“What are you gonna DO, huh? NOTHING.” Sonja hardly needed the mouthpiece anymore to reach the violently intoxicated Omega below as she screamed with the zeal of an entranced sports fan. Reloading the launcher, she squeezed off a second canister, which was reflected with a fleshy ping off a well-placed palm ascending from above, Melody’s fingers spread wider than the blast radius. Smoke unfurled against her skin as the tinny ammo plunked noiselessly to the ground below.

            As she leaned in closer to the building, a missile fired from the VTOL momentarily shuddered the addled Omega off balance, just long enough for Sonja to place another grenade into her massive watering eyes.

            Gail vaulted past the last row of potted peonies keeping her in the central garden area. Having cleared the visitor-friendly zone of winding stalks and Beta artwork, she took off at a brisker hobble along a strip of the bricked rooftop, following the storm drain as she listened to its tiny occupant zoom along inside. She grinned, spying the tube’s exit a mere stone’s throw away, directly into the blank stone circle that constituted the in-progress new entrance to the Convention Center several stories below.

            All the space she would need to finish off the hunt.

            Ben spotted the light spilling into the dank tunnel of the drain not five seconds before he was dumped into a heap of soggy leaves at the base, painfully devoid of fencing or soil embankments behind which he could take cover. The Beta conveyor belts, too, were but a distant mirage. It was down to his own two legs.

            “Let’s see, that was about… wow, almost four minutes you kept that up!” Gail snickered as she sauntered casually around the corner, suddenly looming above the three-inch rebel.

            Ben received the start of his life. With a flinch and a yelp not unlike what he felt inside just before watching his parents turned to mush, he stumbled down the wet hill of biodegrading plant life and landed on his back upon the stone surface. Gail’s boot, scuffed by battle and tinted with what could only be dried, rusted blood painted along the sole, crashed down in front of him.

            The Beta gulped. He wobbled to his feet and backed several fruitless steps away from the ominous black footwear. Ben peered hopelessly back at the sunny horizon where he’d seen the Omega standing powerfully above, ready to snatch up the genocidal maniacs if he’d only managed to get her attention in time.

            But it seemed he hadn’t.

            “I’m pretty sure that’s some kind of new record, kid. The closest one of you has ever come was maybe… three minutes, fourteen seconds? He was cheating, though. He sent his little spawnlings running off in the other direction and cost me a few extra seconds chasing them down before I came back and gave him the game-over message.”

            Ben’s gaze idly flickered all around, taking in the ovular stretch of gray pavement that separated him from safety.

            Nowhere else to run.

            He continued shuffling back, eventually breaching the line of the shadow cast by the loft above and felt the sunshine wash over his cheeks.

            So at least there was that. He knew he’d hate having to die feeling cold, too.

            “But you. You’re a clever one, aren’t you? Seriously, I almost hate to kill you. Well, not quite, but almost,” Gail continued. “Say, though. If you drop on your knees and do some begging - and I don’t mean like “oh please oh please let me live,” cuz I’ve heard it all. No, I mean good begging… then maybe I’ll keep you around for some exercise once this is over.” Her jutting silver eyes tracked his every move, but didn’t appear to mind it as the boy crept further over the unfinished roof of the wing. A fingerless glove hovered at her grenade belt as she took another thunderous step forward.

            “Oh?” Ben heard himself croak. “Can I get your word on that?”

            Gail snorted. “No. Who’s calling the shots here, shrimp, me or you? Look, you put on a good show, and I can appreciate that in a runt. The kind of will you have to live in a place that was designed to eat you up? It’s almost inspiring, really. But you’re going to get on your knees and beg me to put you in your rightful place, or you’re going over that edge there. And fast-like, too.”

            Not particularly wanting this piece of spacial information in his head, Ben nonetheless chanced a glance over his shoulder back at the curved precipice of the rooftop, with neither stone boundary nor railing keeping anyone back. Just a clear blue sky beyond, into which he knew he would soon be soaring. The edge couldn’t have been more than ten feet back. Still he continued inching toward it.

            “I think I’ll have to pass on that,” Ben commented, turning back to face Gail, whose boat-sized ebony boot was once again in easy punting distance of his body.

