everyone else, didn't we? You had the Little Sister's Orphanage, and I had my tower… and after that, Comstock House. They both ended up conditioning us, you with the golden dreamland, and me with the shocks and surgery. They made us vital mechanisms of the city, gave us responsibilities that we couldn't have possibly shouldered with our sanity intact. And when that didn't work out, they made us into monsters."

If the Big Sister had understood a word of what the mad bint had said, it gave no sign. Having had enough of issuing warnings, it catapulted itself towards her with one colossal thrust of its spindly legs, syringe raised to strike. But at the last moment before the attack slammed home, the woman vanished – leaving the Big Sister to futilely drive its syringe into the concrete.

A moment later, the woman suddenly reappeared, once again standing right next to the furious Big Sister.

Immediately, the Big Sister wrenched her syringe out of the ground and swung it at the mystery woman – who once again vanished in a flash of light and reappeared behind her.

"I had the Songbird, and you had Mr Bubbles," she continued. "Remember him? Do you still dream about him? I know I do, even though I never knew who Songbird really was. Too many variables, you see. He could have been Booker Dewitt, or he could have been Constance Field, or he could have been any one of a thousand possible candidates. Just like Mr Bubbles. You don't know who he was any more than I know who Songbird was… but they're both dead now."

Howling in rage, the Big Sister summoned a hailstorm of debris and telekinetically flung it at the mystery woman. Once again, though, not a single missile hit the target.

"But everything's going to be okay," the woman soothed. "We don't have to be alone anymore. We can be friends, don't you see?"

The Big Sister evidently did not see, because it immediately resorted to bombarding the woman with fireballs. None of them hit, but the target did seem somewhat disconsolate.

"Please. I… just want to see if we can be friends. We can even be sisters, if you want to look at it that way. I don't have a family you see, not anymore. Wouldn't you like that? To have a family again? That wouldn't be so bad, would it? Please. Let's be sisters."

And then without warning, the mystery woman darted forward and threw her arms around the Big Sister.

There was a stunned pause.

For once, it seemed as though the Big Sister didn't know how to react: instead of trying to force the woman's hands away or renew the attack, it froze, suddenly unable to do anything other than stare blankly down at the tiny figure hugging it. For several seconds, the light blazing behind the windows of the Protector's helmet shifted from red to green and back again.

Then, without warning, the Big Sister grabbed the woman by the shoulders and threw her clean across the town square, up over the pawn shop sign and onto the roof. Leo had just enough time to realize that the human missile was headed in his exact direction, before she slammed headlong into him with a soft, meaty thud, bouncing off his chest and landing in his outstretched arms.

For a moment, the woman lay there, stunned. Then she blinked and smiled up at him. "Hi!" she said brightly.

"Who the hell are-"

"She likes me! You saw her, didn't you? She was happy! We're having our first game as sisters!"

Leo blinked. This was not on the usual agenda: usually, people who got manhandled by Big Sisters usually ended up dead, seriously injured, or just comatose. The fact that this woman was still alive and fully conscious was nothing short of incredible, and the fact that she'd somehow perceived the attack as an act of friendship was just insane.

"She wants to keep on playing!" the woman giggled. "You'll need to help out!"

"I'll need to do what?!"

"Fastball special! Fastball special!"

"What the fuck is a fastball special?"

"Throw me! Throw me back at my new sister! Come on, it'll be fun!"

Leo looked from the grinning woman in his arms to the Big Sister below them. For a moment, he floundered: he didn't much care for the crazy bint, and it would be entertaining to see how long she lasted against a properly pissed-off Big Sister – assuming she survived the impact… but throwing her back might just put him in the Sister's crosshairs as well. After all, these things didn't take kindly to having things thrown at them.

On the other hand, assuming this daft trollop was durable enough to survive being thrown the length of the square, maybe she'd survive being thrown back and the Big Sister would forget all about him in the inevitable kerfuffle between the two… provided he left the area quickly enough.

So, drawing his arm back as far as it would go, he catapulted the mystery woman outwards, sending her soaring back across the town square with an exhilarated yawp – straight at the Big Sister.

The last thing he heard, before he turned tail and ran, was the madwoman jubilantly screaming "SISTERS FOR LIIIIIIIIIIIIFE!"

Chapter Text

"What happened next?" Elizabeth asked.

In perfect unison, the Luteces gave her a look that fell somewhere between 'baleful' and 'condescending.' This wasn't merely a look that could kill: this was a look that could irradiate.

"Obviously, she kicked the shit out of you," said Rosalind, wearily.

"As tends to happen when you try to hug Big Sisters," Robert noted.

"You wandered through another couple of dimensions-"

"Leaving a substantial trail of blood and vomit along the way-"

"-Before you eventually made your way here."

"Apparently you were just lucid enough to find an unoccupied apartment at the Mercury Suites-"

"And in a dimension where they weren't flooded or claimed by Splicer gangs."

"You spent the next ten hours asleep on this couch, up until we found you."

"The couch?" Elizabeth echoed. "Why not the bed?"

There was a sheepish pause, as Rosalind and Robert's eyes anxiously flicked towards the darkened bedroom and back again. "You don't want to know," they said at last.

"Ah."

"On the upside, we've managed to find your purse-"

"Along with a small collection of souvenirs you gathered during your journey across Rapture."

As Rosalind handed over the purse, Robert reached down into the shadows and picked up a small wooden crate for Elizabeth's inspection: inside was a Drowned Leviathan matchbook, a copy of the Rapture Tribune with a tyre track right across the front page, a programme from the Fleet Hall, the control pad used for the bathysphere, several empty bottles of Arcadia Merlot, a chunk of a Delorean's front bumper marked with blue paint scrapes, an invitation to the gala night at Dionysus Park, a handful of petals from one of the ADAM flowers that grew in the Fontaine Futuristics lab, a crumpled ball of research notes defaced with childish drawings of Suchong being sexually assaulted by a large octopus, a tattered collection of lingerie and toys from the Pink Pearl, a leftover spool of red string, a vuvuzela, a handful of rusty teaspoons, and what appeared to be a Big Sister's right glove.

There was an awkward silence.

"So nothing that I saw in Rapture was real?" said Elizabeth at last.

It seemed hard to believe, even now; despite everything she'd heard since the Luteces had woken her up, she couldn't help but cling to the vague and distinctly self-destructive hope that it had been real after all, if only because it would have been more laudable than what had actually happened.

The Luteces merely nodded.

"I guess we can add the imaginary Booker Dewitt encounter to the list," she added bitterly.

This time, there was only silence.

"But other than that and the space-time misconceptions, my story at least sounded plausible, right? It wouldn't have been totally unbelievable if I'd been sober, would it?"

The Luteces exchanged glances, expressions swinging wildly between irritation and despair. Then at long last, the two of them spoke:

"We…"

"Have…"

"So…"

"Many…"

"Fucking…"

"Questions."

"Why would you believe that Comstock would be alive?" Robert demanded. "You were the one who went to the trouble of eliminating him from the multiverse, in case you've forgotten that as well."

"I…"

Elizabeth floundered. Somehow, it seemed as though the reasons for Comstock's continued existence had made a lot more sense back when she'd been staring him in the face; in hindsight, though, it all became a little trickier to explain.

"I… I thought it was because he was in Rapture when I made the sacrifice," she said limply.

Rosalind sighed deeply, pinching the bridge of her nose in frustration. "The multiverse doesn't work that way, dear. And on a related note, why would Columbia still exist?"

"Come to think of it, why would we have let you run off to Rapture if Columbia still existed?" Robert added. "In case you'd forgotten, the entire point of our mission was to ensure that the city was erased from the space-time continuum."

"As I recall, that was what the locals here might call 'a big deal,' especially considering what happened in possible futures where Columbia continued its reign of terror. You recall what your future self said? 'Once this world has been born again, a million others wait their turn.'"

"One would think that erasing a genocidal theocratic dystopia with ambitions of multiversal conquest would have been a greater priority than letting you run off to Rapture on some pointless self-imposed mission."

"All of which is a moot point given that, As all three of us conclusively proved, Columbia is gone: it no longer holds a physical presence in the multiverse except as a memory – one that nobody, least of all Suchong, can meaningfully interact with."

"Also, why would Suchong of all people be the one to be messing about with Tears? I'm comfortably certain Rapture had plenty of reputable physicists who'd be interested – more interested than specialists in genetics and subliminal conditioning, at any rate."

"What about the bond between you and Songbird? You said he'd been injured in a fight – hence how you were able to bond with him. What was he supposed to have been fighting with? Also, for a relationship you seem to believe was founded on love, your protector certainly didn't have any problems handing you over to Comstock to be tortured into submission. I don't recall much in the way of Big Daddy-esque reactions when Dr Powell was implanting an electroconvulsive device in your shoulder sans anaesthesia."

"Speaking of which, what about this nonsense with the Big Daddy? When the Siphon was destroyed, you stopped Songbird with a wave of your hand… and yet, you're under the impression that a single Big Daddy could kill you without even trying."

"Leading to you being outwitted and outmanoeuvred by a man who – according to you – wasn't quick or clever enough to avoid being imprisoned in his own department store-"

"-a department store that was never seen or mentioned in any other iteration of Rapture, even prior to the date it was supposedly detached from the city. At least Sofia Lamb had the excuse of being on the receiving end of damnatio memoiae."

"And Vigors being engineered from Plasmids?"

"Anachronistic kinetoscopes?"

"Leaving your old dress in a sex shop?"

"You starting the Rapture Civil War?"

