Now Kristen was walking over to an electric heater positioned on a lab workbench. She switched it on and the tungsten elements immediately began to glow. Then, still holding the bottle, she turned back to Van de Vliet.

"I see things that I never saw before. My mind has powers it never had till now."

He nodded knowingly. "I always suspected that--"

"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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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.

What happened next sounded like the end of the world. As the first set of shelves crashed against the second, like a row of ma.s.sive steel-and- gla.s.s dominoes, each subsequent tower tipped and fell against the next, and on and on.

All the while, as the tumbling racks were spewing flammable solvents across the smoky lab s.p.a.ce, they were ripping out electrical wiring and sending sparks flying.

The whole danger-dynamic of the room had been turned upside down.

Katherine Starr and Debra and David now lay pinned beneath a tangled ma.s.s of angle-iron supports that had collapsed in the wake of the falling shelves. All three appeared to be unconscious.

Winston Bartlett was at the far end of the room. He'd been slammed against the wall by the force of the explosion but was pulling himself up. He seemed to be unhurt, though it was hard to see through the billowing smoke.

Karl Van de Vliet was standing in the middle of the laboratory, his eyes glazed, flames and smoke swirling about him.

What does this mean to him? Ally wondered. Years of research data being obliterated in an instant.

But the horror wasn't over. The fire was depleting the hermetically sealed room's oxygen. Ally sensed that anybody who didn't get out of the lab in the next five minutes wasn't going to be going anywhere standing up.

But what was happening with Kristen? She was walking through the flames as though on a country stroll. It was like the fires of h.e.l.l were all around her and she was ambling through them unscathed. She must be experiencing third-degree burns, Ally thought, yet there's a sense that nothing can harm her. How could it be?

And then an astonishing possibility began to dawn on her. With the stem cell enzymes working at full blast, was it possible her body was immediately replacing its damaged cells? Could it be that the telomerase enzyme didn't know the difference between a cell that had aged and one that had been damaged by its environment?

"Jesus," Stone said, finally stirring, "what's--"

At that moment the overhead lights flickered and died and the emergency lights clicked on, sending battery-powered beams through the smoke.

"Christ, Ally," he declared gazing around still dazed as his consciousness seemed to be slowly returning. "We've got to get people out of here."

There didn't appear to be a sprinkler system. Probably, she thought, because an onslaught of water would wipe out all the computers.

Now she was thinking about the automatic air locks. How did those steel-and-gla.s.s doors work without electricity? Did they have a battery backup, or some kind of fail-safe mechanism, which provided a manual override in case of a power outage?

Now Winston Bartlett was striding toward the center of the room. From the dazed look in his eyes, it wasn't clear whether he knew where he was or not. Kristen was walking toward him, on a collision course.

"You let this happen," she said "You wanted to ruin my life."

"Kristy, n.o.body made you do anything," he said choking from the smoke.

"But now we've got to--"

"It's too late," she declared lashing out with the side of her hand against his neck. He staggered back, flailing, and seized an iron girder.

There was a blast of voltage, a shower of sparks, and he screamed as he crumpled sideways. Then the force of his fall broke his hand loose from the electrical short. He lay prostrate on the smoky floor of the lab, twitching.

My G.o.d, Ally thought, she really is determined to kill us all before she's through.

"Kristen," Van de Vliet was saying, "please. There's still time. I'm going to do everything I can for you."

He was gasping for air and now more vials of flammable liquid were exploding from the heat and igniting. He turned and stumbled toward the air lock. There were sounds of yelling on the other side.

The people outside can't get through, Ally realized. The security lock has no override.

We 're going to die.

Van de Vliet pounded on the b.u.t.ton controls of the air lock, but there was no response. Smoke was billowing around him and he choked, coughing and dropping to one knee.

Then Kristen walked up behind him. She appeared not to notice the flames and smoke swirling around her.

"This is where you get what's coming, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d. I warned you you'd better do something for me. But you never really intended to help me. I was just an experiment. That's all I ever was. For both of you. You f.u.c.kers." And she lashed out with a powerful fist, sending him to the floor.

Outside there was now the wail of a siren, the sound faintly filtering through. And the pounding on the other side of the air lock continued, though now it had the force of authority.

At last, Ally thought, somebody finally got serious and called the fire department.

Now Kristen had bent over the prostrate Van de Vliet and was doing something, though Ally couldn't tell what.

"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.