“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.