When brought back to the present, the fire was implied to be started by the devil possessing Wolverine.

X-23, flanked by Gambit, encountered a young girl named Alice and witness her being murdered.

Encouraging them to follow her to a peculiar desert laboratory, Alice introduces them to her employer/owner/adoptive mother: Claudine (Miss Sinister).

Revealing herself openly to X-23, Claudine explains that Alice is also a clone, fourth of a series of five created by Essex as another experiment alongside several other children that live in the complex.

She then expands upon her own origins, stating that the process of becoming what she is left her with vague, but invasive memories of Essex's life and that as a malignant presence within her mind.

Claudine then incapacitates Gambit and straps X-23 to a peculiar chair, stating her aim to switch their bodies – thus inheriting Laura's healing factor.

Laura, Alice and Gambit manage to escape the laboratory as it collapses and arrange for the children to be given new homes before setting off on their journey again.

In the wreckage left behind, Claudine is still barely alive, and is being watched over by the fifth Alice Clone – the new host of Essex.

[6] During the "Collision" storyline, X-23 and Gambit travel to Madripoor in pursuit of Malcolm Colcord, a man that wants to revive the Weapon X program that created Wolverine.

[9] In Paris, X-23 and Gambit pursue the person in possession of the "trigger scent" that sends X-23 into a berserk rage, and the DNA of her and Daken.

Following her transformation into a vampire,[11] Jubilee has come to feel that the people she once considered friends are now afraid of her, a pain with which X-23 sympathizes, because she was born and raised to be a killer, and found transitioning to civility difficult.

After the two help save civilians from the collapsed building, Laura and Spider-Man are approached by Reed Richards, Susan Storm and Ben Grimm.

[13] The Future Foundation then bring Laura back to the Baxter Building to run some tests and discover that she is emitting the same energy signatures that were responsible for the earthquake.

Jubilee appears to tell her to come back to Utopia so that she can make a decision as to what side of the "schism" she wants to be on.