"Okay!" Elizabeth interjected, testily. "Nothing I told you makes sense, I get it. Just…" She took a deep breath. "Why are you so angry with me about what I saw in a dream? I'm just reporting what I witnessed! Like you said, it wasn't real!"

Rosalind groaned. "The reason why we're angry at you, Elizabeth-"

"You're angry, sister, I'm merely disappointed-"

"-is because even after the drug wore off, you still believed your visions to be true – not a good thing considering your abilities. You only used your powers to make one scene from your dreams a reality, and that stopped just short of getting people killed or driven mad: what if you'd done more? What if you'd managed to inflict your perceived reality on everyone in Rapture?"

"Back in Columbia, you recall how your hatred of Lady Comstock helped transform her into the Siren when Comstock used the Siphon on you; you yourself said that she was a conglomeration of the real woman from another reality and your own feelings. What if you'd managed to do the same for Fontaine? The man was a psychopathic con artist with no regard for anything but profit, but the results of him being fused with your vision of him as a lobotomizing thug would be much worse by far."

"And what if you'd done the same thing to Jack or Dr Tenembaum? You would have been destroying their personalities and replacing them with facsimiles of your own devising – as good as killing them in many ways."

"Furthermore, it's not just what you might have done either, Elizabeth," Robert plunged onwards. "The things you witnessed were not conceived of in a vacuum: this fantasy was born from your mind."

"And it doesn't exactly speak very highly of your mental state. You conjured a scenario in which all the work we did to stop Comstock and Columbia was for nothing and your father's sacrifice was completely pointless-"

"-a fantasy in which you cast yourself as a failure and condemned yourself to humiliation, misery, torture, and finally a lonely death-"

"-but not before you ensured the start of the Rapture Civil War, dooming roughly two thirds of the populace to addiction, madness, and death – probably much more, if you count the events following Sofia Lamb's rise to power."

"Also, given that many Little Sisters were killed during the Civil War, your efforts to save this 'Sally' would have been completely pointless-"

"Even if you hadn't ended up in a timeline in which Jack decided to follow Fontaine's orders and gut the girl like a carp."

"He still has that option, as you know."

"Constants and variables, remember?"

"We are very concerned, Elizabeth."

"And more than a little insulted."

This threw Elizabeth for a minute. "Why?" she demanded. "What have I done now?"

"Another little thing you revealed in your dream," said Rosalind, her voice now downright glacial. "You appear to be under the impression that the two of us are complete and total psychopaths."

"What?"

"You really think we would go to such insane lengths just to get blood on your hands? You can't imagine Daisy Fitzroy doing something of her own free will, without prompting from us?"

"I-"

"At the risk of sounding plaintive, we aren't masters of the universe: we aren't responsible for every sparrow that falls from the sky. We are scientists, not gods. We conducted experiments, operating through trial and error until we found a way of helping you and Booker to a divergence point in the possibility space. We did not set out to make you our puppet."

"I know but-"

"And then there's the part where you believed we would so casually abandon you to Rapture," said Robert, who was looking uncharacteristically disapproving by now. "You really believe that we would just sit back and watch you condemn yourself to death via… quantum collapse through visiting a reality where you'd already died, or whatever the hell it was-"

"-Assuming such a thing were possible," Rosalind added helpfully, "which it isn't-"

"-without trying to stop you? As in actually physically stopping you, not just tossing out a few smart-alec remarks over our shoulders while rowing you to your doom."

"You really believe we care so little for you? Is that it?"

"Also, given the disagreement that occurred between me and my sister over what was being done to you, do you think I would so cavalier about allowing you to abandon a child?"

"Alright!" Elizabeth roared, composure cracking noisily. "I get it! I get it! You're both understandably angry over how I acted over the last few days and you're both horribly insulted over how I depicted you in a psychedelic trip I had no conscious control over! I get it, and I'm sorry! Satisfied? I – am – sorry! Now could we all get out of this dripping wet hellhole and agree never to speak about this ever again, please? Also, in case it hasn't sunk in already, I GET IT!"

Robert sighed. "Thank you."

"Now… can we leave?"

"You haven't apologised for vanishing on us yet."

"Excuse me?"

"Seventy-two hours ago, you said you were just going to get something from Rapture and come straight back," said Rosalind icily. "Instead, you went on a binge that left numerous iterations of Rapture in shambles, and you nearly got yourself seriously hurt in the process."

"Do you have any idea how worried we were?" Robert snapped. "We thought you might have actually met someone capable of capturing you – or worse! We spent the better part of two days searching for you, and every step of the journey, we had to follow you through the wreckage you left in your wake."

"Look," Elizabeth sighed, "I'm sorry I worried you, but I don't even remember what I was doing on the night this started, much less the last seventy-two hours-"

"This isn't just about what happened that night. It's what happened prior to it."

"What do you mean?"

"You've been getting drunk every night for the past three months, Elizabeth.

"Every time we've asked you to help with one of our experiments, you've stepped through a Tear and emerged in some bar in a far-flung dimension. You always come back stinking and covered in vomit."

"And when we try to get you involved in something productive, you give up halfway through and start stealing drinks from other dimensions."

"You remember that novel you were trying to write? 'Columbia's story committed to paper at last,' you said. But you kept getting depressed and stopping so you could hunt down a bottle of vodka-"

"-and you puked all over your typewriter as well."

"And then there were your attempts at painting. We saw your work back in the tower, and apart from the Francophile leanings, you were more than capable as an artist. But the moment you'd almost gotten some work done, you stole two bottles of moonshine from a neighbouring reality, drank one and used the second to set the canvas on fire!"

"And when we asked what was wrong, you just sat there, crying!"

"Even the codebreaking hobby went nowhere. I mean… do you actually remember any of this?"

Elizabeth sighed deeply. Pushing her tired memory to its very limits, she could just about remember the smell of grain alcohol and still-cooling ashes, but that was about it. "Vaguely," she said at last.

"Then you should probably have at least some inkling of the fact that it's been getting worse," said Rosalind. "The night you disappeared was…"

There was a sheepish pause, as the two scientists visibly struggled to tiptoe around a very sensitive issue.

Eventually, Robert coughed uncomfortably and said, "Well, it was…"

"The anniversary," Rosalind finished.

"Oh for god's sakes," grumbled Elizabeth. "Just call it what it is or don't call it anything at all. It's been a year to the day since Booker died."

"And you spent that night and the next days after it getting intoxicated in was heretofore unknown to psychopharmacologists. Now tell me, do you really think Booker would want you to-"

"Don't you dare; don't fucking dare put that on me."

Even Elizabeth was surprised at the venom in her own voice.

"You want to know if Booker would have wanted me to spend my life like this?" she snarled. "I don't know, because he's dead, and in the last year of searching the possibility space, I haven't been able to find any iteration of him remotely like the man I knew. For all intents and purposes, my father is lost forever, and all the fever dreams and fantasies in the world can't bring him back. Meanwhile, in all those months since the two of us erased Columbia, I haven't done anything even vaguely worthwhile, not compared to what we did last year: we saved the multiverse. We smothered Comstock in the crib, stopped Columbia from turning pandemic, and nobody but the three of us know that it ever even happened. There's no memorial to Booker out there, no appreciation for what he sacrificed; for all I know, there's a Booker still living his life out in the possibility space somewhere, drinking himself to death and not knowing how much the universe owes him. And no matter where I go, the more I travel, the more I feel as though Columbia was only real in my imagination; the more I feel as though I belong in an asylum… and maybe I do. You know why? Because the most worthwhile thing I've ever done in my life only happened because I killed my own father."

"With his consent," Rosalind reminded her.

Robert nodded sagely. "It was his choice to sacrifice himself."

"And look just how much better the multiverse is because of that," said Elizabeth, not even bothering to hide the bitterness in her voice. "Wars go on, bigotry continues, the so-called utopias fail in bigger and more spectacular ways, and we're left sifting through the ashes, wondering what the hell went wrong this time. And there's a chance the three of us might very well get to do it forever. Now tell me, do you really think there's anything worth doing in my life now that I've outlived my one purpose in it, now that I've killed the one person who made it worth living?"

There was a long pause, as the echoes slowly died away.

"I'm going home," she said at last. "Don't wait up for me."

And with a flex of her power, Elizabeth flung herself across the possibility space, leaving only a flash of light in her wake.

For some time thereafter, there was silence in the apartment as the Luteces considered the situation.

"That could have gone better," Rosalind sighed.

Robert offered a shrug. "It could have been worse."

"Truly, brother, your optimism knows no bounds."

"She isn't suicidal, if that's what worries you."

"No, but she certainly doesn't have any problem destroying herself."

"What do you propose we do? Chase her down again?"

"I would be more comfortable knowing she was at home and stable rather than drunk and roaming the multiverse."

"We cannot infantilize her, sister. She's not a child anymore."

"No, but we can't afford to give her the same leeway we've given her in the past. This problem is not going to solve itself. She needs help; she needs to be guided to a better course of action."

"What do you propose? We can't very well take her to rehab: there's not a facility known to man that would be able to hold her."

"Perhaps not, but there are other forms of rehabilitation, just as there are other kinds of cages. Perhaps, if she had an obligation of some kind…"

There was another, slightly more uncomfortable pause as the two considered this.

Then, Rosalind craned over her shoulder and peered into the darkness shrouding the bedroom. "You've been very quiet through all this," she said. "Perhaps you'd like to render your opinion on the subject."

Somewhere just beyond the shadows, someone laughed mirthlessly. "I don't think even the biggest obligations in the world would be enough to make her behave herself," said a gruff voice. "Look at how badly I did with family obligations. Like father like daughter, am I right?"

