Wesker's radio crackled to life once again. Segers' voice came through his earpiece, sounding strained, but steady. "Sir? The uh…Tyrant. It's gone."

Wesker had been toying with the two prisoners when the call came through, and he disappeared from their view without a word. It would have next to no impact on the mission itself, but it had occurred to Wesker that it might be beneficial to throw Chris Redfield off the bioweapons trail for a while. The formation of the Private Anti-Biohazard Service, or PABS wasn't a surprise, exactly…but they were oddly well-informed. HCF intel told him that they were already moving in on several European targets that they hadn't even begun to organize a strike upon. In a somewhat ironic twist, those teams has often been headed by the best of his former STARS squad.

Redfield, and PABS, were moving fast, and Umbrella was reacting faster to the assaults than he would have liked. The information they seemed to be working from wasn't current, but it went deep. PABS, led by his former team, seemed to be building upon that foundation with every strike.

Redfield's younger sister would be acceptable bait, albeit bait to be handled with care, given her track record. He'd shown her and the Burnside boy just enough to pull Redfield off the trail, if they found a way to contact him. Wesker had been planning to go to ground between missions anyhow.

Thirty seconds after the call had come through, Wesker had put enough distance between himself and the baffled teens (Redfields, he thought with not a little venom. Their singular tenacity was a large part of why the soldiers he had brought along had failed to take the mission seriously enough). He leapt up, catching the edge of a low roof, and pulled himself up. From here, he could see the exit points from the palace grounds while remaining out of camera range. He tapped his earpiece. "Speak."

"It's gone, sir. Ten-foot-tall troll - sorry, Tyrant. That lady you brought - subject Delta? - said she'd get rid of it, and she did." In the background was a muted chorus of 'what the fuck just happened' and 'someone get the wall back up before it comes back.'

"Is the subject stable?" 'Delta' was the designation the soldiers had been given for Marigold, just in case their radio encryption was somehow compromised.

"Probably? She took off to lead it away." Segers sounded sheepish.

Wesker sighed. Of course. "Tell me exactly what happened."

"Well, lady got up and told us to stop fucking shooting and get to cover. Then she started yelling at it."

"…What."

"Damndest fucking thing. Started calling it a Ken doll-looking fucker. I don't think she actually knows how to swear - it was real cute - though yeah, Ken doll. Think she was trying to get its attention, 'cause it don't seem to give a shit til then. Smeared something on one 'a the l'il knives on her belt. Did that till the thing turned around and fucking roared." The man audibly shuddered. "Davies, the guy who carried her in, was getting the bigger ammo ready to blow the thing open, so if she wanted to buy a little time, then whatever. That's what we figured until the lady whipped that teeny knife right into the back of its throat."

Wesker made an amused sound. Marigold's rather prim affect was clashing with that slightly feral baser nature of hers. The virus notoriously caused infertility in all T-Series subjects, and the effect of it was stark in the Tyrant program. "But it's still alive."

"Yeah. Davies took a couple of shots and made it step back a little, but then the lady hopped over the barrier and started yelling at it again, tryin' to lead it off. Shimmied right up a drain pipe and started running across the roof of the nearest barracks, last we saw her. Fucking thing actually turned and followed. Totally forgot about the rest of us." Segers paused. "She still seemed pretty out of it, sir." Segers hesitated, then, "I got her hood up as soon as the mask came off. There's a bunch of guys here who are real pissed at Ashford right now. We don't need to know the play until we gotta, but kid don't need to be target practice. Should we retrieve her?"

"Negative, do not engage the subject now that she is activated. The mission is going as planned. Continue to arm, and await orders soon to move out. Ashford will be drawn out soon enough."

A slightly distant "Shit, Davies, you were fucking right-" came through before the signal cut out. Wesker smirked from his perch, watching the palace. He pulled the digital device with Marigold's tracker encoded from his vest. She was moving slower now, through a heavily infested area. Given how fragile and paranoid Alfred's state of mind seemed to be, his interest would be piqued. It was inconvenient that her hood had been pulled up - her identity would not be immediately obvious - but it wasn't enough to hide her face from the cameras, for which there was no audio feed.

Alfred would break, and, even if Marigold knew where they were by now, there would be no warning.

Distantly, he heard her drugged and disoriented voice in his head. The roses are here. They shouldn't be here. They promised to keep them away. With that, her 'voice' fell silent once again.

