“Hello?” Alexandra gaped hollowly, the fear muting her volume enough that she knew perfectly well no one was actually going to hear her.  “Hello?  Someone?”

            The continued silence was more chilling than any response she could possibly have received from the ether, particularly because of how long it had gone on.  She’d been waiting out whatever was going to happen in the translucent box for over an hour now, finally resorting to sitting on the bed pressed against the wall and combing her trembling fingers through her silky brown tresses.  It had been her hope that getting off her feet would calm the tremors she was experiencing in her knees, but it did little to help.

            At first, she’d been too scared to move once placed inside, particularly after the positively gut-churning ride in the hand of that Omega she’d taken to arrive here.  The Aegis agents that had forced their way into her apartment after she’d failed to answer the door instantaneously hadn’t given her very special treatment, either.  They hadn’t had to subdue her because she went with them when the handcuffs came out, the links chiming ominously as they neared her wrists, but the grim looks on the agents’ faces let her know something catastrophically wrong was afoot.  Even the one who’d read off her charges had spoken them dispassionately and with a burdening grudge threatening to break out of the icy utterances.

            Assault and battery.

            Attempted kidnapping.

            Attempted murder.

            The words came out like something in a foreign language and Alexandra barely had time to let the meaning of them sink in before she was being hustled outside and into a car on its way to Aegis.  When she spoke up on the way there, muttering in a clammy slow-burn alarm that there had been some kind of grave mistake and they had the wrong woman, she’d been greeted with the suggestion that she stay quiet until she’d arrived and been processed.  The handcuffs had dug into her pale skin when they were tightened, and she quickly silenced herself, too nervous to attempt further conversation.

            Whatever this was would be sorted out just as quickly and effectively as it had been carried out in the wrong.  She was sure of it.  Alexandra had never committed a crime in her life except for a few hundred songs she’d downloaded off the internet.  If anything, her name sat positively on the tongues of most Omegas and Alphas at Aegis, despite the act that earned this respect having taken place a decade before when the girl was a tender ten years old.  Whoever had mixed up and sent for her arrest would soon realize their error, and particularly when they realized they’d grabbed a minor celebrity, she’d be on her way with a profound apology while the Aegis agents went on their merry way to capture the true criminal.

            Alexandra knew she would, of course, be courteous about the whole thing when the time came to wrap up the whole matter.  In fact, as she sat quietly on the bed, praying for some kind of movement from above again in answer to the uncertainty of it all, she reassured herself that she would be able to laugh about it later on this very day, and probably while resting on the shoulder of her best friend Bridget Cade.

            If nothing else, Bridget would have this mess sorted out faster than it took for Alexandra to inhale another painfully nervous breath.  Heads would spin, she’d have it back in order so quickly.  The twenty-two-year-old Omega Junior Enforcer was known for her professional and effective decorum, but most of all her unflinching dedication to justice.  On her watch, no one would be made to sit in a glass box against their will, and certainly not when it was her best friend.

            With a little guilty pleasure, in her state of mired anxiety, Alexandra couldn’t help but half-grin at the prospect of Bridget chewing out any and all who were responsible for this little debacle while she cradled her mistreated best friend in the safety of her hand.  The almost certain promise of such a thing unfolding in the very near future was all that allowed Alexandra to finally stop shivering as she continued pontificating on her situation from the simple bed in the clear box, which she now recognized as a standard issue cell for prosecuted Alphas, among whose ranks she had apparently been placed by mistake.

            Her eyes glossed over the isolated toilet in the corner, and she cringed at the prospect of having to use it without any privacy, where an Omega could walk up to the shelf the box sat upon and gaze in; she almost felt some sympathy for whoever was intended to stay in this box, because the very prospect of it seemed positively poisonous, but not quite.  After all, they were supposed to be in here, not her, whoever they were.

            It was going to be all right.  It was all just a massive misunderstanding.  That was all it was, and it would go away very soon so she could go home again.  Alexandra had to admit to herself that she didn’t believe the Omegas capable of such a thing as a mistake, based on what she’d seen them do, and yet here was the proof, because the utterly innocent twenty-year-old Alpha found herself being treated like a heinous criminal.

