Steve had been grabbed again, just as he'd been grabbed from the snow-truck, and as he slowly came to, he found himself in a concrete room lit by halogen lights. Enormous steel coffins, each one stamped with the Umbrella logo and a bio-hazard decal, were racked up around him. Bundles of multicolored rubber cables hung from the ceiling like synthetic ganglia, and the air carried an antiseptic tang that reminded him of a doctor's office.
He was strapped down in a chair, zip-ties cutting into his wrists and ankles, and his legs and arms ached deeply. The door, which stood opposite him, slid open with a hiss, and Alexia stepped inside. "You weren't hard to recover," she said, smiling the sort of smile he imagined belonging to serial killers. Her eyes, too, were the sort he imagined on serial killers: so pale and blue that they were almost luminous. "There isn't anywhere in this facility you could go that I couldn't find you, Burnside."
"Fuck you," he said, tasting the blood in his mouth.
"That's rather impolite." Alexia pushed her hands into the pockets of her crisp lab coat. "Tell me, Burnside," she said, circling his chair like a patient buzzard, "what brings a seventeen-year-old boy to Antarctica?" A thoughtful pause. "You're a senior in high-school, yes?" She leaned over his backrest, her face next to his, and he could feel the heat of her skin, the silky brush of her hair against his cheek. "Shouldn't you be there with your little friends, preparing for university," and Alexia traced the curve of his cheeks with her fingers, "and not—" she gouged his skin with her nails, made him jerk and yelp from the pain "—murdering a woman's twin brother?"
"Alfred killed my dad," Steve hissed, his cheeks burning where her fingernails had penetrated the skin, warm blood trickling down his face.
"You didn't answer my question, little boy. Why are you here?"
"Umbrella," he said, watching her in his periphery, "killed my mom, took me and dad. I helped him steal data from the company. He was a sysadmin." Feeling brave, or at the very least resigned to his fate, Steve hawked and spat a gob of bloody phlegm at her, catching the lapel of her lab coat. "Good enough answer for you, bitch?"
Alexia struck him in the jaw, made his head snap sideways. His jaw hurt badly, and so did his neck. "Good enough, I suppose," she said coolly. "So your father found himself on Rockfort for stealing from my company. Is that supposed to make me pity you?"
"Oswell Spencer owns Umbrella. Everyone knows that."
Alexia stopped, put her hands on the armrests of the chair and leaned down, so their eyes met. If she wasn't such a crazy bitch, he would have thought she was beautiful. Their faces were inches apart; he felt her warm breath on his skin. "Oswell Spencer stole Umbrella from the Ashfords," she said matter-of-factly. "He's doing little else than keeping my seat warm."
"You're as fuckin' delusional as your brother," Steve said, and that earned him another smack across the face, this one harder, more painful, than the last. "Best you got?" he asked, despite the pain. "Fuckin' limp-wristed baby-bitch never hit nothin' but the maid in her life."
"If you think you're going to get under my skin with such ridiculous insults, you'll be sorely disappointed," Alexia said, her tone never quite breaking its careful, icy tension. "I survived a pit of vipers at only ten-years-old." She smiled without any warmth. "What were you doing at ten-years-old, Burnside?" she asked mildly. "Watching cartoons and playing with action figures?"
"Grayson ain't here," Steve observed aloud. "What'd you do to him?"
Alexia giggled, and her giggle sent a chill down his spine. "If you must know," she said, "I fucked him silly, and now he's sleeping. He won't save you this time."
Something long and sharp appeared in Alexia's hand, and it took him a moment to realize that it was a hypodermic needle filled with colorless liquid. Panic set in, and his nerves started screaming. What the fuck was she going to inject him with?
"Don't look so nervous," Alexia said, giggling.
"Claire!" he screamed.
"Not feeling so tough now, Burnside?" she mocked, flicking the syringe to settle any air-bubbles, then ejecting a bit of excess liquid. "You won't get out of here," Alexia continued, holding his head still and needling him in the neck. "This," she said, as he thrashed helplessly in the chair, his veins and capillaries filling with white-hot fire, "will be the worst pain you've ever felt in your life."