Don had been right, Grayson couldn't sleep, shit, piss, or eat in the stasis room, so he'd retrieved some blankets and pillows from the mansion, packed his bag full of canned goods and bottled waters, and if he needed to use the bathroom, he used the private bathroom inside Alexia's office.

He'd made his bed in the corner of the stasis room, near one of the monitoring stations, watching the feeds, turning the dragonfly barrette between his fingers. Alexia had given it back to him shortly before she'd died— no , Grayson told himself, before she went to sleep —and she'd told him to keep it until she came back to collect it. It had been a promise. His gaze slid to the tank. Alexia hadn't moved at all, or at least he didn't think she had; sometimes Grayson swore he could see movement, the occasional twitch or spasm of a limb, but it could have just as easily been his imagination, and probably was. Or, he thought, more likely it was just electrical stimulation: those tiny shocks delivered via medical electrodes to keep Alexia's muscles from atrophying in hibernation, but those muscles had long been dead and stiff.

That was a hard thought to swallow. That Alexia was just a corpse now, slowly decomposing in a tank just twenty feet away from him. She didn't seem to be decomposing, however, and as far as he could tell, her vitals looked stable. But how could he know for sure? He wasn't a doctor, and maybe he was reading the feeds wrong. Maybe the computers were wrong. Sometimes his computer, back in Raccoon City, would freeze, and maybe something like that had happened to these computers. Technology was not infallible; in fact, Grayson would argue that technology was the most fallible thing in the world, and that was why Alexia's tank scared him so much—it was like a blade hovering perpetually over her jugular, ready to cut.

He got up and walked around the stasis room, in the cold glow of the tank and the monitors. Alfred couldn't have known how to operate this machine without some kind of manual. Alexia was a very careful person, and she'd never fully trusted Alfred to perform crucial tasks without a firm guiding hand. She would have left him instructions, some kind of reference.

Grayson found a spiral-bind notebook attached to the control station by a thin chain, of the sort businesses attached to pens so people wouldn't steal them. The notebook was laminated, and looked like some kind of user's manual. The pages inside were typewritten. Instructions were typed on those pages in painstaking detail, and there were photocopied diagrams (they looked to have been copied from hand-drawings) illustrating the different components of the hibernaculum—that was what Alexia called her tank.

He sat down at the monitoring station and started to read. In the manual, Alexia described a virus called the T-Veronica, how it would take fifteen years to bind to her cells. The manual went on to say that, in the event the ARP, the Automated Resuscitation Protocol, failed, Grayson mustn't revive her, under any circumstance, before December 28th of this year, and she provided the instructions for the manual override process. She provided instructions and work-arounds for every possible worst-case scenario. Alexia had prepared for this, and he was grateful for that.

His eyes lingered on his name, and his jaw started to hurt. Grayson realized he was clenching his teeth. Alexia had meant for him to revive her, not Alfred. That was the secret Alfred had been keeping from him.

He laid the manual on the control station, made his way over to the tank. He touched the glass and said to Alexia, "Hey."

Alexia, expectedly, said nothing.

Grayson had read once that comatose patients, though physically unresponsive, could still pick up on stimuli in their brains, and he wondered if it was like that for people who were hibernating, if Alexia could hear him. But , something with his voice said, almost malicious, she's probably dead in there. You're talking to a corpse, you fucking idiot. "It's me, Lex. Grayson Harman. I'm sorry it took this long for me to come."

For a moment, he imagined movement, but when Grayson looked again, Alexia was stock-still. She looked like some dead thing anchored to the bottom of a lake, like Harry Houdini in a failed water-escape trick.

Still, he continued to speak; if there was even a small chance she was alive, that she could hear him, Grayson wanted Alexia to know that he was there, that he still cared. And it made him feel better, because he hadn't spoken to her in fifteen years. "Alfred didn't tell me I was supposed to look out for you," he said, caressing her cheek through the glass. "I'm sorry."

Silence.

"Why'd you have to do something this fucking reckless?"

Alexia did not reply.

"There was no reason for it," he continued, a tight, uncomfortable squeeze in his chest. Hot tears pricked the corners of his eyes. "You were perfectly fucking healthy. A perfectly fucking healthy kid. You didn't have to do this to yourself, Lex. It's like breaking your legs on purpose when there was nothing wrong with them."

For a moment, Grayson imagined that Alexia's eyes opened, just enough to show a thin sliver of icy blue, and she looked right at him. But when he looked again, her eyes were closed.

He walked back to his makeshift bed and, for the first time since that night in the motel after Annette's death, Grayson cried himself to sleep.

Wailing woke him, and Grayson lifted his head off his pillow, squinting groggily into the dimness. He wiped the jagged crystals from his eyes. The noise was coming from the vents. It was a pained, monstrous wailing, and it didn't sound entirely human.

"That's Nosferatu."

Grayson bolted upright. "Don?"

