"Sit down," Grayston instructed, and gestured at the sofa in the living-room. He put the first-aid kit on the coffee-table.
Alexia sat down. "Though I find your worrying very endearing, it's unnecessary," she said. Though she would be lying if she'd said she didn't like the way Grayson doted on her, the way he fussed over little things like cuts and bruises. "It's just a bloody cut, Grayson. You're not excising a brain tumor."
"Just shut up for a second," he said with the gravity of a doctor preparing for surgery, opening the kit.
"So serious," she teased.
Grayson cleaned up her forehead with a gauze soaked in antiseptic, and Alexia winced at the sting of it, and then he applied three butterfly bandages to her gash. He looked disconcerted—not at her cut, but at something else, Alexia decided—his mouth a thin, hard line. Then, "Dad's not home."
"You mean to tell me Veronica was alone?"
"Unless dad slipped out the backdoor as we got in? Yes," he said.
Alexia bristled, but as angry as she was at Scott's negligence, she worried. It wasn't like Scott to take off in the middle of the night, least of all while he was watching Veronica, and to do so without saying a word to either of them. Scott was a careful and deliberate man, painfully so, and took his duties very seriously.
"Have you tried ringing his mobile?" she asked.
"Nothing," Grayson replied, frowning.
Now her anger had been deposed by concern, and she said, "We need to find him. Should we file a missing persons report?"
"Gotta wait twenty-four hours before we can."
"I could send the USS out," Alexia said.
"That requires going through proper channels, and we don't got time for Umbrella's bureaucratic bullshit," Grayson said, and stood up. He packed up the first-aid kit and latched it shut. "Besides," he continued, tucking the kit under his arm, "Umbrella's not gonna waste resources on him, Lex. He's just some butler. Company don't give a shit unless he's an asset that can indict them."
"But he is an asset that can indict them," Alexia said.
"It's his word against Umbrella's. They'd just do to him what they did to William Birkin."
"Then what do you propose we do, Grayson?" Alexia asked, and stood up, looked him right in the eyes, waiting.
Grayson, with absolutely no pleasure, told her exactly what he proposed they should do, then turned and left the room. Twenty minutes later, Alexia was begrudgingly ringing Wesker's mobile.
"Alexia, so unlike you to call," came Wesker's voice, oozing over the line like an oil-slick. She could hear, faintly, the grumble of his car engine in the background, and the sounds of heavy traffic: horns blaring, the rattle of a passing freight-truck. "I was just on my way to see you."
Alexia narrowed her eyes. "Why?"
"So suspicious," Wesker said, unperturbed. "Relax, I'm not up to anything nefarious. In fact, you owe me a thank you."
"And why would that be, Albert?"
"I found Scott. That's what you were going to call me about, I'm sure."
Alexia glanced at the living-room door, but Grayson wasn't there. Probably had gone to bed. She strode over to the window, pulling aside the curtains and peering outside, watching the street. A man hustled along the sidewalk, walking two dogs that kept, to her annoyance, pawing at her hydrangea bushes and sniffing around her fence. "Where was he?" she asked, finally.
"Misery Road," Wesker said. "The middle of the boonies, that place. Banjo Country is what William used to call it."
She pulled the curtains shut and said, "What the fuck was he doing out there?"
"He didn't say. He's quite banged up. Half-dead, in fact. I'm going to have to really scrub the upholstery."
Her heart lurched, then dropped into her stomach. "What did you do to him?" she said icily.
"Nothing. I found him like that. See you soon."
Forty-five minutes later, Wesker showed up on her doorstep, his arm looped around a very bloody, half-conscious Scott. The front of Scott's button-up, which, just a few hours ago, had been sparkling white, was torn and red.
"In my lab—now," Alexia said, ducking under Scott's other arm and yoking it across her shoulders. They hurried into the basement. "Hold on to him for a moment," she said to Wesker, slipping out from under Scott's limp bulk and rushing over to Veronica's portrait. She popped the ruby out of her necklace and pushed it into the indentation on Veronica's throat.
Bolts thudded out of place as the locking mechanism disengaged, and the hidden door rolled aside on its magnetic track, revealing a glowing rectangle of anti-microbial light. Alexia ushered Wesker through the door, and it shuttered behind him, gaskets sealing with a hiss.
"Leave it to the Ashfords to be so unnecessarily ostentatious," Wesker remarked, laying Scott on the op-table Alexia directed him to.
