The dirt road beneath her boots was packed dry from the sun, cracked in places where the heat had stolen every ounce of moisture. Kijuju was already suffocating, the air thick with dust and the unmistakable scent of sweat, livestock, and something… off. A heaviness clung to the streets, not just from the weather but from the people.

She scanned the villagers as she passed, eyes sharp but casual. Their movements were stiff and unnatural. Conversations fell to murmurs when she got too close, and nobody met her gaze for long. A man hunched over a fruit stall peeled an orange with a hostility to make babies cry, his knife pressing deep into the rind, deeper than necessary.

This wasn’t just wariness toward a foreigner, she knew what that felt like... this was something else.

A pair of men in tattered shirts leaned against a rusted-out truck, whispering in low tones. One had a bloodstain smeared across his collar, dark against the faded fabric one might've mistaken for mud. Sheva didn’t look twice, she wasn’t here to stir shit—just get to the rendezvous. But every nerve in her body was telling her this place was wrong.

Her new partner was somewhere up ahead. Chris Redfield. She’d read the files—seen the reports. The man was a legend. Sheva had a solid reputation herself, but she wasn’t arrogant. Working with someone like him meant proving she could pull her weight. That was fine. She had no doubt she could.

What worried her was everything else.

Another corner, another set of eyes that didn’t look quite right. The smell of rot wafted through the alley to her left, the kind that came from meat left in the sun too long. Sheva breathed through her mouth and kept walking, pretending she didn’t notice the way a woman at the end of the street gripped her machete way too tight.

Her earpiece crackled, but no one spoke. Just interference. Great.

This mission wasn’t going to be clean.