            An eyebrow crawled higher on the Alpha’s battle-scarred countenance. Her fingers finally clenched around her belt, unclasping it and allowing it to tumble to her feet, with all of its deathly olive keepsakes neatly lined along the hook.

            “No?” she drawled. An eyelid flinched. “You positive about that?”

            “Yes.”

            “And why would that be?”

            “Because I don’t want to.”

            “I’m sure as hell not letting you walk back downtairs to be with the rest of your dead friends after what you pulled today. You’ve got the chance of a lifetime here, kiddo. Hundreds of flat little stains would kill to be in your position right now if my dogs hadn’t already shat them all out.”

            “You’re not going to make any of us do what you want anymore,” Ben said, craning his neck as high as it would go. He rooted his feet on the uneven terrain of the concrete, buried his anxieties like a last rite, and balled his fists.

            “You don’t have to like it, but it’s just the way the world is,” Gail said. Her stiffened hands next caressed over the body armor, pinching it around her hips and shoulders, allowing it to cascade to the ground too. The knives followed with a ringing clatter. Her holster was abandoned next, but not before she’d fished her pistol out and audibly clicked the safety off as she squared its cold barrel down in Ben’s direction. “But we control you. We even control the Omegas now. And there’s nothing you can do to stop us from-”

            Ben felt his next breath kidnapped along with the Alpha’s final word as he witnessed Gail’s face seizing up, her eyes bulging from their sockets. She regarded him with an increasingly broad smile. Even her shoulders seemed to relax.

            “Of course,” she chuckled. “You saved my sissy, didn’t you? Just long enough to switch off our new favorite toy.”

            “What are you talking about?” the Beta grunted in a nervous lie.

            “That’s why you’re ready to go down for them,” she snickered. “You think if you give yourself up now, you’ll buy enough time for them to get the rest of you cancers out alive.”

            “N-No,” Ben grimaced.

            “You think killing you is the worst I can do? You think you can be the martyr to a race of talking insects?” Gail scowled as she crossed the final distance between herself and her prey, planting her boot near enough for Ben to touch it with his nose. He could see his fearful reflection glossed in the toe’s curvature.

            Rage darkened what remained inside the husks of the woman’s eyes, crusting over her jagged features as her arm rose higher, the gun no longer aimed at Ben. She parted her lips softly, a forked tongue lapping at the corners: “Well, I’ve got news for you. I’m just a little bit of a sore loser.”

            In one snap of her wrist, the Alpha had her pistol crammed against her teeth, her finger plugged into the trigger without a second of pause or even a flinch.

            The back of her head exploded outward in a confetti of skull and fragmented brain. While the rest of her flopped into the puddle, the gun clattered at her side just as the heartbeat monitor set off the beginning of its mortal countdown chime, where it was strapped across her chest.

            On a distant corner of the rooftop, Sonja fired another drug cartridge at Melody, this time managing to aim it between the girl’s massive fingertips, but missed again as this one tumbled off the towering being’s knee as she ascended in one fluid, bird-scattering motion of typhoon-like power to full stature again. It bowled the Alpha terrorist clean off her feet, though she held firm to her launder.

            The Omega’s world was beginning to stitch itself back together, marking clear lines in the world’s geometry, the sounds of life drawing nearer to her ears again and coalescing with her heightened senses, allowing her to pinpoint objects in the distance, including Sonja’s next round of ammo.

            Melody flexed her thumb, bracing her middle digit down against the swirled pad and swinging it just as the metal crumb hurtled through the air. She easily flicked the grenade two hundred feet into the air with a single confident launch of her fingertip.

            “Excuse you,” the Omega grumbled, still quavering from the residual high that didn’t allow her to see much further than arm’s length. The redhead’s heavy ordinance reflexively plopped out of her trembling hands and into the deeply cast shadow of Melody’s body, where she herself crumbled on gelatin knees.

            The VTOL, witnessing the rapid deterioration of their gig through jet-black portholes, made a quick turn in midair and exited the Convention Center property, picking up speed as it slammed into overdrive.