            Alexandra rubbed her hands up and down her arms to warm them, knowing it would do little when the cutting iciness under her skin was coming directly from the unknown of all this rather than low temperatures.  What was taking so damn long?  She’d been in her pajamas when the door had been pushed open and she’d been hurried out, leaving her without even any shoes to wear, making this even more embarrassing than it already was on its own.

            Pressing the tips of her petite toes to the eerie black plastic floor of the cell, she frowned, and gripped the edge of the bed more tightly for support until her knuckles turned ghostly.

            Bridget had to be at work on this already.  She knew for a fact she was going to be in Aegis today, and as involved as she was, it would take her little time to see her best friend’s name pop up.  In fact, Alexandra felt confident that the wait was primarily so Bridget could handle most of the correction herself before happily escorting the shaken Alpha out of the intimidating frigidity of the processing waiting area and back home.  Any second now, she knew, she could count on the door of the cavernous Omega-designed facility swinging open to reveal the comforting and curly-blonde visage of her grinning best friend, ready to offer a hand in escaping the dreadfully exposed surroundings.

            Alexandra had to do a double take when it seemed the universe had answered her deep and fearful hopes as the door cracked open at long last, breaking the silence enough to garner a twitch out of the girl all the same.  She rubbed her palms across her eyes, blinking to get a clear view through the slightly distorted panel of the glassy box, but there was no mistaking it on a second glance.

            It was Bridget.

            She approached the shelf staring straight ahead but with a clean march in her step, almost like a soldier, and it alone was enough to make Alexandra blink again.  She knew her friend took her work very seriously and always composed herself in order to be the most effective enforcer possible.  Maybe she was too deeply in the mindset of her work today to loosen up for her friend.

            Bridget came to a stop directly above the box, allowing an easy panorama for the Omega of the interior, her golden curls dangling cutely and oddly out of sync with the rigid determination gelled into her countenance.

            For a full minute, the girls just stared one another down.  Alexandra had to blink a few times as she watched Bridget’s green irises refuse to budge.  In fact, the only change she saw was the taller girl biting her lip ever so slightly.

            “Hello, Lexi,” came the words from Bridget’s slender lips at last, wooden and unfeeling as could possibly be contained in a greeting that had been delivered with enthusiastic aplomb probably thousands of times in the ten years the Alpha and Omega had known one another.  The four syllables alone were enough to cause the girl to cringe as she rose from her bed, hesitantly taking a few steps forward and wondering why her friend wasn’t cupping her palm into the center of the room to offer a way out yet.  She would’ve thought it would be the first thing that would happen, and yet the coldness of the room seemed to congeal once again, even with her friend present.

            Alexandra felt more and more off-put by the increasingly agonizing second.  The Bridget she knew and loved like a sister would always lower herself down to eye level if it could be helped so the pair could converse on at least the same playing field, despite the Omega’s face filling up enough space to take up a movie screen for her friend.  Instead, in the chill of the waiting area, Bridget remained hanging over the box at her full height, staring blankly down at its contents as though all her personality had been burned away with acid and flushed out of her brain, leaving her a fleshy zombie with vacant green eyes.

            Alexandra gulped hard enough that it could be heard clearly by both parties in the otherwise empty room, and though she hadn’t noticed yet, her knees were knocking against one another once again.

            “H-Hi, Bridge!” Alexandra coughed, having not spoken at a volume higher than just under her breath for more than an hour.  “I’m… I’m s-so glad you’re here.”

            All Bridget did was nod at this, as though simply registering her friend’s coherence and capacity to interact.  Alexandra grinned as enthusiastically as she could manage, but it felt cheap and painted on her lips, so she quickly stopped for reasons she couldn’t explain.

            What was the hold-up?  Why wasn’t Bridget lowering herself down so Alexandra could stare directly into her eyes and be reassured of her friend’s swift justice on the part of cleaning this whole mess up?  Why wasn’t the Omega’s hand flattening into the black plastic base of the cell to invite in for some much needed warmth and familiarity?

            Why was she just standing there?

            “Are… are you going to tell me what happened, or do I have to guess?” Alexandra managed through cheerfully gritted teeth after another moment of silence.  “Cuz… I’m a little confused right now.”

            “Confused?” Bridget exhaled finally, raising an eyebrow and cocking her head at a slight angle.  Her lips pursed together as though a lime had just been teased across them.

