Ben Wagner clenched his clammy fists inside his pockets and kept his eyes locked to his sneakers.  This was already tougher than he’d been anticipating.

            “C’mon, c’mon,” he whispered to himself under his breath.  “Suck it up.”

            As soon as the seventeen-year-old Beta had been hustled off of the subway and onto the platform, he and his class had been immediately nudged along toward the path that led toward the central docking area in order to make room for the next incoming trainload of students.  His nerves were already on edge from being around so many moving bodies this morning, but now that he was out in the open again and could see the Alpha workers from afar directing the influx of Beta traffic that formed an organic sea of shuffling fabric and chattering voices, it was getting harder to keep himself in check.

            Thousands upon thousands of Beta high school students guided by teachers and administrators were marching in orderly throngs up the paths and toward the positively mountainous building that made up the Norman & Joan Tyler Convention Center and Memorial Gardens.

            Scaled for both Alpha and Beta use, the place was a veritable fortress to the latter class.  Ben couldn’t even manage to see both ends of the wall without turning his head, and the roof wasn’t much easier to make out without craning his neck.  Most of the imposingly massive structure was a pristine white dotted with crystalline windows that appeared like diamonds from this distance, except for the furthest edge from the entrance, where extensive additions were obviously midway through construction.

            Cringing as several students shoved past him in their eagerness to move ahead in line, Ben made eye contact with his teacher Mrs. Hall, who gave him an additional wave to get him to pick up the pace.  Due to the sheer number of students present at this first city-wide event of the week commemorating the 20th anniversary of Beta education, he understood that there wasn’t really time to stop and take stock of the unfurling madness around him, but his anxiety made him long for it all the same.

            After his cluster of a couple hundred students had been shepherded up a series of walkways and into one of many wider platforms, still with the Center a good distance away, Ben and the others were directed to stand still.

            The young man’s jaw couldn’t help but fall slack as he witnessed the grandeur of a female Omega marching into view over the side of the elevated road and virtually blotting out all urban scenery behind her with the pure gob-smacking size of her frame.  Though these pathways were raised far above the ground, the slender redheaded behemoth still had to crouch to put herself down low enough to not appear quite so much like a skyscraper.  Even now, her being was so unfathomably huge that he could tell that, despite her appearance suggesting she couldn’t have been much more than a year older than most of the students, he wasn’t the only one with the subconscious feeling that they were in the presence of godhood.  For Ben, it was a bit more than subconscious.

            “Good morning, everyone,” the ginger giantess boomed benevolently in a delicate enough voice that no one was startled, though the magnanimity of her sound still caused Ben to tremble.  “My name is Angela, and it’s my pleasure to welcome you here for today’s events.  Before you all head inside, I’d just like to cover a few quick points to keep everything in neat fashion so we can get started.  Once you’ve reached the front of the line, an Alpha attendant will give you a lift to the correct entrance, three at a time, and from there, you’ll follow the moving walkways to the main auditorium.  Please stay with your classes and teachers, and this will all run a lot smoother.  Thank you so much, and I hope you enjoy the day!”

            She raised a hand large enough to hold their entire grade in the palm and wagged her fingers genially at the crowd of dumbstruck Betas below, some of whom managed to respond with their own waves, but most just watched in awe as the young woman backed away and directed them to continue up the path.  The added urging of their teachers got them moving again.

            Ben gulped and kneaded his hands together to keep them from shaking.  He gazed far ahead in line toward the Center, and could see a few dozen Alphas posted at the entrances lowering a hand for Betas to embark, then lifting them up to the elevated doorways wide enough to allow for the density of incoming guests.

            His line appeared to be moving toward a young woman dressed in a uniform from the Center.  Her dark brunette hair cascaded smoothly over her shoulders, and a few freckles dotted her cheeks.

            This would be easy.  All he had to do was climb into the girl’s hand when it was offered, stand still for a few seconds, and then step onto a platform.  Nothing to it.

            His palms were already sweating so hard, it felt like he’d dunked them underwater.

            “Hey.  Hey, piss-pants,” a voice grunted in Ben’s ear, chuckling barely held back.  “Feeling scared yet?”

            “Get away from me,” he grumbled, elbowing his classmate out of his personal bubble.  “I’m not in the mood now.”

            “I’m just trying to be helpful.  They say you’re supposed to confront your fears, don’t they?” the teen continued with an innocent shrug.

            “I said leave me alone, Mike.”

            “Aww, did I hurt widdle Benny’s feelings?  Hey, you’re gonna have to get used to this real fast, because we’re almost up there.”

            Gritting his teeth, Ben resolved to ignore his bully as the number of people between himself and the Alpha woman lifting them toward the door continually thinned.  He dealt with this kid and his cackling cronies practically every day at school; he needed to block the sound out right now in order to focus, or he’d never make it through this.

            “Michael, that’s enough,” the teacher snapped, noticing the commotion from across the path.

            “Whatever,” he mumbled, then hissed back to Ben: “Aren’t you almost eighteen?  Keep getting people to fight your battles for you, and you’ll never be a man.”

            “Next up,” the young Alpha woman announced with pronounced disinterest as she crouched back down and flattened her hand to the ground where more passengers could clamber in.

            Ben blinked as he stared at the palm, pale and with a few weathered blisters, but it looked soft enough, and obviously everyone up on that balcony had been delivered in one piece.

            He could do this.  He would have to.

            “Come on, kid.  Let’s move it along,” she instructed, and with a start, Ben realized her lake-blue eyes were trained directly in his direction and widened with irritated expectation, her attention entirely on him.  Her hand was already occupied by a sniggering Michael and another student, leaving space for one more.

            I’ll show them, Ben growled to himself within the safe confines of his head, and marched forward without allowing his trembling knees to fully consider what he was doing as he stepped right onto the woman’s hand.  He could hear her heavily sigh with obvious exhaustion at this dull task as her hand began to ascend.  Glancing at her hip as they rose past it, he noticed an ID tag clinging to her belt with a photo and “Sharpe, Taylor” in bold letters beneath.

            “Real impressive.  I’ll bet Mommy and Daddy would’ve been so proud of you right now,” Michael joked into Ben’s ear with a final half-suppressed laugh.

            That was it.

            Ben turned around and launched himself onto his classmate with an enraged yelp, pinning him into the center of the Alpha’s palm and began raining his fists down against the teen’s face.  Michael managed to block most of the blows, particularly with his size and strength advantage over Ben, but the surprise of it allowed the emotionally damaged Beta to get in a few solid right hooks.

            “Enough,” huffed Taylor, and Ben’s heart practically dropped down into his stomach when he felt the pads of a thumb and forefinger almost as wide as his entire body each curling around his sides and plucking him off Michael.

            Ben became horrifyingly transfixed as the Alpha’s swimming blue eyes narrowed, studying him intently while she lowered her other hand toward the platform where the embarrassed Michael was being helped back to his feet.

            “Nobody’s pulling any kind of crap around here, not on my watch.  Got it?” she declared as she brandished the petrified Beta between her two fingers and inched him closer to the bridge of her nose.

            “G-G-Got it,” Ben gasped with his last free breath before going snowy and silent.

            “Good.  Pull anything else, and you have to answer to me,” Taylor warned as she finally lowered the Beta back toward the platform before turning around to bend over and collect the next batch of students.

            Ben’s feet instantly collapsed out from under him as he was gently delivered onto the walkway, and he resolved to remain seated there until his limbs decided to stop quaking so hard.  That seemed the most logical way to proceed.  It would give him time to slow his positively stampeding heart rate back to normal.

            “Ben?  Ben, honey.  C’mon, I’ll help you up,” a voice said before another minute had passed, and he realized his teacher had been on the next load as she placed a hand on his shoulder.  “Are you all right?”

            “Fine.  I’m fine, Mrs. Hall,” he mumbled, taking her hand and wobbling up again.

            “You didn’t have to get on the same trip as Michael.  You could’ve waited for the next one.”

            “I wanted him to see… that I could…”

            “You don’t have to prove anything to him, or anything else.  Don’t worry about him.  I’ll make sure they know it wasn’t just you, too.  Just try to relax now.  We’ll find you a different way back downstairs after the event, okay?” Mrs. Hall said.

            “Okay,” he gulped, gaining confidence in his steps as the pair began walking again with the group.  “Thanks.  I think I’ve got it now.”

            “Of course.  Just talk to me if anything else happens,” she said warmly, at last letting go of his shoulder and marching further ahead to keep the students on the right path as they began winding along the elevated Beta walkway of the cavernous Convention Center entrance hall.

            Putting one foot in front of the other, Ben managed to work himself back into semi-functioning order, and being able to admire the architectural majesty of the Center’s marbled interior amidst the distracted bustling of his classmates did help take his mind off the fact that he’d just been gripped and personally addressed by a member of the class that comprised his greatest existing terror.

            Pillars, large even by Alpha standards, lined the hall, and generous plate-glass windows allowed in plenty of sunlight.  He noticed that many of the teachers who were Alphas gathered around the central part of the hallway, directing traffic flow when needed, while also moving toward a different hallway toward a spillover room, where a video feed from the auditorium would allow them to hear the speakers as well.

            The entrance to the actual space was just ahead, where they would soon hear from Betas who had made great strides in advancing the class and intended to inspire the upcoming generation of learners.

            His nerves slightly calmed, Ben couldn’t help slipping back into thinking about what Michael had spat into his ear.  Even though it was intended to belittle him with his rival’s usual sense of shriveling degradation, it rang stingingly true in its sarcastic sense.

            What would his parents think of him, shaking like a leaf at the mere thought of stepping into the hand of an Alpha who intended him no harm?  It made him sick to even consider.  What sort of legacy did it make him?  A poor one, for sure, but he knew that was the least of it.

            “Benjamin?” a voice called out over the infinite babbling as he continued making his way through the crowd.  “Benjamin, over here!”

            His ears perking up hopefully at the familiar sound, Ben allowed himself a relieving smile to see the bespectacled face of Herman Randolph, his father’s old roommate and the closest person he had left to a surviving relative, grinning at him as he neared.

            “Benjamin, it’s good to see you here today.  How have you been, son?” the man enthusiastically enquired, clasping an arm over Ben’s shoulder.

            “I’m… fine, Dr. Randolph,” Ben lied for the second time in the same three-minute span, still shaken but nonetheless grateful as he accepted his hand to shake.  Not wanting to unload his burdens onto this man who he knew would be speaking so soon before more than one hundred thousand Betas, he managed a false smile.  “Just fine.”

            Across the Center, well out of range of the buzzing voices of masses of three-inch-tall students and teachers, an Alpha guard turned the corner of a hallway and entered the partially constructed north entrance to the building, his eyebrow arched suspiciously at the sound of tires creaking quietly over debris.

            He brushed past a tarp that separated the plaster-swept workspace from the cleaner hallway and was puzzled at the sight of a massive cargo truck with flashing lights coming to a halt as it rolled backward into the area.  Once it had completely stopped, a man and a woman in orange construction gear emerged from the driver and passenger doors and promptly marched to the back of the vehicle to open the door.

            “Hey.  Hey, excuse me,” the guard called out loudly as he marched toward them.  “There’s no unloading or work being done today with the event going on.  I’m afraid I’ll need you two to back that thing out of here.”

            “Just give us a minute, and we’ll be right with you,” the man in orange gruffly responded as he nodded to briefly acknowledge the guard’s presence.  Standing easily at six and a half feet tall with shoulders broad enough to tackle a large mammal, the stranger grasped a handle on the back of the truck and pulled, allowing the door to slide open.  A scraggly beard wreathed his stony jawline.

            “Didn’t you hear me?  Your superiors must have made some mistake on your schedule.  There’s absolutely no work being done today in here, not even drop-offs.”

            “Why not?” the woman said, and it came less as a question and more of a challenge, venom loaded in both heavy syllables.  She didn’t even bother turning her head to show her face, though her black hair appeared to be cut low to her skull, almost in a military style.

            “Because of the… look, I don’t need to give you a reason,” the guard snapped as he finally reached the pair.  “I’d appreciate it if we didn’t have to start making calls about this.  Now.  Please close the truck back up and pull back out.”

            “Sorry.  Can’t do it,” the woman uttered.

            “Pardon me?” the guard responded, placing a hand on her shoulder.

            “Don’t like being touched,” she mumbled.

            “What?”

            “I said I don’t like being touched,” she spat, and in one swift motion she had turned around and plunged a karambit blade hilt-deep into the soft section of the guard’s neck before the man could even get a good look at her ghostly silver eyes that threatened to burn a hole through his pupils with their gaze.

            The bearded accomplice in the other bright construction suit grasped the gurgling guard by the back of his neck and heaved him with ease under the truck, where he wasn’t as easily noticed as he succumbed to a throatful of blood blocking his airway.

            “That was messier than it had to be,” the orange-clad brute commented with a half-smile, wiping a small bloodstain onto the woman’s arm that had spilled as he flung the body.

            “I wanted it messy,” she asserted as she held the crimson-soaked blade under her nose and inhaled deeply.

            “Remember what Halle said?  If we have people sniffing around before, just put ‘em to sleep for a while.  No messes,” he said as he slammed a steel-toed combat boot onto the step of the truck to climb inside and begin unloading the cargo.

            “Not like it matters,” the woman shrugged.  “Things will be moving in a couple of minutes, and then a little blood on the floor will be the least of anybody’s problems.”

“How long has it been since I’ve seen you, Benjamin?  A couple months?  Far too long, I say,” Herman said, giving Ben another hearty slap on the back while adjusting his glasses with the other hand.  “You must come over for dinner sometime, really.  Amanda wants to make her casserole for you again.”

            “That sounds great, Dr. Randolph.”

            “For the last time, Benjamin, you can call me Herman if you want,” the man insisted.

            “All… all right.  H-Herman,” the teen repeated, clearly uncomfortable with not ascribing the full measure of respect he felt for this friend of the family’s and greatly accomplished professional.

            “We’ll work on it,” he laughed, then placed his arm around Ben’s shoulder again and began leading him closer to the auditorium doors so as not to hold up the crowds of Betas still making their way inside.  “Looking forward to today?”

            “You bet.  I can’t wait to hear what you have to say.”

            “I’ll give you a hint: it’s the same thing I’ve been telling you since you were as tall as my knee.  I doubt you could really understand me then, but I tried anyway, and so did your parents, of course.  This new world we live in… my God, you can be anything you want.  Do you know that?  Anything!”

            “I know, Dr. Rand- um, I mean Herman.  It’s really something.”

            “It is indeed, son.  And I foresee great things in your future.  Still keeping those grades up?”

            “Yes, sir.  I was in the top twenty-five on the dean’s list,” Ben admitted with a bit of sheepish pride.

            “Excellent, excellent.  I knew it’d be a cinch for you.  Just keep on doing like you have been, and you’ll be putting your professors at university to shame in no time,” the elder Beta chuckled. “Listen, I’ve got to be going.  I guess they want to fit me with a microphone or something backstage, but I’ll see you afterward, all right?”

            “Sounds good… Herman,” Ben said with a grateful wave as the man parted ways and disappeared down a different Beta walkway.

            Sighing, he folded his hands back together behind his back and continued inching closer to the doors of the auditorium, slowing as he veered toward the wall to purposefully allow more students to pass him.  Somehow, the closer he got, the harder it seemed to imagine going in until he found himself just leaning against the wall and watching the continuous line of Betas all pass through the doors.

            It wasn’t that he didn’t want to hear Dr. Randolph, or the other speakers assembled for today.  It wasn’t that he didn’t hold them all in immense esteem, and swell with a sense of unparalleled inspiration at what they had all accomplished for themselves and for Betas everywhere, and what they all insisted the students could accomplish as well.  But that same feeling in his gut had returned just as soon as the doctor was gone, the one that forced him to wonder if he was even worthy of going in there and trying to soak up the knowledge, like it possibly meant anything.

            Like it would’ve possibly meant anything to his parents, because of what he was now.

            A sniveling coward.

            “Ben!” Mrs. Hall called out.  She had posted herself by the door and only just noticed him having diverted from the flock.  “Coming?”

            “In a minute,” he mouthed, and she seemed to recognize his need for temporary solitude, because she only nodded before turning her attention back to the others.  Crossing his arms, Ben began walking backward against the flow of traffic until he reached an opening to a separate hallway, where he could get a few moments’ peace.

            A bathroom sign above a door offered a welcome respite from all this, and Ben quickly made his way inside to sulk in private as a few stragglers finished using the facility and scurried to get back in line.

            Twenty minutes later, the final round of schools had crowded into the auditorium.  Though it represented little more than an average-sized theatre for the Alphas, to the Betas, the domed assembly hall was more than a sight to behold, because it couldn’t hope to be drunk in with a single glance.  Two dozen balconies of increasing height ascended along the walls to help accommodate the fact that one hundred thousand students were crammed into the room along with a cadre of teachers, administrators, and chaperones.

            A comparatively lesser audience of one hundred Alphas sat in the back of the room shoulder-to-shoulder, still plenty close enough to make out whoever had taken the curtained stage.  Along the various exits, seven Alpha guards were posted to help keep track of the staggering number in attendance, with backup loitering outside.  The entire room was filled with the dull roar of a thousand crisscrossing tiny voices excitedly discussing school gossip, and the hushed demands by teachers for them to quiet down and take their seats as a figure in a suit emerged on the stage.

            “Good morning, everyone!” the Beta called out cheerily, clapping her hands together as her aided voice boomed from the speakers all around the room, filling the auditorium despite how impossibly dwarfed she was by the place.

            “We here at the Norman & Joan Tyler Convention Center and Memorial Gardens are proud to host this first event of Unity Week in a new tradition of celebrating Beta achievement across the past two decades and into the future.  I hope you’ve all found your seats, and that you’re prepared to listen, because our distinguished group of speakers are all here specifically for you.  Yes, you!” the woman began delightedly.  “The speakers we’ve gathered here are living proof that anything you want can be yours, but before we invite the first of them to take the stage, I’d like to review a few of our safety features.  At this time, please locate the nearest two exits to your seat…”

            “Look, I’m telling you… this… this isn’t necessary,” panted a sweat-soaked Max Lawson as he leaned over the control panel in the primary security command center of the building, rubbing delicately at a bruise on his forehead he’d just received.  “I did what you asked.  My subordinates are down in ancillary control, and… and my partner, you just… just…”

            “You neglected to get him out of the room like I asked, so I did what was, indeed, necessary,” his tormentor responded, her silver eyes intimidating him into looking away again.  She casually glanced down at the man who was now lying unconscious in a small red puddle.  “Believe me, I don’t enjoy this.  Spilling Alpha blood doesn’t make me much better than our enemies.”

            “He… he was just following protocol.  There’s supposed to be at least two Alphas in this room at all times, he…” Max uttered with a pained swallow.

            “Stop crying or I’ll have to get more creative with your instruction,” she snapped back, and tapped a finger against her cell phone clipped to her waist.  “Don’t forget what’s on the line here.”

            “Okay, okay, I’m sorry… I’m getting on it,” he sniffled, having difficulty keeping with her demand, and set about logging into the system.  “Please.  Just… if I could just talk to them, to let me know that you haven’t…”

            “I told you, you’ll talk to your precious rugrats when you’ve done your job to my satisfaction.  Now if you please, hand the keys to the kingdom over to my associate,” the woman sneered, shooting a look to the young woman who was seated a few feet away in a swivel chair, her fair hair matted thickly and hanging around her eyes as she tapped away on her laptop that was connected to the main console by several tangled cords.  “Alice, do you have anything yet?”

            “Almost.  Another few minutes, and I should be able to just run the rest of it through here,” the young woman answered to her boss, her hands skittering rapidly over the keys.  “Hey.  Uh, Halle?  On my end, it looks like he’s… um…”

            “Don’t play games with me, you worthless sack of shit,” Halle snarled, turning back around fast enough that her black ponytail swung against her cheek.  She delivered a blow to Max’s lower jaw with a gloved fist that nearly sent him out of his seat, but he managed to stay in place with a quick grab onto the console’s edge.  “This isn’t hard.  Let her in, and then your job is done.  Simple as that.”

            “Just… just listen.  Even if I give her full control of the building security like you’re saying,” Max grunted pitifully, returning to his keyboard begrudgingly.  “Aegis will be doing everything they can to break back in.  I mean, with a solid defense, you could probably keep them out for a matter of hours, at most, but…”

            “You obviously haven’t been acquainted with the toolbox of our good friend Miss Alice,” Halle said with a cruel smirk.  “Just give us what we’re asking for, and we’ll make this place more secure than it’s ever been before.”

            “Okay.  Okay, okay.  I’m… I’m working,” Max mumbled bitterly.

            “Good boy,” Halle said, then tapped a finger to her earpiece.  “Roger?  Where do we stand?”

            “Just about set to spring the package,” the voice crackled through the receiver.  “Gail and I finished with the cargo, and I’m almost done down here in the tunnels.”

            “Any trouble?”

            “A little.  Gail had to put a guy down.”

            “Uh-huh, I’m sure she did “have to.”  Look, are you in place?” Halle said with obvious annoyance, but moved past it quickly.

            “Affirmative.  Whenever you’re ready, I’ll send it out.”

            “Give it a couple more minutes to fill up, and then do it,” Halle declared triumphantly before ending the call, then placed her hands on her hips as she observed Max’s continued work under mortal duress.  “We’re on a bit of a timetable here, Lawson.  Let’s get moving.  Alice, are we in yet?”

            “Another five minutes, maybe less, and it’ll mine,” the girl quietly answered from her chair.

            “Excellent,” Halle declared triumphantly.  “It’s going to be a good day.  I can tell.”

            “You didn’t have to tell my sister what I did,” Gail hissed under her breath to her bearded compatriot as they pushed a cart down an empty hallway out from the partially constructed wing of the building in their construction disguises.

            “She asked me a question, I had to,” Roger said.  “Not like she cares.  She still lets you have your fun.”

            “Whatever.  So are they all down there yet, or what?”

            “Just a few more, and then I’ll pull the trigger,” Roger answered, examining a small display on his tablet.  “Looks like we’ve already got thirty guards down there.”

            “They’re like rats toward a piece of dead meat.  What did you even do?”

            “Nothing much.  Alice already had a hold on their comms, so I just had to send out a call for any security on patrol to head back down to HQ in the basement for a final briefing.  We have a couple packages in the vents on either side of the room.  Once we’ve got enough in there, we’ll just open them up, let them get a good whiff of what’s inside, and they should all be napping a minute later.”

            “I still say we could’ve taken them on our own,” Gail commented.  “No need for Sonja’s fancy toys to come in already.”

            “Believe me, it’ll be a lot less of a headache to even the odds before they even know we’re here,” he said, and nodded at his display.  Out of his pocket, he drew a capped trigger device and popped the top, revealing a red square underneath.  “Thirty-four.  That’ll be enough.  Anymore, and the rest will catch wind of it sooner than we can get to the auditorium.  Here goes.”

            “Can I hit the button?” Gail offered nonchalantly.

            “I thought you didn’t like Sonja’s toys.”

            “I don’t.  Getting to do anything yourself is always best.  But I’m getting bored already,” Gail shrugged.  “Now give me.”

            “If you say so,” Roger shrugged, handing over the trigger.  “Just go ahead and-”

            “Boom,” Gail whispered joyfully as she squeezed the button, flooding the security armory and its thirty-four occupants far below in a chemical cocktail haze thick enough to conk out an elephant.

            “You know it’s gas and not an incendiary, right?” Roger grumbled, then messaged a quick confirmation of the act to Halle.  “We’re not gonna have long before someone goes looking, and I’d bet at least someone down there managed to fire off a distress call before they went down, even with the signal jammer I set up.”

            “The brat should have gotten us the building already, and that idiot Halle decided to pick up should be finished with his rounds.  When do we get to start cracking a couple skulls?  I’m getting real sick of the waiting,” Gail complained as she and Roger shoved the final cart of cargo from the truck into its position in a deserted room.

            “You’re not the only one,” Alma Warren said with a sickly grin, a grave look of remorseless hunger in her eyes as she emerged from the darkness.

            “…and that, my friends, was how I ended up wrestling a splinter out of my TA’s thumb.  Please don’t try it at home,” Herman Randolph enthused to the vast crowd of Betas before him as he paced the auditorium stage for his sixteenth minute, eliciting a wave of rolling chuckles from the grand space.  “But in seriousness, now, before I ask up the next speaker, I’d like to remind you of something.  I understand if it’s hard to believe now, but if you hear nothing else I say, hear this: you are mighty.  Every single one of you is more powerful than you can possibly imagine.  I know it might sound silly, or like something I pulled from a cheesy birthday card.  But I mean it, now more than ever.  This is a new age for us, and I think it’s not just us that stand on this stage today, but all of you, with your bright and eager minds prepped for learning, that demonstrate it better than any words can.  So I urge you all to go forth and give it everything you have, because your actions will speak volumes louder than any words I say to you today.”

            “Couldn’t agree more,” boomed the voice of an Alpha from the back of the room, shrouded in too much shadow to be identified.  “Words are meaningless.”

            “Right… yes, thank you for the support,” Herman said with an uneasy sarcastic chuckle, squinting into the room in an attempt to identify the statuesque female source of the interruption.

            “Not everyone’s words, obviously.  But certainly yours are,” the woman continued.

            “Anyway,” coughed Herman, electing to ignore her now.  “With this, I pass along the stage to…”

            “Us,” the feminine voice cut in a third time.  A perturbed murmur broke out from the audience of Alphas, and a couple hissed at the stranger to move away.

            Herman’s eyes darted to the back corners of the room, where he could see three uniformed guards already marching closer to the stage.  Keeping his cool, he tugged awkwardly at his collar as he watched the woman step into the light at last, revealing what appeared to be a black tactical suit with boots, gear belt, and sensible ponytail for her jet-black hair.  Her silvery eyes met his, and suddenly the man became colder than he’d recalled feeling in a long time.

            “Ma’am, please back away from the stage,” a guard warned from behind her as they advanced, hands hovering over their stun devices.

            “Who is us?” Herman boldly questioned, refusing to take the abrasion sitting down, like he had for his whole youth at the hands of Alphas.

            “Just call us Paradise.  And frankly, it’s just about time you passed it along,” Halle snidely hissed, ignoring the thin threat as she leaned over the stage, close enough that she could’ve blown onto Herman’s face.  “Because I’m sick of listening to your filthy Beta lips flap.”

            With a swift swat of her right hand like a cat batting a rodent, Halle flung the three-inch-tall medical professional across the width of the stage.

            The crowd of more than one hundred thousand Betas and one hundred Alphas fell silent as a dusky tomb from mortified shock, making most feel as though they’d accidentally stepped into a waking dream.  The various devices projecting a video feed of the auditorium to the more than three hundred Alphas in the spillover room had the same effect.

            Perhaps more so than any other place in the city, the bustling ivory interior of Aegis headquarters came to a screeching halt, as more than two dozen titanic defenders of the population witnessed the act on their monitors, the blood of every single immortal being running with a humbling chill.

            The woman in black tapped her ear and smiled as the guards now sprinted toward her with tasers brandished.  “Roger?  Gail?  Come on in and join the party.”

            At the back of the room, all the exits simultaneously burst open.  The attentions of the remaining seven guards in the room were instantly redirected as five more Alphas dressed in black entered.

            The next few seconds trudged by at a nightmarish crawl that melded into a cacophonous flurry of the combined terrified cries of thousands of witnesses.  The guards, quick as they were, were no match for the coordinated efforts of the six intruders in tactical gear, who set into a murderous dance that encircled and then downed the remaining security in a rain of bone-shattering blows and the odd spritz of blood.

            The Alpha teachers began rising from their chairs, rushing toward the group as a unit in hopes of distracting them, but their front line was instantly smacked back down with a few practiced blows and swished blades.  Still-screaming Betas rose en masse and bolted for the tiny metal doors lining the balconies, distraught teachers desperately trying to maintain some shred of order in the horrifying scene, only to find they’d already been locked by a tripped security measure, courtesy of Alice in the control room.

            “ENOUGH!” Halle bellowed with explosive aplomb, nearly bowling over half the Betas in attendance with her volume, and the audience all paused in their desperate effort to defend the room.  By now, the lethal accomplices had drawn firearms and had them trained on the Alpha teachers and chaperones, offering an abrupt end to any further retaliation.  “I’d been hoping we didn’t have to start out on the wrong foot for all this, but I can see now we’re in need of some clarity on the situation.  I need everyone.  Everyone… to return to their seats so we can get this moving along, as silently as possible.  Particularly Alphas.  It would be a great shame to have to harm any of you or your pets just for a foolish act of heroism.”

            There was a pause, as though the prisoners were weighing their options a final time, before everyone began moving toward their chairs again, the Alphas slowly backing away from the guns pointed at their foreheads.

            Here and there over the expanse of the room, pockets of distressed weeping rang out from the Beta balconies, but were mostly lost amidst the collective reseating.  A few minutes of chaos later, the room was back in a state of apparent regulation, save for the violently elevated heart rates of every soul in the room not wearing tactical gear.

            “Alice, you can go ahead and cut the feed.  I’m sure our big brothers and sisters have seen enough already to start running around like headless chickens.  Unlock the central passage only, and wait for my signal for the spillover,” Halle whispered into her earpiece, before raising her voice again to address the room.  “If all Alphas in the room could be so kind as to follow my two associates out to alternate accommodations, I’d be very appreciative.”

            There was another moment of rigid reluctance as Gail and Roger pushed open the door Alice had just electronically unlocked, and prepared to lead the crowd of Alphas out.  No one budged.

            “Oh, and when I say that, I mean right fucking now,” Halle spat poisonously to the stunned guests, in the process causing tens of thousands of Betas to descend into a paralyzed panic, and no small number of the younger students to wet themselves.

            Spurred by the roared outburst, the group shuffled slowly, clearly not wanting to be separated from the now-incredibly vulnerable population of three-inch occupants left in the room.  Several even stopped in their tracks, turning around and seemingly trying to summon the courage to speak out against Halle, but a quick blow to the back of the head from Gail’s overeager gun barrel corrected them.

            “There’s no need for this!” a woman called out from the crowd of Alpha teachers, her voice cracking.  She was already on the verge of tears.

            “The next person who talks out of turn will have a Beta or five on the bottom of my boot to answer to,” Halle announced with a sudden calm, and if the hollow silence hadn’t already been absolute, it was positively deafening now.  Just as the final Alpha was about to follow the others out the door, the lead intruder’s luminous grey irises locked on to her.

            “Wait.  That last one,” Halle said, pointing at the young woman in the back of the pack, who fearfully chanced a glance over her shoulder to confirm that she was being singled out.  The Alpha couldn’t have been much older than a high school graduate.  “Yes, you, with the curls.  Get back in here.  Stand by the wall with your hands at your sides, and don’t move.”

            The female Alpha nodded solemnly, and halted her exit from the room far faster than Halle was expecting to do as she was told, though it was shrugged off for the time being, as the leader’s attention was now left to fester with hungry amusement over the petrified cavalcade of three-inch hostages before her while the auditorium doors were electronically locked again.

            “And now that we’ve got the room to ourselves, little ones,” Halle sang in the most tender voice she could manage, steepling her fingers together greedily.  “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

            Meanwhile, in the tile sanctuary of the bathroom, Ben rubbed his reddened eyes and took a deep breath as he leaned against a wall.  He threw a few handfuls of cold water from the sink against his warm cheeks and stared disdainfully at his wiry frame in the mirror, at last getting up the gumption to join his classmates.

            “Okay, Mom.  Okay, Dad.  Here goes nothing,” he sighed with a resigned shrug.  “I can be… anything.  Yeah, right.”

“What do the chaperones outside say?  What are we seeing?” Abigail Lindon barked across the expanse of the panic-stricken yet grimly efficient Aegis office, where almost every seat was now filled with an Omega busily looking into the apparent takeover of the Norman & Joan Tyler Convention Center.  “I need someone to talk to me about this NOW.”

            “Senior Enforcer Reynolds says all the exits are sealed.  Window and rooftop entrances as well,” came an answer from Kyle Rodgers at his desk.  “They must’ve had someone let them into the security.  Claire and Jenna are already down there, too.  They’re all still checking, but it doesn’t look promising.”

            “Have the chaperones keep looking, too.  What about security?  Why don’t we have control of it yet, Dawn?” Abby rolled on as she turned to her best chance at cracking into the structure’s highly sophisticated system.

            “I’m trying, Chief.  We all are.  But it’s shut tight.  Every time I make a move, it gets blocked.  It’s like they’re already expecting everything I try,” said the addressed Omega behind a laptop, her frizzy walnut locks bouncing against her porcelain cheeks as she busily tapped away at her keyboard.  A few feet away from her massive monitor on the surface of her desk sat a dozen Alphas with their own computers, all working just as feverishly as their overseer.

            “Try harder, then,” Abby answered impatiently, clenching her fists until her ashen knuckles cracked.  “I needed that building back in our hands about five minutes ago.  David, where are we on that list of possible IDs for that Alpha in black?”

            “Still collating.  It was too dark for a definite identification.  I’ve got a short list and it’s already headed over to you,” Senior Enforcer Hart answered from his office as he continued searching furiously through his archives.

            “How about those personnel files?  What kind of defense are we looking at?”

            “Fifty-two on duty.  At least eight accounted for outside,” Hart reported.  “Four called in sick and replacements went ahead.  We’re sending people over to confirm, but I’ve got a feeling they’re sicker than we think.”

            “Okay, that’s… something.  Still not enough to go on.  And where’s Melody?”

            “Right here, Abby,” the honey-haired amazon of an Omega responded, suddenly appearing behind her boss who, despite her own imposing height above most of the room’s occupants, was made to look much closer to the ground by her towering assistant.

            “I want our evac teams on standby.  Full Bulwark Protocol.  Every carrier, Omega and Alpha, here and ready to move out and collect the residential and mixed districts if we so much as hear a whisper from inside that building,” Abby said as she looked up to her colossal protégé’s apologetic countenance.