"Don't be too hard on yourself," said Robert. "You eventually faced up to your obligations-"

"-and by then, it was almost too late. If you're thinking of helping Elizabeth, you'd best make sure she doesn't make the same mistakes I did."

There was a pause, and then the voice asked, "She's gone, right?"

"We detect no Lutece field distortions in the vicinity."

"Good. We were getting a little uncomfortable back here. I still don't see why you have to keep me hidden; after all, she's going to find out about me sooner or later."

"By which time, we hope to have her in a much healthier frame of mind - one more suited to your unique circumstances. Now, if you would, please step out here and talk; we feel distinctly ridiculous at having to converse with a vacuum."

"If you say so..."

And with that, Booker Dewitt stepped into the light.

Chapter Text

Once again, it was a knock at the door that roused Booker from his sleep.

His first thought was that this was yet another nightmare, another terrible dream of mysterious men with English accents pounding on his door in the middle of the night, demanding that he bring them the girl and wipe away the debt. And he knew how the rest of the nightmare would follow: he'd open the door to tell the voices to leave him alone, and he'd be greeted by a vision of burning cities as far as the eye could see; and then his sight would be crowded by a collage of horrors almost too detailed to remember.

But by now, he knew the sights off by heart: flame-wreathed soldiers in copper armour marching through the ruins of a bloodthirsty carnival; black-robed fanatics sacrificing innocents to the murders of crows they hid beneath their hoods; a monstrous bird with a wingspan that blotted out the sun, claws that crushed his body like paper, and a screech that froze the blood in his veins; an old comrade screaming madly of the tin men that would replace him, even as he let his rage scorch the sky with tongues of lightning; hideous metal giants with tortured-looking human hearts in glass ribcages, crying out in anger as they thundered relentlessly towards him; a ghostly woman screaming for vengeance amidst an army of the dead, weeping tears of hate over a legacy of lies and betrayal; teenagers in torturous helmets holding court over room after room of broken men…

And worst of all, a girl's voice screaming in agony, pleading for help, begging for her father to rescue her from a world that he'd created. Booker would give chase, running through vision after vision, trying to reach the voice but never catching up, always lagging behind. And the nightmare always ended with him arriving too late to a world on fire, and falling, falling into a vast, deep lake, where he drowned with a million arms pressing down on him from all angles…

He'd had these dreams for the better part of five years, and even after all that time, they were no easier to deal with: he still woke up drenched in an ice-cold sweat, limbs flailing wildly for a grip on the world around him, heart hammering so hard he thought it might burst out of his chest. On the upside, he'd learned enough self-control to keep himself from screaming as he woke, so at least he didn't wake up Anna anymore.

However, as he lurched awake, he slowly realized that this was not a dream. For one thing, his dreams always began with him slumped over his desk, surrounded by empty bottles and crumpled racing forms. Right now, he was in bed; even from here, he could tell that his desk hadn't seen either forms or beer bottles for almost five years now.

Most tellingly of all, Anna was doing her best to shake him out of bed.

"Daddy, there's someone at the door," she whispered urgently.

"I heard, sweetie, I heard…"

He was halfway through getting out of bed when he belatedly realized that he had no idea who might be calling this late at night. He'd stopped gambling years ago, so debt collectors shouldn't have been a problem anymore; his rent was fully paid – for once – so it couldn't be the landlord's thugs getting ready to throw them out; he hadn't had any trouble with the police, not since he'd gotten his drinking under control. So who did that leave?

This could be one of his neighbours calling for help… or it could be a burglar checking for empty apartments to rob. The latter was a safer bet. After all, it wouldn't have been the first time it had happened in this part of town.

Sighing grimly, Booker reached for his revolver.

"Stay here," he told Anna. "Keep your head down, and don't come out until I tell you it's safe. If I'm not back by morning, you head straight next door and tell Mrs Henderson what happened. She'll know what to do. You understand?"

Anna nodded.

"Good girl. Now, hide."

As Anna ducked under the bed, Booker made straight for the front door, revolver raised and ready. It wasn't easy to see through the smoked-glass window, what with it being nearly 3 in the morning in a building with precious little electric light at the best of times, but he could just about recognize a human figure standing behind the door, knocking loudly for attention.

"Who's there?" he demanded.

Abruptly, the knocking stopped, and a woman's voice called out, "Booker?"

For a split-second, Booker thought the voice sounded familiar. Just as quickly, though, the thought was swept away in an avalanche of questions: who was this, what was she doing here, why was she calling at this ungodly hour of the morning, was she armed, and why was she suddenly on first name terms with him even though they'd never met?

"Who the hell are you?"

"Booker? Booker is that you? I can tell anymore. I tried to find you for so long, I can't tell if that's the you I remember. Please… is it you? Help me…"

The voice was pleading by now, almost tearful, but even with every irrational instinct in the back of his mind insisting that he hear this woman out, Booker kept the door firmly shut – with one foot jammed against it just for good measure.

"You haven't answered my question," he whispered.

"It's me," said the woman plaintively. "It's Elizabeth! Don't you remember me?"

Somewhere in the back of Booker's head, a memory stirred, faded and vanished just as quickly… but even as it did so, he had the feeling that he knew the name. For a moment, he found himself cycling through his mental list of female contacts in search of an Elizabeth who matched the woman's voice and disposition. Eventually, he had to admit defeat: out of all the barmaids, hookers, housewives, neighbours, clients and suffragettes he'd met in his career, a few had been named Elizabeth, but none of them had been slender brown-haired young girls with missing fingers.

Wait, how did I know she had a missing finger?

Driven by an instinct he couldn't quite explain, Booker found himself opening the door; a moment later, a small, slender figure stumbled into the apartment. She was dressed in a ragged mishmash of clothing that included the bottom half of what appeared to be a diving suit, a filthy grey blouse, a feather boa, and one tattered tattered opera glove (left-hand). Also, she appeared to be wearing a battered-looking rabbit mask on one shoulder.

Wherever she'd come from, she was a mess: her short brown hair was befouled with oil and grease and God only knew what else; her skin was pale and blotched with oil stains; her clothes reeked of salt water, spilled booze and blood; most terrible of all were her eyes, which seemed unable to focus on anything apart from the tears pouring down her grimy cheeks.

The moment she stepped inside, the mystery woman surged forward and enveloped Booker in a hug – along with a putrid aroma that he hadn't smelled since he quit working around the docks. As bizarre as this situation was, he could tell at once that this stranger wasn't a threat to him: judging by that whiff of cheap wine and grain alcohol about her, he could safely assume that she was a drunk of some kind, probably lost on the way home – or maybe just in mourning. On the other hand, she could also be a madwoman who'd gotten her hands on some of the hard stuff, but that was another matter for another time. For now, whoever and whatever she was, she didn't seem to be harmless; so he let her cry for a while and waited for her to calm down before finally trying to diffuse things.

"Ma'am-"

"I missed you," the woman sobbed. "I tried to find you so long ago, but I couldn't. I kept searching, but all I found were echoes and memories and…"

"Ma'am, I don't know who you are or what you want, but-"

"Yes you do! You just have to remember!"

"Remember what?"

The woman looked up at him, wild eyes briefly focusing on his face. Then, without warning, she reached up and placed her hands on either side of his head…

…and opened a doorway to a world that no longer existed.

Booker didn't have time to react: one minute he was standing there with the drunken madwoman's hands over his ears, and the next thing, impossible knowledge was pouring into his brain. It was hard to say if he was learning something knew or remembering something he'd forgotten, but whatever the case, suddenly his head was filled with visions of another Booker Dewitt – a Booker Dewitt who'd gone on a fantastic journey to a city in the sky, rescued a princess in a tower, fought a tyrant and won, and sacrificed his life to save everything… yet somehow still lived.

Suddenly, he knew.

His nightmares were real: the monsters he'd seen in his dreams had all been real, in a different world.

He'd drowned, and yet he hadn't: another version of him had drowned, had sacrificed himself – at a baptism that Booker had considered once but had ultimately refused long before he'd ever gotten anywhere near that damnable lake.

But most importantly of all, he now knew that the woman's name was Elizabeth Comstock… but she was also Anna Dewitt, his daughter.

At long last, he opened his eyes, and took in the bedraggled, tormented, impossible vision of his own daughter – now in her twenties, now just as miserable as he'd been after Wounded Knee.

"Do you understand?" she whispered.

Booker nodded silently, blood pouring down his nose.

"The Booker I knew is dead… but his memories filtered through to all of you. All across the possibility space, the surviving Booker Dewitts perceived the days that never were as nightmares and dreams. Ever since then, I tried to find the man I'd lost. And when that didn't work, I tried to find a specific version of him, the one who'd received the most of my father's memory, the one that was most like the friend I lost that day. And… here you are…"

Her eyes filled with doubt. "Are you real?" she asked.

She'd asked that question once in another life, back when he'd stumbled into her tower; at that point, he'd been the first human visitor she'd seen in years, and now she looked upon him with the same desperate, lonely sense of astonishment.

"Yes, Elizabeth," he replied, barely managing to keep his voice steady. "I'm real."

She collapsed into his arms, not even crying anymore, but exhausted beyond all emotion. For several minutes, he held her in his arms, gently stroking her hair, waiting until she was stable enough to stand on her own.

Then, he asked, "What have you done to yourself?"

"I don't know anymore," she replied. "I don't even know why I keep on going. There's no point in doing anything out there: the more possibilities I visit, the less I can imagine doing something; all I can do is observe and take notes and leave everything to just pass me by because I don't want to end up ruining something like I did with Daisy Fitzroy. It's like trying to walk on a road made of eggshells."