            “Y-Yeah.  You know.  The whole… arresting me thing, driving me to Aegis in handcuffs thing, and sticking me in here thing.  All of it.  I’m a little, um… disoriented, I guess.”

            “Lexi.”

            “Yes?”

            “I was hoping we wouldn’t have to do this.”

            “Do what?”

            “What you’re doing right now.”

            “Bridge, I’m so confused and cold right now and I really have to use the bathroom but I don’t want to have to go in that thing, so I was just wondering when you’re going to get me the hell out of this box and explain why they brought me here for no reason!”

            Bridget sighed deeply and shut her eyes, the statuesque stare-down finally brought to a halt as the young Omega ran a palm up the side of her face, drumming her fingers against her pink right cheek in consideration.

            “We really are going to have to do it this way, aren’t we?  You’re not going to tell me about it yourself?”

            “Hey, look, if you want something a certain way, just tell me, and I’ll say whatever the magic password is.  Anything to get me out of here and to a bathroom with actual walls, okay?” Alexandra continued with exasperation, trying to chuckle a little to show her determinedly good humor through all this bizarre vagueness on her best friend’s part, though her patience was rapidly wearing thin.

            “Mhmm,” Bridget murmured neutrally with another nod, finally removing her hand from the side of her face and setting it lightly on the rim of the box, tapping her fingertips there instead.  “Lexi, if you’re going to force me to do this the way I was hoping I wouldn’t have to, then I need you to do something for me.”

            “Bridge… what are you talking about?  Do something for you?  Just tell me when can we go!” Alexandra panted, her voice wavering as she descended rapidly into what she desperately hoped would turn out to be an off-color nightmare.  She took a step back, bumping her calves against the bed and sprawling backward onto it.

            “Yes,” the Omega said as her hand began lowering into the clear cell, her fingers spanned out and primed to collect her best friend against her warm palm.  “I need you to remember that I gave you a chance up front to tell me your side of it.”

            “Hey, what are you… BRIDGET!” screeched Alexandra in blind panic as she watched her best friend’s enormous fingers curl around her sides, scooping her from the bed as easily as a figurine.

“You need to listen to me very carefully, Lexi,” Bridget said in the same algid monotone she’d been using for the past few chilling minutes of Alexandra’s ordeal as she gripped her best friend in her fist just below eye level.  “Because I won’t be repeating myself.”

            The brunette Alpha was barely bothering to process the words coming from her tremendous friend’s lips, as her attention was focused squarely on the feeling of Bridget’s firm fingers encasing her body up to her chest thoroughly enough that movement was totally impeded below that point.  The slightest tightening of the pressure and Alexandra knew her ribs would be wracked with pain.

            Already, the heat emanating from the soft flesh of the enforcer’s coiled hand was making her tiny companion incredibly feverish.  Even with her physical discomfort reaching an all-time high for the morning and mixing rather disastrously with some slight vertigo at the dizzying spiral down to Bridget’s shoes below, though, it was nothing as painful as the mere fact of what was happening.

            Bridget.  Her best friend since she was ten years old.  Bridget had just picked her up into her fist without any warning and tightened her fingers around her with no indication of putting her down or letting go.

            It was too bizarre to comprehend.

            Her gigantic hand was always, always offered out for a lift from a distance of a few steps away, where Alexandra could step safely into the middle and move freely on her own, and if she refused, the appendage was immediately retracted without question.

            The last, and only other, time that Bridget had picked her up in a fist was back when she was twelve years old, when the pair of them were trying to construct a dam by the creek in the Omega’s yard.

            When the sticks they’d stacked taller than Alexandra’s body burst apart in a spray of splinters, allowing the icy water to gush forth in powerful rivulets, Bridget had dived through a mud slick to get back to her friend and had managed to scoop her into her palm just in time to avoid a watery impact that would’ve almost certainly broken a few of the Alpha’s bones on her landing at the stone basin.  And after dusting off the shaken Alexandra and tearfully apologizing for being so neglectful of her small playmate, Bridget had carried her rescue to a higher plateau where she could more safely observe the handiwork and had immediately put her back down, never to pick her up without express consent again.

            Until now, at least.

            “Are you listening to me?” Bridget whispered snappily, her tone taut and commanding despite its quietude.  “Lexi.”

