Chris was hovering over her when she finally came to, his face bruised and scraped, blood crusting his nostrils. "Good to see you're finally up," he said, and grinned.

Right, she thought. Alexia attacked me, dragged me somewhere. It was cold, wherever they were, and her breath steamed in the air. She extended her hand, and Chris grasped it, pulled her into a sitting position. He wasn't wearing his outer-coat; Jill realized, after a lag, he'd put it on her, and it smelled like nylon and freeze-dried sweat, with something that might have been cologne underneath it all.

She looked around, took inventory of her surroundings: shelves crusted with ice, and large plastic bags hanging from racks. Cooling fans whirred in their nacelles, rattling the ducts. A thin layer of frost dusted the concrete floor and walls. "Where the hell are we?" she asked, and looked at him. "And are you okay?"

"I'm fine," Chris said. "I think we're in a storage room." He darted a look around, then looked at her and said, "I'm more worried about Steve. Didn't even have a chance to negotiate with Alexia."

"You really think she would have negotiated shit?" Jill asked bluntly.

"Good point," Chris conceded, frowning. "Still," he continued, and stood up, helping her to her feet, "we gotta do something, Jill. He's just a kid, and he's runnin' outta time."

"If Grayson had been there, we could have done something," Jill said. "Used him as leverage to bait Alexia into helping Steve. But that went out the window." She paused, folded her arms across her chest, tucking her hands under her arms and staring at the toes of her boots. "I dunno if we can help him, Chris," she said, finally.

"Yeah," he said, and rubbed the back of his neck. "I'm not so sure either." Chris looked at her, something heavy settling in his blue eyes. "But we gotta try. Owe him that much, right? We're S.T.A.R.S. We help people."

"There's no S.T.A.R.S anymore," Jill reminded him, huddling in Chris's large, baggy jacket. "But I get what you mean." She looked around. One of the bags was unzipped; a glassy eye stared back at her. "Cadavers," she said, reflexively stepping away from the bag. Jill knew these bodies were dead—actually dead—but she'd trained herself to exercise caution around corpses, because it was better to be prescient than dead. Each bag was tagged with a pink slip, and on those pink slips were handwritten designation numbers, alphanumeric codes, dates, and the signatures of the researchers who had signed off on the bodies.

"Fucking Umbrella," Chris said, and shook his head. "How many of these people were innocent, and just pissed off the wrong person."

"Who knows. Maybe all of them," Jill said, feeling a macabre sense of camaraderie. If Alexia decided to follow through with their deal, then maybe Jill would wind up on the racks, too. Another body, another pink slip, another Umbrella secret nobody would know. But Jill sure as hell wasn't planning on going out like that. "There a way outta here?" she asked.

"Door, but it's bolted shut," Chris said.

"Shit," she said, scanning the room. Jill noticed something: the tracks led to a vertical hatch on the wall, a bio-hazard decal stamped on it, DISPOSAL stenciled below it in white. "Chris," she said, and beckoned him over. "Look. Might be able to get out through Disposal."

"Or fall right into a fuckin' meat-grinder," Chris said, frowning.

"You gotta better idea?"

"No," he said. "But lemme go first."

Jill rolled her eyes. "We're partners, Chris. We'll go together." She tried to pull the hatch open, but the thing barely budged. "Help me out," she said, glancing back at him.

"Might be automatic," Chris said, and pointed at the tracks. "Probably a button 'round here that moves the cadavers on the tracks, opens the hatch." He paused, wrinkling his nose. "Reminds me of this meat plant I worked at when I was eighteen," he remarked. "Lasted a month. Joined the Air Force right after."

"Means only one of us can go in," Jill said, looking at him. "I'll go," and she glanced at the hatch. "I don't think you'll fit in there, big guy."

Chris grinned. "Callin' me fat?"

"Calling you too muscular," she said, and giggled.

He flexed his arms for a moment, then frowned, his mood sobering. "Just be careful, okay?" Chris said, watching her.

"I'll be fine. I survived Nemesis," she reminded him, smiling.

Chris smiled. "Good point," he said, moving toward a control box bristling with switches and buttons. "Gonna move the racks," he announced, flipping the plastic cover off a green button and holding it down with his thumb.

The tracks rattled, carrying the body-bags toward the hatch in neat lines. The hatch slid open, and the bags disappeared into the darkness beyond it. Jill whiffed rot, something like scorched metal underneath that. Like the inside of a well-used convection oven. Furnace. "Not like I gotta choice," she muttered, climbing up into the hatch, hugging the wall.

