JUNE 8, 1959 — 5:35 PM

When Jack and Tenenbaum emerged from her apartment onto the uppermost balcony, the sight that greeted them was Mercury Suites in flames.

One of the explosions Jack had heard earlier seemed to have gone off at the base of the square's central stairwell. Black smoke rose through the elevator shaft it wrapped around, while the metal gates and spokes of the elevator itself sat in a gnarled and twisted heap amid a mess of rubble and broken tile. Fire raged through an open door on one of the floors below. A group of men—splicers, perhaps, but Jack could only guess—forced their way into another, cutting through the metal door with a blowtorch and ramrod, and a chorus of screams rang out under a hail of gunfire. There were others, too many to count, innocents and armed men alike, inevitably meeting one another in the Suites' narrow routes and coming to invariable ends.

The sight of it all was dizzying, so dizzying that Jack very nearly forgot he needed to be making an escape. Thankfully, Tenenbaum was quick to remind him of that.

"Move!"

He snapped back to attention to see a pair of men making their way across the gangway that connected the balcony to the center stairwell. One of them shouted to the other, then raised his gun to aim at Jack. But before Jack was consciously aware of it, his own gun was raised in time to shoot the man down.

A moving target, he quickly learned, was a far different beast than the paper silhouettes he'd cut down earlier that day. Jack couldn't tell whether he'd made a direct hit, but whatever he'd done, it was enough to send the target reeling and screaming over the edge of the gangway. The other man shouted, though by now his words were more than incomprehensible in Jack's ears, and leveled his weapon in Jack's direction.

Two shots this time, and the man went down with a cry. Jack didn't see where his bullets had ended up. He didn't want to look.

"Hurry, Jack!" Tenenbaum's voice cut through the haze of his mind like a bolt from the blue, even though she'd been at his side the entire time. "Who knows how many more bombs they're sitting on?"

He didn't want to think about it. So he did as he was told, and hurried on instead.

Smoke continued to billow out through the grates of the elevator shaft, in addition to where the stairwell itself had caught fire, but there was no other way down. It stung his eyes and burned his throat, to say nothing of the heat of the fire itself, but there was no other choice. Jack shielded his face with one hand and kept a tight grip on his gun with the other, and through the flames he went.

"Jack, wait!"

He was just about to descend the second set of stairs, floorboards creaking and bending beneath his heavy steps, when he heard Tenenbaum shout again. The fire and the force of the explosion must have weakened the walkway's structure; by the time he turned back, it had already begun to give way, and Tenenbaum had already begun to fall away.

Only by lunging forward at the last possible moment did Jack manage to catch her, but he could only grab her by the arm before the floor fell out entirely. She clutched at him with both arms in an attempt to pull herself up, but it was no use. He hung with her at the edge of the stairs, trying desperately to keep her from slipping out of his grip.

"Scheisse—" To her credit, despite the gravity of the situation, Tenenbaum managed not to sound too panicked. "Jack, pull me up!"

It was a struggle just to hold onto her as she was, which was nearly enough to make Jack panic. "I can't," he stammered out, "I don't think I can—"

"Of course you can do it, Jack! We built you with the strength of ten oxen, now pull me up already!"

We built you—those words reminded Jack of just how much he stood to lose with her death. Were his state of mind any clearer, they would have reminded him also of what Tenenbaum had said about those many things that were being kept from him. But that wasn't the sort of thought he was capable of thinking at a time as harrowing as this.

He ground his teeth together and pulled. It was an even greater struggle than before, but somehow he managed to pull her up, enough so that she could elbow her way onto the ledge and drag herself the rest of the way. Once she was safely up, she slumped against him for but a moment, close enough for Jack to feel her panic betrayed in the quickness of her pulse and breath.

Then she tensed, drew her gun out of her satchel with alarming speed, and swung her arm past Jack's shoulder to fire off three shots behind him. When Jack turned to look, another pair of shabbily-dressed men lay slumped on the stairs.

Tenenbaum kept a hand on Jack's steady arm as she shakily got to her feet. "We must hurry."

Jack only nodded and stood as well, carefully stepping past their fallen assailants before taking off with greater speed than before. Tenenbaum followed close behind.

More screams echoed from somewhere above them as they finally reached the ground floor. It was all Jack could do to keep from looking back.

A hail of gunfire stopped them as they reached the tram station; Jack, tugging Tenenbaum down with him, barely managed to duck behind the platform in time. A group of Atlas's men had managed to overturn a tram car in the middle of the railway and were hiding inside it for cover, firing at them with tommy guns all the while.

