The mutamycete colony was overgrown, lost under slick black tangles of hyphae. A mycelial mass had formed in the colony's nursery, and in the nursery was the dragonfly, quasi-alive, its head ruptured by a bulbous ascocarp. The mold-ants tended the staphylae, cultivating new clusters in the parts of the tank that remained untouched by the mutamycete's mycelium. And that was not good.

"Mutualism," she said aloud, staring into the tank. "The T-Veronica gains an effective vector to ensure propagation, and the mutamycete gains cultivators, and a means to disseminate its spores." Alexia rubbed the space between her eyes. "Fuck," she said.

She glanced at the dragonfly, at its ascocarp. "A mycelial mass," she muttered. "Biotransmissions…" Her eyes wandered to the mycelial mass, the Root, in the colony's nursery, considering. Alexia retrieved her notes. "... Nodes in a network..." She trailed off, laid her notes down and glanced at the computer rigged to the tanks, which she used to monitor colony data.

An idea occurred to her, and she wanted to test her hypothesis. Alexia retrieved a dragonfly from the terrarium, this one without the T-Veronica, and another with the T-Veronica, and introduced both dragonflies to the mutamycete colony.

Immediately, the ants converged on the uninfected dragonfly, which they killed outright, ripping it apart with their enormous mandibles and gobbling the pieces down, only to regurgitate the biomaterial into the mycelium. The dragonfly reemerged from the new staphylae—though Alexia supposed eggs was a more accurate term—a perfect mold-copy that, rather than the behaviors she associated with dragonflies, exhibited behaviors Alexia observed in soldier ants. The infected dragonfly remained untouched, at least for the time being, and made its way down to the nursery, attaching itself to the mycelial mass. The ascocarp-dragonfly did the same.

Her work-phone rang, derailing her train of thought. Mumbling a few swears under her breath, Alexia stepped out of the tank annex to answer it. "Dr. Ashford speaking," she said curtly, out of habit, not because anyone actually expected someone else to answer.

"Hey, Lex, it's Grayson," said her husband. He sounded tired. "I try not to bother you at work, but—"

"Scott."

"Yeah," he said. "Just… come home, please."

Claire was microwaving cup-noodles when something on the television snagged her attention. The Misery Sheriff's Department had responded to a call for the homicide of twenty-five year old Nathan Yard, a local hiker from Stoneville, whose corpse a jogger had discovered on the Arklay Trail earlier that day. The newscaster went on to mention the disappearance of Yard's friend, twenty-six-year-old Leonard Dooley, the chief suspect in Yard's murder. On the television, Toast and Shaggy Blonde smiled at them from a photograph taken at some sort of hiking event. They looked sunburned and carefree.

Claire sat down on the couch, peeling back the film on the cup-noodles. It belched hot steam. "We can't just fucking sit around your apartment," she said. "We gotta do something about that monster."

Jill laid down the last of the ant traps, wiped her hands on her jeans, then looked at her. "I know." She peered at the window, sunlight squeezing through the gaps between the wooden slats. "It's a nice day. Been a pretty mild September."

"Indian summers are what those are called," said Claire. "It's supposed to cool down. Fortunately."

"Who cares?" said Jill, shrugging. She flopped down on the couch beside Claire. "Not like we can really go anywhere."

"I remember reading something in Alexia's notes, back in Antarctica," said Claire, twirling the noodles around her fork and slurping them down. "The T-Veronica doesn't like the cold. Won't be as virulent. That's why Alexia was culturing it in Antarctica."

"Yay," said Jill, without enthusiasm.

"We have time to fix it, is what I'm getting at," said Claire, looking at her. Glancing at the ant traps Jill had strewn around the apartment, she said, "You really think a bunch of ant traps are gonna work?"

"They better. Shit was expensive," said Jill. "It's those fancy liquid traps."

"You walked to the hardware store?"

"No," said Jill. "Fuck no. Not with that thing running around. Took a cab."

"Nobody followed you back, right?"

"No," said Jill, "I was careful."

"Not like we could be certain anyway," said Claire. "The thing shapeshifts."

