I have only ever moved away from my home to escape tragedy, and it has occurred to me that the line between running away and moving on is one that is easily blurred. I left- no, escaped- Boston because I lacked my father's resolve to let our dearly departed rest in peace, and so I was haunted by their ghosts at the end of every road and behind every door until I couldn't stand it any more. I convinced myself that I was starting a new life, although the sad truth of it was that all I had really done was wither away inside. But the deepest and cruelest irony was living through the nightmare of my Awakening, when Eve pulled from my soul every painful memory that I thought I had finally suppressed, and then forced me to experience them again and again. It was only after living through that horrifying ordeal that I learned to truly be at peace with the loss of my mother and sister. I'm sitting in my empty Los Angeles apartment now. Relocating to the west coast was an opportunity to escape the painful memories of what happened to me in New York City.

This is the start of a new life for me.

-Aya Brea

Everything was ready to go. Aya inspected her equipment one last time and then, satisfied that she was not leaving anything behind, closed the trunk of her car and took a deep breath. She turned around and leaned against it for a few moments to collect her thoughts as she stared out at the dusty Los Angeles skyline. In the back of her mind she felt that there was something slightly amiss about this assignment. Maybe it was the way Baldwin had seemed so apprehensive during the briefing. Aya knew that she made him uncomfortable, but it was easy to tell that he had been acting more strangely about it this time. Or maybe she was feeling extra sentimental about rushing into danger again now that she and Jodie had openly expressed their affection for each other.

Or maybe her mitochondria were just being irritable with her again, who knew. At least the weather was nice.

At length, she made her way around the yellow vintage ragtop muscle car, her pride and joy, and got behind the wheel. A job was a job, and if it was as bad as she had been briefed to expect it to be, there could be no room for distractions. The roar of her baby as Aya revved the engine to life dispelled her uneasiness, and she made her way out of the FBI headquarters parking lot to begin the drive down to the Island Hotel.

It was about an hour ride on the 405 to get to Newport Beach if traffic was favorable. However, in the year that Aya had lived in Los Angeles she had come to learn that traffic was never that. Pierce Carradine and his tech van had left an hour ago to get set up before she arrived. Aya anticipated that it would be late in the morning before their operation actually went live. She turned on the radio and put her mind on autopilot for the drive, hoping that nobody else got hurt before then. Baldwin's eerie tale about the surviving SRT member ran through her mind again. If there were in fact a new breed of NMC loose in that hotel it meant that they were transforming more rapidly than the MIST team had expected. She wondered what he would eventually divulge about what had happened in there, and if anyone would believe him. There would be those who mocked him; even in the aftermath of what happened in New York City there were still some at the department who scoffed at Aya's reports.

Aya was so lost in thought that she almost missed her first exit. She pulled a hard right into the exiting lane, receiving some angry car horns from the drivers she had cut off. However, one thing she had become immune to after living in New York City was angry drivers, so she continued on her way without giving them a second thought. San Diego Creek and the Upper Newport Bay eventually came into view and Aya gazed out at the water, gently rolling in the breeze and sparkling in the sunlight as she crossed the bridge. The road split off of the highway soon after that and Aya new she was quickly closing in on her destination.

She hit the first major check point at the Santa Rosa/Newport Center Drive intersection. It was pure pandemonium; traffic was complete mess, horns were blaring, people were getting out of their cars to yell at the police and each other. Several state police cars were stationed there and twice as many officers. Cones and road signs divided the road into a lane for police and one for everyone else. Civilian traffic was being guided onto a detour lane that would eventually send them back in the direction they came. Authorized personnel were being allowed to continue onto Newport Center Drive, which ran a complete circle around the shopping and restaurant district in the area; Aya could only imagine the logistical nightmare it must have been for the local authorities to block every major road that accessed it.

"Ma'am, I'm going to have to ask you to pull into the other lane," an officer said to her when she reached the intersection. "Nobody is allowed onto Newport Center Drive at this time, please pull-"

Aya pulled her badge out of her shirt and smiled sweetly.

"Fuckin' Feds," he said flatly. "Okay, go on through."

Smiling and shaking her head Aya pulled through the checkpoint. She couldn't blame him; in jeans and a white t-shirt she hardly looked like FBI.

She reached the next next checkpoint heading north on Newport Center Drive, this one as much of an elaborate disaster as the last one. This time the state police were checking credentials, which Aya had but was forced to answer several extra questions about, simply because she was a pretty girl driving a flashy car, claiming to be part of a highly-classified division of the Bureau. Since joining MIST this had become a regular event when working with other agencies on her cases. Their disbelief had been amusing at first but it got old and annoying very quickly. Aya wondered if they delayed every young blonde woman that they came across, or only the ones carrying assault rifles in their trunks.