"You haven't tried to start a life of your own in just one world?"

"More times than I can count. I've tried so many things, it's not even funny… but curiosity and boredom keeps getting the best of me. Every time I stop for long enough to start something new, the possibility space starts calling to me again and I keep getting the idea that there'll be something better in the next world along. The more choices I have, the less it feels like freedom and more like an obligation. And then I remember the pointlessness of it all, the fact that Columbia is gone and I still can't make it feel like it meant anything…"

She shook her head. "You're still gone, Booker. No matter what I do, I can't bring you back."

"You're still talking to me, Elizabeth, remember? You wanted help from the nearest Booker you could find to the real thing."

"I don't even know if you're real! I can't even trust my own senses! I don't know if you really are the closest thing to Booker I could find, or if I've just forced his memories on the exact antithesis of him, or if I'm just imagining this, but…"

She took a deep breath.

"How do you go on living when everything that made it worthwhile is gone?" she asked at last.

"You find something to live for," said Booker simply. "Or better still, someone."

He thought about Anna, still hiding under the bed in the next room; though his mind was still reeling from the memories that he'd been given, he knew that his little girl would need reassurance sooner or later… and perhaps it wouldn't hurt if he introduced her to Elizabeth. After all, Anna would probably want to know what all the crying had been about, perpetually-curious little explorer that she was, and Elizabeth might feel a lot better for finding proof that there was still a chance of finding meaning in grief; Anna had helped Booker through his grief all those years ago, when the need to care for her and protect her had forced him to clear up his act. Maybe Anna could manage a similar trick with his other daughter.

By this time, Elizabeth's tears had dried, and she was looking almost thoughtful. So, he patted her on the shoulder and whispered, "I'm just going to check on Anna. I'll be with you in just a second or two – don't go anywhere."

But by the time he got back, Elizabeth was gone.

"Suddenly, the remainder of Elizabeth's journey makes a disturbing amount of sense," said Rosalind with a smirk.

"We can already assume this meeting was what prompted her hallucination of being comforted by the imaginary Booker," Robert concluded.

"We can also assume that this encounter was at or around the time she went looking for a Big Sister to befriend. In other words, she took your advice."

"On the upside, she appears to have survived the experience-"

"Even though her dignity didn't."

"Unfortunately, we've had no luck in encouraging her to accept your lesson-"

"As you no doubt witnessed over the last few minutes of witness statements."

"Still, it could have been much worse."

"Only if she'd managed to teleport Rapture onto dry land, brother."

Booker smiled in spite of himself. "Is it weird that I actually missed this back-and-forth, even though it technically didn't happen to me?" he asked.

"You are the nearest equivalent to the Booker Dewitt that erased Columbia that could be found in the possibility space, and the greatest recipient of his memories – natural or otherwise," said Rosalind.

"For all intents and purposes, Mr Dewitt, it did happen to you," Robert clarified.

"Intoxicated as she was, Elizabeth could still perceive the spacio-temporal connections between you and the Booker she knew."

"And as, we've made clear, just because it occurred only in dreams and memories doesn't necessarily mean it never truly was."

"Believe us, it would be much stranger if you didn't miss it."

Both Luteces offered bemused-looking smiles.

Then, as the echoes gradually died away, a small voice from the shadows shrouding the apartment bedroom whispered, "Daddy, the sleepy lady looks like she might be waking up."

"You just leave her to it, kiddo," said Booker softly. "Now, it's time you introduced yourself: I've got some friends I'd like you to meet."

There was a pause, and then a tiny figure tiptoed into the room. This apparition was dressed in cheap nightgown, rugged up in the tattered remains of an Adonis Resort bathrobe just for good measure, and looked to be a grand total of five years old at the very most. She was scrawny, knobbly-kneed, and seemed to be made entirely of extremely bony arms and legs, but there was no mistaking the silky brown hair or the enormous sky-blue eyes.

"Anna Dewitt, I assume?" Rosalind asked.

The little girl nodded shyly.

"We're-"

"Ros'l'nd an' Robert Lutece," said Anna, brightly.

After everything they'd seen and done in their journeys across the possibility space, along with all the weird and improbable phenomena they'd encountered in their experiments across Columbia's many different iterations, there honestly wasn't much that could surprise the Lutece twins. Somehow, this little girl had just managed it.

"Yeah, I meant to tell you," said Booker. "She's been having these dreams of Columbia as well – more of those memories falling though the possibility space, or whatever it was. Plus, I think she might have heard Elizabeth talking in her sleep."

"Ah. Why did-"

"Were you the lady from the flying city?" Anna asked loudly.

Rosalind blushed; already unaccustomed to talking to children at the best of times, she found herself completely unmoored at the prospect of talking to a stranger that actually knew her story. In the end, she could only nod awkwardly and mutter "Er, yes."

She was even more surprised when the little girl hurried over and hugged her tightly around the middle, then hugged Robert as well for good measure. "You helped my daddy!" Anna giggled, as if by way of explanation.

There was an embarrassed pause, as the two scientists struggled to hide the fact that their ears had turned a rich shade of garnet. Eventually, the little girl returned to her father's side, and resumed hiding in his shadow.

"As… as happy as we are to meet her," said Robert sheepishly, "We'd really like to know why you brought her along with you."

Booker smiled and shook his head. "You clearly haven't had much experience with kids, have you? She invited herself along for the ride. Didn't you?" He ruffled Anna's hair affectionately, prompting another fit of giggling.

"Through dim'nsshuns!" she agreed. "Through the poss'bility space!"

Rosalind's eyes narrowed. This was a bit more knowledge than she would have expected from the girl, even if she was every bit as precocious as Elizabeth had been during her time in the Tower. They'd observed the tendency of certain Bookers to inherit snippets of memory from the iteration who sacrificed himself, and it was well within the boundaries of probability for the various incarnations of Anna to receive fragments of knowledge from Elizabeth in a similar fashion. However, this was a bit much even by those standards.

She cleared her throat nervously. "Er, Anna, if you don't mind, could you tell us what happened when you and your father arrived here?"

Anna Dewitt couldn't sleep.

Daddy couldn't either, but he was better at hiding it than she was. It had only been an hour since the strange lady had knocked on the door and begged for Daddy to let her in, and neither of them were any closer to getting back to sleep: Daddy was still gloomy that the lady had run off and left without saying goodbye, and Anna was now too full of questions to relax. Who was this Elizabeth? Where had she known Daddy from? What had she been talking about? And why had she been crying?

And why did Daddy have a nosebleed?

Anna had asked all of these questions up front, and though Daddy had said he'd tell her when she was older, she could tell he wanted to explain everything to her right away; he had a funny way of letting his mouth open ever-so-slightly and shut just as quickly when he really wanted to tell her something. He'd done the same when she'd asked about his bad dreams last week.

So, who could Elizabeth be, really? Just about everyone in the neighbourhood knew Daddy, and lots of people hired him when they needed help, but even Anna didn't think any of them would have shown up in the middle of the night and left without a word. She'd managed to sneak a quick peek from around the door while Daddy was talking to her, and though she hadn't gotten a look at Elizabeth's face, she had seen her hands while she'd been hugging Daddy: the little finger on her right hand was just a stub and covered with a shiny thimble.

Why did that seem so familiar to her?

And what had that strange rumbling sound from the office been, just after daddy had returned to the bedroom? It had as if someone in the distance had thumped a big metal vat with a sledgehammer. Daddy hadn't been able to explain it to her: all he'd said was that Elizabeth had gone by the time he'd taken a look. Anna briefly wondered if this Elizabeth was some kind of stage magician: she'd never seen one up close – or on stage, for that matter – but the Henderson kids said that all the best magicians liked to vanish with loud bangs and lots of smoke, so maybe the noise she'd heard from the office had been the sound of the mystery lady disappearing.

Sighing, she turned over in her bed and stared across the room, where Daddy was lying in his own bed and faking sleep. By now, Anna could tell when he was pretending: he had a habit of mouthing bad words when he was angry at not getting to sleep, which he kept at even with his eyes closed and his body perfectly relaxed.

And then, just as Anna was started to wonder if she'd be asleep at Mrs Henderson's place while Daddy was at work, when there was another loud rumble from the office. Immediately, Daddy sat bolt upright and shot out the door like a bullet out of a gun, barely stopping to pick up his revolver along the way. Slipping out of bed, Anna followed him. After all, he hadn't told her to hide this time around, had he?

By the time she'd made it to the door, she was already halfway convinced that it was Elizabeth back again to say sorry. But when she peeked around the door, she found that a gigantic patch of the left-hand office wall was gone, and in its place, a huge circular hole big enough to drive a cart through sat, glowing faintly in the night.

And through the hole in the air, Anna could see things… strange, halfway-familiar halfway-unrecognizable things. In fact, from here, it almost looked like another apartment, but unlike anything she'd ever seen in her building: Daddy barely had enough money to keep their home furnished, and even their luckier neighbours didn't have as much stuff on displays as whoever owned the apartment Anna could see. Wherever it was, this place had huge leather armchairs, potted plants, framed posters on the walls, weird boxy machines, tiny stumpy tables, and even a fireplace!

Looking out at it all, Anna found himself silently asking about a dozen questions a second: what was that weird green light she could see through those big curving windows? What were those strange lights in the distance? How could any of the buildings outside be that tall? Where had this city been built? Why had this hole in the air just shown up? And were those fish swimming past the window? Was this place underwater?

In the end, she settled for "What is it, Daddy?"

"It's a Tear."

"What's that?"

