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.”