The next two intersections were completely barricaded off except for a designated path onto Santa Cruz Drive that would take her right up to the hotel entrance. As she made her way around the outside of the building she saw the perimeter that had been set up with road barriers and officers. The occasional Special Agent could be spotted in the mix. They must be the new guys, Aya thought, to get stuck managing a police perimeter. She realized, of course, that she herself had only been in the Bureau for a year, but she never had to deal with being a brand new Special Agent

Aya was special, after all.

A security fence had been erected across the entrance to the road leading into the hotel complex. This time it was SWAT blocking her path, fully clad in their tactical gear and carrying M4 carbines. Aya pulled up to their checkpoint and waited. She watched one of them appear to begin having a conversation with himself, but when he started walking toward her she noticed the ARC microphone around his neck and realized he had been talking to whoever was on the other end of the radio.

"Agent Brea?" he asked.

Aya nodded.

"We've been expecting you, ma'am. Welcome to the party."

The smile and look he gave her wasn't creepy like the others she'd gotten from the police; his told her that he was familiar with serious danger and that he respected the presence of special units like MIST on the scene, being part of a special unit himself. She could tell he was prior-military, Ranger Bat maybe, an infantryman at the very least. It was amazing to Aya how much she had picked up about those types of units in the short time she had been with the FBI. A few short moments later they opened the fence and she pulled into the perimeter. Another SWAT officer began ground-guiding her through, but as she pulled around the first few trees along the driveway the MIST van came into view. Aya waved a thank you to the SWAT guy and pulled up to the rear doors of the van, which were open, Pierce Carradine sitting in back looking at a series of monitors.

They were right in front of the valet entrance. The only other unit so close to the facility was SWAT. Aya shut her engine off, popped the trunk, and got out of the vehicle, her black boots producing a dull thud on the hot pavement. As she made her way to the back of the yellow car Pierce jumped out of the van to greet her.

"Aya, you're here," Pierce said, and then simply looked at her.

Always the master of the obvious. "Yes," Aya replied a bit awkwardly. "Yes, I am." After a few more moments of Pierce smiling blankly at her with his hands on his hips, she said, "Isn't this is the part where you brief me on the situation?"

Pierce shook his head and adjusted his dark sunglasses. "Of course it is!"

Aya began getting her gear on while Agent Carradine talked quickly: "Nobody has gone in since the SRT got wiped out. We have the whole place surrounded and locked down. All the access roads are blocked. Only HQ can authorize personnel into the perimeter. I ran several scans of the building and came up with activity all over the place. There is definitely something happening in there, but the readings are very different than the NMCs we've dealt with in the past. Unfortunately, that's where you come in."

Aya had her pink body armor secured tightly and was stowing her sidearm into a drop-leg holster when he stopped talking. "Is that all?" she asked looking up at him.

He shifted nervously. "Yeah, basically," he said. "This whole operation sort of depends on you going in there to investigate."

"How convenient." She jammed magazines of .45 rounds and her special 6.8mm ammunition into the pouches attached to her vest, making sure that one was also locked and loaded in each weapon. The assault rifle hung comfortably on her body from a three-point sling. Aya kept the stock extended and didn't change the sight that Jodie had attached to it for her; the ACOG could go on the next mission, but this time she needed Jodie with her.

"Okay," she said after she had everything all set. "Here goes nothing."

"Not quite," Pierce said hurrying back into the van. He came out with a couple small pieces of electronic equipment. "You'll need these to communicate back to the van. The earpiece is also microphone. Just fit it in and it should be operational."

Aya pushed aside her shiny blonde hair and fit the small earpiece into her ear. "Good?" she asked, and she immediately heard her own voice from somewhere inside the back of the van.

"Okay, comms are up," Pierce said. "Now I just need to use your phone..."

Aya eyed him suspiciously and produced her smart phone from an accessory pouch on her vest. "You sure you want to go looking through that?" she joked. She couldn't help but think that very soon she could change her background to a picture of Jodie's beautiful face.

"I'm sure I don't." Pierce connected it to another small device and tapped the screen a few times. After a few moments he disconnected her phone and handed it back to her. "What I just did was install the software that will allow you to remotely receive information from all of my monitors. GPS, imaging, all that cool stuff. It will also allow me to track your exact location in the building at all times."

"That's not creepy," Aya said as she put her phone back in the pouch.

