Hibernation had taken more of a toll on Alexia than Grayson had initially thought (though he supposed fifteen years of suppressed metabolic activity couldn't have been easy on Alexia's nominally human body), and, absolutely spent after another torrid round of lovemaking, she'd collapsed into a deep, obstinate sleep, snoring lightly into the pillows heaped under her head.

Grayson pulled the covers over her, then leaned down to kiss her cheek. She didn't stir, but he swore he saw the flicker of a smile on her face. He dressed and slipped like a shadow from the room, locking the door (he didn't trust Alfred, and there were zombies roaming around) behind him and sliding the key under the door for Alexia before quietly making his way to the drawing room.

He peeked inside. Alfred was fast asleep in the armchair, and the fire was burning low behind the firescreen. The decanter of scotch was empty, which meant Alfred, who had already been profoundly exhausted, would be dead to the world for a good, long while.

The least he could do was throw a blanket over Alfred, and he did, then headed over to Alfred's gunroom. He selected a 1911 (Grayson had shot it before, and liked the feel of it in his hand) and took a handful of magazines, stuffing them into his pockets. He left the mansion, crossing the hydroponic yard (the simulated daylight had gone, and in its place was simulated night—so the polar seasons wouldn't throw their circadian rhythms out of whack) and riding the elevator up into the facility.

As the elevator rumbled up, he thought about Claire. Not romantically—not ever romantically—but in that nostalgic way you mused on old friends. Without her, Grayson doubted he and Sherry would have survived Raccoon City, and sometimes he doubted he would have survived himself had Claire not been around to jostle him out of his funks. She was a good kid, a real good kid. He owed her, and the opportunity to repay her had finally arisen. He could get her to safety, maybe, if Alexia decided the mouse wasn't worth the chase (or if she, blessedly, stayed the fuck asleep so she couldn't chase the mouse to begin with), but he was truthfully more concerned about Alfred, in that regard. Whereas Alexia could compartmentalize which battles were worth expending effort and which ones weren't (though that didn't mean she didn't dabble in the occasional pointless violence to sate some psychopathic craving), Alfred wanted to fight all of them; he wanted war—a long, bloody, evil war.

But Grayson wouldn't kid himself, no; his intentions weren't entirely altruistic. He wanted to ask Claire about Sherry.

The elevator dinged open, and Grayson stepped out into chilly darkness. His breath steamed in the air. He supposed the back-up generator only had enough juice for partial power (or the techs, if they were even still alive, were conserving power by shutting it off in non-crucial areas), and if he'd known that, he would have brought a thick coat to wear over his suit. He thought about boarding the elevator again and riding it back down to the mansion to retrieve said coat, but decided against it and started down the narrow concrete hallway. A waterline had broken, and Grayson slipped on a slick patch of black ice, but managed to right himself before the ground was swept out from under his feet. He moved carefully now, one hand on the cold concrete, the other looped through the trigger of his 1911. His face burned from the cold, and he was beginning to regret not doubling back to the mansion for that coat; but the elevator was already behind him, so he pressed on, wondering if this was how the Germans had felt as they'd marched toward Moscow, and died from the merciless Russian winter.

Of course, Grayson was being dramatic; it was cold, but a tolerable kind of cold—the sort of cold that had come with the winters in England, when he'd lived there as a kid. He'd hated living in England. After spending most of his life in Antarctica with the twins as his only real friends, conforming to civilization for a period longer than a few weeks had been an adjustment, made worse by the fact it had been in a country Grayson had only come to know through hearsay. He'd gotten a lot of shit from his Eton classmates; he'd been this big, dumb-looking American kid, and there wasn't a day the Eton boys didn't remind him that he was a big, dumb-looking American kid. When they'd found out his dad was the Ashford's butler, they'd graduated from heckling him to outright tormenting him. The bullshit stopped, however, when Grayson had bloodied Neil Barrowclough, a Pop prefect and the little ringleader of the group, so badly that he'd suffered a severe concussion, and had never quite recovered from it. The only reason Grayson had never seen any blowback was because of the Ashfords, whose patriarchs were all Old Etonians who regularly, and generously, donated to the school. He reminded himself to tell the story to Alexia, one of these days; as a St. Swithuns chick, even if she'd only been there for a few short years before she'd outpaced the curriculum and graduated to Oxford, she'd probably appreciate it—and then she'd probably just make fun of him for having gone to Eton ("The dumb ones go to Eton, the smart ones go to Winchester," she'd probably say, and then she'd smile, not patronizingly, but sympathetically, and pat him on the arm).