            “Right,” Melody confirmed, swiping her tablet open and dialing in a message with swift strokes.  “It’ll… take a little while, but…”

            “Just get moving on it.  Anything at all from the beacon we sent to Kayla?” Abby demanded almost pleadingly.

            “Nothing,” Melody said with a heavy swallow as she reopened the call and jammed a thumb aggressively at the screen, as though it would produce more promising results.  Given how far away Dr. Everett was at the moment, it only seemed more hopeless with each thrust of her finger.  Though her movements were small, the obvious tension throughout the girl’s body caused her rounded biceps to bulge slightly with every flick of her wrist.

            “Damn it.  Keep trying,” Abby snapped, the strain of the situation obviously getting to her just as it was everyone else in the room.  “Can someone at least tell me we’ve been able to open a line of communication?”

            “We’re listening, but we’re not getting any outgoing signals,” Dawn regretfully announced, tapping her petite digits anxiously against her lips.

            “Okay, then what about us contacting them?  Can we get access to a phone in there somewhere?  A laptop, even?  Anything?”

            “They’ve got us locked out of all that, too.  Whoever it is must have gotten access to the building’s mainframe.”

            “Fantastic.  So we’re just flying blind here.  Get somebody to check on whoever was on duty for the Center’s security today.  No, scratch that.  I want anyone who’s ever held the keys.  Maybe they can tell us something,” the elder Omega drawled agonizingly, digging her nails into her temple and sliding them up through her brunette bob, clearly dying now for a single shred of good news.  “Ev.  Do you have anything?”

            “There might be something we could use in the lower levels, below the primary supports.  But it sounds like the power’s already been cut to all maintenance entrances,” Evelyn Cade reported mutedly as she tied her silvery blonde hair behind her head and gazed down at a digitized blueprint of the building’s exterior.  “Worth a try, but I don’t think it’ll be of any use now.”

            “There’s an opening on the new wing, Chief,” Kyle called out suddenly.  “Construction hasn’t put in the security system yet, so they can’t gate us off.  Of course, they’ve probably already rigged up…”

            “If it’s an access point, it’s the only one we’ve got, and it’ll have to do,” Abby interjected.  “We’re just about ready.  I just need-”

            “Abby!” Tricia Reynolds clamored militantly from the Alpha walkway.  She was garbed in body armor, with an assault weapon strapped to her back and a utility belt strung around her waist.  “My team and I are prepped and ready for deployment.”

            “Good.  Then it’s time to mobilize,” Abby said, biting her lip and willing herself to stay in control, though her blue eyes couldn’t help but well from the duress.

            The auditorium, despite containing in excess of one hundred thousand people, remained in an eerie graveyard-like reticence that was interrupted only by the occasional burst of tears by young Betas in the balcony who had managed to move beyond a catatonic traumatized state and into one of gut-wrenching turmoil at what was happening.  A few choice glares from Gail, who had been pacing aggressively around the room with a knife teased against her mouth, was often more than enough to quash these irritations back into silence.

            “Everything closed up tight in that spillover, Alice?” Halle asked into the earpiece, now standing in a cautious huddle with five members of her team in the center of the room.

            “Yep, looking good.  All Alphas I can see in the building are in the room or otherwise… dealt with, and it’s sealed off on both exits,” came the static reply.

            “What about Betas?”

            “Might be a couple strays moving around the halls, hard to say just yet.  I’m looking.”

            “Keep it up.  We’ll send out a few extra pairs of eyes,” Halle said, at last addressing her crew directly.  “Sonja?  Alma?  Take a stroll and pick up any stragglers.”

            “I still have to finish hooking a few things up before we’re set.  I need to be in here,” Alma countered.

            “Okay, then.  New guy?  You’re up.”

            “It’s Randall,” the greasy gunrunner commented, scratching at the back of his neck and twitching with the intensity of someone deprived of a fix.   “My name is Randall.”

            “Prove you’re worth a damn and then maybe we’ll start remembering that,” Sonja scowled, sharpening the blade of her knife against a piece of body armor before grabbing the newbie by the shoulder and shoving him toward the door.  “Come on, let’s get moving.”

            “Where the hell did you find him?” Roger mumbled under his breath to Halle.  “He looks like he cracks under pressure.”

            “He had an in, and he knows how to put someone down when he has to.  It was good enough for me.  Don’t worry, I won’t give him anything important.  Besides, we won’t need him the whole time,” Halle said.  “I almost forgot about Taylor, too.  I sent her to watch the south entrance, but that’s enough for now.  Someone give her another call and get her in here.”

            “What if she doesn’t handle it?  What we’re doing?” Gail suggested to her twin sister as she hunched over in one of the chairs.  “How much did you tell her?”

            “Not any more than she needed to know.  I don’t think she’ll be a problem, though.  You should see some of the things on her record,” Halle said, smirking.  “She’s a girl after your own heart.”

            “And what if she becomes a problem anyway?” the scruffier sibling pressed, grinding her yellowed teeth demonstratively.

            “Then you know what to do, won’t you?”

            “It looks like they’re trying to advance on the north wing,” Alice said into her boss’s earpiece, interrupting the exchange.  “The construction side.  No cameras, so I don’t have eyes down there, you might wanna…”

            “I know.  We were expecting this.  Let’s see then, Roger?  Grab a box and follow me,” Halle instructed with a controlled cool, eyeing the pair of black parcels resting at her feet they’d just finished filling moments before.  “Let’s go greet our public.”

            In the short hall leading off of the Beta walkway in the entrance to the Center, Ben emerged from the restroom and dug his hands back into his pockets as he strode toward the main thoroughfare.

            “Stop jittering.  You’re making me nervous,” Sonja growled from around the corner as she and Randall exited the main doors of the auditorium.

            Ben’s heart fluttered in his chest just by nature of being in the same vicinity as Alphas again, and he abruptly pressed himself up against the drinking fountains positioned outside the bathroom, his heart railing in his chest.  He exhaled wearily and clenched his eyes shut.

            This had to stop, now.

            He’d never learn to live with himself if he couldn’t get over this, and he’d most certainly never live down his parents’ names.  The Beta had to just step out into the unknown if he ever wanted to be something of use to the world.  After all, they were people, just like him, who just happened to be big enough to pick him up with two fingers.

            “Okay, diaper-pants, you take the west side, then head upstairs and look around.  I’m gonna check out the entrances.  Stay tight, keep your voice down if you have to say something.  And watch your goddamned back.  Anything with little legs runs across the floor, you grab it up.  Don’t smash it unless that’s your last option.  Halle wants as many as we can get still in one piece.  Got it?” Sonja hissed.

            Ben’s breathing stopped almost entirely now, a cold bead of sweat trickling down his forehead.

            So maybe they weren’t people just like him.

            “Got it.  Look, I know what I’m doing, all right?  Done shit like this a thousand times,” Randall groaned.

            “Buddy, I guarantee you you haven’t done shit quite like this before, and if you don’t keep your trap shut more often, you won’t get the chance to top it, either,” Sonja fired back as she continued sauntering back into the front of the hall toward the sealed entrance, her eyes scanning obsessively over the Beta walkway.

            It was at this moment that her face became framed by the narrow hallway entrance and her owl-like eyes fell on Ben.

            Adrenaline instantly surging through his veins, the scrawny blonde Beta hardly had time to process the unsettling sight of oddly luminescent red tresses, the long black lines of eyeliner that resembled war paint on the woman’s cheeks, nor the various firearms strapped to her hips.  He leapt to his feet and darted the few long paces back into the relative safety of the bathroom, his heart threatening to rise into his throat and burst out.

            “What’s the rush, little fella?” Sonja snickered through gritted teeth as she lunged forward, her powerful arm filling up the hallway immediately, her gloved fingers clenching together with a leathery slap just as Ben dove over the threshold.  Army crawling because of the fact that his legs were more or less composed of jelly now, he scrambled further into the room in time to avoid Sonja’s long fingers opening back up and clamping hard against the doorframe, clearly strong enough to at least do some structural damage if she tugged hard enough.

            “Damn it, I forgot how fucking fast you shits can be,” she cursed, opening and closing her fingers into the bathroom entrance as if simulating shark jaws.  She clearly couldn’t fit any further, but that didn’t stop Ben from hyperventilating as he witnessed the towering woman’s massive black-clad appendage clawing desperately for him.  He remained sprawled on the tile in front of the sinks, unable to convince himself to move any further.

            “You think you’re safe, huh, little mouse?  Think you can just hole up in the can, and wait it out?” Sonja taunted as she withdrew her arm from the hallway at last with a final waggle of her fingers.  “I’ve got a fun surprise for you, then.  I hope you’re a bug fan, because I certainly am.”

            Forcing life back into his limbs by sheer force of will, the Beta resolved to operate on autopilot to avoid finding out firsthand what the woman’s verbal abuses were hinting at.  With the frantic effort reserved for people with Ben’s particular depth of paranoia, his mind went to work on constructing a way out and immediately spied a grate on the wall to the left of the stalls.

            It was small, but someone with Ben’s nimble frame could manage to maneuver through, if he could pry the screws way.  Plunging his hands into his pockets again, he fished for his pocket knife, praying he hadn’t neglected to bring it with him today, then gratefully felt its shape in his palm.

            No sooner at the Beta selected the proper tool and darted to the wall to work on undoing the screws around the edges of the grate, then he heard something else from down the hall, which had fallen momentarily silent after Sonja’s last statement.

            Skittering, like nails brushing threateningly against a chalkboard, and rapid.  It grew louder, clattering in Ben’s ears as he hurriedly finished the second screw, and the next time he looked over his shoulder, he saw what he could only describe with a ghastly churning in his stomach as a metallic four-legged spider the size of a scaled Saint Bernard stepped into the room.

            A single crimson eye in the center of the thing’s pod body scanned into the upper corners of the room, then moved to the walls, making a single pass over each surface.

            Ben nearly choked in his paralyzed throat to keep silent as he twisted the final screw required to open the grate, then spun it to the side so that the cover only hung on by the final fastener.  He didn’t allow himself another moment to look back as he threw himself into the claustrophobic tunnel of the vent shaft and lunged forward as best as he could into the dusty blackness.

            The sounds of the spider’s legs clinking aggressively against the entrance to the vent could be heard behind him in few enough heartbeats that Ben was surprised his ankle hadn’t been skewered by a sharp robotic limb, but considering how hard he was breathing as he squirmed through the tunnel, it wasn’t like his body needed the extra help to barely function.

“Stay tight… watch your back… who the fuck does she think she is?” Randall huffed aggressively to himself as he turned the corner of another deserted hallway in the Center.  He wiped his nose on the back of his sleeve and squinted at the empty Beta walkways for any signs of life.  The hallways were darkened after the windows had been electronically shielded in bulletproof steel thanks to Alice’s tampering, though dim lighting from the emergency bulbs above guided his sauntering march.

            He hadn’t stumbled on any loose Betas yet, but he hadn’t exactly been putting his fullest effort into searching for strays after Sonja’s belittling instructions.

            “Watch your own back, BITCH.  That’s what I should’ve said!” he declared victoriously to himself in the silence, thrusting his arms above his head.  “What, does she think I’m some kind of amateur?”

            Shattering this eerie serenity with volume and explosive motion, a tightly coiled fist the size of a truck barreled through the wall ten feet above Randall’s head in a raining eruption of brick, mortar, and steel, all shredded as easily as paper under the artillery-like power of the hand and its attached Omega limb.

            The greased-up gunrunner, gripping his firearm in a fist that had smashed through enumerable faces, screamed bloody murder as the titanic hand unfurled, palm aimed squarely for him with mighty fingers clenching around his back fast enough that it was only by the miracle of the awkward angle from which he was snatched that his bones weren’t crunched to powder.

            “Gotcha,” growled a catastrophically enraged Jenna Reynolds as she withdrew her hand from the hole she had punched in the third floor of the Norman & Joan Tyler Convention Center with runty Alpha in tow.  Brandishing her squirming capture before her face, a sneer curling into her upper lip, the twenty-one-year-old couldn’t help but let a triumphant glow flare in her irises.  “You talk way too loud, you know that?  I barely had to put an ear to the wall.”

            “My leg! My… m-” he screeched as the hot fist tightened around him.  He hadn’t ever known a sensation quite like this, as though his entire body was being compressed and folded into itself by a trash compactor.  He felt and heard a rib snap, and his whimpering cries turned into a pain-wracked yelp.

            “Jenna.  We need him in one piece to hear what’s happening in there,” Claire Lindon said as she loomed over her shorter friend’s shoulder, trembling with just as much anger.  “That’s enough for now.”

            “I know.  I’m just giving him a little encouragement before we start talking.”

            “Mom will want to be the one to talk with him.  Come on, ease up now,” Claire encouraged, conflicted over the idea of relenting on the pain of Jenna’s prisoner, but nonetheless far too focused by the entire situation to let her feelings redirect her.  Still gripping the petite Omega’s arm, she extended a hand with her palm up.  “Jenna.  Give him to me.”

            “Fine,” the Omega groused, acknowledging the wisdom in her friend’s words amidst her own boiling fury, and her wrist shook violently as she uncurled her tightly bound fingers above Claire’s waiting hand.  “Don’t let him feel too at home.”

            “Oh, believe me,” Claire replied, brow furrowed as she held the weeping little Alpha close enough that her warm breath could wash over him.  “I won’t.”

            Having arrived minutes before, Aegis had already set up a point of communications outside the Center, down in the hills distanced from the raised thoroughfares used for Alpha traffic, though even at this elevation, most of the Omegas’ heads rose above the rooftop.

            Tricia Reynolds and her team, armed to the teeth and raring for answers, had already breached the building through the partially constructed north entrance.  Ten Enforcers and another three dozen Alphas were still scouring the exterior of the building for alternate ways in while David and Rebecca settled in behind Abby as they reviewed Tricia’s tactical plan with a backup strike team.

            Melody remained at the back of the group, continually sending out distress signals on her tablet to Kayla, who it was already well-understood couldn’t possibly receive them if she hadn’t already; still, a grim hope was clung to.

            “I could use some good news right about now, Dawn,” Abby said as she peered over her frizzy-haired tech support’s laptop.  “I really didn’t want to have to send in Tricia and the others.  We could go tearing those barriers down ourselves, but I don’t want to do anything that might spook whoever’s in there, not until we’ve had a chance to talk, or at least get a headcount.  What have you got?”

            “I’m sorry, Chief, I’m still not seeing anything,” she said.  The Omega peered down at her vest, containing twelve metallically-reinforced pockets with strap-in seats, each one housing an Alpha on her team with their own devices.

            “What about you?  Brandon, I thought you said you almost had something?” Dawn spoke into one of the openings in the fabric, parting the cover with her fingertips to see its comparatively tiny occupant better.

            “I did.  I’m sorry, I lost it.  Whoever’s in there is putting up a real fight,” the man sighed resentfully from the Omega’s pocket.

            “Just keep trying,” Abby asserted to him and others as she turned her attention toward the building, only to see her daughter striding quickly toward her.

            “Mom.  Jenna found you a present,” the younger Lindon said with a smile as she opened her palm to reveal Randall’s quivering form in the soft center.

            Pointing two fingers into the silent void, Tricia Reynolds peered through her visor as she led her team of eleven across the threshold of the construction site.  With her rifle squeezed to her hip in preparation to enter the open, Tricia and her unit pressed their backs against the broad side of the cargo truck Roger and Gail had left parked in the foyer, the spacious trailer emptied of whatever contents it had previously held.

            Her eyes darted furtively under the truck, immediately spying the crumpled body of the security guard Gail had stabbed, and silently alerted her team to it.  She then examined points on the ceiling, searching the high arches and pillars that acted as the only support system for the roof several stories above.  At last, drawing a scanner from her belt, she carefully set about emitting a pulse from the device to scan for potential threats: explosive, organic, or otherwise.  Seeing nothing, she looked over her shoulder and nodded to the team in preparation to move again.

            No sooner had Tricia and the three immediately behind her come out into the open when a piercing whistle and a rush of wind flashed not ten feet above their heads.  One of the three primary pillars centered between the double-door entrances, still draped with plastic to prevent construction damage, had been struck cleanly in the center by the projectile fired from the hallway ahead.

            An instant later, the brunt of the explosion from the launched grenade at a point above their heads nearly staggered the team off their feet.  Righting herself, though, Tricia was back with the iron sighting of her rifle over her eye before the last block of pillar stone from the black smoke had finished tumbling to the ground in a dust-billowing crash.

            “I wouldn’t be too fast on that trigger, honey,” Halle bellowed to Tricia from across the ovular entrance hall, a lead box the size of a fishing tackle wedged under her arm.  Roger, fuming grenade launcher gripped in his fist, was lowering his weapon back to his side while holding his own box under the opposite arm.  The pair were standing out in the clear without any form of cover to defend them across the fifty-foot distance that separated them from Tricia’s team.

            “You’re going to have to put the weapon and the boxes down on the ground and take three big steps back,” Tricia said contritely, ignoring the suggestion if only for protocol.  “You have five seconds before my team and I are forced to end this the ugly way.”

            “See, I could, but I think you’d find that me putting this box down for any reason would end pretty poorly for me and about… oh, I’d say about thirty, maybe forty little kiddies?” Halle declared as she peered down into her box with one eye closed, chewing her lip as though in contemplation.

            “You have an extra ten seconds, then, to explain what you’re trying to say.”

            “Was I talking too fast for you to keep up?  My apologies,” Halle answered with a cheerful grin and a toss of her black ponytail to the other shoulder.  Her free hand hovering over the opening on top of the box, she took another glance inside, speaking directly to the Betas.  “If I still have a gun pointed at me in the next minute, something fun is going to happen to all of these things.  Isn’t it?”

            A flurry of tiny desperate pleas for help and indeterminate screams were suddenly ejected from both the boxes under Halle and Roger’s arms, which it was now apparent contained quite a few Betas.

            Tricia shuddered, but kept her fist tightly clenched around the barrel of her poised weapon.

            “You will set that box gently down on the ground, and back away, like I said.  Launcher, too,” the Aegis operative said, her voice becoming gravelly from barely quelled vengeance.  “Now.”

            “I’m afraid we can’t do that,” Halle sighed contentedly.

            “Don’t play games with us.  There’s no way out of here.  Not for you two, and not for anyone else you have back there,”

            “All right, fair enough, you got us,” Halle shrugged.  “Though I feel it’s only fair to let you know that each of these boxes is lined with a number of particularly sharp objects.  If you make it so that I am forced to drop the box… too quickly, I doubt many of my little friends here will make it out without becoming delicious Beta kebobs.”

            “Halle, we have a problem,” Alice’s voice suddenly piped quietly into her boss’s ear.  “They grabbed the new guy.  Right through a wall.  They have him now.”

            “Noted,” Halle whispered back in a bitter reverie, at last resolving to get things moving faster.  There was no more time for games.  She exhaled heavily.

            “This is your last chance,” Tricia grunted, nearly mad with rage now

            “No, you disgusting excuse for an Alpha,” Halle snarled with renewed volume, dropping her sweeter cover as her hand descended like a striking viper into the box.  She was clearly through with any pretense of an act.  “It’s yours.”

            The hearts of every SWAT team member ceased beating for a fraction in time as they witnessed Halle’s fist emerge from the trap, three adult Betas poking from between her fingers as they beat their tiny fists against their gloved cage and cried for aid.

            Without another instant’s hesitation, Halle roared as she crushed the helpless Betas into her fist with a grisly crunch that silenced their collective begging in a tiny spritz of crimson.  Opening her fingers again, she threw the mangled bodies to the ground several feet in front of her like discarded trash, where their limp corpses landed with a sickening whispered plop in the morbid silence that had instantaneously befallen the team.

            Tricia’s finger quivered over the trigger, fighting her muscles to squeeze.  She couldn’t remember a time in her life where she was more desperate to plant a bullet between someone’s eyes.  Her vision was practically on the verge of blurring, so focused had she become.

            And then the screams started up again, as Halle had handily murdered the three well within view of the box’s other passengers.

            “You and your super squad of mutants are sadly mistaken if you think anyone but us is in control here,” Halle spat to the stunned SWAT team.  Her blood-dampened hand dug back into the box, drawing three more Betas out.  This time, she had snatched up teens.  “Now back the fuck out of the building NOW, or you are going to have a lot bigger mess to clean up.”

            “Fall back,” Tricia declared blithely to her team.

            “Trish?” one of her team responded, voice quivering traumatically.

            “You heard me.  Fall back now,” she ordered, her gaze flashing on the spot the three unfortunate teachers had landed.  There wasn’t an extra second given to deliberation as Tricia began backing away, still with her gun primed and aimed at Halle’s face from afar.  Her team begrudgingly followed suit.

            “We’ll be in touch soon!” Halle crooned brightly across the hallway as the team disappeared back out the entrance to the wing, then turned to her smirking cohort.  The pair were left in silence again except for the muffled cries of the Betas below mourning the three teachers.

            “That went well,” Roger chuckled.

            “Are you kidding?  Just look at this,” Halle groaned with a disgusted grimace as she shook the final few drops of blood off her glove.  “I wish she’d moved sooner.  Now I’ll have to get new gloves when this is all over, too.”

“What now?” Taylor Sharpe inquired in a husky whisper as she kneeled stiffly next to Alma Warren.  Both were positioned before the latter’s elaborate contraption on the floor of the storage hall adjacent to the auditorium.

            “Just hold on here so I can work,” Alma mumbled to Taylor without looking up as she continued tinkering between the gears of a metal unit mounted on wheels.  She lifted a hand and indicated toward a brass handle that had appeared between the gears.  The young woman obliged, grasping what she assumed to be the equivalent of a mechanical emergency brake on the device.

            Dark rings of sleeplessness hung under the convicted Alpha’s eyes, which were flushed a strung-out pink, but all the same, she hardly blinked as she meticulously worked on her creation.  “I’m serious.  Keep your little mitts around it tight until I say so, and don’t let go for anything else.”

            “Got it,” Taylor grumbled, clenching her knuckles harder as she passively witnessed the catlike woman picking at chunks of metal jutting out of the device at odd angles.  It was obvious the whole mechanism had been designed from scratch by the treacherously off-balance woman.

            “I’m just about set with my gear,” Alma said to Halle as she neared for an update.  “We can start loading up the vermin in a couple minutes.”

            “Wait,” Taylor uttered, a frown etching into her forehead as her suspicions were coming dangerously close to being confirmed.  “Loading up.  You mean…”

            “Fantastic.  We’re ahead of schedule, then,” the black-haired vixen said, ignoring her underling’s babbling.  “I knew you’d pull through.”

            “Thanks for the vote of confidence.  Let’s just get it all together before we celebrate, though,” Alma commented gravely.

            “Agreed.  Roger?  Gail?  Is Sonja back yet?”

            “She said she’d just be a couple more minutes.  It sounds like she rounded up a couple dozen strays,” Roger grunted.

            “Why’d she have to spill all her shit here, anyway?” Gail asked as she disdainfully kicked at an open duffel bag of tactical gear and weaponized apparati Sonja had abandoned by the back wall.

            “Not like it matters.  The floor’s clear of pests,” Roger shrugged, shooting a steely glance up at the paralyzed balconies of Betas above.

            “What about her?” Gail growled, squinting over at the young Alpha chaperone Halle had ordered to stay when the teachers were shepherded out.  Rising from her chair, the grizzled animal of a woman advanced on the teenaged girl like a beast stalking its prey, clomping her boots dramatically with each step.  “I don’t trust the look of her.”

            “It’s not like you’ve ever trusted anything in your life, sis,” Halle chuckled.

            “And with good reason,” Gail hissed as she came to a stop in front of the hostage Alpha, who remained stock-still against the wall, where she’d been ordered to remain on threat of liquefied Betas.  “What’s your name, missy?”

            “M-M…”

            “Spit it out already,” Gail ordered as she lifted one of her kerambit blades again and used it to brush the girl’s dirty blonde bangs off her forehead, revealing her auburn irises more clearly.

            “Mona,” the girl managed with a heave of her chest, trembling at the sight of the knife but somehow remaining in control.

            “That’s enough, Gail.  We may need her for labor in a few minutes, and I really don’t feel like working next to someone who shit their pants,” Halle said with a sly smirk.  “Come on, put away the flatware.”

            “I’ll be watching you.  Every second.  Even if you think I’m not,” Gail droned harshly to Mona, sliding the tip of the blade one final time through the girl’s hair before backing away again.  “So don’t try anything funny.  I’m not one for funny.”

            “She’s really not,” Roger cut in gruffly.

            “Listen to Frankenstein.  He knows all about it,” Gail whispered as she waved a hand at the towering brute of an Alpha and took a seat again to continue playing with her metallic toy between her fingertips.

            “Please,” Mona peeped in the silence, drawing the surprised attention of everyone who could see her.  Her voice was on the verge of cracking and her eyes remained locked to the floor.  “Please leave everyone alone.  Don’t h-hurt anyone else.  They haven’t d-done anything to y-you.”

            “And just why should we do that?” Halle queried pleasantly.

            “They’ll… they’ll give you whatever you want.  Whatever it is, if you just leave everyone else alone.  Aegis will.”

            “My dear, believe me, no matter the outcome of today’s festivities, nobody is getting what they want.  Not unless every single Omega volunteers to commit seppuku with blades the size of radio towers, anyway.  Then maybe we could say we got everything we wanted,” Halle smarmed with her hands tucked politely behind her back as she ambled toward the cowering young Alpha, before finally coming to a stop right before her.  Standing a full head taller than Mona, the stone-cold glace from Halle was hardly necessary to help make the point.  “But I don’t foresee that happening, so we’ll just play the cards we’re dealt.”

            Mona’s jaw hung slightly open, and she was clearly scared out of any attempts at further retort.  Halle, satisfied, gave her some space again with a sweep of her dark ponytail.

            Across the room, Taylor bit her lip, summoning the courage to speak up to Alma without being prompted first.  Her palm was sweaty as it continued gripping the handle.

            “So those racks…” Taylor said, eying the rows of metal towers and black rectangular units that resembled something like a room-sized computer hard drive.  The entire space was filled to capacity with them, forming a veritable maze of cold steel.  “They’re to hold…”

            “Yep.  Let go of the switch now,” Alma said, again without looking up.  “Don’t go away yet, though.  I might need you to again.”

            “I don’t understand,” Taylor continued, her heart rate rising steadily.  She touched a fingertip to her freckle-dotted cheek, willing herself to stay calm.  “I thought the idea was to keep them all in their seats, so we can keep track, until the ransom comes through.”

            Alma couldn’t help but let a snicker emerge from her cracked lips, and at last she rewarded the confused Alpha hire with eye contact.

            “God, they did not trust you with much, did they?” Alma muttered merrily, wiping some grease from her hands onto an equally filthy rag.  “You really think we’re here to pad our wallets a little?”

            “What do you mean?  I thought… I thought that’s what this whole thing was about,” Taylor pressed uneasily.

            Alma sighed before digging her hands back into the protruding gears.  “You better start getting with the program soon.  No, we’re not here for a fucking Aegis paycheck.  We’re here to start making things right again.”

            “By… sticking thousands of kids into boxes?”

            “Betas, newbie, not kids.  Now c’mere,” Alma said, waving a hand toward her face.

            “Why?”

            “Because since you’re gonna be helping us load up here in a few minutes, you’re only going to slow us down if you don’t know what we’re doing, so it’s time somebody explained, but I don’t want too many people picking up on it.  Get it?” Alma muttered through gritted teeth, shooting a furtive glance at the packed balconies.  Hesitantly, Taylor leaned in close and allowed the woman to press her lips to her ear and utter a more complete version of the plan.

            Every passing word caused Taylor’s blood to drop a few degrees colder until her whole body was trembling.  Alma’s lips had curled into an uncontrollable smile as she finished divulging the true intent of Halle and Gail’s plan.

            “No,” Taylor grunted hollowly, yanking herself away from Alma and backing away on her hands and knees, the strength momentarily sapped from her limbs due to shock.  “I’m… I’m not…”

            “Yes you are.”

            “I couldn’t.”

            “Might want to change your tune real fast. then.  Your employers aren’t going to be big fans of dissention,” the hardened Alpha suggested with a sarcastic shrug.

            “You heard me.  I’m not doing that,” Taylor scowled throatily, digging her fingers anxiously into her dark locks, and earned a pitiful shake of the head from Alma.  “I’m not going to be part of… this.  I’m not going to help you k-”

            “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” Alma lullabied under her breath, then raised her voice loud enough for Halle to make out: “Ladies?  I think we’ve got a little problem here.”

            Ben was surprised that he hadn’t vomited yet.  The walloping after-effect of the adrenaline rush from his close encounter with Sonja had kicked in once he’d crawled about ten feet into the vents to avoid the multi-limbed spy droid, and nearly every major function of his body was in painful overdrive.  Sweat poured down his forehead, his vision was swimming, his breathing heaved as needles on every inhalation, and his heart was all but ricocheting off his other organs like a grenade ready to burst any second.

            The rolling nausea as he steadily began to grapple with the apparent gravity of the situation was just a natural byproduct.  Unthinkable and nightmarish a prospect though it was, seeing those two marching out of the auditorium and being able to rush right at him with such clearly murderous or worse intent had to be an indication that everyone inside the room was in just as much danger, too.  What had become of the guards that were supposed to be posted inside?

            It was hard to estimate how long he’d been mindlessly crawling forward through the silvery darkness of the metal tunnel, but Ben had a feeling this rush of terror had carried him much further than he normally could’ve made it, because the exhaustion was beginning strike to as well.  His body was punishing him for not even pausing to let his bruised elbows rest, but he also had a feeling that if he did stop, everything would finally catch up to him and he’d become violently ill, so he refused.

            Mercifully, the tunnel had begun to widen as the path forked into what Ben assumed to be a vent used for Alpha access, and suddenly he could stand up again, allowing him to move with considerably increased swiftness.  The journey eventually took him past a grate with wide enough slats that he could’ve easily fit through, though as he stealthily approached the openings, he realized the drop was more than ten feet: an absolute death sentence for someone of his height.  Realizing that getting out just yet wasn’t an option, Ben fought yet again to hold back the sickness and returned to his original path.

            “I knew Halle made a mistake when she picked you up,” a voice hissed from below, positively pulsing with wrathful acid.  With the acoustics, the sound boomed like something belonging to an Omega, though he knew it had to be an Alpha.  Ben paralyzed himself defensively at the mere introduction of such a hateful tone, then realized the noise had come from down below through the bars of the grate rather than inside his hiding place.

            “This isn’t going to work,” came the answer.  The source of these words sounded considerably more human, and as he cowered in the dimly lit tunnel, Ben chewed the words over and realized he recognized the voice, though he couldn’t say from where.  “You won’t be able to pull it off.”

            “I always tell her we have to be sure about these things, but does she listen?  Of course not,” the first voice grumbled.  Ben heard a crack, like the sound of a hand slapping across skin.  “Get moving.”

            This response was followed by footsteps marching beneath the tunnel and then growing fainter.  Pressing his ear to the wall of the vent, the Beta detected the sound of a door opening and shutting fairly close by, not more than twenty feet down the way.

            Whoever they were, Ben realized, they were probably not the pizza delivery people.

            Hardly thinking about it, the Beta began sprinting further down the tunnel.  Ben tried not to laugh at himself as he scrambled, following the direction he’d heard the door close.  Even if he did manage to hear something useful from the pair, it wasn’t like there was a single damned thing he could do with such information, was there?

            Unless he could get outside again.  Surely someone was aware of what was happening here, or would be soon?  If not, he would have to get help on his own.  No matter his doubts in himself, he had to try.  There were over one hundred thousand people in that auditorium, probably terrified out of their minds, especially if that redhead had more killer spider-robots up her sleeves.

            He turned a corner into what he strongly suspected to be a vent hanging over the room the two Alphas had entered.  As he took a step, the air in Ben’s throat was sucked away, and he realized too late the decline in the vent’s pathway dropped out from under him.  Tumbling down the cold slide, he slammed into an undulating metal plate at the end that projected a rumbling echo through the walls.

The tiny thump inside the wall of the janitor’s closet had barely registered before Gail had one of her kerambits out and her arm drawn back.  A breath later the blade was whizzing through the air, spinning end over end, before embedding itself in the wall in a small spray of plaster a matter of inches away from where the sound had originated.  Squinting, the Alpha approached the wall, holding a thumb against it, before yanking her weapon out of the slice she’d formed in the surface.

            “You’re all crazy,” Taylor spat, staring wild-eyed at the tossed cutlery.  “You and all your friends are-”

            Gail’s hand smacked back across her charge’s face, silencing her.  She then thrust her fist against the Alpha’s throat, the blade peeking from between her gloved fingers as she held it to the pale skin.  “We’re going to have to adjust this attitude of yours.  I think a few hours in the time-out chair will do you some good.  Now put your hands up before I make a mess on your shirt.”

            Grimacing, but resolving to keep her commentary to herself now in the presence of the woman’s particular brand of madness, Taylor placed her wrists over one another and held them up.  Gail tugged a length of tightly coiled rope from her belt and wound it around the traitorous girl’s forearms and two metal shelves behind her, securing it such that Taylor was forced to stretch both limbs up toward the ceiling.  Bending down, she did the same to the subdued Alpha’s ankles, attaching them to the leg of a table littered with sawdust and screwdriver heads.

            “Remember I’m not slicing you yet, but only because we might still need you.  You helped get our operation into this shithole with that uniform, but it doesn’t give you a free pass.  Understood?” Gail growled as she rose back to her feet, teasing the tip of her blade against the underside of Taylor’s chin.

            “Completely,” Taylor whispered coolly.

            “Fantastic.  I’ll catch up with you in a while and maybe we’ll see if you’ve started thinking clearly again,” Gail said, grinning a toad-like smile.  She sheathed the blade back on her person and turned back toward the door, slamming it behind her on the way out.