The floor suddenly dropped out from underneath her, and she found herself buried under several body-bags. Jill shimmied out from underneath the pile with a loud grunt, looked around. Ash and bits of bone dusted the floor, and there were burners set in the blackened concrete. But furnaces, she knew, had technicians to maintain them, and technicians needed maintenance access. And if she was quick enough, she could get out before she got cooked…

A rusty door stood on the opposite end of the room, several warnings plastered all over it. Jill made her way over, tried to open it. Shuttered tight.

Panic set in, intense and electric. The burners hissed.

Scrambling back toward the disposal hatch, Jill grabbed the lip of it and vaulted through, hitting cold concrete and rolling. The hatch swung shut behind her, just as the burners erupted into flames. Chris stared at her, wide-eyed.

"No go," Jill said, and coughed, climbing to her feet. "We're stuck."

Claire was worried. Jill and Chris had been gone a long time, and Steve wasn't getting any better. His skin had the cool, waxen look of a corpse, tinged greenish-gray, which, in her mind, conjured images of cartoon nausea. He'd stopped sweating at some point, too, and his breathing roiled in his lungs like soup.

Claire did her best to distract him with conversation, mostly about their lives, about what they were planning to do once they left Antarctica, about their hobbies and interests. Steve liked computers and wanted to go into IT, he'd told her, in his rare lucid moments, and that his favorite sports were basketball and soccer, and that he'd been pretty good at both. Claire told him about Sherry Birkin, about Raccoon City, about her dreams of working for some kind of NGO that championed human rights and worked to hold conglomerates like Umbrella accountable for all the terrible shit they did in the world. And Steve just smiled, and told her she was too idealistic, but he liked that about her.

"Got too many pessimists in the world," Steve said, staring at her with tired, glazed eyes. "Like me, you know? It's nice there's still people like you, Claire. 'Cause it's people like you that make a difference in the world, 'cause they think a difference can be made."

Claire smiled.

"You gotta nice smile," Steve said.

She blushed. "Shut up."

"You think Alexia's gonna win?"

"What do you mean?"

"Exactly what I said," Steve said. "You think she's gonna win, or wind up like that guy from Raccoon City? The scientist. William Birkin."

"I wish I could say she definitely won't win, but…" Claire trailed off, staring at the clock on the wall.

"But?"

"Alexia's smart," Claire said. "So was William Birkin, I mean. But Alexia's freak-smart. I dunno, but I got this feeling that she's gonna be just fine. That she's already ten steps ahead of everyone, including Grayson and Umbrella."

"You think Grayson could turn on her?" he asked.

"Maybe," Claire said, shrugging. "But I don't think so."

"Shame," Steve said, lying on his back and staring at the ceiling. He closed his eyes. "She'd never expect him to go benedict."

"Would definitely help if he was in our corner."

Steve didn't reply.

"Steve?"

Silence.

Tears burned her eyes. Steve died at a quarter-past midnight.

He'd narrowed down Chris's and Jill's location to the old disposal room; Alfred had sealed it off a few months ago—one of the technicians had died after the burners had malfunctioned during a routine maintenance, and enough of his friends had complained about it that Alfred had to shut it down. As far as Grayson knew, nobody had been down there since then, which made it the perfect makeshift prison, like a modern oubliette.

Problem was, Alexia had been keeping tabs on him ever since he'd let Steve out of BOW storage. He'd tried plying her with drinks, but Alexia figured out pretty quickly that he was up to something, and so Grayson found himself scrutinized like a suspect in some high-profile crime, probably unable to even piss into a toilet without Alexia insisting that she hold his cock for him.

"Wesker's headed this way," Alexia told him. She'd found another dress, nearly identical to the one she'd ruined, and Grayson wondered how many of those fucking dresses she had, and where the hell was she even keeping them anyway? She gave him an odd look. "What?"

"How many of those dresses—you know what, doesn't matter." Grayson shook his head and leaned against the wall, folding his arms across his chest. "Joy. Wesker's exactly who I wanna see. Not a rescue team or anything, nope."

"Quit whinging, Grayson," she said, applying a fresh coat of nude lipstick, staring at her reflection in the antique vanity mirror. "I'll deal with Wesker quickly," she continued, setting the lipstick aside and picking up a glass bottle of some expensive perfume, dabbing it onto her pulse-points. Her porcelain dolls stared vacantly at them from their showcases. "You needn't worry."

