Alexia lay in bed, freshly showered and fucked, feeling guilty. She hadn't told Grayson the truth about Miranda, although she'd told him everything else.

Grayson sat up beside her in the bed, his eyes burning like tiny furnaces. "I can't sleep," he said. "Zombies in the tunnels, a crazy fungus-woman after my daughter." He heaved a sigh and sagged against the headboard and pillows, rubbing his face in his hands. "Also, that shit about me and Albert bothers the fuck outta me."

"It was just a hallucination, darling," she said, reaching over and stroking his bicep.

"Yeah," Grayson said, and nodded. Flipping the covers aside, Alexia watched him, naked, pad over to the window. He stared out at the trees, moonlight sketching out the topography of his muscles. "This shit with Miranda feels like a goddamn fever-dream." Grayson looked at her, then said, "And this shit 'bout zombies? I don't like it. We don't need another outbreak."

"I'm more worried about Miranda," Alexia said, absently brushing a finger over the pink stud of her nipple. "As you should be," she added, a little more scathingly than she'd meant to. "She's after our daughter, Grayson."

"Sherry's in danger, too," he said.

"I know that, Grayson."

He smoothed back the waves of his hair, but they stubbornly curled back into place. "Miranda used Sherry to get intel on us," he said. "Who does that? Takes advantage of a lonely kid."

"Always go for the weakest link," Alexia said. "You've been around Umbrella all of your life, Grayson. This situation is textbook."

"Maybe that's my problem. Spend too much time around psychopaths, you start calling it normal."

Alexia couldn't decide if that was a jab at her, and asked, "What is that supposed to bloody mean?"

"You're not exactly the most well-adjusted person on the planet, Lex."

She opened her mouth to argue the point, reconsidered, and promptly shut it. He was right. "No," she admitted, even if it pained her to admit it, "I suppose I'm not."

"See? First step to solving a problem is admitting you have one." Grayson grinned.

She hurled a pillow at him, and it hit his chest and flopped to the floor. "Shut up," said Alexia, smiling.

Grayson stooped to pick up the pillow. He stared at the pillow, as if the answers to his questions were hiding in the printed pattern. Then he asked, "You really think we gotta worry 'bout another outbreak?" He looked up, gave her a long, meaningful look. "Sherry's been through enough," he said, padding over to the bed and restoring the pillow to its place against the headboard. "I've been through enough. If I can go my entire life without seeing another zombie, I can die a happy man."

"You should die a happy man regardless. You're married to me."

"Needless to say," Grayson said, and smiled. A long pause, and then he said, "But in seriousness, Lex. Are we looking at another outbreak?"

Alexia didn't want to lie and tell him it would never happen; there were nights Grayson woke up in a cold sweat, she knew, because of the things he'd witnessed in Raccoon City. So she told him the truth. "It could happen," she admitted. "I don't know how soon. Too many variables to consider."

"Shit," he said. Grayson sat down on the bed, then said, "How are there still zombies? It's been nearly two years."

"Conditions in the tunnels are optimal for slowing decomposition," she said. "Zombies can 'survive', if that's what you'd like to call it, for as long as they can move."

"We should seal off the tunnels," Grayson said.

Alexia sat up, leaned against his back. She rubbed his shoulders, and said, "It wouldn't guarantee anything. Rats started Raccoon City. All it takes is one infected rat, or something as small as a mosquito, to slip through the cracks."

"Goddamn it," he muttered, rubbing the space between his eyes.

"I'll send a USS clean-up detail into the tunnels," she assured him, mentally filing that away for when she returned to NEST 3. "Hopefully there aren't many."

"Could be just a few dozen, or it could be hundreds," he said, and looked at her. "When Raccoon City was overrun, a lot of people ran into the sewers, hoping to find a way outta the city. Maybe some went down there when they heard missiles were coming. I dunno."

"I'll do what I can, Grayson."

Grayson nodded. She felt the knots of tension between his shoulders relax, ease away. "Thanks, Lex," he said.

Alexia kissed his shoulder, then slipped her arms around him. "Of course, darling. Now," she said, and gently pulled him down onto the bed beside her, "you need to sleep."

They lay there in the dark, listening to the crickets chirruping outside their window. Then Grayson asked, "Do you think dad's okay?"

"I hope so," Alexia said, and curled up against his side, hugging him under the blanket. "I'll do everything I can to bring him back, Grayson." She pushed her face into the crook of his neck. "I promise."

"You've always got my back," he said, stroking her hair.

"And you've got mine. That's how it works, Grayson."

A moment of silence, as if he were letting those words sink in, and then Grayson said, "I don't know what I'd do without you." He rolled onto his side and raised himself on his elbow, looking at her. A hand slid down the fuselage of her body, came to rest on the curve of her hip. "What if I'd never gone back to Rockfort?" he asked. "I thought about it, you know. Just disappearing. After Raccoon City, I figured nothing mattered much anymore." He frowned, knitting his eyebrows. "But if I'd done that, I would've never wound up in Antarctica, and maybe the Redfields would've killed you. Maybe Wesker would've killed you. Maybe the fucking cryotank would've killed you."

"But none of that happened," Alexia said, caressing his cheek, the cut of his jaw. "You were there, and now we're together. Your problem, darling, is you dwell too much on what-ifs." She brushed her thumb over the faint cleft in his chin, then kissed him. Drawing back slightly to look at him, she said, "We could sit here palavering all night about what we could have done differently, or not done at all. The important thing is we did what we did, and it worked out."

