Three Months Later

31st December, 1958

As he walked, he could not help but be moved by the devastation all around him, the bones of the bellicose city –– an eerie calm suffused the fallen grave markers and overgrown plant life. Too far removed from the rest of the city for external sounds to penetrate the thick walls, and within, no slamming doors, no babbling splicers, no wandering feet, no sacrilegious voices breaking in upon the stillness. Even the press of ivy under his shoes struck his ear with a jarring distinctness. But though he stepped quickly, his easy efficiency of movement gave an impression of repose that was at once static and evocative.

In the center of the garden rested a small mausoleum, the structure lying in partial ruin. Headstones littered the hills. Space was at such a premium and real estate had become so valuable that even the dead could not remain in Rapture without the money necessary to rent a spot in the crowded cemetery. Only the wealthy could afford a traditional burial and even then, their corpse only remained undisturbed for as many weeks as they had paid for in their will. Then they were dug up and cremated the same as the paupers, scattered in the gray estuaries and washed out into the sea. The dark, archetypal nightmares of wooden boxes and six-foot-deep holes, the objective correlatives that haunted the minds of all men, held no meaning in Rapture. As though death was not, in of itself, an end.

He reached beside one of the gravestones and uprooted a green vine, a few feet long, with several bell-shaped flowers. A vindictive look in his pale indigo eyes, he tossed the invasive plant aside. Unkempt ivy cascaded over the crypts and catacombs, growing tendrils in every direction. The path was punctuated with weeds after every stone. The dishevelled, unmanicured lawn was more moss and lichen than grass. Clusters of defiant daffodils reared their golden heads amidst the gloom and there were smatters of fuchsia alongside the scarlet and saffron hued primroses.

The air, despite the angiosperms, still smelled of salt.

An industrial-grade window arched over the Arcadia cemetery. The neon and cold-cathode fluorescence speckled the sea of darkness; like millions of stars, they burned with a steady light in the serene ocean night. There was no breath of wind to make them flicker as they hung there in space. They made the city seem as vast as the sky, reaching out into infinity. The view communicated beauty and strangeness and a hint of terror that sent pleasurable excitement thrilling through his blood.

Even inside the walls of Arcadia, motes of phosphorescence danced over the gravestones –– ignes fatui like the expiring gleams of thousands of vanished lives.

He followed the smell of Miltoniopsis santanaei through the plots –– he could picture in his mind a vein of anise and nasturtium suspended amidst the pervading brine, the odor the texture of petals, soft and supple.

There was only one man in all of Rapture who had the resources and capital necessary to cultivate orchid flowers fifty fathoms below the ocean's surface –– not to mention, the horticultural expertise. Well, Augustus had grown up on a peach farm.

And Sinclair's twice-monthly offering of small, white flowers meant Solf J. Kimblee had no issue in locating her gravesite.

A subsidiary requirement to his sense of direction, perhaps, for indeed his memory had yet to lead him astray. Still, Kimblee welcomed the smell of orchids amidst so much rot and decay and death.

The marker was small, gray, undecorated. It was, he thought, ever-so-slightly cleaner than many of the others, that stone upon which someone had attempted to etch her history, a paltry, final testimony after a lifetime of scratching out divisions upon the ground, over ephemeral time itself, as though to give her short, sad life its final punctuation. Kimblee brushed the moss from the headstone and found there an inscription he knew very well…

Riza Hawkeye: 1926-1958
No more let life divide what death can join together.

"The cemetery," recited Kimblee quietly, "is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place..."

It was not long before a voice interrupted his vigil.

"I reckoned I might find ye here. Down on your knees before her, no less."

If Kimblee were a less prudent, practical person, the newcomer's deliberate and obstinate desire to behave in ways that flew in the face of consequence would begin to irritate.

Kimblee's expression grew graver, and he weighed on his company with a solemn scowl. In the pool of light shed onto his lap, his hands, long and white and slender, picked at a speck of dirt on his trousers.

The man who called himself Atlas had a strong, high-cheeked face, with a vertical wrinkle erupting between his eyes as he glowered, black, unruly dark hair falling over his forehead. He hadn't shaved. Stubble the color of cigarette ash clung to his jaw. Kimblee appraised him at his own molten leisure, noted the eyes that gleamed like polished larimar, the expression pinched and cruel. Nature, Kimblee decided, had squandered an unreasonable quantity of beauty on this undeserving creature.

Given the intricacy of pattern and design an artist of Atlas's preoccupations produced, his disguises tended to lack any initial force of appearance. He was a construct of the civilization in which he lived, an amalgam of vague ideologies and ethics. It was as though Atlas –– Fontaine, Kimblee affirmed to himself with a self-satisfied smirk –– had spent his life standing very close to a window in the ocean's perpetual twilight, trapped between his mirror-image's own transmission and reflection, the city forever superimposed over his countenance. Atlas was parasitic, saprophytic, like the moss on the grave markers. His was an identity that infected, deadening all impulses towards a truth of conviction.