            Taylor began squirming as soon as she was alone, looking to loosen the ties, but became aware almost immediately of just how skilled the kookier of the Paradise sisters was at tying knots.  All were rigidly cinched, and her hands were forced upward at too awkward an angle to hope to even try picking at the rope with her nails.  She spent several minutes wriggling from every angle, even trying to pull down the shelves with enough momentum, but was clearly going nowhere of her own volition.

            Taylor stood silently for a moment, hanging from the shelves like a broken puppet and brushing her fingers along an empty shelf above.  Her fingers fished for something she could grab and use to free herself, but came up empty.

            Then, like a jungle cat detecting motion in the brush, the Alpha held her breath and closed her eyes, listening intently to the near-deafening silence of the room.  Finally, she exhaled steadily, controlling her breaths, and then made her move, launching upward from the ground and sweeping her hand quickly across the shelf, easily snatching up Ben as he crept carefully across the surface on his hands and knees.

            “I thought I heard something,” Taylor sighed with a satisfied smile, closing her fingers authoritatively around the Beta as he wrestled violently to escape his captor’s palm.  “You can relax, whoever you are.  I just want to talk.”

            Craning her neck upward and tilting her wrist forward to make the rebelling contents of her hand visible, her fist closed gently around the Beta so as not to harm her only hope of liberation, she and Ben at last made eye contact, instantly recognizing one another.

            “Great.  The little model citizen again,” Taylor huffed, remembering Ben as the student who’d started a fight in her hand as she’d lifted him up to the entrance of the Convention Center.

            The Beta, meanwhile, was forced to confront the fact that he’d not only been captured by someone who was at least in the part-time employ of Alpha terrorists, but someone who’d been in disguise earlier and probably had a less-than-positive outlook on him as a person.  He screamed, thrashing about and kicking, though Taylor’s thumb easily folded over his knees, pinning his legs down to her hand and ceasing all physical resistance.

            “Let me go!” he cried.  The fight was squeezed out of him in less than a minute of being back in the Alpha’s controlling hand, and was replaced with violent trembling, his nearly every inch quaking with the emotional agony of being forced into such proximity with a member of the race he feared more than any other on the planet.  “Please!”

            “I will.  In a minute.  First we need to get something straight,” Taylor groused, though she kept her voice low and as close to soothing as she could manage, as she sensed how little help Ben was going to be if he descended into panic mode.  “Are you listening close?”

            “W-W-What do you all w-want with us?” Ben peeped fearfully.  Already his life was beginning to flash before his eyes.  It was surely over now, after all.

            How could he have been so clumsy?  It was like some sick joke.

            He really was as pathetic as Michael made him out to be.

            “I don’t know how much of that you heard, kid, or what you know, but I’m not with them.  Not… anymore,” Taylor insisted through gritted teeth.  Her face, though youthful, belied a disintegrated spirit through those weary lake-blue eyes.  Whether or not she was playing him, she, at least, was not lying to herself.  “You’ve got to believe that.”

            “Why?” he demanded.

            “In case you haven’t noticed, that wasn’t my best buddy who just left.  And I’m kind of stuck here until you give me a hand.”

            “Me give you a…” he gasped, trying desperately to compose himself.  Maybe there was still a way out of this, if he could only sound convincing about a false desire to free this monster.  “I… I…”

            “Before you start trying to think of clever ways to get the hell away from me just because you crawl too loud…” Taylor began with a groan, reading him instantly.  She rolled her neck from side to side, as it was beginning to get sore from having to look upward at him far above her head and pinned in a cocoon of her fingers.  “…I need you to listen to what I’m about to say.”

            “Okay, okay,” Ben mumbled.

            “Neither of us is going to be able to get out of here alone.  I need you to cut me loose, and without me, you won’t be able to get out of this building in one piece.”

            “W-W…”

            “Just so you know, those vents you were hiding in before won’t take you all the way out of the building.  If you actually want out, you’ll need to go out into the hallway.  Trust me, I’ve had to twist off some pipes for maintenance before,” Taylor continued, eager to move this process along.  “And considering how long you actually lasted out in the open alone here, you’ll want some help back out there.”

            Ben bit his lip and, in spite of a stampeding heart rate, managed to get his quavering body somewhat in check and actually process Taylor’s logic for the first time since her hand had closed around him.

            He was terrified out of his mind, and still semi-convinced that at any second the Alpha’s enormous fingers would compress a little further and mash him to a pulp against her palm, but there were parts of her rationale that were impossible to ignore.

            Clearly, he wasn’t having much luck alone, and this place was essentially a city-sized fortress for someone of his size.  The girl might very well have been lying about the vents not leading outside, but was that a risk he was willing, or even physically capable, of taking?

            “Listen,” Taylor piped in again, her voice now at a whisper.  Her fingers even seemed to loosen a little around Ben’s body, which helped relax him infinitesimally, though she still kept him clamped in her warm grip.  “What’s your name, kid?”

            There was silence.  Ben opened his mouth but couldn’t manage it.

            “C’mon.  Spit it out,” she ordered as casually as she could.  “Mine’s Taylor.”

            “Ben,” he uttered with some effort.

            “Good to meet you,” she said.  “Now, here’s the deal: I know you’re probably having a really shitty day today.  I am too.  You also probably heard some stuff earlier that’s making it real tough to want to trust me.  That’s true, isn’t it?”

            The trembling picked up again, and Ben nodded his head.  He couldn’t summon the courage to answer verbally, but Taylor could feel the change in composure against her skin as he quivered like an injured lemming.

            “Sure it is,” she responded for him.  “But even if you don’t feel like trusting me, at least trust the fact that without me, you’re dead meat out there.  Yeah?”

            Ben heaved a painful sigh in coughing bursts.  He didn’t need to speak up again this time, either, but as his body slumped in Taylor’s palm, both understood he was finally coming around to her side in the most tangential way possible.

            “I’m going to open my hand and let you out,” she murmured.  “I need you to find something up there on the shelves and cut me loose.  You do that, and I’ll help you get out of here.  Cool?”

            “Y-Yes,” Ben forced himself to say, stiffening his spine and crossing his arms over his chest.  Incredibly, he’d worked himself into a temporary state of emotional rigor mortis to avoid worming about any further against the firm overlay of Taylor’s fingers.

            “All right.  Here you go,” the Alpha said.  She tilted her wrist closer to the shelf, ensuring there was plenty of clearance, and then true to her word opened her fingers again to release her gamble.

            Ben was out of the girl’s palm like a shot, his flesh crawling at having been so tightly confined, despite the fact that she’d been holding him fairly gently in her lightly blistered but nonetheless soft skin.  Once he was sure he was out of range of both her hands and her eyes, he began backing toward the wall again, shooting furtive glances to the slotted hole in the wall he’d exited the vent through.

            This was it.  He’d managed to escape again after stumbling through yet another near-fatal encounter with an Alpha whose intentions he could trust about as far as he could throw her.  Which, if he was honest with himself in the presence of this building-sized young woman, was not particularly far.  All he had to do was run back into that hole in the wall, and he was free again.

            “Okay,” Taylor breathed.  “Here’s the thing, and I’m guessing you’re already thinking it yourself.  It’s not just us in here.  A lot of people… people like you… are stuck in that room and need help.  A few of them are probably already dead.”

            Ben’s limbs hung like cadaverous meat off his body.

            “And a lot more of them are going to die if we don’t try to do something about it now,” Taylor said, almost pleading.

            Where was she getting this “we” word?  What kind of miracle-spouting sorcerer did she imagine him to be?

            “You were working with them,” Ben grunted as his knees wobbled harder.  “You… you let them in.”

            “Are you listening to anything I’m saying?” the Alpha called out excruciatingly.  He heard a deep sigh of resignation that filled the room as his accusation made its mark.  “I get it if you’re scared the fuck out of your mind right now.  I am too.  And I’m sorry this is happening.  For… whatever part of it is my fault.  Hell, maybe all of it is.  But we don’t have time to talk about it now.”

            Ben observed the girl’s fingers, which had come to rest on the edge of the shelf, clearly making no more attempts to scoop him up, then turned again to the opening in the wall.

            The escape was right there.  Just waiting for him.

            Safe.

            “Goddamn it,” Ben mouthed to himself as he slid a small scrapping razor out of its plastic sleeve, wedged among some cleaning products, and steadily approached Taylor’s hands, which were now brandished as high as they could reach.  Holding his breath in his chest, the Beta plunged the thin blade into his unfortunate compatriot’s bindings.

            “I bet you’re wishing you’d just gone to school today, huh?” Halle asked as she sauntered back across the stage of the auditorium.

            Snapping to attention, Mona realized the terrorist was addressing her, and turned in her direction, though was clearly too fearful to make eye contact as she cowered in the chair Roger had pulled into the middle of the room for her.

            “Yes, I’m talking to you, dear,” Halle confirmed with a broad smile as she came to a stop and leaned against a wall.  She pointed at the teenage Alpha, the sole chaperone who’d been allowed to remain behind with the Beta hostages, and earned a flinch from Mona, which only gave her tormentor cause to snicker.

            Biting her lip, which was already fluttering with her effort not to weep, Mona shook her head from side to side.

            “Huh.  Are you sure about that?” Halle laughed.  “You could’ve been nice and safe with all your friends, hearing about all this on the news instead of having to sit through it yourself and wondering if somebody’s going to stick something in your neck.”

            Mona shivered, but held resolute, shaking her head again.  Her eyes had shifted back to the area behind the stage, where Roger, Alma, and Sonja were busily marching back and forth, carrying boxes from the hose-mounted shelves into the auditorium.

            “You know, I like you.  You’re ballsy,” Halle said honestly, shrugging to herself and digging her fingers delicately into her pocket.  “We could use someone like you on our team.  It’s too bad you’re in love with a bunch of rodents.  But hey, if you ever change your mind about that, send us a resume.  We’ll keep you on file.  Mona… Collins, right?”

            This recognition seemed to unnerve the young Alpha most of all, and at last she managed to tear her eyes away from the horrible sight before her.  Finally, she managed to form papery words.

            “How… how did y-”

            “What kind of operation would we be if we didn’t take notes?” Halle smirked, nodding in the direction of a laptop resting on a chair in the corner.  “My girl Alice got us a complete guest list, just so we can make sure everybody gets to come to the party later.”

            Mona’s mouth hung open, but no sound escaped.  She didn’t have much energy to engage in conversation, and the gut-contorting fear of this imposing statue of an Alpha wasn’t helping.  There’d be a lot of commotion earlier from the thousands of Beta schoolkids trapped in the balconies above as the group set to their purpose with the boxes, but after some encouraging roars from Gail, almost all had been silenced again as the smaller race rose from their seats and did as they were ordered to do by their diabolical hosts.

            Even now, in the relative quiet peppered only with the shuffling footfalls of the Alphas, Mona could hear the sobbing of horrified Betas above, who wanted help so desperately that she couldn’t provide for them now without risking their lives.  It felt a bit like having her heart quartered with a butter knife.

            “Since you’re being so good now, though, and not making a big stink while my friends do their work, I decided I might as well let you get the festivities started a little early with a party favor,” Halle said.  Drawing her hand out of her pocket at last, she opened her leather-clad fingers to reveal an absolutely petrified Beta girl.

            Mona’s face went from merely pale to a decrepit ashen, her eyes glazing over.  She looked a few dead brains cells away from fainting.  White knuckles were the only things keeping her from catapulting herself instinctively at the woman who was now holding Mona’s three-inch-tall little sister.

            “Ah, I can tell you’re just itching to party already,” Halle said, savoring the pained recognition in the girl’s face.  Her silvery eyes shifted down to the helpless captive teen in her gloved palm, still lightly stained with crimson from her earlier acts to dissuade Aegis intrusions.  “Aren’t you?”

            “W-What…” Mona croaked.  “What do you w-want…”

            “I want our world back,” Halle interrupted curtly, the false smile she’d been wearing up to now fading just as quickly.  Her hand tilted from side to side, forcing the Beta girl to lean along with her to avoid falling from the precarious perch.

            Mona twitched, still fighting the desperate urge to lunge forward and help her hostage sibling, despite knowing such an act would almost certainly be a death sentence for the girl.

            “They’re… they’re just kids,” Mona said pleadingly, unable to take her watering eyes off her sister.  The Beta had silently noticed her sibling and reached an arm out hopefully from Halle’s treacherous palm.  “Please don’t punish them for what-”

            “For what Aegis did?  See, that’s not bad logic, except for the fact that I’d probably be one very flat lady if I just took this up with an Omega.  We all do what we have to,” Halle explained, obviously still getting immense entertainment from the horrified expression on Mona’s face as her sister was rocked hazardously back and forth in the ponytail-sporting Alpha’s glove.  “For example, little… Audrey, isn’t it?  She’s just going with the flow right now so she doesn’t have to take a tumble.”

            “Please,” Mona rasped, her volume rising higher than it had yet.  She clasped her hands together, already begging.  “Please don’t d-do anything to-”

            “Stay cool, hon.  We’re just having a nice little chat,” Halle said soothingly as she pressed a finger to her lips.  Without removing her eyes from Mona, the Alpha gently deposited Audrey back into her pocket and patted it, then called out to her cohorts up near the stage: “How are we looking, folks?”

            “Almost finished loading up,” Roger answered gruffly, balancing two of the hefty metal cases on each arm as he marched back into the storage area to re-insert the units into their shelves.  He was clearly beginning to fatigue from the length of time they’d been at work.

            “What about those monitors, Alma?” Halle followed up.

            “Ready to go when you two are,” the hardened criminal replied with a slimy smile as she finished shoving another of the boxes onto its tower and fidgeted with the attached hose that wound like a snake down the leg of the rack and onto the adjoining one.

            “Wonderful.  Alice, dear, go ahead and open the channels wide open,” Halle said quietly, pressing a finger to her earpiece and nodding at her employee’s response.  “Yep.  It’s time.  Let’s give them a little show.”

            “They’re bringing in the last few blocks from residential into the facility now,” Melody reported to her boss across the humming domain of the command center Aegis had established down the hill from the Convention Center.  She lowered her phone away from her ear and unlocked the tablet again, drawing up a twelve-tier schematic in prediction of the inevitable follow-up question.

            “What about the mixed center?” Abby pressed, approaching quickly from her former post.  It was barely noon and the Omega’s tired eyes were strained with an endless parade of dead ends Aegis had been meeting all morning in their aggressive efforts to keep the disaster from elevating any further.

            “Shield unit is on patrol.  Snipers on major rooftop chokepoints and Alexis is just outside the outlet mall with her eye on everyone going in or out,” the lofty Omega said as she examined the cobalt-tinted layout of the shopping center.  “The team down there says perimeters are locked up tight.”

            “All right,” Abby said, calmed if only in the smallest measure to know the threat could no longer metastasize further across the city.  “Melody…”

            “Howard and Corey are at Aegis.  I just heard from them,” she replied with a similar look of abatement glazing over her glassed irises, anticipating this question too.  “They came in on one of the last shuttles.”

            “Thank you,” Abby breathed.

            “Chief, I’ve got something!” Dawn shouted from her station nearer to the building.  Her fingers were ticking madly away on the keys of her laptop as she peeked down into her tactical vest, where her Alpha support team were all seated in pockets with computers of their own.  “I’m not just seeing things here, am I?” she asked quietly of them.

            “Nope, I see it too,” one of the Alphas called up to her Omega handler.  The others quickly concurred from their respective pockets.

            “What is it?” Abby demanded, suddenly standing over her petite tech guru’s shoulder.

            “I… I think we can patch into a camera inside the building,” Dawn said after a pause, less assured of her ability and more in the threat of accidentally creating excitement over what might turn out to be yet another roadblock for justice.

            “Which one?”

            “It… looks like it’s in… the primary auditorium,” Dawn responded with a frown, knowing how unlikely such a coincidence was that they’d magically gain access to the single most helpful lens in the entire fortress.  “I…”

            “She’s right,” one of the Alphas in her pockets shouted out helpfully.  The others chattered in agreement.

            Abby nodded, her lips pursed tightly.  “And it’s only that one?”

            “Yes,” Dawn confirmed.  “I don’t understand, though, it’s… it’s right there, like-”

            “They must be ready to talk,” the Omega said.  “What about phones?”

            “There’s… there’s one.  Just one I can see.  The rest are still blocked off,” Dawn sighed, realizing her boss was correct.  She drew a phone from a lower pocket and switched it on.  “If you want, I could-”

            “Go ahead,” Abby ordered softly.  “They’ve dragged this out for long enough.”

            Gulping, Dawn tapped in the digits and handed the device to Abby, who pressed it to her ear, hovering as a mountain over the laptop.

            Before even a decibel had emitted from the speaker, the commanding Omega already understood what they were up against, the sensation of it coiling through her stomach and around her heart.  This was only the first day of Unity Week.  Had this unknowable crisis, whatever it was, struck only twenty-four hours later, Howard and Corey would’ve both been in the Convention Center, out of hers or anyone’s reach, instead of in the mixed class shopping center for one of Corey’s regular check-ups where they were now.  The very concept of being unable to tear through walls and earth itself to defend those closest to her was unfathomable to Abby, and yet here they all were, watching just such a nightmare was about to unfold for thousands of families.  Knowing full-well she stood now for every man, woman, and child waiting out in the city for news of their loved ones, Abby exhaled into the receiver as the dial tone cut off.

            By now, all members of Aegis present had heard the commotion and moved inward to watch Dawn’s computer screen as it pulled up the promised video feed of the auditorium, breaths held and prayers mouthed.  Rebecca Reynolds and Evelyn Cade towered as silent sentinels beside Abby.  Melody, Kyle, and Claire, each holding several Alphas in their hands to help them see the screen, huddled behind the crowd of anxious public servants.

            “Helloooo?” sang Halle’s voice from the phone.  She stood a few feet from the camera in the cavernous auditorium, smiling and waving to the viewers.  “Sorry I couldn’t come to the phone earlier.  We’ve just been so busy this morning, I couldn’t make the time.”

            “What do you want?” Abby intoned sternly.

            “Oh, what kind of manners are those?  Aren’t you even going to ask my name?” Halle giggled.

            “Your employee already told me.  You’re Halle Paradise,” the Omega simpered.

            “Oh no!  Not my employee!  I suppose my whole terrible plan is unraveled,” Halle mocked, chuckling with a fervor that made most of her audience’s skin crawl.  “By the way, I wanted to congratulate whoever it was that swiped the idiot.  Is she around somewhere?”

            The underling Jenna grabbed just knew the peripherals of the operation, as he’d been a hired gun rather than a key limb, so Abby didn’t have much need for him yet.  Still, he’d at least been useful in detailing the identities of the team working inside; so, she’d kept him close by as some begrudging emergency medical staff patched him up well enough for him to stay conscious and available for further questioning.  It was a small gain, if nothing else.

            Jenna was a different story.  Abby sighed, steeling herself to recall the look on the girl’s face when Tricia had emerged from the Center and reported the Beta casualties incurred with hardly a twitch from their silver-eyed murderer.  The tough-as-nails young Enforcer wasn’t the type to get squeamish, making the hollow horror in her eyes all the more rattling as she staggered back and took a rumbling seat at the bottom of the hill outside the Center.  A thousand yard stare glazed into her eyes like an open wound.  Claire had huddled herself around her friend, rocking her back and forth even as tears trickled from her own eyes.  Jenna had simply remained stoic, gazing down into the grass as though she could see miles into the crust of the planet.

            “You can tell her in person later,” Abby continued efficiently.  “And I’m not going to sit here and pretend to be impressed about what’s in your criminal record.  I don’t have time to play games, and neither do you.”

            “Right down to business, huh?  All right, we can go with that,” the Alpha said.  “What I want is to speak to Kayla.  Everett, in case that wasn’t clear.”

            Abby’s hand tightened in agonized frustration around the phone, her limbs shaking a little from rage at the cruel irony of the universe.  Rebecca laid a comforting palm on her friend’s shoulder, feeling a similarly instantaneous reaction.

            These people had no idea of what the most powerful being on earth was truly capable of.  If only Kayla were here instead of ascending through the cosmos in pursuit of humanity’s future, this nightmare would’ve been over mere minutes after it had begun thanks to the effort of one veritable goddess of an Omega.  They’d have thrown these monsters in cells hours ago while counselors soothed the hostages, all of whom would’ve gotten out with their lives.

            But that wasn’t the reality they’d been handed.

            Kayla wasn’t here - couldn’t be here - and because of some cruelly serendipitous timing, these Alphas had the upper hand.  Betas, innocents in all this, had been murdered.  And even more might very well be lost before this was over.

            It crucified Abby’s heart like nothing else, but with a brave exhalation, she kept her composure.

            This was not the time to falter.  Not when she was the one responsible for these people in their leader’s absence.

            Claire lightly grasped her mother’s arm, clearly sensing the aid her parent needed but unsure of how to provide it in this particularly grim moment.

            “She’s can’t come.  You’ll just have to deal with me,” Abby said, willing herself to maintain a steady tone, knowing anything else would be a sign of weakness.

            “Can’t come.  Well, isn’t that peachy.  Has anyone ever told you what a crummy negotiator you are?” Halle asked.

            “I’m the one who’s going to arrange for terms.  If you want something, you’re going to get it through me.  Understand?” the Omega emphasized.

            “Hey, as long as everybody’s happy!” Halle laughed with a shrug.  “Let’s talk some turkey, then.  I suppose you’re wondering why I finally allowed your joke of a tech team to take a peek in here.”  She stepped back, revealing more of the stage behind her.  The view wasn’t very clear with the lighting, but Abby and her towering companions were able to make out the rows of boxed racks behind it.

            “You seem like a lady in a hurry, so I won’t bother wasting more time,” Halle said, her voice shifting into business mode.  “Behind me in all these boxes is every single scrap of Beta you were so kind as to gather for us in this convenient little space.”

            Cupping a hand to her ear, the ringleader of Paradise leaned toward the back of the stage, silencing herself as well as everyone else in the room.  In the quiet, a low but no less disturbing chatter of tiny voices rang out from among the macabre aisles: a cacophony of wailing, screams, and barely coherent cries for help.

            For a moment, every member of Aegis ceased the regular flow of oxygen.

            “Don’t get worked up yet.  They’re still all alive, at least for the time being,” Halle continued as Alma crept into view, her head bowed and a rabid glint in her eye.  “But thanks to a very impressive set of fancy tubes and wires, courtesy of my good friend Alma Warren here....”

            Rebecca, standing like an iron soldier, let her arms fall to her sides.  Her fingers clenched in, knuckles cracking loudly enough for all to hear as the Senior Enforcer watched her former charge step into the light.  Evelyn, meanwhile, upon laying eyes on the birth mother of her damaged surrogate daughter, had to set the Alphas she was holding down on a table and press a fist against her lips to keep from crying out.

            “…that won’t be the case forever, unless you do everything we say, exactly as we say it, exactly when we want it,” Halle said as she marched closer to the boxes.  “See, every one of these nifty little devices is hooked up to a particularly large quantity of unpleasant gases an associate of mine was able to acquire.  With the dose we’ve cooked up, if we should feel inclined to open up the floodgates in here, each and every Beta would go belly-up in, I don’t know… twenty seconds?”

            “More like ten,” Sonja’s voice bellowed proudly from somewhere off-camera.

            “Ah, thank you,” Halle smiled graciously.  “Ten.  In case there aren’t a lot of math whizzes over at Aegis, that’s pretty quick.”

            There were multiple stifled cries from Omegas and Alphas alike as the magnitude of the group’s ploy began to sink in.  Several burst into quietly choking tears and held one another closer for support, especially those with children currently trapped inside the boxes.  A few, going weak at the knees, shuddered to their haunches.

            Claire and Kyle, both chewing their lips in effort to stay calm, exchanged helpless glances.  Meanwhile, all Alphas in Melody’s expansive palm felt the tender ground quake beneath them as rage boiled to a nuclear fever pitch inside the ordinarily peaceable Omega.

            Only Abby remained a wall of unmoving and graceful stone.

            “Now, I’m sure at least a few of you are already getting some real funny ideas about how to get around our little set-up here, so let’s jump ahead here and save us all the time,” Halle continued as she approached the camera again, having paused for long enough to let her previous threats simmer appropriately in the hearts of everyone listening and watching.

            She didn’t bother to hide a gleeful smile as she patted a small disc affixed to her lapel that blinked like a metronome with a small crimson beacon.  Gail stalked into the view of the camera, wearing an identical device on her tactical suit as well.  “And here’s why.  My sister and I are both sporting a couple of hip new accessories that Ms. Warren’s hooked up to her art project back here.  Anything happens to us?  The same thing happens to your precious baby animals.”

            Another grave void of noise and steady breathing followed for everyone watching.  Only the heart monitors worn by the Paradise sisters, it seemed, were in motion as the lights blinked ominously.

            “Are you going to tell me what it is you want, or not?” Abby besieged at last.  Her voice was heavier now, more forceful.

            “For now, I want you to just keep on what you’ve been doing all morning, which is to say, doing a very, very poor job of impeding our work here,” Halle said snidely, then winked at the camera.  “Don’t get lonely, though.  I’ll give you another call in a little while and I’ll start to list out a few of the things I want besides all of you hundred-foot-freaks to chug a lake of sulfuric acid.  Clear?”

            Abby nodded solemnly.  “Yes.”

            “Don’t sound so glum, dear.  I imagine this whole “not being in control” thing is new for you, but don’t worry.  You start to get used to it.  Trust me, I know from experience,” Halle reassured.

            At this, the eldest Lindon released a miraculous burst of laughter that caught everyone off-guard, Paradise sisters and Aegis workers alike.  Rebecca, too, snorted in disbelieving disdain.

            “You know from experience,” Abby repeated back, deadpanning.  “You.”

            “Struck a nerve, hmm?” Halle chuckled.  “I’ve been around long enough.  I’ve seen it all.”

            “No.  No you haven’t,” the Omega responded coldly.

            “You sound like you know something I don’t,” her Alpha opponent teased.

            “The truth is that you, your sister, your colleagues... you're children. You remind me of the ones that found my home when I was young and still a Beta. Those who in the same streak of inhumanity thought it would be fun to fill our homes with pesticide, and laughed as it killed over a hundred people who couldn’t fight back,” Abby said steadily, each word fortified with strength as she felt the hands of every Omega around her and even some Alphas’ tiny appendages placed on her shoulders, arms, and back.  She exhaled, then rolled onward: “And that’s just endemic of what you are.  Little spoiled children still stuck in a world that's dead.  That we killed. That we bury a little further every day. You and your friends... you're nothing I haven't seen before. And one way or another, we will bury you, too.”

            The whirring of toy-sized news choppers in the distance buzzed in Abby’s ear as she retraced her finger over a schematic of the Center for at least the twentieth time.  She paid them no mind, swiping at her screen to bring up an alternate view.  Frowning, then, she silently cursed at the impossibility of yet another insane theory she’d been working on the last several minutes to bring an end to this nightmare.

            “Abby…” Rebecca Reynolds uttered soothingly, eyeing the approaching cluster of copters and refusing to let her anxiety show in spite of it.  “They’re…”

            “I know.”

            “What do you want me to tell them?”

            “To let us do our jobs,” Abby said, still engrossed in her tablet.

            “It’s RED,” the Omega added.  “I don’t think that’ll be an option.”

            “Director Lindon!” a tiny Alpha voice announced from one of the whizzing aircraft as it zoomed into range, as though to drive Rebecca’s point home.  The sound was amplified through a device affixed to the side intended to match an Omega’s volume.  “The Convention Center has been sealed off for hours now, with no contact inside.  What’s happening here?  The people have a right to know!”

            Rebecca looked to Abby, who still hadn’t lifted her head up from the screen.  “Abby,” she repeated from the corner of her mouth.  “We need to-”

            “I’m sorry.  I don’t have any commentary for you right now,” Abby said, swiveling around to face the helicopter as it leveled itself off just above her head.  “We are working hard to correct any difficulties and will get back to you once we’ve finished.”  Instantly she switched into a rigid diplomatic mode, even though it pained her deeply to be pulled from her real duty.  Every second spent speaking to these little sensationalist parasites, particularly those of RED, was time she couldn’t get back.  Time that very well might mean the difference between the loss of thousands upon thousands of Beta children.  These were all the words Abby intended to spare for now as she turned purposefully back to her tablet.

            “I’m not sure that worked,” Rebecca whispered into her friend’s ear.  The whirring of the chopper blades persistently remained present, increasing Abby’s frustration with them by the second.       

            RED, never supporters of Aegis’s societal restructuring, had spent the better part of the previous decades doing everything in their power to repaint Abby and her fellow public guardians as totalitarian usurpers.  Constantly splashing the headlines with the “incompetencies” of the Omegas for everything from bank robberies to natural disasters, punching below the belt wasn’t only the exception but the rule for the media conglomerate. It was only just a matter of years ago that their top news anchors stopped making casual on-air jokes about watching where you step in mixed class zones to avoid shoe stains.  More than anything Abby wanted to spin back around and give those hate-mongers a real piece of her mind, letting them see her teeth.  But this was not the time to give them even an inch to work with, not with so much at stake.

            “I’m not interested in fueling that fire,” Abby answered back just as quietly after a stinging pause, swiping away another display on her screen with a little more ferocity.  “Ignore them and they’ll go away.  Like bees.”

            “Errr…” Rebecca mumbled, looking nervously over Abby’s shoulder as the copter edged in near enough that its blade were practically getting tangled in the Omega’s hair as they peered down at the contents of her tablet.

            “The questions of the people won’t be ignored, Mrs. Lindon,” the voice from the metal megaphone sounded again as it buzzed closer and closer.  “Why look through the building’s blueprints?  Is it locked up?  Are the people inside being held hos-”

            The word couldn’t quite escape the Alpha’s chopper, as the entire side of the vehicle had been suddenly consumed by the might Abby’s immense palm.  Fingers squeezing around the sides and preventing even the faintest glimmer of hope for escape, Abby had the copter in her fist.  Her hand had ascended swiftly enough from the tablet that for a fleeting moment Rebecca wondered if her friend was going to swat the bug-like entity down to the ground far below or simply crush it in her grasp.

            “As I said before…” Abby breathed with a strange calm as she lowered the chopper down so that her face filled the entire front window.  “…we’re not taking questions at this time.”

            She could feel the pilot struggling in vain to regain control of the machine.  To the Omega, it was like holding a dragonfly trying to make its escape.  It looked like the reporter inside was screaming something at her, though it wasn’t audible through the glass.  Exhaling heavily, her breath fogged the window, but she quickly wiped it away with her thumb.

            “So once again,” Abby said pointedly, trying not to let her lips curl into too much of a snarl.  Several clumps of metal were shaved off the shell of the copter by the Omega’s steadily clenching fingernails, eliciting another screech from the reporter inside.  “We’ll get back to you soon.”

            Abby reared her arm back just behind her head and then let it swing.  A flick of her wrist and the parting of her fingers sent the copter spinning off through the air.  By the time it had corrected its flight pattern, it was more than a block away from the Omega again, and its passengers didn’t appear too interested in coming back for another curveball practice.

            “That may not go over so well,” Rebecca said into her friend’s ear, trying not to smile too visibly so the news crews couldn’t interpret her reaction correctly.  “I don’t think they’re going to stay away for long.”

            “Go and talk to them for me, please,” Abby whispered, returning to her work as though nothing had happened.  “Because if I have to do it, I’ll probably just end up with a bill for a new helicopter.”

            “Okay, so what’s your plan?” Ben asked sheepishly as he perched on Taylor’s shoulder, his arm wound several times around a strand of her dark hair for added support.

            “I don’t remember saying I had one of those,” she answered.  Putting one hand in front of the other to crawl through the near-pitch black void of the Center’s inner walls, the young woman was careful not to slam her knees against the metallic paneling of the Alpha access vent which could easily alert any keen Alpha ears of their presence.  She’d been moving for the better part of the past hour, trying to put as much distance between the unlikely pair and the supply closet Gail had stuck her in.

            “Oh,” he said after another moment of silence.

            “I just said we have to do something.  It seemed like the brainstorming could wait until we were both out of that room and not where somebody could, you know, cut our throats open,” Taylor retorted.  “And try to keep the talking to a minimum until we’re out of this shaft, okay?  You may be small but your voice isn’t, not in this thing.”

            “Sure, sure,” Ben said, coughing lightly and suppressing it with a painful gasp.  “Sorry.”

            “Not really sure why I still hear talking.”

            The remainder of the trip was made in silence until the silvery path came to an end, fittingly between the beaming slits of light through a grate that Taylor appeared confident enough to pry apart after thoroughly inspecting the area outside.  Clambering through the opening, and cupping her palm around Ben to make sure he didn’t tumble from her shoulder, she crept into what appeared to be a storage wing, mercifully empty of people and, most vitally, security cameras.  The space was laid out with racks of rolling tables and chairs probably meant for use in large gathering spaces during meals.

            Along the longest brick wall was a mural, painted with vaguely humanoid figures of varying sizes resembling a paper cutout chain and borrowing every vibrant hue of the color wheel.  All were standing in a line atop a garishly smeared representation of Earth and holding onto each other’s hands or fingers, depending on what class they represented.  Cheekily cartoonish smiles were etched on the faces of each. 

            On the opposite wall was a single handprint of an Omega in deep blue, so vast it looked to Ben like a lake at first glance.  Within the calming mass of azure were the blood-red prints of Alpha hands, numbering at least in the hundreds, and each containing a series of yellow speckles.  When Ben squinted at the pattern, however, he realized the spots were actually Beta handprints: golden glimmers among the staggering scale of the larger classes, the color of which stood out most of all.

            “So,” Taylor said, taking a seat on the floor behind a tall stack of folding tables for use as cover from the door.  “Let’s talk.”

            “Okay.”

            “If we’re going to be able to come up with something, we need to be on the same page about what we’re up against,” Taylor said.  “It won’t be fun to hear, but you’re not going to be any help to me if you’re just sitting here moping.”

            She twirled her finger through the strands of hair Ben was by now partially tangled in and lowered her hand under his feet, inviting him to step in.  After a bracing moment of discomfort and jelly legs, Ben slid into the pale palm and tried not to let his trembling become too visible as he took a seat.

