"You have to hold on, Annette."

"We need to get to Sherry," Annette said, wincing. Slowly, she reached into the sticky pocket of her lab coat and came up with a plastic syrette. 400 miligrams of potent, experimental opioid flowed into her bloodstream, and her eyes glazed, and she gazed at the ceiling like a dopefiend after shooting up. "You," she said lazily, and with difficulty, "need to get me there. I have the vaccine for her. In my other pocket."

"If you move, you're gonna make your injuries worse." Though Grayson couldn't imagine her injuries getting any worse than this. Every bone in her torso was broken, and she was bleeding internally, he knew, and it was only a matter of time.

Below, the fight between G and Leon went on, and things exploded and shattered, and Leon shot G and seemed no closer to killing it.

Annette was barely hanging on. "I'm tired, Grayson," she murmured.

"Don't close your eyes. Just hang on."

"If—"

"I said don't close your eyes. Hang on," Grayson told her. "Sherry needs you, Annette. I need you. We'll go see her, and we'll get you help."

But the rational part of his brain nagged at him, said Annette wouldn't last much longer, and the emotional part—the part which almost always overwhelmed his rationale in its intensity—argued there was still a chance, that Annette could survive if they moved fast enough. Umbrella had brought people back from death; they could certainly save Annette from the brink of it.

The fight, in the makeshift arena below, hit its crescendo, and G roared, in real pain, and something exploded, and he smelled burnt meat, something under that that might have been chemical—maybe one of the bioreactors. And Leon came up the maintenance lift, creaking on its struts, and he was covered in slimy pieces of G, and the filth from his slog through the sewers.

"Jesus, that looks bad," he said to Annette. Leon kneeled beside her and checked her wounds, and his face said: this really is some bad shit.

"Feels worse, believe me," Annette said, grimacing. She squeezed her eyes shut and hissed through her teeth, and shifted, trying and failing to find some sort of relief from the pain.

"Look, about what you said… I don't know how much I believe it, but I'm willing to—"

Annette, wincing,her eyes glazed with pain and opioids, grabbed Leon's arm and said, "Just tell me you'll destroy that G sample."

"No. It's evidence. It's going to the FBI."

"There's no FBI, boot."

Annette told Leon about Ada, and Leon, predictably, was unconvinced.

"He's an idiot," Alexia said, encyclopedic, like someone reciting a well-known fact. She leafed through the brittle, yellowing pages of a book on myrmecology, one long, white leg draped over the other. "Wong's a mercenary. She told Leon where to find the G-Virus, I'm sure." She glanced up at him. "Why do your dirty work, when someone else is so eager to do it for you?"

They'd taken a break from chess, and were sitting in a room that served as a sort of study. Grayson had buried himself in a flaking paperback titled The King's Game: Strategy and Diligence, which had, the inside of the book-cover said, originally been written in 1922, but this particular copy was a reprint from 1966. He was reading the chapter on The Bishop's Opening, puzzling out the weird chess parlance, and the diagrams. He would have asked Alexia, but her explanations were equally as loaded and lengthy as the explanations written on the page, and so it would have been pointless.

"Are you really so determined to beat me, Grayson?" she asked, and smiled like she was trying to sell him a used car.

"I made a promise to myself," he said.

Alexia turned a page in her myrmecology book, and said, "Did you know some species of ants can clone themselves?"

Grayson looked up from his book and stared at her. "I don't care about your bug shit, Alexia."

"You know," she said, and turned another page, "I don't think Wong got very far with the G-Virus. Umbrella wanted it. The USS would have hounded her."

"She didn't get far. Annette shot her, in the main shaft."

Alexia blinked.

"She shot her," he repeated, unsure if she'd heard him or not.

"Yes, yes. I got that. But Annette? Annette Birkin shot someone?" She tossed her white-gold hair over her shoulder. "I once saw her agonize over the death of a laboratory rat."

He raised an eyebrow. "Really? Annette didn't like animals."

"Maybe she was traumatized by her dead rat," Alexia remarked, reading her book. "She'd named it, you know. Snowdrop. She called it Snowdrop."

"Snowdrop? You're fucking with me."

She shrugged.

