Ada Wong's phone rang moments after she awoke that morning in her clean, mostly bare apartment. She sighed, and sat up, reaching for it.

Derek Simmon's voice came rough over the receiver, with just a touch of panic. "Ada, we received your package. It seems that someone else hit your safehouse first though." Of course, they had. HCF had given her a pickup window when the woman - 'Callie' - would have been asleep. Her handler had told her not to worry about it. She hadn't, much. After all, that woman had only wanted away from Umbrella; if Simmons wanted to take his sweet time getting his people in gear, then her primary client had no problem sweeping in for the prize. Allegedly, they had a new specialist on the team familiar with the target and could handle any issues that arose, independently of her regular assignment of monitoring Annette Birkin's movements.

Something about her handler's voice when he had told her set her nerves on alert. There had been a thin edge of uncertainty when he mentioned this 'specialist'.

From the photos, Derek had inferred that the other 'package' had been meant for the Family, or at least was open to an opportunistic interception. That was fine- a little bait tossed that way often paid out well enough.

"What did you find?"

Derek sighed in frustration. Interesting. "My team reported that there were signs of a struggle. A woman's shoes and jacket were left behind. Likely, the target panicked and had to be sedated."

That gave Ada pause. "She seemed pretty willing to go when I stashed her in there. You mentioned that you got my photos?" She had developed them at the office, and emailed them early yesterday evening, their actual package.

"We did. Father got in late from a work dinner yesterday evening. He knew the face. Ada, his hands started shaking when I told him that photo was taken earlier in the day." The cadence in his voice suggested that he had started pacing the room. "He's fairly sure that the woman in question was last seen Stateside in November 1981. Did she leave a name?"

Ada sat up straighter. "Derek…that's unlikely. She wasn't a day over twenty-five, at most." She thought back. "I have a name for the register, but It's almost certainly fake. Callie Lundy."

He could hear Derek repeat the name through a poorly muffled receiver - so he was actually in the room with the elder patriarch. Curiouser and curiouser.

"Alright, it's fake, but it's the right fake. Thanks for confirming that for us, Ada."

"Care to let me in on the fun, then? There's a decent chance I'll run into her again, given how quickly the company moved in on this one."

Derek paused. "I'm not sure you should, even if that's an option. If you hear any chatter about a BOW project called Placidia, you need to listen - but be careful." He hung up without saying more.

Ah, Derek. So dramatic. So eager to impress. Although the idea that she had been taxiing around a nervous BOW gave her a moment's pause. The woman had been determined to speak to that specific survivor from the STARS mission, and the morose little comment about not having ID anymore had been...odd.

She placed the receiver back in its cradle and looked at the photo of her and John on her bedside table. "Well. I suppose I can't say you never got me anything."

'I'm certain I can find you later. Unless you'd care to join me?' The smile 'Marcus' gave her split his face nearly in two. He began to advance, and the fragmented, oily feeling of his hunger took over everything else.

Marigold pitched upright from her dreams in a cold sweat with a shriek before realizing she was awake. She forced herself to relax and fell back to the small bed in her 'quarters'.

The room itself was somewhat more comfortable than she had feared. No windows, but it was set up like a small single dormitory room, for the most part. A small closet of clean clothes (restocked when she was taken out of the space), a bed, a small bookshelf. There were shower and bathroom fixtures partitioned from the living space by a curtain. The floor of the space had a small drain installed in the centre. It was a space built for utility and little else.

There was a small opening in the wall by the door - a sort of milk door, for lack of a better term. It was designed to only have one side opened at the same time- not pneumatic, but something of a similar function. A very nervous-looking technician informed her through a speaker by the one-way mirror- another one, good god- that they would be delivering her meals and incidentals by this means. When they had asked if there was anything she needed, she noted the logo on his lab coat -HCF. He looked down. "That's the company division, miss." A beat, then a realization. "You came here from Raccoon City. Right - this isn't Umbrella." She had tweaked an eyebrow at him, glancing meaningfully past the tech towards the lab. He had laughed nervously. "I think the new guy...well, I signed an NDA. But he's new to the company."

She must have seemed skeptical, and the tech shuffled from foot to foot. "Is there anything else, miss?" She started to shake her head, then paused. "What...can you tell me what email is?"

The technician had paused, then clicked off the microphone, presumably to pursue a less inane conversation. When the meal arrived later in the day, a dictionary had been slipped in with the tray, along with an interesting little periodical called WIRED. Passive-aggressive, yes. But useful.

