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Jack wakes to the hateful glare of surgical lights and a headache crushing his skull, and he knows he has to be fast. He props himself up on an elbow, swings his legs off the side of the bed, sits up straight. Pain narrows the world to a pinpoint, but it’s worth it. He’s ready for examination. Papa Suchong won’t use the Words to make Jack sit up, because Jack beat him to it.
His vision comes back, and he blinks, and blinks again. He knows he’s in the lab, because leaving the lab is against Mister Fontaine’s rules, but his eyes tell him something different. The lab has one bed, but the walls of this place are lined with bunk beds; the lab has linoleum floors, but the floors of this place are cobblestone; the only people allowed in the lab are Mister Fontaine and Mama Tenenbaum and Papa Suchong, but five feet away from Jack, a group of small people sit in a circle, drawing in chalk on the floor.
One of the small people — children, realizes Jack, who has never met one before — catches him watching her. She jumps to her feet with a gasp, and before Jack can ask why she looks so impossibly familiar, she dashes off. “Mama Tenenbaum!” she yells. “Mama Tenenbaum, he’s awake!”
Tenenbaum is her mama, too. In books, people who share a mama are called brothers and sisters. Is she his sister?
No, she can’t be. Jack is an only child. His parents struggled so long to have a baby, lost pregnancy after pregnancy, until the doctors told his mom to give up hope. But Cathy-Marie Wynand was more stubborn than every mule in Kansas put together, and somehow, by some act of grace, she’d had Jack. You’re special, she always says, whenever she tells the story. You were born to do great things.
Jack frowns at these thoughts, confused, because he doesn’t know what a Kansas is.
Kansas is home. Kansas is the chickens clucking in their coop, and the hogs wallowing in their pen, and the wheat fields shimmering like a sea of gold in the breeze.
But if Kansas is home, why is he here, and not there?
A gift, a plane, a crash. Memories rush in like water through a broken airlock. The weight of a golf club and the crunch-squelch of hitting gray matter. Langford’s fingers squeaking against glass. The blinding heat of a burning submarine, and Atlas swearing vengeance for his family, except there ain’t no Atlas, kid, the name’s Frank Fontaine—
There was a Jack who lived in a lab, and there was a Jack who lived on a farm, and the third Jack who is both of them pulls his knees to his chest and shakes. Atlas was a lie, just like the Wynands were a lie. His mom never sat by his childhood bedside, holding a damp cloth to his forehead while whooping cough wracked his chest. His dad never gave him a BB gun for his seventh birthday. He’ll never have a seventh birthday. He’s a thing, not a person; lab-grown, not born.
His wallet sits heavy in his pocket. He takes it out, half-expecting the photo to be gone, to never have existed— but it’s there, solid and real. Him and Mom and Dad, smiling shoulder-to-shoulder.
They took the photo the same day Mom and Dad left Kansas. Jack remembers the cab driver holding the Polaroid while the empty cab idled on the long dirt road to the farmhouse; remembers smiling close-mouthed, his hands on his parents’ shoulders. Mom was tense, but Jack chalked it up to nerves: It’d make anybody nervous, wouldn’t it, leaving Kansas for the first time?
Afterwards, his parents shuffled into the cab without hugging him goodbye.
He thought it was just a good upbringing that made him so politely obedient. Thought it was just a coincidence that the camera flash felt everyday-familiar, even though he’d only had his picture taken a handful of times in his life. Thought his parents’ coldness was just nerves. The truth, more bitter than coffee grounds, is this: Everyone in that picture was working for Fontaine, and Jack was the only one who didn’t know it.
Hate pounds a drumbeat against his ribs. It sounds like liar.
The radio on Jack’s hip crackles to life. “Welcome back, child,” says Mama Tenenbaum’s voice, and lab instinct straightens his back. If Mama Tenenbaum catches him slouching, damaging the spine his genes so carefully laid out the plans for, she’ll use the Words. She always does. “You are angry at Fontaine, yes? Now you know the truth. You are his tool, brought back to Rapture to save him.”
Thanks for everything, kid, Fontaine said, before he set the security bots loose. Jack remembers a bullet grazing him; remembers voices calling for him to follow; remembers being led to a vent, to safety, and then— “You sent the Little Sisters,” says Jack. A cold weight sinks to the bottom of his stomach. “You stopped him from killing me.”
“You have saved many of my little ones. I owe you a debt.”
“No,” says Jack, louder, because she doesn’t understand. “You stopped him from killing me. You got in his way. He’s gonna punish you. Us. On the plane, there were all those people, and he made me— What if he makes me kill the—”
“Stand, would you kindly.”
The Words ring in the air. He knows what comes next: hooks will bite into his muscles, and a thing that is not himself will lean forward, push his feet against the floor, straighten his legs.
His legs don’t move.
“You see? While you sleep, I undo some of Fontaine’s mental conditioning.”
“How much?”