He'd gotten so lost in his head that he didn't immediately register the gunshot, and the burning sensation in his shoulder. "Shit," he heard someone say, a woman, and he knew that voice. "Grayson, is that you?"

"You shot me, Claire. Thanks," he said, wincing. The pain wouldn't last very long; it never did. Just as the wound wouldn't last long.

A flashlight snapped on, shining in his eyes. Grayson screwed his eyes against the light. "Jesus Christ, you're the last person I expected to see here," said Claire, rushing over to him. She wore jeans, boots, and a black parka, the Umbrella logo emblazoned on the breast-pocket. Holstering her gun, she said, "Did they grab you after Raccoon City? You were in NEST. You saw the shit Umbrella was up to. Were you on one of the other planes?"

"No, remember that noble family I'd told you about? The one my dad butlered for."

"Oh, Jesus," said Claire, with immediate realization. There was a dark bruise bisected by a gash above her right eye, probably where she'd banged it when the plane had crashed. "The Ashfords."

"Yeah," he said. "Long story—goddamn, this hurts."

"You can still do that healy-thing, right?"

Grayson nodded. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I'll be fine. Just hurts like a bitch, but it'll pass."

"Here," she said, and yoked his good arm across her shoulders. It was an unnecessary gesture, but Grayson appreciated it all the same; she was a good kid, a real good kid. "You know Alfred's a fucking psychopath, right?" she asked, as they started down the long stretch of concrete corridor.

"Yeah," he said.

"And you work for him."

"It's complicated," he said. "It's like executioners."

She looked at him, puzzled.

Grayson elaborated, "In the Middle Ages, executioners were barely better than lepers. People kept away from them. Thought they were dirty and vile, and wanted nothing to do with them. You know they'd try an executioner for murder after a killing before acquitting him? Crazy shit. Anyway, what I'm getting at is that it was a profession nobody wanted, but one they often found thrust upon them, usually by family." He looked at her, then said, "That's what I mean. I'm an executioner."

"You could have gone anywhere after Raccoon City," said Claire.

"I had my reasons for coming back," he told her, and that reason, although he hadn't known it at the time, was soundly asleep in his bed. "Like I said, it's complicated." Grayson was just about to broach the topic of Sherry when Claire suddenly stopped. "What's up?" he asked. "Why're we stopping?"

"Look."

Grayson did. A ganglion of oily black tendrils were sprouting from cracks in the wall like unfinished wirework, small hairs bristling on them like spider legs. The hyphae, and they were thick here. "Shit," he said, playing dumb, "those look pretty gross. Probably shouldn't touch them."

"They're all over the facility," said Claire. "And more and more of them just keep appearing." She unholstered her gun and popped half a clip into the mass of tentacles before they retreated, with a low groan that put in mind the sound of a ship about to capsize, into the wall like so many eels into caves.

Grayson wondered if Alexia could feel those things being shot, but decided she probably couldn't. They weren't exactly part of her body; they were, as he understood it, proxies—bioagents working in some kind of weird symbiosis with her, or, more precisely, with the T-Veronica—and if Claire had shot them before, which, given the confidence in which she'd shot them just now, seemed to be the case, Alexia would have made her discomfort known.

They turned a corner, and Claire said, "I've seen some weird shit here, tentacles aside."

"Yeah?"

She nodded. "Ant-zombies. One killed a group of survivors from Rockfort."

"Ant-zombies," he repeated, hoping for some kind of elaboration.

"It's like… the ants come out of the cracks or the vents, and then they come together and make this… I dunno, this man-shaped thing. Like the Plant 43 zombies in NEST. You remember those."

He did, and he wished he hadn't. "The ones that don't fucking die from anything short of a fireball. These ant-zombies are like that?"