Jack peeked out from over the platform just long enough to try taking them down, but with three shots he was spent and had nothing to show for it. He swore as he ducked back under cover, while more bullets flew overhead.

"Give me your gun," Tenenbaum said sharply, then took it from his shaking grip when he didn't hand it over fast enough. She retrieved more rounds from her satchel and began to reload it for him.

"I can't..." Blood was pounding in his ears; only a sharp pain in his shoulder and the cacophonous ratatat of the gunfire that surrounded them cut through the roar of his own heartbeat. He had to shake his head to clear it enough for him to speak. "I can't shoot them out. There's too many of them."

"Then think, Jack." Tenenbaum glared at him as she pressed the gun back into his hand. "This is what you were built to do. You can do this, I know you can."

Jack didn't know what she meant by that. He couldn't possibly fathom what she truly meant by that. But he knew that if either of them had any hope of making it out of this situation alive, he would have to believe in whatever she said.

He thought. He thought as hard as he possibly could. The roof of the tram car shielded the group of men from any gunfire, and the way they had turned it across the tracks left it impossible for anyone to cross—unless they tried to make a break for it across the median, or down the other lane, but the car's open windows and wide views would leave them just as vulnerable as if they were to try a frontal assault.

Across the tracks...

An idea occurred in Jack's mind—a foolish idea, an incredibly stupid idea, but it was the only possible solution that would come to him. Besides, he reasoned, he'd done a number of incredibly stupid things over the past few days, and he'd yet to die from any of them so far, so what was one more?

He fired a single shot at the tram car, enough to force them under cover again, then darted out from behind the platform and down the stairs to the tracks.

"Jack, what are you doing?!"

Tenenbaum's words were lost to him amid the haze of fear and adrenaline that propelled him forward. He shot at the car again when he spied a head peeking out from one of the windows, again and again and again, until he reached the raised track itself and was able to wrap his free hand around it.

Once again, it felt so easy, so natural: blue bolts of electricity sparked out from his fingertips and arced down the length of the metal track, up through the point of contact, and all throughout the tram car itself. Keeping the electricity going was no difficult task at first, though the longer he kept at it the more dizzying it felt, the lighter his head seemed to be...

"Jack!"

He realized with a start that screams were coming from within the tram car ahead. He hadn't been fully aware at the start of this quickly-cobbled plan whether or not it would actually work, but now it seemed as though it had.

"Come on!"

He released his grip on the track with a shaking hand, staggered to his feet, and followed Tenenbaum as she ran down the other lane.

By the time they reached the Bistro Square, it seemed as though Atlas's men had already beaten them there.

Perhaps they had already been there the entire time, or perhaps they had come here first before making their assault on Mercury Suites, but regardless, the scene Jack and Tenenbaum found was the remnants of what looked like some great battle: the Bistro in flames, parts of the square reduced entirely to rubble, and bloodied bodies lying in the street.

Atlas had told Jack there would be a war coming. He had warned him of this. But he could never have imagined it would be coming so soon.

The pounding in his head was starting up again. He quickly shook it in an attempt to make it stop. The Metro station wasn't far from here, he told himself. Just another short distance, and then...

Another explosion sounded from the direction of the station, and more echoing screams soon followed. Jack didn't know if he'd ever felt his hopes dashed so swiftly and so surely.

Now what? His own apartment was only a short distance away, as well—but if Atlas's forces had been so eager to pillage Mercury Suites, there was nothing stopping them from doing the same at Athena's Glory. There was no refuge to be found here; they had to escape. But the bathysphere station...

"There's a bathysphere station down in Apollo Square," he said shakily, looking down the path to the bulkhead. "We'll have to... It's the only way out—"

"What are you thinking, Jack?" snapped Tenenbaum. "Where do you think these men came from? Do you really think we can make it through there alive?"

"What else are we supposed to do?!" Jack couldn't keep the panic from his tone; he could hardly even think to try. "Either we're gunned down at the station here, and who knows if there's even anything left down there, or we try to sneak through Apollo Square, and the only other option we've got is to wait here for them to find us—"

"Nein," she said sharply, holding up a hand to stop him. "There is another way. We must go to the sewers."

Jack only nodded in reply. He had no idea what could be waiting for them in the sewers—a way to the emergency access tunnels, perhaps, but if that was the case, then wouldn't Atlas's forces already be there by now?—but once again, he had no choice but to trust in Tenenbaum.

