Jill stared at the prisoner number stamped on the zombie's clothes, shaking her head. "Fucking prisoners," she said to Chris. "Umbrella was keeping fucking prisoners here."

"You sound about as surprised as me," Chris said dryly.

"Not surprised in the slightest," she agreed, holstering her gun and stepping over the corpse.

They made their way down a drab hallway, past empty offices, and a row of payphones that no longer worked. A poster of a USS soldier was taped to the wall, advertising dates for the next round of try-outs, and beside it was a print-out listing materials that the would-be recruit would need to bring: a signed physical examination, a completed application, hazard handling and retrieval certifications, four different shots and the paperwork to prove they'd gotten them, and their company ID. It reminded Jill of the S.T.A.R.S tests, made her feel weirdly nostalgic.

"I'm just hoping that, you know… that Claire's okay," Chris said, as they turned a corner into another hallway, this one lined with doors, reprints of famous paintings, etiolated ferns and snake-plants in cracked ceramic pots. Inert security cameras stared at them from the ceiling like calm cyclopean insects. "She's tough, I know. But this place? It's like a fucking gulag, Jill."

"Relax," she told him. "She's fine, Chris. She survived Raccoon City without you, right?" Jill glanced over her shoulder. Why did it feel like they were being watched? "You get that feeling we're not alone?" she asked. Then, mostly to herself, "I swear to fucking God, if there's another tyrant here…"

"I think," Chris said, amused, "if there was a Nemesis wandering around here, Jill, we'd have known by now."

"Gotta point," she conceded. "Would have been eating a rocket or two by now."

"You know you're on Umbrella's shit-list when they send a giant with a fuckin' rocket launcher after you," Chris said, chuckling, pieces of shattered ceramic crunching under his boots. "I saw those cameras," he said. "Maybe we can find a security room and look through the CRT feeds for some sign of Claire."

"Probably lots of security rooms on this island," she agreed. "Umbrella wouldn't want word of their fucking concentration camp reaching the media."

It didn't take them long to find one of those security rooms. A placard on one of the doors in the hallway read SECURITY, and beneath that, a placard in red that read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. It had an electronic lock, but someone had ripped the thing off, and now it dangled by its wires like a dislodged eye, sparking. "I'll head in first," Chris told her, nudging the door open with his boot. "Watch my back, Jill."

"Sure," she said, glancing left, then right. Nobody, dead or otherwise, in the hallway. She followed him into the room.

A fan turned slowly on the ceiling, the shadows of its blades scudding across rough plaster walls where several cockroaches skittered between cracks. A man's stiff corpse was zip-tied to a chair with his throat cut, his shirt crusted with blood. "Security officer," Chris said, unclipping the man's blood-sticky ID card. "Paul Steiner. He's been dead for a while. Maybe a day or less."

Jill shook her head. "Poor bastard," she remarked, and strode over to the CRT monitors. Some feeds showed the exterior and interior of the training facility, while others displayed the prison compound. And what a prison compound, Jill thought, wrinkling her nose. Concrete walls topped with razor-wire, chain-link pens that looked like something on a cattle-farm, and on one of the monitors was a yard, three concrete posts within it, and a wall stained with dark splatters. "They had fucking firing squads," she said.

"Not such a poor bastard now, huh?"

"How does anyone do this kind of work?" Jill asked, shaking her head. She'd asked the same question in Raccoon City, then later in NEST-2, and now she'd asked it here, and still had no answers. "How do they go to sleep every night after watching people lined up against a fucking wall and shot? Is there some kind of clause in Umbrella's fucking contract that says you have to be a certified fucking psychopath to work for them?"

Chris sat down at the monitoring station and said, "It's fear. They know if they open their mouths, they'll be next. It's a matter of not rocking the boat." He started tapping something out on the keyboard. "Like how Brad sided with Irons."

Jill frowned. She'd been pissed at Brad about that, maybe had even hated him, up until he'd saved her life in The Blackjack Bar. She guessed it was kind of like that with Umbrella's low-rung employees. They just needed a push, or at least left with nothing to lose. "What're you doing, anyway?" she asked.

"Looking through all these feeds from the day Leon got the e-mail, to now. I need to know if Claire's okay, or if she—" he glanced at the feed of the execution yard and his voice caught "—I don't even want to think about that."

"You don't give Claire enough credit," Jill said, moving away from the monitoring station and sweeping the room for any unpleasant surprises, finding nothing. Steiner hadn't been bitten—she'd double-checked—so he wasn't coming back. She returned to Chris and sat down in the chair beside him. "But that's just an older sibling thing, I guess. Always worrying. I wouldn't know what that's like. I'm an only child."

"But you have parents. Same thing," Chris said, playing through timestamps, his mouth a thin, hard line. "I'm all Claire's got, and she's all I got."

"Not true," Jill said, looking at him. "You've got me, Chris."

He looked at her and smiled.

While Chris combed through security footage, Jill occupied her time with a deck of cards she'd found in a drawer, and then, after several rounds of Solitaire, she sat down, kicked her muddy boots up on the monitoring station, pulled the bill of her old S.T.A.R.S hat over her eyes, and napped.

Then, after what had felt like only a few minutes, Chris was shaking her awake and saying, "There's someone on the island, Jill. Alive."

She pushed the bill of her hat up and squinted at the monitors, her vision blurred at the edges by sleep. Chris had paused the recording. In it was a blond man in black fatigues, though his back was turned toward the camera and the resolution was grainy. Jill could barely make out the H.C.F stamped on the back of his Kevlar vest. The timestamp placed the video at around four hours ago. "He seems familiar," she said.

"That's not the craziest thing," Chris said. "Watch." He rewound the video, then played it.

The man in the video was running so fast that the motion sensors on the camera were barely able to track him. He streaked across the yard, then jumped a twenty-foot wall topped with razor-wire with the ease of a pole-vaulter. Jill stared. "Did you increase the speed?" she asked, and looked at him.

Chris shook his head. "No," he said, "that was normal speed."

"And he really jumped that wall?"

"Yes."