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.