Grayson raised himself on his elbows with a groan, lifting his head and squinting against the bright glare of the halogen strip bolted above the door to the CHP room. He wobbled to his feet, his head throbbing, and Alexia groaned to his left, curled at the foot of the wall. Taking her gloved hand, he hauled her to her feet, and she swayed for a moment, looking a little green.

Silence smothered the basement like a thick blanket, and there was a wrongness in the air, a stillness like a vacuum. Grayson looked around. Slick, viscous ropes of mutamycete oozed down the wall, glistening unpleasantly in the glow of the light-strip, pooling on the concrete in dark, jammy puddles that curdled around the edges into hard black crusts. It made him think of gore, of the viscera-soaked streets in Raccoon City… There had been so much blood, then. "What the fuck happened?" he asked Alexia, and looked at her.

"Your eyes turned black," she intoned, casting a wary look around. Then she added, "Don't touch the mutamycete."

"Wasn't planning on it." There was something deeply wrong about the mutamycete here, Grayson decided. It behaved different, felt different. Experimentally, he picked up an oblong piece of concrete that had broken off from the wall, and tossed it into the vile, gore-looking stuff. It sank, very slowly, as if into quicksand. "What the fuck," was all he said.

"Destabilized parts of the mutamycete network. Liquid void," said Alexia, gravely.

He looked at her, raising an eyebrow.

Alexia said, "Think of it as corrupted data."

"We're inside the mutamycete," he said, understanding. "And I was the one who brought us here."

She nodded. "You used me as the client to access the network."

Grayson paused, bending his ear toward a noise. Swore he heard Steve calling out for help on the other side of the CHP door, but when he opened it, he found himself stepping, not into the room in which Steve had been confined and had died in, but into his apartment in Raccoon City. His sagging second-hand couch, made of some rough tweed material that smelled of cigarettes, squatted beside his glass-topped coffee-table, upon which was spread several subscription magazines and unpaid bills. Beyond his window, a summer twilight bruised the sky deep, bloody purples and reds. His shoes, as he moved toward the window, made the old floorboards creak.

A gray cat, the stray he'd often seen and sometimes fed, peered at him from his fire-escape, then, losing interest in him, curled up into a furry crescent on the expansion-grate with a plaintive meow, and went to sleep.

He put his head out the window and scanned the narrow street below. There were people down there, but their faces were indistinct, hasty sketches. He heard music, too, from the bar around the corner, but after several moments of listening to it, Grayson decided that it wasn't a song at all; it was noise arranged into something that only vaguely sounded like Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer", which had always seemed to play, without reason, at that particular bar at that particular time.

"This is where you lived in Raccoon City?" asked Alexia, incredulously. "I've seen council flats nicer than this hovel."

"How is this here ?" he asked, turning away from his window to look at her.

"You haven't figured that out yet?"

"If I had, I wouldn't be asking you, Lex."

She sighed. "The mutamycete is a repository for consciousness, for memories. For everything that makes a person a person." Alexia scrutinized his apartment, and strode into his yellow-tiled kitchenette, wrinkling her nose at the cheap laminate countertops and cabinets that had been slowly festering, unchanged, in his apartment since the 1970s. "What you're seeing," she continued, opening his avocado-colored refrigerator and peering at all the beer and foam take-out containers, "is what you remember." She thunked the fridge shut and looked at him. "Is that all you really kept in your refrigerator?" she asked suddenly, making a face. "Cheap beer and takeaway?"

Grayson didn't answer her right away, distracted by the sound of Steve's voice coming from the direction of his bathroom. Then, "Sometimes I had milk and soda, and maybe snack cakes. One sec." He walked off, and Alexia's gaze tracked him to the bathroom door. "You hear that, right?" he asked, pressing his ear to the door, listening to Steve's muffled wailing.

"I hear him, yes," said Alexia, coldly. "You can't save him, Grayson. He's dead, part of the mutamycete now. And he could be anywhere within the network."

"What if I could find him?"

