Ants marched among and inside the corpses, carving out homes for themselves inside the cavities where organs used to be. The bodies were blooming, germinating like grotesque mossbeds, unspooling slick, black tangles of mycelia across the concrete. Jill shuddered, and said, "Reminds me of that fucking plant in the Arklay Mansion."

"Yeah," agreed Chris. He carefully rolled over a body the ants had yet to convert into real estate, studying the back of the dead man's polar jacket. He said, "H.C.F." Chris looked at her, took off his knitted cap and wiped a hand through his sweaty hair, his face flushed. It was warmer in this part of the facility; hot gusts of air blew from the vents. "Those letters mean anything to you?"

Jill shook her head. "They look paramilitary. Kits are almost identical to the USS's."

"Mercenaries, then," said Chris.

"Or paramilitary from one of Umbrella's competitors." She paused, motioned for him to move. Chris tugged his hat back on and glanced behind him, and saw the line of ants marching toward the corpse. He retreated to her side, and Jill said, "I think they'll leave us alone if we leave them alone."

"Tell that to them," said Chris, sweeping his gaze over the sprawl of corpses. "They're apartments now."

"Greenhouses, more like," said Jill. "Think these things might be attine ants."

"When the fuck did you become an ant expert?"

"Back in high school, had this biology teacher who was super into ants. Made us do a whole fucking unit on them."

"Okay, Ms. Entomologist—"

" Myrmecologist ," corrected Jill, with a grin.

"Okay, Ms. Myrmecologist," repeated Chris, smiling. "Share with the class?"

"Attine ants. They're fungus-growers."

"Think that's what that black shit is?"

Jill nodded. "Think so. Definitely smells like some kinda fungus." She stopped, whiffed the air to double-check herself. And wrinkled her nose. "Yep, like moldy food."

"Pretty familiar with that smell, huh? Saw the inside of your fridge before, Jill."

She snickered. "Shut up, Chris. Wasn't that bad."

"True," conceded Chris, with a peaceable nod. "Forest's was worse. Way worse. Guy had fudgesicles in his freezer that expired in 1997."

One of the bodies moved. Jill whirled on it, pointing her gun.

"Shit," said Chris, beside her. He was scraping the bottom of his boot against the wall—smearing guts and chitin on the concrete.

"Chris, you didn't," said Jill.

"I didn't see it!"

The body twitched again, then stood up: a skinsuit filled with ants. She'd seen a lot of fucked up shit in her time dealing with Umbrella, but this, Jill thought, topped her very long list of nightmare fuel. The corpse peered at them with chitin-glittering sockets, and the ants swarmed and chittered out of the skinsuit, sheathing it like armor. Jill, in the right socket, glimpsed a swollen red thing: a bigger, fatter ant than the rest—the queen, she guessed. The queen sank away from view, into the wriggling cloak of drones, and Jill said to Chris, "Run. Fucking run."

They bolted just as the other bodies rose, shambling after them at breakneck speed. Jill narrowly maneuvered to the side of a lunge, and the swarm-thing collided with the wall and dispersed into a shapeless mass of ants—like how a hollow point broke upon hitting their target—leaving behind only the skin and the bones. The ants scrambled to fill the skinsuit again, but Jill saw the queen; she aimed carefully, squeezed the trigger: the queen popped like a zit, and the rest of the ants, without a leader to guide them, milled around in confusion, then began to attack each other.

But killing that queen had been a lucky shot. The other queens were still hidden from her, sequestered behind the rank-and-file. And Jill didn't want to waste more ammunition than she needed to, so she kept running, her boots pounding the concrete so hard that her tibias felt as if they were splintering apart.

As she and Chris swung around a corner, someone told them to get down, and they ducked, squatting on their toes. Someone cracked three gunshots, then dragged her and Chris to their feet and yanked them stumbling into a room, slamming the door shut behind them and locking it. The door heaved once, twice. Then nothing. A soft chittering, and the slow shuffle of feet, receded into stillness.

Someone jumped at Chris, wrapping her arms and legs around his torso like a sloth hugging a tree trunk, and Claire said, "I knew you'd come." Then she looked at Jill, grinning. "And you brought Jill!"

"Goober, you okay?" asked Chris, bear-hugging his sister so tightly that Jill thought he might snap the poor girl in two. He put Claire down, beaming. "You look good. Nothing that looks life-threatening."

"I got some shit to tell you, bro," said Claire. Then she hugged Jill, and Jill laughed, patting Claire on the back. "It's good to see you again, Jill." She pulled back, smiling. "Just wish it was under better circumstances."