            “Y-Yes?  Bridge, what’s… what’s g-g…” Alexandra gasped, finding very little usable air in her lungs to form coherent words, even though her friends’ fingers weren’t squeezing tightly enough to constrict her lungs in the slightest, only her muscles.

            “Good.  Now, I need you to pay attention, because I’m only going to go through this once with you,” Bridget announced calmly again, her usual warmth still absent and even more apparent in its loss for the continued stillness of her curled lips.

            “You’re going to tell me what’s going on now?” Alexandra demanded a little more loudly this time, no longer having the need to regard her friend’s feelings after not only being made to sit in the box for an hour against her will but then being picked up into a fist without being asked first like one of the common Alpha crooks Bridget had become an expert in handling and correcting over her two years as an enforcer.

            Bridget nodded with a solemn tilt of her head before gently clearing her throat.

            “Yes.  The first thing you need to remember is that, even though we… know each other, well… have known each other well for a long time, you can’t refer to me as Bridget during all this.”

            “What?”

            “You’ll refer to me as Enforcer Cade, or ma’am, whichever one.  Clear?”

            “Bridge, I…”

            The Omega batted her eyelashes a couple times, clearly conflicted.  She bit her lips lightly then parted them again.

            “I’ll… let that one go.  Next time, I’ll have to count it against you.  Now, please listen to what I’m saying to you all the way until I’m finished, and then I’ll answer any questions you have if they’re relevant.”

            “Oh… okay…” Alexandra mumbled, too thrown off and wallowing in a state of denial to be able to comply so much as just exist and accept the persuasively cold words her friend was spitting out at her like a digital automator.

            “Thank you.  Now, it’s my duty to tell you that you’ve been processed into my custody as of twenty minutes ago, at 0900 hours.  High Command has approved my taking charge of the sessions you’ve been scheduled for.”

            Alexandra mulled this statement over to herself for a few moments, nodding silently, before finally deciding while swallowing a golf ball-sized lump in her throat that the depth of whatever mistake had transpired to bring her into the unrelenting fist of her best friend went far deeper than she could’ve imagined.

            A cold sweat collecting on the nape of her neck, she was beginning to process it: Bridget was not here to pick her up and take her safely home after sorting out the issue herself.

            She was here to do her job.

            She was here to… punish her for whatever false crime she’d been convicted of.

            Alexandra gazed longingly up into Bridget’s enormous face, pleading with each unmoving skin cell, searching for a sign of some kind.  Something.  Anything.

            Nothing.

            No glint in her eye.  No twitch of her colorful irises to show she was at least considering the probability of her friend’s innocence.  Just stillness, her beauty frozen over as she studied her new charge with the same balanced dispassion she was known for in dealing with all her new convicts.

            Why couldn’t Bridget see through the madness of this?  She couldn’t seriously believe Alexandra had committed a crime, let alone with words like “assault” and “murder” listed in the charges.  There wasn’t even the slimmest chance she could buy this train wreck of unseen and interconnected coincidences that had delivered her here.

            She couldn’t.  It was impossible.

            “Do you understand, Lexi?” Bridget asked after the pause went on for more than a minute.

            All the Alpha could do was nod, her jaw hanging open, unable to sum up the necessary words to begin combatting the horrifyingly calm and collected speech she was receiving.

            “Good.  Now, moving forward, I need you to explain the… event to me in your own words so I can know you understand… why you’re here, and what will be happening to you,” Bridget stated.

            “Bri… Enforcer C-Cade…” choked Alexandra, practically having to reorient her vocal cords to get out the identifier.  “I don’t know why I’m here, they… they read me some charges, but… but it’s all a m-mistake, some huge freaking misunderstanding.  You know me, you know I would never do anything to-”

            “Just.  Explain it.  In your own words,” cut in Bridget curtly.  Alexandra wouldn’t necessarily have stopped, except for the way she felt her friend’s palm shifting around her, so capable of clenching with the most relaxed of muscle twitches on the Omega’s part.

            “I don’t know.  They didn’t tell me what happened, just what they thought I did.  Don’t you GET that?”

            Bridget studied her friend, then sighed again, blinking several times in rapid succession.

            “All right.  If… we have to, then we’ll do this like this too.  I hope you’re listening close.”