Grayson sighed, nodded. "You're right." Then he smiled, adding, "As usual."

"Of course I am," she said, and grinned. "I'm rarely ever wrong."

"Been like that since we were kids," he agreed.

The baby-monitor crackled to life, and Veronica wailed. "Speaking of kids," she said, and slid out of bed, slipping on her silk robe, "I need to feed ours, lest the poor dear suffers an apoplexy. I swear, I can't wait until she's off the bloody tit."

"She takes after you, honey. Pretty sure it won't be long until she's drinking out of cups and describing her apple juice as 'ripe and sweet, with just the right amount of tartness' in Latin."

Alexia snorted a very inelegant laugh. "That certainly sounds like my daughter."

Another anti-Umbrella demonstration was in full-swing outside the company's headquarters. Jill and Chris watched the protesters from the other side of Spencer Parkway, nursing foam cups of burnt convenience-store coffee. Idly, Jill wondered if they could even reach the building, let alone Ashford. Their sweep of the Umbrella lab off Misery Road had turned up nothing but a logo, so they'd decided to politely confront Ashford while she was at work.

"You think she's even gotta office?" Chris asked, looking at her. Like her, he was dressed in plainclothes.

"She's an executive," Jill said, reasonably.

Chris fished out a cigarette, lit it with a brass flip-lighter, the commemorative one he'd gotten from S.T.A.R.S. "Even if that's the case," he said, blowing smoke, "she probably doesn't spend much time in it."

"I thought you quit," she said, glancing at the cigarette.

Chris shrugged.

Jill sighed, then said, "Anyway, you're probably right. But it's not like we can call her."

"Don't think they'll let us walk right in," he said.

"They won't have a choice, not with our marching orders from Simmons."

Chris snorted. "As if Umbrella ever played by the rules."

"Worst happens, we stake out the parking garage and jump her."

He looked at her, blinked.

"Not like we always played by the rules either," she said.

Chris grinned, finished his cigarette and flicked it to the pavement. He ground it under his shoe. "Good point," he said. Then, jokingly, "Maybe we should call my sister, have her break in."

Jill laughed. "Yeah, because that worked real well in Paris."

A detail of USS guards escorted her from the parking garage to the Umbrella building. Alexia ignored the jeers—she'd gotten used to it, and it was all background noise to her now—and shouldered through the rotating door.

Down in NEST 3, the front-desk clerk looked surprised to see her. Apparently, Alexia later overheard one of the junior researchers say, a rumor had been going around that Spencer had fired her. She snorted at that; Spencer needed her more than she needed him, and the old bastard knew it.

She got a coffee in the cafeteria, then headed to her laboratory. An aluminum briefcase was sitting on her desk. A note was stuck to it, and it read:

It was difficult, but I managed to smuggle some out. She calls it the cadou, nemotodes exposed to the mutamycete. I don't know much more than that. She keeps a close eye on me, but sometimes she gets sloppy. Hope it helps, princess.

Alexia swallowed the rock in her throat, unlatched the case and opened it. Inside, set in a slab of molded foam, were three phials, and in those phials were tiny, fetal-looking things: grayish lumps bristling with little hairs, like cilia. They looked, Alexia decided, like excised teratomas.

She closed the briefcase and looked around, but Scott was nowhere to be seen.

They didn't know which car belonged to Ashford—there were no Rolls-Royces in the parking garage—so they'd decided to wait for her by the employee-access lift, just out of sight. They'd watched a steady stream of Umbrella assholes disembark the lift, but none of them had been Alexia.

Jill checked her watch. "Quarter to eleven o'clock," she said. "Gotta come up for air at some point. Doubt Ashford sleeps here." She watched him light another cigarette, shaking her head. "Those cancer-sticks are gonna kill you," she chided, waving away the acrid smoke. "Especially with the way you've been going through them."

"You sound like my mom," Chris said.

"I thought your parents were dead."

"Yeah, but you still sound like her."

"Then your mom was a smart woman, and the world, as well as your health, is lesser for her loss."

Chris snorted, turned his head and blew a cloud of smoke. He watched the lift disgorge a man in a suit, who climbed into a brand-new Mercedes and drove away, tail-lights flashing. "Jesus Christ," he said. "She's like one of those deep-sea fish."

Jill looked at him. "The fuck does that mean?"

"You know, deep-sea fish. They're elusive. They don't leave their depth. That's why we never see giant squids."

"I think your metaphor needs a bit of work," she said.

"Yeah, but you get what I mean."

They went quiet as the lift opened again, spilling a wedge of fluorescent light across the tarmac. This time it was Alexia, wrapped in a thin Burberry coat. They came out from behind the pillar and grabbed her by the arms. She didn't fight them, and Jill didn't like that, because that either meant they'd walked into a trap, or Alexia was confident she could kill them.

"What the fuck do you and Redfield think you're doing, Valentine?"

"We got some questions about that Umbrella lab off Misery Road," said Jill. Then, "Where's your car, Ashford? We're going for a little drive."

Alexia didn't answer, so Jill dug around in her pockets until she found her key-fob. She hit the button; a brand-new Bentley flashed its lights.

"Why am I not surprised it's a Bentley," said Chris, and they shoved her into the back of the car.