Jill smiled. She hadn't seen Claire since the S.T.A.R.S barbecue up in Stoneville, way back in June, when a cottonmouth had almost nipped her while she'd been swimming in Stonewater Lake. Her last memory of the younger Redfield was of Claire bolting out of Stonewater with Rebecca, both of them screaming about watersnakes, and Barry, half a beer-cooler in, shooting the thing as it cut across the shallows, then spending the rest of the day bragging about the shot to anyone with enough patience to listen. Then, finally, she replied, "Considering the shit I've been through these last few months? These are the better circumstances."

"Whoah."

Jill pulled her gun at the sound of an unfamiliar voice, but when she saw the scrawny teenager sitting on the cot, she put the gun away. The kid had that grungy Cobain look, if Cobain had spent half his life in Spencer Gifts and the rest in a state prison, and he was chewing on a toothpick. She asked, "Who the hell are you?"

"Steve Burnside," said the kid. Then, to Claire, "You never told me you had hot friends."

"Not even in your dreams, kiddo," said Jill.

The room they were in looked like some kind of infirmary, and it was freezing. Every vent, gap, and crack in the room had been sealed with duct-tape.

"What the fuck were those things out there?" asked Jill, jerking her thumb at the door.

"The reason me and Steve are still holed up in here," said Claire. "We heard screams. I poked my head out of the room to see what was going on. Saw those USS guys getting attacked, so we sealed up the room best we could to keep the ants out."

"They're not USS," said Chris. "Some outfit called the H.C.F."

"Steve fucking shot the ants," continued Claire, throwing a glare in Steve's direction, who gave a nonchalant shrug, picking at his teeth with the toothpick. "They attack us on sight now."

Jill looked at Steve, already feeling that cop-itch she got, the one that told her she was dealing with a particularly annoying delinquent. Steve looked like the kids she used to bust smoking weed and underage-drinking, and stealing from convenience stores—usually while she was off-the-clock. S.T.A.R.S didn't deal in petty crime, but it had never stopped her from putting the fear of law into kids who were breaking it.

"You're a cop, aren't you?" asked Steve, with a shit-eating grin.

"I was."

"Yep, you look the type."

"Aw," said Jill, "do I remind you of your parole officer?"

"Hah," said Steve, unimpressed. "Fuckin' hilarious. Nah, you remind me of the rentacop used to be in my school. Before they caught her bangin' Principal Hofstetter, anyway."

Jill rolled her eyes, turned to Claire. "Anyway, getting back to what I was gonna say before Butthead over there derailed things, I wanted to tell you something: I figured out a way to beat those ant things." And she told Claire how to do it.


Grayson watched Alexia re-apply her make-up at the vanity. A long cut in the back of her dress displayed the pale sweep of her back, the lines of her scapulae tense, knitted together.

"You okay?" he asked, watching her in the mirror, his dark reflection like a blast shadow on the wall.

"I'm fine," she replied, dabbing away the imperfections of her lipstick before slipping on her silk gloves. Alexia draped one long leg over the other, brushing a touch of dark eyeshadow on her eyelids.

"No, you're not," said Grayson, and he strode across the room and stopped behind her, squeezing her shoulders, trying to knead the tension out of them. "You're tense as a fucking coilspring." He leaned down and planted a kiss on her neck, smelling gardenias and female skin. Alexia tilted her head, opening her carotid to him, and he grazed his lips along it before he asked, "What's wrong?"

"You're being unusually affectionate," she said, with a conspiratorial gleam in her eyes. A smirk touched her lips. "You couldn't possibly be fishing for more sex."

"No," he said, "I'm not fishing for sex." He tipped a deliberative look at her, then said, "Something's bothering you. If it's about Alexander, don't worry about it. I'm not freaked out." Grayson paused to reassess that statement, and appended: "I'm freaked out that there's a poisonous—"

"Venomous," interjected Alexia.

"— Venomous," he corrected, "super BOW on the loose in the facility. But that's where the concern ends." Grayson stooped down, his face illuminated by the vanity's light in the mirror. Idly, he studied himself; he looked, Grayson decided, like a Hollywood composite of the Golden Age's leading men, and felt an acute kind of smugness about that. Only the best for Alexia. "I don't care what you did to Alexander," he continued, frankly. Alexander had been his father's buddy, but to Grayson, just as he'd been to the twins, Alexander was a poltergeist that only occasionally made his presence known—to remind you that he was still there, haunting your halls and rooms. "You never saw Rockfort Prison. You think what you did was fucked up? You didn't see what your brother did to the prisoners there."