The sewers were at the very end of the railway, in the opposite direction from whence they came. The tram cars sat empty and undisturbed at the station, and the only evidence that anything was amiss was the scent of smoke mingled with blood and gunpowder that wafted down the glass-paned tunnel. It seemed that Atlas's men hadn't ventured this far after all.

"Keep a lookout," hissed Tenenbaum once they reached the gate to the sewers. It could only be lifted through the turn of a crank, and though it took her some visible effort, she managed to get it going.

Jack kept watch just as she said, looking back down the tunnel and keeping a careful eye out for any approaching assailants. But none came. Only the echoes of shouts and flickering orange light came from the other end of the winding tunnel.

The rest of the city shimmered and swayed beyond the glass of the tunnel, lights all aglow, looking as though nothing had ever changed. Jack could only wonder whether the rest of the city was truly at peace, or if Atlas had already reached them as well.

Atlas. Jack had thought he'd been given a chance to find a solution to their struggles without any bloodshed. He'd thought he could manage it. But the span of a week was hardly any chance at all, was it? Something like this required no small amount of coordination—had this been Atlas's plan the entire time? Why had he even bothered to attempt making peace with the son of Andrew Ryan if he was going to carry out an assault like this anyway?

"Got it." The gate was up, at least far enough for Tenenbaum to duck under and through. "Come, Jack."

He followed after her without a word. The stench of the sewers was almost a welcome reprieve from the smoke-filled streets they'd just left behind.

"You close the gate," she said, pointing to the crank on their side of the wall. "I will go on ahead. Follow me once you are finished."

Jack watched after her just long enough to determine which direction she was headed—not that there were many directions for them to go down here—then set to turning the crank.

He remembered the money he had given Atlas just days before. He wondered how much of that had gone to funding their supplies.

He wondered how much of the innocents' blood was on his hands.

The gate made a loud clang as it finally shut, reverberating into the floor and up through his bones. Jack had to shake himself before he remembered what he was supposed to do next.

Tenenbaum was nowhere to be found, but at the end of the corridor where she had gone was a set of stairs leading down to a large door; it appeared to lead to some maintenance storeroom. The door opened at his approach, and Tenenbaum stood inside.

"Quickly," she called to him, reaching for him to usher him through the door. Jack didn't need to be told twice.

The interior was dimly lit, and it looked no less like a maintenance room on the inside than it did on the outside. At least that was what Jack thought until he ventured further inside and noticed the toys that littered the floor.

"What is this place?" His voice was quiet, and not without trepidation.

"This is my safehouse," she said simply, walking past Jack to peer down the stairs. "A sanctuary for the girls, away from your father's eyes..."

Despite that, however, there appeared to be no one present aside from the two of them.

"Crafty little ones." Tenenbaum shook her head. "Their instincts remain strong. They must have escaped through the vents once they heard what was going on."

Jack tensed once he considered the implications of what she'd just said. If those girls were the reason they'd come all this way...

"Where would they have gone?" he said tentatively, squeezing the grip of his gun. "If we have to go find them, how—how are we going to—"

"Leave that to me." Somehow the calm of Tenenbaum's voice cut through his rising alarm. "I know where to find them. But first we should tend to your wounds."

"Wounds?" Only then did it occur to Jack that some part of him was in pain. There was a sharp, burning sensation in his shoulder, one he'd felt earlier, but it hadn't been enough to stop him at the time; it didn't feel enough to stop him even now. "No—no, I'm fine."

Tenenbaum gave him one of the most unimpressed looks he had ever seen in his life. Then she crossed the room to where he stood, ripped apart the already-torn fabric at his shoulder, and pressed her thumb to the spot.

The pain that followed was immediate and intense, shooting down the entire length of Jack's arm and blooming across the span of his chest. It was enough to make the gun fall from his grip.

"You are resistant to pain," Tenenbaum said quietly, probing the spot with focused intent. "Perhaps too much for your own good. I have enough ADAM to fix what damage has been done, but first I will need to extract the bullet."

Even if it weren't for the intense pain emanating from his wound—a bullet wound, apparently, and Jack wondered just how resistant to pain he had to be to have missed something that grave—the mention of ADAM would have been enough to make his stomach turn.

"No," he said shakily, gripping one of Tenenbaum's wrists with his other arm. "No—no ADAM. Please."

"You will be fine," she said in reply, as calm as ever. "It does not affect you like it does the others. Come, there is no time to argue."

