October 6, 2025 · Restricted Airfield Hangar, France · 04:30
He was in the green field.
He recognised it the moment he arrived — the same way you recognised a recurring place in the specific register of dreams where you don't learn the geography so much as remember it, the way you remember something that happened before you were old enough to record it consciously. Green grass, very long. Wildflowers in colours he couldn't have named after waking. Air moving through the field in long slow waves. Above: a sky that was neither day nor night, the particular diffuse light of neither.
He had been here before. Many times. Always the same field, always the same light, always the same air moving.
Then the song came.
It came from somewhere ahead — not a direction, a point in the field that was simply where the song was, drawing him forward the way sounds in dreams drew you without your deciding to move. A woman's voice. Soft, not trying to carry. The kind of singing that was for one person and not a performance.
Sleep, my love, as the trees above protect you from the dark.
A great river will watch you as you dream until dawn.
Sleep my love, close your eyes,
And when you've awakened, the new day will bring to you a bright new world.
Sleep my love as the birds above do rest their weary wings
Let the rain play a gentle song to help your dreams sing.
Sleep my love, close your eyes,
And when you awaken, the new day will bring to you a bright new world.
Ever so gently hear my voice,
Ever so softly feel my touch.
Always so gently I walk —
So go to sleep, my love.
He moved toward it.
He always moved toward it. Across four months of this dream he had never once found a way to stop moving toward the song, because in the dream the song was a reason and reasons were enough.
She was standing in the middle of the field.
White dress. No shoes. Long dark hair loose around her shoulders. Her right arm was at her side and even at this distance he could see the way she held it — slightly away from her body, the specific careful posture of someone accustomed to protecting an injury that had become permanent. Blue eyes. Not his mother's eyes — the cold analytical blue that ran deep and calculated everything. These eyes were different. Clear. The blue of someone who had been through things that should have destroyed her and had come out the other side still present, still looking directly at what was in front of her.
She was singing to him. She didn't know she was singing to him. She was just singing, the same way she had always sung, because the song was the one thing that had always worked — the one thing that had reached through the mutation and found the mind underneath. She had sung it at a riverside church in the Amazon while a monster that used to be her mother listened from the water and went quiet. She had sung it to keep herself calm in the dark when there was no one else. The song was hers. It had always been hers.
He stepped toward her.
The barrier stopped him.
It was invisible and it had no texture and it had no logical reason to exist in a green field in a dream and it stopped him completely, the way it always stopped him, at exactly the same point — close enough to see her face clearly, too far to reach her. He pressed his hands against it. It didn't give. He drove his shoulder into it. Nothing. He had tried everything across four months and the barrier had not moved once.
She turned and looked at him.
Her mouth moved. One word. Maybe two. He had never been able to hear it clearly through the barrier — the dream muffled it the way glass muffled sound, you could see the shape of it but not the content. But her eyes said it more clearly than her mouth did. Help me.
A tear moved down her cheek.
He hit the barrier with both hands. The titanium fist left no mark. The organic right hand felt nothing. She was still looking at him, and the tear was still there, and the song had stopped, and the green field had started to go grey at the edges the way it always went grey when the dream ended—
∗ ∗ ∗
He woke coughing.
Not slowly. The kind of waking that was almost a physical event — lungs seizing on the first breath, body going from horizontal to sitting in the same motion, the cough taking over before anything else was available. His heart was running very fast. Wrong fast. The specific arrhythmic pattern that the CIED monitored and managed but could not fully suppress when the trigger was strong enough.
Then hands on his shoulders. Someone saying his name. He knew the voice before his eyes were open.
"Calm down," Rebecca said. "This is a dream. You're in the hangar. Calm down, Alen."
He got control of the coughing. He opened his eyes. Grey pre-dawn light through the hangar's high windows. The Night-Wing a dark shape in the centre of the space. Rebecca sitting on the edge of the cot beside him, one hand on his shoulder, the other already reaching for the portable CIED monitoring kit.
"When did you get here," he said. His voice was rough from the coughing.
"Lie down," she said. The tone that left no room.
He lay down.
She ran the CIED check efficiently — the scan, the battery reading, the rhythm trace on the tablet. He watched her work. She had the focused expression of someone finding what she expected to find and being serious about it rather than alarmed. The battery indicator on the tablet showed orange. Degraded output. He had burned through six batteries in four months on the nights the dream came hard. This would be the seventh.
She swapped the battery. She ran the check again. Green. She set the tablet down and looked at him.
"The dream," she said.
"Yes."
"Same as before?"
"Same field. Same song. Same woman. Same barrier." He paused. "I couldn't reach her. I never can."
Patrick appeared in the doorway of the rest area with a towel and a cup of hot water — he had been awake, which meant he had been watching the telemetry too or had heard the coughing. Probably both. He crossed the hangar floor without a word and set the cup beside the cot, handed Rebecca the towel, and sat down in the chair he had designated as his chair three days ago.
Rebecca wiped the sweat from Alen's face with the specific calm efficiency of someone who had been doing this for a long time and had stopped performing concern because actual care didn't require performance. He drank the water when she handed it to him.