"…I'll tell you in a minute. I just need to get some extra ammo from the other room. Just in case," he added reassuringly. "Wait there a minute…"

As he hurried back into the next room to pick up his gun belt and ammo, Anna found herself slowly but surely drawn towards the Tear; once again, she couldn't help but find both it and the strange apartment beyond somehow familiar. She'd no idea, but maybe it was one of those strange things she'd seen in her dreams – like the sea of lighthouses.

And then, just as she was starting to wonder if Daddy knew more than he was letting on, someone inside the Tear stumbled into view, tripping over the table at the centre of the room and barely stopping herself from falling over: Anna didn't recognize her face, probably wouldn't have been able to anyway with those bruises, but she definitely recognized the tiny silver thimble on the smallest finger of her right hand.

Elizabeth was back again, and from the looks of things, she was hurt: there was blood pouring from her nose and down her chin, one side of her face was a swollen mess, and she had a black eye on the other. Also, as she tottered over to the Tear, she looked as though she was limping.

"Booker," she whimpered. "Booker, are you there? I can't… I don't… I…

She fell forwards, slumping facefirst to the floor.

Anna didn't know if Elizabeth was breathing or not, if she could call for help, or even if anyone including Daddy could help the mystery lady collapsed on the other side of the Tear. Mind blank, Anna simply got to her feet and ran straight for the Tear; she'd just enough time to hear Daddy shouting at her to wait before she reached the glowing window in the air and stepped though.

Instantly, she noticed several things at once: first of all, the apartment was a lot colder than the office; New York wasn't exactly warm this time of year, but wherever this underwater city was, it was as cold as any of the winters Anna could remember. Secondly, it was also really damp here: water was dripping from the ceiling in about a dozen places, and though someone had set up buckets to stop it puddling on the floor, there just weren't enough to catch it all. Thirdly, there was music coming from somewhere in the distance, echoing from somewhere just outside the darkened front door, strange bouncy up-beat tunes that Anna had never heard before in her life. And fourthly, as weird as this place was, Anna couldn't help but feel as though she'd been here before.

Fortunately, Elizabeth was still alive; she was even awake enough to keep her eyes open and carry on talking, but none of what was she was saying made any sense, and she definitely didn't look to be in any fit state to get up.

Behind her, Daddy leapt through the Tear and landed on his feet with a thud, expression caught somewhere between anger, concern and exasperation. "Anna," he said wearily, "what did I say about waiting?"

"She's hurt, Daddy!"

"I know, kiddo, but you could have been hurt worse by going through the Tear…" Daddy's eyes suddenly narrowed. "Are you okay?" he asked.

"I'm fine."

"You're not feeling any headaches? You're not… remembering things that don't make sense?"

"…no. Why, what's wrong?"

"No reason, just…" Daddy smiled bemusedly. "Guess it wasn't just the dreams, then," he added absently.

"What?"

"Nevermind. As long as you're here, you'd best make yourself useful."

Together, they helped the mystery lady to her feet – a lot easier than it sounded: Elizabeth was very light for a grown-up, and even before Daddy took up the slack, Anna was able to prize her shoulders off the floor and force her into a kneeling position. Immediately, Elizabeth started babbling worse than ever, muttering on about birds and cages, double-sided coins, "constants and variables," and most commonly of all, "Songbird."

"Elizabeth, can you hear us?" Daddy asked.

"Nnnngggrrrmmm. Never backtalk, never lie, or he'll drop you from the sky. Hmmm." Elizabeth let out a long, drawn-out burst of delirious giggling, and then abruptly started crying. "No wait, don't go. I'm sorry. Don't be mad. I never should have left. Okay? I was wrong. I shouldn't have run away. Please, don't leave me. You're my only friend. No, don't." Her voice rose to a scream. "DON'T! WAIT! COME BACK! I'M SORRY!"

"What's she talking about, Daddy?"

"Nothing: she's sick, Anna, really sick."

Elizabeth groaned loudly. "Auntie Rosalind," she whimpered, "I don't feel so good…"

"Just relax, Elizabeth, everything's going to be fine."

"Urggh. I don't wanna be in Comstock House anymore, it's too high up. I feel sick, Booker, I feel like I'm gonna… gonna…" Elizabeth let out a loud retching noise at the back of her throat, and even Anna couldn't fail to recognize the sound of someone trying desperately not to throw up.

"Anna, I think I saw a bathroom back there; run some cold water and make sure the path to the toilet's clear, okay?"

Anna obediently made a beeline for the dingy little bathroom attached to the bedroom, and immediately ran as much cold water as the sink could handle. A moment later, Daddy arrived with Elizabeth slung over one shoulder, and managed to get her standing over the toilet – just in time. For the next minute, Elizabeth was bent double over the privy, retching and coughing and groaning in pain, until there was nothing left in her but gasps of foul-smelling air and tiny, choked sobs, all while Daddy kept her hair out of her face and patted her soothingly on the back.

"Can I have a hug, Lady Comstock?" she mumbled tearfully, once she was able to speak again. "You'd be a great mommy, you know that? I didn't want to make you mad. Just one hug, please? Please? I promise to be a good daughter…"

After that, Daddy helped her over to the sink and began gently pouring cups of cold water down Elizabeth's parched throat. Then, with Anna leading the way, he carried her to the bedroom, planning on tucking her in and letting her sleep off whatever illness she'd caught.

Unfortunately, the bed was already taken.

Worse still, neither Daddy or Anna or even Elizabeth's fevered mutterings could wake the bed's current occupant up. As far as they could tell, the sleeper was still alive, but wouldn't be waking up anytime soon: apparently it was something to do with the weird-looking pipe lying in the ashtray, or so Daddy said.

Dark as it was in the bedroom, Anna could see that this other stranger sported a huge mane of platinum blonde hair framing a splendidly made-up face; unlike Elizabeth, this particular mystery lady hadn't been hurt or bruised at any point, so it was clear that she was startlingly pretty. Also, she didn't appear to be wearing much apart from the bedsheets, and what clothing she did have consisted mainly of sequined underthings scattered across the bedroom floor.

Fortunately her purse was still in the area, and after a little bit of searching, Daddy explained that the woman's name was Jasmine Jolene.

Of course, he hadn't been able to explain what Jasmine and Elizabeth had been doing here in this apartment, and actually seemed a little sheepish when Anna started asking about it. In the end, they were forced to leave Jasmine to her sleep and move Elizabeth to the couch. Fortunately, the living room couch was so roomy it might as well have been a bed in its own right, and once Anna had borrowed a pillow and quilt from the bedroom, Elizabeth was already about ready to start nodding off: already, her mutterings were growing fainter and fainter, and her eyelids were slowly drooping lower by the minute. By the time Daddy had finished mopping the sweat from her brow and applying ice to Elizabeth's bruises, she was asleep.

In the silence that followed, Anna asked, "What are we going to do now?"

"We wait. If I know Elizabeth, someone's gonna come looking for her, and with any look, they'll be here soon – and they'll be able to take care of her better than we can."

"Oh."

"Now, you have a seat with me here, just by the door, and we'll wait for them to show up."

"Daddy?"

"Yes, sweetie?

"What is this place?"

"I'll explain later, kiddo. Now, it's past your bedtime; you sit here and have a rest…"

Somehow, despite the snippets of music occasionally echoing down the corridor, the haunting green light cast on everything, the view from the windows and the constant drip-drip-drip from the ceiling, Anna actually managed to fall asleep.

Though it was still bitterly cold in the apartment, she remained warm and comfortable in Daddy's arms, and ended up nodding off on his shoulder just a few minutes after the two of them had settled down. Her sleep wasn't perfect, and she spent the next hour or so in that weird, not-unpleasant world that she only ever experienced by dozing off during the day, occasionally waking up for a moment or so only to drift back into sleep just as quickly… but at any rate, Anna couldn't complain.

She was aware that, at some point, Daddy fell asleep as well; and so from then on, the apartment and everyone in it were all slumbering: Elizabeth, Jasmine, Daddy and Anna, all drifting through that strange emerald-green twilight glow in peace.

She'd no idea how long they sat there together, dozing in that strange apartment under the sea. All she knew was that it was the sound of coughing that roused her from sleep. Opening her eyes, Anna found that Elizabeth had kicked off her quilt and was now trying to upright herself – without much success.

Also, for some reason, she appeared to be hugging a very old and extremely crumpled poster.

"Water," she gasped. "Water…"

Somehow extracting herself from Daddy's arms without waking him up, Anna slid out of the chair, padded across the apartment to the bathroom, and came back carrying a large glass of water. It took a bit of effort to get Elizabeth upright enough to drink it without choking, but eventually she was able to slide her into a sitting position and bring the glass to her lips with only a couple of spills.

When she was finished drinking, she looked up at Anna with bleary, unfocussed eyes, and whispered, "Constance?"

"My name's Anna," said Anna helpfully.

"Oh… sorry…" Elizabeth paused and blinked rapidly, as if trying to make sense of what she was seeing. "You look a little like her. I mean, I think she was a lot older than you when I last heard from her. I never got to meet her in person: I only ever heard from her through voxophones and old letters, but…" Her face contorted with the effort of not crying. "She was nice," she said at last. "She wanted to be my friend."

There was a pause, and in the silence that followed, Anna asked, "What happened to her?"

"She's still out there somewhere, a bright, lonely little girl with a love of science and parents too proper to indulge it… but in Columbia? Constants and variables: she never met the same fate twice, but she was always gone by the time I got out of the tower. Once, I saw she died from cancer… all because she wanted to see me on Monument Island and didn't care about the warning signs. Once, she fell through space and time, and ended up lost in Fink's labs in another Columbia altogether; once they realized they had a subject that honestly liked me… well, the Songbird of that dimension was pretty easy to make."

