The dinosaur-apes had escaped their tanks, and now Carlos and him were running, tearing around the corner, throwing themselves into the elevator. Grayson had caught a claw in his side; warm blood soaked through his shirt, gushing down his side, and he sagged against the wall, smearing blood on the chrome.

The doors closed, and the elevator went up. Carlos, sweating, looked at him and said, "Jesus fuck, they got you good." He looked at the wound, his tanned forehead creasing with concern. Carlos's hair was wet from the sweating, the rain, unkempt and shaggy like a mop-head. Like that, he no longer looked like Antonio Banderas; he looked like a homeless man who, in the right light, could have passed for Antonio Banderas. "Fuck, Harman."

Grayson slid down the wall, trailing blood, his knees drawn up to his chest. And when sitting like that became too uncomfortable, he sat down and stretched his legs. Fat beads of sweat rolled sluggishly down his face, like drops of olive oil or, he imagined, snails, and warm blood seeped through his grimy fingers, cooled to something sticky, glue-like. "I'll be okay," he grunted, wincing, trying and failing to find some relief from the pain. "Just trust me."

"Harman, those fuckers got you real bad," Carlos said. "We're in a hospital. They got meds here. Too many of those claw-monsters, so survivors weren't picking the place clean." He paused. "Kinda tempted to take some stuff, honestly. Know how much I could sell certain prescription painkillers? Lot of money, man."

"We don't have fucking time for that," Grayson said, and, with Carlos's help, stood up. "We need to get back to Jill." The elevator stopped, and the doors opened, gliding along their magnetic tracks. Grayson limped into the room, Carlos behind him. The stink of spoiled Chinese food attacked his nose.

"I was kidding 'bout the meds, man," Carlos said. "Mostly. You sure you're gonna be okay?"

"You'll see," Grayson said, hugging the wall and making his way to the door. "Don't worry about me."

Carlos looked doubtful, but said nothing else, and they went.

They were greeted in the lobby by Nikolai—at gunpoint. He'd stuck a couple of improvised explosives on the pillars holding the ceiling up, and he didn't look pleased at all to have his work interrupted. "Carlos," Nikolai said, by way of greeting. "Admittedly, wasn't expecting you to show up. Caught me by surprise. Almost. Like Tyrell." He was smoking his cheap Russian cigarettes; the acrid smoke stung Grayson's eyes, made them water.

"You killed him," Carlos said.

"State the fucking obvious, please," Nikolai said, rolling his eyes. His scar contorted unpleasantly as he worked his mouth around the filter of his cigarette, which was slightly bent.

"Why, Nikolai?"

Grayson knew. Nikolai was a Monitor, a member of Umbrella's Internal Investigations; but he didn't tell Carlos that. Nikolai was scrubbing evidence, and that was why he wanted to blow the hospital up—to cover up the laboratory underneath it—but Grayson didn't tell Carlos that, either. "Nothing to concern yourself with, Oliveira," he said, and smiled without any warmth at all. "Just a little this and that."

"You gonna shoot me, Nikolai?"

"Not to kill," Nikolai said, and shot Carlos in the knee as nonchalantly as someone who routinely shot people in the knees, and never lost sleep over it. Carlos howled and folded, and he was clutching his bloody knee, gritting his teeth. "Put a splint on it," Nikolai said, and put his gun away. He finished his cigarette and flicked the butt to the ground, and mashed it under the toe of his boot. Then he turned and punched a code into the detonator. "Harman," Nikolai said. "I'll be back for you later. I suggest you run. You have five minutes until—" and Nikolai grinned like a showman, pantomiming an explosion, mouthing boom—"this place is up in smoke. And, ah, you do not look so good, Harman. You should get that wound looked at."

Then Nikolai was gone, and Grayson, still nursing his wounds, was left with a yowling, bleeding Carlos, and less than fives minutes until the hospital went up in flames. He managed to get Carlos up, stumbling toward the automatic doors, Carlos hissing through his teeth and grimacing and wishing, aloud, that the pain would go away. But the pain didn't go away; it only, it seemed, got worse, and Carlos opened his mouth in a silent, white-toothed scream, his eyes screwed shut, and he was yelling what Grayson guessed were several fucks and shits in colorful explosions of Spanish.

"Hold on," Grayson said, and together they limped through the automatic doors, into the rainy streets of Raccoon City which smelled of death and garbage and petrichor, and down the street.

