Sterne's Waterproof Matches aren't, and the matchsticks themselves are some kind of flimsy cardboard rather than solid wood. The last one in the book rips in half as he attempts to strike it, and he lets the whole sad, soggy mess drop to the floor, cigarette still dangling unlit from his lips.

It's not like he's the one who bought the damn things, anyway - fished the half-full book out of a dead man's pocket this morning, so it's not his money going to waste. Didn't look like the poor sod was going to be having much use for them anyway. He didn't buy the pack of NicoTimes either, though those he found on top of an ashtray, not on a corpse.

Capitalism was Andrew Ryan's God, the God of the city he created, and yet he hasn't bought anything honest john in - weeks, maybe. Not as if there's many places left open to buy from except the damn vending machines, though.

Now that he thinks about it, he's not sure what's keeping him here, really. He came to Rapture in the first place because it sounded far and away better than staying topside, and there was little on dry land for him to justify staying.

Down here, under six miles of seawater, anything seemed possible.

The radio on the desk before him crackles, transmitting faint sounds from Arcadia: the splash of water in the canals, the calling of songbirds, the footsteps of the man from the bathysphere on the dying grass.

He smiles to himself, a bitter twist of sarcasm on his lips - yes, there's a reason he's staying. To kill Andrew Ryan.

Even after Ryan's dead, the only way out of Rapture might be the muzzle of a gun. He's been working on a way to hack one of the remaining bathyspheres, but not seriously - he's not getting out of here alive anyway. The world doesn't hold much appeal to him anymore - like Andrew Ryan, he intends to go down with his city.

He's no great shakes with hacking - he can manage a security camera or two, but the monitor he's sitting in front of is his highest achievement. He has yet to see his accomplice from topside on it, but it's helped him getting the jump on splicers looking for ADAM more than once.

The footsteps on the radio have stopped, and though he listens for any sound of an enemy, whether a splicer's voice or the thump of a Big Daddy's footsteps, he doesn't hear a thing.

Why's he stopped?

He tries to think of what the man could be looking at and comes up blank - until he remembers the posters. Not as if they're easy to forget - some as big as bedsheets, printed in garish colors and cheap ink with the image of some he-man who never was, asking WHO IS ATLAS?

He presses down the call button and speaks.

"You might hear things about me" - from Ryan, mostly, and he's heard Tenenbaum on the shortwave too - "see my name about." On every wall in Arcadia. There's not a corner in the place without his idealized visage scowling down at it. His fingers twitch and he bites down on the filter of his cigarette. He'd just about kill for a light - should've spliced Incinerate while he had the chance. "Think what you will. There was a time when I cared about politics, but it's just an excuse men use to kill one another."

His brow furrows as he stares at the monitor. What he wouldn't give to talk to another human being, to walk free somewhere not fathoms under the Atlantic - to think of himself as a man for a moment, not the monster Rapture's made of him.

"I'm done with all that," he says, and the soggy paper splits under his teeth, spilling tobacco onto his tongue.

God help him, even the tobacco tastes like the sea.

"I just want to see the sunlight again," he says.

No answer.

He lets the call button come up and forces himself to smile at his own foolishness. Whoever he is, the man he's been guiding through Rapture doesn't seem very talkative, to say the least. He hasn't said a single word so far.

He shakes his head, drops the remains of his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray on the desk. Silent or not, whoever it is he's talking to seems plenty agreeable: despite his silence, he's been doing as asked so far, and he isn't dead yet.

That part's a little baffling - the fellow's tangled with more than a few Big Daddies in his time down here, but the big apes don't even seem to give him pause. Sometimes there's a groan of pain between the gunshots and explosions, but never any indication of a really serious injury.

As long as the man stays alive, though, he doesn't really care what trouble he gets in. The problem would be if he got himself killed - with him dead, Atlas would have no way to get to Ryan.

