"Can I get you to look directly into the camera here —" He gestured. "State your full name, your age, your affiliation with the suspect."
She raised her eyes steadily to the red blinking light. She took a centering breath.
"My name is Sherry Anne Birkin. I'm twenty years old."
The shadow-man behind the camera waited. There was a wall of glass separating them.
"I lived with Albert Wesker. He raised me," she said.
When she was twelve, they boarded a plane and fled the United States. As she understood it then, her parents, God rest their souls, had done some bad things; they had paid for it with their lives. Albert Wesker had done some bad things as well, but he was spared their fate due to a fortunate twist in genetics. It seemed terribly unfair at the time.
It would be a year before Sherry Birkin could really remember her last night in Raccoon City and the final moments with what was left of William Birkin. Night terrors, tremors, and uncontrollable panic set in shortly after she first recalled The Great Eye in her father's bulging shoulder.
In the bustling airport, Wesker stooped, dropping his carry-on bag to the ground and looking her in the eyes. He was wearing contacts and she could see the rings of his orange irises, glowing like embers. He had warned her that his vision was poor without the contacts and non-existent with them in. His pupils were no longer round, but elliptical… like a snake's, contracting and expanding in the light. He promised that he would get better, that he would be more than human in the end, but he was still adjusting to his metamorphosis, after all, and he was in excruciating pain as his body went to war with itself, rearranging its very DNA to fit the virus made just for him. At least that was what he said. That was what he told himself.
She should have been afraid of the man she'd only met a handful of times in her life, perhaps even run into the crowd, never to be seen again… but she only felt very sorry for him.
"I need you to lead me… through there." He pointed, wincing in his invisible agony. "Through security. Alright? Yes?" Breathless.
She nodded, all the while thinking he might never get better, and she'd be left in the care of yet another dead adult.
"I will tell them I have a migraine so that they don't look closely at my eyes… And you must call me father. Papa. We have to play pretend, hmm?" He straightened and slung the bag over his shoulder again, his jaw clenching. "Pretend."
He fumbled with his wallet, almost trembling. It dropped to the floor.
She knelt and picked it up, before taking his hand.
He stiffened at their first touch.
She looked up at him. "Pretend," she said. Pretend to get better.
And he nodded.
"Do you know where Albert Wesker is now?" the man asked, flipping through a file. There was urgency in his voice, but he tried very hard to appear unbothered by busying his hands. She knew that it was an interrogation tactic.
You're definitely not in trouble… look how bored I am with all this. See? Terribly bored and not at all interested in any of the words coming out of your mouth and being recorded and analyzed by the federal government.
The problem was that she really didn't know anything.
"Miss Birkin? Do you know his whereabouts?" He looked up then.
She shook her head.
The man sighed behind the glass.
"I think," she said, her voice frail. "I think he's dead. He told me… if he didn't come back that he… he must be dead."
The man shook his head this time and continued to page through the manila folder. "He was seen in Berlin just last week."
Sherry looked down. Her heart was broken.
She was essentially mute until she was thirteen, and even after that, she spoke in unnatural starts and stops, the fluency of communication all but gone out of her. It was hard to hear her own voice. That was fine for him - she knew he also secretly hated his own sound. Most times, they were silent together, and spoke with nothing but gestures and eye contact.
It was also at thirteen, she realized she despised her name. Sherry wasn't short for anything - like Sheryl (as in Sheryl Crow), and it wasn't long for anything - like Cher (which would have been infinitely more impressive). He'd told her that her parents were drinking a saccharine-sweet Sherry the night she was conceived, lest she would never have come to be. She listened to his story, as she always listened to him, that is to say intently and seriously, and she knew that it was meant to seem romantic, wistful even. All she got out of the tale though was how two sad and irresponsible people accidentally had a daughter they never wanted.
It was in that year, he began to call her Cricket.
"Gentle… careful," he whispered to her. "Don't hurt him."
They stared into her cupped hands. A ray of light slipped between her thin fingers and illuminated the lowly little insect. She smiled at the twitching antennae that tickled her palms. She could feel Wesker's breath on the nape of her neck, and he was smiling too.
"A cricket that sings in the house is very good luck." He led her to the balcony, where he kept his forest of potted herbs and vegetables in their apartment in Lisbon. "This one - here." He motioned.
She slowly opened her hands over the dark rich soil of a flowering squash plant. The cricket hesitated for a moment before springing into the foliage.