Atlas had incited a conspiracy –– had brought himself to within teetering distance of civil war. Something was going to change in Rapture... something beyond reckoning.

Kimblee smiled, then, his mouth a gash of red, thin and oracular, before rising to his feet in one fluid motion. He allowed his thumb and forefinger to brush Riza's gravestone as he stood.

"I am merely paying my respects," murmured Kimblee, stepping up to Atlas, enmity radiating between two pairs of blue eyes.

Atlas arched a shiftless eyebrow. "Yeah, boyo? Didn't think the lass was your..." a thin, bloodless smirk, "type."

His tone of voice reminded Kimblee of the slow stretch of honey from a silver spoon... but honey made from rhododendrons, pure poison.

"I fail to see the relevance," said Kimblee coldly. "She was a creature of integrity and duty. I am honoring her memory."

Atlas sneered at the gravestone. "She was Mustang's mott. I expect the bastard kept her around for one reason and one reason alone." He peered sidelong at Solf, eyes narrowing in consideration. "I know you're not out here doin' your keenin', Kimblee. What could ye possibly hope to find here? The dead tell no secrets."

"There is no one here left to talk," said Kimblee quietly. "Most of the boxes beneath this earth are empty."

"Aye... burial at sea. All this," he gestured to the Arcadia cemetery, "is just smokescreens, innit?"

"Putting a body in a box as a keepsake so that mortals might cling to their dearly departed even after everything that made the person who they were has rotted away –– it retains little sense to me. I have always been of the mind that graveyards are for the living, not the dead."

"You're a real ray of sunshine, Kimblee. A right Section-Eight."

"Tell me," said Kimblee, picking idly at a perfect fingernail, "why did you kill her?"

Atlas hooked his thumbs in his braces. "Care to repeat that, my son?"

"Gladly... I was laboring under the impression that you intended to use Miss Hawkeye's life to negotiate for Mustang's plasmid. And yet here you are... you have what you wanted, and Miss Hawkeye is still dead."

"Problem with that?" Kimblee sensed in Frank Fontaine a distrust, an uneasiness. An antagonism, which, because it was instinctive –– and, admittedly, warranted –– was irremediable.

Kimblee's lip curled, exposing his very white teeth. "For a businessman reportedly of some repute, you seem to have a worryingly tenuous grasp of the concept of compacts."

Atlas, patience wearing thin, rounded on Kimblee, stabbing a finger in his narrow face. "You listen to me, you little shit," he hissed, in an accent that was very much not working-class Irish, "I didn't give a damn about that little whore. I didn't give a damn about Mustang. The pair of 'em signed their own death warrants the day they decided to fuck with Frank Fontaine."

"Then tell me... where is Roy Mustang now?"

Atlas crossed his arms, snorting in disdain. His brogue back, he muttered: "Slant-eyed wonder is probably swingin' from a scaffold somewhere."

The bravado left Kimblee unconvinced. Mustang's absence made Atlas squirm and Ryan sweat, but they had all heard the rumors... about Mustang, about his two missing men.

And about the former Fontaine Futuristics scientist, Brigid Tenenbaum

Ryan Industries, her employer after Fontaine's alleged death, had tried to cover up her strange behavior, but after her renunciation of the Little Sister Program became public, she was labeled a madwoman in the city papers. Tenenbaum soon disappeared from the public eye all together.

Perhaps of a more principle concern, the Little Sisters themselves were vanishing in droves, squirreled out from under Ryan's nose. The remarkable concurrence of disappearances –– Mustang and his surviving subordinates as well as Tenenbaum and the Little Sisters –– communicated to Kimblee that some force was working to fight the turgid slick of conformity Rapture had become. It seemed as though the rebels found the chaos of transition, the vacuum of their souls left in the wake of young Miss Hawkeye's death, more difficult to accept than the tyranny they had known before under the thumb of Andrew Ryan. They would joyfully welcome chaos –– for it was less painful for them than numb indifference. Kimblee found himself searching for contempt and finding only grudging admiration. And he supposed a rebel was not in of himself a miserable or contemptible person... provided they believed in and followed the practices of the principles that presided over their insurrection. Kimblee maintained that there was nothing inherently contemptible in the act of revolution as such –– to wear the mantle of iconoclast in view of the ruling society did not in of itself lower the value of a person. In the diametrics of a mathematical system, it was not a direct correlation.

Conversely, there were two things Solf J. Kimblee had always observed to be in singular accord: aberration... and hypocrisy.