Jill got up, wandered over to her investigation board. She put her hands on her hips, pondering Alexia's picture. "It's just like fucking Nemesis all over again," she said, finally. "But at least I knew when Nemesis was coming for me. This fucking thing?" She shook her head. "God. Fuck you, Ashford."

"It seems to enjoy taunting us," said Claire.

"The fact that thing has intelligence makes it even worse," said Jill. "Wonder if Alexia took a few pages out of daddy's notebook. Her dad, Alexander, did that thing with the intelligence genes." She turned to Claire. "Right? It was Alexander, I think. Not Edward."

Claire nodded. "Not much is known about Edward Ashford. Alexander, however, was a geneticist and bioengineer, and a pretty damn good one."

"It's like you're fascinated by those creeps."

She shrugged. "It's like having a near-death experience," said Claire. "Once you come back from that, you wanna understand death more, so you start reading about it, talking to people about it."

"To be fair," said Jill, "it was pretty much a near-death experience."

"Yeah," said Claire.

"I guess it's like how people are fascinated by serial killers," said Jill.

Claire snorted, then said, "Even better way of putting it. Yeah, it's like that."

It was around sundown when Chris called the apartment. Jill brought him up to speed about everything that had happened, then passed the phone to Claire. "You holdin' up okay, Goober?" asked her brother, his concern oozing through the receiver like some sticky-sweet syrup.

"Doing my best," replied Claire, shaking her head. She laid down on the couch, kicking her feet up on the armrest. She stared at Jill's popcorn ceiling. "It's just… a lot to take in, you know?"

"Perfectly reasonable reaction to a cult tryin' to kill you," chuckled her brother, though it was a worried, unamused chuckle. The sort of chuckle someone did when they wanted to reassure themselves that everything was okay when it wasn't.

Claire smiled. It was nice to hear her brother's voice again. "Yeah, no kidding," she replied. "And Jill's poor Accord."

"May that heap rest in peace," joked Chris. Then his tone sobered, and he asked, "Other than this fuckin' thing Alexia's released into Arklay, has she been botherin' you?"

"Other than her weird mutant pet trying to kill me? No, Chris."

"What I wonder," said Chris, "is why she just doesn't kill you outright."

"Damn, Chris. Want me gone that badly?" she joked.

"'Course not," he said. "I just mean it's weird. Why use a monster when she can do the work herself, no problem?"

"Who fucking knows," said Claire. "Maybe she doesn't like getting her hands dirty anymore? Rich people are like that. That's why they pay hitmen to kill their wives and husbands, even if they could just shoot 'em themselves." She paused, kept staring at the ceiling. If Claire looked long and steady enough, it began to boil like static. "My guess," she continued, "is that the thing's a prototype, and she's testing it. Like Nemesis. Or S.T.A.R.S and the mansion incident."

"Maybe," said Chris. "Oh, also, forgot to mention it to Jill. Leon and I have been diggin' more into the Church of the Mother."

"Yeah?" she said, in her go-on voice.

"A Moravian cult set up shop in Arklay County, way back in the 18th Century," said her brother, sounding a little proud of himself for finding that out. "Moravian Vlachs who were chased out of Moravia Wallachia by the Church. This particular cult had some pretty fucked up practices, like human sacrifice, and were surprisingly entrenched in not only Moravia Wallachia, but also a good chunk of Slovakia, Romania, Moldova, and some parts of Poland, too. When they washed up on American soil, they used the Moravian Church as a convenient blind."

Claire sat up. "Grayson mentioned a Moravian mission near Misery. They built it to preach to the Natives."

"Yeah, that was their base," said Chris. "When the Miner's Migration happened in the 1930s, they got a little bold, started recruiting people. And apparently a good chunk of those people were already cultists themselves who'd escaped the wars in Europe to work the mines. Then the cult got quiet again, and it wasn't until recently they started getting loud again. But Grayson's still alive? Shit. I thought you said he died."

"He did," said Claire. "He's infected like Wesker."

There was a long silence on the line, and then Chris said, "Not good. Is he infected with the same shit as Wesker?"