Her laboratory was a microcosm of NEST 3: anti-microbial steel and lights, and all of the latest biotechnology from Umbrella Japan's R & D lab. And because Spencer was so desperate for a cure to his illness, her laboratory was bankrolled entirely by a special research fund he'd set aside for her. Of course, Alexia did the bare minimum for Spencer, forwarding the occasional report she'd trussed up in esoteric medical jargon to show she'd at least been doing something to justify the company's money. Here, she toiled on the A-Series for The Connections instead, though they hadn't been in contact of late, and devoted the rest of her time to tinkering with the mutamycete and T-Veronica, hoping to resolve her remission problem but, to her disappointment, making little headway in the matter.
She walked over to Scott, past the cultivation tanks containing the fetal abstracts of the A-Series, and peeled him out of his sticky, blood-soaked shirt, discarding the scraps in the biohazard disposal.
And froze upon seeing his chest. Or, rather, upon seeing what was left of it.
A ragged hole yawned between Scott's pectorals, and after a bit of probing, mostly to confirm that she wasn't in fact hallucinating it, Alexia found that he no longer possessed his heart. Someone had, quite literally, ripped it out of his body. Yet Scott was breathing, alive.
"What the fuck," Alexia said aloud.
"Someone Kali-Maed him," Wesker remarked, raising his eyebrows over the frame of his sunglasses.
"I need… I need to run an analysis," Alexia stammered out. "Yes. Tests. Several tests." She swung over the articulated monitor and, by memory, tapped out a sequence on the keys. The scanner, the one built into the op-table, whirred to life with a noise like an ancient fax-machine, and Scott's vitals appeared on the monitor, all of them stable. "I need to take a tissue sample," she said.
"I've never seen you look so unsettled, Alexia."
"Get out of my laboratory, Albert. We'll chat later," Alexia said.
"Don't you want to hear me out?" he asked, a dark chuckle rattling in his throat.
"Not particularly," she said. "I want to work. Go away."
"You saw Miranda, didn't you?"
Alexia stared at him, narrowing her eyes. Silence settled over them like a thick dust, and then she asked, "What do you know?"
Wesker reached into the pocket of his jacket, and Alexia automatically reached for her gun. "No need for that," Wesker said peaceably, producing a black lozenge from his pocket and dropping it into her hand. He smiled knowingly.
"This is Scott's medication," Alexia said. She stared at the little pill, then stared at Wesker, a sudden realization unfolding in her mind like an origami trick. "You bastard," she hissed through her teeth. "You've been working with her this whole time."
"Yes and no," Wesker said, still smiling. "I've never actually met Miranda. Some months ago, I met with one of her intermediaries in Europe. A very large woman by the name of Alcina Dmitrescu. I received the medicine from her."
Alexia glowered, caging the pill in her fist.
"Don't look at me like that. It was just business," Wesker said, with the casual air of someone discussing sports. "Business that, at the time, didn't involve you. The Connections wanted a sample of Miranda's Black God mutamycete. And then an opportunity presented itself when you came to me about Scott. My employers wouldn't miss a few bottles."
"You're playing both sides. As usual," Alexia said.
"No different than you, Alexia," he pointed out, and for a moment, Alexia had a flashback of their conversation about Chess in Arklay. My ultimate point, Dr. Ashford, something with Wesker's voice said, is that, in order to succeed in Umbrella, one must stay ten steps ahead of everyone else. It's a great deal like chess.
"What's your bloody angle, Wesker?"
"Simple ambition, Alexia. Nothing more," he said. "Needless to say, you're still quite useful to me."
"And when I'm not?"
"You'll find out when it happens, won't you?" Wesker said, and shrugged. "For the time being, however, our partnership is a lucrative venture. You need me, and I need you. We're both using each other for our own ends." He paused, eliciting another smile, this one with a sliver of white teeth. "You always were a quick study," he remarked.
Alexia said nothing, watching him, imagining herself shooting a hole in his head, and, in another fantasy, jabbing a needle into his neck—just as she'd done to her father, to Steve, to the boy from Chapman.
"Don't look so murderous," Wesker said, and spread his arms in a gesture of peace. "Let me offer you something as an apology: Miranda's holed up somewhere in the Arklays. You aren't the first person to report seeing a six-winged woman in the area, and several people have been going missing. Weekenders, mostly, from out of town, out on the hiking trails in the Reserve. Stuff that makes it onto the local news for one night between headliners, and is promptly forgotten about the next day."
"Who else saw her?"
"Jill Valentine, actually."