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The glass reflected the window behind her. In the real mansion, those windows had been shattered by the arrival of One and his team.

Now she saw movement reflected in it.

Diving out of the way, she just missed being punched by Isaacs. Instead, his blow destroyed the table on which the picture had sat.

Alice sliced upward with her other Kukri, the one that had had its tip knocked off in Vegas, and it made a ragged cut through Isaacs’s chest.

Then, before her eyes, the wound healed.

This, she realized, was going to be a problem.

Her shock at seeing that gave Isaacs an opening to backhand her, sending her flying across the hallway toward where, in the real mansion, the access door to the Hive had been.

Isaacs spoke, finally, his voice sounding deeper but still the same irritating voice that tried to tell her what a pen was all those years ago. “You can’t kill me. They already tried. To think, I actually feared you.”

He stepped forward and wrapped a tentacle around her neck, strangling her.

A part of her wanted to just give up. Carlos was dead. L.J. was dead. Angie was dead. Jill was God knows where. What was left?

The cure. There was that. And only she had it.

As spots formed in front of her eyes, she caught sight of the Kukri, which had embedded itself upright into the faux mansion’s floor. It was just in reach, if she could grab the hilt…

Somehow, even as consciousness started to fade, her fingers managed to close around it, and she sliced straight through the tentacle, severing it from Isaacs’s body. Isaacs howled in pain and stumbled backward several steps.

The tentacle fell to the floor. Alice took several quick, deep breaths.

Isaacs stopped screaming and looked down at the stump where the tentacle had been.

Two more tentacles grew out of the stump to full extension.

Turning to Alice, Isaacs smiled. “Now I have an idea what it feels like to be you—the power.”

“You have no idea,” Alice said.

The tentacles lashed out toward her, and Alice realized there was only one way to win this fight.

Reaching out with her mind, she froze the tentacles in midair. Then she ripped up the floorboards on which Isaacs stood, sending him careening into the wall.

Then Alice collapsed, spent. The day’s exertions were starting to catch up even to her enhanced metabolism.

But Isaacs just climbed out from the wall, plaster dust crumbling at his feet. “I told you, I can’t die,” he said with a hollow laugh.

Then the floor and windows and walls all exploded with similar psychic force. But Alice wasn’t doing it. It was Isaacs. Alice felt herself picked up and thrown at the mansion’s front door—and through it.

She landed on a glass floor. Trying and failing to clamber to her feet, she saw that the door led to another re-creation, this from the Hive itself: the corridor to the Red Queen’s CPU, where One, Drew, Warner, and Danilova were sliced to pieces while Alice watched.

Isaacs strode in and looked down at her broken, bleeding form. “So weak, so pathetic.”

Gathering every inch, every aching, pain-wracked muscle, Alice got to her feet. If she was going to die, it would be standing up.

And she didn’t intend to die, unless she took the fucker who made her shoot Angie with her. If she was lucky, the room would provide that any second now, assuming they really had re-created this room to the letter.

She punched him, a weak lunge that Isaacs probably would have seen coming even before he was mutated. He grabbed the fist and threw her behind him, back toward the far end of the corridor.

Just as she’d hoped. The pain was beyond agonizing, but she didn’t care anymore.

“For so long,” Isaacs said as he slowly walked toward her, “I thought you were the future. How wrong I was. I am the future.”

“No,” Alice said contemptuously, “you’re just another asshole.”

The lights dimmed. Finally!

“And we’re both going to die down here.”

A laser lit up at the end of the corridor behind Isaacs. A horizontal beam of death headed straight for him.

Then, not bothering with the first two steps, the laser spread into a diagonal grid that left no