Chapter 1

You must be somewhere in London
You must be loving your life in the rain
You must be somewhere in London
Walking Abbey Lane

-"England," The National


November 1, 2004

London

Many people who've never been to New York City imagine it's a city made entirely of skyscrapers. Similarly, the woman known as Ada Wong found that people who'd never been to London sometimes assumed the entire city looked like Mayfair.

The buildings of that section of the city were grand and imposing, built in ornate styles such as English Baroque and Georgian, and there were many parks and broad boulevards to explore. It was also close to the center of London, and those old—and now largely symbolic—bastions of power: Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace. Unsurprisingly, Mayfair was also one of the most expensive places in London to live and do business.

Ada had no doubt that the townhouse she now stood in had cost millions. The décor was a striking symphony of peacock blue and crimson, accented with polished wood, dark marble and burnished gold. During the six years he'd owned the house, Albert Wesker had also managed to accumulate a sizable art collection. There was no discernible theme—abstract modern works, Renaissance religious art, Gilded Age portraiture, even Chinese scroll paintings—but it somehow worked.

Ada had never personally visited the infamous Spencer Mansion, but she'd seen photos of it, and the townhouse's interior bore more than a passing resemblance. It stood to reason, she supposed. Wesker had spent many years at the isolated estate as an Umbrella researcher. A place like that was bound to leave an impression on a person.

Ada had arrived less than an hour ago with her small amount of luggage. Her sometime-employer had greeted her at the door.

"Punctual. But I expected nothing less," Wesker said dryly as he closed the heavy wooden door behind her. "You'll be in your usual room on the second floor. We'll talk in the study once you're settled in."

"Is Sherry around?" Ada called after Wesker, who was already walking away, no doubt returning to a task far more important than welcoming her.

"She's at a café down the street. I don't like to interrupt her when she's studying. She knows we have dinner reservations." His voice echoed slightly in the large foyer.

Ada shrugged to herself and started towards the stairs. Wesker's skills at manipulation never ceased to impress her. He'd given Sherry independence but not freedom.


A few minutes later with her luggage stowed away and her evening attire in place, Ada found herself in the large study located at the rear of the townhouse's first floor. The study, originally the formal dining hall, was a long, chestnut-paneled room lined with stuffed bookshelves. There were books on every imaginable topic, a veritable library. It was enough to make Ada, a glutton for the written word, think that under different circumstances, she and Wesker might've been friends.

The requisite roaring fireplace graced the room's right end. This was also the side of the room that Wesker occupied with his desk and neat stacks of files and papers. The hall's left side was more suited to socialization, with a few impeccably upholstered couches and chairs and a grand piano. The study was the inner sanctum for the townhouse's occupants—part Wesker's office, part Sherry's lounge.

The rest of the downstairs consisted of a rarely-used formal living room, a small dining room and a modernized kitchen. All these rooms were connected by the grand foyer, a space that extended the full three stories of the house and was capped in a stunning wrought-iron skylight. A sweeping staircase linked the three floors. The second floor consisted of the master bedrooms suites, and he third floor had guest rooms, storage, and an exercise room. And in the basement was...

"What do you think of the new painting?" Wesker asked Ada without looking up from the laptop on his desk. "I finally got around to hanging it last week."

Ada walked to the back of the room where four large, beautifully famed painted portraits were displayed in a row. The painting on the far left was very old, from sometime in the late 1700's. Wesker had salvaged it from Rockfort Island, the now-ruined stronghold of one of Umbrella's founding families, the Ashfords.

The portrait depicted a seated woman, resplendent in a bright purple gown, her chestnut brown hair pulled back in a matronly chignon. She held a porcelain teacup in her right hand and her left arm rested on an open book. Her head was tilted so that her gaze did not meet the viewers', and she seemed sly and coquettish, but nonetheless noble.

This was the great Veronica Ashford, the woman whose fortune and social position had set the stage for the Ashford family's dubious success. However, only a few people in the world now remembered Veronica. Wesker was one of them.

The next portrait on the wall, to the right of Veronica's, was a modern depiction of a black-haired beauty in a red Renaissance-style dress. In the painting, she leaned almost aggressively over an ornate couch. Her angular face and dark, arresting gaze seemed to challenge the viewer. It was an imagined portrait of Lisa Trevor, a girl who had fallen into Umbrella's clutches in the 1960's when her architect father made the mistake of accepting a British nobleman's request to build an Old World-style mansion in the forests of midwestern America.

