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.”