Chapter 93: One Question, One Trap
Matthew bought the evidence without hesitation.
About thirty minutes later, a sealed cardboard box was delivered to the office. He opened it, gave the contents a quick scan to confirm everything he had asked for was there, then walked directly to the laboratory floor.
The pressure seal vented with a heavy hiss as he crossed through the laser corridor and handed the box to Thomas's team, the researchers handling the Spider-Man Serum project.
Thomas opened the box with a mildly puzzled expression. "Boss, what is this for?"
"Comparison analysis." Matthew kept it brief. "I need you to test these blood and skin samples and confirm whether the tissue belongs to Ada Wong."
"How long will it take?"
"Five minutes. Less, if everything goes smoothly." Thomas said it with complete confidence.
"Then I'll wait here."
Five minutes. Not long, but not nothing.
The report was in his hands shortly after.
Thomas stood beside him and walked through the comparative values point by point, explaining what each figure meant. When Matthew indicated he had heard enough, Thomas delivered the conclusion.
"Boss. Based on comparison across all data points, every result confirms that the blood and skin tissue you provided belongs to Miss Ada."
Matthew reached back into the box and produced the evidence bag containing the half-cigarette. He held it out. "Check this as well. See if there's anything on it."
"Understood." Thomas took it without a moment's hesitation and turned to carry out the instruction. Clean, efficient, no questions asked.
There were no ethics in the man's operating framework. No particular concern for where things were headed or what they would be used for. Work that paid was good work. That quality had been visible from the beginning, when he had stepped over his supervisor's career without a backward glance to take what was on offer. It was exactly what Matthew looked for.
Give a person something to want, and the rest followed naturally.
This test took closer to thirty minutes. When Thomas returned, his expression had the carefully controlled quality of someone who was genuinely unsettled by what he had found.
"Boss." He looked at the report. "The cigarette contains traces of an unidentified mold. The surface also has pollen on it, carrying mold spores."
"Mold." Matthew looked toward the microscope below.
Through the lens: strange spores with black filaments extending from each one, organized in a pattern unlike anything in the standard biological catalogue.
He recognized them immediately.
E-Type Mold.
Matthew's expression shifted slightly.
At this point in the timeline, E-Type Mold existed in two places. The Alliance had a small quantity, but not enough for their own experimental work, let alone anything they would be leaving on a cigarette on a dark road. That left one possibility.
Miranda.
In the original RE Village storyline, Miranda had disguised herself as Mia and lived beside Ethan Winters for an extended period without being detected. The pattern was the same.
He had seen enough.
Rather than lingering, he walked back to his office.
He pushed the door open and found "Ada" standing at his desk, turning a potted plant in her hands. A few small pale-white flowers had opened in the soil, and the faintest trace of something unfamiliar moved through the air when he breathed in.
Miranda turned when she heard the door. "I brought this back from Eastern Europe," she said, her voice unhurried. "A small thank-you for your patience with me. These flowers are supposed to have a calming effect, help with sleep. I thought they might be useful."
Matthew looked at the plant. In the afternoon light coming through the window, the flowers were almost translucent, and he could see a faint white mist drifting around the petals if he looked carefully.
He held his gaze on it for a few seconds, then moved on without expression. "That was thoughtful of you."
He let that settle, then shifted the conversation with the air of someone who had just remembered something.
"Oh, Ada." He pressed a hand to his forehead as though catching himself. "I nearly forgot. Eleanor asked me to track down the shopping link for those shoes."
"Shopping link?"
"The ones you were wearing last night when you left work. The heels. Eleanor's been wanting a pair for a while." He kept the delivery easy and natural. "She's away on assignment right now and can't get back, so she asked me to ask you."
Hearing a perfectly reasonable explanation, Miranda produced a smile.
"Oh, the heels! Those." She nodded quickly, buying herself a second to think. "I bought them in a physical store. No link, I'm afraid."
"If I get the chance, I could take Eleanor with me sometime. Though I'm not sure they'd still have them in stock by then."
"Is that right. What a shame."
Matthew's expression gave nothing away.
The answer alone was enough.
Ada had spent the entire previous day in flat boots. Not heels. The shoes that had turned up burned at the accident scene were flat-soled.
Beyond that, there was the question of Ada and Eleanor's actual relationship. They were not at the level of sharing shopping links. They were not at the level of going to physical stores together. Eleanor had never been comfortable with Ada's presence at Umbrella, and Ada had always maintained a studied indifference toward Eleanor in return. What they had was a careful professional equilibrium, not a friendship.
To see whether his read was right, he changed direction.
"While I have you. That thing we were discussing the other day. Have you had a chance to think it over?"
A conversation from a few days ago?
Miranda's mind went blank.
The diary had nothing about this.
Was she going to have to improvise again?
She was still working out what Matthew and Ada could possibly have been discussing recently when Matthew stepped closer and put his hand against her face.
"Are you still not sure about what's between us?"
Miranda's internal reaction was immediate and total.
What?
Was this right?
She was a woman who had been alive for a hundred years. Everything she had done, every calculation she had made, every person she had moved, had been toward one purpose: reviving her daughter. That was the whole of it.
And now, somehow, she had been dropped without warning into what appeared to be a romantic subplot. Involving her and her target. Of the workplace variety.
The discomfort that crossed her face was not something she could fully suppress. For a moment she genuinely did not know what to say.
Matthew needed nothing more from the reaction.
He already knew, completely, that the person standing in front of him was not Ada Wong.
The real Ada, faced with this exact situation, might have done almost anything. Deflected it, matched it, turned it back on him. What she would never have done was look flustered. That was basic operational discipline. The most fundamental quality in a field operative's toolkit.
"Never mind." He raised a hand to cut off whatever response was forming. He let something that looked like disappointment and irritation surface in his expression, briefly. "I can see you haven't made up your mind yet."
"You can go."
He walked her to the door without ceremony and closed it behind her.
In the moment the door shut, he looked at the strip of red disappearing into the gap, and something cold moved through his eyes.
But dealing with Miranda was not the immediate priority. The immediate priority was confirming whether Ada was still alive.
The moment Miranda was out of the office, he activated the Las Plagas mental network and reached Fisk. His instructions were direct: use every resource available in New York's underground to search for Ada Wong. The search should prioritize abandoned facilities, unfinished construction sites, and derelict buildings. Those were the likely locations.
With that in motion, he sat back down and turned his attention to the question of what exactly to do about Miranda.
Or more precisely: what kind of end to arrange for a final boss.
Kill her outright?
No. A perfect host already partially fused with the Megamycete was not something to waste carelessly.
Control her, then?
That option had problems. Whether Las Plagas parasites could establish control over someone carrying active mold was genuinely uncertain. The two systems had never been tested against each other.
Which left, for the moment, one remaining path: put her in a condition where she could no longer threaten anyone and keep her available for research.
He considered this with the flat equanimity of a man reviewing logistics.
That would do.