His lips started to burn. It started as a tingle, then gradually intensified, until it felt as if he was kissing hot cast-iron. He quickly peeled his lips from hers; his lips were raw and red, and he could feel a painful bubble forming on his tongue, as though he'd burned it on a slice of hot pizza.
"What the fuck?" he said, and licked at his sore, scalded lips.
"Sorry," Alexia said. There was something in her eyes, a kind of fear. She touched him, her skin fever-hot.
"Jesus Christ," he said, and stood up. He touched her forehead; it was on fire. "You sick?" he asked, and checked again. Still hot. Grayson frowned. "Got some kinda fever?" Grayson stared at her, deflating, feeling a tight whorl of disappointment, of knowing, in his chest. "Lex..."
She stared at him, expressionless.
"Sorry," he said, and pulled away. Grayson paced, glancing at the array of camera-feeds on the monitoring station. Clouds of snow tumbled past the cameras, washing out the horizon and the escarpments. Whiteout. "You need to put on some clothes," he said, and mostly to distract himself from the numbness of his lips and his burned tongue, and from the fact Alfred was dead and Alexia wasn't anymore, Grayson started to look around for clothes. Then his looking around became a frenzied, frustrated search as he shoved chairs out of the way, zip-tied bundles of cables, containers and filing cabinets full of print-outs and oak-tag folders, large metal canisters of what he presumed was liquid nitrogen. He caught his foot on a hose rigged to Alexia's cryo-unit and tripped, landing hard on the tiled floor. He didn't get back up. He didn't want to get back up. Alfred was dead, and he wasn't sure if Alexia was even human anymore.
Funny that a burned mouth freaks you out, he told himself. Yet you were completely cool with the fucking tentacle, asshole. Maybe it had been easier to separate the tentacle from Alexia, Grayson decided. But her saliva, that was something he couldn't separate from Alexia, because it was a tangible part of her, one he'd tasted for himself.
"Grayson."
He rolled onto his back and stared at her. She'd found a lab coat somewhere, and it was too big for her. She looked concerned.
"I need to show you something," he said, and he did.
Back in the hangar—Grayson still remembered his way around the facility—he showed her Alfred, who had turned the blue-pale of the several-hours dead, his body partially eaten; though Alexia had killed the zombie—one of the survivors from Rockfort, still dressed in its prison rags—who had been responsible for the mess. Alexia squatted beside his rigid, bloody ruin of a body, hugging herself in the over-sized lab coat. She looked as if she wanted to cry, but couldn't remember how to.
Grayson wished he wasn't so numb to seeing this sort of thing, but it had been a sight he'd witnessed a thousand times over in Raccoon City. And he'd been away from Alfred for so long that, though the sadness was definitely there and it hurt badly, it wasn't as intense as it should have been. Still, he cried.
Alexia didn't cry, though she appeared continuously on the brink of it. Maybe whatever had happened to her inside that tube had made it impossible for her to cry. Maybe her body had evolved to the point that it viewed sadness as a devolution, and so it had discarded it in favor of some better, more productive evolutionary trait.
She took Alfred's sapphire ring from what was left of his finger and dropped it into the pocket of her lab coat. Then she took off Alfred's ammo belt and gashed her palm with the sharp corner of the buckle, trickling blood over his corpse as though she was anointing it in some primitive funerary rite.
A moment later, Alfred burst into flames that bordered white in color, the stink of butane and sulfur in the air, and underneath that, of burnt hair and charred flesh.
Alexia stood up and stepped away from the makeshift pyre, dropping the belt. The wound on her hand knitted back together, the flesh smooth and white again. "We couldn't bury him," she said, finally. Then, to the crusted black thing that had once been Alfred, "I'm sorry you won't rest in our family tomb, brother."
"It's the best we could do," he said, wiping at his eyes and wondering why her flammable blood didn't bother him as much as it should have. Grayson wasn't usually one for words, but he wanted to say something, and so he did: "Alfred, you had a million and one problems, and we only solved one of them—our friendship. I'm sorry I couldn't save you. We could have solved the rest of your problems, because your sister's here now, and she's always been good at that kind of thing. But it's too late now…" He realized he was rambling and shook his head, turning away. "I'm sorry, Lex," he said, meaning it.
"Was it the boy or the girl who shot him?"
He told her.
"He's still here," she said. "So is the girl."
"The girl didn't do anything," Grayson said. "It was Burnside. Redfield had nothing to do with Alfred's death."
"But the boy cares about Redfield," Alexia said, her expression unreadable as always; but he knew what she was intimating. "I'm going to have fun with these little rats, Grayson," she said, conversationally. "Like the dragonfly and the ants."