            “You better believe I am, because I want to know who thinks I did something to deserve being in here.  For God’s sake…”

            “Assault and battery, attempted kidnapping… and attempted murder.  At just past 2100 hours last night you reported to be around a clothing store in a classified “mixed” common area, having gone shopping, and making your way back to your car.  Is that correct?”

            “I… I… well, yes, I was there, but…”

            “You made your way into an alley instead of the more direct route to the parking garage-”

            “I… I don’t even remember, I guess maybe I did.  But I…”

            “-where you encountered six Betas returning from their shopping as well along a walkway, at which point, with no warning, you removed all of them from the path without consent and placed them on the designated Alpha path instead.”

            “Wait… I… I don’t even think I saw Betas last night, let alone got near any of them, Br… m-ma’am, I just…”

            “Whereupon you proceeded to… remove your shoes,” Bridget continued, the words clearly paining her as she gulped.

            “Okay, STOP there for a second, just hold on, I never…”

            “And chase them around the alley, pinning them all down when you caught up several times with enough pressure to badly bruise three of them, break a leg in two of them, and… the sixth one…”

            “What?” Alexandra gasped, her voice cracking, now not only terrified of the words being ascribed to her but genuinely worried for the victims of whoever had perpetrated this act and gotten off the hook.

            “The sixth one is now in a coma.  She sustained a broken hip and repeated bludgeoning that has bruised roughly 70% of her body, before receiving a fracture to her skull on the final high-impact blow when you… dropped her from a height just above your knee.”

            “NO!” shrilled Alexandra, her eyes welling at this point at the description of the carnage and particularly what it meant for her that Bridget was continuing on seemingly with the full acceptance that her friend was, in fact, responsible for such an act.  “Bridge, that’s wrong, all wrong.  You KNOW me.  What is this, some kind of sick joke? 

            “Lexi.”

            “It has to be.  That’s the only thing I can think-”

            “LEXI.”

            “What?”

            “It’s… Enforcer Cade now.  Or ma’am,” Bridget declared coldly, and suddenly her fist began narrowing, coiling snugly enough that in a matter of seconds, Alexandra had gone from a painless still to a numbing tremble and finally a distinctly stinging breathlessness that ran from her sternum down to her toes.  It made her feel like a tube of toothpaste being drained of its dregs as she felt the air literally squeeze upward in a single puff and robbed from her lips in a terrified gasp.

            “P-P-Plea…” she hacked, her cheeks flushing a deep turnip-red as she found herself unable to complete the word.

            “Shake your head if you understand,” Bridget said, her tone and facial expression absolutely unmoved as she squeezed her best friend.  “Enforcer Cade.  Or ma’am.  No Bridge.  No Bridget.”

            Alexandra began emphatically swinging her head up and down, bonking her face against the rippled pad of Bridget’s curled thumb just below her chin.  She nodded so hard she was sure she’d do some damage to her neck if she was forced to go on for much longer, but fortunately the Omega relented just before such a thing became necessary, softening her grip such that oxygen was able to make its way back through the tiny body again.

            Air rushed into the Alpha’s lungs and she heaved, huffing in short wisps as tears began flowing down her cheeks freely, sobs gurgling in her throat.

            The things she was accused of that apparently had checked out sufficiently to not even raise a suspicion in the mind of this girl she would once have called her sister and, despite the fear and panic ravaging her mind at the treatment she was receiving, probably would still label Bridget as such, which only tormented her further.

            Something scary was happening in the Omega.  She was like a machine, barely pausing when explaining the grittier of the victims’ tragedies, and not even giving the slightest consideration to any of the statements Alexandra was trying to make to soothe the situation.

            Where was the Bridget that would’ve immediately recognized that something was wrong and refused to stop until true justice was served?

            Who was this person?

            “Now keep listening.  We’ll get this over with and I can take you home so we can get started,” Bridget continued with the exact same tone as before, apparently having put the brief episode out of her mind already.

            “H-H-Home?  With… w-with you?”

            “High Command has determined that you will serve up to 90 sessions with me, one per week.  These will be spent at my discretion to provide you with the quickest route to a full rehabilitation in your actions.  After a month with me, you will have the opportunity to replace up to half of those sessions with doubled hours of community service or a variety of extracurricular Beta culture and race relations courses, reducing your minimum sessions to 43.  Believe me, either one ought to be your preference over the alternative.  Do you understand this ruling?”