Agent Brea eyed the valet corridor that would take her into the Island Hotel; there was only one thing left to do.

The lobby was empty and eerily quiet. Aya stood in the center of it for a few moments, extending her senses out to their limits. Other than the SWAT team outside (and was that Pierce breathing in her ear?), there was no other detectable activity. Most importantly, Aya was not feeling a change in her mitochondria the way she normally would in the presence of NMCs. To her right there were the elevators and restrooms down one side of the hallway and the entrance to an unknown room on the other side. To her left was the front desk. She walked up to it and was very tempted to ring the bell just to be facetious, but her tactical mind thought better of it. However, she did pick up a guest map of the hotel; so much for Carradine's fancy GPS, she thought. Next to the front desk there was a small store. It was trashed but there were no signs of life, extinguished or otherwise. Aya considered the possibility that there may have been looters during the craziness that had apparently happened. She looked at the map and decided her best option was to begin clearing the place room by room. Aya went to the very next room down, the Balboa Room, and opened the double doors.

She was not prepared for the horror that awaited her inside.

The dimly lit beige interior was a mural of splattered blood. The smell of death immediately assaulted Aya's senses, and she reeled back a step holding a hand to her mouth. The floor was littered with what appeared to be the remains of hotel guests. As Aya quickly collected herself she scanned over what added up to at least ten bodies, all of which had bled out in some way. The checkered carpet was barely visible after the amount of blood that had soaked into it. Carefully, Aya began to step her way around the bodies to get a closer look at what might have happened.

Their injuries were grotesque. Large chunks of flesh were missing from limbs and necks. Their faces were frozen in expressions of terror, some as though they had died while screaming in agony. Aya made her away around them, hardly able to stand being in the room full of fresh corpses.

"Pierce, I have a lot of dead bodies on my hands," Aya said.

"I'm tracking you on thermal," Pierce's voiced sounded into her ear. "Your heat signature is normal. Any sign of NMCs?"

"No." Aya rounded the large sofa at the back of the room and stopped short. "But I just found one of the SRT."

With all of his gear still on it was difficult for her to determine his condition. Aya hurried to him and took a knee to shake the man, calling to him to try and get a response. But when she turned him over she fell back on her behind in shock, because his throat had been torn completely away.

"Jesus," Aya said getting back to her feet. "Everyone is dead. I'm going to keep moving. Make sure everyone understands not to send people into the building until I come out."

"Will do, Aya."

She began making her way back out of the Balboa Room. As she was about to pass through the open doors, she heard something moving behind her. Spinning around, she was horrified to see the arm of the SRT member draped over the bloody sofa in the back of the room.

Had he survived!? "I have a survivor," she told Pierce as she rushed back into the room.

"Aya, I don't know what that is moving around in there but it's ice-cold," his voice crackled alarmingly.

Pierce's words registered just as she arrived at the man, who had clumsily managed to get to his feet. Before she could do or say anything, he lunged at her with his arms and grabbed her shoulders.

His hands were indeed cold. Aya was so shocked that it was all she could do to keep from falling over as he pushed her back, gurgling and sputtering blood from the gaping hole where his throat used to be. His eyes were glazed over with the white film of a corpse. As Aya finally gathered her wits about her she pushed him away and stared in disbelief as he continued to sputter from his opened neck. He began shuffling his way toward her again, and this time Aya did not think twice. She had her sidearm out in a split second and fired a single round, painting a fresh coat of red against the wall from the back of his head. His body slumped to the floor in a contorted heap.

"Aya, what's going on in there!?"

She didn't have time to respond before the entire room seemed to come alive at once. All of the guests that Aya was sure were long dead began getting to there feet. They began dragging themselves towards her, reaching for her. It seemed to happen so fast that Aya couldn't even react before she was surrounded and trapped in the back of the room, the lifeless body of the SRT agent at her feet.

Instinct finally took over, and Aya Brea went to work.

She blasted a path around the right side of the room with her .45, dropping corpses one by one in a symphony of exploding brain matter. She kept herself on the outside of the group at all times until she was backing herself toward the doors. The receiver locked back on her handgun. In one fluid motion she hit the release to rack it forward again and slammed it into the drop-leg holster. Her rifle was at her shoulder immediately as she backed through the entrance of the room, firing one precise round after another until she had created enough time and space between her and the mob of corpses to lower the weapon and slam the double doors closed.