"Do whatever you want to Burnside, Lex, but Redfield's innocent."
Alexia was already walking away.
The Antarctica facility was built like one of Alexia's ant-colonies with its zigzagging, meandering tunnels. They rode a lift down, and as it came to a stop and the doors slid open, the familiar diorama of the mansion greeted them, its stoic Palladian facade beyond a yard of hydroponic grass banked on all sides by walls painted uncannily to resemble a lazy summerscape.
Grayson crossed the yard behind Alexia, past flowerbeds his father had planted years ago, but had since been tended to by the yard's hydroponics systems. Automatically, he jogged ahead of Alexia and grabbed one of the double-doors and opened it for her with a squeak of old, infrequently oiled hinges just as he'd done when they were kids, because he liked to do that for Alexia, and because his father had hammered into his head ("Always get the door for a lady, Grayson," his father had said. "You weren't raised in a barn") that men were supposed to do things like that. She flashed him a smile, and he smiled back, following her inside.
The scent of dead flowers, from vases his father had placed around the mansion all those years ago, permeated the foyer, mingling oddly with the scent of Cuban cigars, the ones Alexander had liked to smoke, and of sweet Oriental tobacco from Edward Ashford's pipe habit. It smelled, Grayson decided, exactly as he remembered it. Like home. Real home.
The foyer was large. The floor was of imported marble, the walls wainscoted in dark cherry-wood. The room, like the rest of the mansion, was furnished with antiques the Ashfords had brought from their ancestral home in England. Suits of 15th-Century English armor stood against the walls, halberds in their hands, glittering in the light of the enormous Venetian crystal chandelier that hung from the domed ceiling like an iced upside-down layer cake. Painted on the ceiling was a Baroque-styled quadratura that depicted the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, which, his father had once told him, had been Edward Ashford's favorite Greek myth. Edward had commissioned it, his father had said, when his wife had died of cancer in the 1950s. Grayson had always liked it; he remembered sitting on the staircase as a kid, staring up at the fresco and trying to identify all the little, subtle details in it.
They walked upstairs to the balustrade, then through a door and down the hallway. They passed the door to Alexander's study (it had been Edward's beforehand), Alexander's laboratory (still shuttered tight, Grayson had found after he'd tried the lock, even all these years later), Alexander's bedroom, the drawing room, the library, Alexia's old study… If walking down Memory Lane was a thing, then this, he thought, was walking down Memory Avenue. All of his childhood memories came flooding back to him, and Grayson found himself smiling at familiar dents and scuffs on the walls from their frequent rough-housing, at the row of height-charts his father had marked off in old strips of masking tape at the end of the hallway beside his bedroom door, their names and dates written in his father's precise, old-fashioned handwriting. When he saw Alfred's name, however, his gaze lingered, and the smile slowly slipped from his face.
Alexia touched his hand, the tenderness surprising him. "Come on," she said.
Grayson nodded and let her take his hand, and they walked like that, hand-in-hand, to her childhood bedroom.
Her real bedroom looked exactly like her fake bedroom on Rockfort, but more lived-in. He could still smell the traces of flowery perfume in the air, from when Alexia had accidentally knocked over a bottle and it had soaked into the antique Oriental carpet (his father, Grayson recalled, had been absolutely furious about it, but had never raised his voice, had just sternly reprimanded Alexia, and she'd never spilled another bottle again). The walls were red-papered, on it printed tessellations of gold fleur-de-lis. Porcelain dolls gazed emptily at them from their showcases, somehow eerier than the reproductions in the Rockfort mansion.
Alexia removed the lab coat, standing naked, her back toward him. For someone as tall and willowy as her, her backside was round and shapely rather than rectangular and flat, with a small beauty mark on the right cheek. Grayson grinned at the observation, but said nothing, turning around and picking through her ancient vinyl collection, which was exactly as they'd left it.
He saw a couple of Journey albums, and snorted. "Journey, Lex?" he said. "Seriously?"
And just like that, the air of some untouchable mutant goddess fell away, and Lex was the awkward, clumsy girl he remembered. She flushed. "Am I not allowed to have my guilty bloody pleasures?" she asked, dressing in some sort of antique-looking gown that might have been purple or black.
"I bet you had a Steve Perry poster in your room somewhere," he remarked, amused. "Anyway, I like Air Supply." He paused. Annette. Putting the album back on the shelf, Grayson pulled another at random. Eurythmics. He pulled another. One of Kate Bush's earlier albums. "Never took you for a Kate Bush woman," he remarked. "She made a new album right after you—well, I'll let you check it out when you can. Lot of stuff you've missed."
