“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.