Although the painting depicted Lisa as a woman in her 30's, she had ceased to look human long before she reached that age. Ada knew about Lisa Trevor; Wesker had told her of the girl's sad fate. Early in her captivity, Umbrella's scientists had pumped Lisa full of a version of the Progenitor virus, mutating her beyond all recognition or sanity.

And yet, when Wesker himself became a junior researcher at the Spencer Mansion facility years later, Lisa had still been alive. Somehow, the experiments granted Lisa a seeming immortality, and it was through her that many of Umbrella's most powerful—and most dangerous—discoveries were made. But to the best of anyone's knowledge, this tortured soul was finally dead, killed in the 1998 explosion that leveled the Spencer Mansion and its grounds.

The next portrait was yet another salvaged item from Rockfort Island. The artist seemed to have attempted to copy the style of Veronica Ashford's portrait. Furthermore, the sitter, a blond girl of ten or eleven, was dressed in a purple gown that was strikingly similar to Veronica's. Her face was serene, and her gloved hands were folded neatly in her lap. Like Veronica, the girl's face was turned to the side so she remained aloof and enigmatic.

Ada paused a moment to stare at this painting of Alexia Ashford, a woman whose life story was ever more outrageous than Lisa Trevor's. Raised as the daughter of Alexander Ashford, who himself was the son of Umbrella co-founder Edward Ashford, Alexia was in fact a test-tube baby. Purportedly, she was a clone of Veronica herself, created from a sample of the noblewoman's mummified tissue.

Ada had always had a hard time swallowing that story. For one thing, history recorded Veronica as a brunette, and Alexia's hair was white-blond. But whatever the truth, the revelation of her unnatural origins had been enough to drive Alexia and her twin brother Alfred mad.

The two undeniable aspects of Alexia's life were her scientific brilliance and her deviant tastes. By the age of ten, she'd already graduated from college and been put in charge of Umbrella's Antarctic research facility. She went on to imprison her father and used him as a scientific guinea pig, commit incest with her mentally unstable brother, and later injected herself with a pathogen of her own design—the T-Veronica virus.

But despite all her depraved actions, Ada had to admit that Alexia's plan was quite brilliant, at least on paper. She faked her death and put herself into cryogenic stasis so her body could adjust to the virus instead of being taken over by it. Fifteen years later, and just months after the destruction of Raccoon City, Alexia emerged from her hibernation as a super-being, only for her and Alfred to be killed by another brother-sister duo, the Redfields.

But the final portrait, the one just added, was of someone still alive. Like the three other women, the portrait of Sherry Brikin depicted her sitting. She was facing the viewer, her pose relaxed yet elegant, with her left arm dangling over the side of the chair she sat in. In the painting, Sherry wore a low-cut blue ball gown with a pink sash wrapped obi-like around her waist. Her gaze met the viewer's dead-on but seemed content, not accusatory like Lisa's steely gaze. Sherry had matured into quite a striking beauty, having inherited her mother's high cheekbones and large, dark blue eyes.

Around Sherry's neck was her ever-present gold locket, an item Ada knew all too well. On that hellish night of September 29th, 1998, when 12-year-old Sherry was wandering the streets of Raccoon City looking for her lost parents, she'd dropped the locket in a panic when she thought she saw a monster.

But it was not a monster who found the locket. It was Ada, who was conducting a reconnaissance mission for Wesker. And ironically enough, Sherry's locket had held Ada's objective: a tiny vial containing a sample of the infamous G virus, placed there by her scientist father, William Birkin.

A few days later in Washington D.C., Sherry was escorted into the back of a Towncar by Wesker, and Ada had been there in the back seat, waiting to give the girl the last remnant of her family and former life. Ada still recalled how Sherry had wept softly as she held the necklace again.

Despite the considerable pain she was in from her heavily bandaged wounds, Ada had tried to comfort her, putting her arm around Sherry's shoulders and whispering "it will be okay" over and over again. She hadn't been able to think of anything better to say.

But the most interesting part of that ride had been Wesker's reaction to Sherry's grief. Despite his ever-present sunglasses, Ada could tell that his burning red eyes never left the girl's face. He did not speak, but he was visibly tense for the whole trip. He seemed transfixed.

Later, in their hotel suite, Ada looked over the passports Wesker had secured for them. She had to admire Wesker's thoroughness. They now had assumed names and Sherry's passport had a new birthdate that made her several years older than she actually was. And yet...

I'm not Ada Wong any more.

The scars and wounds on her body now belonged to someone else. Ada let herself cry while leaning again the mirror in her room. She thought about Leon for a long time and her tears fell as much for him as they did for herself. Finally, she cried for both them—the "them" that would never exist.