            “Please…”

            “Do you understand?”

            “NO!”

            Bridget blinked, clearly still not yet prepared to deal with her friend’s refusal to comply, looking for the briefest moment like a deer caught in headlights and creating a hopeful chink in her armor that was visible to Alexandra for only the briefest second.

            “Don’t make this harder on yourself, Lexi.  You’re already in a world of trouble.  Stop it now.”

            “Please,” the Alpha cried with croaking exasperation, the tears now in full force, her eyes a puffy pink.  “Please.  Please believe me.  I didn’t do anything.  I swear.”

            “We’ll talk more about it after we get home,” Bridget snapped.  “We’re done for now.”  Her voice came dangerously close to emotionally wavering on the final word.  Clearly hearing it, she cringed, and suddenly her hand was lowering toward the waist on her denim jeans.

            “PLEASE!” screamed Alexandra as the omnipotent fingers unfurled, depositing her hopelessly into the dark, linty solitude of her best friend’s inescapable pocket.

“You’ll be staying in there when you’re not participating in a session or extracurricular work,” Bridget deadpanned with arms crossed as she stood over the clear cell once again containing her tiny friend, which had been placed atop a bookshelf in the Omega’s living room low enough that staring down into its contents was still a viable option.

            Alexandra had of course been inside the Cade home hundreds of times before since she first visited it ten years ago and was well familiar with most nooks and crannies of it, particularly at table height, and yet the entire five-minute trip back to it felt like she’d been taken to a remote location halfway around the globe.  She could hardly say she recognized the place, despite no noticeable physical changes being made to the furnishing.

            The main room, normally warm in its lighting through floor-length windows and personalized by the various black and white photographs Bridget’s mother kept framed on the walls, along with the various souvenir trinkets her father would send home from his work on the other side of the world, had become desolate and perhaps even colder to Alexandra than the waiting area at Aegis.  She couldn’t help but shiver as she glanced unconsciously around the area, having to recognize its components again like a stranger.

            In that moment, it became more apparent than ever how far away it all was from her, and how much like staring into dead space it was.  How she wouldn’t have a prayer of getting anywhere around the house without a lift from her friend.  How a drop from this bookshelf could snap her legs just like had happened to those Betas she was wrongfully convicted of brutalizing.

            How this was no longer her best friend’s home, but a prison.

            Her prison.

            It was enough to make her want to be sick, but her legs were locked to the bed as she grasped the sides with a death grip, half-expecting to be whisked off to soaring heights again without warning in the threatening fist of her best friend.  Obviously Bridget could pluck her up between two fingers without the slightest effort no matter how tightly she held on, but it was the only comfort she had in this moment when the Omega so clearly had shut her ears to any and all normal logic.

            She couldn’t even find the words to speak up to Bridget as the latter continued staring down at her, doe-eyed and unchanged as a centuries-old monument.

            “Do you understand?” the enforcer asked for probably the tenth time that morning, repeating it after nearly every brief explanation about the proceeding of Alexandra’s incarceration.

            Why did she keep saying that, and in that same brain dead tone, like the words were coming from someone else?  Alexandra knew her friend was a professional and followed the provisions of her job to the letter with uncompromising focus, but she also knew the young woman to be very confident in her abilities.  Such robotic rigidity wasn’t necessary to get the message across, and yet here Bridget was, spouting off as though reading from a foreign textbook, like she’d never had to do this before.

            Alexandra’s senses were lost in a nauseating void.  All she could manage in response to Bridget’s question was a nod, the slight dip in her chin making her feel like she was skydiving for the length of a blink.  Her stomach was swirling far too rapidly to make speaking up at this moment an option, and any additional movement made her feel even queasier.  It was all she could do to remain just as startlingly still as the towering visage of her best friend far above.

            “Good,” Bridget said, repeating another word she seemed to have fallen awkwardly into the habit of using.

            There was so much Alexandra wanted to say but knew the phrasing didn’t exist to use.  She felt the need to throw herself on her knees and beg, let the tears come as infinitely as she felt they needed to, and bare her soul to her best friend.

