Later, Marigold sat in her room, paging through the magazines the technicians had left her. Some more modern reading materials began to appear in to her room. Apparently, the information embargo was lifting ever so slightly. She had privately started calling the two technicians Statler and Waldorf for lack of actual names - from what she could surmise, they were essentially muppets who did light lab and maintenance tasks anyhow.
One of the magazines had a fold-out insert of the continental United States. It was this that held her focus now.
She'd run an exercise a year or so before her capture, back in 1980, to see if she could navigate by proximity to her 'subjects'. The staff here mostly stayed out of this wing, when she was out. She didn't relish the idea of arbitrarily ensnaring people who were so clearly terrified of her. She couldn't feel any of them, so they were clearly sterilizing and using precautions.
Marigold's thoughts returned to the forest, to Arklay. She had sensed Wesker within a few hundred yards before she had known what had been following her. There had been no contact made at the time. The infected creatures in the vicinity had passively drifted out of her way on her journey back to Racoon City. Marcus had been trying to do…something, but he had been exposed to her earlier. If she had to guess, she had established enough of a prior hold to effectively hold him at bay until he had been distracted.
What might have happened otherwise...didn't bear consideration. She had enough nightmares as it was.
Wesker probably hadn't been exposed. The pheromones themselves had short-term effects when she was in distress, but it was a cumulative effect. 'Go away' had worked on him, to a point. She didn't know why it had stopped working.
Don't you though?
Enough. Daniel was still alive and at the old house, and Kate hadn't run yet; she could surmise that much. If she had a third point, she could triangulate where she was.
As far as she could tell, it was mid-August. Wesker would leave once a week and be gone overnight. he didn't offer information on where he went, and she didn't ask. She'd been taken at dusk, and the car radio had said she had been out for three hours, possibly at least partially away from highways on winding backroads. Mixed conifers and deciduous. The smell of that air still came in through the facility. They were likely still in or near the Appalachian region.
She hadn't asked Kate where any of the others from headquarters had gone. While time had been a factor in that conversation, she regretted not trying to learn more.
It would be easy to get lost in these hills if she tried to escape. Not to mention that she wouldn't have the same cloud of confusion of the Arklay breakdown available if she tried it. The last time, in the ruins of the mansion, had been no more than dumb luck and good timing.
She needed to know the reasons behind keeping her here - Wesker's reasons, and the non-Umbrella entity behind him. It didn't seem like research. It seemed like an assessment. Looking for information. The episode where he had tested (toyed with) her physical ability level had almost the feel of a training exercise to it, barring her own reaction to being pinned down.
Good lord. She had never blacked out like that and it worried her. Back at the diner, she had almost gone to that presence in the woods before better judgment prevailed. That sense of controlled hunger.
She might have imagined what could have happened, had she given in to that impulse. She did have a lot of time on her hands, these days.
It would only get worse. The constant little touches inflamed and distracted her. The limited amount of touch in the past had left her starved for it. Marigold didn't even have her old, rather excellent excuse of being afraid of hurting the other person.
That tight knot of control she had constructed over the years within herself was pushing hard against an old, repressed instinct to submit.
Marigold had spent years maneuvering around pompous directors who liked to throw their weight around. Heavens knew, that giving in to those jackals had gotten her into enough trouble before any of this mess had come crashing down on her head, thirty years earlier.
That hadn't happened here. Not exactly. Here was a similar sense of control when she met this one in '81, but she could have begged off while still upstairs. Maybe. Some perverse part of her had wanted to see the shape of the trap. Recognized, and stepped right into it.
And she still hadn't run. And, following the thread of her thoughts, was she seriously considering what she was…yes. Considering. And uncovering some very uncomfortable things about herself.
Because that feeling from the woods was beginning to keep her up at night, that hungry presence ready to snatch her up and devour her whole.
And worse, she was beginning to want it to.
She closed her eyes again. The safe thing to do would be to ask for her suppressants. Take the edge off what she knew to be building. But doing so would void the only real contact she had with the outside. There was an outside chance that Wesker had put it together - her upbringing had fostered a rather impressive degree of paranoia. There was a greater chance he'd put it together eventually. Marigold would have to make good use of the time she had between now and then.