            “Right,” he gulped.

            “Here’s the thing.  By now every Beta in that room is in one of the boxes they brought in behind the stage,” the Alpha said.

            “But why are-”

            “They’re going to gas them,” Taylor said bluntly.  “The boxes are hooked up to a machine.  All they have to do is throw a switch and everyone will be gone in a couple of minutes.”

            It took a moment to register as his brain fought valiantly to refuse this particularly cruel reality, but almost immediately Ben could feel his heartrate picking up at an alarming rate.

            He could’ve so easily been in there now, waiting to be executed like a common pest.  Their faces flashed before his eyes as though he was suddenly transported into the boxes with them all.  His friends, the people he’d spent years in class with learning not only about the world, but to believe Betas could have a place in it.  Dr. Randolph, standing up for his people with words and by example.  All the thousands of kids he’d never met and might still never if this situation went any further south.  Even Michael, little shit though he was, didn’t deserve to be in there.  Why wasn’t their fate his too?

            Blind luck.  That’s all it was.  And even then, if he and this Alpha set a toe out of line, there could well be a fate even worse than a shadow-shrouded chemical shower in his future.  It felt as though Ben was being punched from inside his chest as all the blood in his numbed limbs was diverted to the center.  His lungs seemed to be sinking lower in his body, making it impossible for them to re-inflate with air.

            “Hey.  Hey, kid.  Ben.  Stay with me.  There’s more,” Taylor uttered as therapeutically as she could manage.  By now her hand was vibrating from the tremors in Ben’s body.  She patted a finger against the Beta’s back, not knowing this wasn’t going to help matters.  Instantly he flinched, gasping out a petrified squeal that surprised the Alpha enough to cringe as well.

            “S-S-S… Sor… Sorry…” he panted.

            “You’re not gonna pass out if I keep going, are you?” Taylor said, frowning as she withdrew the offending finger.  “Listen, I didn’t mean to, uh…”

            “No, no it’s fine.  It’s fine.  I’m okay,” he grunted.  “Keep going.”

            Come on, he thought.  For Mom and Dad.  For Dr. Randolph.  Get it together.  Prove you’re worth your last name.

            Prove you’re worth anything.

            “They’re also hooked up to heartrate monitors.  Halle and Gail, the leaders,” Taylor said.  “If they go below twenty beats a minute, the boxes fill up with gas.  There’s maybe a two minute window for error, so even if someone took them down, there’s no way to get everyone out.  It’s a failsafe in case any of the Omegas tried to break in and take them.”

            “What… what kind of system is the remote on?” Ben said, swallowing in attempt to regain his composure.

            Taylor shrugged resignedly.  “Fucked if I know.  Most of the gear in that machine was customized by someone else working with us.  None of it is weaponized.  That’s why no one was onto them.  It’s just a universal remote, like you’d get at an electronics store.”

            “Does it use a rechargeable battery?”

            “Uh… yeah.  Yes,” Taylor said, grimacing with the effort to remember.  “Why?”

            “What about the heartrate monitors?  That can’t be on the same power source,” Ben said.  Still terrified enough to puke up some vital organs, the Beta had managed to find the familiar embrace of logic and technology in this mad experience.  In a world where scientific knowledge was frequently the only friend he had to rely on, right now it was providing him with just enough clarity to think straight.

            “It’s not.  It’s old school.  As in, a big handful of D-batteries.  Otherwise it’s not much of a failsafe,” Taylor explained.   “And that one I know for sure, because I had to help them put it on over and over again for the test runs.  So are you going to tell me why that helps, or what?”

            “What kind of weapons did they bring?  I know someone had to.  I saw some on the woman, the… the one with red hair,” Ben said, trying and failing to suppress the nightmarish visage of the black glove following him down the hallway earlier that day.

            “Sonja.  Yeah.  She’s got all the stuff that goes boom,” Taylor said uneasily.  She noticed Ben had managed to stop trembling at last in her hand, and endeavored to keep her palm and fingers as still as possible to preserve productivity.  “Seriously, why?”

            “What kind of gear does she have?  The monitors we… we can’t do anything about, but… the electronic ones.  The remotes.  Does she have a-”

            “Son of a bitch,” Taylor breathed, catching up to Ben at last.  “Yes.  Yes she does.”

            “Please.”

            Surprised at the voice, soft and fragile though it was, Halle Paradise turned away from the stage.  She couldn’t help but smirk with admiring delight at the velvet void of the auditorium, where Mona Collins had just summoned enough courage to eke out this desperate syllable.

            The group of seemingly victorious extremists, having finally finished loading up all one hundred thousand innocent lives into their execution chambers, was taking a much-needed rest.  Only Alma remained too on edge to cease tinkering with her mechanical masterpiece.  Sonja and Roger, meanwhile, snacked on dozens of the pre-made Beta lunches Gail had discovered in a mess hall.  Halle had almost forgotten their guest, except for the feeling of the girl’s Beta sibling squirming in her pocket, fighting for release.

            “Need something, hon?” Halle answered pleasantly as she cantered back toward the teenage Alpha, her hands folded neatly behind her back.  Her tactical attire caught the dim glow of the few lights still burning in the cavernous hall, making it seem as though she might melt into the shade if not for the argent gleam of her eyes.  At last she came to a stop in front of Mona and edged a boot against the ornate carpeting.  As if to twist the knife, she dipped her glove-clad hand into her pocket and curled her fingers around Audrey Collins.

            “Please,” Mona said, swallowing as her gaze fell away from the moonlike irises glaring so cheerily down at her.  She knew if she made eye contact she’d burst into tears again at the thought of her helpless sibling struggling between Halle’s fingers.  “Please.  If… if you have to take one of us, please… let my sister go.  Do… whatever you’re going to do to… me.”

            “Tsk, tsk,” Halle sighed.  She chuckled, lowering herself onto her haunches and placed a hand on Mona’s shoulder as if to comfort her, for the first time actually allowing her eye line to dip below the terrified youth’s.  “You really don’t know much about negotiating, do you, Mona?  I can already do anything I want to either of you.  You’re not exactly in a position to use yourself as a bargaining chip.”

            “I know,” the Alpha muttered meekly, already beginning to regret the outburst.  “I just-”

            “I appreciate the sentiment, though,” Halle said genuinely.  “It shows you’re thinking.”

            Trembling, Mona forced herself to look back up at those silvery crescent eyes.  “T-Thinking?  What do y-”

            “Well, of course you are.  Who in your position wouldn’t be thinking about ways to get the better of me?” Halle said.  “After all, we’re talking about giving all of your little boy and girl scouts here a cyanide bath.  There’s a lot at stake.  Surely it’s at least crossed your mind?”

            “N-No!  No.  I would n-never…” Mona choked out.  The Alpha could already feel the tears flowing down her cheeks, despite how hard she was biting down on her lip to keep from doing it. She tasted blood on her tongue.  If anything ever happened to a single one of those Betas because of something she said, Mona knew she’d never be able to forgive herself even if she lived forever.

            “All you’d have to do is wait for one of us to turn our backs,” Halle said gently.  She stroked her hand along Mona’s clammy cheek, brushing her hair back.  “Like me, for example.  You could grab one of my blades and put it right into me.”

            As she said this, Halle’s free hand tugged a knife from her belt and brandished it before Mona’s face, then lowered it down to the girl’s lap.  Mona flinched as the metal touched her fingers until she realized Halle was sliding the handle of the weapon between her fingers, giving it to her.

            “It would be a tough getaway, sure, but the door’s not far.  You stick me in the side, grab your sister, make a run for it.  You might have a chance,” Halle said.  Her voice had lowered to a whisper now and her eyelids had seemingly stopped blinking, letting their metallic glow continue imprisoning Mona unimpeded.  Once the knife was slid completely between the girl’s fingers, Halle wrapped her gloved fist back around Mona’s hand, pulling her closer until the blade’s tip was pointed at the Alpha’s own ribcage.

            “I’m wearing armor under this suit, of course, but it’s a lightweight synthetic material designed to allow for freedom of motion.  If you get me at the right angle, all there is between my skin and this knife is a few knitted strings,” Halle explained.  She continued to direct Mona’s hand, sliding the edge of the blade over the curve of her own hip until she could find an opening in the armor, and poked at it so the young Alpha could believe her.  “Right… here would be good, I think.  Do you feel it?”

            Mona’s eyes had only widened as her now-armed grip was guided right over the body of this monster who could so easily extinguish her little sister’s life.

            She had, indeed, been thinking.  Far too fast and panicked for it to be of any use, though, as she watched Halle’s hand continually fish back into her pocket to play with Audrey.  It filled Mona with such rage and horror that tactical rationality wasn’t exactly coming easily, yet here she was, with a blade in her hand and aimed at the terrorist’s body.  Her shoulder trembled with the urge to thrust her hand just a little further forward and up, burying the knife into Halle’s chest.

            “Mona, honey,” Halle murmured after a pause.  “I said do you feel it?”

            “Yes.”

            “But then you’d have to ask yourself something…” the woman cut in again.  Her opposite hand snaked back along her thigh and into her pocket, where she retrieved Audrey once again, lifting her three-inch body up to the same height as the knife, just under a foot away from the razor’s edge.  The Beta wriggled in terror at the sight of the blade, her face stained with tears, but at the sight of her equally endangered sister fought to remain steady in the leathery fist.

            Mona’s fingers instantly weakened as the knife began to slide from her hand, but Halle gave her a squeeze, ensuring the blade not only stayed in place but was pressed into her own body hard enough that another ounce of pressure would split the flesh open.  Once there, she released her grip on Mona’s hand as well as the knife, leaving it entirely free to be plunged in.

            “Are you fast enough?” Halle asked pleasantly, as though she herself truly didn’t know the answer.  “If you stab me, and put this entire blade in before I can make my move, little Audrey will be just fine.  But if you take too long… if you’re not strong enough to put it all the way in, and my other hand happens to slip…”

            Steadily Halle inched Audrey closer to the knife, until the Beta’s tiny head was not much more than a hair’s breadth from the sharpened curve.

            “…well, I wouldn’t even have to stick her.  You’d be doing the job for me,” Halle sighed, nodding in self-satisfaction.  “So what do you think?  Are you fast enough, Mona?  Maybe you’ve thought it through, but have you thought it through far enough?  And even if you think you have, does little baby sissy here trust that you have?”

            Blinking in a vain attempt to dam up her cascading tears, Mona at last found the bravery within herself to look her little sister in the face through the cage of Halle’s fingers.  The Beta’s hair was matted back, her body slicked with panicky sweat after so long in the grasp of the disturbed Alpha’s hand, but her eyes still held the same loyalty and adoration for Mona, who’d spent her whole life fiercely protecting her smaller sibling from harm.

            Mona knew Audrey would trust her without the slightest hesitation to try thrusting the blade.

            Which was precisely why she couldn’t dream of risking it.

            “I didn’t think so,” Halle said knowingly as she watched Mona’s soft features shift almost imperceptibly from determination to surrender.  The girl’s fingers loosened around the handle of the knife again, and this time its owner accepted the weapon back, sliding it into its sheath.  “But hey.  Can’t say I didn’t give you a chance.”

            “W-What are you… what are you g-going t-to-”

            “I’ll save you the effort, hon,” Halle interrupted as she shifted her weight and ascended back to full height.  “We’re going to be packing up very soon for a trip, so I’m going to do the fair thing and make sure little Audrey has some company on the way.”

            “No.  No, please, please, I’ll-” Mona croaked.

            “I thought we already went over this,” Halle snapped with more apparent irritation.  She marched haughtily away from the emotionally drained chaperone and back toward the stage, where the nearest of Alma’s miniature gas chambers was positioned.  “You have zip.  No bargaining chips.  Nothing.  Try to keep up, all right?  Or I’ll be retracting that job offer I gave you.”

            Mona could only bury her head in her hands to stifle the choking sobs that followed as Halle snapped open the door of one of the boxes and callously rolled Audrey inside.  Immediately the girl was helped to her feet by several weeping students and shepherded away from the opening.  A Beta teacher inside attempted to plead for a chance to speak about sparing the youngest prisoners, but Halle had already slammed the hatch shut, cutting off his protest along with a chorus of high-pitched cries and guttural screams.

            “God, I can’t even stand to listen to them.  Like a bunch of fucking crickets,” Gail muttered, cramming a handful of Beta-scaled sandwiches between her discolored teeth.  She spun one of her kerambits around her thumb without looking at it, earning a few nervous glances from Sonja.  “I think it’s time we sent another message.  Slice a few open, just to remind the freaks out there who’s in charge.”

            Gail let the blade fall comfortably back into her palm, pointing it hungrily at the rows of Beta-filled boxes.  The others present considered this proposition, hesitantly nodding but still returning their attention to their leader for permission to agree.  Roger, clearly game, even pulled a machete up from a sheath along his calf and slaked its tip along the edge of his boot.

            “That won’t be necessary,” Halle said curtly.  “I saw the look in that bitch’s eye when I made a fresh batch of Beta jam.  No one is going to try and break in here.”

            “So maybe that’s true, but what about later?  When we have to move them all upstairs to the roof?  You really think they’ll let us be without some extra encouragement?” Gail challenged.  She drew the blade back closer to her body and tapped its curled edge thoughtfully against her top row of teeth.  “I say we crack open a box and butterfly them all right in front of a camera.”

            “No.  No, I don’t think we’re going to do that,” Halle said coolly.  “We all know what the plan is.  And the only reason we’ve gotten this far is by sticking to it.  No playing games.”

            “I’m not talking about playing games, sis,” Gail said.  She leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs, clearly not the least bit intimidated by her sibling’s veto.  “I’m talking about just getting started with what we all know we came here to do in the first place.”

            “I think you’re forgetting what we came here to do, then,” Halle retorted.  “Because it sure as hell wasn’t to let you make a mess of the most valuable asset we’ve ever had over Aegis.”

            “Then maybe it’s time we rethought your plan,” Gail said.  Refusing to flinch, the woman pressed her tongue against the kerambit, clouding its cold surface.  “Maybe we should just throw the big switch now on Alma’s fun-box and watch the fireworks.”

            Halle only blinked.  Her monolithic expression remained static.  For the others, though, it was a bracing moment as they all recognized their leader all but going nuclear.  The collective intake of breath was palpable.

            “Gail, love?” Halle said, smiling broadly enough that even her mercenary employees were chilled to the marrow.

            “Halle, dearest?” Gail responded.

            “Would you mind stepping over here with me for just a minute?”  Halle extended an arm and wrapped it around her animalistic sister’s shoulders, forcing her to stand up.

            “Of course not,” the woman snorted as the namesake duo of Paradise meandered between the rows of theatre chairs, away from the stage and past a now-despondent Mona until they were in the deepest corner of the lavish auditorium.

            Once under cover of darkness and beyond earshot of their cohorts, Halle slapped her sister across the cheek.

            “What the hell do you think you’re-” Gail growled, grabbing her twin’s wrist to retaliate, but Halle had already thrust her knee into her sister’s stomach, interrupting the protest.

            “We need to get something clear right now,” Halle said calmly as Gail clutched an arm over her abdomen, huffing quietly to regain lost air without looking too pathetic.  “I’ve spent the last three years planning out every detail of today.  To give us the tools we need to rebuild our world.  Without all the little fucks in those boxes alive, we’ve got nothing, and the Omegas will hunt us to the edge of the Earth.  We’re not going to throw all of that away just because you want to play butcher.”

            “What’s the matter, sis?” Gail snickered.  “You’ve gone soft.  Don’t you remember that summer in the backwoods when we found that Beta nest?  Mom had to tell you to wash their blood out of your clothes, not me.”

            “You’re a good soldier for the cause, Gail, but you never were able to look at the big picture,” Halle said.  “That’s why I’m in charge here, and you’re carrying the boxes.  Understand?  You’re not going to undermine me again.  Especially not in front of the others.”

            “I could be crazy-”

            “Is that even a question?”

            “-but I seem to remember my connections being the only reason we have others even working with us,” Gail hissed, ruffling her matted locks.  She pointed an accusing index finger at her sister and prodded her in the chest.  Then, taking a step forward, she put herself almost nose-to-nose with Halle, until each woman could feel the carnivorous warm breath of the other on their cheeks.  “And I’m starting to get sick of you acting like you own me just because you popped out of Mom’s vag six minutes ahead.”

            “As far as I’m concerned, sis…” Halle said with a withering snarl.  “…I do as long as we’re on this job.  Until we have what we need, you’re on a leash.  My leash.  So keep your hands off the Betas.”

            Gail’s eyes darkened, her lip quivering on the verge of a poisonous smile.  No human in the world could’ve said this to her, other than her sister, and not wound up with their intestines unspooling onto the floor a half second later.

            “Just try to keep a cool head, Hal,” the more disgruntled twin breathed, allowing a manic grin to play across her lips.  “You might be the smart one, but if things suddenly start going haywire, and your plan fucks us over, we’re going to need some new ideas.  Maybe some new leadership.”

            “Then we’ll handle it as it comes, like we always have.”

            “We?” Gail gasped dramatically, cupping her cheeks in her hands.  “I thought it was just you.”

            “Listen,” Halle spat, grabbing hold of her sister’s tactical vest to prevent her from turning away.  “Either you get the fuck back in line with me, or-”

            Before her sister could expel the next toxic word, Gail had sliced the kerambit back through the air, stopping an inch away from Halle’s ear.  Rather than planting it in her sibling’s skull, though, the woman instead arched her arm back and threw.  The weapon sang out a deadly whistle as it carved through the silence and into the back wall, where it became embedded a mere two inches above the floor.

            Ben, a matter of paces away from Sonja’s littered gear in the auditorium shadows, cowered on his back, having dove to the carpet just in time to look up and see his sallow reflection in the glistening blade that so nearly removed his head.

Gail’s blade had only just left her fingers when a startled Halle defensively wrapped a leg under her sister’s thigh, kicking her feet out from under and knocking her to the ground.  She followed to the floor as Gail socked her sibling across the jaw, earning just enough of a window to catch her incoming clawed hands.  They rolled over twice, with Gail ultimately pinning her twin down beneath a knee wedged directly over the lungs.

            “What the hell was that?” Halle coughed, regaining her bearings and releasing her grip on Gail’s wrists.  Her sister, too, relented on the submission hold, but it took her an extra second of bitter consideration to do so.

            “I heard something over there,” Gail said.  She lifted her face to the ceiling and took a hard sniff at the air like a half-starved wolf.

            “The doors are closed and every Beta was up in the balcony,” Halle pointed out.  “You’re not helping your case for being in charge.”

            “Everything going okay over there, ladies?” Sonja called.  None of the others had bothered to look up from their feast of bite-size sandwiches at the sound of the commotion.  Alma, so engrossed in her work, hadn’t even acknowledged it to begin with.

            “We’re just having a discussion,” Halle reassured through gritted teeth loudly enough to be heard.

            Gail had risen back to her feet and was padding cautiously across the floor, squinting into the darkness until her knife in the wall became visible again.  Surprised to find nothing skewered on the end of it, the woman scooped the blade back out of the surface in a spray of plaster dust.  Still unconvinced, she inhaled deeply again and smacked her lips, sampling the air.

            “Well?” Halle murmured, followed in her sibling’s footsteps with similar discretion.

            “It came from right here,” Gail stated.  She crouched on the ground and slipped her glove off her hand, running her fingertips sensitively over every fiber of the carpet.

            “I think the job is starting to get to you,” Halle said.

            “Shut up, I’m trying to look,” Gail scowled as she crawled over the immediate area of the carpet, searching in vain for her ghostly source.

            “Halle,” came the gruff interruption as Roger lumbered over to the pair, earning the ponytailed Alpha’s attention.  The towering brute scratched at a tuft of his beard and jabbed a meaty finger at a radio hooked around his bicep, ceasing a transmission with a soft crackle.

            “Yes?”

            “Garza just made contact.  The bird is in the air.  ETA forty minutes,” he reported.

            “Perfect,” Halle said, tapping her earpiece.  “Alice, you get all that?”

            “Got it,” the little voice buzzed.

            “Keep me posted,” Halle said back to Roger.  “When it gets here, I want you, Sonja, and Gail up to the roof and in position.  Then I’ll make the call to our friends outside.”

            “Sure thing.”

            “Why don’t you take another patrol for now?”

            “Will do,” he agreed with a swift nod, pivoting to head toward the exit after tossing another handful of Beta sandwiches into his open mouth.

            Gail, meanwhile, still faced the wall, as though expecting its gilded wallpaper to mouth a solution to her paranoid perceptions.

            “Are we done here?” Halle interrogated coldly as she laid a hand on her sister’s shoulder from behind.  “The coffee break is almost over.  I need you sharp for the after-party.”

            “Yeah.  Fine,” Gail grunted, twirling the kerambit around her fingers rather than putting it back in its sheath.  The pair turned at last back to the stage far ahead and made their way back.

            Ben didn’t allow himself to exhale until a full minute of solitude had passed.  He huddled behind the duffel bag of tactical gear, feeling his heart rail so fast against his chest the beats could hardly be distinguished from one another.  With every petrified stride on his sprint from the knife to the weaponized cargo, the Beta had expected another blade to pass through the air, this time meeting its mark and dividing him into two equal halves.

            Frankly, he’d been expecting such a fate just as soon as Taylor had given the pep talk convincing him to journey into the belly of the beast in search of a way to stop Halle and company.  Going on reconnaissance in enemy territory was so far outside of Ben’s comfort zone he might as well have been juggling torches over a lake of gasoline.  Still he’d taken the risk, swallowing his fear for the good of his friends and everyone else contained inside those murderous metal stacks.  Not long after he’d clambered out of the Beta access vent on the far side of the auditorium’s back wall and begun making his tiptoed trek over to Sonja’s bag, though, the morbid suspicion of his near-certain failure was almost vindicated.

            Watching Gail pluck her sharpened implement from the wall was incredibly surreal.  That blade had cut far too close.  He had to continually pat his palms together to convince himself he wasn’t just experiencing a last dream before slipping into nothingness, and was still in fact a unified piece of meat and bone.

            Even once Ben was alone again, the sheer volume of troubling information he’d just become privy to was enough to buoy his rampaging pulse.  Not all of the bits and pieces he’d absorbed from Halle and Gail’s conversation made immediate sense to him, but Ben was thinking straight enough to know time was not on his side.  And there was still one more job he had before he could get the hell out of the lion’s den.

            Scrambling up the leathery strap of the bag, Ben hoisted himself along, using the teeth of an opened zipper as a makeshift ladder.  Once he’d reached the top, he had to peer over the cushioned rim for another minute to ensure Gail wasn’t coming back to double-check her terrifyingly accurate hunch.  Finally, taking a courageous breath, the Beta rolled over the side and into the dark contents of the bag.

            He landed lighter than he was anticipating on the rubber handle of a weapon Ben was too nervous to try identifying.  Going over Taylor’s rough description of the intended object over again in his mind, he fished semi-blindly through the jungle of metal and kevlar comprising Sonja’s gear.  With only a dim ray of stray light cast over the corner of the bag to guide him, Ben found the ovular case he was looking for.

            The Beta slid his hand around the curve of the case, itself only about double the length of Ben’s whole body, and found the locking mechanism.  He kicked both feet into each side of the pressure-sensitive according to Taylor’s instruction and pried it apart with both arms, at last revealing its contents resting in the black foam.

            Ben, staggering back, was flooded with surprising and perhaps premature relief to look upon Sonja’s portable short-range EMP device.  The possibility of salvaging this unthinkable nightmare had become clear.  If set off in the room, the pulse would temporarily fry everything powered on volts, including the remote control hooked to Alma’s genocidal machine.

            And maybe, just maybe, give him and his unlikely ally a fighting chance.

            “Jenna?” Claire said feebly.  She’d been sitting across from her friend in abject silence for nearly an hour at the bottom of the hill, and was finally unable to withstand it any longer.

            The strawberry-blonde spitfire of an enforcer barely acknowledged the address with a flutter of her eyelids as she rested her chin against her knees.  Her legs were tucked up against her stomach as though awaiting a tornado to pass through.

            “C’mon,” the youngest Lindon murmured, placing a hand on Jenna’s shoulder.  “Please look at me.  It’s not your f-”

            “Yes it is,” the girl uttered, silencing Claire with the gravity of her tone.  Her lips hardly shifted.

            “But it’s… you can’t believe that it’s-”

            “Yes I can.”

            Sighing, Claire pressed her fist against her lips and rocked back and forth in the grass.  It took all her restraint to avoid throwing her arms around Jenna in a protective embrace, knowing it wasn’t what the mournfully guilt-ridden Omega needed right now.  Idly she blinked away a few lingering tears and rose back to her feet to return to her mother.  Claire studied the ground before taking a step forward, and felt some relief at who she saw incoming.

            “Jen,” a smaller but nonetheless insistent voice called out from somewhere below Jenna’s field of vision.  Tricia Reynolds’ tiny hand rested against the Omega’s limp thumb.  “That was a good grab.”

            Jenna’s gaze didn’t shift down to her mother.  If anything, she focused more intently on the distant horizon as she did everything in her power to suppress the memory of swiping that Alpha through the brick wall of the Norman & Joan Tyler Convention Center mere minutes before the leader of the terrorists slaughtered a handful of Beta teachers.  She’d been making some good progress in the last hour convincing herself that she, at least, wasn’t responsible for every tragic event in Beta history rather than just these Betas, but her mother’s comment wasn’t helping matters.

            “You knew the environment first and made sure your target was isolated.  Quick, in and out.  Like I taught you,” Tricia continued, proudly patting her daughter’s enormous fingernail.  Still the girl made no effort to react.

            Having fully expected this kind of treatment, Tricia stripped her tactical gear into the grass beside Jenna’s fingers and marched up to the Omega’s right sneaker.  Cracking her knuckles in preparation, then, the woman bounded up the rubber rim of the shoe, pulling herself by the crossed laces and up to the mouth of the footwear.  Once there, she ran along the smooth incline of her towering child’s shin, stopping only when she’d reached the summit of Jenna’s knee, where the mired enforcer could no longer ignore her mother.

            For the first time in her haunted reverie, Jenna’s eyes recognized the existence of another human being.

            “You know,” Tricia began, crouching so that her gaze was even with her daughter’s.  “My second year on the job we busted a guy for farming Betas and selling them online to this couple out in the country.  When we kicked in the front door, they’d already filled the incinerator with Betas, most of them just kids.  And they were waiting for us with a hand over the switch.  They only agreed to back down when we lowered our weapons.  So my captain gave the order.”

            Jenna blinked, keeping her attention on her mother.

            “But I’d already gotten a look in their eyes.  That man, and especially the woman.  I saw nothing inside them.  No compassion for life.  Only cold,” Tricia explained.  “And I knew then that they wouldn’t be bargained with.  That they couldn’t be reasoned with, or bought for anything, because of what they were.”

            Tricia could feel the vast landscape of her daughter’s body tensing beneath her feet.

            “So I kept my handgun in the holster.  And when we all backed down, just like they said, and I saw that woman’s hand go for the crank anyway I put three rounds into her chest before she had the chance to tug,” Tricia said.  She took a few unsteady steps forward over the curve of Jenna’s knee until she could place a hand on the girl’s ivory cheek.

            “You did what you could to help everyone trapped in there.  That’s all anyone could’ve asked,” Tricia continued softly.  “The people inside now.  They’re the same kind of empty people I’ve been fighting ever since that day, and they’re doing what they’re going to do, with or without your input.”

            For a moment the Alpha simply stroked her hand over the immense wall of Jenna’s pale cheek.  Soon the Omega’s hand appeared up at her knee, where she tenderly wrapped her index finger over her mother’s arm.

            “It’s not your fault, Jen.  It’s not,” Tricia said.  “Now come on.  Buck up.  I need you back, and so does everyone in there.”

            Jenna released a heavy sigh she’d been keeping trapped in her chest since the morning.

            Just beyond the hill and separated from the controlled madness of the Aegis command center, Melody planted her feet amongst a cluster of pine trees not even tall enough to reach her shoulders.  The honey-tressed sentinel, weary from the tribulations of the morning as well as what she considered a personal failure to contact someone literally millions of miles out of radio range, had retreated for a breath of fresh air.  She brushed her hand along a high-hanging branch, letting the sprigs slide between her fingers as she pressed a palm to the bark to relieve some tension, though was careful not to squeeze too tightly in case of accidentally ripping the entire tower from its ancient roots.  There had already been enough destruction for one day.

            Bracing herself for a thousandth disappointment, she tapped her finger against the screen of her tablet, sending out yet another distress call up and into the stratosphere.  Melody next cast her eyes to the oceanic sky above, its peaceful canopy blissfully unaware of the calamity taking place down on Earth.  Though she couldn’t see it, the amazonian Omega imagined even further than her eyes could reach into the infinite blackness between newborn stars and planetoids, and sighed.

            All they needed was a miracle.  That wasn’t so much to ask, was it?

            “Please, Kayla,” Melody murmured, biting her lip.  “Please come back.”

            “Forty minutes, they said?  You’re sure?” Taylor demanded, dipping her palm so Ben could crawl over the surface of her fingers.  She arched her thumb, which he rested his arm on without even noticing.  The static swish of water pipes striping the ceiling shrouded her voice from the outside.

            “Yes,” the Beta replied, clutching a fist to his chest as his heartrate at last dropped below the level of a racehorse.  He’d only just come back out of the auditorium access vent and had gratefully dived into the sanctity of the Alpha’s hand, his terror at her touch long forgotten after being nearly decapitated in the dark.

            “Shit,” she groused, running her fingers through her dark locks.  Her freckled cheeks had gone even paler.  “They’re ahead of schedule, then.”

            “What does that mean?  For us?”

            “It means we have to keep moving,” she said, straightening her back against a copper wall within the Center’s winding entrance foyer.  She curled her fingers partially back around Ben’s body; once again, there was no flinching.  “You gonna be okay?”

            “Yeah,” he sighed.  “I’ll be fine.”

            “Good.  Because I’m going to need you to not shit your pants for the next part,” Taylor said.  “Halle will send some of them up to the roof to receive the getaway.  That’s when we’ll have to make our move if we want any kind of a shot.”

            “She said she was sending up three of them, I think,” Ben said.

            “That’ll even the odds.  It’s still not ideal.”  Returning the Beta back to her neck, she allowed him to wrap himself back in a few silky strands of her hair for safety.  Taylor herself crouched down, hustling on her knees into the Alpha maintenance vent.

            “What happens after?” Ben asked following a long pause, where the only sound for several minutes had been Taylor’s hands and feet passing over the grating.  He involuntarily tightened his grip on the girl’s hair, twisting the black strands in his pasty knuckles, though the Alpha didn’t seem to mind.

            “What do you mean?”

            “I… mean their plan,” he said, wishing the question wasn’t necessary.  The longer he waited, though, the more it weighed on his already grossly burdened heart.  He was this deep already, after all; Ben knew he might as well have every last excruciating scrap of information.

            “I don’t know everything.  They wouldn’t tell me,” Taylor said.  “I do know a VTOL is coming from some base out east where Aegis hasn’t locked down the region.  I know they’re going to load up all the boxes with everyone inside and get out of the city with them.  Not sure where they’re going to take them.”

            “How are they… I mean, won’t… won’t Aegis-”

            “That’s the other thing I don’t know,” Taylor said, turning a corner in the cold tunnel.  “Halle has something else up her sleeve.  The Omegas won’t let that plane get a block away without a damn good reason, and she knows it.”

            “What happens in the meantime, then?  Where are we…”

            “Right now?  We’re going to go pay Alice a visit,” Taylor said.  Having reached the end of the tunnel, she set about prying off the exit hatch, careful to peel it slowly enough that only a whispered whine was emitted from the metal sheet.  “She’s at her computer with an eye on the whole building.  Our odds of getting into that theatre go way up if we make a pit stop in her room and… I don’t know, put her in a coma?”

            “Right,” Ben snorted.  “We.”

            “Hey, now.  You did some good work back there, getting in and out of that bag like a little cat burglar.  Don’t sell yourself short,” Taylor said genuinely, before coughing uncomfortably at her unintended pun.  “Sorry.”

            “Don’t worry about it,” he said, managing an unlikely smile as he looked around what appeared to be a simple broom closet with only a lime-crusted sink and shelves stocked with chemical cleaning jugs.  “I’ve had much worse.  Trust me.”

            Taylor crawled through the opening in the vent and lowered herself down to the tile floor below, once again cupping a hand around Ben for safety.  The force of her landing nearly rocked the Beta from her shoulder, but instead he bounced harmlessly off the soft pad of the girl’s palm, remaining entangled in her messily cascading hair.  The Alpha then slumped to the floor, keeping both hands centered together beneath Ben, and leaned her head back against the flaking plaster of the wall for a much-needed breather.

            For a while neither made a sound except to exhale.  Ben, grateful for a reprieve, took a seat on the girl’s fingers again, wrapping his arms around his legs and pulling them up to his chest.  He focused on the feeling of warmth emanating from the Alpha’s hands and tried to come to some level of peace.

            “You know, if this… doesn’t go so well, and we get cornered, it’s over for both of us.  These people, they… they don’t give second chances.  You understand that, right?” Taylor spoke up at last.

            “Yes.”  The word came easier than he would’ve guessed, even though he did understand, now more than ever.  It was simply a fact.

            “So… if you’re really going to be the last person I ever have a conversation with other than Halle about which eye I want a bullet in, I figure we might as well know who the other one is, huh?” Taylor explained with a fatigued wisdom.  “What do you say?”

            “Okay,” Ben grunted with a shrug.  Evidently, impending doom had made the notoriously private Beta learn to be casually spontaneous.  “Like what?”

            “There’s something I want to get straight,” she said, the blue pools of her eyes settling on him with great intensity.  Slowly Taylor brought her cupped hands in closer to her body until Ben was just a matter of inches from her chin: a distance that, even just this morning, would’ve put the Beta into a blubbering panic and more than likely provided him with a month-long bevy of nightmares.  Especially after that mortifying scolding as he dangled from Taylor’s fingers on the way into the building, Ben assumed he’d been set back in his feeble social development by at least a decade.