"I listen to everything," she remarked, combing her hair in the vanity mirror. She looked over her shoulder at him and smirked. Now it was Alexia's turn to snort. "Air Supply, Grayson?" she said. "Really? Didn't they do that one oppressively saccharine song, Sweet Dreams?"
"The best ballad ever," he said, chuckling and putting her album back where he'd found it. "You look good," Grayson said, without thinking, giving her a once-over. He leaned against her vinyl showcase and crossed his arms. "Really good," he added. "You should consider modeling, Lex. Get outta this Umbrella shit."
"You never had a problem with my 'Umbrella shit' before," she said, turning in her seat to look at him, draping one long, pale leg over the other. Alexia seemed to read something in his face, and said, "Something big happened, didn't it?"
"Yeah," he said. "Raccoon City's gone."
"Gone?"
"Blown up," he said, matter-of-factly. "Government dropped a couple missiles on it. Wiped it off the map. Now Umbrella's tangled up in the Raccoon Trials. It's all over the news; it's like fucking Nuremberg in the Supreme Court."
Alexia stared, silent. But he could see the disbelief in her eyes.
"I dunno what you and Umbrella are planning," he said. "Because I know you didn't fund this cryo-shit yourself. My dad was your legal guardian after Alexander vanished, right? He was in charge of your finances. Dad would've never let you have that kinda money to do something so reckless with." He stared at her, then asked, after a long pause, "What are you and Spencer planning?"
"I don't know what you mean, Grayson," Alexia said.
"Bullshit."
Alexia shrugged.
"You're gonna have a lot of shit hitting the fan when we get outta here," he told her. "Guarantee you're gonna get called into the courts, and then there's the whole situation of faking your death you'll need to sort out with the feds. You're a dual-citizen Lex. You're gonna have a lot of paperwork to do and phone-calls to make, both in the States and in England. And then there's Alfr—arrangements to see to."
"I'll worry when I need to," she said smoothly, and stood up, meeting his gaze. Her eyes were so pale they were almost white. She trailed her finger along the thick line of his eyebrow, smiling. "We've been apart for fifteen years, Grayson, and all you can talk about is Spencer and the bloody courts. Then again, I suppose that's like you, always worrying about me."
"Lex, Spencer's gonna make you his patsy," he said. "You'll wind up serving time in a fucking max-security prison while that fucking paraplegic mummy and his pets on the Board get off, scot-free. With your company." He frowned. "I may not like Umbrella, but I rather it winds up in your hands than in Spencer's arthritic claws."
"You're doing it again," Alexia said, pressing her finger against his lips. The pad of her finger was warm, as if there was a tiny fire crackling under the skin. "Worrying about me. I'm a big girl now, Grayson," and she gave him a coy smile. "I can handle Spencer. All right?"
He nodded.
"You forget that I'm very good at seeing the long-term," she said. "That's why I waited for you. Why I told Alfred to entrust—"
"What?"
Alexia pulled back slightly, surprised. "I wasn't sure if the cryostasis tank would function properly," she said. "I needed someone there to ensure that, should things go sideways, to manually override the tank's automatic processes so I didn't die." Her mouth became a thin, pink line. "He didn't tell you," she said, barely containing the contempt in her voice. "I shouldn't even be surprised."
"You wanted me there? To override the controls?"
"If something had gone wrong, yes. Alfred wasn't reliable," she said. "You've been nothing but reliable, Grayson. For our entire life, you were always the one I could fall back on. Yes, I wanted you there. I wanted you to be my contingency plan."
"I thought you were dead for fifteen years," he said, barely loud enough to hear himself.
Now Alexia barely hid her anger, and said, "He didn't even have the courtesy to tell you that I was alive?"
"I think he forgot," Grayson said, and paused. Forgot until he didn't, anyway. He sat on the edge of her bed, the coil-springs creaking, suddenly feeling very tired again. The duvet smelled musty from infrequent airing.
"You need rest," she said, and strode over to him, gently coaxing him down onto the mattress. "When was the last time you slept?"
"Other than the couple winks I caught in the hangar? I'm not sure."
Alexia pursed her lips, then sat on the bed beside him. "Sleep, Grayson," she told him, and suddenly he remembered a very specific moment in which Alexia, aged six, had told eight-year-old him to sleep with that same stern look on her face, because he'd been feeling unwell and insisting that he didn't need any rest. "We can speak more later," she continued, and laid on her side next to him, raising herself on her elbow and propping her head in her hand. "The undead, as far as I know, can't use elevators. We'll be safe here."
For some reason that reminded him of Wesker, and he said, "Albert was looking for you, back on Rockfort."
"Albert Wesker?"
"Yes."
Alexia looked thoughtful, and said, "Interesting."