"I'm able to think just like I did when I was little," she continued, cutting him off. "Sometimes I'm there, in that
world. Then sometimes I flip back. But I can always tell when grown‑ups are lying to me. What did you do to my mind?"
"Kristen," Van de Vliet said "the brain has many functions that we still only barely understand. With the Beta procedure, we don't really know what activates general cell replacement or what the nature of the replacement tissue actually is. We're just at the beginning of a marvelous—"
"I'm seeing a future in which nothing exists," she muttered despairingly, still holding the glass bottle of solvent. "I don't want to be a part of it."
Van de Vliet was staring at her, his eyes flooded with alarm. "What . . . what are you seeing, Kristen?"
"I'm seeing you dead." She glared around "All of you."
Then, with an animal scream, she whirled and flung the glass liter bottle at the electric heater on the laboratory workbench. It crashed into the shiny steel case with a splintering sound followed by an explosion that sent a ball of fire and a shock wave through the room. In an instant the entire end of the lab was engulfed in a sea of flame.
Ally sensed herself being knocked to the floor, but she also felt a surge of adrenaline. This was endgame, the moment when everybody found out who they were.
A hand was gripping her like a vise. It was Stone's, but the blast had knocked him to the floor too and he was now motionless, slumped against the side of a laboratory bench. It was like she was being held in a death grip. Was she going to have to carry him out? She wasn't even sure she had the strength in her legs to get herself out.
Now something even more horrible was slowly beginning to happen. The central part of the lab had several sets of steel shelving arranged in rows, and each supported a carefully organized arrangement of sample vials filled with some kind of organic solvent. She saw with horror that the first towering set of shelves, easily seven feet high, was slowly tipping from the force of the blast. It teetered for an instant and then fell into the set of shelves next to it with all the ponderous majesty of a giant sequoia.