"Keep your face close to the floor," Stone was yelling. "It's where the last of the air is. Hang on. We'll be okay."
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