"Maybe Annette just didn't like animals because she'd grown up on a ranch. I'd have gotten tired of them, too. Imagine smelling all that cow-shit every day."

"What happened to Kennedy? After this whole 'shooting Ada' thing?"

"I dunno," Grayson said. "I was too busy getting Annette to Sherry. Ada wasn't dead, though. I'll get to that."

Annette had shot Ada. Grayson had watched her fall down into the pit of the main shaft, down into the bottomless darkness, and the G-Virus had gone with her. Annette had collapsed from her wounds, and then NEST had started to collapse, an approximation of a woman's voice warning all personnel to evacuate. So Grayson, despite knowing it was probably a bad idea, helped Annette up and half carried, half walked her to the North Area, where Sherry was supposed to be.

A few zombies shambled in the hallway, oblivious to the fact that the laboratory was coming down around them, and they stretched their rotting arms and careened toward them; but Grayson was quicker, and easily slipped around and past the infected, and cut right, down another hallway.

"Grayson," Annette said, and lifted her head. Nudging him away, she leaned heavily on the wall, and her breathing was laborious and shallow, and she was sweating and bleeding, and doubling over, her features drawn tight with pain. "I'm not gonna make it. You need to get out. The cable-car isn't far from here."

"We came this far," Grayson told her. "I'm not leaving."

"Grayson. I'm dying. You know it, and I know it." Annette stared at him, and her eyes were pink and wet with tears and pain. "I need you to get out," she pleaded. "While you can. The self-destruct sequence, someone's activated it. If you don't get out now, you're gonna die, too."

"Then we go out together," he said.

"I have to help Sherry. You've done enough, Grayson. She'll be safer with Claire." She straightened up, or tried to, and something loudly cracked. Annette yowled, doubled over again, dripping blood onto the tile. "Your condition makes you a target for Umbrella," she wheezed. "Sherry's been through enough, Grayson. She won't be safe with you."

"Annette..." Hot tears blurred his vision. "I can't leave. Not like this."

Annette pulled her gun, the one she'd taken from the USS, and pointed it at his head. "I won't ask you again, Grayson." Her hand shook, and her finger shied on the trigger. "Go. Please. If you love me. If you love Sherry, please, go."

Grayson stared at the gun, feeling numb all over.

"I'm sorry things didn't work out like we wanted it to, Grayson," Annette said, and she lowered the gun and kissed him, and it felt as if she'd used all her strength to perform such a small thing. "I love you."

Her lips tasted metallic, and the blood cooled on his lips.

"I wanted that university job," Annette said, and stroked his cheek.

Grayson found himself staring at the words in The King's Game: Strategy and Diligence as if it was some alien language, and he became aware of the tears stinging his eyes. He quickly wiped them away and put the book down.

Alexia watched him like a cat.

"Sorry," he said, and cleared his throat, straightening up in his chair.

"You did love her," Alexia said, and she sounded angry.

"Don't start this shit with me again, Alexia."

"Oh, I'm sorry. Am I supposed to take that graciously, Grayson? That you loved her?"

Grayson picked up his book and pretended to read, mostly to avoid the conversation, and the inevitable confrontation which would accompany it.

"Ignoring the elephant in the room doesn't change the fact that there's a bloody fucking elephant in the room, Grayson."

"All right. So we're doing this again," he said, and looked at her. "Fine. You were dead, Alexia. Or I thought you were dead. You can't be pissed about this. You've got no goddamn right."

She pursed her lips. The magnified red ant on the cover of her book, titled A Study of Myrmecology, seemed to be judging him with its beady eyes. "Apologies if I take issue with you falling for some other woman, Grayson. I didn't realize I no longer mattered."

"Jesus Christ, you're still the same self-centered, egotistical brat you were fifteen years ago," Grayson shot back, putting his book down and resting his hands on it. "You're twenty-seven-years-old. Fucking act like it."

"Don't you dare speak to me like that, Grayson."

"Or what? Gonna hit me with your tentacle again? Lob a fireball at me?" Grayson sighed. "Sorry," he said, and meant it. "It's… a lot has happened in the last couple of months. I'm overwhelmed. I guess that's why I'm even telling you this story. It's cathartic. It helps me work through things."