Alfred Ashford hovered over the command console, focused and manic. The blackouts - those blank spots - were getting worse, but he seemed to be getting things done, if the looks on the prisoners' faces had been anything to go on.

The tremors in his hands were getting worse, though they had quieted for now. It was getting harder to hold his nerve. He coughed, and touched a bleeding cut on his head with an irritated hiss. Burnside had got a lucky hit in with the stock of a rifle while trying to escape. He'd pay for that, soon enough. All of these bastards would.

Those two had breached the palace, and gotten into the inner sanctum, the living area and old labs present beneath the palace, on the cliffs. They'd accused him of something. Impersonating Alexia? Ridiculous. She had returned just a little while ago, had she not?

Of course I have, dear brother, the ghost of Alexia's voice agreed in his head. Alfred relaxed minutely, wiping away sweat from his brow while scanning the cameras.

He'd been steadily, quietly, building up defenses since Raccoon City had gone up. No, before that: since Arklay. A ghost had called the mansion, and had old Scott Harman not been the one to answer the phone, even that small warning might have passed into a subconscious fever dream.

But prepare, he had. And here the invaders were. Not three months after the fall of Raccoon City, and the vultures were arriving to feast upon the corpse. They'd had quite a rude awakening.

The prisoners themselves wouldn't get far. He'd locked the coordinates for all planes belonging to the corporation to one location, and there would be no escape from there, even if they survived being pinpointed as the Tyrant's secondary target. He could deal with them at his leisure.

The primary targets -the new wave of HCF soldiers - seemed to have repelled the Tyrant with barely a shot fired. Was there a new anti-BOW tool in place? They'd brought BOWs of their own, not to mention the T-Virus itself. The pit itself was in a blind spot, but a single solder single soldier seemed to make it past the Tyrant onto the roof of a barracks, running to draw the creature away.

He followed the slender figure on the cameras, to a heavily infested area on the edge of the training facility. The Tyrant seemed to lose either sight or interest in the interloper, and began to head for the airfield. The interloper jumped down into the zombie-infested path.

The zombies milled around the figure, flowing away like they were a stone within a river. A BOW? The figure drew their arms around their middle, looking wary of the infestation, though not moving entirely steadily now that momentum and, he assumed, adrenaline, had been lost. They had a hood pulled over their head, but long, pale hair poked out, and there was something familiar about the build, about how they moved.

They seemed disoriented and uncomfortable - self-aware - though not entirely lost. Where were they headed…?

Alfred glanced at the console. Somewhere along the line, the rose he had worn on his label had dried out. He'd set it down here, where his time had been more and more occupied. Scattered remnants of other roses, from other trips back to Antarctica, could be found in his office, in his chambers, in the foyer. Somewhere along to line, he'd decided that they were a necessity.

He wasn't so far gone to bring them up into the mansion, not in Antarctica. Grayson's 'allergy' to them was so bad that he'd nearly died from touching one when they'd been young - mere months before Arklay's maw had opened and snatched up the first family member to fall that decade. The fresh ones originated from there, of course, but only in a secure, ventilated lab that Grayson - any of them, really - could not access.

The figure on the camera shook their head, like they were trying to clear it. One zombie came too close and brushed into the figure, causing them to startle, and swat the creature into the nearest wall. They stared at the pathetic creature, going still.

The zombies milling around the figure very slowly began to shuffle away. Alfred began to break into a cold sweat. The Tyrants could be given targets, but they were programmed. This was something different altogether. T-virus victims did not have the capacity to take commands.

The figure seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, and pushed their hood back. Reaching under their collar, the figure peeled some sort of patch away and moved to toss it away, then paused and placed it in their pocket. Was it some sort of medication? Was that the source of the disorientation-

The figure looked around and his heart seemed to stop for several seconds. Their eyes - suddenly familiar - settled on the camera on a nearby post, at close range.

He watches for a moment, gobsmacked. Not you too, a small voice inside him pleaded. The figure - the woman, one he'd known since he was a very small child - blinked, then made a very familiar sign, ending it as a question with slow, unsteady hands. Name signs, after all, were deeply personal. She'd given Alfred his when he was three years old, and had taught the twins that silent language in the years that followed.

Crow?

In the control room, Alfred's hands began to shake once again.