It'd be nice to hear a human voice once in a while. Just to know that it's a man on the other end of the radio, not some helpful phantom. He's grateful for the help and all, but it's been too long since he's had a real conversation with someone.

That might have something to do with the fact that, so far as he knows, he's the only person in the neighborhood sane enough to have a conversation. Two weeks ago he intercepted a transmission from someone who sounded reasonably sane, but he's heard nothing since then, not counting Andrew Fucking Ryan's intermittent radio broadcasts, or poor old Johnny.

He cocks his head to the side, slowly lowering the radio to the desk. He could swear he heard footsteps in the hall a moment ago, but there's no sound of a triggered alarm, and no ranting from a splicer looking for ADAM.

Barring some sort of quiet splicer (and none of the ones he's seen around are quiet; it's like silence scares them or something), it's got to be someone sane.

Someone looking for him.

He glances to the security monitor. Not a peep. Everything is as he left it, so far as he can see.

Rapture must be making him crazy.

He hears a step outside and closes his eyes for a moment in weariness. As if the day hasn't been bad enough already.

He eases the desk drawer open and draws out the revolver he keeps tucked there in case something gets past his cameras, checks that it's still loaded.

His system is humming with EVE - thanks to his cameras and steady aim, he hasn't had to rely on plasmids for defense in a while, and the unused EVE coils in his blood. He raises his hand, concentrating, and watches electricity bloom across his skin in blue currents.

He doesn't like the risk of getting a monkey on his back from the stuff, but what he told the man from topside is true - there's nothing like a fistful of lightning. Many's the time a jolt of the stuff has saved him from death. If ADAM and EVE are curses, they're useful ones.

He flexes his fingers, resigning himself to the task at hand, and stands up, hooking the gun from the desk with the fingers of his other hand as he does.

The door opens for him, and he takes a cautious step forward, scanning the hall. To the left, empty, lit by flickering lightbulbs.

To the right, a ghost in a shabby suit, one hand gripping a section of pipe.

The ghost grins when he falters. "Hello, Atlas."

His palms have gone sweaty, and he holds the gun tighter, pressing his fingers into the grip. "Frank Fontaine is dead."

"Not anymore I ain't," the ghost sneers, tapping the pipe against its palm. "I wanna cut a deal with ya, Mack."

"I don't make any deals with dead men," says Atlas. First he's seeing ghosts, now he's talking to them. Ah, Rapture. "Am I supposed to just take your word that you're him?"

"That's the general idea," the ghost says, grinning. "Howsabout you let me into your little office here and we have ourselves a discussion?" He taps the pipe against his palm, grin like a mask on his face. "Whaddaya say?"

Atlas looks him over. He looks solid enough, and the smirk is the same one he remembers seeing on Fontaine's ugly mug back when he worked for the man. Not a ghost, probably, and if he's a splicer he's a civil one, since he hasn't yet cold-cocked Atlas to work him over for ADAM.

"Fine," says Atlas. He has the advantage, anyway - a gun and a blast of electricity versus a lead pipe isn't much of a contest.

He steps back into the office and leans casually on the desk, thinking sourly of other meetings with men in similarly shabby suits, always asking for him to help. As if wanting to help save a city from itself somehow gave him the power to solve a thousand problems at once.

Fontaine, or Fontaine's ghost, or whoever he's just invited in, swaggers inside like he owns the place and Atlas just doesn't know it yet. He looks the place over with an insolent smirk, as if to say that as hideouts go this one is piss-poor. Which is fair enough, since this isn't someplace he'd exactly have chosen to hide if he had his way.

Atlas drums his fingers on the desk, the hum of electricity the only sound in the still air. (Over the radio he can just hear the trickle of water and the breathing of the man from topside.) "So what kind of deal are you looking to make?"

"We both want Andrew Ryan dead - right, dollface?" Fontaine spreads his hands in a gesture made much less amiable by the pipe he's still hanging onto and the expression of sneering disdain on his face.