She carefully, gently took him by his uninjured arm and led him down the stairs. It was strange to Jack, the thought of Tenenbaum ever being gentle, but he went without protest, feeling no different than a child being led by the hand.

The floor below was home to an arrangement of cots beyond a knee-high gate, more toys strewn about, and a wide-windowed office through another set of doors. Chalk drawings decorated the stone floor, depicting in childlike proportions an assortment of sea life and the hulking figures of Big Daddies. It was into the office that Tenenbaum led him, then sat him down on the cot inside before she began to rummage through the desk opposite him.

Jack stared through the window. His head felt like it was in a fog.

"Verdammt." He couldn't see Tenenbaum's face, but he could hear the frown in her voice. "I have no anesthetic."

"It's fine." Jack's stomach turned again, but he knew he had no choice. "Just do it."

Tenenbaum didn't bother asking him if he was sure. She only gathered her tools, pulled up a chair, tugged aside the fabric of his shirt, and got to work.

Despite his supposed resistance to pain, the sight of his own blood was dizzying, and the sensation of her digging around inside his shoulder wasn't an easy one to bear. He wondered how much worse it would be if his resistance wasn't supposedly so high. He wondered why it was so high in the first place.

He wondered...

"Why..." Jack's voice was a croak, but Tenenbaum was more than close enough to hear him. "Why did you say those things?"

"What things?"

He couldn't tell if she honestly couldn't remember or if she was too focused on digging out the bullet from his flesh to think about it. Either way...

"About the pain, about the ADAM, about—about everything, that..." His head and shoulder throbbed in time with each other as he struggled to recall her exact words. "That I was built for this—what did you mean?"

Tenenbaum's hands paused, and her lips pressed together. "I suppose," she said slowly, carefully, "since you did keep me alive back there...I do owe you some answers, after all."

Jack wouldn't have thought to put it like that. But he was hardly in any position to protest.

Finally the bullet came free. Tenenbaum dropped it into a metal dish beside him on the cot, and kept her focus on his wound when she spoke again.

"When your creation was ordered of us, Suchong and I..." Her lips pursed again, only for a moment, but this time the expression was accompanied by a knit in her brow. "Our orders were not to create an heir for Andrew Ryan. It was to build a weapon."

Jack's heart pounded. He didn't understand.

"A weapon?"

She nodded as she gathered up her tools again, leaving Jack's side to deposit them in a nearby sink. "Yes... A weapon built from Andrew Ryan's flesh and blood."

He didn't understand. He didn't understand at all.

"But my father..."

His hands shook. He could feel the whole world crumbling away beneath his feet.

"How did he..."

Did he know this would happen? Did he somehow know that someone like Atlas would try to start a war in his city? But no, if that was true—if what Tenenbaum was telling him was really true, then that would mean...

It couldn't be true, could it?

How could that possibly align with what his father had told him?

"Everything he told me—everything about becoming my own man, and earning his name, and bearing his legacy..." He clutched at the edge of the cot with his free hand, feeling as though he might fall from it if he didn't hang on with all his might. "Were those all just lies? Was he just—was he just trying to keep me in line, or what? Was he lying to me when he said I could become a man of worth?"

"No, Jack."

Tenenbaum's voice was suddenly firm as she sat in front of Jack again, syringe in hand, and there was a ferocity in her eyes that he hadn't seen before. It was too great a ferocity for him to hold her gaze.

"Your father is cruel in some ways—many ways, perhaps—and at times, many times, I cannot understand the way he thinks or what he intends. But if he said this to you, I would not for even a second doubt that he truly meant it."

Jack had nothing to say to that. Words felt entirely beyond him at the moment.

Tenenbaum took the syringe in her hand, filled with murky green ADAM, and injected it into his shoulder. He flinched as he felt the raw ADAM flood his system, as his injured muscle and flesh twisted and regenerated and made itself whole.

"Jack."

She set the syringe aside and gently touched her hand to the underside of Jack's chin, lifting his head to meet her gaze again.

"If you do not believe in your father, then believe in me." Her hand rose to softly stroke his hair. "You were born to do great things, child—no matter what the circumstances of your birth may have been. If you can believe in nothing else, believe in this."

He wanted to believe it. He wanted to believe it more than anything else in the world entire. But he didn't know if he could.

He sank forward into Tenenbaum's arms, willed himself to believe it, willed himself not to be broken by it, and held onto her tightly enough to keep the rest of the world from falling away.