She would just have to power through the rest of it.
"Welcome to the Trans-Arklay messaging service! Your mailbox contains three new messages. Please select an option."
The HCF-owned (through a half-dozen intermediary shell companies) office and warehouse were lightly used, especially this close to Umbrella's territory. Most of the industrial complex around it stood empty, about twenty miles outside Raccoon City limits. It had been acquired through a series of shell companies linked to a shipping company that HCF had recently, though quietly acquired. The attention to detail and security was refreshing after years of watching Umbrella slowly suffocate under its own weight like a beached whale.
Birkin was still working with their mutual contact. He had left messages to the service, unaware that Wesker was receiving and parsing the requests through to HCF for clarity. Reaching out to him directly would simply distract the man. Besides, it seemed like Birkin's plan was almost in place. Any contact they made now had to be through secure channels, and none of them trusted email servers.
At this stage, Wesker hadn't intended to be here as often. The facility he had made into his temporary base was adequate for his needs. However, it was getting harder to concentrate at the remote base. He'd taken to sleeping on the battered old couch in the office. Perhaps Ashford's nightmares had more of a reach than anticipated, so he'd take the respite as it came.
The sense of a breakthrough there was imminent. But, it was also far less urgent than Birkin's situation. He still had responsibilities to William to see through.
The Ashford woman had made a quip regarding Umbrella retirement plans at some point. It wasn't far off the mark, but a shadow had passed over her face while she had said it before breezing past it. She had almost studiously avoided any questions regarding the fates of her family. Wesker got a strong sense that she'd managed to learn the bare facts of that fiasco, but mentioning Alfred had only elicited a spike of irritation and redirection.
The Ashford camp had always been oddly silent on the matter, come to think of it. They had seemingly known what was happening almost before it went down, and all but fled the country. Alexia had reportedly been rather cross at having her conference cut short, but she had actually complied.
A few years later, in 1989, they had all been in a hall together in New York, for the 20th anniversary. None of them really wanted to go, but Spencer had insisted. The young Ashford lord, barely eighteen years old, had been cold and severe. When an older executive had commented on how much like his father he seemed at that age, the young man did not reply, immediately. Throughout the evening, though the sheer weight of the hostility he gave off towards the man had made him excuse himself from the party early.
Spencer had had the gall to comment on how he had lost three close family members in just a few years. Wesker could remember how Alfred had simply stared at him. Cold, almost blank. Finally, he had spoken. "Three. Of course. And Arklay has seen such success since Doctor Marcus…retired, yes." He had raised his glass to Spencer, a sardonic toast. "To continued good health at Arklay then." Alfred Ashford's cold gaze had found Birkin then; Birkin, who had been lobbying to use Placidia for the next step of G-virus. Spencer had paled- his health had been beginning to fail at the time.
Later in the evening, Alfred had appeared like a ghost while Wesker had stepped out for a cigarette. They had smoked in silence for a moment. "I'll know if something happens, you realize," he had said, almost mellow compared to his earlier display. Wesker, who had understood his meaning at once, said nothing - only looked back, placid. Alfred paid it no mind and had continued. "I heard a rumor that the old bastard who ran your lab died rather suddenly. I'm sure you were shocked. The whole generation, a bunch of incompetent middle managers."
When Sergei had been brought on to develop the paramilitary arm of Umbrella in the early 1990s, he had toured various bases to implement his overall strategy before stepping in the take over the Tyrant program.
Wesker could still remember the first time the Russian had walked into the lab and sighted Placidia, floating dormant in her tank. He had startled at the small form surrounded by Goliaths, then had chuckled. "The boy was right after all." When asked if that was going to be a problem, he had responded in the negative, greatly amused. "No problem, I think. It looks to me that everyone involved with this one fucked around a bit too freely. How many men did you lose trying to secure her, I wonder?"
The shadow passing over Marigold's face in the interview room played through Wesker's mind once again.