            All she wanted now was to feel safe again.  In the past, whenever she was in Bridget’s palm, she felt more confident in her personal security than when she was walking around on the ground on her own.  The Omega was known for her incredibly steady hands and could make even the most wildly spinning elevation feel like a dreamy comfort cruise.  Though she wasn’t quite esteemed as the very best at it among Alphas and Betas alike, the title of which was unofficially ascribed to another at Aegis, she was universally known to possess a willing pair of palms for anyone with a need to get somewhere safely in a hurry.

            Alexandra wanted to feel that comfort again so badly she almost couldn’t breathe, yet she couldn’t shake the lingering sensation of her friend’s soft finger flesh, previously such a welcome experience, rapidly constricting around her like quicksand to punish her, and then suddenly she literally couldn’t breathe for a moment.

            Why?

            “Your sessions will take place on Tuesdays, starting today, with timing at my discretion, though each could last anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours, depending on how satisfied I am with your progress.  Do you understand?” Bridget announced with a lengthy blink and a focused frown, and Alexandra was puzzled to realize something bizarre.

            She knew that look.  The expression wasn’t so much out of increased anger, but out of a flash of shaky confidence.  It was a look the Alpha didn’t see very often on her friend’s face, as she was so often fully in control of herself, but she’d known her long enough to recognize it for the rare episodes when Bridget was struggling.

            Could she be suspecting?  Just a little?

            Alexandra held her breath and nodded uneasily again.

            “Good.  Additionally, you’ll have the opportunity for conversations about your time here and what you’ve done, also at my discretion.  I’ll reserve the right to withhold this chance if your cooperation isn’t kept up.  Do you understand?”

            Just as quickly as the crack in Bridget’s exterior had appeared, it was gone again, and her tone was back to the mechanical curtness of before.

            Alexandra was on the verge of sinking into herself.  Every attempt she’d made at disagreeing with the statements so far had been swatted aside, and she had a feeling the same would happen again if she chanced it here.  After the squeeze she’d received earlier, she was too afraid to risk going into her friend’s hand again, and had at last decided passivity for the time being would keep her out of harm’s way a little longer.

            “We’re going to go ahead and get started,” Bridget continued onward without waiting for a nod.  Her hand loomed over the box again, and sent Alexandra’s queasiness into overdrive.  “Impress me, and this will be over sooner than it might need to be.”

            The tree trunk digits sheathed the Alpha in their soft palm and brought her quickly out of the cell.  Paralyzed once again in her friend’s grip, Alexandra remained almost entirely limp as Bridget took several meandering steps across the room with her passenger toward a black armchair in the corner.

            “I don’t think I have to tell you, Lexi.  These sessions are designed to ensure you not only understand your crime, but that you also eventually come to empathize with those you’ve… hurt,” Bridget said as she steadily lowered herself into the cushions.

            Alexandra’s blood became as ice.  She knew this perfectly well, but having it spoken aloud made it all the worse.

            Her knowledge of her friend’s specific tactics as an enforcer were vague at best, as she had decided a long time ago that she didn’t want to be privy to more unpleasant specific information than necessary.  What she did know, though, was that Bridget had a penchant for what she referred to as The Golden Rule, particularly when it came to violent offenders.

            Alexandra herself would’ve more accurately called it an ironic dedication to poetic justice, and right now, based on the description of the crime she’d apparently been framed for, it was making her want to vomit.

            The Omega placed her friend on the ground with a plop from a few feet above that very nearly knocked her over from the impact, but she managed to right herself in time, dusting off her pajamas if only to find something to do with her hands to keep them from shaking.

            Forcing herself to stare up at the Olympian image of Bridget seated in the chair was something else that made Alexandra’s stomach turn.  The black flats, the jeans, the smooth midriff-exposing white top seemed larger than ever before on the reclining giant, and despite the fact that the girl was just in a cushy stick of furniture, Alexandra had to convince herself she wasn’t gazing up at a queen on her throne.  She needed to take a few steps back to even fully see her face.

            The Alpha could scarcely remember specific instances from the decade she’d known the girl where she found herself at this level.  At minimum, she would be placed on Bridget’s slender thigh if they were watching a movie together or reading, and that was only if she refused the consistent first offer of sitting atop her shoulder, swaddled up in a few of her gorgeous golden curls for safety.

            Somehow, she had a feeling that security would not be so forthcoming as she stared dead ahead at Bridget’s black shoes, which the Omega was already quietly kicking off with the tips of each and letting them fall to the floor before placing her bare feet on the wooden floor with a fleshy slap.