            But now, toughened through a rapid maturation into manhood within the span of an afternoon, he hardly blinked at the looming specter of the young woman’s immense and angelic face.  Though he wouldn’t dare it admit it to himself, he was even made more comfortable by her proximity.

            “Shoot,” he said.

            “The way we met today, when you punched that kid, well… it’s almost like a different person from the one I’m looking at now,” she said, furrowing her brow.  “The you I think I know now wouldn’t hurt a flea to protect his life savings.  So what gives?”

            “With Michael?  He’s, uh… we just… just don’t really get along,” the Beta said.  No matter what that little dickwad had ever said to done to him, ethically, Ben couldn’t bring himself to sell Michael out when he and everyone else were facing their deaths just a few doors down in the Center.

            “He picks on you, doesn’t he?”

            “I… I don’t really want t-”

            “Relax, kid.  Everybody has a tipping point,” Taylor said.  She spoke with the experience of someone who had gone through several of her own before.

            “Okay, so maybe he does.  Everybody gets picked on sometime.”

            “What was it, then?” she pressed.  “What did he say that put you over the edge?”

            Ben let his hands fall into his lap, lacing his fingers together as if preparing to pray.  “He just, um… he talked about my parents, when we were about to get into your hand.  He knows it b- well, it used to bother me.  Being held by Alphas.”

            “Why’s that?” she said.  “I admit, I was kind of a bitch to you this morning without knowing the whole story, and that’s my bad.  But why all Alphas?  There’s no way all of us have bitched at you.” 

            “It’s not all Alphas.  For most of my life, Alphas were nicer to me than any Betas I ever knew beside my parents,” Ben sighed, feeling as though he was opening something up inside of himself that had been lying dormant for a very long time.  The next words spilled forth in a relative calm.  “Things kinda changed after I saw them die.” 

            “Oh,” Taylor managed, noting just how tender a subject she’d inadvertently stumbled on.  “Sorry again.  We’ll, uh…”  She bit her lip, hoping to back out of it as cleanly as possible.

            “What the hell,” he mumbled, shrugging again.  “Like you said.  We might be the last people we ever see.”

            “We might,” she agreed in a whisper.  “But I… I don’t want to make you talk about something that you-”

            “Please,” he said, surprised to feel a lump in his throat.  “I feel like someone ought to hear it.  About them.  In case things don’t-”

            “Okay,” Taylor said.  She hovered her thumb over Ben’s right shoulder, giving him a few soothing pats.  “What happened?”

            Ben opened his mouth to dole out the painful words: a feat a top therapist at Aegis had been unable to get him to accomplish after several years of work.  Gulping a fresh breath of air, he began to speak.

            “C’mon, kiddo, let’s get a move-on,” Eric Wagner chuckled, half-wrestling his son Ben as they continued walking along the sidewalk toward the nearest Beta train station.  “It’s almost two a.m.  And you know my bedtime is ten o’clock sharp without exceptions.”  He looped the thirteen-year-old into a loose headlock, while Jane Wagner followed along behind, merely rolling her eyes and smirking at her husband’s childishness.

            “Oh man, but this was so worth it, and you know it!” Ben laughed, breaking free of his father’s roughhousing embrace.  “That was opening night for a movie starring a Beta!  I mean, how many of those have even been made yet?”

            “Not enough,” Jane said.  “I was so impressed with the cast.”

            “I guess I’m just more of a matinee man myself,” Eric said.  Taking hold of his son’s arm, he playfully pinned it behind his back, but Ben slipped easily out of this hold as well.  “Next time, I’ll just watch the home video version so I can still get my beauty rest.”

            “Boring!” Ben chuckled as he looked to his other parent.  “Mom?”

            “Agreed,” Jane said, grinning at her spouse.  “Boring, honey.”

            “It was a shame Herman couldn’t come while Amanda is out of town,” Eric said.  “He swore he’d be here for this, but I suppose he got stuck with an extra shift at the clinic.”

            “That man never takes a break, does he?” Jane sighed as they turned a corner around on the elevated Beta path of the mixed class area.  On the wall of the movie theatre a gleaming poster featuring the new film’s three-inch celebrity was plastered high above their heads.  At its full size, the image of the Beta ironically put him up to nearly the size of an actual Alpha.  Ben couldn’t help but feel a swell of oddly personal pride to see such a thing, even though he didn’t know nor had any actual connection to the person on the poster.

            Somehow, it just felt like another step toward something more for them all.

            “What the SHIT!” a voice shrieked from down the alley, shattering the night’s serenity.  Her discontent echoed wrathfully off every trash can and every vehicle packed into the narrow stone thoroughfare.

            Ben squinted ahead, just able to make out an Alpha woman in the glow of a low-hanging street light.  Wearing broad-rimmed sunglasses and a white leather jacket, her dirty blonde hair hung over her shoulders in helter-skelter tassels as she staggered across the street on four-inch spike heels.  The meandering dance of each step indicated her blood must’ve at that moment consisted primarily of alcohol.

            “Eric, we should-” Jane murmured anxiously, putting a hand on the shoulders of her husband and son.

            “Yes.  Maybe we’ll just… go the longer way around,” he agreed.  “Ben?”

            But the boy hadn’t heard, as he was already sprinting down the miniature road.

            He’d realized the source of the woman’s ire: a trio of Beta teenagers, perched precariously on the edge of the elevated path with some kind of homemade projectile, which they’d been using to fling an impressive assortment of white blobs at the Alpha woman’s parked convertible below.  Evidently they’d been expecting her to be gone for longer than she was.  Already the boys were jumping to their feet in alarm at being caught in their prank, but it was clear there wasn’t nearly enough time to flee.

            “BEN!” Eric bellowed, giving chase, with Jane in quick pursuit.

            “What the living fuck do you little shits think you’re doing?” the Alpha scowled, her words slurring into a bumpy sequence of furious musical notes.  Reaching the Beta path only just in time to keep from stumbling over, the woman slammed both immaculately manicured hands down onto the pavement, creating a pair of walls with her palms that prevented an escape for the young vandals.  Even from this distance, the impact shook Ben and nearly toppled him to the ground, but he continued running, not content to stand by with what he already knew was coming after the first hateful word out of the drunken giant’s maroon lips.

            This wasn’t merely a stupor the woman was in.  This was the ravenous cutting loose of inhibition.  This was someone only just held at bay by the bounds of humane society.

            “Get back here!” Jane cried at her son, as she and her husband were still a good distance behind.

            “Do you know what I ought to do to you, you scrawny little fucks?” the woman spat, drool spilling from between her lips as her hands scooped together, collecting the three Betas into her palms.  They screamed and thrashed, fighting uselessly against the cage of her fingers.  Her voice dropped into a focused whisper as she brought them closer to her mouth, but Ben was already near enough to hear it.  “I ought to do what ought to be done to ALL of your kind.”

            “Leave them alone!” Ben roared at the top of his little lungs, pointing up at the colossal woman as though declaring class war.

            “More of you?” she uttered with revulsion.  “Maybe you just all need a little lesson.”  Cupping her first three captures into one palm, her hand immediately descended, blotting out the dim protective light of the bulb above.

            Ben, small as he was already, could almost feel himself shrinking down as the woman’s titanic hand engulfed him.  The courage as well as the blood drained instantaneously from his brain as the enormous fingers, sweaty and scented heavily of cheap perfume and bourbon, snaked around his legs and torso.

            Another ear-splitting screech sounded as the fingers snapped away just as soon as they’d closed around Ben, causing him to stumble back in shock.  The woman’s opposite hand lowered back to the path, her fingers parting as the trio tumbled from her grip and made their horrified retreat into the night.  The appendage that had so nearly captured Ben was instantly gripped with trembling agony as blood trickled from her fingers.  Eric, having caught up to Ben, held his needle-sized Swiss army knife, flecked with a single drop of the Alpha’s blood.

            “FUCKING BETAS!” the woman announced to the night with a spine-curling howl.  Bloodshot eyes narrowing down to her miniscule targets, the gigantic woman’s wounded hand curled into a talon.

            “Ben!” Jane cried, her voice quavering as she advanced and threw her arms around her son in anger and relief.  Her lips pressed to his ear, covering up a wailed vow from the stranger above to make them all into jam, though Ben was already beyond comprehension.  “Start running.  Now.  Don’t stop.”

            Feeling as though he’d drifted out of his body after the shadowy visage of the woman’s hand all but consumed his being, Ben numbly processed his mother’s words and followed the order, unable to do anything else.  He could feel his feet hammering on the pavement, his arms pumping, and his lungs aching in protest. In the distance he could make out the blurry shapes of Alphas rushing to aid in the commotion, far too late to stop it.

            By the time Ben had become aware enough of his body again to stop and turn, both Eric and Jane Wagner were smeared over the Beta path, their innards painted across the woman’s hands in crimson rorschach spirals.

            Taylor swallowed hard, finding her throat completely empty of words as the little life in her hands finished detailing the blood-soaked testimony of how he came to fear her kind.

            She tried to look away, but found it impossible as Ben breathed a redemptive sigh, his chest heaving up once, having at last gotten a direct account out of his system.  Even when he was brought into Aegis the night of the crime to identify the drunken murderer of Eric and Jane, all he’d been able to do was point a finger through a window without opening his mouth.  There were plenty of other eye witnesses present to corroborate the truth, but even if there weren’t, the Beta wouldn’t even have been able to utter the story back to anyone with a pair of pliers holding his jaw open.  It was simply locked inside, allowed to fester like a tumor through five years of stewing anxiety and near-silent therapy sessions with a caring Aegis therapist.

            Until now, anyway, when his own end seemed to come nearer with every passing minute, and he was cupped in the palm of one of the very beings that had slaughtered the only family he had.  The irony wasn’t lost on Ben as he laid back in Taylor’s hand, weary from the effort to expel the grisly history.  A tired smile appeared on his face.

            “Thank you, Ben,” Taylor whispered, not entirely sure at the time where her gratitude came from, but feeling it potently nonetheless.

            “No, really, thank you,” he muttered.  He felt lighter now, as though he might be able to stand up and leap right out of the Alpha’s hands and carry himself to the finish line.  “So… what about you?”

            “I guess it is my turn, isn’t it?” she breathed.  Taylor rose back to her feet, careful not to jostle her trauma patient of a passenger, and glanced back up to the vent.  Her hand ascended into her hair, where Ben obediently twisted himself back in her soft black locks.  “I’ll tell you on the way to Alice.  Hold tight now.”

            Dr. Herman Randolph stared blankly through the crowded, muggy darkness of the prison.  Several thin slits in the metal along each side wall were the only source of oxygen or glimmers of light provided for what he assumed to be more than one hundred Betas trapped in this same box with him.  The vast majority of them were kids, hardly old enough to have begun puberty, and yet here they were, breathlessly waiting to be slaughtered like barnyard animals.

            The possibility of their demise was something the doctor had already worked out just from the crude design of the self-sealing panels that could contain the air if directed, as well as a thick hose that ran through the center of the square container.  The tube was pockmarked with openings intended to diffuse an aerosol, which Herman had to assume was something meant to bring a swift end to the functioning heartbeats of everyone in this box, as well as the countless identical ones all lined in single file upon the stage.

            Of course, he’d kept this information to himself, knowing the chances of minimizing anxiety attacks for the terrified teens would be vastly improved if a reasonable doubt was maintained.  Already there’d been a lot of hyperventilating amongst them that only spread by a panicked crowd mentality, which he’d been able to keep in check with some soothing words, but he knew it would only do so much good.

            “Dr. Randolph?” Ben’s teacher Mrs. Hall whispered, crouching next to where he’d slumped against the cold wall of their box.  “Lift up your arm.”

            “Thank you,” he said, using a free hand to hoist his limp elbow up high enough for the Beta educator.  Delicately she wrapped another strip of cloth torn from her sleeves around his shoulder for use as a sling.  He lowered it back into his lap and winced at the sting of it, but considering Halle had literally swatted him across an entire stage, he considered himself lucky he’d only come away with a broken arm and severely twisted ankle.

            “You’re welcome,” she said as she finished tying it off.  “I’m sorry I can’t do much more for it.”

            “You set this pretty well, actually,” he said, running a hand along the strip of fabric.  “Had any medical training?”

            “Just first aid,” Mrs. Hall answered.  “My mother is a nurse, though.  She made sure I had a few skills I could pull out if need be.”

            “Beta?”

            “Alpha, actually.  She tended to worry a lot about me for it, I suppose,” she said.  “Glad to know it’s coming in handy now.”

            For the first time in the hours they’d all spent in the box, there was a hush hanging over the teens as they huddled together.  Some continued sobbing dryly into each other’s shoulders, most of them having run out of moisture for tears, but otherwise the dim space had become a graveyard of sniffling and heavy breathing.

            Earlier, when the air was filled with petulant screams and rambunctious arguing among the students, Herman had only hoped for eventual silence so that the group might be able to calm down.  Now that no one spoke, it somehow made the dread twist even tighter inside his gut.

            It was like many of them had given up already.

            “Everyone?” Herman called out loudly enough for his voice to fill the blackened void above their heads.  Most at least lifted their heads to look in his direction, though many remained with their chins slumped against their chests.  “I’d like to go over that breathing exercise again, for anyone that needs it, okay?  Let’s start out by straightening our spines out.  Just sit up, that’s all you have to do.”

            There was a low groan as several dozen of the students who hadn’t yet reached their emotional breaking point begrudgingly did as instructed, either too determined to surrender or too numb to care.  As long as they were still willing to respond to a voice, Herman knew it meant they had a chance of coming out on the other side.

            “All right, that’s good.  Expel all the air from your lungs.  Now, let’s just inhale slowly again for four counts.  One, two, three, four,” he sounded off as gently as he could while still letting his words reach all corners of the box.

            There was more shuffling as the outliers among the rows of three-inch-tall students joined the oxygenating party.  They sat up straighter and inhaled together.  Mrs. Hall gave Herman a pat on his good shoulder as she followed along with the exercise, obviously requiring a boost of hope just as much as any of the youngsters.

            “Good.  Now, just hold that breath for seven seconds.  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,” he continued, holding his free hand up and measuring the beat with his fingers.  “And finally we’re going to let it out, nice and easy, for eight counts, until you’re on empty again.  Ready?  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.”

            By now the majority of the box had joined in as the collective exhalation filled the space with a temporary breeze.  Herman smirked in spite of himself, glad to see the downtrodden masses were still willing to keep rolling onward even with the possible object of their doom hooked directly into the center.

            “Very nice.  Now, we’ll just keep doing that.  Do it for as long as you like.  Focus on counting each second, one step at a time,” Herman instructed.  He counted again, quieter this time, and heard the group move onto their second set of inhalations.  His own heart, troubled as it was, was aided by it, even though he knew how feeble a tactic it was given the circumstances.

            “You know Ben, don’t you?” Mrs. Hall whispered to Herman after he’d ceased counting aloud, though the breathing exercises audibly continued throughout the space.  “Ben Wagner?”

            “Yes, I know Benjamin,” he said.  “Old friend of the family.  Are you his-”

            “His homeroom teacher, yes,” she answered.  “He’s a good kid.”

            “That he is,” the doctor replied.  “I haven’t seen him in here.  I would’ve assumed he was with your group.”

            “I… haven’t either.  I remember, before the ceremony started, he… went off toward the restrooms.  I don’t know if he made it back in with the class later on,” she explained nervously.

            “I’m sure he’s all right.  He’s got a logical head on his shoulders,” Herman said, lying even to himself.  As smart as Ben was, he knew the teen’s timid nature meant he would’ve been hounded fairly quickly even if he wasn’t in the auditorium at the time of the takeover.

            Still, it didn’t pay to squelch positivity.  Not in a place like this.

            “Yes.  Yes, he’ll be all right,” Mrs. Hall answered.  It sounded like she as well had to convince herself.

            “Pointless,” a voice croaked from somewhere in the huddled crowd, his voice cracking on the first syllable.  “It’s all pointless!”

            A low murmur ran over the group as a few Betas whispered to one another, trying to identify the voice’s owner without a face to look at.  The steady synced breathing was momentarily interrupted, mismatching the counting order.

            “Just focus on the breathing,” Herman repeated above the mumbling.  “Everything will be all-”

            “Don’t you see where we are?” the teen protested with exhaustion.  “Look at that tube in the middle!  It’s going to-”

            “Right now, it’s not our job to worry about where we are,” Herman interrupted, knowing he couldn’t simply quell the crowd with a few entry level breathing games while a half-panicked kid was trying to drum up some terrorized solidarity.  He didn’t blame the teen in the least for his reaction to the situation, but he needed to be shut down before the fragile equilibrium of the group was tested beyond repair.

            “Michael, please…” Mrs. Hall implored sympathetically.

            “Well, then whose job is it?” Ben's bully screeched, ignoring his teacher.  A few of his neighboring students attempted to shush him, to no avail.

            “Aegis,” Herman said calmly.  “Don’t doubt for a second that they’re doing everything they can right now to get each and every one of us out of here, safe and sound.”

            “Oh, right.  Because they’ve been working just so hard all this time, haven’t they?” Michael spat, descending deeper into wild hysteria.  “We’ve been in here for HOURS.  If they were going to do something, they’d have done it!  They’re… they’re just gonna let them fill this box up.”

            “No they’re not.”

            “Are you all fucking BLIND?  Look at the thing in the middle?  Don’t you know what that is?” he cried, waving his arms frantically at the hose.  The murmuring around him grew louder, and fresh sobbing broke out as anyone who’d somehow managed to block out the image of that deadly instrument was reminded of it again.  “They’re gonna gas us like rats!”

            “It’s taking time because they’re going to ensure that everyone gets out of here safely.  All right?” Herman said, careful not to snap and just increase the frenzy level.  All around, the students were already breaking back down into tears again; clearly, many of them were thinking the very same things this anonymous rabble-rouser was spouting.  Admittedly, he wasn’t exactly unfounded.

            “You all think they’re going to let us get out of here alive?  You’re all crazy!” Michael shrieked, on the verge of hyperventilating now.  Several students worked to keep him from moving, wrestling him closer to the ground, but the Beta was obviously intent on being heard as he simply raised his voice.  “Do you KNOW who that is out there?  Who built this fucking thing we’re inside?”

            “Now, now, let’s just-”

            “Alma fucking Warren!” he croaked.  This name caught the attention of a few more agitated kids, and ignited further squeals and pants-pissing writhing.  For many, no explanation was required to accompany with these three words.

            Alma was the kind of person who acted as the subject of everything from cautionary tales by parents to spooky campfire stories: a monster in human skin, albeit one who was not only very real but locked in prison and ready to eat her way out and make up for lost time.

            Herman sighed, hoping to have kept the identity of the death trap’s architect secret from the masses for as long as possible.  He, too, knew the face of the woman from the moment she’d scooped their party up and deposited them into the box, most notably in a lecture he’d attended where her mugshot was featured.

            “You’re right,” he said to Michael with more calm than he had a right to.  “That is Alma Warren out there.  But I’ll tell you all something else.”

            Miraculously, enough of a hush fell over the group that the doctor could actually be heard.  He bit his lip, knowing that even now, they still were willing to believe there was a sliver of hope.  The man already had to lift their spirits about the future on a well-lit stage today; it was his duty to continue doing so now.

            “If their plan was to do away with us all, they could’ve easily done it already.  They want something from Aegis, and it’s just a matter of time before we’re let out and things are set right.  Because they caught her once, and they’ll do it again.  And the same with all her friends out there,” Herman intoned.  There was a hefty silence as the fear-mongering Beta student was at last convinced to shut up by those around him, and the deluge of tears abounding the space seemed to slow as well.

            “Now, let’s start up again.  Everyone together, with me,” Herman began, lifting his arm up to count off.  “One, two, three, four…”

            “Are you sure this is safe to come out here?” Ben whispered as Taylor slid out of the vent and into the partially constructed new north entrance hall of the Norman & Joan Tyler Convention Center, littered with construction tools across the tables, the truck Roger and Gail had used for entry into the building, as well as the dusty rubble of the pillar after it was blown out by a well-placed grenade during the encounter with Tricia’s SWAT forces.

            “As safe as it’s going to be,” Taylor reassured as she crept between portable cement mixers and piles of metal girders, keeping to her hands and knees between each.  “I’ve seen the feed from the control room.  They don’t have a camera set up here yet, and this is the quickest route over to Alice.  We need to stay out of the open until we’ve put her down for a nap.”

            “Okay,” Ben sighed, winding a leg through the Alpha’s hair for added support as she glided from one hiding place to the next.  It was strange to find themselves back in the light again, filtered through the numerous tarps hanging over what would eventually serve as ceiling-high windows between the positively towering trio of pillars.  The Beta felt intestine-churningly exposed to be robbed of the darkness and silence, and instead plopped out into the open, but he trusted the girl’s instinct for efficiency in dire situations.

            That trust was heightened after learning of Taylor’s unique career path: from her beginnings as the child of two black market arms dealers who taught her self-defense and self-reliance with the tools of the trade, leading to her violent expulsion into a normal life where she tried to blend in as a sorority girl, and finally found herself in Omega enforcer custody for pledge initiation exercises that involved swallowing and vomiting up several forcibly stripped Betas served from a punch bowl.  The job at the Convention Center was her work release, and subsequent employment by the Paradise sisters an unlucky sequence of events mostly reliant upon her strategic position within the structure.  It was a lot to take in, and Ben knew he’d have had difficulty processing it if the much more pressing matter of their imminent and mortal peril wasn’t taking precedence.

            “Alice is just down the hall from here,” Taylor whispered.  Steadily she ascended back to her full height under the shade of the abandoned truck.  “We’ll stick close to the walls, and I’ll put you in my pocket once we’ve found her, so you don’t get stuck in the middle.”

            “Right,” Ben nodded, distracted as he gazed up between the strands of Taylor’s hair.  His eyes settled on the crumbled remains of the stone support Roger had blown out earlier.  “That sounds good.”

            “What is it?”

            “Nothing,” he shrugged.  Once again, knowledge was a useful friend for the Beta in times of potential terror.  “Just… the way this hall is set up.”

            “And?

            “Well, see how there were three pillars?”

            “Yeah.  Except they blew the middle one when Aegis tried to come in,” Taylor agreed, peering up toward the ceiling far above.  “Why?”

            “It’s just… well, we should probably keep moving out of here.  The way the roof is supported, when it’s not completely reinforced yet… those pillars are really the only things holding it up.  It can handle losing one of them, but with just two left?  It’s still dangerous.  If it lost another one, this whole area would collapse.”

            “Okay.  Noted.  We’re getting out of here,” Taylor uttered, darting along the trailer of the vehicle and peeking around the corner of its front cabin.  “How the hell do you know that, anyway?”

            “Architecture course,” he said smugly.  “Read a few books on it, too.”

            “All right, all right, Raphael.  Let’s just keep a move-on before you try to show me up again,” Taylor smarmed in a low voice.  She lifted reached a hand up toward her shoulder, spreading her fingers for Ben to climb in.  “Why don’t you get in?  We’re almost at the end of the hall, and I want you in my pocket so Alice doesn’t get a chance to second-guess.”

            But the Beta made no reaction from within the canopy of the Alpha’s hair.  Taylor could feel his tiny fists trembling around her locks, his legs quaking against the skin of her neck.

            “G-G… G…” he mumbled.

            “What?”

            “Get down!” Ben shouted into her ear.  Startled, Taylor dropped to the ground, diving away from the truck just as a rapidly advancing Roger swung a hulking fist into the window of the truck where her head had been a heartbeat before.

             “So how long was it for you?  Nine years in the hole?” Sonja asked as she wandered up behind Alma Warren.

            Scowling at being interrupted as she continued tinkering with the inner workings of her massive instrument of personalized class revenge, a grease-splattered Alma nodded at her co-worker without turning around.  Her hand didn’t even cease its motion inside the device.

            “Guess that makes you the winner,” the redheaded weapons specialist chuckled, picking at a chunk of food between her teeth from the filched Beta lunches.  “I spent five myself.  Busted out twice.  The third time, Gail came to get me, like when we came for you.”

            This elicited no reaction from Alma, who continued twisting the metallic contents of her deadly art.

            “But you just spent nine straight in there.  Sounds like being a handywoman only gets you so far,” Sonja continued, leaning against the machine and blocking out some of Alma’s light.  “I guess that’s what’s made you go all… screwy like this, huh?”

            At this, Alma’s sinewy forearms stopped their rhythmic twisting of gears inside the machine and plunked the wrench she’d been holding onto the floor with an ugly clatter.

            “You want to know what made me go all screwy?” Alma snarled, rising to her feet and letting her clenched fists hang heavily at her sides.  Sonja remained standing near, though she couldn’t help but flinch at the advance.  “Try being born into a world that’s fucked up beyond fixing.  Where everyone’s living a lie, that things you could kill with your goddamned pinky are worth as much as your life or even more.  Where giant fucking freaks run your entire life and can put you in a box whenever they please.”

            “You don’t have to tell me about the Omegas, Alms, I’ve been screwed over plenty of times by them.  How do you think I kept getting put back in the slammer?” Sonja replied, crossing her arms proudly.  “They had to bring in the big guns to get rid of me.”

            “I’m not finished,” Alma snapped, aiming a bitter index finger at the black-clad gunslinger.  Her voice grew haggard as a pent-up grudge was dredged to the forefront.  “Maybe try giving birth to a child into that same world you had to grow up in, knowing it was a lie.  Try giving her the chance to retake it with you, the golden opportunity in a place that believes your rights aren’t worth jack-shit.  And then imagine her throwing it all back in your face and turning you over to the enemy.  For a couple of fucking insects.”

            “Can’t say, Alms.  I never had kids,” Sonja shrugged.

            “All right, then.  Then maybe try this one,” Alma grumbled, her eyes clouding as the memories unfolded.  She could hardly even see Sonja any longer, as her gaze affixed to the back wall with a thousand-yard stare, the tactile sensations incoming again.  “Waking up every day for a year in a fucking funhouse of a room, made for the giant freaks.  No one to talk to except for the giant bitch who gets to take you out and play with you whenever the hell she wants.”

            “Never had any sessions with an enforcer either,” Sonja reported.  “I’m too quick for ‘em.”

            “Let me give you a little perspective then,” Alma spat, jabbing her finger at Sonja’s throat.  “I’d wake up and get dangled over the ground.  Tossed around for a while, until she’d just stick me in… in her shoe… and put her fucking foot in with me.”

            Sonja was working very hard to keep an entertained smile from forming on her lips.

            “Do you know what that’s like?” she continued.  “Can you even fucking imagine?  Being stood on?  Having her toes coming down on you, over and fucking over, pounding, fucking with your life, like it doesn’t mean anything to her?  Being used like a goddamned accessory when she does that… that thing they do?  Being told you deserve it, because it’s what you’ve done to the fucking Betas?”

            “No, not quite,” Alma’s listener casually said.  “Doesn’t sound like any fun, though.”

            “So that’s it.  Tell me, are you still wondering at all what made me go screwy?” Alma scowled, dropping to her knees and scooping the wrench back up.  “Prison’s a vacation.  And I’d rather go back for a goddamned century then spend one more hour with the motherfucking Omegas.”

            Sonja only smirked now, admiring the tapestry of bottled-up fury that was Alma Warren.  At last satisfied with her goal of somehow getting the shrewish woman to crack, she stepped back, wandering toward the center of the auditorium again.

            “How’s it looking, Alice?” Halle called from nearby, pressing a finger to her earpiece.  “That bird still on schedule?”

            “Yep, as far as I can see,” the voice crackled into her ear.  “Everything’s looking good.”

“Roger’s still on patrol.  Can you see him now?”

            “I saw him head past my door and into our blind spot in the north wing.  I guess he’s just doing a sweep.  Nothing going on out on the front steps, though, so he should be just fine,” Alice reported.

            “Glad to hear it.”

            Glass from the truck window spilled out across the floor as Roger pulled his fist back out of the vehicle.  He wagged his arm, mumbling something under his breath to work through the soreness, and turned toward where Taylor had fallen.  His intended target, though, had already scampered back behind a stack of bricks and out of sight.

            Stamping over the crystalline particles in his combat boots and crunching them to dust, Roger’s hand slid down to his belt, reaching to pull a handgun from its holster.  Before he could draw it, though, he eyed the opaque tarps draped over the open windows of the hall, realizing just how little of a sound barrier there was between here and any Aegis forces loitering around the building.  Resolving to keep the matter quiet and, more importantly, avoid Halle’s wrath, the bearded ogre of a man shoved his firearm back into its place and instead yanked a machete from its sheath on his thigh.

            “Hey, c’mon out, uh… Taylor, isn’t it?” he said sunnily as he raised the broad-edged blade up to an offensive stance.  He neared the pile of bricks.  The light of the thinned sun shining through the tarps reflected off the machete and flashed several times across the floor, stretching all the way to the wall.  “I promise I don’t bite.  Not when I’m on the job, anyway.  Gotta save some fun for after hours, you know.”

            Once he’d reached the brick pile, Roger clambered on top for a clear view of the other side, which was emptier than he’d been expecting.  He leaned down, wrinkling his nose and simpering at the girl’s pathetic hide and seek game.

            As soon as her hunter was preoccupied, Taylor popped up from the opposite end of the pile and flung a brick at his head.  Surprised, the man put a hand up just in time to swat the chunk of building material out of the air, laughing as he watched it bounce to the concrete and shatter into red dust.  It wouldn’t have hit its mark even if he’d missed it coming.

            “Let me guess.  They never let you play pitcher in little league, did they?” he snorted, turning back in Taylor’s direction just in time to see a mortar spade spiraling through the air, this time aligned with its target.  Gulping air, he swerved a little too late to avoid the tool’s cold tip clipping against his temple and drawing blood.

            Roger sputtered and tumbled awkwardly off the pile of stone, punching the ground with enough force that more of the brick dust was kicked up into the air.  He wiped a finger over his forehead, swiping away a smear of blood, and felt the veins in his joints tightening.  It was a little too novel of a sensation to have been cost an injury from something that still continued to live.

            Taylor held the breath in her chest as she took cover again behind the bricks and placed a hand over her pocket to ensure Ben hadn’t been too jostled after she emergently stuffed him in.  He wriggled responsively as her fingers fished gratefully inside for his well-timed warning.

            The moment was short-lived, though, as the entire stack of bricks, supported on a wheeled forklift raft, suddenly lurched to life.  Roger, with his shoulder pressed to the other side, grunted as he shoved the entire pile forward, nearly burying Taylor under the cascading bricks if she hadn’t taken off running again.

            By then, she was off in a flash.  Her eyes flew over the area littered with bags of powder cement and improperly stored tools, looking for a hammer or screwdriver to defend herself.  Vaulting over a folding table, she looked over her shoulder just in time to see Roger’s machete slicing down through the air, catching the light again as it had so helpfully a few seconds before.  The man brought his blade down into the table, bisecting it with the smallest added thrust and kicking the crumpled metal legs aside as he closed the distance with Taylor.

            The Alpha’s black hair bounced over her eyes, blocking out her peripherals.  In the next instant she felt Roger’s hand on the back of her shirt, defying gravity with a single lift.  Thinking fast, she windmill-kicked with both limbs, meeting Roger’s chin with her feet before his machete could rise back up to meet her stomach.  He huffed, instinctively throwing Taylor through the air, where she fell head-over-heels and collided across the surface of another table, this time knocked a wrench to the ground.

            She gasped, ignoring the aching pain in her back from the hard landing, and flung herself at the tool.  Before she could lift it, though, Roger’s boot came back down, stomping onto the handle and nearly taking Taylor’s fingers off with the force of it.  He kicked the wrench well out of her reach and leaned down, meaty fingers extended to make a grab at the young heathen’s throat.  Taylor’s eyes flashed back up to the table, and gritting her teeth, she kicked back up into the underside of it, propelling its top board into Roger’s side.

            The machete dropped from his hand as the six-and-a-half foot giant staggered to the side, patting at his bruised hip.  As soon as he went down, Taylor swung herself onto her feet and reached her into her pocket.  Her blood ran cold as she realized it was empty of anything, Beta or otherwise.

            In the instant of her frantic realization, forcing the young Alpha to look back to the floor for her displaced charge, Taylor’s world became a flash of fuzzy neon color as Roger’s fist met her jaw.  She tumbled back onto the ground with a hard slam and felt a lost tooth ricochet off the inside of her already-swelling cheek.  The salty metal flavor of blood spread over her tongue.  There wasn’t even time to think about getting back up before the grizzly brute’s leg wound back and launched forward, impacting Taylor square in the stomach and sending her sliding over the floor like a hockey puck.  Crashing into a pile of wood scraps that puffed a noxious cloud of sawdust up into the air, the Alpha blinked, fighting to avoid blacking out.

            “Now I just gotta know…” Roger drawled contentedly, wiping another trickle of blood from his forehead.  “…where did such a pretty little girl like you learn those fancy tricks?”

            Taylor coughed, struggling to regain a full breath, and feebly reached out.  Her vision swimming, she settled on the wrench Roger had punted aside, a mere stone’s throw away.  She crawled forward, aching in her side, determined like never before.

            “Ah-ah-ah!” Roger scolded churlishly, suddenly standing above her.  Putting his thick legs overtop the subdued woman, he lowered himself down onto his haunches, purposefully giving Taylor plenty of time to grab the wrench.  As she rolled back around, though, preparing to bludgeon his face, she was met with a smarting slap to the cheek that blocked her blow and caused her arm to plop onto the ground again.  “C’mon.  You’re gonna have to be much, much faster than that to get anywhere with me.  Though if you want to try beating a different part of me, maybe a little lower down, well…”

            Taylor spit a thick wad of blood-tainted saliva into Roger’s face, halting his sanctimonious foreplay, and the swaggering grin faded from his face.