Alexia looked inquisitively at him, like a cat expecting more treats.

"He had a torture room. Under the infirmary hut," he said. "So much blood down there that the tiles are permanently red." Grayson paused for a moment, a little surprised by his own words. He'd seen so much. Too much. And that sort of too-muchness, that insouciance, changed a person—carved new, permanent wrinkles in their brain. It became a part of that person, an immutable characteristic, even if they didn't want it to. "There was an armchair down there, a giant Chesterfield," he continued evenly. "Alfred liked to sit in it. He liked to drink brandy and listen to Shostakovich while watching the prisoners die."

Alexia said nothing—not because she was surprised, Grayson decided, but because she was genuinely interested in what he was saying, hanging on his words.

"I never watched the torture. Not like he did, anyway," said Grayson. "I watched because it reminded me of what would happen if I stepped too hard on Umbrella's toes." He stopped for a few beats, then said, "And even before that, I saw shit in Raccoon City that, I confess, has permanently fucked me up. So I suppose the point I'm trying to make is this: violence is no longer a spectacle to me. It's just my ordinary." He peered at her. "So back to my original point," he said. "What's got you tense? I can handle anything."

Alexia turned to face him, something uncertain in her expression. Then she said, "I'm not sure how we're going to get out of Antarctica."

Grayson squatted on his toes, looking up into her face, folding his arms over her knees. "Spencer didn't know about your T-Veronica research," he said, with a slow nod of understanding. "So he thinks you're still dead."

"And if he learns I'm still alive," said Alexia, "I'll still be dead. My family is the largest stakeholder in the company, darling." She stopped talking to see if it was sinking in, and when Grayson affirmed that it was, she continued, "He was never intimidated by Alfred, because Alfred was manageable. He simply put my brother away on that little island you spoke of, and gave him toys to play with—all the while robbing him of his influence and power in the company. And my brother is too stupid, or perhaps too naive, to realize it." Alexia paused. Then, "But I'm not stupid, Grayson. I'm not someone who can be placated with toys and trivial administrative powers. I pose a legitimate threat to Spencer's hold on Umbrella."

"You said more people came here," he reminded her. "To the facility, I mean. They got to Antarctica somehow."

"Most of them are dead," said Alexia. "And do you happen to know, I wonder, how to pilot a plane?"

Grayson frowned. "No," he said, "I dunno anything about planes." Then he grinned with sudden realization, and said, "But Alfred does."

"True," said Alexia, but unlike him, she wasn't smiling. "But there's a problem. You've undoubtedly noticed Alfred's mental faculties slipping away. Would you really trust my brother to pilot a plane in his condition?"

Grayson considered the question, then shook his head.

"Precisely," said Alexia.

"So what do you propose we do?"

"There's a safe-room, supposedly, that my father built in the event of a biohazard," said Alexia. "Problem is," she continued, her frown deepening, "I'm not sure where it is in the facility, or that we can even get inside it. It's likely shuttered tight, perhaps behind a passcode or a special key. Things my father knew but, in his current condition, doesn't know any longer."

"Couldn't you just brute-force your way in?" he asked. "Like you did to the door in the stasis room."

"Assuming the mycelium reaches that deep, perhaps," said Alexia.

"Mycelium?"

Alexia nodded. "Where do you think the hyphae come from? They don't come from thin air, love."

"Doesn't T-Veronica give you super strength or something, Lex? Could just rip the door off its hinges or whatever."

"T-Veronica does make me physically stronger, but not quite so strong that I can rip a thick, reinforced steel vault-door free from its hinges. The safe-room is, from what little I've managed to gather, built like a bank vault," said Alexia, and she stroked his hair, fingertips grazing along his temples and scalp. "Besides," she continued, "it would defeat the purpose of a safe-room if I tore off the door, even if I could. We wouldn't be safe any longer from the explosion."

Grayson closed his eyes and thought for a moment, enjoying the sensation of Alexia's fingers combing through his hair, arranging his locks into artful sand-garden waves. Then an idea struck him, one that was both a long shot and their only real option, and he said, "There might be someone who could fly a plane, if we can manage to persuade them."

"Do tell," said Alexia.

"Claire contacted her brother Chris Redfield before the satphone died," he said. "If he comes, and I think he will, we could put him to the task. He was with the Air Force."