The sterile white of the government facility was the first color Sherry Birkin truly remembered after the blood and fire of Raccoon City. At twelve, the world had shrunk to the size of a single room, the scent of antiseptic replacing the city’s stench of death. Leon, his face etched with a fatigue that went bone-deep, had made a deal. His freedom for her safety. It was a trade that left her in a gilded cage and him on a leash.

Her guardian was a man named Derek C. Simmons, a name spoken in hushed, respectful tones by the scientists who cataloged her blood. He was an architect of shadows, his interest in her purely clinical. For eleven years, Sherry’s life was measured in needle pricks and vital sign charts. They studied the G-Virus sleeping in her cells, a monstrous inheritance from her father. They logged her accelerated healing, her resilience, marveling at the miracle that had saved her life and simultaneously damned her to a life under a microscope.

The years bled together, a monochrome existence punctuated by the vibrant, life-affirming visits from Claire Redfield. Claire brought stories of a world outside, the scent of worn leather and gunpowder clinging to her jacket. She was a fierce, loving constant, a mother forged in the same fire that had orphaned Sherry. She was the anchor that kept Sherry from forgetting she was a person, not just a specimen.

Then, in 2009, the world shifted. Albert Wesker, the ghost who had haunted the periphery of her stolen childhood, was finally, definitively dead. The experiments on her ceased almost overnight. Simmons, ever the pragmatist, saw not a girl to be protected, but an asset to be deployed. He offered her a new cage, one with the illusion of freedom: a badge, a gun, and a mission to fight the very monsters that had created her. She accepted. It was the only way to take the power back, to turn her curse into a shield for others.

December 2012, Edonia Republic

The rain had stopped, leaving the night air in the narrow Edonian alleyways thick with the metallic tang of shed blood and damp concrete. Sherry Birkin moved with the quiet confidence of someone who had spent a lifetime being watched. Her steps were precise, her gaze sweeping over every dripping pipe and darkened doorway. The distant, rhythmic crackle of gunfire was less a threat and more a familiar soundtrack to a war that never truly ended.

Dropping through a manhole, she landed with a soft thud on the slick floor of the sewer, the ladder clanking once behind her. Pale squares of light from the street above cut through the gloom, illuminating a grim tableau. Bodies in the torn uniforms of the Edonian Liberation Army were strewn across the walkway, their faces frozen in expressions of pained surprise. For a moment, Sherry’s professional composure faltered, replaced by a flicker of the lost child who knew this kind of carnage intimately. Eleven years of being a subject had taught her the price of survival. Three years as an agent had taught her how to get the job done regardless.

Above the corpses, a lone figure stood silhouetted against the faint light. He was tall and splattered with gore that wasn't his own, watching her with a guarded impatience that bordered on aggression. Jake Muller. The son of Albert Wesker. A mercenary with a fractured past and the unwanted heir to a legacy of monsters. Sherry felt a strange pang of recognition. She didn't flinch. She had stared down her own father’s mutated form; this was just a man.

She stepped forward, her boots echoing softly in the concrete corridor. Her voice, when she spoke, was steady and controlled, designed to carry without shouting, a tone honed by years of delivering hard truths. It held no plea, only purpose.

“My name is Sherry Birkin,” she said, her eyes locked on his. “I’m here to take you in—your blood is needed for a vaccine to stop this from spreading any further.”