            “Okay, pretty little girl.  You want to play around rough?” he uttered venomously, dropping all pretense of playfulness.  He lifted his arm again, colliding his fist with the concrete mere inches from the side of Taylor’s head.  “We can play rough, then.”

            In a flash, Roger’s expression changed once again from irritated resolve to one of distilled agony.  Opening his mouth, he let loose a furious roar that nearly discombobulated Taylor’s sense of hearing.  Blinking through the last of her temple-thumping dizziness, the endangered Alpha looked down the length of Roger’s body, down to his ankle, where the cuff of his pant leg had been shredded.

            Ben, clutching a jagged scrap of loose metal with all his might, dangled from the end of Roger’s now-bleeding shin, where the Beta had just jammed the shard in all the way up to the hilt.

            Practically foaming at the mouth now, Roger wheeled around and spied Ben, who’d let go of the makeshift weapon and begun to back uncertainly away, knowing full-well he’d be a stain under the towering Alpha’s fist before he took more than one stride.

            Bleary with pain and frustration, Roger reached for the miniature annoyance.  A shadow was cast morbidly over Ben, who now remained perfectly still, his clothes stained with Roger’s blood and his arms folded reverently behind his back as if waiting for the gallows to drop him into oblivion.

            A second before the barbaric mercenary’s fingers could close around the Beta, Roger’s world fractured into a cold, unconscious void as Taylor cracked her wrench across his skull.

            Alice Webb’s fingers scuttled over her keyboard, jumping from her laptop to the control panel of the Norman & Joan Tyler Convention Center’s external security measures.  She’d put the finishing touches several hours ago on a definitive block to keep out the pesky team of Aegis tech wizards trying to retake the building, but she had also been given strict orders by a mortally paranoid Halle to make regular manual checks of the layout regardless.

            It hardly mattered now, though.  Even in her brief seven months under Aegis employ more than three years before, Alice had scooped up just about every trick she needed to tango with the best the Omegas had to offer, at least on a computer screen; in person would be an entirely different story.  Luckily, Alice’s arena of choice was in cyberspace, where the only size that mattered was measured in bytes.

            None of them had ever appreciated her there, anyway.  The fact that she’d remained in an entry level position for more than half a year was infuriating enough, but to have to stand by and watch in the unpunished aftermath of her best friend’s house being attacked by an Omega all to win back some Beta scum’s furniture… well, that was just about all the convincing Alice needed to learn she had been on the wrong side.  When the invitation for fulfilling alternative work with the Paradise sisters came through, it wasn’t much of a debate.

            “Alice,” came the call through her direct radio to Halle.

            “What’s up?” the girl said, clicking the button on her device.

            “We’re about ready to lay out the terms for our friends outside.  Go ahead and patch the same camera back through, if you please,” Halle said.

            “Will do,” Alice replied, tapping through a few screens on her laptop and opening up security just wide enough to let Aegis break through once again into the feed.  “There.  Done.”

            “What would I do without you?” Halle chuckled, cutting the communications line again.

            Alice shrugged in answer to the question even though no one could see her, idly tapping the rubber heel of her shoe against Max Lawson’s bound unconscious form still flopped on the floor like discarded butcher’s scraps.  With the VTOL nearly here, this whole escapade would soon be over, and she could finally get out of this room, which the Alpha was very much looking forward to because of how sore her butt was becoming.  More importantly, it would be time to cash her check, and judging from the number Halle had so casually pitched to her during the covert job interview, there were going to be many glorious days of lounging in the months to come.  Or weeks, depending on how fast she spent the cash.  Alice’s mother had always been a real stickler about “saving for the future,” but given how easily the girl could get what she wanted with a few clicks, it sounded awfully damn petty.

            She surveyed the blinking display screens around the room and leaned back in the swivel chair that served as her throne, folding her hands behind her head as a pillow.  If today really was going to be pulled off as smoothly as it was looking and the jobs continued to roll in, she knew she’d realistically only need to work for a combined total of maybe ten days for the rest of her life.

            The gleeful pontificating in Alice’s silent computerized sanctuary was rudely interrupted by the slamming of a metal grate in the ceiling, the view of which was blocked by a humming cabinet stacked with hard drives.

            Choking back a shriek, the awkward Alpha stumbled from her chair, nearly tripping on the wheeled lower legs, and made a dive for her loaded pistol resting on a side table.  Her fingers groped at the edge of its surface, but by that time Taylor already had snagged Alice by the ponytail.  The intruder slammed her victim’s head hard enough into the table that spatial awareness was suddenly slightly more impossible than defying gravity by blowing bubbles.  Ben, huddled in his new friend’s pocket, was rattled by the impact, but held tight to the fabric of her pants, knowing this was necessary to have any kind of chance at retaking the hostage Betas.

            Alice, sputtering back tears of shock as she flopped to the floor, attempted to distinguish shades of the color spectrum around her.  She wobbled back to her haunches to retaliate.  Taylor acted quickly and tore the radio off the techie’s jacket and slid it over the tabletop.  From there, she delivered a knee to the unprepared Alpha’s head that conked her back to the floor, where she remained in a fearful curl.

            “All right, buddy,” Taylor sighed happily.  She gripped the utility belt around her waist that she’d ripped from Roger’s unconscious and now-conveniently incapacitated body and pulled loose a roll of duct tape she’d yanked from a toolbox in the north wing.  “I’ve got a couple easy questions that you’re going to give me easy answers to.  If not, we’ll talk about pulling some of that hair of yours off.  Got it?”

             “So you see, Madam Director, or whatever the hell they’re deciding to call you now…” Halle sang into the auditorium camera in plain enough sight for Abby Lindon.  “…it’s really a pretty good deal for you, when you think about it.  Wouldn’t you agree?”

            There was a stinging pause on the other end of the comm line.  “Just tell me your terms one more time,” Abby ordered stonily into Dawn’s laptop microphone.  Once again, Omegas and Alphas of Aegis alike crowded around on all sides, holding their breaths at the possibility of this whole nightmare coming to an end soon.

            “With pleasure,” Halle said, holding up her fingers to count through each.  “Number one: you and all your super-friends back away from the building.  All the way back, off the freeway and over the hills.  I don’t even want to see you in the camera feed.  And then when our ride gets here, you’re going to stay right where you are, and let us leave nice and quiet-like with our boxes of little friends.”

            Abby shut her eyes, clawing her fingers into the opposite palms.  Claire’s hand squeezed her mother’s shoulder.

            “And?” Abby grunted.

            “Number two: after we leave, you’re all going to go into the city and take down every Beta school.  Every elementary, every community college, and every goddamned daycare.  Not with your bare hands.  With fire.”

            “All right,” came the frigid reply.

            “And number three: you’re going to wipe every existing computer record for every single Beta.  Not just the ones we have.  Everyone.  A clean slate.  No identities.  Nothing,” Halle explained, taking a deep breath and extending her arms amiably toward the camera.  “And once you can prove you’ve wiped them all.  Once we can turn on a TV to any channel and see a Beta school going up in flames.  Then you’ll get your precious vermin back.”

            Abby’s eyes flashed up to the sky a final time, already savoring the look on the faces of these monsters once Kayla returned with the might to hurl them all high enough to see the curvature of the globe.

            All this was temporary.  Everything these people wanted was replaceable.  They simply needed to buy time now for those kids.  The Omega locked her lips, wrestling back a slurry of words intended to skewer the pious terrorist grinning broadly at her through the monitor.

            There would be time for that later.  And plenty of it.

            “You’ll have your terms,” Abby said numbly into the device.

            “So happy to hear you’re coming around to our side finally,” Halle commented.  “Start backing the fuck up now or we’re going to have some in-flight snacks on the way out of this shithole of a city.”  With that, the silver-eyed vixen pointed a pistol into the camera and fired, shattering the lens and snapping the feed to black.

            “Well?” Sonja said earnestly to her boss as she dug through her duffel bag and removed a grenade launcher longer than her arm, balancing it against her shoulder for support.

            “It’s show time,” Halle confirmed.  “Gail, you’re up.”

            “Whatever you say, boss,” her sister grunted without looking Halle in the face.  Her fingers danced over one of her kerambit handles, stroking underneath the blade as she marched up onto the stage and navigated between the aisles of Beta gas chambers toward the utility exit.  Sonja followed eagerly behind, already loading ammo into her clunky ordinance.

            “And for shit sakes, Sonja, don’t put one of those into an Omega unless they get too close.  We want this clean, just like we planned, clear?” Halle warned, having seen the hungry glint in her hired gun’s eye.

            “Whatever you say, boss,” the woman called back mockingly, echoing Gail’s tone as the deadly duo slammed the door behind them.  Halle, shaking her head jovially, came up next to Alma.

            “You’ve done good work, Warren.  Really,” she said, patting the disgruntled convict on the back of the head as she gazed adoringly over the silent stacks of Beta containers as though it comprised a gorgeous mountain landscape.  “And believe me, I’m not easily impressed.  You’ve really outdone yourself with all this.  I mean, I’d read about some of your handiwork, but… Christ, were they holding you back before!”

            “They were holding all of us back,” Alma said with a hint of mania.  “It’ll be different after today.”

            “I expect it will, yes,” Halle replied, running a finger down the length of her chin as she studied each and every towering execution stack.  “This will just be the start.  We’ve got a lot of work still to do.  Like my mom used to say, knock ‘em over, and kick ‘em while they’re down.”

            “After today, they’ll be too afraid to try getting back up anyway,” Alma said, at last shutting the cover of the mechanical access panel in the center of her device.  She looked into her own deadened eyes in the brassy reflection, realizing she couldn’t quite recognize it as herself, and felt gladder for it.

            “I hope you’ll consider coming with us after this is all over.  The pay day is nice, especially from the people who chose to invest in us, but… that’s never been your game, has it?” Halle posed softly.   “You’re like Gail and me.  You believe in something more important.”

            Spreading her lips as she narrowed her eyes, boring into the image of her sunken face in the cold metal, Alma exhaled a hellish fog that blotted out her mirrored visage.  Satisfied, the Alpha rose back to her feet and repaid Halle with eye contact at last.

            “When do we start?” she asked simply.

            “Immediately, if you can,” the Paradise leader smirked, patting her bloodthirsty recruit on the back.  “Unless you were planning on taking a vacation first, of course.  Which, truth be told, I could use one myself after sitting in a dusty little basement for a year with nothing but a shitload of blueprints and my sister’s knife collection.”

            “Not a vacation,” Alma responded, placing a hand delicately over her heart.  “There’s… someone I need to see before we go dark again.  Someone I’ve waited a… very, very long time to visit.  It can start to get awfully lonely in prison when you don’t get to see your family, you know?”

            Halle’s pearly irises flared as she finally understood.  “A reunion, huh?  I think that could be easily arranged.  After all the fun’s over here, we’ll lay low for a while, take you to see your little princess, and then get back to base again.  Trust me, there’s some real magic cooking over there.  I think you’re going to have a ball.”

            “I’m sure I will,” the cadaverous inventor agreed.  She gave her machine a last loving nudge with the tip of her boot and then stepped away with Halle, sauntering back up onto the stage.  “Give me the toys and I’ll make you something beautiful.”

            “If it’s half as beautiful as this, I don’t think we’ll have any problems finding you work,” Halle sighed as the two spent a few moments admiring the architecture of Alma’s annihilation artistry under the dim theatre lighting that seemed to catch them all at their most haunting and dramatic angles.  Their eyes worked over each deadly edge, their ears straining to make out the intermingled anguished cries of a generation, so much so that both glossed over the creak of the rear exit in the auditorium.  “Imagine it, Warren.  Anything you can dream up, we’ll be able to do.  Smoking out an entire city, sticking whatever’s left of them up on poles for the cameras to see…”

            “…scrubbing the shit out of your prison toilet?” Taylor suggested helpfully as she tiptoed closer to the women, by this time already halfway up the velvety carpet en route to the stage.

            Halle pivoted back around before the sentence was even out: her handgun drawn, cocked, and aligned perfectly with Taylor’s nose.  The latter couldn’t even take another step.  Recognizing the threat without further prompting, the dark-haired intruder stopped walking and winsomely raised both hands over her head in supposed surrender but kept her eyes locked onto the barrel of her former employer’s weapon.

            “You know, maybe I didn’t make this clear before, but when I fire someone, it’s kind of a done deal,” Halle simpered, hopping off the stage but keeping her firearm steady and level to blow a hole through Taylor’s cranium if the mood should strike her.  “Perhaps I didn’t explain myself well enough the first time.  Though I thought Gail might’ve done it better for me.”

            “I know.  I was surprised she didn’t kill me, too,” Taylor chuckled good-naturedly.  She eyed Alma upon the ledge, as the woman remained stock-still, her marble-black eyes twitching cautiously at the young Convention Center worker.  Taylor knew the catlike death designer was high-strung enough to suspect something was amiss, unlike her over-confident boss, who by now was close enough to smack her target across the face with her weapon as well as just gunning her down.

            “And to think she’s accusing me of going soft,” Halle sighed with a shrug, tapping Taylor in the forehead with the shaft of the piece before looking over her shoulder to Alma.  “Oh well.  I guess this is what makes me the smart sister.”

            “Is it, though?” Taylor challenged quietly, lowering her hands just enough to snap the night-vision goggles she’d stolen from Roger onto her eyes.  The sound startled Halle, prompting her to turn back around and face Taylor with a confused frown.  All she received in reply was a bizarrely victorious grin and a casual salute.

            A cacophonous fireworks display of spurting sparks and crackling outlets spread instantly across every wall and ceiling.  Ben, who’d just managed to crawl his way back into Sonja’s duffel bag while Taylor stalled for time, heaved with all his bodily strength, miniscule though it was, into the activation plates on the portable short-range EMP.  With a blinding flash that deep-fried the lights and fizzled out the remote control connection to Alma’s device, the auditorium was plunged into darkness.

            Halle, panicking for perhaps the first time in her life, fired a round into the void and hit only air as Taylor landed a right hook across the Alpha’s pristine cheek.

“This is Ivy Erikson from RED Channel 1, your go-to source for what’s happening… in your world!”  The reporter nudged an earpiece with her fingertips as she clung to her seatbelt in the news chopper, attempting to make out the suggestions over the roar of the rotating blades above them.  Her cameraman steadied the mechanical rig against his shoulder and gave her a thumbs-up.  “Right now we’re above the Norman & Joan Tyler Convention Center and Memorial Gardens, which has been locked down by unknown hostiles since this morning without any contact from those inside, and very little information from the Aegis personnel around the perimeter.  We’re coming to you now with a new development.”

            Ivy’s grip on the belt tightened as the helicopter swerved around the head of a dark-haired Omega rising up off her haunches back to full height.  The young leviathan’s tanned features grimaced at the sight of the copter so nearly skidding along her cheek with its tail, but her brown irises were too intensely focused on the gravely silent fortress to react otherwise.  She hardly paid the whizzing vehicle any mind as her shoulder rose into view of the front window, forcing the pilot to steer sharply upward to avoid bouncing directly into Claire Lindon’s chest.  With mere feet to spare, the RED copter zoomed past the Omega’s ear, traveling in pace with eight other flying competitors from other stations converging toward the Center.

            “As I was saying…” Ivy grunted, patting down her shiny bangs to ensure they were in place for camera.  “The Omegas and other forces of Aegis have begun retreating from the Center, most likely complying with the terrorist cells that may be operating inside at this time.”

            The Alpha thoroughfare leading to the Center, by now positively jammed with a colorful mob of buzzing reporters, weeping parents, and angry protestors, had descended into hysterics over the last hour.  The covered Beta paths lining the roads were on the verge of structural damage from how thickly packed they had become with helpless Beta family members.  The din raised by the mixed races clamoring for the whereabouts of their children clouded the air, affecting even the Omegas’ auditory clarity.  Some carefully placed PR pleasantries from Rebecca Reynolds had managed to keep at least some peace in the road, but after the decree from Paradise to fall back, the crowd was rapidly losing its already short temper.

            “Everyone needs to move away from the building,” Abby Lindon instructed, allowing her voice to boom a solid mile down the road, so heavily trafficked with people the concrete was no longer visible between the waving arms, megaphones, and crimson-painted signage.  She raised her hands up, palms facing the city skyline beyond, and gently waved them back, knowing in her heart how difficult it was going to be for those people down there to want to listen when so little was known.  “Please clear the street.”

            Below, an armored frontline of Alpha security and SWAT teams were attempting to shepherd the masses back down the block without the use of riot shields, though a fully supplied arms van was nestled at the bottom of the hill in case the situation became direr.  Blended cries and desperate demands for answers from all over the throng intermingled from those who stood at six feet and three inches alike.

            “Cooperate and this can be over much sooner,” Claire announced to the crowd, taking a similar stance next to her mother near the edge of the blockade Aegis had arranged that morning with trucks and stone barriers carried in her own pocket.  She too raised her arms, brushing the air and gritting her teeth behind stoic lips.  “Thank you for your patience.”  The pair of towering brunettes, with help from the Alpha police below, steadily repelled the sea of faces.

            On the opposite end of the Convention Center, passing over the loping hills were Melody, Kyle, Dawn, and Enforcer Hart.  Each approached the news choppers one by one, holding out a hand to act as a temporary helipad as they calmly explained the necessity to move back for the safety of everyone trapped inside.  Those that were caught in Melody’s fingers, especially, beat a hasty retreat from the vicinity of the building.

            “It appears the Omegas are issuing orders that members of the press go back behind Convention Center property lines, thus infringing on our God-given first amendment rights as journalists,” Ivy Erikson reported intently into the RED camera from inside their helicopter: the final remaining airborne straggler.  “Our audience surely is familiar with the Aegis approach to freedom, and it would seem even in times of danger for our Alpha friends and… Beta friends… inside the building, they have no intention of involving the public in their master plans.  Personally, I think there’s no better time than now to-”

            Having slipped out of her seatbelt as she leaned in on the camera, Ivy was jostled roughly to the floor as a round of apparent turbulence nearly whiplashed the RED chopper out of the air.  Rolling over, stamping her pristine pantsuit in grease on the cold hull of the vehicle, Ivy struggled to regain her footing as she watched her cameraman thrown back against the seat.  The recording device slipped from his hands, shattering into a pile of useless glass and metal at his feet.  Ivy screamed with concern for the camera as her hapless coworker rubbed his aching temple.

            Meanwhile, the pilot had released his grip on the steering handle and given his full attention over to keeping his bladder from popping in terror as Jenna Reynolds’ blue eyes narrowed menacingly into the front window of the chopper, filling up whatever view of the sky remained.  Wisps of her fiery locks dangled over the glass rim as she cautiously drew the rebellious little fear-mongers closer to her face.  The enormous fingers trembled as they clamped around the tail of the chopper.  Jenna was doing her very best not to snap the protrusion clean from its metallic body and send the whole pile of junk spiraling to the ground in a plume of smoke.

            “Excuse me,” Jenna coughed with feigned politeness, instilling epileptic tremors into each passenger.  “I believe we asked you people to back off?”

            Halle Paradise blinked woozily, face-down on the floor of the Norman & Joan Tyler Convention Center and Memorial Gardens main auditorium.  She stroked a knuckle along her sore jaw and traced her gloved finger up to her lip, sampling the warm liquid that was trickling from the nostrils of her shattered nose.  Biting back the pain like she’d been trained to do, the woman was far more troubled by the foreign and utterly poisonous feeling of uncertainty she was being made to feel right now through the veritable molestation of Taylor’s deceit.  Batting her eyes with the effort to regain full awareness, she realized the room had gone black, and felt the twinge of another unwelcome novelty: fear.

            Like a wounded jungle cat, Alma Warren had sprung from the stage the moment Ben’s triggered EMP had cooked the lights.  She scrambled on all fours in the dark toward her pile of tools near the main console of her death-dealing architecture.  Rooting through the nothingness, her fingers flew over loose screws and rubber wire hunting for a socket wrench she’d left lying out.  There was nothing, though she knew it had to be there.  Despite her penchant for chaotic order in her workspace, Alma was not one to be forgetful.  She growled, unaccustomed to feeling lost.

            The wrench revealed itself as the brunt of its business end was smashed into the ragged Alpha’s spine, courtesy of a quick-thinking Taylor.  Alma doubled down onto the ground, ignoring the swelling on her back and instantly pinpointed her foe in the dark.  Wrapping both legs around the goggled traitor, she coiled her limbs like a snake and knocked Taylor down to the ground.

            Unprepared for such a speedy retaliation, Taylor landed hard on her tailbone, but scuttled backward out of Alma’s grasp as quickly as she could before the older criminal could land a blow.  Through her green-tinted night vision lenses, she watched as the blinded woman searched the void with shifty irises that would’ve looked more at home in the crusted sockets of a massive arachnid, her hands sliding like discerning claws over the floor.  With a gulp, Taylor chanced the immediate telegraphing of her location and leapt to her feet, slamming the soles of her boots against the ground for added support.

            This, too, brought a response the young Alpha wasn’t anticipating.  Alma lunged from the ground toward the sound, wrapping herself around Taylor’s thighs and dragged her right back to the ground, this time not letting up as she clambered her way overtop her prey.

            Squirming beneath the wiry frame of her savage former coworker, Taylor fought for the necessary leverage to heave the socket wrench into Alma’s neck but froze when she felt the woman’s nails sinking into her forearm.  She cried in pain, already feeling blood dampening her flesh as her hand instinctively released the wrench to the ground with a clatter.  Before Alma could lower her sharpened fingertips back into another exposed part of Taylor, however, the pinned girl tucked her knees into her attacker’s stomach, shoving up with all her might and tossing her aside.

            With the momentary distraction, Taylor grappled for the wrench as she rose, missing it in the panic of the rush to her feet.  Alma had already recovered, keeping a low center of gravity as she pivoted back around for another pounce, her fingernails now glossed with Taylor’s blood.

            Sucking in air between grinding teeth, Taylor squeezed her opposite hand around her ravaged forearm to dam up the blood as she silently stepped backward on the balls of her feet.  Alma was advancing slowly, shaking her head rapidly from side to side in furious search for any audible clues.

            Taylor peeked over her shoulder in time to see Halle stumbling up, her lips and chin stained dark.  Her embittered eyes darted through the dark as she and Alma both began narrowing their search into the cross section of the blackness, where Taylor was plotting her next move in an attempt to ignore the stinging sensation shooting down her limb.  She felt the five distinctive cuts carved into her skin and watched as Halle marched with increasing confidence into the black.

            That was when Taylor spied Mona Collins, risen at last from her chair for the call of duty, moving with impressive silence across the carpet behind Halle.  The woman’s practiced ear picked up on the disturbance, but too late to avoid the follow-through as the young Alpha heaved herself onto Halle’s back, wrapping her arms around her slender neck and kicking her feet into the woman’s thighs.

            The move was inefficient, foolish even for how vulnerable it made the teenager, but for the militaristic Halle, it was just far enough outside the realm of her expectations to buy Taylor time to move out of the woman’s warpath.  It only took the elder Paradise sister a few seconds to propel an elbow into Mona’s side, stunning and turning her into a human-sized ragdoll to be thrown aside in favor of more threatening targets.

            But it was enough, as the commotion had caught Alma’s attention.  She crept swiftly toward her employer, hands curved for more butchery as she passed Taylor.  The only Alpha burdened with vision clapped her borrowed wrench into Alma’s knee, instantly reducing her back to the ground, and this time didn’t waste an instant going for the woman’s chin.  Anticipating this by the time she’d hit the floor, Alma threw her arms up in defense, saving her skull but still suffering a crushing blow in her limb that snapped bone and shredded her vocal cords with the anguished screech that followed.

            The room was nearly theirs, and with it, the one hundred thousand innocents now clamoring in fright and fragile hope that their saviors had finally arrived.

            A survival lantern crashed into the floor and rolled toward the front of the auditorium, spilling damning light to all corners of the stage.  Instantly everyone present was illuminated, and Taylor’s goggles blared with blinding white, the accessory now betraying her.

            This was all that was needed to turn the tide.

            Within moments Halle had Taylor’s weakened arm in a lock beneath her elbow, snapping her away from Alma.  A painful pop echoed off the walls of the magnificent hall as Halle twisted Taylor’s shoulder out of its socket, yielding an ear-shattering scream from the young Alpha as she crumpled to her knees.  Wiping her wet gloves together, Halle spit onto the incapacitated girl’s face in contempt.

            “What in the unholy shit is going on in here?” Gail roared as she stomped into the glow of her provided light source.  She scoffed as her sister shuffled around to face her, looking none the worse for wear with disoriented pupils and bloodied face.

            “Little oversight,” Halle muttered, wiping a fresh red smudge off her nose and cringed at the contact on her broken bones.  “No problem.”

            “No problem?” Gail gawked, patting her sibling roughly on the cheek.  “Look at yourself.  You just got fucked up by a little girl in pigtails.”

            “I guess maybe I was distracted by the fact that she’s still alive,” Halle scowled, dodging her cheek away from Gail’s touch.  “I’m surprised you didn’t slit her from neck to navel.”

            “I was saving this one for later in case I got bored on the flight,” Gail said, unsheathing a kerambit blade and pointing it at Taylor, who wasn’t even bothering to look up now as she pressed her forehead to the floor, clutching her abused and bleeding limb in a trembling fist.  “Really, I think the main concern here is how you almost let our entire operation go to shit because you like to talk to your toys so much.”

            “Our operation?” Halle sneered, coughing with the awkwardness of inhaling through the blood as she advanced back on her sister.  She jabbed another finger into the woman’s chest as Alma, nursing her bruised knee and rapidly darkening forearm, looked on with stoic neutrality.  “I don’t know how many times I’m going to have to squeeze it through your thick skull, but nothing that’s happening here is yours.  Get that?  Everything we’re doing today… accomplishing… is because of me.”

            “Fair enough.  You can have what’s yours, sis,” Gail said, nodding with uncommon peace, even having the grace to ignore her sister’s prodding hand.  Instead she reached out to Alma.  “But if it’s okay with you, I’m gonna have what’s mine.  Alma?  Would you mind tossing me my cookie?”

            Wincing from the pain, Alma nonetheless found the focus to dig through her baggy pockets and produce a black trigger handle, capped on the end with a protective metal cover.  She threw it to Gail’s waiting hand without a second thought.

            “What are you-” Halle snarled, unwilling to believe what she was witnessing as Gail triumphantly caught the activation device for Alma’s execution machine.  Snapping the top open, the woman squeezed her finger into the red tab.

            But nothing happened.  A few crackles emanated from the machine as it attempted to establish a connection, but quickly fizzled out, still completely juiced after the blowout caused by Ben’s electromagnetic distraction.

            “Huh.  That’s funny,” Gail said, frowning at the now-useless gassing trigger as her sister seethed with apocalyptic fury.  “I hope we didn’t pay you up front, Alms.  I’m seriously starting to question your talents.”

            “What the FUCK do you think you’re DOING?” Halle burst, throwing herself into Gail with what little strength remained in her bones.  Both women tumbled to the floor as the trigger fell from Gail’s loosened fingers, rolling over one another as the more murderous twin allowed her sibling to wail against her chest and shoulders unimpeded with limp fists.  Halle’s throat croaked, as she was unable to make a choice between pure rage or broken-heartedness as her sister’s alternate plans became perfectly clear at last.  “You… that wasn’t the plan… you could’ve screwed this entire thing, right now.  You…”

            “C’mon, Halle.  You honestly thought I was just gonna let all those runts walk out scot-free?” Gail teased, catching her sister’s wrists and blocking any further attack as they tussled.  A few drops of Halle’s blood dribbled down her chin and plunked against Gail’s cheek.

            “You were always just going to kill them.  Sell us up the river, just like that,” Halle accused, her quicksilver eyes flaring as what little love remained for her sibling drained away.  “We would’ve all died, you know.  If what you’d just done had fucking worked, Aegis would come in here and tear us into cutlets.  You were really ready to-”

            “Of course I was goddamned ready,” Gail snarled, froth spilling rabidly as she looked on her sibling with renewed passion.  “And if you weren’t, too, then maybe we’re not even on the same side anymore.”

            “If you want to die so badly for your sick little cause, then maybe you should,” Halle taunted, her upper lip curling as she leaned in close enough that both sisters could feel each other’s’ harried breaths fogging against the nape of their necks.  “Seriously, sis.  You’re ready to lay down another Alpha’s life?  Just to make some pointless-”

            “Absolutely,” Gail said calmly, burying her knife into her sister’s stomach with a single thrust between the pieces of her armor.

            Too surprised to react, Halle’s body flopped, the air expelled from her lips as Gail shoved her twin onto the ground beside her.  She crawled in closer, not bothering to look Halle in her frightened silver irises, and pressed her lips to her sister’s ear: “And I would lay down a thousand more if it meant the fucking diseases in those boxes would be cured from my world forever.”

            Beneath Halle’s bloodstained tactical suit, the blinking display of her battery-operated heart monitor flared, sounding off its cautionary siren for the secondary trigger as the Alpha’s heartrate began to plummet.

Ben clutched his pasty knuckles against his vibrating chest, for a moment considering the possibility that his heart had actually stopped until realizing it was just beating so fast he was having difficulty picking out individual pulses. A cold drop of sweat traveled down his forehead and descended the bridge of his nose as he gazed into the fuzzy bloom of the light provided by Gail’s survival lantern left near the front of the stage.

            The glow was cast across Alma, crouched to the ground with her elbow fastened around Taylor’s neck, the latter of whom appeared to be grappling with the option of passing out. Her face had gone even paler than her concealed Beta accomplice’s hands, her eyes glazed over even from this distance, her dislocated arm dangling off her shoulder like a disembodied salami. Mona looked especially sickly herself too, especially after being dealt a blow that was rapidly causing her jaw to swell like a purple storm cloud.

            Of course, even more troubling was Halle Paradise, sprawled on the carpet a few paces away from her mutinied engineer with her sister’s knife wedged between her ribs and dark blood spurting like a broken fountain out of the wound. Her heart rate monitor was still blaring its warning call, threatening to set off the gaseous mechanisms inside the metal graveyard that would send one hundred thousand innocent souls to Kingdom Come if the woman’s heart ceased to pump. Her march toward the reaper, and with her so many others, was apparently so inevitable that Gail felt comfortable leaving the pair unattended by anyone other than the now-ravenous Alma.

            Ben’s vision was swimming faster into a whirlpool by the minute, and it wasn’t just the difficulty of seeing anything in the near-pitch black of the auditorium after he and Taylor had blown out the lights with Sonja’s portable EMP. He knew his options were trickling away just as quickly as the seconds, and standing here allowing his kneecaps to fully turn to gelatin wasn’t going to help anyone: not himself, not the Alpha he’d grown to trust against all odds, and certainly not the masses like him quietly awaiting their fates.

            Somehow or other the boy got his feet in motion again, sprinting even, pounding like fluttering petals against the floor and becoming lost in the expansive hall. Estimating where he’d found it before, Ben crashed headlong into the duffel bag and immediately began pulling himself up and over the edge. Some brief fumbling allowed the Beta to reacquaint himself with the military junk, barely remembered from earlier, but enough familiar shapes that he soon found a thimble-width cylinder with a glass lens at its tip. Snapping the flashlight on, his eyes flared with blurry ovals and green dots before readjusting and scanning rapidly through the blackened jungle of weaponry, eventually settling on something that made the exhausted young man crack a near-impossible smile.

            “There’s nothing you can do now, you know,” Alma snarled quietly, breathing down the back of Taylor’s neck as her sinewy limb crushed harder against the girl’s windpipe, keeping her docile. “You’ve seen how it works. Once Halle bleeds out, the failsafe lock goes off, and there’s no bringing her back. Or any of the rest of them.” The warm words like drops of acid dipped into the young Alpha’s ears and made her squirm in spite of the paralyzing pain emanating out from her shoulder and the drunken chill settling across her skin.

            “D-Didn’t have to… b-be like this…” Taylor sputtered, having difficulty focusing enough to twist her lips into the right shapes.

            “It didn’t, huh? What could it have been like, then?”

            “You c-could’ve just… held them to… r-ransom…” the Alpha continued, her words growing meeker as she felt Alma’s arm squeezing in closer. “M-Made them do whatever you… want. N-No one else had to… t-to die.”

            Alma opened her mouth to let out a raspy cackle before the decibels halted in her mouth, her ears perking up like a wolf’s at a metallic tinkling sound, so soft it probably would’ve been missed by anyone else present. It repeated, over and over, insistent in its cold whisper from somewhere in the back of the hall.

            “Girl,” Alma barked, earning Mona’s attention after a sharp whistle. “Check it out. Slowly.”

            Nodding, the innocent Alpha arose shakily to her feet and padded softly out of the lantern’s dim glow and into the blackness. The futility of resistance had apparently been already accepted without a verbal reminder.

            “Make loud enough steps so that I can hear you,” Alma added. The young Alpha obeyed, slamming her small feet down as she disappeared into the theatre’s shrouded walkways.

            “A-Afraid someone e-else will leave you?” Taylor whispered to her captor, suddenly formulating a potentially dangerously optimistic explanation for the sound, and deciding to take a chance.

            “I don’t need to be afraid of anything, not now and not ever again,” Alma retorted more curtly than normal, her words growing edgy as she nudged Taylor in the gut. “But I don’t need the added headache of babysitting you two separately. Soon Gail will be back, and we can watch the real show happen onstage.”

            “Y-You… gotta b-be afraid of s-something…” Taylor grumbled, conjuring up a soft belly laugh that startled her handler. “I know y-you have some… trouble keeping… keeping people in y-your life.”

            “I think that’s enough talking from you,” Alma growled, focusing her dark eyes in narrowed splinters onto the girl.

            “It’s n-not something to b-be ashamed of, Alma… everybody’s f-family is a… l-little dys… dysfunctional.”

            “Are you going to shut up, or am I going to have to choke you out before Gail comes back to decompress?” She gave Taylor’s neck a hard pull in the crook of her elbow.