He chuckled, then... a quiet laugh that didn't quite leave his chest. "The power of choice is the result and sum of a person's most fundamental convictions, wouldn't you agree? Tell me what a man intends to do, provided he finds himself caught between the storms of Ryan's hypocrisy and Atlas's fanaticism, and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life.

"And in a way, those decisions in turn become reciprocal and self-determining, no? Acting upon one's ideals is the ultimate trial by fire. I suspect Andrew Ryan has it right on certain accounts –– that it is well and good when our convictions are not based upon the "Thou shalts" and the "Thou shalt nots" of Scripture and instead on our own philosophies. We do not merely make choices..." Kimblee's gaze finally flicked to Frank's face, where impatience warred with barely restrained frustration and fury. Kimblee leered at him once again, but the smile failed to reach his storm-colored eyes...

"In the end, our choices make us."

Atlas's jaw hardened, and there was a low rumble in the back of his throat, almost a growl. "What the fuck are you on about, you spastic little headcase?"

Kimblee began to pace, slow and sedate, the grass susurrusing underfoot. He dragged his long, narrow shadow behind him like a man winding back the hands of a clock. Atlas, a shark bellying at the scent of blood, tracked Kimblee in his orbit.

"I don't like to discredit my own experiences to any considerable degree, but I've found that people almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.

"Take you, for example, my delightful little ideologue... I imagine carving a crest of Riza Hawkeye's blood was a very attractive prospect indeed. A sublime despair coupled with an almost divine audacity. You had the opportunity to sink your teeth into the throat of the woman who denied you her life. How could you resist?"

Atlas's eyes searched Kimblee's face with an intensity some would find disquieting, and Kimblee understood then that the man was systematically mapping out in his head every possible path forward and its resulting outcome.

He couldn't help but admire Fontaine for it.

"Do you know what that decision to kill her made you?"

"I don't give a rat's ass, Kimblee," he hissed, with a reflexive, regressive contempt.

But admiration would not save him.

"A hypocrite." Kimblee's lips elongated into a thin rictus grin. His long fingers tapped a tune against his trouser leg. He stalked closer, his movements feline, his violet eyes turning subdued ––lethal.

"And I do so despise hypocrites."

Kimblee sprang from his slouch, his muscles snapping forward like elastic. He grabbed Frank Fontaine around the back of the head, the former's pale fingers splayed across the latter's scalp like a bleached starfish, and pulled him forward onto his outstretched palm, until he held Atlas's entire head between his hands. Kimblee's skin simmered like the coils of a hot plate and Fontaine froze.

"What the fuck are you doing?!"

Kimblee leaned closer, until his words feathered over the shell of Fontaine's ear, causing the flesh there to erupt in goosebumps. "Atlas," Kimblee murmured, "is not a person. Atlas is an idea."

"What––"

"The people believe in a cause... and the cause tells them what to believe. It's a cycle, you see... water flowing into the ocean, then up to the skies, and into rain, which falls and flows into the ocean again. Ideas have weight. They have momentum. Once an idea starts, it spreads and grows and gets heavier and heavier until it cannot be resisted.

"You, on the other hand, are but a man, Frank Fontaine. And Atlas has outlived you..."

Red lightning flashed from Kimblee's palms, pushing its inverted limbs down into Fontaine's flesh, his atoms fissioning into new unstable isotopes, the reaction releasing neutrons and an immense proliferation of binding energy...

There was a ripping, popping sound as the ligaments tore and the muscles shredded, and a soft, limpid crunch like a branch breaking under the weight of snow as Fontaine's skull shattered. Kimblee caught a flash of white, before the heavy spray of crimson and gray billowed up from under his deadly hands. The chain reaction of volatile molecules manifested as a red fountain from the serrated stump of Fontaine's throat, every plume and projection showing the thready struggle of the man's heart.

Kimblee grinned broadly, the motion catching as the thick clots of blood and brain matter cracked and creased the furrows of his face. He allows Fontaine's body to fall, the hollow pipe of his spinal column cracking when it hit the ground. The meat landed with a wet, heavy sound –– a sound of finality. That son et lumière having sated Kimblee's immediate itch, he turned instead to more pressing concerns…

"Atlas is dead," intoned Solf J. Kimblee, to no one in particular. Then, he pitched his voice higher, wet his mouth and throat to lubricate its roughness, added a smokey lilt to his natural cadence, and, the words whisper quiet, recited in an immaculate Dublin brogue:

"Long live Atlas."

Kneeling, he removed a shortwave radio from the holster at the corpse's hip. He adjusted the frequency, settling on the dearly-departed Fontaine's private channel, and held down the talk button...

"This is Atlas," he relayed, pressing the receiver close to his lips. "Would you kindly meet me at the Kashmir Restaurant?

"We're gonna give Rapture a New Year's Eve she'll not soon forget."

The End