He watched her from the sliding door wall and the dusky twilight sky that hung over the city washed everything in pink and violet light. "It's the male that chirps," he said. "But his song attracts deadly parasites. The females are silent… and have exponentially longer lives for it."
Most girls would have desired to be called butterfly, or firefly, or little bird.
Sherry though was happy with quiet and long-lived Cricket.
"Did Albert Wesker share his work with you, at any point, between 2001 and 2005?"
"No," she said.
"Did he mention Tricell Pharmaceuticals?"
"No."
"Did you ever hear him speak to a woman named Excella Gionne? On the phone perhaps, or even in person?"
She shook her head. "No."
The interrogating agent leaned back in his chair, his hands folded over his round belly. "You lived with him, in his home, all of the time, from 1998 to this year, correct?"
Sherry looked at him and blinked. "Yes," she said quietly.
"And he never… not even once… talked about what he did?" He glared at her, skeptically. "Took any phone calls around you? Gave you any indication at all that he might be doing something… unsavory?"
Her eyes threatened to tear up. "He said he was protecting me."
She was fourteen when she'd first thought of his body and wondered how it might feel on hers. She was surprised it hadn't occurred to her sooner. She thought obsessively of him. She dreamed of touching him. She pressed her lips to her pillow and imagined.
She would kiss his mouth, in her mind, and feel his tongue touch hers. And the fantasy would end there, a hazy fade-out, because sex was far too abstract a concept for her then.
That was the year she first bled.
She'd peered down into the toilet bowl, red with the first drops of menses. It was not as if she didn't know - in theory, she knew what her body was doing. He'd explained it so plainly to her, so scientifically:
"Your uterus will slough off tissue every month, or thereabouts. It will be something like blood, but it is made up of much more than that. You may experience pain in your lower belly, in your lower back - these are contractions, similar to the contractions you will have during childbirth."
She must have looked concerned.
"The female reproductive system is complex. I… I fear I'm not doing it justice this way. Perhaps I should buy you a book about it, hmm?"
She knew he did not know what else to say. She was sad for herself, being born a girl, but more so for him, being born a human.
Life was tragic.
He was gone the day she'd gotten her first period. She hadn't known what to do, other than put a washcloth in her underwear. She curled up on the beautiful toile couch in the parlor, and watched the squares of yellow sunlight arc from one end of the room to the other, feeling the blood that wasn't exactly blood drip out of her slowly.
He came home well after dark.
"Are you hurt? Have you injured yourself?" he asked in greeting, unhurried as he pulled off his long coat and hung it in the entryway. She was embarrassed that he could smell her. His sense of smell was preternatural after the metamorphosis - he'd told her so.
She shook her head.
"You're a woman now, then." He came to her across the shining marble floors, unbuttoning his cufflinks. He stared down at her and brushed a lock of her white-blonde hair out of her face. "Are you in pain?"
She held up her thumb and forefinger, pinched nearly together - a little.
"Have you taken anything for it?"
Another shake of her head.
"Oh Cricket…," he sighed. "We've got to take better care of ourselves, don't we?"
He used the word we whenever he was chastising her. We've got to eat healthier than that. We've got work on taking responsibility for our actions. We've got to improve if we want to be anything at all in life. She imagined it made him feel better, the we in his directives.
He disappeared into the bathroom. She heard the medicine cabinet open and close. The faucet ran. "What are you using?"
She pushed herself up and stared at the soft light flooding the hallway. She saw his shadow move, heard the rattle of pills in a plastic bottle. "What do you mean?" she asked weakly.
"For the blood. What are you using?" He emerged, a cup of water in one hand, a few Advil in the other. He offered it to her.
She took one capsule at a time, as she found it difficult to swallow pills, even after all the years of immunosuppressant therapy. He waited patiently for her to finish the water. She felt like a child, always like a child. "A washcloth," she finally replied, wiping her mouth.
He walked to the kitchen and set the cup in the deep sink. "I'm sorry," he said, after a long moment, his back to her. "I'll ring up concierge. They'll bring something for you… right now."
He made her his sister's favorite chicken and rice for dinner that night, instead of ordering out. He added an entire head of fresh garlic. They loved garlic, together.
He only made chicken and rice when he felt guilty.