Not worried about Wesker, Grayson thought. Worried about what he knows, what he might say to you about Annette. "My hero," he said.

Alexia put the perfume away, then went over to her bed, where she'd laid the aluminum case containing his father's research, and her journal. "We can't let Wesker get a hold of this," she said.

"We could put it in the attic," he suggested.

"Playroom," Alexia corrected, with a too-charming smile. "Attic makes it sounds so impersonal, dear. We'd spent a great deal of time up there as children."

Grayson smiled, then reached up and grabbed the latch. He was tall enough that he no longer needed the ladder-hook, and pulled the hatch open with a creak of old hinges. A ladder rattled down. "Ladies first," he said.

"You just want to look up my dress," Alexia teased, starting up the ladder.

"If I wanted to look up your dress, Lex, I'd just ask," Grayson said, climbing up after her. The ladder was comically small now, child-sized, and he worried the rungs might collapse under their combined adult weights. But nothing happened. They emerged in the stale, dusty air of the playroom, surrounded by the relics of childhood.

The room was large, the walls wainscoted in dark-lacquered wood. An inert television sat in the corner of the room, several Atari cartridges scattered around it, the console still wired to the TV, neglected and forgotten. "Remember that commercial for the Atari, the one with the old lady and kid?" he asked.

"Yes. What of it?"

He shrugged. "Nothing. Just remembered it, and thought it was funny."

Alexia rolled her eyes, framed in the cage of the lattice bay-window that overlooked the hydroponic yard. "You dwell too much on the past," she said.

"Sometimes I miss childhood," Grayson said, watching her lay the aluminum case on the windowsill, where, as a child, Alexia had spent hours curled up with her books between Atari matches. "I miss that you weren't part of it for fifteen years," he continued, watching her, her back turned toward him, the delicate lines of her scapulae tense and knitted together. "You missed a lot, Lex. Maybe I dwell so much on the past because I keep thinking of the what-ifs." He felt a deep, inexplicable anger then, slowly blooming into a smoldering frustration. "What if Alexia had been in the theater with me when I'd gone to see Back to the Future, and I went through that whole stupid fucking phase of wanting a Delorean. What if Alexia had been there when I'd graduated Columbia, gone out with me for drinks somewhere, and then a celebratory fuck in that shitty apartment I was renting in fucking Washington Heights, because I told Alfred I didn't want him paying my rent, he'd already paid for my college, and that was all I could afford working odd-jobs and bouncing gigs for clubs and bars. What if Alexia had married me before all that, soon as I turned eighteen in '87. We'd have a fucking eleven-year-old kid by now, Lex. So yeah, I guess I do dwell too much on the past."

Alexia stared at him, her expression unreadable. She said nothing.

"What if you'd been in Raccoon City with me," he continued, never taking his eyes off her. "You, me, and that eleven-year-old kid. You'd have worked at the Umbrella building there, the kid would've attended Michael Warren, that fancy fucking school on Ivy Street, and I would've probably still been a cop, because I'd liked being a cop."

"Grayson—"

"Would you just let me vent?" he snapped.

She opened her mouth, closed it, gestured for him to go on.

"Do you know how much shit happens in fifteen years?" he said. "How quickly things progress? Things could have been different for us, Lex. We could've lived a normal life. Or as normal a life as someone can live, being as smart and rich as you. For fifteen years, Lex, you were all I wanted—"

"I'm here now, Grayson," Alexia said, moving toward him, wafting perfume in his direction, pressing a too-warm finger to his lips. "And you'll have all those things, I promise. I'll make it up to you thousandfold, I swear."

"Are you sure about that?" he asked seriously. "I want kids, Lex. A relatively normal life—or as close to normal as I can get. Can you actually give me those things?"

"The T-Veronica likely rendered me sterile, but…" Alexia trailed off, met his eyes. "It's also possible that it didn't, and we've already made love several times, Grayson. But I don't want to get your hopes up." She paused, traced the curve of his lips with the tip of her finger, and said, "If I do wind up pregnant, well… there are going to be complications that will need to be addressed. That said, we'll discuss our future and our potential offspring, and all of my fuck-ups later, at a more opportune time. Right now, Wesker is strolling across the hydroponic yard."