Then Raccoon General rumbled like a beast, and it went up like a flash-fire, tumbling into pieces of concrete, rebar, and glass. They managed to crawl under an aged Toyota pickup, which took the brunt of the damage. Debris rained down like an extinction event, and the Toyota's windshield shattered, the truck dented by huge chunks of concrete.

When it was over, and the smoke had settled, they crawled out from under the truck and limped back to St. Michael's. Though Grayson, stumbling and wishing everything was over, had carried Carlos most of the way.

In St. Michael's, Grayson found a UBCS medical kit, and Carlos cleaned and bandaged his wound as best as he could. The injury had cracked part of his kneecap, or that was what Carlos assumed anyway ("Yeah, pretty sure it cracked my patella. That's basically the 'kneecap', man. I learned some things," Carlos told him, while he was putting his leg in the splint. "I've always been a fast learner"), and Grayson figured Carlos probably knew more about that sort of thing than he did, so he didn't argue.

Grayson's injuries had mostly healed, and Carlos kept asking how that was even possible, but he didn't answer him, because he didn't know how it worked himself. "Maybe I'm just lucky," he said to Carlos, which seemed like a good enough answer. "Maybe it just looked worse than it really was."

They went into the chapel. Once upon a time, St. Michael's had hosted weddings in the chapel, the occasional baptism for Raccoon's more devout citizens; but now there was something funereal about it, like they were attending someone's viewing, waiting for the family and the friends to arrive with their flowers and their Tupperware food, and their polite condolences.

Jill lay on one of the pews, and she looked dead. While Carlos administered the vaccine to Jill in the form of a long hypodermic needle, Grayson waited. He sat in the pews and thought about his father. His father was a Catholic, and he'd often talked about his childhood in Hoboken, how his mother had made him attend church every Sunday, and how he'd hated it at first, but had, over time, resigned to it, and had eventually even started to like it.

His dad's faith had often put him at odds with the twins, with Alexander and Edward, who had viewed religion with the same hostile revulsion that Annette had viewed the video games Sherry played. Grayson remembered, vividly, several nights where his father had gotten into heated arguments with Alexia, who had hated religion, and everything even tangentially related to it.

"I remember," Alexia interrupted, flicking through the pages of A Treatise on Empiricism and Reason, "one particular night where Scott was waffling on about Jesus, as he often did, and I'd called him stupid." She frowned. "I still regret that."

"You were a snotty kid," Grayson said, and shrugged. He was reading about The Catalan, another mercilessly complex—to him, at least—chess gambit, and becoming increasingly annoyed at himself for struggling to understand the text, and the seemingly and needlessly complicated rules of the game. It was little wonder, he thought, why chess was so popular among intelligent assholes. "We all say things we regret. Do things we regret." He frowned.

"I'm looking forward to seeing Scott again," Alexia told him, and she turned a page in her book.

"He'll be happy to see you, too," Grayson said. "He might even cry."

"Now that Alfred is gone," Alexia said, and she said it so matter-of-factly, so easily, that it would have seemed to anyone else that she'd never cared about Alfred at all, "I'll be taking over Scott's care. I'm going to get him a nurse. Not live-in, as I like my privacy, but someone who will check on him every day. I'll get him the best bloody specialists and doctors—"

"Specialists and doctors who happen to work for Umbrella?" he interjected.

She looked at him, and her stare went through him like a knife. "Who else? My company has the best resources, Grayson. We have access to cutting-edge biotechnology and medicines. And his situation is a delicate one, one which cannot be treated by someone unfamiliar with—"

"One of your viruses put him in this mess," Grayson said. "Umbrella's done enough."

"Nobody could have foreseen this, Grayson."

"So you knew about this?"

"I did."

"And you did nothing?"

"The damage was already done, Grayson. Dr. Wesker injected him with the prototype many years before I was born."

"Project W."

"Precisely. The virus mutated, however, and that was what caused Scott's heart cancer." She put her book down, steepling her fingers. "I'll do everything I can to help him, but I'm not a medical doctor. I'm a virologist, Grayson. But rest assured, Scott will have whatever care he needs, and I will personally see to that."

"Will you be able to keep that promise?" he asked bluntly. "Umbrella's in the courts. The Raccoon Trials. You faked your death for fifteen years, Alexia, and when we get back stateside? You'll have a lot of explaining to do to the feds. And chances are, Spencer's gonna drag you into this shitstorm. I'm betting money now you wind up subpoenaed in the Supreme Court."

"We'll deal with that when the time comes," Alexia said. She smiled meaninglessly, picked up her book and resumed reading.

"Whatever you say, Lex."

"Have some faith, Grayson."