After three hours of questioning, they shut down their camera and let her rest. She laid her head on the tabletop next to the styrofoam cup of stale coffee… and she cried. She didn't sob, her shoulders didn't shake. Instead, silent, exhausted tears dripped steadily down her cheeks. The stainless steel was so cool on her face… she just wanted to sleep.
There was a knock on the glass. She turned her head without lifting it.
Chris Redfield stood on the other side. He stared at her with apologetic eyes, his hand on the partition that separated them. She sat up, sniffing back her tears and the mucus that dripped down her throat, not bothering to wipe her wet face.
"Hey kid," he said, his voice muffled. "You're doin' good. Hang in there. Not much longer, okay?"
She nodded and balled up the kleenex in her hands.
Wesker sent for a stylist, every season, without fail. Spring, summer, fall, and winter. A woman or a man, sometimes a small team, would sweep into wherever they were - in Vienna, or Paris, or Hamburg, or Madrid - with a rack or an armful of the most beautiful clothing in the world at that very finite moment. They would fuss and groom and display her like a little doll, in front of one mirror, two mirrors, three mirrors, all under his approving gaze. Pastels and metallics and muteds and mattes - every color and shade and hue.
But not black. Never black.
After an hour of climbing in and out of fancy, irritating garments, she came before him in a lovely modest dress, by a designer who's name she'd forgotten immediately, but whom she was told was going to be a star. It was sunny and yellow, tea-length and full.
He sat, legs crossed, on a leather ottoman, his hands folded over his knee. His lacquered wingtip drew a lazy circle in the air. He was thoughtful as he studied her on the pedestal.
A music box princess.
"Do you like it?" he asked, his first question of the night.
She shrugged, not bothering to glance at her own reflection in the tri-fold mirrors the dresser had set up.
The stylist smiled nervously. She stood off to the side, her elegant hands wringing. "She's quite… discerning, your daughter. I um… I've brought more - perhaps she'd prefer something less formal, and I have —"
"We'll take it all," he said, dismissive.
The woman stammered, something about didn't he want to see the rest, didn't she want to try it on, but he was already writing out a large cheque in his fine, narrow script.
"It's not as if she'll wear anything but that ratty t-shirt anyway," he lamented, glancing disdainfully in her direction as he handed over the payment.
Sherry saw that he was smirking underneath though, and so she smirked too.
A nurse in a HAZMAT suit came into the interrogation room.
"Hey sweetheart," she said in a Southern drawl. "We just need a few vials. We're gonna run ya for any pathogens and then we can stop wearin' these dumb tents."
Sherry stared at her forlornly, rolled her sweatshirt sleeve up, and offered her arm.
"Thank you, honey… won't take but a minute." She tied Sherry's bicep off with an occlusion band. "Make a fist for me, darlin'." Sherry looked away when the nurse swabbed her vein with an alcohol pad. "Gonna pinch a bit going in, okay?"
Sherry sighed. She heard her blood, rushing out in a steady, narrow stream, hitting the sides of the glass vial.
The nurse reached over and popped the cap off another container. "My goodness if you aren't an easy bleeder…" she said. "You feelin' light-headed? You doin' good?"
"I'm fine," Sherry said.
After replacing the vial six times, she loosened the band around Sherry's arm and told her to relax her hand.
"Gonna sting when I pull the needle out, baby," the nurse warned her in a kind voice.
Sherry couldn't feel anything anymore.
"Alright… okay. Just hold this here, sweetie —" She pressed a rolled up gauze pad to the inside of Sherry's elbow. "You might leak a little… I gotcha pretty good. Might bruise too, just be careful with that arm."
"It's fine," Sherry said. She pulled the gauze off.
The nurse started, telling her to wait… but then she watched Sherry's pale arm.
The angry red prick where the needle had been healed over before their eyes.
The nurse could only stare at her.
One morning, in early July, just before she turned fifteen, a pretty woman she didn't know walked across the hall from the master bedroom to the bathroom. She was wearing a robe - his robe - wrapping it tightly around herself. And then the door closed.
Sherry had frozen where she stood, a mug of coffee in her hands. She'd almost dropped it.
He had been discrete enough, she supposed. But her newly-opened heart didn't care about his discretion, and she went back to her room, weeping.
She could recall the look on his face perfectly. He was so stoic and removed from everything around him, but as he sat there on the edge of her bed, he looked at her with a tenderness that she never dared to hope for.