"Songbird?"

But Elizabeth didn't seem to hear her. "All those Songbirds," she said. "So many different people across the possibility space, a different person every time: in one world, Constance Field; in another, my own father… so many different people, all remade, all suffering, all dying, and I don't know if I'll ever be able to find them and apologise for what I did and…"

She stopped, once again on the verge of tears.

Anna had no idea what the strange, sad lady was talking about, of course, or even if she was well enough to think straight; however, there was one thing she knew she could do. It was something she'd had plenty of practice with, especially after all the times Daddy had returned home after bad jobs, and by now, she'd had this little trick perfected to a fine art.

So, edging as close to the couch as she could get, she leaned forward and very gently hugged Elizabeth around the shoulders. For a moment, Elizabeth didn't seem to know what to make of this; then, as the hug went on, she very slowly relaxed, her posture softening, her shivers gradually subsiding – until at last she returned the hug.

Then, as the two of them finally parted, Anna said the magic words – the ones Daddy used when she'd had a bad day with the other kids downstairs, the ones Anna used when Daddy had a bad day with a cheap client or an impossible job, the ones that could somehow make everything okay if said just the right way.

"Do you want to talk about what happened?"

And just like that, Elizabeth told her everything.

She told her about a city built above the clouds, a place where almost anything was possible; flying ships and windup mechanical men, metal giants with human heads and hearts, wailing ghosts who could raise the dead, wizards who belched fire and travelled as flocks of crows, magical potions that could clothe you in metal and make lightning erupt from your fingertips, and even doorways to other worlds.

She told her about an evil tyrant who ruled a kingdom in the sky through visions of the future and laws that taught the innocent that they deserved to suffer. She told her of his wicked kingdom of barons and lords, how they set aside others to be tormented and oppressed for no other reason than the colour of their skin or the place where they'd been born. She told her how one brave woman dared to stand against the tyrant, to lead armies and break the chains of the enslaved – only to slowly fall to the same madness that had claimed the tyrant so long ago: the madness that told her that she could justify anything if it meant a better world. And so, hope was lost.

She told her of the tyrant's dirty little secrets, how he imprisoned his daughter in a tower far beyond the reach of any flying ship, kept it guarded by a ferocious dragon formed from the broken body of a tortured soul. She told her of how the girl wished she could be free, could even open doorways into other worlds and see all the lands and cities she wishes she could travel to, but the evil magic of her father kept her chained to the tower and subject to his will. And there she stayed until she grew up, wishing she could be free but never truly knowing what freedom was.

She told her about a lost and lonely man who had done something he could never forgive himself for, and would have died of despair if it hadn't been for a miracle. In his darkest hour, he was visited by a brother and sister, two great wizards who'd escaped the madness of the tyrant and vowed to make amends for the monster they'd helped create. With their magic, they brought him to the flying city and set him on the path to free the tyrant's daughter from her prison.

Together, the lost man and the tyrant's daughter had many adventures across the city, and gained many things along the way: the lost man found a daughter of his own, and a chance to make amends for past mistakes; the tyrant's daughter found a father who loved her, and a realization of the responsibility her powers had given her.

Until at last, Elizabeth and Booker found themselves in a sea of lighthouses spanning as far as the eye could see…

As the story gradually came to a close, Anna found herself nodding off again, so Elizabeth shuffled over to make room for her on the couch and covered her with the quilt; after a while, Elizabeth began drifting off to sleep as well.

And that was how the Luteces finally found them: Elizabeth fast asleep on the couch; Anna cradled in her arms; and Daddy watching over them both.

"Well," said Rosalind bemusedly, as Anna busied herself in tidying up the bedroom. "That certainly clears things up."

Booker coughed loudly for attention. "And now it's my turn to ask questions: why did you have us hide in the shadows while you were talking to Elizabeth?"

"Because we didn't know how she'd react, obviously," said Robert.

"She was disoriented and clearly not in the right frame of mind, if you recall."

"For all we know, she might have decided to use her powers to send you home-"

"With all the potential accidents that might have ensued."

"And given that we'd just finished cleaning up the wreckage in Dionysus Park-"

"We decided it would be best if we erred on the side of caution."

"Then why didn't you just let me talk to her once you knew she was well and truly sober?" Booker demanded. "More importantly, why can't I talk to her right now? I mean, she clearly needs help, and I think family support might be the best thing for her."

"Define 'family support'."

"She stays with Anna and me for the next few months until she's recovered."

There was a pause, as the Luteces exchanged glances, looking genuinely saddened for the first time in months.

Eventually, Robert sighed and said, "Normally, I would be in complete agreement with you, but… well…"

"Yes?"

"You do have other obligations."

"Like what?"

"The usual," said Rosalind. "Home, work, a family of your own – you're trying to raise a daughter in difficult enough circumstances as it is. Even with assistance from us, even if we gave you a new apartment and enough money to guarantee Anna's future, you would have an uphill battle caring for Elizabeth, especially given the crippling sense of self-doubt she's currently grappling with."

"Oh come on! You're acting as if she can't even take care of herself!"

"And that's because she can't. You heard what we said about her, you heard the witness testimonials, and you saw what she was like towards the end of the seventy-two hours: she can barely manage to remain functional at the best of times, and at the worst, she's… well, getting inebriated and summoning Parisian monuments into underwater cities."

"I can help her though; I've done it before, don't forget: I helped keep her safe for the last few hours, didn't I?"

"Because she was coming down from her high at the time," said Robert sternly. "If she'd met you in the middle of her delirium, the results would have been worse. What if she'd made a mistake while providing you with the memories of your dead counterpart? What if Anna hadn't been resistant to Tear Sickness? The two of you could have been driven incurably insane! Are you really so sure you can guarantee your safety-"

"Or that of your daughter."

"Elizabeth's a human being, not a caged tiger," snapped Booker.

Rosalind pinched the bridge of her nose in exasperation. "At present, she is a very troubled young woman who is in the process of destroying herself because she believes she has nothing worthwhile left in her life and no longer trusts herself to make anything worthwhile from it."

"Surely you notice the similarities," Robert added.

There was a distinctly wounded pause, and when Booker spoke again, even he sounded aggrieved: "Low blow, Robert."

"All I'm asking is that you consider historical precedent: without me around to buy her, you were forced to reform and give up alcohol in order to provide for your daughter. Do you really want to bring that instability back into your life now, when you can only just support yourself and Anna?"

"And what do you propose we do instead?"

Rosalind thought for a moment. "Finding her some kind of obligation to keep her grounded is still our best option," she said at last.

"Perhaps we could take inspiration from your case," Robert suggested.

Booker's eyes narrowed. "You want to give her someone to care for?"

"Someone in similar circumstances as her, someone who can be supported by her and support her in turn."

"Ideally someone she doesn't know very well at present, someone she wouldn't easily find in the possibility space if she were ever inclined to look for alternates."

"That way, we would be able to keep her perspective on the situation realistic."

"With any luck."

Booker shook his head. "You know how I feel about this option," he said darkly. "I had family obligations to keep me steady, and that only lasted until the drinking and gambling set in; I only just managed to get my act together in my world. Who knows, there are probably hundreds of different versions of me who ended up screwing everything up from beginning to end."

"Again, you give yourself too little credit," Robert chided.

"All I'm saying is that, if you're planning on trying to make Elizabeth clean up her act, you're going to have to supervise this every step of the way: no time off for experiments, no delays, no lapses… if you want this to work, you're going to have to be almost as grounded as she is for as long as this plan of yours lasts."

"That should be no great trial," said Rosalind, briskly. "After all, it's only been a year since we put our lives on hold to help you and Elizabeth through Columbia."

"And there's another matter you haven't considered yet: how are you going to go about this? Who is Elizabeth supposed to just start caring for? I mean, you can't just force her to just randomly care for a complete stranger, right?"

"We did have one idea," said Rosalind mysteriously.

"Admittedly, it only occurred to us after we learned that we weren't the only individuals following Elizabeth across the space-time continuum," Robert confessed.

"Drunk as she was, she often neglected to take the proper precautions when travelling from one iteration of Rapture to the next: in many cases, she left stable Tears in her wake-"

"Some of which remained in place long enough to be found. Fortunately, most of the witnesses were either too spliced up to understand what they were looking at, or too intimidated to investigate."

"In total, there was only one individual brave enough to actually enter the Tears, and though her journey has been even more erratic than our own, we have been able to confirm that she has been making progress."

"Normally we would have just eliminated her before she became a threat to either Elizabeth or the stability of the possibility space, but we soon realized that her attitude was… quite dissimilar to that of the others. Eventually, just before locating this apartment, we found the pursuer exploring the complex and interviewed her – with some difficulty."

"Her speech is stunted at present, but just coherent enough for us to ascertain that she actually has a functioning mind. It seems her initial bout of Tear Sickness actually appears to actually have undone the years of cognitive damage inherent to her mental conditioning, enough to leave her lucid, if not necessarily stable."

"She has expressed… an interest in Elizabeth."

Booker groaned, smiling in spite of himself. "Please tell me it's not who I think it is," he chuckled.

In perfect unison, the Luteces grinned…

…and in that moment, there was a knock on the door.

"And that would be her," said Rosalind. "Booker, I believe this is your cue to leave; my brother will escort you and your daughter back to your home dimension, and then do the same for Miss Jolene. Hopefully, the opium in her system will have cushioned her system against Tear Sickness… but you'll have to give her a quick check-up before she next returns to Eve's Garden. On his way back, he'll pick up Elizabeth."

