Ace in the Hole

...

Jack took the apparition for a reaction on part of his instability at first. But she remained present, rifling through some drawers, muttering to herself. She stopped suddenly, and Jack whirled around, gun raised, heart pounding, before he remembered that she was not real. She shook her head, muttering something about Splicers before she stood up and walked over to a corner of the room.

He followed her until she slipped past a crack in the wall. He applied a careful dose of Incinerate! to weaken the pipes before he broke through with his wrench and followed.

A few, nonfunctioning Gatherer's Garden machines stood, propped up against the walls. He considered searching them briefly, but his attention was diverted when he saw the woman's ghost again. She walked calmly towards the window, where the ghosts of Atlas and his associates stood, waiting. A small girl struggled in one of their arms, eyes white and wide with terror. A Little Sister?

The sound of explosions caused him to look up through the window. Nothing. Perhaps following this woman was not the best course of action.

But then the first man spoke.

"Hey there, sister." Jack recognized the voice at once, with a swoop in his stomach. Atlas. But Atlas wasn't a real person—Fontaine had stressed that fact all too clearly. "D'ya have it?"

"I have it."

"Give it over then. I'm keen to get this brat off me hands."

The woman withdrew a slip of paper from her shirt.

"You know what? Andrew Ryan said I was a rube. But he was wrong. I'm not the rube, Atlas. You are."

A flicker of anger passed through Atlas's face as he took the paper from her.

"Now, we both know what happens next." She looked to the men flanking him. "Just get it over with."

Atlas took a wrench from one of his cronies' hands. "Well, love...if you insist."

And he brought it down hard on her skull with a loud crack. The woman slumped to the floor, bleeding freely onto the grimy tile. The girl watched in horror. Atlas read through the paper, meanwhile. His eyes widened in rage.

"What is this? It's just a bunch of gibberish!" He looked down to where the woman's ghost lay, motionless.

"What does this say, you little whore?" he roared. She was drifting in and out of consciousness. "Hey—hey!" Atlas grabbed her by the back of her head, wrenched her face up. She looked at him, unrecognizable through the blood coating her face.

"What does this say?" She struggled to speak through the combination of blood and saliva pooling in her mouth. A few of her teeth were missing. "It says…Would You Kindly."

Jack's lungs grew cold, constricting.

The trigger.

Atlas let her go, smiled triumphantly to his fellows. "We got the activation phrase. Now we all to do is get that genetic freak of nature aboard an airplane, and Rapture's ours!" They left quickly, jubilantly. Jack watched as the woman bled out upon the floor, unconscious. Then he noticed the Little Sister stumble towards her, singing softly. He could not understand the words, but he understood her intent.

She was trying to comfort her in her final moments.

The girl leant down and pulled the woman up, propping her against the window. She took her hand, passed something between their fingers. The woman smiled weakly. A trickle of blood oozed down the corner of her mouth. The opaque quality of her ghostly figure masked the extent of the damage dealt to her, but he could not ignore the patch of dark running down her face, staining the window. She raised a hand and gently touched the child's face. Then her eyes went blank, and her head drooped forwards.

The Little Sister bowed her head.

Jack stood there, trembling with shock as the ghosts disappeared. This woman, whoever she was, had risked her life in order to give Atlas—no, Fontaine—the code, and by delivering it to him it, she had inadvertently sealed his own fate.

In this sense, this stranger and he were very much alike.

Son, you were special. You were born to do great things.

But who had she been? He had not seen her face on any poster, not heard of her from any advertisements or announcements.

Another surge of pain hit him. "Code Yellow" was taking its toll.

If he survived his current ordeal, he would ask Tenenbaum about her.