Listen to paige's discrimination of her survival at sounds a lot like a epic first awakening namely that when they first use there power they go insane and try to kill anything in reach. Afterwards she is strangely calm about trusting and working with epics especially for a reckoner who's parents were killed by epics.
In addition we the only other person to survive the death rise serum is an epic all the non epics we see take it die.