"He said it was different. A mycovirus."

"So Grayson's got some kinda virulent mold in him?"

"Yeah," said Claire, "I think so. Jill and I saw something like that, down in the mines."

Another pause, this one uncomfortably long. Then Chris spoke. "Leon and I are gonna do more digging. We'll keep you and Jill updated, Goober." He hung up before Claire could even say good-bye.

She listened to the dial-tone drone in her ear, then handed the phone to Jill, repeating what Chris had told her. "That fucking door we saw was built in the 18th Century," she said.

"And now we know who built it," said Claire.

Someone knocked on the door of Jill's apartment. A man spoke. "Jill?" said the voice, and knocked again, a little harder this time.

Claire watched as the color drained from Jill's face. "No way," said Jill to herself, staring at the door, hand on the grip of her gun. "I saw you die, Brad."

"Jill?" said Brad, still knocking. "Open up."

"You're dead," said Jill. "I saw you fucking die, Vickers."

"I did," said Brad, his voice muffled. "That's why I'm here. Umbrella's up to some seriously bad shit, Jill." A stretch of silence, then Brad said, "Look, I went through hell to escape where they were keeping me. Hear me out, would you?"

"You're not Brad," said Jill. "Brad's fucking dead."

Silence.

Claire exchanged a worried look with Jill, felt her throat tighten. No way Umbrella would have expended the money and resources to bring back someone like Brad Vickers. She snagged her gun off the coffee-table.

"Don't you want to know about Origin? Grayson's mycovirus," said Brad, a sharp, venomous edge in his tone. "I can tell you all about it, Jill."

More silence. Then Claire heard skittering. Ants squeezed under the front door, and then the door heaved, splintering around the edges.

"Get to the fire-escape," said Jill, grabbing Claire, dragging her toward the window where the walk-up's fire-escape zigzagged down the side of building, to the street.

"Jill," said Brad, "come on. We're S.T.A.R.S, aren't we?"

The door heaved and popped, toppling to the floor. Brad Vickers stepped into the apartment, his jaw snapping apart with a crack into a set of bony mandibles, viscous ropes of something that might have been saliva dripping from them, sizzling on the floorboards. The Brad-thing wore a yellow S.T.A.R.S vest, and tattered, bloodstained fatigues. Its eyes were huge and white, and hungry.

Claire's legs felt like chunks of lead, rooted her to the spot.

"Jill," taunted the Brad-thing, its voice like the chittering of a thousand ants, "don't make this so difficult."

"Move!" cried Jill, shoving Claire through the window to the fire-escape.

Claire landed in a heap, quickly scrambled to her feet.

Jill fired several rounds at the Brad-thing, but the creature pressed its slow march across the living-room, the dark, molasses-like spatters of its blood hissing and sputtering like grease before bursting into flames. Its arm exploded into the massive black claw, and the Brad-thing raked its talons along the wall, carving deep furrows into the paint.

Jill vaulted through the window, and they bolted down the fire-escape, the rusty expansion-grate vibrating precariously underneath them. Claire looked up. The window belched smoke and fire. She heard sirens as she and Jill swung down onto the asphalt.

On the other side of the street, a crowd had gathered to gawk at the fire, some, probably the tenants of the walk-up, shivering in the cold, crying about lost things. But she and Jill didn't have time to feel bad. Their feet pounded the pavement, so hard that Claire felt the impacts shiver up through the rubber soles of her moto-boots, vibrating in her shins, in the bones of her feet.

Once they reached her bike, Claire jumped on and passed her helmet to Jill, kicking the engine to life. Then she told Jill to climb on and hold tight, and when she did, Claire peeled out of there, full-speed, the ghost of burnt rubber hanging in the air for a moment before it was subsumed by the inferno stench of the walk-up.

"All my fucking work is gone," said Jill, behind her, just as Claire swung out onto the interchange. She sounded as if she were teetering on the brink of frustrated tears, though it was hard to tell for certain because of the helmet. "It's fucking gone because of that fucking thing."

"We didn't have a choice, Jill," replied Claire.

Jill said nothing else, sulking in silence.