"Right," says Atlas.

"Well, whaddaya gonna do after that?"

Atlas tugs on the brim of his flat cap. "I don't know," he admits. He hasn't thought about that - with no Andrew Ryan to fight against, and his city in ruins, he won't have a purpose to guide him.

The only thing he can think of is sending his silent chum back home - after all he's done for Atlas, it's the least he can do by way of thanks. He doesn't seem to have any trouble operating the bathyspheres, or any of the other machines in Rapture, so Atlas doesn't suspect there'll be much problem packing him into a hacked 'sphere and sending him back to dry land. It'd be a shame for him to be trapped down here - not his fault his plane crashed where it did.

Fontaine looks at him like he suspects Atlas of having a few screws loose, maybe more than a few. "I heard that bathysphere come down a couple days ago, and since then you ain't done nothing but talk to whatever dumb sonuvabitch came out of it. Who is he?"

"I don't know," Atlas says. "He never told me."

"He never told you, huh? Sure he didn't." Fontaine snorts derisively. "Come on, kid. If you're gonna lie to me, you're gonna have to try a little harder." He taps the pipe against his palm. "Who is he?"

"I don't know," he says, curling his fingers into a loose fist and relaxing them. "I wouldn't know him if I saw him."

Fontaine taps the pipe against his palm again, harder this time with a meaty smack of metal on skin, and Atlas furrows his brow. "What, does he owe you money?"

Fontaine grins, showing off that perfect Steinman smile - if his poise was spoiled, the crack in it has been filled in now. "Not exactly. I know you've been using him, whoever he is, as a tool to get to Ryan, so what I'm asking you is: what are you gonna do with him once Ryan's dead?"

Atlas shrugs, flexes the tingling fingers of his left hand. "I thought I'd fix up a bathysphere and send him back where he came from." He does wish he could muster a better thanks for the man he's been dragging through hell, but a ticket topside is the best he can do. It's funny - he can energize a city to the point of civil war, but he can't get one man back above sea level.

Fontaine chuckles - not quite laughing in his face, but much the same feeling's behind it. "I'm afraid that won't be happening, boyo." That smirk is back on his face again as he pats the radio on the desk with his free hand. "This cohort of yours was my business partner first, and I intend to keep him that way. He's mine, bought and paid for, and I decide what happens to him after I'm done with him."

Apparently being dead does a number on the mind. Atlas keeps his mouth shut and his thumb near the hammer of his pistol. However sane he is or isn't, Fontaine's a fair sight more pleasant than a splicer screaming for blood.

Fontaine pats Atlas's cheek in the same gesture he used with the radio - Atlas jerks away from him. The con man's smirk only widens.

"I think we can come to a deal, you and me," he continues, "seeing as both of us want to get rid of Andrew Ryan. Here's what I'm thinking." He points back to the radio. "You keep talkin' to him. Once Ryan is dead, he's mine."

"What's in it for me?"

Fontaine shrugs. "I let you live. That sound good to you, dollface?"

"Fine." He doesn't understand what Fontaine is getting at, but he'll go along for the time being - sounds harmless enough. Inasmuch as any Fontaine scheme is harmless.

"That's just jake, mister boghopper. But I got one more question for you." Fontaine lifts the pipe, taps it against the side of Atlas's head.

"Then ask it, Fontaine."

"Are you gonna go easy, or are you gonna make it hard for me?" The Steinman smile is perfect and straight still, shining white without a hint of nicotine yellow. Strange, for a man who's been dead a year and a half to have such good teeth.

"What?" Atlas shakes his head. "No, of course not." You make things hard for Fontaine, and Fontaine sees to it that you end up in a salt pond.

Fontaine raises his eyebrows. "Can't say I didn't warn you."

He taps the end of the pipe against the side of Atlas's head one more time, and then there's a rush of air, a spray of bright light, and Atlas is down for the count.