"It would be like trying to find a pebble in the sea, but if you managed it? I'm not entirely sure." Alexia paused, and for a moment, she looked uneasy. She glanced around as if expecting something to jump out at her. "I've never been this lucid inside the mutamycete before."

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Anytime I'd attempted to interact with the mutamycete beyond the surface, it was like a dream. I've never had this much agency, this much awareness , within the Mold before." She swept her gaze over his kitchenette again, wrinkling her nose. "Ugh," she said, "I haven't seen rubbish like this since I was a girl. The 1970s should stay dead."

"My landlord was an old guy, and figured if it still worked, why fix it?" Grayson shrugged. He opened the door to his bathroom and stepped inside.

Except it wasn't his bathroom. Grayson stood in the middle of a wide, rain-slick road, awash with corpses and guts, and the mangled wrecks of cars that had tried and failed to escape Raccoon City in the heat of the bungled, too-late evacuation. The sky was the color of lead. Fires flickered here and there, and zombies shuffled around like dumb cattle, some eating, others content to stare into some nameless distance, their blood-caked mouths agape, jaws barely held together by fraying ligaments and rotting flesh. He observed a girl, maybe twelve, being dragged out from under a school bus by a band of infected, then, with a visceral pop of joints, pulled apart like taffy. Her shrill, blood-curdling screams pitched to a crescendo, hanging in the air for what felt like an eternity before they were subsumed into the gloomy ambience of rain, and a city of the dead.

Alexia put her hand on his arm, and Grayson almost shit himself, thinking it was one of those things. But then he remembered this was all just a projection from his head and that Alexia was here with him, and he relaxed under her touch.

Alexia's expression seemed to waver, indecisively, between disbelief and pity, and she said, "I didn't think it was this bad."

Grayson heard Steve calling out for help, from somewhere down the road. "I can still hear him," he said.

"So can I." Alexia turned her head to peer at him. Her face, once again, was a pale, unreadable mask. But there was something in her eyes that might have been concern for him, might have been worry. "Are you all right?" she asked, and then she grimaced slightly as if she realized, too late, that the question was a profoundly stupid one. "Sorry," she added, quickly.

"No," he said, honestly, "I'm not really okay. But we're here now." I wanna wake up from this nightmare. I don't wanna relive this shit again, not now, not when I'd just started getting better. Not in front of Alexia. "Come on," he said, and he started toward Steve's voice, "we need to find Steve."

" Grayson," hissed Alexia, "he can't be saved."

"Maybe he can," said Grayson, because something, a kind of instinct, told him that there was still something he could do. "But it's something only I can do. I don't know how I know that. I just do."

But Grayson wouldn't find out what that thing he could do was, at least not yet. He woke with a start to the whine of an alarm, and a cool female voice counting down the hours until the facility's destruction. He was inside his room, in the mansion, and Marigold and Alfred were there, and so was Alexia, who looked as if she were still shaking off the aftershock of a nightmare.

"Spencer's done it," said Alfred, and he didn't sound surprised.

"I have friends in certain high places who were able to delay it," relayed Marigold, and she was looking more withered, more sickly, than before. "We have Seventy-two hours." She coughed into the crook of her arm, then straightened slightly. "And you both have already thrown away five."

He looked over at Alexia, then Marigold. "We were out for five hours, Ma?"

"Alfred and I found you both in the basement with the boy," said Marigold. "We brought you here. But yes, you've both been out of sorts for five hours."

"Then we've got no more time to waste," said Grayson. "We need to get down to that safe-room."

Alexia did not look excited at the prospect of that, and she said, "Must we really go down there, Auntie?"

"It's the only way out of the mansion, Alexia," said Alfred. "The lift's been damaged. Crashed into the bloody shaft. Something huge crawled out of the bloody rubble, and Aunt Callie and I only barely managed to drive it off."

"Drive him off," corrected Marigold.

"He's a thing now, Aunt Callie," said Alfred. Then he scoffed, "Bloody jocks. More trouble than they're worth."