            Before the aircraft could zip over more than three blocks, though, passing over one of the broader alleyways, a pale fist large enough to palm a boulder catapulted up from the street, impacting the base of the vehicle and stuttering it out of the sky. It spun wildly for a moment, fighting for control, but clearly had lost most of its capacity to correct as the underside crackled with dying machinery. Before the VTOL could crash into an apartment building that stood in its smoldering path, though, Jenna Reynolds rose up from her haunches in a flourish of strawberry locks, wrapping both hands around the sides of it like a treasured lost toy. Her fingers clenched deeper into the cracking hull, its bulletproof metal yielding to her digits like foam.

            The Junior Enforcer lowered the vehicle to her face and squared its front hatch to her chin, just close enough that its unethical passengers could make out two vast rows of gleaming, pearly teeth grinning in at them.

            Back on the rooftop, for a few pregnant moments after Gail’s tactical sacrifice, Ben stared numbly at the pile of gruesome humanity before him. He knew that down below, Taylor and Mona must’ve been panicking to realize the machine had started up once again, this time out of the brave Alpha’s reach of preventing. The seconds to cancel the mandate with a failsafe ticked by with costly efficiency.

            It was over.

            They were going to die.

            Every single one of them.      

            And then Ben’s eyes, deeply welled as they were with tears of exhaustion and insurmountable grief he’d been reserving for many long years, landed by chance upon Gail’s pile of discarded weaponry, poised on this very specific rooftop, which he only just now was recognizing.

            And that’s when he saw it.

            A glimmer. Something, sparse as it was, very closely resembling what Ben desperately wanted to believe was hope.

            Electrified by a loony spurt of hereditary bravery he’d managed to dredge up from somewhere deep in his petrified little soul, Ben timed his rapid footfalls with his clamoring heartbeat. In seconds he was straddling the loose grenade belt, tugging with all his might until each of a dozen crimson button-prompted trigger mechanisms was aimed on its side.

            With a final peek back toward the horizon, the Beta took off running along the string of grenades, punching each trigger in turn until all were lit up in a glowing promise of incendiary doom. Never breaking pace even to gasp in what he knew to be his penultimate breath, he sprinted away from the carnage for a race he knew he couldn’t possibly win.

            Ben couldn’t have said what caught up with him first, the ear-splitting cannonade of a dozen explosives unfurling their black fire all at once, or the rooftop itself, earlier staggered by Roger’s firepower, tipping down toward the ground on its last crumbling pillar with an arduous groan.

            Ultimately, all the Beta could really process was that his feet had left the ground, and very quickly. The force of the destroyed roof launching upward didn’t even break his legs, which surprised Ben as he hurtled in a swelling arc through the wind. He seemed to suspend in the mercifully cool air, almost slowing as he was toppled and thrashed like a miniature cork in so many ways on the journey that he could no longer distinguish up from inside out.

            Despite the roof growing distant in his blurred vision as Ben sailed weightlessly forth, he watched the rubble of the oval stone disintegrating in a dilating veil of smoke, tipping all its contents including the weapons and Gail’s grisly remains toward the entrance several stories below, presumably directly through the elevated road, if Ben’s rapid-fire mental math was correct, and to the earth much further down, where the analog heart monitor would fall well-out of range of the holocaustal device, thus silencing it for good.

            Ben Wagner allowed himself a smile as he closed his eyes, awaiting the impact of The End as he curled into a place of peace he hadn’t yet experienced since his orphaning in a world that had, until extremely recently, been far too large for him to live in.

            But it didn’t come. Instead came a pillowy impact that Ben would’ve entirely overlooked if his senses were just a tiny bit more jumbled than they already were.

            As the Beta cautiously unpeeled his eyelids again, remarking on the peachy terrain etched in endless creases and soft canyons, he briefly wondered if he’d arrived in the afterlife’s waiting room, before looking up in time to witness five tremendous obelisks of untold jurisdiction curling benevolently into this haven in which he’d landed.

            Melody released a staggered sigh as she laid over the Convention Center roof she’d just lunged across in a single planet-jarring bound, leveling several thousand plants in the process, and cupped the infinitesimal hero into the center of her palm.