"What's the matter? Why are you crying?" he asked. He reached for the blanket, pulled over her head protectively. She shied away from him. "Tell me," he said softly. His pupils expanded until his golden irises were nearly eclipsed. "Tell me and I'll destroy it."
She stared at him over her shoulder, her eyes bleary and red in her throbbing face.
And when she could not tell him, he took her hand, though she resisted. He put her palm to his chest, just over his heart, and he frowned beautifully.
They remained like that, a statue of themselves.
There were things she wanted desperately to say, even then, at fifteen. Inappropriate things, wild things, animal things. But she did not find the words until much later on. Still, the emotion of those unutterable things echoed in her head without any way to escape for years and years:
We belong. You are mine, and I am yours. Eternal.
"While we wait on that blood work… I'm going to ask you a few more questions, alright?"
As if she had a choice. As if she could refuse. Sherry stared at the agent, on the other side of the glass… again.
"Did Albert Wesker perform any experiments on you… that you know of?"
"No."
"You're sure?"
"Yes."
"Did he talk about a doomsday virus?"
"No. No. He didn't talk about any viruses. At all. Ever." She dared to raised her voice.
The man watched her dispassionately, like he was watching a film in a language he didn't know. He waited a moment, and then: "You're sure?"
Sherry hid her face in her hands. "Yes."
During an unseasonably warm September in her sixteenth year, they stayed with a friend of Wesker's in Lourmarin - a little village cradled by the Luberon mountain range in the south of France. It was an achingly romantic place. Ancient cemeteries, cobblestone streets, lazy cafes, and the beautiful hard French sun. Everything was dry and cracked, in a lovely way, and all of the fences were covered in centuries-old grape vines and the houses were green with waxy-looking ivy. The trip made her feel nostalgic for things she'd never experienced.
One of them, perhaps, first love.
For a week and a day, she hadn't done anything but eat cured meats and unpasteurized cheeses, and sit around the clear pool in the courtyard, listening to the song birds call. Wesker had spent his time on intense and loud conference calls with his associate, breaking just once a day to join Sherry for dinner. When he was with her, and her alone, he would slump into the stately wingback chair and quickly fall into a fitful sleep. She was the only one who was allowed to know how exhausted he was.
One slow afternoon, she pulled a chaise lounge to the water's edge and laid on her stomach in the hot sun, the straps of her bikini top undone, the tight bottoms tugged up so that most of her buttocks was exposed to tan. The breeze rustled the yew and juniper trees around the property. She pressed her cheek to the warm canvas of the lounge and closed her eyes.
Somewhere, she heard a door open and shut quietly. There was a rustle, something soft being dropped to a chair nearby. She cracked an eye and saw pale bare feet crossing the mosaic edge of the pool. The long muscles in his hairless calves flexed with each measured, silent step. He moved like a cat even in his leisure time.
She folded her hands under her cheek and watched him climb the stairs to the low diving board.
He was wearing a black Speedo, and the sight of it would have shocked her had she not grown accustomed to his showmanship. Her eyes travelled up his thighs - hairless and lean-muscled like his calves - to the tightly curtailed bulge between them. She wondered, briefly, how he walked with that, every day, constantly. She suppressed a smile.
His hips, like the rest of his frame, were narrow, almost delicate, and the deep v-cut of his lower belly drew the curious eye up to a washboard of defined abdominals. His chest was as smooth and bare as the rest of him, and his collar bone was shaped so finely that it looked like the curve of a violin. He was all at once hyper-masculine and androgynous; like a chameleon, he knew how to appeal to everyone's personal taste.
With perfect form, he launched off the diving board, his lithe body slipping like a knife into the water, barely disturbing the surface of the crystalline pool. She very nearly sighed.
He emerged at the other end of the pool, his hair, almost white, plastered to his head and face. He pushed it back from his eyes and then began swimming relaxed laps, kicking off the blue-tiled walls, languid and calm. She counted forty of them before she stopped, closed her eyes again, and just listened to him glide through his exercises. Hissing cicadas shook off their skins in the trees and the groundskeeper's dog barked twice. Everything was warm, everything was perfect. She dozed, her senses dulled pleasurably.
After nearly half of an hour, he climbed up onto the sun deck and reclined in the shallow water on his elbows, flicking the surface lazily with his fingertips, watching the ripples sent across the pool. He let his head fall back and the sun painted his throat and his shoulders and his chest gold with it's afternoon light.