Three, going on four days had passed since meeting Wesker in that little lab room. Three days of boredom. She had tried to sleep, but the nightmares were always lurking just under the surface. Even knowing that Marcus was dead, the sense-memory of that thing in the woods outside the mansion had clawed its way up every time she tried. She was exhausted, and bored.

Someone must have noticed. Old paperback books - westerns, romances, classics - started appearing behind the milk door. After a few of these, she noticed that few of the publication dates were before 1981. Someone was likely vetting the collection.

For now, she could live with that. The rest of the time she spent stretching, doing body weight exercises, meditating.

The meditation was something she had picked up on in the late seventies, after an episode bad enough to leave the staff on edge. Spiritualism had been sweeping through fashionable London at the time. When she had tried the practice, she found that she had been able to locate many of those in and around her estate, like fireflies in the dark. She'd been able to develop it to the point where she could leverage Everett back in 1981, the executive she had caught in her orbit, in order to call her brother, to warn him. Everett had surfaced a moment later under the impression that she had something important to get to back at the office. It had likely saved her life back then.

But they had been in the same building. And the effort expended had likely cost her own escape.

Now...if there were a real measure of what had changed within her since her initial incarceration seventeen years earlier, this was it. Raccoon City was likely less than 100 miles away; she could still sense Everett and a few others in the city. She was going easy on herself for the first few runs, but it was much easier to locate them than before.

In another direction, the Connecticut house; Daniel Simmons had been exposed ages ago, but he was still 'visible' to her. She couldn't sense the infected the way she could for those she had exposed in small ways over the years, through mucous membranes, through droplets, through surface transfer. It truly was amazing how often people touched their faces.

Could she have done this before? She had started taking the suppressants back in 1974, when her monthlies had sent her to bed with a fever for days on end. It wasn't something that she was willing to tolerate, given other options.

The virus, those infected with this new version, showed up differently for her. In the lab under the mansion, she could feel them all around her. It had felt like the creeping edge of a Lovecraftian nightmare. She had acted instinctively and pushed them away. Doing so had likely helped a great deal during her escape.

That push had been what had kept Marcus at bay when she had encountered him in the woods. The put-on cordiality and sense of a crawling hive of nightmares under the surface had nearly driven her over the edge. She'd been having nightmares about that meeting ever since.

He'd said his students had killed him.

The door slid open. Someone (an alarm? A monitor?) had alerted Wesker to the fuss she had made. She looked down, realizing that she had shredded her thin blanket between her hands. She dropped the pieces and looked back to the door.

I'm interacting with it. And Wesker had infected himself with a form of the virus to survive his little stunt at the mansion.

It was possible that her nightmares weren't affecting her, alone. Likely, even.

"I ran into him," she said quietly, almost embarrassed to be confessing this. "When I got out. He said he'd been murdered, but he was still a bastard. He knew what he'd done. Back…before." Marigold was panting again, but she barely noticed it. "It was like a hundred rats ate him and made a skinsuit. Is that what the virus is now?" She looked at Wesker, aiming for sardonic, falling short. "Are you about to turn into a skinsuit for rats? I may be angry with you. I'm still not prepared to deal with that."

Wesker stood quietly, silhouetted in the doorway. "Leeches."

"...Beg pardon."

"Doctor Marcus. Spencer had us remove him in '89 when it became clear that Marcus was going to publish his research. Birkin got his own facility after taking the work over. Marcus' focus was bonding the virus to leeches." He shrugged. What I have is T-virus. It's a modified version of what you were exposed to. The leak itself was linked to what you say encountered outside there." He grimaced. "It stands to reason that his research ate and absorbed him. That's what he claimed on the monitor feeds, by all accounts. Before he was put down."

Marigold stared. "Leeches." She shook her head. "You don't seem to be eating the staff. Should I be concerned? I recall being shown a video with cannibalistic rats, and there were people in the woods covered in blood.." They had kept away, but she had seen enough to not want to get anywhere near them. She meant for the words to have an acidic edge, but the nightmares were taking a toll.

He didn't answer. She might have expected as much. She swung her feet around to the floor, making a decision. "I need to move. I used to have space to go for a run. I'll go stir-crazy soon enough if I don't do something." And if I wear myself out enough, maybe I won't dream.

His face was hidden in deep shadow, but he nodded assent after a moment. "It might be best to come to a solution there. This way."

This time, she didn't think twice about getting to her feet and following after him.