She had a premonition they were not going to be okay. They all were going to suffocate. All, that was, except Kristen. She seemed to possess some magic immunity from the horrors around her. She had risen and was standing over Van de Vliet like a statue, while everybody else was on the floor. As Ally watched her--a serene figure in the middle of chaos and death-- she began to have an odd sensation. The burning in her lungs, from the smoke, started to dissipate. And strength felt like it was pouring into her limbs. The tongues of flame around her had become dancing white figures that invited her to rise and join them. She did, slowly, not quite knowing what she was doing. Then she walked to the jammed air lock. She stepped over Karl Van de Vliet's collapsed frame and placed her hands on the steel. It was already scalding, but she only took fleeting notice of that. While a firefighter's ax futilely pounded on the outside, she seized the wide bar of the door and ripped it open, to the sound of wrenching metal. It was a superhuman effort she didn't realize she was capable of. And it was the last thing she remembered. The space around her had become a blazing white cloud and she didn't feel the hands of the two firefighters who seized her as she fell through the open air lock. Chapter 36 _Friday, June 5 8:39 P.M. _ Days later, Alexa Hampton was still considering herself one of the luckiest people alive. When she'd regained consciousness the next week in Lenox Hill Hospital, hooked up to oxygen and being fed by an IV, she noticed that the nurses were looking at her strangely and whispering to each other. Finally she couldn't stand it anymore and asked why. "It was what you did," a young Puerto Rican woman declared, gazing at her in awe through her rimless glasses. "No one can believe it." Then she explained. What they couldn't believe--as reported by the New Jersey firefighters--was that she had single-handedly wrenched open the steel-door air lock of the laboratory at the Dorian Institute. At the time firefighters were on the other side vainly trying to dismantle the door with their axes. Yet she'd just yanked it aside like paper. It was reminiscent of those urban legends of superhuman strength in times of crisis, like the story of a panicked woman who hoisted an overturned Chevy van to free a pinned child. Later, though, some of the New Jersey fire crew went back and looked again. The steel hinges had literally been sheared off. . . . How did she do that? More important, though, symptoms of her stenosis had entirely disappeared and she felt better than ever in her life. The stem cell technology pioneered by Karl Van de Vliet had indeed produced a miracle. She even had a new kind of energy, periodically. It was unlike anything she'd ever felt.