"What the fuck were you thinking?"

Steve shrugged, hawked and spat a gob of phlegm on the ground. Rain pattered steadily around them. Flames crackled and sputtered, some component shifting within the frame of a burnt Jeep and settling with a plaintive groan. "I wasn't aimin' at Harman," he said, finally. "He jumped in the way."

"He bought us time," Claire said, showing him the sticky, blood-flecked ID, Hank James's laminate face gazing tiredly back at them. "To get this," she added, slipping it inside the breast-pocket of her vest. "He helped us."

"And took a bullet for Alfred," Steve pointed out. "You really gonna trust some asshole takes a bullet for that psychopath?"

"Alfred's all he's got now," Claire reminded him, frowning. "Not justifying…" She trailed off, feeling a pang of guilt. She'd meant to say she wasn't justifying Alfred, justifying whatever he'd done to Steve's father. But instead she decided not to say anything at all, because sometimes that was better than maybe saying something stupid.

As they walked through the gates of the training facility, they were greeted by the business end of an automatic. Rodrigo's tanned face stared down the barrel, nut-brown eyes glazed with pain, bloodshot. Sweat pebbled on his skin, beading on his mustached upper-lip.

"Rodrigo," Claire greeted, hands up. "Good to see you on your feet."

"I thought you were a zombie," Rodrigo said gruffly, lowering his gun and wincing. He groaned in pain, slumping against a rusting stack of fuel barrels.

Claire looked at the bandage taped to Rodrigo's side, under his ribs, the gauze stained brown. "How's your wound?" she asked.

"Hurts like a bitch," Rodrigo hissed, looking to his right. Several zombies lay in the mud, twitching, skulls reduced to red pulp. "Cleared the area," he said, and looked at her, something in his eyes flashing. "You get us a way into the airport?"

She showed him the ID. "Right here," she said.

Rodrigo studied the card, dark features composed in a look of vacant intensity. "Yeah, I know—knew—him," he said, and straightened up with sharp grimace, cursing under his breath. "That'll work."

"You sure you're gonna make it, man?" Steve asked.

Rodrigo shook his head. "No," he said. "But it's better than sitting around and waiting to find out."

"Claire."

She looked at Steve, raising her eyebrows. "Yeah?"

"I can't leave," Steve said, frowning. He looked beaten-down, tired, and worried—all at once. "I need to find my dad. I can't leave Rockfort without him."

Claire reached out, and Steve flinched, unused, it seemed, to any kind of human contact which didn't consist of fists or feet. She squeezed gently, then said, "I know you're worried about your dad. But we can't stay here."

Rodrigo sighed, and when he moved, it was laborious, soft with the chinking of magazines in the pockets and pouches of his tactical harness. "Kid," he said, brow furrowing. "We don't got time. I feel for you, I really do. I lost my family to Umbrella as well. But the chances of him surviving—"

"You won't be able to fly the plane without me," Steve said, scowling hard at them. His hands curled slowly into fists. "You're fucked if I don't come. And I won't come, not until I find my dad."

Claire looked at Rodrigo, hoping for some kind of support, another vote in favor of leaving. But got nothing. "Your dad's David Burnside, right?" Rodrigo asked, a gravity in his expression.

Something, a spark of hope, lit Steve's face. "Yeah."

"I don't know where he went exactly, but we were holding him in Block Ten of the men's compound," Rodrigo told him. "He could still be there, hiding. It wasn't hit as hard by the infected as other parts of the compound, mostly because it was already light on population. Alfred kept persons-of-interest there."

"Why would Alfred give a shit about Steve's dad?" Claire asked.

"Not sure. David, he mumbled a lot about some data he'd stolen, that Alfred was interested in it. Or maybe Umbrella was?" The guard shrugged, then winced again, doubling over. Sweat dripped in fat, oily beads from his face. "Fuck," he groaned, squeezing his eyes shut and clutching his wound, "that hurts."

"Need you to hang in there, Rodrigo," Claire said, helping him stand up. He nudged her off him, and she moved away, toward Steve, settling beside him. "Don't go dying on us, okay?"

"Going to try my best," Rodrigo said, wiping his face on his thick forearm, his rifle dangling from its nylon sling.

"Guess we should get over to Block Ten." Claire paused, offered the ID to Rodrigo. "Go ahead and secure us a plane. Probably safer than out here, and they probably got a first-aid kit."

She knew it was a gamble, trusting an Umbrella employee with their only ticket off Rockfort; but unless Rodrigo knew how to fly, he wasn't going anywhere. And despite his dubious occupation, Rodrigo seemed like a good guy. Claire had always had a good sense for that kind of thing, seeing the good in people, to the point Jill had once told her that it would kill her one day, that naivety and quickness to trust, if she wasn't careful. But Jill had twelve more reasons, and two incidents at the hands of Umbrella, to be more jaded about the world than Claire did.

"Sounds like a good idea," Rodrigo agreed, slipping the ID into a zippered pouch on his harness. "I'll keep the plane warm." He took something out of his back-pocket—a piece of fax paper that had been folded several times—and gave it to her. "I drew a map," he said. "When I was back in the isolation cell. Sitting around like that was driving me insane, and I figured you could use it. It's crude, but it'll give you the gist of the prison's layout."

Claire carefully unfolded the map. The map consisted of several rectangles and squares which represented buildings and areas, and lines which represented the roads connecting them, all of it drawn in shaky blue pen. Rodrigo had crossed out areas that were blocked off. An area to the north of The Palace was crosshatched, a solid blue block in the middle of it.

"What's the crosshatched area?" she asked, looking at him. "And the little blue block?"

"Alfred's home," Rodrigo said. "My father helped build the bridge that leads there, but I don't know how to reach it. He died when I was young." His expression guttered a moment, and then it was unreadable.

"I'm sorry," she said, and meant it.

"He wasn't the only one Umbrella worked to death," Rodrigo said, and shook his head sadly. "Back when the island was called San Amaro. A lot of people died transforming San Amaro into Rockfort."

Claire said nothing, because there was nothing she could say.