Spencer, later commenting that they were in a holding pattern around Rockfort - had they been protecting something? Even after the 1981 incident, after all of the 'accidents', clearly embittered and aware, Alfred had only made some veiled threats - then committed himself wholly to the training facility project, while maintaining control of the family's shares. He almost seemed to be taking Marigold's baton in growing the company in this darker paramilitary direction, albeit with limited evident competence - if the grapevine was a viable source of information.
Sergei had seemed to enjoy the old-world flavor of Rockfort Island - the elder wolf and the yearling holding onto his own territory. "Someone is getting stabbed in the back, but not today. Not tomorrow either. That one can hold to a mission, with some experience." He'd eyed Wesker skeptically. "This is insurance enough against that sort of thing, yes? Your friend, Birkin, will leave this one in place, now that he has his new toy."
"Don't let him hear you call it that," Wesker had responded dryly. The ruins of her fire-ravaged home in England had offered up tantalizing clues that she had been studying the impacts and progression over time, and a hidden target range on the ground had uncovered rail spikes embedded deep into a series of targets, likely thrown from a distance. Remembering the unsteady but devastating improvised knife work on display when they'd captured her, it was clear once again just how much worse that incident might have been for them.
So they were protecting something. What? The young scion, Alexia, had been studying a retrovirus found in ants. Come to think of it, the whole family had been extremely isolated up until Alexia had started her accelerated graduate program and joined the company. Allegedly, had maintained very little contact with their aunt. The last known visit had been 1977 - she had made pains to publicly clear her schedule for that. Not long after she had begun to get more hands-on with the company for a time. Less careful.
When they had lured her down to Arklay, he had almost been disappointed on her behalf that she had so readily stepped into the trap. Yet, when she arrived it became clear that the virus had created a limited time period where she could pass unnoticed, and that window was closing. Annette, the only one of the three of them not an only child, had looked on their confusion with indulgence.
Then Alexander Ashford had disappeared. (Alfred's look of contempt at the suggestion he took after his father).
A year later, Alexia. And Alfred turned their home into a fortress - all for the benefit of the company, of course. (Marigold, brows drawing together at the mention of 'retiring' scientists). While the Ashford in his care might have has limited knowledge of the aftermath, she probably knew more than anyone alive about the internal and the factors behind the events. And the rumors of T-Veronica…there had been no way for even that young prodigy to unlock something so quickly.
But the family had locked down hard after the patriarch's death in 1968. And this data had been available the entire time. A decade's worth of research. In the hands of a geneticist. While Patient Zero was actively drawing focus away from their work-
Oh, Spencer was a fool. And they had lost another fifteen years in service to his pride and stupidity.
The recent incident (not nearly the one he expected to occur) seemed to have a specific trigger. All those years ago, he'd spied an opportunity when she was trying to escape and managed to sedate her. There had been a strong reaction to being touched in the back of her neck. It was forceful, but so were gas, darts, and bullets; it was obvious afterward that the sedation ran through her quickly. (The gloves, shying away from touch mixed with rumors of debauched parties. Spencer's little digs at her previous troubles at school - no one quite knew what happened, and the resultant sterility noted in her file.
It was an open secret that several of the elder (and more than a few junior) heads of Umbrella had made overtures that were flatly ignored, for her portion of the Ashford fortune. The cloistered status had nicknamed her Umbrella's 'corporate abbess'. behind closed doors) All an artful mask?
He'd started touching her since that last incident- a hand to the back, skimming across the forearm, small things. The dilation of the pupils, rising scent, and flushing skin were hard to miss, even if the mask was well honed. Self-imposed isolation had been a necessary fast from sensation. But now, it seemed she had little defense against it.
In the meantime: Birkin sent another message- Sergei was on a tear, and there were some reports of a girl stumbling out of the woods following the destruction of Arklay. Umbrella had lost track of her trail, with no reports from STARS of sighting her within the mansion.
Poor, doomed Clemens, desperate to be avenged. Honestly, the diversion was good news for Birkin, if unnerving. And still, silence from the only legally documented living Ashford on any of this. No threats, no demands for information.
Power like that is worse than useless to us if it can't be controlled, Spencer had said once, while they were deciding the mode of the Placidia incarceration. He hadn't been wrong at the time. But now, the scales had shifted. Was it enough?
It could very well be worth finding out.