She took careful sneaking glances at him, and then hid her desirous gaze in the crook of her arms. He was so still that he looked as if he was carved from stone. She hoped that he was observing her as well, but then she chastised herself for the naive thought.
He would never. Dumb girl. Stupid girl. Little girl.
Some time passed in the midday heat and she came close to falling asleep. It wasn't until she felt his hands on her that she realized he was close.
His fingers were wet, and his hair dripped cool water on her naked back. A fat drop rolled down the space between her shoulders, settling in the the arch of her lower back. She felt time freeze; all the blood in her body seemed to stop in her paralyzed veins. She stared, her eyes suddenly open and unblinking, over the head rest of the chair and she held her breath until it hurt.
So softly it felt like a whisper against her ribs, he lifted the untied straps of her bikini. She felt him cross and tighten the strings, the loose knot pressed into her spine with a single finger. She took a deep breath as he casually tied a bow. She licked her lips, her throat on fire.
His slow, thoughtful fingers trailed down her back, not quite touching her over-heated skin; her stomach muscles jerked and jumped at the sensation. She was electric.
He found the hem of her bikini bottoms and gently worked his fingertips underneath, hooking them and pulling the material out.
Her vision tunneled. For a moment in time… she imagined he might urge her with his touch to lift her anxious, desperate hips and slide the bottoms off, down her long legs. And she would let him… she would let him have whatever he wanted.
He tugged on the spandex so that it lay as intended on the small curve of her buttocks.
And then his hands were gone, and the little wet fingerprints he'd placed on her were drying - so fast, too fast - in the French sun.
"Don't be in such a hurry, Cricket," he said quietly.
He picked up his towel and padded into the house, wrapping it around his waist.
Seventeen was the year when she came to test him in earnest.
She decided to be an artist early on in life, or rather the decision was made for her by her talent. From the time she could hold a pencil, it was a compulsion - get the images out of her head and onto a page. She drew and drew and drew. A constant cycle of new beginnings and creation.
After the events of Raccoon City, the urge only grew stronger. It was as if she balanced the loss of language with her artistic abilities. She drew everywhere, filling notebooks and blank spaces on textbook pages and the margins of his lab print-outs, the ones with perforated edges from outdated-looking computers. She left her mark on everything. Her parents had largely ignored her skills; they smiled politely when she brought home another art project, were alarmed when she achieved A's in art class, but very nearly failed Science. They couldn't comprehend a child of their own… with no interest in mathematics, no innate sense of biology.
But Albert Wesker watched her for the better part of a year, and he understood.
She began taking formal art lessons at thirteen. Several times a week, in whatever place they were staying, he found her a teacher. There was Mr. Zhou in Hong Kong, who specialized in three-quarter portraiture; there was Mrs. Canterbury in London, who taught her how to apply acrylic paint to canvas with a knife, in the way of the old masters; there was Mr. Ray in Jamaica who taught her how to use watercolor to capture the ocean and the sky, when they took vacations there every year.
By the time she was seventeen, she was accomplished in almost every type of traditional art, and some digital. She could paint very well with any medium, draw beautifully with pastel, pencil, or ink, throw truly impressive pottery, and somewhat capably sculpt out of clay or whittle wood. Her hands were almost always dirty, and she left her tapered fingerprints on anything she touched, it seemed. There were art supplies littering every apartment, every villa, every lavish hotel room - open tubes of bright colored paint, ripped up pages of failures, Prisma colored pencils, some sharpened, others broken.
Wesker diligently cleaned up after her late every night and he never said a cross word about it.
That spring, Mr. Holbein, her old sketching teacher in Germany, brought a young man with him to her Thursday morning lesson. She and Wesker greeted the pair at the door. Her face flushed marvelously pink when she saw the boy - just a bit older than her. He smiled, rakish, and kept running his hands through his dark curly hair. His cheeks were red with flirtatious embarrassment, like her own.
Wesker looked flustered - it was the first time she had ever seen him visibly shaken by anything, ever. "Who's this?" he blurted out. Sherry immediately lowered her eyes, hoping he hadn't noticed her acknowledging the boy. She feared it was too late for that though.
"This is my assistant, Niklas," Mr. Holbein explained, leaning on his lion's head cane. "He's going to be Miss Birkin's subject today. Anatomy." The old man smiled warmly.
Wesker did not return his smile. "I would… I would prefer that you not bring anyone to the apartment whom I haven't personally vetted, Mr. Holbein." She knew he was watching his tone, his word choice in front of her.
