Highland Medical Trust — Scottish Highlands | September 30, 2011
Two weeks into the Highlands, the internal countdown clock in Alen's head — the one that had been measuring time in operational intervals since 2003 — slowed to something he barely recognized.
Amelia devoted herself to him with the efficiency of someone who had decided this was the project that mattered now. She cooked elaborate meals and walked him through the hospital and told him the history of the valley with the specific authority of a person who had been the valley's doctor and confidante for forty years. She showed him the locked wing where her office was, and the room that had been Jessica's as a child — a window seat looking out at the grey hills, a stack of old books, the quality of light she had described in the diary.
He trained in the mornings. Running the ridge lines in the fog, maintaining what the Progenitor enhancement required of him to stay at the level his operational work demanded. He checked the perimeter when he walked it, because he could not stop checking perimeters — it was not a choice, it was the architecture of how he moved through spaces — but the checking had a different quality here. He was not looking for threats. He was memorizing. Learning the land.
In the afternoons he sat with Amelia and let her talk.
She talked about James Marcus.
Not directly. Not at first. She talked around him the way people talked around something that was still too large to approach directly — in references, in the shapes of things left out. She mentioned the 1950s in ways that revealed she had been at the same university, at the same time, as the three men who had founded Umbrella. She mentioned the field of paleovirology with the specific familiarity of someone who had studied it herself, long ago, before other things required her attention.
He listened and let her arrive at it in her own time.
One afternoon in late September, she led him through the estate to a study he had not been inside. She opened the door. She let him go in first.
END OF CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Chapter Forty-Four follows...