Robert gave Rosalind a dubious look. "And what might you be doing while I'm playing chauffer?" he asked gloomily.

"I'll be looking after our guest until Elizabeth returns."

"I really am doing most of the donkey work in these missions, aren't I?"

"Look on the bright side, dear brother: you won't be rowing this time around."

Booker's laughter ricocheted wildly around the apartment. "Anna! Come on back, kiddo; we're going home!"

"What the hell am I doing back in the Mercury Suites?" Elizabeth demanded. "I thought we were done here."

"So did I. Unfortunately, something rather important has become apparent, and it requires your immediate attention."

Elizabeth made a noise at the back of her throat that, to her hangover-amplified hearing, sounded like the dying snarl of a constipated dragon. "This is going to be another lecture about drinking and/or using responsibly, isn't it?" she grumbled.

"Well, at the risk of sounding naggy, I did find you in a bar."

"I'd stopped to ask for directions!"

"And you'd ordered a drink."

"Of water! It was just iced water, okay? You knew that wasn't vodka or tequila or anything like that. You could tell. We both agreed that it was just water."

"Filtered with industrial kerosene," Robert muttered.

"What was that?"

"Nothing."

Elizabeth groaned and massaged her temples, trying not to wince at the squeak of rusted door mechanisms as Robert ushered her into the apartment.

"Look, would you just explain why you've brought me here?" she sighed. "It's been a miserable day already, and I really don't want to spend another minute of it in Rapture. I mean, what could possibly be so important that you dragged me back here to see? I mean, couldn't you have just brought it straight to me? What about this is… just… so… immoveable…"

Heart skipping a beat, Elizabeth stopped short, slowly trailing off as she recognized the figure before her.

There, in the shadows of the apartment, a Big Sister sat in silence on one of the smaller couches just across from Rosalind. Unlike so many others of her kind, her posture was relaxed, almost becalmed, and a pale emerald glow poured from the portholes of her helmet. Because her face remained hidden behind brass, it was almost impossible to guess at what she might be thinking, but even with Elizabeth's hangover wearing down on her, there was no mistaking the fact that the Big Sister was looking directly at Elizabeth.

There was a pause, as the Big Sister cocked her head to the side in a quizzical tilt.

Elizabeth instinctively followed suit. After all, she'd seen a lot of strange and improbable things since she'd left her tower, but a Big Sister sitting calmly on a couch next to Rosalind had to be one of the least probable of them all.

Even more improbable was the fact that she'd clearly met this particular Big Sister before.

"She followed you," said Rosalind, by way of explanation.

"You mean she's-"

"Yes."

"But… why? Why would she-"

"Sis-ter."

Elizabeth blinked. In all the months she'd spent investigating Rapture and its many different variations, she'd never once seen a true Big Sister that could speak: driven feral by the breakdown in their childhood conditioning, they'd been left incapable of speaking in anything other than bestial howls, snarls and ear-splitting screams. The only exception to this had been Eleanor Lamb, and she'd only retained her sanity because she'd been awakened from her programming before it was too late. Hearing one that was capable of speech was almost impossible to conceive of, yet here it was, right before her eyes.

"Sis-ter," the Big Sister repeated slowly, as if trying to remember the significance of the word. "You… said… we were… sisters?"

"Oh," said Elizabeth. Suddenly, breathing seemed very difficult; thanks to the Luteces, her warped memories of the last few nights were gradually beginning to coalesce inside her mind, and she could finally remember the desperate, crushing sense of loneliness she'd felt when she'd approached the Protector back in Pauper's Drop.

On instinct, she crept closer. In response, the Big Sister rose from her chair, all six feet and ten inches of her willowy frame gently unfolding itself from the upholstery; at full height, she towered over Elizabeth, could probably have snapped her neck like a twig if she'd wanted to. And yet, Elizabeth couldn't find a shred of fear in her heart in that moment: right then and there, all thoughts of defending herself were gone. Instead, she found herself gripped by a powerful need to speak to this Big Sister, to understand her and help her to understand in turn – something she hadn't felt since she and Booker had confronted the Siren for the last time.

The two stopped in the middle of the apartment, barely a foot between them. Craning her neck to peer up into the Big Sister's face, Elizabeth found her hands gently straying to the release catch on her collar. Immediately, the Protector stiffened in alarm; somewhere behind the helmet, an almost childlike shriek of fear echoed.

"It's alright," Elizabeth soothed. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to scare you; I promise, I'm not going to hurt you. I just want to see your face."

"…face?"

"That's right, your face. I won't do this if you don't want me to. It's your decision now."

For a moment, she appeared to consider this. Then, with trembling hands, she reached up, trigged the release catch and removed her helmet.

Under the brass dome and glass portholes, the Big Sister was as pale as any of her younger counterparts, her skin an unhealthy, vitamin-starved grey. Long, tangled red hair framed a thin, high-cheekboned face bordered by tiny, lobeless ears. Above the pallid, bruised-looking lips and the button nose, two enormous green eyes stared back at Elizabeth, blinking rapidly as they struggled to acclimatize to seeing the world without a helmet for the first time in years. It wasn't easy to measure emotions on a face that hadn't needed to express anything other than murderous rage for god only knew how long, but Elizabeth had the distinct impression that this girl was, in fact, terrified out of her life.

The sight alone was heartbreaking, but the implications were even worse: this was what the people of Rapture had been made to fear? These were the girls that Sofia Lamb had charged with kidnapping children and murdering dissenters? Good god almighty, they were barely teenagers; the one standing in front of her couldn't be a day older than fifteen!

Suppressing her anger, Elizabeth whispered, "What's your name?"

The Big Sister paused, lower lip trembling as she struggled to think of an answer. "Alice," she said at last. Without her helmet, her voice was low and hoarse, her throat probably rasped raw by the deafening screams the Protectors used to announce themselves. "Alice," she repeated – almost as if trying to convince herself that it was true.

There was silence for a moment, as Alice tried to think of what to say next. "You are… Elizabeth?" she said at last.

"That's right."

"Big sister? Bigger sister?"

It took all of Elizabeth's willpower not to let out a snort of laughter. Being anyone's big sister was weird enough of its own, but being considered a bigger sister to Alice – a girl who could comfortably grab her by the shoulder and fling her across a town square like a lawn dart – was nothing short of ridiculous.

"I… I don't know if I'd call myself bigger or anything like that, but I'd be happy to be a sister to you if that's what you want."

Suddenly, Alice's curiously pallid face was gripped by an almost childlike look of confusion. "Are you real?" she whispered.

"Of course I'm real."

"I'm… I'm not dreaming?" Though her voice remained rough and rasping, the words seem to be flowing smoother now, almost as if she was remembering how to speak again.

"No, Alice. You're wide awake right now."

"Where's the White Fortress?"

"…I'm sorry?"

Alice's gaze grew faint and faraway for a moment, her eyes seeming to focus on a point above Elizabeth's head. "First there was a Golden Palace," she said. "Everything was right and good there. It was never cold, never wet, never lonely. Nobody hurt us. Nothing scared us. We all had our Daddies, and we were all happy together. We were good little girls, gathered from all the angels we could find, gave ADAM back when Papa Ryan said so. But then… but then the Bad Men came. They hurt our Daddies until they all Went Away and never came back. They lay down and didn't wake up, no matter how many times we called to them and how long we cried. I thought it wouldn't happen to my Daddy; I thought we'd be okay together, 'cause Papa Ryan was gone by then and Mama Lamb took over. Mama Lamb looked after us, made all the Bad Men smile at us, made them all call us 'precious.' But then… but then I got tall. I got big real quickly and my clothes didn't fit anymore and I got ugly and wrong and I couldn't carry ADAM anymore and nobody liked me anymore… and then… and then…"

Alice stopped for breath, eyes full of tears. "And then Daddy didn't want me anymore," she whimpered. "He didn't love me like he used to. He didn't even notice me anymore. I tried to talk to him, I tried to get his attention, but… but… all he did was yell at me. And when I tried to hug him like I used to, he hit me!"

Her voice rose to a scream. "Daddy hit me! He hit me and he walked away and he didn't look back and I never saw him again! And then nothing was right, because the Golden Palace was gone and there was nothing but the cold and the dark and the monsters and my sisters hated me and the other Daddies hated me even more and when I tried to hug my sisters they screamed that I was a monster and the Daddies hit me because I was a monster and all I could do was-"

Instinctively, Elizabeth threw her arms around Alice and drew her into a hug. Admittedly, it was a little bit more awkward than she thought it might be, if only because there was a significant height difference between the two of them; in fact, Elizabeth was currently at eye level with Alice's lower ribs, and acutely aware that if the Big Sister happened to have any aversions to physical contact, she was going to know about it very quickly.

But instead, Alice simply slumped to her knees, buried her face in Elizabeth's shoulder and started to cry. For the next minute and a half, the Big Sister wailed and bawled and sobbed like a child, snuffling frantically for breath, and all the while, Elizabeth could only hold her in her arms until the storm had passed.

Eventually, she calmed enough to continue: "For a long time, there was nothing but darkness. But then Mama Lamb found me, found all of us, brought us to Papa Alex. He filled my head with light, turned aside the shadows. And when I opened my eyes again, I was in a White Fortress, and I was a princess in a silk dress and a diamond crown. Mama Lamb was the queen there, and she told me the kingdom was infested with Bad Men, monsters who'd eat my little sisters if they got a chance; the fortress had knights in shining armour and good men to protect the little ones, but they couldn't do it alone. They needed me. I was a magical princess, and my spells could stop the Bad Men in their tracks… and for a while, I didn't need anyone. But then I met you, and I…"

She closed her eyes, clearly trying to fight off another onslaught of tears. "I didn't really know anyone before, not really. The new Little Sisters weren't afraid of me anymore, but they didn't play with me like they used to when I was little like them. The Daddies didn't hate me anymore, but they didn't care about me either. Big Sisters like me… we didn't even speak to each other. You were the first time anyone hugged me since I was little. So I followed you through those doors in the air and… they made me sick. My nose bled everywhere. My head went all weird and I stopped seeing the White Fortress… and now I'm here."

She took a deep breath. "Please, I need to know: are you real? Is this real, or have I gone all wrong again? Mama Lamb told me all about Big Sisters who go bad: she sends us to sleep in the dark place and we never wake up. And…" Her lip wobbled again. "I don't wanna never wake up," she said, voice smaller than ever. "I wanna be alive."

Elizabeth patted her reassuringly on the back. "I'm real; everything about this is real."

Far from being reassured, if anything, Alice looked even more confused than ever before. "I looked around for Mama Lamb when I got here… but she's gone. Everyone's gone. No Big Sisters. No Daddies. I can't even find any little ones anymore. What am I supposed to do if there's no more Little Sisters to protect?"

And Elizabeth didn't even hesitate: "You can stay with me," she said earnestly.

Alice looked around in bewilderment. "Here?"

"No, no. See…"

Elizabeth wasn't entirely sure what she was talking about at present: at the moment, she was improvising like crazy, trying to think of something, anything that could bring Alice just the tiniest measure of peace. This poor, mistreated girl deserved so much more out of life, and Elizabeth needed to make it possible if it killed her, even if she wasn't sure how.

Somehow, though, inspiration struck.

"There's a special place for us on the surface," she said at last.

Alice's eyes turned heavenwards. "The Surface?"

"That's right."

"But Papa Ryan said the Surface was bad, would kill us all if it could."

"Papa Ryan lied, Alice: I've seen the surface. It's no better or worse than anyplace. It's not perfect, but there's a chance for us there. There's people who'll take us in up there. They've rescued Little Sisters, a Big Sister, a Big Daddy, and they're all cared for by a woman who's given up everything to make things right for people like us. And if we're lucky…"

She glanced over at the Luteces, who were smiling approvingly at her. "What year is this, by the way?" she asked.

"1968," said Rosalind. "Judging from our brief reconnoitre, less than twenty four hours after Eleanor arrived on the surface with her household of Little Sisters."

"According to our studies," said Robert, "They have been joined by a handful of other survivors, including Grace Holloway, Subject Sigma, and of course, Brigid Tenembaum."

"With some helpful towing from Alex the Great, they've been able to make their way back to a major shipping lane."

"They should be acquiring passage to New York any minute now."

"Great!" said Elizabeth. "I should be able to…"

But then she thought again: hadn't Alice been through enough today without being put through another round of Tear travel? From the sounds of things, exposure to alternate timelines had almost driven her insane long before it had destroyed her psychological conditioning. The last thing Alice needed right now was another influx of psychic trauma. More to the point, she couldn't afford to have too much thrown at her at once, not if she was going to find a happy life for herself on the surface. They'd have to tackle the problem in stages, introducing Alice to the Surface bit by bit, and that would mean introducing her in as mundane a fashion as possible.

Elizabeth turned to the Luteces again. "Uh… this may sound kind of weird, but do you think you could find us a bathysphere to the surface? And a boat, as well?"

Robert sighed, smiling in spite of himself. "Here we go again…"

The first step was the journey to the surface, the long slow ascent in the bathysphere towards the light. Alice spent the entire trip clinging to her seat, staring through the porthole as the darkness of the ocean depths gradually receded and the haunting green glow that shrouded Rapture turned to vivid blue as they rose steadily higher.

For the longest time, Alice didn't want to leave the 'sphere; she hadn't been one of the Sisters sent out to kidnap children from the surface, and things like sunlight, wind and even the sound of gulls drove her into a blind panic of confusion. It wasn't until Elizabeth stepped out through the bathysphere door and stood on the lighthouse stairs that Alice was willing to even consider the idea: in the end, she stepped out into the sunlight on legs as wobbly as a newborn foal's, hiding her face from the sun and blinking furiously as her eyes struggled to adjust to the light.

But as she slowly acclimatized to the brightness, she gradually realized that the sun wasn't going to hurt her, and soon realized that there was something in the dawn light that she hadn't felt in a long time: warmth. For the first time, she understood that she was free from the all-encompassing chill that had been the hallmark of Rapture's later years, and for a moment, she could only bask in the sun and let the heat envelop her.

At last, she smiled.

Then, her gaze gradually strayed from the sunlight bathing her body to the horizon, and her eyes widened as she finally took in the vastness of the sea. Born and raised in Rapture, she'd never known any other life outside the rooms and corridors of the city, and the sheer scale of the surface world took her breath away.

By the time Robert Lutece appeared in his new boat, she was almost used to the massiveness of her new world, but the sheer experience of travelling at speed – with the wind in her hair and the ocean spray in her face – had her giggling like a kid at an amusement park.

With the knowledge of the possibility space they had on hand, not to mention her own gift for tweaking the laws of physics ever-so-slightly, the boat moved much faster and travelled much further that it would upon the open ocean. Indeed, it wasn't long before the distant shape of the refugee ship slowly crept into view, towing a train of bathyspheres in its wake. In one of those was Subject Sigma, kept out of sight until Dr Tenembaum could restore him to human form. The figures massing on deck, meanwhile, were easily recognized: children wouldn't have been seen on salvage ships, so those tiny shapes peeking out at them from over the railing could only be Little Sisters... and that tall, slender figure striding through the crowd, dark hair gleaming in the sunshine, could only be Eleanor Lamb.

And in the silence that crept up on them, just as the first calls from the lookouts began echoing across the ocean, Alice put a hand on Elizabeth's shoulder.

"Elizabeth?"

"Yes, Alice?"

"You won't leave me, will you? You won't vanish again when we get on board? You won't leave me alone?"

"You'll never be alone in this world again; I'll always be there for you."

And perhaps she really would be: after all, she was more anomaly than flesh, and neither she nor the Luteces had a precise gauge of her lifespan – if, indeed she would ever die. One way or another, she would be there for Alice for as long as she had the strength to ensure that a fellow outsider could find a new life. And for the first time in a long while, Elizabeth found herself looking towards the future without any of the old doubts and uncertainties that had plagued her the past year, smiling giddily as the ship began issuing hails.

Alice smiled back at her, her pallid face suddenly aglow with happiness. "Sisters for life?" she asked.

"Sisters for life," agreed Elizabeth.

"I think she's taking bold strides toward recovery, don't you?"

From their apartment, Booker and Anna watched the drama unfold through a lone Tear in the wall, courtesy of the newly-arrived Robert Lutece; this was due to be closed very soon, but for now, the two of them were free to watch Elizabeth and Alice being introduced to their new family.

"Do you think we'll ever see her again?" Anna asked.

"I think so," Booker replied. "When she's well enough to wander again, she'll find her way back here… and maybe we'll get to see how well she's been doing up close."

"Or maybe you'll visit her," said Robert. "Perhaps you'll even stay, if you really want to. Speaking of which, I think my sister and I owe you a gift."

Reaching into his jacket, he held out a pocket-watch-sized assembly of brass and platinum, roughly octagonal in shape and augmented with a single silver button on top. "Consider it our compensation for all the strife we put you through."

"What is it, though?"

"It's a Lutece field manipulator, built specifically to follow the same principle my sister and I once communicated through before we found one another: essentially, it's a signalling device. Simply press the button, and we will be there in minutes."

Booker offered a wry grin as he tucked the gift into his pocket. "Well, after all the uninvited visits to my office, I suppose it's only fair that I get the right start knocking on your door for a change." He chuckled, and to his own immense bemusement, shook the scientist's hand.

"Don't hesitate to call on us," said Robert. "We stand ready to offer any assistance you require. You have the means of contacting us: if you ever need money, protection, or a new home… just call."

"Is your sister going to be here to say goodbye?" Anna piped up.

"In just a moment, if my estimates are correct… and they always are."

A moment later, Rosalind appeared.

"Sorry I'm late," she said. "I've just been moving all our possessions to a new laboratory in New York circa 1968. We'll be able to keep a closer eye on our happy little family from there."

"And I'm sorry that I'm early," said Robert, even more deadpan than usual. "Even though I've been stuck playing boatman again."

"Well, for what it's worth, I am sorry you had to once again spend your day on your least favourite form of physical activity."

"Oh, I don't know… I suppose I could consider it training for our next voyage: we could go to post-apocalyptic Venice this time around, and you could perform experiments on Tear phenomena occurring within flooded palazzos while I pilot the gondola."

"It must be a great disappointment to realize that however far you travel, you can't escape the duty of rowing interdimensional travellers across a mysterious ocean." Rosalind offered a distinctly sardonic smile. "At least this time you were ferrying passengers from the lighthouse instead of to it. Perhaps we should consider that a good omen, dear brother."

"Rowing?" echoed Robert. "You didn't see the boat I used this time around, did you?"

"No, why?"

"You're behind the times, dear sister: we are approaching the 1970s after all – rowing has become a thing of the past."

"What are you talking about?"

Now it was Robert's turn to grin. "Perhaps it's time I told you all about the modern marvel that is the outboard motor…"

THE END