            “I j-just want to h-have a little conversation now that you’ve d-decided to… go kamikaze on t-this whole thing… before the Omegas c-come in and t-turn you into j-jelly…”

            “You can only think in the small picture, can’t you? You and all your friends,” Alma scowled, seemingly forgetting her previous threats for just an instant in the face of such blasphemously narrow-minded ideology. “We don’t matter. None of us matters, individually. Gail understands that. I understand that. And soon, after everyone else sees what we’ve done here today, they’ll understand it too. It’s all about the change we have the chance to make.”

            Taylor had no spoken response this time. Instead, after another moment of pause, her breathing became heavier, heaving even, as her chest huffed out what eventually were revealed as dry sobs. The sounds throbbed in their bid to escape from her neck, still contorted by a veiny forearm.

            “Of course. This is the natural response. Just cry it out, kid. You won’t have much longer to do it, anyway.”

            Sure enough, tears began pouring down Taylor’s cheeks and dripping into the crevice between her tender throat and Alma’s skin. Like clockwork, her muscles loosened, allowing her to slip in her captor’s grasp as though her entire body had ejected the rest of her bones from their sockets as well. She slumped back against Alma’s abdomen, limp, but was quickly thrown to the ground, flat on her face like an unwanted ragdoll.

            “Pathetic. Hey, girl. What’d you find?” the poisonous Alpha spat into the darkness, only just now remembering Mona’s existence. The thumping footsteps had ceased long before. “Come back this way now.”

            “Okay…” the girl peeped, shuffling back into view, her quivering hands clasped together in a bundle of her over-long sleeves.  She remained near the edge of the lantern’s meager rays, her back to the shadows.

            “What are you doing?” Alma hissed, beckoning with a trembling finger. “Come here. Now.”

            “Y-Yes…” The girl’s feet shuffled along the aisle and closer to Alma, her fingers still interlocked and concealed inside her sweater.

            “What are you holding?”

            “Nothing.”

            “Tell me now.”

            “Nothing!” Mona squealed, quaking at the increased volume.

            “You… you found one of them, didn’t you? One who got away…” Alma accused, her hazy irises broadening in paranoia. Her fingers rent into talons as her teeth dragged bicuspid-to-molar, shredding the words. “Bring it here. To me. Now.”

            “P-P-Plea-”

            “NOW. Or so help me you will watch me peel its fucking skin off one strip at a time.”

            Now weeping just as heavily as the prone and questionably conscious Taylor, Mona took the final fateful steps toward her kneeling captor, alert and just a twitch away from a manic episode. Her fingertips eased out of the woolly sleeves one stitch at a time.

            “Open your goddamned hands.”

            Nodding, Mona unfurled her palms, turning her fingers just enough that Alma’s practiced iron-sight gaze could detect that there was not, in fact, a Beta in her hands, but a tazer, the crackling tongs of which were already whizzing through the shadow and embedding themselves into Alma’s forehead before she could get out much more than a muted squawk. The victimized Alpha’s eyes crossed into one another, adopting an eerily milky hue for a split second before her lids clenched shut and she collapsed in a heap, most likely shattering her nose as her face smashed against the ground.

            Alma was barely incapacitated before Taylor was stumbling back to her feet, wiping away the theatrical tears, and wrapping an arm around a clearly shaken Mona, who dropped the incapacitating tool out of her hands as though it had become white-hot just as soon as she’d finished firing. Ben, swelling with relief that his longshot of a backup plan had worked once he’d managed to lug the proper equipment out of Sonja’s bag, ducked back into the light at last. He hopped into Taylor’s waiting hand without hesitation after she stooped down to collect him. The Beta noted her icier touch and pearly tone of her skin, but still felt safer than he had in hours as he gave her thumb a warming pat and found the gesture returned with a sporting nuzzle against his shoulder blades.

            “You okay? Holy shit, that was… um…” Taylor breathed, every gulp of air still labored, but her spirits were noticeably lifted to see things weren’t quite so history yet.  Her thumb ran down his spine as soothingly as she was capable of.

            “Yeah, I know…” he shrugged. The past several minutes he’d spent too high on adrenaline to capably judge whether it was going to work, and now all he could really muster was wrapping his trembling palms over Taylor’s broad fingernail. “Wait… w-what about…” 

            Any and all comfort gleaned from the minor victory over Alma was instantly squelched as Halle harshly sucked in what sounded distinctly like her ultimate cloying gasp, a larger gush of blood seeping from her wound as her chest inflated fully in a desperate failed attempt to continue gathering oxygen, and then sunk down. Her hand flopped to her side and splashed into the sticky pool of crimson that had puddled around her hip. An instant later the monitor’s beeped alarm settled into a continuous, apocalyptic tone. The gears shifting inside Alma’s mechanical masterpiece further signaled that all this deceptive chaos was too little too late.

            “Fuck.” The word was almost musical in its utter despondency as it escaped Taylor’s lips. Her wrists shook, rattling Ben momentarily above her palm before she curled her fingers in closer around him, clasping him to her clammy skin. His temperature had dropped in the previous seconds to match her own.

            “What do we do?” Mona cried, shuddering down to her haunches and bracing herself against the ground as her tears plopped into the carpet. “What do we do?”

            “I… I d-d…” Taylor croaked.

            “How long do they all have? Before it… it-”

            “Two minutes. Maybe less.”

            “What about the box?” the frantic Alpha continued, grabbing for any possibility as she gazed pleadingly in the direction of Alma’s scrap-metal control hub in front of the stage. “Isn’t there a way to-”

            “Won’t work. It’s already closed off.” Eyes agape, the very veins clawing closer to her pupil as if to choke the remaining life from it, Taylor’s chapped lips closed again. A near-fatal hush settled.

            “The bag,” Ben droned out in the hollowing pause.

            “What?”

            “The bag,” he repeated more insistently, louder now so Mona even managed to drag her line of sight back up from the floor and presumably the hell to which she assumed she’d damned herself through her failures.

            “What about it?”

            “F-First aid. Or… or something. S-She must have… have a-”

            The final words were choked out of Ben’s cheeks as Taylor’s fist fully enclosed him for his own safety as she took off at a stumbling sprint into the darkness. She rooted through the contents of the duffel with her free hand while Ben scanned the semi-familiar items from chest level until they spotted it at the same time in the low spray of the flashlight.

            “What is it?” Mona howled as Taylor came tearing back with an AED dangled from her fingertip in the same hand as Ben. The younger Alpha had risen to her feet but couldn’t summon the strength to flounder much past Halle’s blood-moistened corpse before her knees gave out again. “Please…”

            “Undo the straps. Get her armor off,” Taylor ordered imperiously, dumping the device at Halle’s feet and picking its latches open with her remaining good hand. Just as terrified but yet entranced by her elder’s apparent lack of hopelessness, Mona obeyed, fumbling over the lightweight defensive attire before locating the fasteners and tearing them away with strength that could’ve only been imbued with the fear of losing a family member in the very immediate future. By the time Taylor had awkwardly pieced together the wires and patches inside the defibrillator according to the instructions emblazoned on the case’s inner panel, Halle’s body was exposed.

            “Now what?” Mona demanded.

            “Get her top up. Then move away.”

            Sweat dribbled into the corner of her eye as Taylor clung to a piece of cloth in her teeth, putting the final touches on their plastic-molded last hope. She inched forward on her knees and attached the defibrillator’s pads to the corresponding locations on the tanned, sweat-drenched skin of her former boss as Mona finished rolling the fabric as high as she could get it and wriggled away. Ben, with little else to do, clambered inside the AED’s open case and peered intently at the directions.

            “S-She won’t… w-won’t be here for l-long even if this w-works…” Mona pointed out, her words ebbing into a tragic slur. “She’s l-lost too m-much blood.”

            “We don’t need her for long. Just long enough to get that failsafe in the box open again.”

            “Watch the light,” Ben peeped to Taylor once the ends were attached to Halle’s unmoving chest. “It’ll go on when it’s ready to-”

            As if on cue, the circular display near the top of the panel glowed with a supernal red that flashed an unsettling gloss over the pooled blood. It had hardly been on for half a heartbeat before Taylor’s fist was hammering into the button marked with a lightning bolt.

            The pulse seemed almost to lift Halle’s lifeless body, teasing an exorcism, before the terrorist’s remains flopped back into the blood. A few drops splashed onto Mona’s and Taylor’s knees were the only response. It felt an awful lot like being mocked.

            “C’mon. C’mon. Again,” Taylor growled. Her thumb jammed so hard back at the button it seemed it might chip clean off the device.

            “W-Wait for the light,” Ben noted, pointing again at the darkened semi-automatic indicator.

            “C’mon, bitch,” Taylor scowled under her breath as she leaned in lower over Halle’s defiantly still form. The blue steel in her eyes flashed brighter than the defibrillator’s reader. “Get. The fuck. Back. Up.”

            “It’s almost charged again.”

            “Did you hear me, Halle? You’re not fucking dying yet. Not until you’ve done the first and only good thing in your goddamned life,” Taylor commanded so coldly Ben wondered how even someone beyond the grave could be compelled to ignore the strained syllables. The rose light filled the bulb again and in the same stroke the Alpha’s thumb squeezed the AED’s trigger, willing life and another electrified jolt into Halle’s chest. There was a start, a pulse of the Alpha’s breasts via invisible puppet strings, and a blood-choked scream from the dead-woman-lying’s lips as she was resurrected purely to save the thing she hated most in the world.

            The most beautiful sound Ben had perhaps ever heard in his life flooded his ears as Halle’s heartrate monitor returned to its emergent series of pulsing bleeps, and with it, the whirring of the execution device’s gear-operated brain.

            “Open it up. Now,” Taylor commanded as her palm lowered to scoop Ben back up. The two Alphas made the short limping dash toward Alma’s murderous technology, guided by the lantern’s previously haunting light.

            “Stop!” Halle yelped, having regained a state of mind just clear enough to interpret what was happening around her. Her hands flailed, smearing the blood further out over the carpet, and her cry rapidly devolved into coughing as more fluid spilled into her lungs, signaling how little time there was.

            Mona heaved the maintenance panel off the device as Taylor set Ben back on the ground by her feet, allowing her to fish into the mess of copper wire and clacking cogwheels with her quavering fingers for anything of use. She allowed her eyes to flutter shut, acting purely on bleary memory of her earlier work under Alma’s begrudging tutelage, flattening her palm against each rotating surface inside the bulky broadside of the controls.

            A bar. The cold clasp of a handle in her fist. Something that shut it off, however briefly. It had to be there.

            “Please do something,” Mona begged, crowding closer to Taylor over the opening but clearly afraid to set a hand on her and upset the uncertain work of defusing the device. Instead she reached down, allowing Ben to scramble into her soft palm and be lifted up into view of the action above. “Please!”

            “I’m trying.”

            “Maybe we can smash it! Is there a-” the younger girl gaped.

            “No!” Taylor retorted. “They talked us through this. Right now it’s just keeping the gas from dispersing. We destroy it now, the timer goes down to zero.”

            “What are you looking for? Let us help,” Ben offered.

            “Bar. Long. Probably below somewhere. Behind the wires. It’s… hard to see all the way in because of the-”

            “There it is,” the Beta gasped pointedly, crawling forward in Mona’s hand so far he nearly toppled off the cusp of her fingers.

            “Where? Talk me to it.”

            “You almost had it. Put your middle finger further out. Two more inches. One to the right.”

            “Got it,” Taylor grunted triumphantly, latching her fingers with a resolve thicker than any length of cobbled metal inside the horrendous belly of Alma’s pièce de résistance.

            “STOP!” Halle wailed from the distance with her final bubble of air before her gullet became too thick with blood to speak. This pitiful plea was immediately followed by the returned single-note of her monitor, and with it, the telltale whiz of the machine again setting into its preliminary gassing phase.

            “Fuck,” Taylor murmured again, eyes darting over the opening for an alternative that didn’t exist as she felt the handle beginning to sink back down through the gears toward a pair of swiveling panels, waiting like brass jaws to clamp down and swallow up the last prayer for any of the thousands of Betas inside the boxes just ahead. Pieces of what she’d learned from watching Alma were coming back now. Hanging on was the only way to keep everything still while she was working. Letting go now was a death sentence; she might as well have thrown the switch herself.

            “What’s happening?” Mona said, the words nearly as dead inside as she.

            “The failsafe is trying to close off.” Taylor ground her teeth together as the handle continued inching toward the interlocking barrier, forcing her to lean in closer until her arm was almost entirely inside the mechanism. She touched her tongue to the roof of her mouth, acutely aware of the wet sensation trickling away across her skin in all directions like ice cracking across a frozen lake, as if savoring the final moments of subtlety in her body before all feeling explosively stopped.

            “W-What happens when you-” Ben started.

            “It’s not going to feel good,” she laughed dryly.

            “Wait… how do you even know it will… p-please, you’ll-”

            “If I let go, they’re all going to die,” Taylor said, clearly trying to brace herself just as much as the other two as the handle and her hand passed between the panels, at last forcing her to insert her limb up to the hilt of her shoulder. “I…”

            “Taylor, look at me,” Ben pleaded, causing his newfound and unlikely friend to snap her attention to him. “Take a deep breath. Just look this way. Focus on my face. Don’t look at anything else.”

            “Okay,” the girl swallowed, nodding her head as fresh anticipatory moisture welled in her eyes, crystallizing the once-metallic blue.

            “T-Taylor…”

            “Hey,” she said, reading his mind and stopping him before he could get another word in. She even managed a shrug with her opposite arm. “If you had a couple more inches on ya, it’s what you would’ve done. And you know it.”

            Alpha and Beta locked eyes, refusing to blink, even as the device closed on Taylor and shredded instantly through the meat of her forearm, extracting a sentience-halting shriek from her throat that rebounded from the dustiest corners of the auditorium to every box of the execution chambers, which remained miraculously devoid of death thanks to Taylor’s fingers coiled unrelentingly around the bar.

            The streets around the Norman & Joan Tyler Convention Center and Memorial Gardens were laid gravely still and devoid of life, adorned only by the occasional blustering paper scrap after the mass shepherding by the Omegas of every Alpha and Beta away from the same mile-radius.

            Cars were abandoned in packed traffic jams, some doors still hanging open as the final dredges of the demanding, squealing, screaming throng of bitter parents, reporters, and onlookers were pushed behind distant police lines. Even the towering sentinels of Aegis had retreated once the last overzealous news chopper had been snatched out of the air, with only a few remaining at the outskirts of the landscape just close enough to ensure the deal was carried out as dictated. Abby Lindon clutched an arm around her daughter, while Rebecca Reynolds and David Hart looked on from beside them.

            “FURTHER BACK,” Gail Paradise spat into a megaphone jerry-rigged to the rooftop’s speaker system, bellowing out her orders as she stood like a self-appointed queen near the edge of the complex’s roof, her combat boots planted in a flower bed atop some freshly crushed white lilies recently potted in honor of a family of deceased miniature citizens.

            Behind her stood Sonja, oblivious to the managerial adjustments that had taken place down below in the auditorium, with a sneer carved into her lips and a grenade launcher propped against her shoulder, squared at the sky.

            “This all went much smoother than I expected,” Sonja cracked to Gail, blinking a drop out sweat out of the corner of her eye and leaving it to trickle down the smeared black liner below her lids.

            “You’re telling me,” Gail chuckled knowingly. “How much longer we got on that clock?”

            “Five minutes ‘til Garza’s bird sets down.”

            “Glad to hear it.”

            Melody King stood stock-still above the highway on the opposite end of the site, wringing her knuckles against her palm until her titanic digits were beginning to turn the raw pink of battered animal carcasses. Her honeyed tresses billowed in the breeze from on high, momentarily drifting across her face and blotting out her vision of the distant pair of terrorists that had positioned themselves near the central helipad where, Abby had informed them all, a VTOL would arrive to collect the Beta boxes and transport them to an unknown location until every Beta citizen was wiped from the digital records and every empty school was flattened under Omega boots. It wasn’t ideal, but the matriarchal Lindon understood it as a temporary solution until Kayla returned into the stratosphere to bring everyone to justice in the length of a coffee break. Melody, too, was comforted by this.

            Or, at least she had been for the past few minutes, until a twinge abruptly began to unfold inside her, gradually blooming larger, even by the standards of the one-hundred-sixty-two-foot girl.

            Something had changed.

            The duress weighed on the height-gifted Omega’s chest, pulling at the strings of her gargantuan heart and threatening to unplug them. It couldn’t be explained, and she knew it wasn’t just worry for the wellbeing of everyone inside. After all, time was their only weakness now; they held every other advantage ranging from physical might to the element of surprise, yet the churning sensation winding through her gut hadn’t ceased. Her fists shifted up the length of her taut abdomen until they were lodged under her chin, and she became aware that her feet were dragging her softly over the insignificant dips of the rocky terrain beneath the overpass.

            The impulse to stop briefly alleviated her pulse of a few beats, but the motion continued. She was walking closer. Going expressly against what the Omegas had been ordered to avoid in the interest of preserving those innocents. Still the balls of her feet propelled the girl forward at a stately pace, hardly bludgeoning the ground under every megaton stride, as though her motions were guided not by the volition of her toned muscles but an intangible force, like a warming gale improbably strong enough to budge someone as sturdy as Melody.

            “Mellie?”

            The nickname echoed fully in the Omega’s ear, yet it registered as coming from somewhere on the horizon, as though Claire had called out from across the city in a hushed whisper that had nonetheless been carried by this same guiding wind. Melody continued to march softly toward the Convention Center, her prayerful fingers still clasped and her trenchant amber eyes locked to the pair of miniature monsters poised on the rooftop. Her heartrate had since settled down to normal again.

            “Melody!”

            The yell was louder, more insistent now, and clearly not from over the sprawling urban ecosystem but in fact a few paces behind on the hill. Melody felt the rumble of the ground emanating through the rubber soles of her shoes as Claire pounded urgently after her. Those bronzed fingers reached up and wrapped over the eldest King’s shoulder, clammy and trembling in ways Melody knew she ought to have been if it weren’t for the spectral compulsion at her back nudging her forward.

            “Everyone’s clear. It’s time to move back. We… don’t want to… upset them…” Claire uttered, her lips now just a few feet away from Melody’s ear as she stood on her tiptoes to deliver the message. Her own dark locks batted in the wind and crossed over the golden tangle of Melody’s.

            The blonde leviathan paused briefly in her fated tread, not even opening her lips to respond yet. Instead she gently laid a hand over Claire’s and lifted the clenched fingers away as easily as though brushing away a fallen tree branch.

            “What are you doing?” Claire whispered, reaching out again, this time toward Melody’s arm. “Please, Mellie. Come with me. I know you’re scared for them too. But we c-can’t j-”

            “I have to,” the Omega said at last, each word a murmured hymn just as natural as the ethereally magnetic pull she was experiencing toward the epicenter of the carnage. There was clearly no further rebuttal intended.

            Briefly compelled by the confidence of her friend’s answer in spite of the monumental risk, Claire shook her head and latched a fist back around the young woman’s arm, clutching the bulging limb into her chest and giving it a tug like a fearful child attempting to guide its mother back to the known world.

            “No. I can’t let you,” Claire said resolutely. She clasped her palm to the mountainous tricep, already fully aware of how fruitless this would be if Melody didn’t physically comply.

            “Trust me,” the colossal guardian requested, remaining perfectly motionless as her friend yanked on her arm with enough potential energy to level a skyscraper into smoke. As unmoved as Claire had predicted. At last Melody reached over with her other arm, tenderly grabbed hold of the Junior Enforcer’s jacket by the scruff, and removed her friend’s resistance by briefly levitating her off the ground with a single hand. Her eyes flashed peacefully as she gazed beyond Claire’s shoulder.

            “I TOLD YOU TO BACK OFF,” Gail roared impatiently from afar through the crackling bullhorn, her eyes now locked and narrowed to the looming titan headed her way.

            “Stop!” Claire croaked, abandoning the defensive line upon having her muscular deficit demonstrated, but refusing to give up with so many at stake. Her voice cracked as another gust of wind whistled through her brunette tresses and Melody resumed her self-assured gait, turning her back on Claire once again. For a moment she considered pouncing forth and tackling her prodigious friend to the ground, ramming her through eighty feet of concrete street if necessary to halt the progression.

            “Claire.” Her mother’s voice rang out from behind, instantly nixing this possibility. “Come back.”

            “W-What? Mom, Mellie’s… w-what if they-”

            “I know. I know. Just come back,” the city’s stewardess lullabied, extending her arms and ushering her daughter back into them. The same lucid dreamy glaze Claire had seen in Melody’s eyes was even thicker in her parent’s. “It’ll be all right.”

            “But… h-how can you…”

            “Just trust her,” Abby said as she invited the trembling Omega back into her embrace. “Or if you can’t, then trust me.”

            “The tall one’s not fucking off,” Sonja observed, clamping her teeth down on a toothpick she’d been idly chewing before spitting it into the trampled soil of the flower beds below. Her thumb nudged provocatively against the trigger.

            “I can see that,” Gail said as she allowed the megaphone to fold comfortably back into her other hand.

            “So… what now? I’m guessing we don’t just gas the kiddies over that, or we’re out of chips to play.”

            “Correct.” The murderous Paradise sister seethed with the mechanism’s trigger grasped in her other fist, hardly taking notice of her accomplice now as she locked eyes above with the steadily advancing Melody, who wore a neutral expression of ashen calm with her lips pulled tight and her cold scrutiny unbroken.

            “Do I get to know what you’re thinking here, or are you just playing commander of the fucking world again?”

            “Shut up with the twenty questions,” Gail ordered coolly. “I hope you’ve already got the safety off. You can handle just one measly Omega, can’t you?”

            “Nothing. There’s nothing,” Mona huffed pitifully as dashed back into the auditorium and filed quickly down toward center stage where Taylor was bloodily clinging to consciousness, still with the remains of her arm ensnared in the manual failsafe override, and Ben seated on her shoe. “I tried every elevator in this hallway. All of them open but won’t go up or down. Stairways are locked. I think they might be barricaded too. I… could try the other wing, but-”

            “Waste… of time,” Taylor breathed in a labored sequence, groggily chewing her lower lip as she did her best to focus on the girl’s words instead of the throbbing pain threatening to seep out of every pore like liquid metal. “If did it to… those… did it to… all.”

            “I thought so…” Mona sighed, crouching down before Taylor and peering anxiously into her foggy eyes, flinching at an accidental glance inside the maintenance hatch where the young woman’s limb had been minced into a grisly spectacle beyond human-shaped recognition. It was a marvel the sacrificial former accessory to this whole mess hadn’t passed out already. “H-How are… I mean, is there anything w-we can-”

            “Don’t… worry about… me,” Taylor gulped, nodding in the direction of a half-empty painkiller bottle from the first aid kit resting on top of the copper hub, the powder-white contents of which she’d ingested in a single swallow before a fearful Ben had begged her to leave the rest. “Have to… get to roof. Have to… tell… Omegas. C-Can’t…”

            “What?”

            “The trigger for that… machine is burned out now,” Ben explained, patting a reassuring palm on his friend’s enormous quivering ankle. “So the only way to set it off is releasing the failsafe, or if the other one’s heart stops.”
            “W-What? But… I thought she had the b-bar!”

            “Separate… valve…” Taylor drooled. “Can’t… reach… now.”

            “But the only two left are up on the roof,” Ben continued. “Meaning…”

            “The Omegas can just grab them,” Mona finished shakily, nodding as she wiped a quaking knuckle over her forehead to smudge away the sweat and caked blood. “And… this will be all over.”

            “Yes,” Ben said, hardly daring to believe it himself that the end of this living nightmare was miraculously in view. “But they don’t know that. And all the cell phones in here got cooked when we blew the lights. They w-won’t work. The only way to let them know is getting up there with them.”

            “There must be something else,” Mona cried, huddling her knees into her chest for support as she leaned against the control hub and rifled through the first aid kit for anything of further use. She stood up and dragged a cloth over Taylor’s sheet-toned forehead, soaking it with ice-cold moisture, then returned to the ground, scooping Ben up and bringing him up to the level of Taylor’s face. “Aren’t there any other ways up there other than the stairs and elevators? There… there has to be!”

            “Is,” Taylor sputtered, clenching her eyes shut, throat gurgling as muscular control was neglected in favor of constructing a mental barrier to the limb-ripping agony. “Not… Alpha…”

            “What do you mean?”

            Taylor’s lips peeled apart again, a dusty rattle crawling out of her esophagus in response, and shut again. She coughed, punctuated with the burble of thickness in her throat.

            “W-What?”

            “A Beta elevator,” Ben said for her, deciphering it first.

            Taylor emphatically nodded her head once then slumped her chin back down against her chest, lapping stickily at her lower lip.

            “A B-Beta elevator? There was one just outside the hall, but… w-well, I mean… d-do you think you’ll make it?” Mona repeated with a shudder, stooping down lower to the carpet, her trembling fingers sliding nearer to Ben. “N-Not that I doubt you… a-at all, after what we just d-did, but…”

            “No, I’m with you there,” the young Beta shrugged, his eyes sinking to the crimson-splattered carpet along with his spirits. “I-”

            “Shut the… fuck up…” Taylor snorted quietly, forcing one eye back open and training its steely gaze back to Ben. “Can… make it.”

            “They told the Omegas to move back. No one will see me in time. They won’t even kill me. T-That one… Gail… she’ll just kick me off the edge and let gravity do the rest,” Ben responded bitterly. “What am I supposed to do?”

            “Show… prove… them…”

            “What?”

            “Prove… them… wrong…” Taylor fired back with newfound gusto, spitting a thick wad of blood-tinged saliva into the ground between her shoes. She wobbled in her stance, clearly on the verge of hobbling to the ground, but she held firm, even before a paranoid Mona threw her hands under Taylor’s shoulders for support. “You… already proved… me…”

            “I…” Ben gulped, suddenly rooted to Mona’s palm as a sublime spark trickled through his fingertips and into his bloodstream, familiar just as well as ancient in the way of a ghostly visage of a long-forgotten friend appearing by surprise in a dream with a smile of mysterious promise. His heart was thumping faster than ever, but his frame stood tall, or at least as tall as possible at his three-inch stature.

            “If y-you don’t think you can make it, w-we’ll find something else… we h-have to…” Mona pleaded, her hand trembling beneath him. “I won’t m-make you go t-”

            “No one’s making me. No one alive, anyway,” Ben reported solemnly, brushing off the look of immediate confusion glossed over Mona’s horrified countenance and the tranquil curve easing into the crook of Taylor’s withered lips. “Take me to the elevator.”

            “You hear me, toots? Back. The FUCK. OFF. Unless you wanna watch the fireworks go off together,” Gail bellowed through the megaphone and into the sky above her, much of which in her view was currently being blocked and overshadowed by the tremendous landscape of Melody King: her powerful shoulders squared, fists folded softly at her sides, her mountainous biceps bulging beneath tanned skin. A lone sentry amidst the deserted backdrop of the highway and hills, the canopy of her hair whipping softly in the breeze above.

            “I won’t,” Melody said calmly, every muscle in her body poised and stock-still.

            “In case metaphors don’t quite go through in that barn-sized brain of yours, I’m not actually talking about fireworks, I’m talking about your insect farm down in the building there getting a nice, refreshing chemical bath,” the last remaining Paradise sister retorted. “Sorry if that was unclear. You’re going to be responsible for thousands of little kiddies biting the dust because you can’t wrap your head around someone telling you you’re not in charge anymore.”

            “I’m only going to say this once,” the Omega declared, her voice just as cool as the passing zephyrs, betraying neither fear nor rage. “If you stop now, nothing else will have to happen. You’ll be taken in, and I’ll make sure you’re treated fairly. It’s up to you. All of this can end.”

            Gail shouldered Sonja, who still had her combat boots planted in a readied stance, the grenade launcher squared to her neck, the black warpaint around her eyes smeared into the iron sights. The redhead’s finger twitched above the hammer of the trigger.

            “You’re right,” the animal of an Alpha bellowed into the wind. “It can.”

            A mere flight of cobblestone steps up and three racks of petunias over, the matchbox-sized Beta elevator door to the rooftop garden creaked open, courtesy of Ben’s anxious punching of the emergency release button inside. Creeping onto the raised platform, he briefly took in the wide surroundings of the infinite greenery that stretched over the expansive surface of the Norman & Joan Tyler Convention Center and Memorial Gardens.

            Of course, the Beta hardly had time to process the veritable rainforest of flora surrounding him before his full attention was immediately sucked in to the deity-sized honey-blonde currently blotting out the sun just beyond the roof’s edge. He couldn’t quite attribute the effect fully to her stature, given the trauma he’d been through in the past few hours, but he felt his breath literally taken away. Though he knew she was standing at least one hundred feet away, practically miles in his mind, given how much of her gentle countenance and gladiatorial limbs filled the skybox, it felt as though he was nearly standing nose to nose with her.

            Knowing he’d need to be closer to have even a prayer of getting the girl’s attention, Ben bowed his head and took off at an awkward sprint, stepping quickest when the moving Beta sidewalk was provided cover behind a tall pot or a particularly full hydrangea.

            “See it?” Sonja whispered out the corner of her lips. “Garza is-”

            “Obviously I see it,” Gail huffed as she watched the blip of the VTOL blitzing over the buildings, its four sets of black chopper blades swiveling as the massive aircraft leveled off around the edge of the

            “He’s not gonna land while she’s standing there,” Sonja commented.

            “You think I don’t know that?”

            Melody’s eyes flashed to the hovering getaway vehicle beyond with the interest she would’ve paid a passing gnat, but quickly refocused on the two Alphas again.

            “Do you need a countdown, sweetie? You know, like a three-year-old?” Gail spat back into the megaphone, her confidence rising higher as the froth was fired from her cracked lips, despite her direct line of sight just barely aligning with Melody’s belly button. “I guess I have to be the grown-up here, don’t I? Whatever you want. I’ve got all the time in the world. You’re not past that freeway by the count of ten, and I gas the little shits. One. Two. Nine. T-”

            “HEY!” Ben screamed breathlessly from above Gail and Sonja’s heads, nearly shredding his vocal chords on the first syllable. He leaned over the railing of the Beta walkway as far as he dared, fearful of allowing them to catch a glimpse of him. “HEY! DOWN HERE! IT’S OVER! JUST GET THEM!”

            An eyelash flinched above Melody’s amber orbs. With the rustle of a thousand sprig-sized plants dotting the rooftop in a tapestry of verdant greens no larger than her thumbnail, the light refracted just so as to direct the Omega’s attention to one specific speck amongst the stepping stones and crisscrossing paths.

            And there she saw a Beta: miniscule enough to fit between the buds of most of the flowers on that roof, but one defiantly bouncing up and down, waving his arms, and shouting something that had been lost as a whistle in the wind.

            “You hear that?” Sonja growled between gritted molars to Gail.

            “Shut up,” the deranged Alpha scowled, jamming a thumb against her comrade’s lower lip for silence.

            “DOWN HERE!” Ben rasped, nearly out of sound, when he realized the Omega’s eyes had affixed to him, miraculous as it was, like a twin pair of golden-brown beams seeking him out amongst a boundless ocean of leaves. His heart fluttered with joy he wouldn’t have thought possible again in his life, post-hostage-taking.

            “It’s gotta be a…” Sonja grunted, peering up in the direction of the overhang and pointing with her free hand. “It’s up there.”

            “One got out,” Gail cursed, her ears having already picked up on the exact location above. Her knuckles popped. “Hold on. I’m gonna go make sure Muscles here gets the picture and see if I can break the Beta-punting distance record. That’ll get her to take a hike.”

            Ben heard the clomping of Gail’s boots below on the steps, immediately spotting the top of the stairs no more than a dozen feet off to his left, and felt his stomach surge upward, into his esophagus, and clot at the back of his throat. The terrorist’s footfalls landed heavier in his eardrums with every alternate crash. He noticed the pain in his chest from the speed of his takeoff before he even registered that he’d started running, pounding his tiny feet into the rubberized locomotional pavement.

            Gail skipped the last three steps and pounced to the upper landing of the garden’s loft level like a hungry puma, scanning the separate elevator doors and tracks of whizzing conveyor belts for finger-sized folk.

            There were no Betas in sight. Firearms, grenades, and kerambits strapped to every available surface on her body armor jangled in the brief quiet. Her nostrils bristled, her back arching slightly as she indulged in her favorite kind of game since childhood. So quickly did she descend into the hunt, in fact, that she barely noticed the flared shadows of an Omega’s slender fingers cresting over the rooftop and extending up to the loft, opening wider as they traveled on high.

            Melody’s colossal arm stretched forth through the space, her bared palm closing in on Gail, her lips pursed with determination, her enormous eyes bright and focused completely on the object of her ire.

            “HOLD IT RIGHT THERE!” Sonja crowed into the mouthpiece. Several hundred feet away, just above Melody’s eye line, the VTOL, churning up the air, advanced across the immense lawn and commenced spraying a barrage of white-hot high-caliber rounds into the back of the Omega’s neck that brushed away like the gentlest kiss of autumn starlight. The prodigious girl paid the annoyance only enough mind to turn her head, giving the vehicle a frown and a furrow of her brow that instantly encouraged it to ceasefire.

            But Sonja saw her chance. Clenching the launcher in her fists and rooting her heels to the ground, the Alpha lined the sights up and squeezed the trigger with all the strength she could muster, felt the satisfying expulsion of pressure inside the barrel, and watched the tube of god-defying destruction careen through the air until it collided with Melody’s open left eye just as the titaness turned back to face the Convention Center.

            “Fucking damn it. Nobody takes you at your word anymore. You have to kill everything, in front of them, and make sure the blood splashes all over them. Then they listen,” Gail muttered beneath her breath as she ducked well out of reach as Melody’s burly hand crashed down to the roof, her caging fingers missing the Alpha by several feet.