"Yeah," said Claire. "Kinda. They're hard to kill. One almost killed Steve." She paused, then said, "He's a boy who escaped Rockfort with me. One of the prisoners."

I know who Steve is. "Where's Steve at?"

"In one of the barracks," said Claire. "There's a kerosene heater in there. Some of the survivors were holed up in there before the ant-zombie came outta the vents. They're all dead."

"And… he's just hanging around a bunch of potentially infected corpses," said Grayson, dully.

"They didn't die in the room," said Claire. "They ran out, and the ant-zombie followed them. One of the Rockfort guards stuffed a grenade in its mouth. Took it out—and himself."

"And the other bodies?"

"The ones that weren't destroyed in the blast, me and Steve threw down into the mineshaft." She said nothing for a few beats. Then, "Also, I heard some weird wailing noises before I'd covered the vents. Sounded like a guy, kinda, like he was in pain. I can still hear him, but he's muffled."

"Nosferatu. That's what the personnel call it."

"Is it an it or a person?" asked Claire, looking at him.

"Nobody knows," he said. "I'm thinking it's both."

"Both?"

"Like William Birkin."

Claire frowned. "They were doing BOW research here?"

"Were," he said. "But the BOW labs have been shuttered down for years."

They walked in silence, through a dark maze of corridors, lit in occasional patches by emergency halogen lights cabled to chugging portable generators—the handiwork of the survivors, Grayson supposed, to compensate for the loss of the facility's power. Claire said, "I'm sorry for shooting you."

"It's fine," he said, having nearly forgotten that he'd been shot; the pain was gone now, and he told her so. "I know you didn't mean to. Look, I gotta tell you some stuff when we reach Steve. It's important."

"I got some stuff to tell you too," said Claire. "We'll trade stories when we reach the barracks." She scrutinized him, as if she were looking for the chinks in a set of plate armor. Then, gently, "How're you holding up, Grayson?"

"I don't even feel the wound anymore. It might have even healed already; it was a clean blow-through."

"Not what I mean," said Claire. She gave a sharp intake of breath, as if bracing herself for a punch, then said, "Annette."

"I miss her," he said, and meant it, his heart lurching uncomfortably, arrhythmically. "I miss her every day."

"I didn't mean—"

"No," he interrupted, "it's nice. Talking about her, I mean, with someone who knew her."

"Didn't know her for that long," said Claire, smiling. "And I really hated her, at first." Then the smile vanished, and she said, "But in the end, I liked her. She was just someone in a shitty situation. Maybe being the way she was, so clinical, was how she coped with it all."

"It was," he said, and nodded. "Whenever Annette got stressed out, she always had this bad habit of retreating into herself and compartmentalizing her emotions. Drove me bonkers, honestly." Grayson chuckled, then said, "She was my rock, my foil. I was the drippy emotional one, and she was the calm, collected one. We balanced each other out, I think."

"I'm sure she thought of you as her rock too," said Claire.

"She wasn't always like that—how you saw her, I mean," he said. "The more Umbrella squeezed, the more William yelled and mushed her through the iditarod of the G-Project, the worse Annette got. But when she could relax, unwind, Annette was a livewire. She was fun. Great sense of humor too, when you got a few beers in her." He smiled, then said, "I used to bartend at this nightclub, this place called The Gomorrah Room, on the weekends, and they're blasting some club remix of that fucking Aqua song, the one about roses being red and violets being blue. Annette settles down at the bar—she wanted to surprise me—and she's drop-dead gorgeous. Put all the twenty-somethings to shame. Anyway, she's got this slip of a blue dress on, and goddamn, her legs were so beautiful and long. I plied her with drinks, and next thing I know, she's dragging me out from behind the bar and trying to get me to dance." Grayson laughed at the memory, then said, "You would have liked her, I think, before Raccoon City happened."

"Hard to imagine Annette having fun in a club," chuckled Claire. She stared at him for a long while, then said, "You really loved her."

"I still love her. Always will," said Grayson, and he would. Even with Alexia in his life, there would always be that part of his heart that belonged to Annette.

"I almost feel bad for William," said Claire. "He never stood a chance." Then, anticipating his next question, Claire said, "Sherry's okay. We're almost at the barracks. I'll tell you more when we get there."