Leon didn't move at first.
The eyes held his. Yellow. Not catching the light — holding it, like something had gone in and settled there permanently.
Everything else receded. The water. The sound of it running. The smell. Just that color and the distance between them, which was almost nothing.
Then she flinched.
Small. Sharp. Her whole body pulling inward like a reflex that had fired without permission.
Leon exhaled slowly and shifted closer.
"It's okay," he said. Low. Not performing calm — just keeping his voice underneath the level of threat.
Her breathing hitched. Her fingers curled and loosened against the wet tile.
He reached toward her carefully, telegraphing the movement. The moment his hand made contact she jerked — not fully away, not with any real strength, but enough. Her body pulling inward, the bitten arm lagging behind in a way that was wrong, the head turning and snapping back.
Not recognition. Reaction. Something operating below thought.
Leon didn't pull away. He adjusted — one hand behind her back, the other under her arm, avoiding the wound without looking at it directly. His fingers found her wrist.
Her pulse was gone.
He counted. One. Two. Three.
It came back. All at once, like a door reopening.
He kept moving.
"You're okay," he said.
Not true. Didn't matter.
She resisted once more. Weak. Then not at all. Her weight settled into him and he registered two things — how little of it there was, and how hot she was running. The heat came through his sleeves like something left too long near a fire. Her breath broke unevenly against his shoulder.
Her fingers caught at his jacket briefly, then slipped.
Leon stood.
"Marvin—"
Already moving. Out of the restroom, through the corridor, through the dark water spreading across the tile. Each step adjusted for her weight and the instability in her body, the way she shifted without warning, his footing uncertain on the wet floor.
Her body spasmed once. Twice. Leon tightened his grip and said nothing, because there was nothing left to say that would be true enough to matter.
The main hall.
Marvin turned before Leon reached him. One look, and he was already moving.
"Put her down."
Leon dropped to one knee, lowering her carefully, one hand staying under her head until the floor took the weight.
"She's bitten," he said. "Forearm."
Marvin was already beside her, moving fast and controlled in the way of someone running on less than he should be.
"How long ago?"
Leon didn't know. He'd found her in water and darkness with no way to measure time.
"She was in the restroom," he said. "Door was closed. I passed that hallway earlier and I didn't—"
He stopped.
Marvin looked up at him. Once. Brief.
"Leon."
"There was a sound," Leon said. "Earlier. When I came through. I thought it was—"
He didn't finish.
Marvin held his gaze for a moment. Not judgment. Just a man waiting to see if the person in front of him was going to be functional.
"Help me," he said.
Leon moved — a half-second behind where he should have been, not hesitation, just the lag of a body that had stopped expecting the next instruction. Then he was beside Marvin, holding where directed, hands doing the work his attention was only partly connected to.
"She's burning up," Leon said.
"I know."
"She's still—"
"I know." Marvin didn't stop moving. "Stay with it."
Leon stayed with it.
She shifted under their hands.
Her eyes opened briefly — unfocused, moving across the ceiling without landing on anything. Then they stopped. On Marvin. Just for a second, like something in her had found the one steady thing in the room.
"You're safe," Marvin said.
Low. Even. The tone of a man who had said it enough times to know how to mean it under pressure.
Her breathing slowed. Not normal — still too shallow, still too fast — but less fractured.
Leon sat back.
The hallway.
The sound.
He heard it again the way you hear things you've been carrying — not from the corridor, but from somewhere internal that didn't have a door he could close. Small. Behind a door he hadn't opened. Not dragging. Not shuffling. Something lighter.
He hadn't opened the door.
"She was there," he said quietly. "I heard something when I came through the first time."
Marvin didn't answer right away.
"We deal with what's in front of us," he said. Not absolution. Not dismissal. Just the only true thing available. "S.T.A.R.S. office. Medical kit — lower cabinet, right wall." He didn't look up. "Go."
Leon stood.
The route he'd taken before was blocked.
The bathroom corridor — gas still hissing behind the sealed door, the path still unusable. He stood at the junction for a second, took the long way without stopping to think about it.
The station had gone quiet.
Not empty. It was never empty. But the immediate pressure had lifted, and what replaced it was worse in a different way — space, and silence, and the sound of his own footsteps carrying further than they should.
Nothing to push against.
Just the walking.
He heard it again while he moved. Not in the corridor — in the space behind his eyes where things he hadn't processed were still waiting. The sound from behind the restroom door. Small. The kind of sound he'd categorized as building noise and kept moving past.
Elliot.
The notes clutched in the hand. The corridor. The choice he'd made about direction, about what he was moving toward.
The restroom door.
Closed.
Water running underneath it.
He'd passed it.
Leon's jaw tightened. His grip shifted on nothing — his hands were empty and there was no reason for the adjustment, but his body made it anyway.
He kept walking.
The S.T.A.R.S. office held together better than the rest of the station.
Desks. Equipment. Papers left mid-sentence, mid-task. Order that had been interrupted rather than destroyed — the difference between a place people had left and a place people had fled. Leon moved through it without slowing, pulling drawers, checking cabinets, hands working while the rest of him stayed somewhere in the corridor.
Medical kit. Lower cabinet, right wall. He found it.
A note on the desk stopped his hand.
Chris.
The name connected — to something Marvin had said, something Claire had said on the other side of a fence — and passed. He folded it without reading further and put it in his jacket. A keycard beside the terminal. Same motion. His hands collecting what was useful without requiring the rest of him to be present.
A locked door at the far end. Glass panel. Equipment inside, a handgun with a heavy frame. He noted it and moved on.
On the way back, the silence changed register.
Not empty. Held — the specific quality of quiet that means something in it is also being quiet on purpose.
Leon stopped.
Sound. Not footsteps. Not breath. Something wet and deliberate moving above him, weight distributed across a surface that wasn't the floor.
He looked up.
It was on the ceiling.
Wrong in every detail — the shape, the way it held itself against the surface with a confidence that suggested the ceiling was simply another floor. No eyes. The face smooth where eyes should have been, which was somehow worse than if it had them.
But it turned.
Listening.
Not toward him immediately — past him, by a degree. Like it had almost chosen something else.
Then it chose.
Fast — violent and certain, dropping from the ceiling and striking with a force that cracked tile. Claws. Impact. A body that folded into the attack like violence was its resting state.
Leon stepped backward.
One step. Two. Each one placed with the deliberate care of someone who understands that the next sound he makes will be the last decision he gets. He turned at the corner, kept the same pace until the armory door was in front of him, got inside, and pulled it closed.
Silence.
He stood with his back against the door and let his breathing return to something that wouldn't be audible through the wood.
In his hands — the medical kit. The note. The keycard.
He looked at the shotgun case.
This time he didn't look away from it.
This time he had the keycard.
He crossed the room and tried it.
The case opened.
Leon stood with his hand on the door of it, listening to the muffled silence of whatever was moving in the corridor outside.
Then he reached in.
Not because it was standard issue.
Because the next door he came to, he was opening it.