"You look tense," he said. "You came from the mountain at four in the morning because of a cardiac variance. That's not only a cardiac variance."
"No," she said.
"Tell me."
She sat back slightly. Outside the rain had stopped at some point in the night and the hangar was very quiet, just the cooling systems and the drip from the rafters. Rebecca looked at the window for a moment — the grey light beginning to show at the edges.
"Yesterday morning, Linda received an emergency contact from Yoko Suzuki."
He was very still. "Yoko has been missing for three weeks."
"She was taken by The Connections. Midnight raid on her apartment in Vancouver. They're using her as a facility technician — they found her Umbrella background from the Outbreak and they needed someone with computer access who could also handle biological maintenance." Rebecca paused. "She managed to get four minutes on an unsecured line. She sent a location packet before she hung up. She couldn't tell us everything but she told us enough." She looked at him. "She's acting as caretaker for a girl The Connections are keeping alive. T-Veronica long-term carrier. Organ transplant dependency. Female. Described as very important to whatever they're building toward."
Alen said nothing. He was looking at the ceiling.
"I know who she is," Rebecca said. "I met her once in 2002. She was nineteen. She'd been infected with T-Veronica at fifteen because her father bought the strain from a black market dealer posing as an Umbrella researcher." She held his gaze. "The dealer was Albert Wesker."
The ceiling. He kept looking at it. A muscle moved in his jaw.
"Manuela Hidalgo," he said. Not a question.
"Yes."
He was quiet for a long moment. The water cup was still in his hand. He set it down.
"I know the full file," he said. "Operation Javier, 2002. Leon Kennedy and Jack Krauser. Javier Hidalgo, Sacred Snakes cartel, Amazon rainforest. Hilda Hidalgo mutated by T-Virus in 1991 — my father sold the strain to Javier the first time, posing as an Umbrella representative. Javier used T-Veronica on Manuela in 2001 when she presented the same hereditary disease. He kept her human by transplanting organs from kidnapped girls." He paused. "Girls taken from the village of Mixcoatl. Girls the same age as Manuela."
The words were flat. Not uninflected — the specific flatness of someone who has been carrying knowledge that has weight and has chosen precision over volume.
"Her mother became a monster," he said. "Her father became a worse one. And in the middle of all of it she was nineteen years old in a white dress with no shoes, singing a lullaby to keep her mother calm. Twenty-three years ago. She's been in government protective custody since then, and now The Connections have her, and they will not be keeping her alive out of compassion."
"They want the C-Virus biology," Rebecca said. "Her blood was used in C-Virus development years ago. If they've traced that lineage they'll want her as a living source. Regular extractions. Which means they need her stable, which means they need the organ transplants continuing, which means they need someone like Yoko to manage the logistics of it."
Alen sat up. He swung his legs over the side of the cot and sat there with his forearms on his knees, looking at the concrete floor. Rebecca did not tell him to lie back down.
"Why is she in my dreams?" he said. Not a question he expected her to answer. The kind of question a person asks when they have run the analysis and the analysis hasn't produced an answer.
"I don't know," Rebecca said. "But you've been dreaming the same dream for four months and last night Yoko made her first contact in eight months and told us where she is. Those are the facts." She paused. "Coincidence or not — she needs to be found. She's been through enough."
He looked at her.
"I know I will," he said. "I am Sunjata. This is what that means." He said it without ceremony, the same way he said things that were simply true. "She's not a mission objective. She's a person who was handed an impossible situation by a man who sold a virus to her father. My father. That ends now."
Rebecca looked at him for a moment. Then she picked up the CIED tablet and began setting up the morning monitoring protocol, because some things were true and required action and some things were also still requiring medical management and both were true simultaneously. He watched her work.
"You said she's important to them," he said. "Beyond the C-Virus biology."
"Yoko said 'whatever they're planning, she's central to it.' She couldn't tell us more on the line."
"The packet she sent."
"Trinity has it. Facility layout, guard rotation, everything Yoko could map in three weeks."
He stood. He picked up his coat from the back of the chair, checked the inside pockets — both disks, the letter, the notepad — and put it on. Patrick had been watching from the chair with the particular quality of an eighty-year-old man who had lived through enough consequential conversations to know when one was ending and action was beginning.
"More tea," Patrick said. "Before you do whatever comes next."
"Yes," Alen said. "Then I need to talk to Rebecca properly. There is something serious about the Elpis synthesis I need to walk her through."
"Something serious," Rebecca said. "How serious?"
"The kind that is going to produce strong opinions," he said. "And you are going to tell me two of my assumptions are wrong."
"How many assumptions?"
"Several."
She looked at him steadily. "Make the tea, Patrick."
Patrick went to the small kitchen. The hangar was lightening through its high windows, the grey beginning to resolve toward something that might eventually become morning. Outside France was wet and quiet and entirely unaware that in this building a man who had been dreaming for four months about a girl singing in a field had just been told her name.
He already knew it. He had known it since the first dream.
He just hadn't said it out loud until now.
— END OF CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO —