The fire was still burning when Jill became fully aware of herself again.
Not dramatically. Just the gradual reassembly of sensation — heat against her face, debris under her hands, the ringing in her ears that meant something had gone off too close. She was sitting against what remained of a concrete barrier at the edge of the street. She didn't remember getting there.
She took inventory.
Ribs — worse than before, the left side catching on every inhale in a way that said cracked, maybe more than one. Shoulder — a deep ache that flared when she tried to raise her arm past a certain point. A cut above her hairline she hadn't noticed until she felt the drying along her temple. Jacket torn in two places. Hands scraped raw.
No weapon.
She was aware of Carlos before she looked up — boots on debris, unhurried, the movement of someone scanning rather than fleeing.
"You're awake," he said.
"I wasn't asleep." She got to her feet without asking for help. It took more out of her than she wanted. "How long?"
"Two, three minutes." He was watching the street, weapon up. "You went down hard."
She got her bearings. Looked at the street. Fire still burning, city still coming apart.
"Rally point," Carlos said. "Two blocks east. Subway station." A glance. "You good to move?"
She didn't answer that. She started walking.
They were halfway there when it came out.
She wasn't looking at him — she was watching the street, the doorways, the gaps between abandoned cars — but she caught the UBCS patch on his shoulder and something that had been sitting at the back of her throat all night came loose.
"How long have you worked for them?"
Carlos glanced over. "For who?"
"Umbrella."
A beat. He kept moving, kept scanning. "I work for UBCS. It's a—"
"I know what it is." Her voice came out harder than she'd intended. "I know who funds it and I know what your employer has been doing in this city long before tonight." She stopped walking.
He stopped half a step later and turned.
"My friend is dead." Flat. No room for anything else in it. "He died tonight, because something that should never have left a laboratory was walking through this city hunting people, and the laboratory that made it has its name on your shoulder." She looked at the patch. Then at him. "So. How long?"
Something moved behind his eyes — not defensiveness, not guilt. Something more uncertain than either. He exhaled slowly.
"Okay. First — I'm sorry about your friend." He held up a hand. "Second — I genuinely don't know what you're talking about. Not covering. I mean I was given a grid and a drop window and told this was a rescue operation, and everything past that has been—" he gestured at the burning street, "—this. Nobody briefed me on laboratories."
Jill stared at him.
"I'm not your enemy," he said. Something loosened in his expression — not quite a smile, more the shape of one. "Also you have no gun, your ribs are clearly broken, and I'm the only person within two blocks who isn't trying to bite you. So maybe we keep moving and finish this somewhere with walls."
She looked at him for a long moment.
He wasn't lying. She could see it — not because she trusted him, but because she'd learned what lying looked like up close, and this wasn't it. He was confused and tired, trying to hold something functional together in a situation nobody had prepared him for.
She started walking.
"We're not done with this," she said.
"I figured," he said, and fell into step.
The subway entrance had become something between a field station and a waiting room. Emergency lighting cast everything amber. Civilians sat along the walls in varying states of shock — some holding injuries, some holding themselves, some staring at nothing with the blankness of people who had run out of responses. Two UBCS soldiers stood near the stairs watching the entrance. The air smelled of sweat and smoke and field medical supplies.
Somewhere deeper in the shelter, a radio cycled through static — voices cutting across channels that weren't connecting, the occasional burst of something that might have been words before the signal collapsed. Nobody was monitoring it.
Mikhail was near the far wall with a map spread across a folding table, studying it with the focused calm of someone doing triage on a problem too large to solve all at once.
Carlos moved half a step ahead as they approached.
"Mikhail, I'd like to — she was up on the roof, she's — I mean we pulled her out, she's—"
He stopped. Started again.
"She helped us back there, so—"
Mikhail glanced up from the map.
"Carlos." Low, unhurried — the Russian accent sitting heavy in his words. "You didn't think to ask the lady her name?"
"…Didn't get the chance."
Mikhail's attention shifted to her.
"S.T.A.R.S.," he said.
A brief pause.
"Her name is…"
Another pause, smaller.
"Something… Valentine."
"Jill," she said. "Jill Valentine."
Mikhail held her gaze for a moment, then straightened.
"Mikhail Victorov. UBCS. We were sent in as a rescue unit — civilian extraction, containment support." A beat. "That was the briefing." He looked back at the map. "We work with what we have."
Carlos looked at her. "…You're S.T.A.R.S.?"
"Was," Jill said, and turned to the map.
Carlos appeared beside her with a field medical kit and set it down without comment. On top of it, a small canister — cylindrical, the stylized U embossed on the cap catching the amber light.
First aid spray. Umbrella manufacture.
She looked at it for a moment. Then picked it up and used it, because the alternative was going into those streets with her ribs catching on every breath. She applied it in a corner away from the civilians — the hiss of it quiet, the relief that followed immediate and partial. Pain pushed back far enough to work through. That was all she needed.
She found a handgun and a combat knife in the supply crate, checked both, holstered them. The weight of a weapon settled something that had been unsettled since the apartment.
Mikhail pulled the map closer and tapped a point northeast.
"Power substation. City-wide failure took down the subway system — without power, the tram lines are useless and evacuation is stalled." He straightened. "We restore power, we restore the only extraction route we have left."
Jill studied the route. She knew these streets — which blocks flooded when it rained, which storefronts had loading bays that cut through to the next street, where the road surface had been repaved badly enough to make a vehicle useless. Worked them for years before any of this.
"You don't have anyone who can move through those streets fast enough," she said.
Mikhail looked at her steadily. "No."
"I do." She straightened. "I know every route between here and that substation." She looked at the map one more time, then at him. "I'll go."
He studied her for a moment, then nodded once.
A voice from somewhere off to the side — quiet, almost casual, the same accent as Mikhail's but with something taken out of it.
"Assuming she stays functional long enough to matter."
Jill turned.
He stood a few feet away, arms crossed, like he'd been there the entire time. Watching her with a mild appraisal that didn't reach his eyes. His gaze moved over her slowly — the torn jacket, the way she was holding her left side, the absence of a weapon — and something settled on his face that wasn't quite a smile.
"S.T.A.R.S.," he said. The word clipped, almost dismissive. "I thought your unit was supposed to be elite."
"We were," Jill said.
"And now you're here." He tilted his head slightly. "In my experience, people in your condition don't last long enough to matter."
"Nikolai." Mikhail didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. "That's enough."
Nikolai's attention shifted — not obedience, more acknowledgment that the conversation had reached its limit. He pushed off the wall and moved away without hurrying.
Jill watched him go. Not the words — those were just surface. The quality of attention underneath them. He hadn't been dismissing her. He'd been measuring her. Filing something away.
Mikhail looked back to her, expression unchanged.
"You know the city," he said. Not a question.
"Well enough," she said.
Carlos came to stand beside her while she checked the handgun a second time.
"I can come with you," he said.
"You're needed here." She holstered the weapon and picked up the map. "And I move faster alone."
He looked like he wanted to argue that. He didn't.
She moved toward the exit and stopped when she drew level with him.
"The conversation we tabled," she said quietly.
"I know," he said.
She went up the stairs, the left side catching on every step. She didn't let it slow her.
At the top she paused in the open air — fires across the skyline, smoke low over the streets, the sound of everything coming apart layered into something almost constant. She fixed the route northeast in her mind.
Then stepped forward and let the dark take her.