“All the triggers I know of. Suchong did much of his work in secret. I expect Fontaine still knows unpleasant strings to pull, but his control over you is no longer complete. If you—”
Tenenbaum keeps talking, but Jack stops listening after complete. “Would you kindly,” he whispers to himself. “Would you kindly, would you kindly, would you kindly.” The conditioning always kept him from saying the Words himself, but the Words are just words now. No capitals. Nothing special about them. He breaks into hysterical giggles that might be sobs, except they can’t be, because Papa Suchong made him stop crying so many times that his body forgot how to.
“Are you listening to me?” asks Tenenbaum.
“Sorry, Mama Tenenbaum.” He hears the title come out of his mouth, and he frowns. “Dr. Tenenbaum,” he tries again, because Tenenbaum isn’t his mom. His mom is Cathy-Marie Wynand, a kind woman on a well-deserved vacation to Europe, who’s waiting for her son’s plane to arrive.
He tries a third time, and gets it right: His mom is a corpse rotting on a bed in Eve’s Garden.
“As I was telling you,” continues Tenenbaum, “if you wish to find answers, Suchong’s flat in Mercury Suites is where you should begin.”
It’s gift-wrapped like advice, like a favor, like the pretty presents the Sisters leave for him— but Jack was raised on orders, and he knows one when he hears it. Andrew Ryan is dead, and the only difference it makes is the voice on the radio.
He takes his pistol from the bedside table, where Tenenbaum must have left it for him. A memory unearths itself: Five shell casings on the linoleum, two holes through the center of the left target. Gunfire ringing in his uncovered ears. Mama Tenenbaum looming behind him, a foot taller than Jack, muttering disapproval and jotting down notes. The smell of gunpowder and Mister Fontaine’s cigar smoke. Would you kindly try again, said Mama Tenenbaum, and Jack’s body obeyed: five more casings, three new holes in the target. In the space between commands, Jack swung his aim to the left. Would you kindly stop, ordered Fontaine, just as Jack’s aim landed on him.
(Only baby teeth, said Tenenbaum in the aftermath. They would have come out anyway.)
This time, Fontaine won’t have the Words to save him.
Upstairs, just inside the door to the safehouse, one of the girls Jack saved asks him to play hopscotch. She smiles at him with trusting eyes, and a warmth like Kansas sunlight unfurls in his chest. The same feeling he gets every time he saves a Little Sister. He remembers Atlas-Fontaine asking if he was willing to trade Patrick’s life for the life of a monster; remembers staring into the flames of the submarine wreckage, hating himself for making the wrong choice. The right answer was no, but somehow, Jack couldn’t kill the helpless thing writhing in his arms. Atlas-Fontaine could’ve forced him to, but he didn’t. And Tenenbaum could’ve forced him not to, but—
Before Jack’s first choice, she gave him a plasmid. He searches his memories (his real memories, because nothing Fontaine gave him can be trusted) for any feeling like the one in his chest. The closest match he finds is the way he felt about Spot, before Suchong made him snap her neck. It’s a good feeling. He doesn’t trust good feelings.
“Come on, Big Brother Jack,” says the Little Sister, pulling him from his thoughts, tugging on his arm with all the strength of an underfed eight-year-old. “Play with me!”
Tenenbaum’s leash is loose around his throat. It gives him enough leeway to swat the girl’s hand away, and he snaps, “Get away from me.”
Her lower lip wobbles like she’s about to cry. The sight guts him like a splicer’s knife. Before Jack can think, he’s kneeling down to the girl’s level. “I’m sorry,” he says.
The girl sniffles. “Are you really sorry?”
“I’m really sorry.”
“Are you sorry this much?” she asks, holding her hands two feet apart.
“I’m sorry that much.”
She widens the distance between her hands by half a foot. “And this much?”
“This much,” Jack says, holding his hands as far apart as he can.
The Little Sister considers this, wide-eyed and serious. “Okay,” she says, nodding importantly. “I forgive you.”
The pain in Jack’s stomach dissipates like fog, and that confirms it. Physical pain was part of the Words, too: a headache like something was trying to burrow out of his skull whenever he took too long to complete a command. Tenenbaum’s talk about owing him for saving the Little Sisters is a lie, just like Atlas and the Wynands. If she meant it, she would’ve told him the truth before Hephaestus. Instead, she waited for Fontaine to throw him away, then plucked him from the trash heap.
She doesn’t owe him anything, because none of it was his choice.
He could walk out, couldn’t he? Smash his radio, hunt down Fontaine by himself. No lies, no orders; just him, his choices, and his wrench smashing Fontaine’s skull to pulp. But Tenenbaum knows more about Fontaine than anyone alive in Rapture. Jack wouldn’t even know where to start. He chooses this, he tells himself. He chooses to be used by Tenenbaum. He chooses to become her tool, not because she’s fooling him, but because they want the same thing.
Fontaine needs killing, but Jack spends a handful of minutes skipping across chalk squares, getting scolded for each mistake. He can’t find it in himself to call the time a waste. He wonders if whatever he finds in Suchong’s apartment will cure this new conditioning, and then he wonders if he wants it to.
That last thought isn’t his, though. No matter what lies his brain tries to sell him, these feelings are a weed Tenenbaum planted in the garden of his mind, and they do not belong to him.