"Just this once then, yes?" the old man asked, unfazed, turning to the boy. "We'll make it count."
Sherry followed the two of them to the sun room, where the early light was best, and where the potted garden grew unchecked and wild. She quietly closed the glass doors behind her.
On the other side, Wesker stared at her, his arms crossed over his chest and his mouth set in that unreadable line.
She stood in the parlor and watched him that evening as he sat in his office with the door open. He was clicking a mouse furiously and glaring at one of his many oversized monitors. He punctuated his nightly ritual with the occasional sigh, or paused his incessant clicking to rub the back of his neck. He hadn't asked his usual questions that day, after her lesson. He hadn't asked to see what she'd produced, or tried to get her to explain what she'd learned. Her heart thundered in her chest as she debated with herself.
To show him, or not to show him.
Boldness ultimately won out and she approached the office, knocking quietly on the doorframe.
He took a deep breath, as if he'd forgotten she was home, and turned to her in the huge leather rolling chair. His reading glasses, useless things really, were halfway down the bridge of his nose, and he looked over the top of the frames at her. "Cricket," he said softly. "Come in."
She went to him then and crouching beside him, spread out the sketches she'd done that morning on his heavy cherry wood desk. He pushed the narrow glasses up so that he could see through them.
The first sketch was of the young man in shotput motion, his hand drawn back and torso twisted. It was a lively sketch in charcoal, all great swooping lines and action. It was also, in her opinion, very sloppy. But Mr. Holbein had liked it best, citing that she'd used her entire arm to capture the boy, rather than micromanaging with only her fingers.
In the second sketch, the model was reclining, one knee up. She was particularly proud of the feet. She pointed to them, and Wesker nodded in agreement. "Yes," he said. "Very real."
The third sketch was the boy dressing - doubled over, pulling on a pair of loose jeans. It was her favorite of the lot; she loved the folds of the denim, the tension in his thighs, the way it seemed so true to life. She tapped the corner of the drawing, to indicate that it was her best. Loose charcoal dusted curled up into the air between them.
The young man had been nude. Wesker hadn't mentioned it, but she'd seen his eyes flicker to the genitals, and his jaw tense.
He looked up at his computer screens, turning his face from her suddenly, as if something had come to his attention. He took off his glasses and set them on the desk top.
"Would you be… terribly upset with me if I told you I canceled any further lessons with Mr. Holbein?" he asked.
She studied his profile. Her blood throbbed in her ears, in her lips - making her feel very hot, almost painfully so. She reminded herself to breathe and shook her head. No, I don't care. I don't care about any of it but you.
"These are beautiful," he said, after a moment. "Stunning."
I want to draw you like this, she wished to say. But she did not.
When the agent came back, he didn't sit on the other side of the glass wall. He strode into the room, without the HAZMAT suit. He tapped the spine of the same manila folder against his palm. Sherry sat back in the awful plastic chair; her hands smoothed out the crumpled kleenex over her bouncing thigh. The news must have been good - they might let her be for the night.
"Your labs came back… Aside from remnants of the G Virus, nothing remarkable in your panel." He laid the report in front her.
She looked down at the papers; she couldn't read any of it. It was all a jumble of lines and acronyms and numbers drawn-out to the millionths place. Her blood levels, she assumed. She swallowed, trying to do what the agent wanted her to do - look over things she didn't understand and nod as if she did. She touched the top page, praying for him to say something, or for the information to somehow absorb through her skin.
"Did… Albert Wesker ever say anything to you about your parents?" he asked slowly.
She glanced up. "Yeah."
"He talk about your dad?"
Her stomach lurched. Something was wrong. "Yes," she replied, breathlessly, confused.
The agent took a seat in the folding chair across from her. He rubbed his face. "William Birkin, correct?"
She sank away from the table. "Yes." Barely a whisper.
"Hmm." He closed the folder in front of her. "Well… everything checks out, Miss Birkin. You are who say you are. The B.S.A.A. will be working in tandem with the federal government from this point on. You'll be placed in protective custody for the time being. We made arrangements for your quarters tonight and Chris Redfield will be the lead agent. If you need anything at all, consult with him, yeah?"
She nodded. She wanted to ask: What about my father? But she was too afraid.
In the other room, Chris watched.
Author's Note: Thanks to ironbutterfly25 for the menstruation scene.