Aya stood looking down the sight of her weapon again, breathing heavily, waiting for one of them to come out so she could blow it back to Hell. Long seconds went by. She could hear them groaning that unearthly groan and banging into the doors, but they never opened. She lowered her rifle and absently changed out magazines for both of her weapons. Only then did she realize that Pierce had been trying to get her attention the entire time.

"Aya! Aya, what is going on in there!?"

Struggling to calm her breathing Aya replied, "I... I don't know. That was not NMCs. Those were humans..."

"I'm picking up a lot of new bodies moving in from the east side of the perimeter. There are people coming into the building from outside."

Aya looked down the hallway toward the next room, which looked like a dining area that was half indoors and half out. "I thought I said nobody comes in. Don't we have all the access points blocked off?"

"Somebody must have made a mistake."

"I'm checking it out," Aya said as she finally managed to to pull herself together. "It could be survivors."

"Aya, I really don't think that-"

But she was already through the doors.

The place was called the Cabana Room for good reason; it was an elegant tropical cafe that would have been beautiful were it not for the horde of wandering whatever-those-things-were. As soon as they noticed her they were drawn to her as if she was the newest dish on the menu, and from what Aya had been able to infer from her last encounter only minutes ago, that is exactly what they intended to make her. The distinct sound of turbine engines could be heard suddenly, but Aya didn't have time to decide what it meant.

Which was okay, because that was Pierce Carradine's job: "Something strange is going on here, Aya, a military helicopter just flew over head. I'm picking up a separate GPS signal now moving down from several floors above you."

"Little busy here, Pierce," Aya said trying to keep track of all of these things that were suddenly happening simultaneously, and at the same time not end up on the buffet line for all of the gruesome monsters that were snarling at her.

Then, to complicate things even further: "Aya, your heat signature is off the charts."

It had crept up on her in the midst of all the confusion, such that she almost wouldn't have noticed it as being out of the ordinary for her. Aya's mitochondria were irritated with something but they didn't know what. It wasn't the familiar pulse of being surrounded by NMCs but it was damn similar. The shuffling, mangled remains of hotel guests which should be dead were now closing in on her again. As her finger began to pull back on the trigger of her rifle, a volley of gunfire from the rear of the dining room beat her to it, dropping bodies and taking everything else down around them.

Aya hit the floor as glasses shattered and tables blew apart in the barrage of bullets that was suddenly tearing the place down. She crawled to cover behind the bar and dared to peek up to see what the hell was happening now. Making their way in from the east side- these must be the bodies Pierce was talking about -was a squad of heavily armed soldiers covered in black tactical gear. It appeared as though they hadn't noticed her for the time being. They were absolutely methodical in their dispatching of the reanimated corpses. Had a special team been given clearance to move in, specifically in order to deal with these monsters, without her knowing? The red-and-white pinwheel on their shoulders caught her attention briefly-

-but then she felt it.

It was unmistakable this time. The feeling made her forget to breath for a moment as her insides ignited. Aya's mitochondria now knew exactly what they were reacting to. It was the only thing that could make every cell in her body produced this kind of fury. She heard the soldiers in the room begin panicking as the temperature in the area rapidly began to rise. Time seemed to slow to a crawl. Calmly, as is if being guided by the will of her cells, Aya stood up and searched the room, unafraid of any threats to her now. As the soldiers began to retreat and the walking corpses started bursting into flames all around her, Aya closed her eyes and searched for the origin of her unrest, and her mitochondria sensed that the source was near.

They sensed that Eve was here.

But something was different. Eve's presence was more powerful now than ever, so much so that it was overwhelming Aya's capability to control it. Aya felt as though she were going to explode. The room was burning down round her, the horrible reanimated bodies now melting into pools of liquid human remains. A few of the pinwheel squad managed to escape back outside; those that didn't now lay on the floor burning to death in their own armor. Aya's mitochondria were beginning to produce discharges now that were generating extremely high-temperature ions. The feeling was horribly frightening but at the same time Aya's mitochondria instinctively recognized the process to be perfectly natural, much like the first time Aya had felt her mitochondria truly be liberated. But this was not liberation.

This was evolution.

The explosion of charged ions that occurred then obliterated everything within a twenty-five meter radius of Aya Brea and set fires to things well past that, and she dropped to the floor unconscious.

She had a dream about a man calling out to her. It felt so real. In Aya's dream, he pulled her out of the fire. She saw flashes of light and heard his voice again. Then she felt herself floating and going up, floating up for what felt like an eternity. It wasn't a dream. She was going to Heaven. Aya felt a deep, deep sadness that she would never get to tell Jodie Bouquet how in love she was with her. And then the blackness came for her.