Don was standing there, in the half-darkness of the stasis room. He had a backpack, which he slung down to the floor with a grunt. "Brought you some stuff, mate," said the Scotsman, unzipping the bag. He pulled out an assortment of snacks, a six-pack of beer, a bottle of good whiskey, and several porno magazines. "Thought you could use some entertainment," chuckled Don, and glanced over at Alexia. "Then again, you been starin' at some tits and fanny this whole time, so maybe I should've just brought books instead."

"Alexia's got books in her office," said Grayson. He'd taken a few from her bookcase to pass the time, and was in the middle of The Myrmecology Compendium . He stared at the spread of naked women, and absently leafed through a 1987 issue of Playboy. "And," he said, putting the magazine down, "I haven't been staring, asshole. Not like that."

Don snorted. "Good, 'cause it's necrophilia."

"She might not be dead, Don."

The Scotsman sighed, cracking open a beer. He passed it to Grayson, and sat down beside him, watching the tank. "Been worried 'bout you," he said. "You've been down here for a while."

"I haven't been down here that long."

Don gave him a worried look, then said, "Mate, it's November."

"Stop fucking with me."

"I'm not," said Don. "You dinnae look so good, Grayson. You're lookin' peely-wally."

"I've been exercising. I feel fine."

"And survivin' on nae but fuckin' canned food? Saw your rubbish bin."

"I feel fine." He sipped his beer, and realized it had been his first beer in quite a while. Grayson downed it, opened another. "Has Alfred come back?"

Don shook his head. "Reckon he's got his hands full with Rockfort."

"Good, I'm gonna fucking punch him."

"I'd pay to see that," said Don. "What's got you all wound up?"

"Other than the fact I lost track of a month and a half? A lot of things, Don."

In the vents, Nosferatu wailed again and again, and wouldn't stop, each cry louder, more desperate, than the one before it. "This," said Don, miserably, "is why none of us fuckin' sleep." He glanced at the vents, and said, "That vent connects to the BOW labs. Fuckin' shame."

"Why's that a shame?"

"BOW labs were sealed off. No way to shut the fucker up."

"I didn't know that," he said.

"Happened 'bout, oh, five years back?"

"That's when Alfred took over the facility," said Grayson.

"Aye, but nobody was usin' the BOW labs even before Alfred came," said Don. "They moved all the BOW production to Arklay after Alexia died"—the Scotsman glanced at the hibernaculum, as if he expected Alexia to wake up and correct him—"but with Raccoon City gone the way of the dodo, that could change." He shrugged. "But it probably won't. This bloody place is undermanned and will probably stay that way, thanks to the bossman's shite leadership. More than likely, they've moved the business to Arklay City, and this place will just be left to," and Don mimed an explosion, " poof . I keep waitin' for the evacuation alarm to go off."

"You ever been in a self-destruct?" It was a rhetorical question.

"Nae, cannae say I have."

Grayson killed his fourth beer, then said, "Let's just say the evac alarm is a formality."

Don stared at him.

"I was there when NEST-1 went up," said Grayson, helpfully. "They barely give you enough time to evacuate. That's by design."

"What 'bout the people who manage to evacuate?" asked Don.

"What do you think the USS is for?"

Don frowned. "And the only reason you got to bloody walk out is because of who you know."

"I guess so," said Grayson.

"By the way," said Don, "what did you do with Peter's body?"

At some point in his conversation with Don ("I dunno what you're talking about," he said to Don. "Peter was there last I checked. Maybe the ants ate the rest of him"), Grayson nodded off, and he dreamed about Annette. He was back in NEST-1, and Annette was dying again, lying on the floor in a puddle of her own blood, her body broken in so many places that he was afraid of touching her, of breaking her even more. Claire was there too, telling Annette that they would get her help—but Grayson knew there was no help to give her.

Annette told him to look out for Sherry, that she loved him and was sorry for everything, and she kissed him one final time, and her lips tasted of blood and cigarettes. Sherry wept and begged her mom not to go, and Claire comforted her because he couldn't, because losing Annette was like losing Alexia all over again, and all Grayson wanted to do in that moment was die.

Then the evacuation alarm went off, in that dream, red lights flashing. Annette became Alexia, and Alexia began to rot in his arms, as if someone were fast-forwarding through the stages of decomposition…

Grayson woke up to see DATA NOT FOUND [ERR: 14] flashing on a computer screen in bright red monospace, and around him were empty beer cans, and a half-finished bottle of whiskey. Don was gone, and Alexia's tank wasn't as bright as it had been before he'd passed out, as if it was operating on reduced power. Her vitals, on the feeds, were dipping, but hovering within stable parameters.

He scrambled to his feet and sprinted to the control station, leafing through the user's manual, trying to find a fix. And found it, under a section titled In the Event of Data Corruption, and he looked for Error 14 (directory corruption) in the list of errors, and did the things Alexia instructed him to do, palms sweating, his heart pounding in his chest.

He ran the recovery protocol (Alexia had graciously automated most of the software, and made the things that couldn't be automated as simple as possible to operate), then rebooted the system and held his breath.

It came back online. The error was gone. The feeds stabilized, and behind him, Alexia's tank glowed bright. Grayson turned to the hibernaculum and hugged it, pressing his hot face against the cold glass.