            From behind a miniature shrub some distance away, Ben watched those five digits make meteoric contact with the roof and bend at the joints. Each finger was longer than the Beta train car he’d used to reach school that morning. His mind battled to comprehend some connection between his personal existence and the larger-than-life appendage clawed into the loft, but he was too distracted in study of the intricate grooves and spirals detailing each tanned segment of the feminine digit, like something lovingly carved by beings even higher than this Omega, if such a thing was possible. In a dazed huff, he sprinted for the next hiding place.

            Melody blinked, expecting to see the sun-blared visage of the gardens below come fully back into view, and instead felt the curious sensation of her senses being tugged out of her skull through her ears, nostrils, and pupils. She felt the pebbled surface of the roof beneath the tender skin of her palm, but it was distant, as if she was learning about the impact through a phone call.

            Everything around her seemed to expand at once, a novel sensation for the skyscraper-topping Omega, blurring the colors together with the increasing roar of the wind and the VTOL’s rotors, until everything was a green, screeching mess of muddled reality. Suddenly flooded with fear, another sensation Melody didn’t often experience, she concentrated what little agency she had left in her body and gently lifted her powerful hand away from the roof, drawing it back into herself. It still barely felt attached.

            Below, she could feel her limbs wobbling, her footing unsure, like the ground was being plucked apart blade by grass blade through some invisible force. Immediately Melody descended to her haunches, brushing her fingers below in the earth before taking a seat to avert any collateral damage, her heart pounding faster than ever, and she couldn’t be certain if it was anxiety over loss of Beta life, or whatever creative cocktail of psychedelic drugs that Alpha had just introduced into her towering body.

            “I have to give you credit, whoever you are. I really do,” Gail called across the rows of multicolored flowers as she turned the corner on the rooftop, following the nearest crooked path of the Beta sidewalk. Confident now that Sonja’s specially designed Omega-halting weaponry had temporarily worked, she flaunted her words, letting them carry across the plants and paths, knowing it was probably striking some kind of cord in the tiny being’s microscopic heart. “We swept the building, top to bottom. Granted, not all of us were exactly at the top of our game, but… well, we manage. I really thought we had everything sealed up tight. But you’ve been proving me wrong. And several times today, if I’m not mistaken. Right? Snooping on us in the auditorium, switching off the lights, even in the fucking broom closet with Little Miss Resourceful. I guess it turns out she’s not as crafty as I thought. She just had a little guardian devil sitting on her shoulder.”

            Ben crouched down against a chromed statue of a Beta scientist planted among a fresh row of lilies, peeking around the corner at Gail tramping nearer and nearer to his location at the far end of the loft. It was obvious he was cornered up here by the elevators. His heart was playing ping-pong with itself against each curved wall of his ribcage. But oddly, his hands were still as he gripped a particularly lengthy chunk of mulch, peeking in the opposite direction for the most logical exit route. Instantly he spied a string of white Christmas lights, hooked at the edge of the loft and descending down to the lower levels again.

            “Ya like that? Thought you were invincible, huh? Thought nothing on goddamned planet Earth could fucking touch you. Well look at you NOW!” Sonja cackled into the megaphone as she peered down at Melody, statue-still as she perched on the lawn beside the Convention Center and waited out the grenade overdose.

            Though every ounce of her yearned to ascend back to her feet and swat Sonja into the sunset, along with that overly loud helicopter-hybrid, it was trumped by the fear that a misplaced grab would damn thousands below, and probably by extension at least another million out in the city. The same pull Melody felt inside her, taking her by the hand and forcing her to stand guard above the Center when no one else would, now restricted her to the ground, quelling the anxiety in spite of rationality. And so she listened.

            “I’m serious, you know,” Gail cried out again as she turned another corner on the garden loft. She plucked at the taller flowers, pinching their orange petals to dust and kicking at the occasional patch of dirt that seemed high enough to hide a Beta. “It’s not every rodent that can give me the slip. I’d never really thought of any of you having enough value to consider this, but I could actually see you having some application in tactical work. For real. If it wasn’t my sworn duty to wipe you fuckers off the face of the earth, I just might hire you. And believe me, I don’t mince words. If my sister wasn’t filling up with her own blood right now, you could ask her.”

            The sight of the metallic Beta scientist statue in the lily soil caught Gail’s catlike eye. The sheen of it made it stand out amongst the duller memorial plaques and Beta-built replicas. She smirked, ducking to her haunches and embracing the beast in full, her knuckles nearly dragging along the cobblestone as she extended a claw to snatch it away.

            “Thanks but no thanks!” Ben squeaked. He made his dash just as Gail’s spindly fingers closed around his hiding place. The Beta passed beneath an artful arrangement of bark and stone that separated the next patch of flowers, disappearing from view.

            “Get back here,” Gail seethed, the coy act of before dropped immediately as foam dribbled over her teeth. She surged forward, scrambling across the awkwardly laid garden dressing just in time to see Ben hooking his mulch stick over the Christmas lights, grabbing each end, and zipping along the wired line down to the main stage of the gardens.

            The Alpha booted the wooden cover aside in blind fury, shattering it into splinters, and stomped through the remainder of the lilies on her way to the anchor point of the light fixture. Clasping it in her fist and popping several of the miniature plastic bulbs against her palm, Gail gave the festive chain a whip and a tug that instantly ripped it from its embankment across the way.

            Ben noticed the detachment of his zipline much sooner than he’d hoped he would. He felt the tug of gravity, and tucked his legs up into his stomach for an increase in speed. Making the final push through the air, the Beta whizzed above countless flowers and stone shapes that faded into one as he plummeted toward the cushioned bed of newly planted soil just beyond his intended landing point on the next miniature walkway. The string of lights crashed to the ground below moments later.

            Achy but in one piece, Ben bounded up immediately and hopped to the next conveyor belt, sprinting along with the aid of its added speed, his mind on autopilot but the faces of every Beta he knew nailed to his mind’s eye.

            There was no losing now. Not as long as he could still draw in oxygen.

            “For fuck’s sake!” Dragging her fingers through her truncated soldier’s locks, Gail hurdled over the brick edge. She dropped ten feet to the stone Alpha path below and landed clunkily on her ankle, which she shrugged off and recommenced jogging after Ben, a slight limp hampering her pace. Unhinging further with every step, the woman kicked pots aside as she stamped through the beds. Porcelain rain and clouds of mulch sprang up as she crossed the last garden barrier between her path and the Beta’s, inadvertently blocking the line of sight just long enough for Ben to vanish off the belt.

            Tucking himself into his knees, the boy rolled into an open drainpipe behind the flower beds that traced all the way to the end of the garden and took off running again with hardly a look back, guided by shadow and a descending angle. The boy eased to his back and slid invisibly down the damp tunnel leading toward the north wing, curious whether he’d manage to outrun the savagely unhinged psychopath or an almost certainly impending panic attack for the longest.

            “What are you gonna DO, huh? NOTHING.” Sonja hardly needed the mouthpiece anymore to reach the violently intoxicated Omega below as she screamed with the zeal of an entranced sports fan. Reloading the launcher, she squeezed off a second canister, which was reflected with a fleshy ping off a well-placed palm ascending from above, Melody’s fingers spread wider than the blast radius. Smoke unfurled against her skin as the tinny ammo plunked noiselessly to the ground below.

            As she leaned in closer to the building, a missile fired from the VTOL momentarily shuddered the addled Omega off balance, just long enough for Sonja to place another grenade into her massive watering eyes.

            Gail vaulted past the last row of potted peonies keeping her in the central garden area. Having cleared the visitor-friendly zone of winding stalks and Beta artwork, she took off at a brisker hobble along a strip of the bricked rooftop, following the storm drain as she listened to its tiny occupant zoom along inside. She grinned, spying the tube’s exit a mere stone’s throw away, directly into the blank stone circle that constituted the in-progress new entrance to the Convention Center several stories below.

            All the space she would need to finish off the hunt.

            Ben spotted the light spilling into the dank tunnel of the drain not five seconds before he was dumped into a heap of soggy leaves at the base, painfully devoid of fencing or soil embankments behind which he could take cover. The Beta conveyor belts, too, were but a distant mirage. It was down to his own two legs.

            “Let’s see, that was about… wow, almost four minutes you kept that up!” Gail snickered as she sauntered casually around the corner, suddenly looming above the three-inch rebel.

            Ben received the start of his life. With a flinch and a yelp not unlike what he felt inside just before watching his parents turned to mush, he stumbled down the wet hill of biodegrading plant life and landed on his back upon the stone surface. Gail’s boot, scuffed by battle and tinted with what could only be dried, rusted blood painted along the sole, crashed down in front of him.

            The Beta gulped. He wobbled to his feet and backed several fruitless steps away from the ominous black footwear. Ben peered hopelessly back at the sunny horizon where he’d seen the Omega standing powerfully above, ready to snatch up the genocidal maniacs if he’d only managed to get her attention in time.

            But it seemed he hadn’t.

            “I’m pretty sure that’s some kind of new record, kid. The closest one of you has ever come was maybe… three minutes, fourteen seconds? He was cheating, though. He sent his little spawnlings running off in the other direction and cost me a few extra seconds chasing them down before I came back and gave him the game-over message.”

            Ben’s gaze idly flickered all around, taking in the ovular stretch of gray pavement that separated him from safety.

            Nowhere else to run.

            He continued shuffling back, eventually breaching the line of the shadow cast by the loft above and felt the sunshine wash over his cheeks.

            So at least there was that. He knew he’d hate having to die feeling cold, too.

            “But you. You’re a clever one, aren’t you? Seriously, I almost hate to kill you. Well, not quite, but almost,” Gail continued. “Say, though. If you drop on your knees and do some begging - and I don’t mean like “oh please oh please let me live,” cuz I’ve heard it all. No, I mean good begging… then maybe I’ll keep you around for some exercise once this is over.” Her jutting silver eyes tracked his every move, but didn’t appear to mind it as the boy crept further over the unfinished roof of the wing. A fingerless glove hovered at her grenade belt as she took another thunderous step forward.

            “Oh?” Ben heard himself croak. “Can I get your word on that?”

            Gail snorted. “No. Who’s calling the shots here, shrimp, me or you? Look, you put on a good show, and I can appreciate that in a runt. The kind of will you have to live in a place that was designed to eat you up? It’s almost inspiring, really. But you’re going to get on your knees and beg me to put you in your rightful place, or you’re going over that edge there. And fast-like, too.”

            Not particularly wanting this piece of spacial information in his head, Ben nonetheless chanced a glance over his shoulder back at the curved precipice of the rooftop, with neither stone boundary nor railing keeping anyone back. Just a clear blue sky beyond, into which he knew he would soon be soaring. The edge couldn’t have been more than ten feet back. Still he continued inching toward it.

            “I think I’ll have to pass on that,” Ben commented, turning back to face Gail, whose boat-sized ebony boot was once again in easy punting distance of his body.

            An eyebrow crawled higher on the Alpha’s battle-scarred countenance. Her fingers finally clenched around her belt, unclasping it and allowing it to tumble to her feet, with all of its deathly olive keepsakes neatly lined along the hook.

            “No?” she drawled. An eyelid flinched. “You positive about that?”

            “Yes.”

            “And why would that be?”

            “Because I don’t want to.”

            “I’m sure as hell not letting you walk back downtairs to be with the rest of your dead friends after what you pulled today. You’ve got the chance of a lifetime here, kiddo. Hundreds of flat little stains would kill to be in your position right now if my dogs hadn’t already shat them all out.”

            “You’re not going to make any of us do what you want anymore,” Ben said, craning his neck as high as it would go. He rooted his feet on the uneven terrain of the concrete, buried his anxieties like a last rite, and balled his fists.

            “You don’t have to like it, but it’s just the way the world is,” Gail said. Her stiffened hands next caressed over the body armor, pinching it around her hips and shoulders, allowing it to cascade to the ground too. The knives followed with a ringing clatter. Her holster was abandoned next, but not before she’d fished her pistol out and audibly clicked the safety off as she squared its cold barrel down in Ben’s direction. “But we control you. We even control the Omegas now. And there’s nothing you can do to stop us from-”

            Ben felt his next breath kidnapped along with the Alpha’s final word as he witnessed Gail’s face seizing up, her eyes bulging from their sockets. She regarded him with an increasingly broad smile. Even her shoulders seemed to relax.

            “Of course,” she chuckled. “You saved my sissy, didn’t you? Just long enough to switch off our new favorite toy.”

            “What are you talking about?” the Beta grunted in a nervous lie.

            “That’s why you’re ready to go down for them,” she snickered. “You think if you give yourself up now, you’ll buy enough time for them to get the rest of you cancers out alive.”

            “N-No,” Ben grimaced.

            “You think killing you is the worst I can do? You think you can be the martyr to a race of talking insects?” Gail scowled as she crossed the final distance between herself and her prey, planting her boot near enough for Ben to touch it with his nose. He could see his fearful reflection glossed in the toe’s curvature.

            Rage darkened what remained inside the husks of the woman’s eyes, crusting over her jagged features as her arm rose higher, the gun no longer aimed at Ben. She parted her lips softly, a forked tongue lapping at the corners: “Well, I’ve got news for you. I’m just a little bit of a sore loser.”

            In one snap of her wrist, the Alpha had her pistol crammed against her teeth, her finger plugged into the trigger without a second of pause or even a flinch.

            The back of her head exploded outward in a confetti of skull and fragmented brain. While the rest of her flopped into the puddle, the gun clattered at her side just as the heartbeat monitor set off the beginning of its mortal countdown chime, where it was strapped across her chest.

            On a distant corner of the rooftop, Sonja fired another drug cartridge at Melody, this time managing to aim it between the girl’s massive fingertips, but missed again as this one tumbled off the towering being’s knee as she ascended in one fluid, bird-scattering motion of typhoon-like power to full stature again. It bowled the Alpha terrorist clean off her feet, though she held firm to her launder.

            The Omega’s world was beginning to stitch itself back together, marking clear lines in the world’s geometry, the sounds of life drawing nearer to her ears again and coalescing with her heightened senses, allowing her to pinpoint objects in the distance, including Sonja’s next round of ammo.

            Melody flexed her thumb, bracing her middle digit down against the swirled pad and swinging it just as the metal crumb hurtled through the air. She easily flicked the grenade two hundred feet into the air with a single confident launch of her fingertip.

            “Excuse you,” the Omega grumbled, still quavering from the residual high that didn’t allow her to see much further than arm’s length. The redhead’s heavy ordinance reflexively plopped out of her trembling hands and into the deeply cast shadow of Melody’s body, where she herself crumbled on gelatin knees.

            The VTOL, witnessing the rapid deterioration of their gig through jet-black portholes, made a quick turn in midair and exited the Convention Center property, picking up speed as it slammed into overdrive.

            Before the aircraft could zip over more than three blocks, though, passing over one of the broader alleyways, a pale fist large enough to palm a boulder catapulted up from the street, impacting the base of the vehicle and stuttering it out of the sky. It spun wildly for a moment, fighting for control, but clearly had lost most of its capacity to correct as the underside crackled with dying machinery. Before the VTOL could crash into an apartment building that stood in its smoldering path, though, Jenna Reynolds rose up from her haunches in a flourish of strawberry locks, wrapping both hands around the sides of it like a treasured lost toy. Her fingers clenched deeper into the cracking hull, its bulletproof metal yielding to her digits like foam.

            The Junior Enforcer lowered the vehicle to her face and squared its front hatch to her chin, just close enough that its unethical passengers could make out two vast rows of gleaming, pearly teeth grinning in at them.

            Back on the rooftop, for a few pregnant moments after Gail’s tactical sacrifice, Ben stared numbly at the pile of gruesome humanity before him. He knew that down below, Taylor and Mona must’ve been panicking to realize the machine had started up once again, this time out of the brave Alpha’s reach of preventing. The seconds to cancel the mandate with a failsafe ticked by with costly efficiency.

            It was over.

            They were going to die.

            Every single one of them.      

            And then Ben’s eyes, deeply welled as they were with tears of exhaustion and insurmountable grief he’d been reserving for many long years, landed by chance upon Gail’s pile of discarded weaponry, poised on this very specific rooftop, which he only just now was recognizing.

            And that’s when he saw it.

            A glimmer. Something, sparse as it was, very closely resembling what Ben desperately wanted to believe was hope.

            Electrified by a loony spurt of hereditary bravery he’d managed to dredge up from somewhere deep in his petrified little soul, Ben timed his rapid footfalls with his clamoring heartbeat. In seconds he was straddling the loose grenade belt, tugging with all his might until each of a dozen crimson button-prompted trigger mechanisms was aimed on its side.

            With a final peek back toward the horizon, the Beta took off running along the string of grenades, punching each trigger in turn until all were lit up in a glowing promise of incendiary doom. Never breaking pace even to gasp in what he knew to be his penultimate breath, he sprinted away from the carnage for a race he knew he couldn’t possibly win.

            Ben couldn’t have said what caught up with him first, the ear-splitting cannonade of a dozen explosives unfurling their black fire all at once, or the rooftop itself, earlier staggered by Roger’s firepower, tipping down toward the ground on its last crumbling pillar with an arduous groan.

            Ultimately, all the Beta could really process was that his feet had left the ground, and very quickly. The force of the destroyed roof launching upward didn’t even break his legs, which surprised Ben as he hurtled in a swelling arc through the wind. He seemed to suspend in the mercifully cool air, almost slowing as he was toppled and thrashed like a miniature cork in so many ways on the journey that he could no longer distinguish up from inside out.

            Despite the roof growing distant in his blurred vision as Ben sailed weightlessly forth, he watched the rubble of the oval stone disintegrating in a dilating veil of smoke, tipping all its contents including the weapons and Gail’s grisly remains toward the entrance several stories below, presumably directly through the elevated road, if Ben’s rapid-fire mental math was correct, and to the earth much further down, where the analog heart monitor would fall well-out of range of the holocaustal device, thus silencing it for good.

            Ben Wagner allowed himself a smile as he closed his eyes, awaiting the impact of The End as he curled into a place of peace he hadn’t yet experienced since his orphaning in a world that had, until extremely recently, been far too large for him to live in.

            But it didn’t come. Instead came a pillowy impact that Ben would’ve entirely overlooked if his senses were just a tiny bit more jumbled than they already were.

            As the Beta cautiously unpeeled his eyelids again, remarking on the peachy terrain etched in endless creases and soft canyons, he briefly wondered if he’d arrived in the afterlife’s waiting room, before looking up in time to witness five tremendous obelisks of untold jurisdiction curling benevolently into this haven in which he’d landed.

            Melody released a staggered sigh as she laid over the Convention Center roof she’d just lunged across in a single planet-jarring bound, leveling several thousand plants in the process, and cupped the infinitesimal hero into the center of her palm.

The multi-tiered streets of the gleaming metropolis, usually teeming with vehicles, lights, and various sizes of life by this point in the midday cycle, stood almost totally silent.

            On the outskirts of the city, where the crisscrossing highways and geometric tapestry of office and apartment buildings finally became sparse enough for the fields to lay, a mass of citizens accounting for the majority of the entire population was gathered. Still, voices were almost as quiet as they were in the empty roads downtown.

            The field seemed to stretch endlessly on, yet every blade of grass was occupied by a bleacher or part of a giant’s shoe. Omegas lined the back, creating a perimeter, while Alphas crammed into countless folding chairs occupying the middle ring of humanity. Betas filled in at box seats in the center, and despite their three-inch height, represented almost a quarter of the space necessary for the guests at the funeral procession and memorial honoring the lives lost in the terrorist attack on the Convention Center seven days before. On the main stage, aided by speakers, family members and loved ones passed along last words for their fallen.

            David Hart and Evelyn Cade stood as far back as they could so as to prevent their skyscraper-scaled bodies from blocking the view of any potential latecomers. Shoulder to shoulder, arms crossed reverently before their chests, the stone-faced pair blinked away gusts of wind brushing their eyelids as they gazed around the monumental circle of mourners.

            There’d been no shortage of work for the two senior Omegas as well as everyone else in Aegis employ during the last week. Extracting the hostages, assembling an army of medical examiners and psychologists to prevent anyone among the unfortunate thousands of near-victims from mental collapse, then reuniting a sea of Betas with their families, and cleaning up the partially destroyed Convention Center. The list went on.

            In this moment, it was calming like little else to stand still and reflect on the actual people: Beta teachers, mostly, as well as some Alpha workers taken out and replaced by the infiltration team. All were honored equally as the different-sized caskets were carried on trays of flowers from the Memorial Gardens itself by suited pallbearers along a central line.

            “Didn’t Kayla say she’d be back by now?” David whispered into Evelyn’s ear.

            “She said she had fourteen new leads to follow as of this morning. She’s Kayla, after all, but she can still only work so fast,” the female Omega said. “Something she got out of the big guy’s head, I think. It wasn’t much.”

            “The one the kid knocked out… Roger. What about the others?”

            “The redhead’s still conked out after the King girl’s jump. Kayla says she’s still working on some of those threads. Nothing promising so far.”

            “Sonja Dixon. There’s a hell of a file on her,” David said. “What about Alice Webb?”

            “Our former tech guru, right. Kayla started with her. I suppose she thought she’d be the most useful. Connections and all.”

            “And?”

            “They really know how to pick ‘em. Nothing in that head but a grudge.”

            “I’m guessing the same for the grunt that Reynolds Junior grabbed up.”

            “Yes. And he didn’t even have the grudge,” Evelyn said. “We believe now that the sisters were really the only ones who could’ve helped, especially after the boys in that flying-whatever came out with holes in their chests.”

            “Insurance in case they failed. That has to mean something. I know Kayla must’ve already traced the maker down.”

            “Of course. Went cold, too.”

            “Of course.”

            “Excuse me.” A voice even softer than the furtively conversing Omegas sounded in Evelyn’s opposite ear. The source, at a height coming in just above David’s own impressive stature, placed a hand at her superior’s shoulder, brushing her ginger locks out of her eyes, and cast a sorrowful glance over the immense crowd beyond.

            “Yes, Angela?” Evelyn answered.

            “Dr. Everett came back to HQ for just a minute. She wanted me to let you two and Ms. Abby and Mrs. Reynolds know that she finished tracking the new leads and nothing came up yet, but she’s not done. She said she got some new ideas from the VTOL’s metalworks manufacturer so she’s following that next and she’s sorry she couldn’t be here right now.”

            “Never stops for even a minute,” David sighed.

            “Like that surprises you,” Evelyn said to him, before turning back to Angela. “Thank you for telling us, dear. Anything else?”

            “No, that’s it. I… should probably let Ms. Abby know now, too,” the slender Omega remarked, turning and scanning the horizon of outlying mega-humans, before spotting the elder Lindon seated reverently at the back beside Claire and Melody. Despite so dramatically dwarfing almost everyone present in physical size, the commander appeared almost compressed down to her former height as she cupped her right hand atop her knee, where two incredibly tiny specks were housed in her expansive palm. Her cold blue eyes held unwaveringly on the distant row of caskets, her lips taut, hardly aware of anyone else around her.

            “Wait,” Evelyn said as she gently caught Angela’s forearm.

            “We can tell her for you,” David said, knowing full-well now was not the time to speak to Abby.

            “All right,” the young Omega said with a nod. She brushed a thumb over her welling eyes, but put on a brave grimace. “I should get back to my desk. We’re processing… her now.”

            Alma Warren rolled over on the mealy fabric slab that constituted a cot in her temporary glass prison, nursing the bruises that painted her shoulders and knees. She’d known perfectly well there was no getting out of this once she’d awoken from the game, separated from her mechanical artwork, and strapped to a gurney. The woman put up resistance during transferal, of course, just to let them know they hadn’t killed her spirit, as she was wheeled through the whitewashed hell of Aegis. She dealt out swollen purple cheeks to at least three workers before she was beat back into submission.

            “Hello, Alma.”

            The Omega’s voice, high-pitched and cheerful though it was, seemed to darken the shadow-flooded holding room even more as its feminine notes rebounded off the translucent walls of the Alpha’s container. Footsteps followed, gaining ground, until Alma could feel the floor vibrating beneath her. She rolled her eyes.

            “Please rise so I can address you,” the voice of the Junior Enforcer continued.

            The formality was forced; that much Alma could sense, but still she sidled to her feet and padded forward in her fish tank. Gazing up toward the opening above, the Alpha watched Jenna Reynolds’ porcelain face fill in the black space. Her pale, billboard-sized countenance was so rigid it could’ve deflected a missile.

            “You’ll be referring to me as Enforcer Reynolds. It’s my duty to inform you that you’ve been processed into my custody. I’d tell you the time, too, but trust me: time is about to become highly irrelevant to you,” Jenna said, launching into the script immediately. Every word was grazed sharply between her incisor teeth.

            The Alpha sighed in resignation, crossing her arms.

            “Look, I’ve been through this before. I’ve seen it all,” Alma scowled. Gritting her yellowing jowls, she summoned a glob of spit and fired it on the altar of the glass cell before Jenna, who remained still. “Talk through your speeches if you have to. But just know you don’t scare me, little girl.”

            “Give it time,” the Omega murmured, twiddling a silky sprig of her strawberry-blonde locks between her thumb and index finger. “What, you’re saying you don’t recognize my face?”

            “Your faces have all started blending. Hard to keep track,” the Alpha grunted, though for the first time her beady black eyes zeroed in on the petite leviathan. The ebony of her irises expanded, swallowing the veins around them. “You.”

            “Aw, good, you do remember!” Jenna remarked with a facetious smirk, daintily patting her cheek. “I know it’s been a long time and stuff. Back then I was barely tall enough to see you up on that shelf where Mom kept you. But I’m willing to bet that you’ve got a way with faces, don’t you?”

            Alma chewed her lower lip until she could feel the salty crimson droplets pooling around her gums.

            “Really, it’s gonna make this whole process much smoother. You know the drill. Some of it, anyway. Things have changed since the last time we had you,” Jenna continued. She reached up, grasping at the glass cusp of the cell and tapping her fingers expectantly with the confidence of a concert pianist. Each impact rumbled down to Alma’s ankles. “I expect we’ll get along great once you remember who’s in charge again.”

            “Wanna bet on that, too?” the Alpha gnarred.

            “Of course,” Jenna answered. Her palm flattened to the side of the crystal cage, smudging steadily down the edge with an ominous squeak. Once in front of Alma, her fingers, suddenly tightening into clawed arches, pinched the willowy woman by the scruff of her jumpsuit and jerked her into the floor. After deliberately dragging the thrashing Alpha’s face through her own splotch of spit she’d left as a welcoming gift, Jenna plucked the creature out of her box and up into the darkness above. For a few moments the Omega brandished her immoral pupil in an iron-tight fist, silently savoring the show as the mad engineer flailed and scratched her way into indignity.     

            “This doesn’t mean anything,” Alma said at last once Jenna got bored and clamped her thumb into the Alpha’s stomach, briefly robbing her of air. “Your mommy played tough. Acted like she didn’t care. But she’s a softie, through and through. Couldn’t do anything to me that I couldn’t get over with a few thousand dead Betas.”

            “I’m sure that’s true,” Jenna admitted, raising an eyebrow as she lifted her prey higher, dangling her upside-down above her chin. The Omega’s lips parted, her tongue flicking threateningly from the damp hovel below. “But I’m not my mommy, am I?”

            For once in her life, Alma was speechless. In one swift motion, the Junior Enforcer’s fist softened, whereupon the wide-eyed Alpha traveled through the tube of pale flesh, was dumped directly onto the squirming tongue below, and forcibly wedged past Jenna’s tonsils and into the grim sliminess of her first session with a single gulp.

            Taylor Sharpe swallowed a sticky lump in her desiccant throat. She twirled her fingers around the narrow tube feeding morphine into her body somewhere below the mint-green hospital sheets she was currently vegetating within. The sounds of clinking, pouring, scribbling life in the medical center beyond her floral-sprayed room made nice enough company, but every once in a while during the past week, things got a little lonely. Which she supposed she deserved, given all she’d helped inflict on the city.

            Her arm, or whatever remained of it, was cradled by ceiling suspension in a variety of bandages and pins that had thankfully been numbed into oblivion after she was picked delicately out of the bloodied machine, once all Betas were rescued from the auditorium. She herself had insisted upon this, of course, viciously growling at any attempts by the rescue team to remove her until she saw each and every box opened and emptied.

            Though she’d been keeping her eyes closed for most of the day, catching hour-long naps here and there, a bristle in the blurry image between drooped lids finally prompted her to give the room a better look.

            At the foot of her bed, standing atop the plastic bay after a long ride down the Beta belt, was Ben Wagner.

            “Look who finally decided to show up,” Taylor croaked, immediately cracking a grin and a wink as the boy fought back an embarrassed chuckle. The pair stared eye-to-glassy-eye for a minute or two, competing in who could summon the most awkward smile.

            “Hi…” he breathed at last.

            “What, you’re gonna make me squint at you down there?” she groused playfully. Lifting her only free hand, she beckoned with a softly curling finger. “C’mere, small fry.”

            Ben hopped off the table and slid down the cushy slope of the blankets. He traveled cautiously along the rounded hill of Taylor’s leg below the sheets until he reached her outstretched palm, opened and awaiting him. Without even a second of the five-minute, hyperventilated pause he would’ve required a mere eight days before, Ben clambered upon the girl’s tender fingertips and rolled into the center. She scooped him up toward her face, though not quite as quickly as before, in light of her sapped strength.

            “Lookin’ good, kid. Like you barely came out with a scratch,” Taylor commented smarmily.

            “I’m just a fast runner,” Ben said. “How are you… um…”

            “Oh, peachy as hell. Just peachy,” she answered for him, glancing over at her ravaged limb inside the pristine white wrappings. “I’m gonna be looking into getting it replaced with a metal one. Maybe I can go around to schools and scare kids off drugs or something.”

            Ben snorted in response, scratching the back of his head as he leaned absentmindedly back in Taylor’s palm. He peeped up to her sky-blue eyes, a little more sunken than he remembered them before the incident.

            “Have they already peeled the band-aids off you?”

            “Basically. I just have to keep going in for check-ups every week for a while just in case. They’re afraid I’m gonna get overexcited or something since everyone wants to keep coming to see me at the house and say thanks and…” Ben continued, his words trailing off out of bashfulness.

            Taylor snickered, nudging her newfound friend in the arm with her thumb. “How many medals have they given you already? Four?”

            “Just one. I mean, well, it’s not, like, a medal, it’s a piece of paper from the city. It’s really nice, though, we stuck it on the community fridge, and-”

            “Wow, I was kidding,” the Alpha said, rolling her eyes almost to the back of her skull, her jaws hanging comically open. “Just yanking your chain, dude. You deserve it.”

            “T-Thanks,” he said softly. He peered over his shoulder toward the door. “That guy out there, in the Aegis uniform, is he-”

            “He’s there to make sure I stay out of trouble,” Taylor confirmed.

            “They really think you’ll try to-”

            “I think it’s more in case someone tries to come and finish me off,” the Alpha finished, her gaze dwindling out of the subject in her palm and down to the sheets between her legs. “Not like I blame them or anything, obviously. But I’ve still got a sentence to carry out.”

            Ben’s eyes bulged. “Y-You mean they’re going to p-put you with… with a-”

            “An Omega, yes. But not like how you’re thinking. Once I can move around on my own without this metal piece of shit dragging me around, I’m moving in to her box, at least for a year. Not for… what they usually do. I guess they’re trying something new with her,” Taylor explained.

            “Her?”

            “The Omega. Actually, the big one that caught you after your pyromaniac fun on the roof. Melody,” Taylor said. “Believe me, I’m… getting off easy. They… I mean, she made sure I knew that. Not the one who grabbed you, but the… one of the leader ones. Lindon.”

            “Lindon,” he repeated, his ears twitching at the mention of a name he’d heard like a ghost story whispered under breath between impressionable Betas about the hazards of existing, no matter how tall your parents were. “You mean like Corey Lindon?”

            “Sort of. She wanted me to know that he’s… well, she made it sound like this Corey guy is the reason I’m going with the big Omega and not… you know, going inside some big person’s shoe. She repeated it a lot so I wouldn’t forget.”

            “Oh. G-Good,” Ben said, allowing himself to relax at the idea of his gentle mountain-sized guardian taking charge of Taylor, despite the lingering uncertainty of his friend’s fate. “What… what will you do while you’re with her, then? The one who saved me.”

            “I’m not sure yet. Lots of reading and hearing lectures and reading some more. A little like a monk but without the rocking hairstyle. And I assume just thinking a lot about becoming better. Or good, at least,” Taylor said, chancing a shrug, but instantly flinching upon remembering that shoulder movement was still a challenge at this stage. “Not like that’s a hard goal to aim for. Basically any direction I go now would be better than where I started.”

            “That’s not true,” Ben said, sensing the conviction hidden behind the girl’s sarcasm.

            “Right.”

            “I think you’re selling yourself short.”

            “That sounds more like something you’d do,” Taylor said with another wink. “Pun intended.”

            “I’m serious,” Ben said. “I think you’re already good.”

            “Tell that to the million people whose lives I almost ruined because I never got out of my the-world’s-not-fair phase,” the Alpha droned, her tone drained immediately of color, even more so than her cheeks.

            “How about just to the one hundred thousand you chopped your arm off for?”

            A hush suddenly pervaded the room, allowing the medical hustle of the hallway outside to re-enter the gaudily wallpapered space.

            “I’ve got a lot of distance to go before anyone thinks about calling me even-steven,” Taylor said, bowing her head lower to her chest. A grateful smirk nonetheless tipped at the edge of her mouth. “And still. If they can thank anyone for that stunt, they can thank you.”

            “My arm wasn’t long enough to fit in there. It was just common sense,” Ben joked back, earning another shoulder nudge from her thumb pad. “Hey, it’s a big world. I gotta know my limits, right?”

            “Do you, though?”

            The Beta regarded Taylor’s stoic face: for once in their bizarre partnership she was completely and utterly serious.

            “Maybe,” he sighed, releasing the last of a weight he’d carried on his shoulders since birth. “Or maybe not.”

            “Count on it, kid,” the Alpha said, giving Ben’s hand a gentle squeeze between her fingertips.