That night, she caught Wesker standing in the doorway of Sherry's bedroom. Restored by a shower and decent meal, Sherry now slept peacefully in her oversized hotel bed, her chest rising and falling slowly beneath a new periwinkle blue nightgown.

"Birkin, I'd never underestimate you," she heard Wesker mutter under his breath. "There's something about this little girl..."

They'd left the country the next day on the first flight from Dulles to Heathrow.

Pushing the memory aside, Ada peered more closely at Sherry's portrait. Something about it bothered her. The young woman depicted in it wasn't merely relaxed. The dress showed off her cleavage and her wavy honey blond hair cascaded carelessly over her shoulders. She was languid, sensual. Inviting.

Sherry and Wesker's official cover was that they were father and daughter. He even maintained that fiction among his business associates who knew about Wesker's past with Umbrella. Not even the household staff knew their real identities. But this was hardly the type of portrait most parents would commission for their teenage daughter. It depicted her as a mature woman, seen through the eyes of an admiring man.

Ada felt her stomach lurch. She told herself she was imagining things. Sherry had probably just chosen the pose from a fashion magazine.

"It's a good likeness," Ada said, trying to keep her tone casual. "The artist knew what he was doing."


Sherry rocked back in her chair and sighed at the textbook in front of her. It was almost time to head home but she felt like she hadn't accomplished anything after nearly three hours sitting in the café—besides spending too much money on too many cups of coffee.

In theory, she was supposed to be studying biology, but her mind kept wandering. Why, on today of all days, did her mind have to fixate on what had happened over the summer, on what was still happening...?

Sherry suddenly felt warm and pressed her eyes closed. No use in staying any longer. She packed up her textbook and notepad, pulled on her coat and headed out into the chilly autumn afternoon. The townhouse was just a few blocks away, but Sherry took a detour through the east side of Hyde Park to enjoy what was left of the overcast day's hazy sunlight.

Ada had probably arrived, but for the first time since she'd known the older woman, Sherry wasn't in a rush to see her. She feared that Ada would be able to tell that things were somehow different. A woman like Ada could discern so much from just a look, a careless glance...

Had it really been six years? Sherry felt her pensive mood deepening as she neared home. Yes, six years since she lost her parents and began this strange new existence. Sherry lived in the middle of one of the world's largest cities and yet she was isolated from everyone around her by an invisible wall of experience and memory.

She could still vividly recall her first few days London. She's been desperately homesick, though she knew there was no home to go back to. Still, Sherry ached for her family's bungalow at the end of a tree-shaded street with its solid Craftsman style furniture and worn Persian carpets. She pined for her mother's frustrated sighs in the kitchen as she made her millionth cooking blunder and missed the way her father would look up from his papers and ruffle her hair.

Her new bedroom had provided some comfort. It was like something out of a fairytale, with beautiful floral wallpaper and a canopy bed fit for a princess. But the nightmares started almost immediately, and it took Sherry time to get used to the large townhouse. And she was still mourning her parents, as strange and inadequate as they'd been for much of her life.

Wesker had retained a small, discrete household staff to look after Sherry's needs and Ada stayed with them for a while to recuperate from her injuries. She'd explained the Raccoon City outbreak to Sherry, but dropped her gaze and became silent whenever the girl asked about Leon and Claire's whereabouts. Soon, Sherry simply stopped asking.

New furnishings arrived daily, and Wesker came and went without paying much attention to Sherry or Ada. Still, Sherry felt his gaze on her sometimes when he thought she wasn't looking. Before long, Ada had recovered and was off to parts unknown.

The wind picked up as she walked through the park and Sherry recalled a night about a month after her arrival in London, when she spent the chilly evening sprawled in one of the study's overstuffed armchairs. Gwendolyn, the head housekeeper, lit a fire at the room's far end and Sherry could hear the wind whistling outside. The room was barely illuminated except for the fire and Sherry's reading lamp. She had a bowl of popcorn perched on the chair's arm. In other words, it was a perfect autumn night.

Sherry got up to grab a fleece blanket from the nearby couch and resettled herself with a book. Just then, she heard the front door open. Gwendolyn's muffled voice echoed across the foyer.

"Good evening, sir...Yes, she's in the study."

Wesker was back from yet another mysterious trip. Sherry put down her book as he entered the room. He took off his suit jacket and mirrored aviator sunglasses, tossing them on a nearby table, and sat down on the end of the couch closest to Sherry's chair. Now their eyes were level. Now they could talk.

"You're looking well," Wesker said casually. "I hope you've settled in."

"I...think so," she answered tentatively. "Will we—I mean, can I stay here? Is this where I live now?"

"Yes. And you are safe here. I can promise you that."

