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But his strength kept her from pushing the makeshift sword back into his chest.

At first.

Alice had lost some of sensei’s focus, but she still had her anger. Since waking up naked in the shower of the mansion that led to the Hive, she had seen far too many people die. Lisa Broward. Rain Melendez. Bart Kaplan. Terri Morales. Peyton Wells. Charles Ashford.

She took her anger at the injustice of a world that allowed good people like Lisa and Rain and Kaplan and Wells and the others to die, yet allowed Timothy fucking Cain to live, and focused it into her considerable strength.

And she pushed.

Nemesis stumbled backward, a ten-foot piece of metal impaling him in the chest.

Pressing her advantage, Alice started pounding her fallen foe, each blow in revenge for Kaplan and Rain and Wells and the hundreds of others she didn’t know who’d died just because Umbrella had to have a super-virus and Spence had to have his big payday and—

—and then she and Nemesis locked eyes.

Alice knew why the blue eyes were so familiar.

Matt!

Twenty-Nine

Matthew Addison had been trying for hours to gain dominance over Nemesis.

Umbrella’s programming was good. They had subsumed Matt’s personality as far as they could, but they couldn’t eliminate it altogether.

But every attempt to regain control of his own body had failed.

When they’d arrived at City Hall and Matt saw Alice once again, his spirit fell. He knew that Nemesis’s primary objective was to seek out Alice and destroy her. He had already tried once, and only Alice’s ingenuity and smaller size kept it from getting any uglier.

This time, though, Matt was going to try something else.

Memories.

Nemesis knew only his programming, but Matt knew where that programming came from.

He tried to force the images from his own mind onto Nemesis.

The times he’d come across the Umbrella Corporation during his tenure with the U.S. Marshals Service.

His growing frustration at his inability to pin any of its illicit activities on it.

Aaron Vricella recruiting him for the secret organization dedicated to bringing Umbrella down.

The years of greater frustration as his and Aaron’s group failed to make headway, even as Umbrella’s power and influence grew.

His suggesting using his sister Lisa, who had her own grudge against Umbrella, to infiltrate the company to try to find the evidence they needed.

The destruction of the Hive on the very day Lisa was to deliver the evidence to Matt, thanks to the greed of an asshole named Spence Parks.

Matt’s sojourn through the devastated remains of the Hive, first as the prisoner of Umbrella’s hired goons, then as one of the few survivors of the fruits of Spence’s greed: five hundred undead creatures.

The attack of the licker on the train, wounding him and starting the mutation process.

Collapsing in the mansion’s vestibule and being strapped down by Umbrella doctors in Hazmat suits.

Being experimented upon by a man named Sam Isaacs, the head of the Nemesis Program, and his superior, a total bastard named Major Timothy Cain.

Having his DNA rewritten, an agonizing process made worse by not being able to scream.

His own thoughts subsumed to a series of programming instructions written by Isaacs and supervised by Cain, forcing him to think of them as his masters.

Knowing that the very corporation he had dedicated his life to destroying had turned him into its ultimate weapon.

And right next to him, throughout the process, was Alice, having the same experiments done on her.

But, while Isaacs was turning Matt into a Frankenstein’s monster, Alice remained herself. She was physically unchanged, at least on the outside.

Eventually, Matt got through.

Nemesis weakened.

Just in time for Alice to stab him in the chest.

And then for Alice to finally recognize who it was she had been fighting all this time.

With the same look of agony that Matt had seen on her face when Rain asked Alice to kill her if she mutated, Alice now whispered, “I’m sorry, Matt.”

“Finish him.” That was the voice that Nemesis