Sherry sat up straighter, regarding Wesker with a renewed curiosity. "You don't hide your eyes around me," she said. "I like that." Wesker smiled faintly at this but Sherry continued. "You still haven't told me how they turned red."

"Let's just say...I'm an ongoing experiment." He smirked, seeming quite please with this witty answer. Sherry just shrugged and cracked her book open again. Adults and their secrets. "What are you reading?" Wesker asked.

"A book of Native American myths."

"You should be reading about the history of England. After all, you live here now."

"That's what I did all day," Sherry said, pointing to a stack of books on the adjacent coffee table.

"Fair enough. So tell me about these myths."

"I'm reading about skinwalkers," Sherry began. "It's a Navajo story. They're sort of like witches, but a bit like werewolves too. It's complicated."

"Try me." That odd half-smile again.

Sherry took a deep breath and read aloud. "The curse does not befall the skinwalker by chance. He seeks it out. He willingly breaks the highest taboos of the People. He murders those closest to him and desecrates the dead. That is how he gains his power. The People say, 'with it, he goes on all fours.'"

She looked up to gauge Wesker's interest. Outside the wind gusted and made the windows rattle.

"It's the perfect story for a night like this. What's next?"

"Now he is cast out and must wander the desert," Sherry continued, trying to make her voice suitably dramatic. "But it is what he wanted. He never cared about the People, their rules, their ways. Now he can become any animal he chooses. He walks on wings, paws, hooves. The People fear him, for he can come in any form. They fear him because he can possess anyone. They fear him because he has become the things that he's done." Sherry sat back in her chair, her recitation finished. Now it was her turn to smirk. "Oh, and the book also says skinwalkers' eyes are red and they glow in the dark. So there's that."

Wesker suddenly seemed uneasy. "Yes, there's that," he echoed, shifting in his seat.

Had Sherry's comment upset him? She felt the sudden urge to apologize but Wesker had already moved on.

"We need to talk about something very important," he said. "You probably never knew this, but your father and I were quite close, so I'm more than happy to look after you. However, people need to believe that you're my daughter."

Sherry cocked her head. "That's okay, I guess. But why?"

"Because no one can know who we really are," Wesker replied, a sudden sternness in his voice. "Officially, you are still in a U.S. Government witness protection program. Some very highly-placed people helped me take you out of the country. If anyone ever discovered your identity, it would cause a chain reaction that even I could not stop."

"Wow, sounds pretty serious." Sherry folded her arms and leaned back in her chair. "But what about Ada? She knows the truth."

"She can be trusted. She has nothing to gain by betraying us."

Us. Sherry liked the sound of that word.

"Fine, I'll call you 'dad' in front of other people. And I won't tell anyone who I really am. But when it's just us, how about..." Sherry let her eyes wander up to the ceiling as her playful mood returned. "How about I just call you 'Al'?"

Now Wesker smiled at her in ernest. And she smiled back.


That evening was also the first time he drew Sherry's blood. Wesker seemed to be looking for something, but it would be a few more days before he emerged from the townhouse's off-limited basement to announce that Sherry hadn't actually been cured of the G virus. Not really. The antiviral drug that saved her life in Raccoon City had severely weakened the virus, causing it to go into a harmless dormant state. Wesker doubted the remnants would ever cause Sherry to mutate like her unfortunate father. Transmitting the pathogen to others was, to Sherry's great relief, equally unlikely. But the virus would be a part of her forever.

Next, Wesker hired skilled tutors to continue Sherry's education. When he found out she'd been taking piano lessons before the Raccoon City outbreak, he bought a grand piano and found an exacting teacher who pushed Sherry's musical skills to a near-professional level.

She had a pleasant singing voice, surprisingly strong and clear, but she sang mostly for herself as a kind of therapy on her more difficult days. The hours Sherry spent alone at the piano proved to be some of her happiest moments in the ensuing years.

Other bright moments came courtesy of Wesker himself. Although he never told her details of the "activities" that kept him away for days or even weeks at a stretch, he spent time with Sherry whenever he was home. They often went for walks where he quizzed her on recent lessons and told Sherry more about her parents, what their lives had been like when they were young. Sherry often wondered if she was the only person he had to confide in.

Time passed. Trauma faded into memory and her days settled into a comfortable pattern. Sherry took up jogging when she was 14 and got to know a few other teens in the neighborhood. Her limbs and hair lengthened and her voice deepened until it sounded very much like her mother's—but without Annette's bitter edge. She had her studies, her music and, although it felt odd to admit it, she had a companion. But the whole time, Sherry held out hope for a normal life.