            “They… all managed to talk eventually, Lexi.  Except the one you put in a coma, obviously,” Bridget informed her friend pithily.  She swallowed hard and slowly began to put on a show with her toes, drumming them against the floor and crossing her big toe over the second one in a manner that almost appeared playful.  “The kinds of things they talked about… you doing.  What happened last night, it just… I…”

            “Enforcer Cade,” Alexandra choked out, knowing she would never be comfortable referring to her best friend that way as long as she lived.

            “Don’t interrupt me,” Bridget warned in a way verging on spitting, and suddenly her tone had become coiled in thorns.  She took a labored huff, clearly having lost her composure for just a second.  “Like I said.  We will have a conversation later today about this.  This, right now, is not a conversation.  You just need to pay attention.”

            Alexandra had nothing.  What could she have possibly said in response?  The words were enough to want to make her cry again, but she was still far too stupefied by the sheer magnitude of her friend seated above her to manage it.

            “The things that happened…” Bridget continued with more focus, biting her lip and narrowing her eyes.  She leaned forward ever so slightly toward the floor, and unconsciously Alexandra lowered herself deeper onto her haunches.  “…they made me sick.  Having to hear them all, one by one, give their version of it, and the looks in their eyes, after something so simple as…”

            Alexandra couldn’t have been prepared for what came next if she’d known a month in advance and received an adrenaline shot or four.  Her tone dropping off into an aching whisper, Bridget clasped her palms to her knees and suddenly one of her two-story-long lower appendages was lifting up off the ground and swinging.

            Her big toe pointed forward, Bridget kicked into her tiny friend without mercy and sent her flying back several feet where she landed flat onto her back with a coughing gasp.

            Alexandra clutched her hands to her stomach, struggling to regain the air robbed of her on the landing that felt akin to having a sandbag fired at her from a catapult.  Groaning painfully, she pulled herself to her knees and stared up just in time to see the looming shadow of the wriggling digits returning.

            She blinked, and in that split second Bridget had flicked the toe into her friend’s chest, causing her to flop back again.  The pain lingered this time, stinging in her breasts, and she moaned, falling flat onto her face as soon as she tried to right herself.

            “The one you did the… least to… was able to give the clearest account,” Bridget whispered as she calmly placed the slightly greasy pad of her big toe down on Alexandra’s back, pinning her to the floor with the simplest tap.  The Alpha screeched, flailing her arms back and forth against the floor like a fish on the off-chance that she was being given any sort of chance, but she discovered instantly that this was not the case.

            “He told how you started out like this.  Just knocking them over and scattering them, with just your… toe… until they had to stop moving just to make it end,” Bridget said, disdain freely flowing in her words.  “And then you started holding them down.  Just like this.”

            Alexandra bit her tongue and shut her eyes.

            “Was this what you were going for, Lexi?” Bridget asked, trying not to let her question sound like a demand.  “Was this what you wanted them to feel like?”

            “NO!” screamed the Alpha.

            “Then get back up and we’ll keep trying to get it right,” the Omega announced, releasing the pressure of her toe.  Alexandra, panicked, scrambled to a standing position and considered dashing off in the other direction, but could tell already how fruitless it would be.

            “What’s the matter?  Not sure what to do now?” Bridget asked with astounding cool.  “Realizing you’re out of options, and the person above you… doesn’t have to care?”

            Alexandra couldn’t bring herself to look back up at the face of the person delivering these words.  She knew it would hurt too much and almost assuredly break off the concentration she knew was desperately needed right now.  Clenching her fists and taking a deep breath, she started sprinting toward the right of the monolithic armchair and its colossal occupant.

            This move was answered exactly as it had been before.  The rubbery tip of Bridget’s toe swept out her little legs as she ran, causing her to somersault over onto her back.  Adjusting the imminent position of her foot, the Omega then brought her squat pinky toe down against Alexandra’s face, brushing along it hard enough that it was more like receiving a padded uppercut from a prizefighter.

            The Alpha grasped her sore jaw and rubbed it in shock, trying to get over the surprise of the blow as the pain settled in.  Gritting her teeth and choking back fresh tears, she rolled onto her side and stood up, still staring only at the floor and pessimistically plotted her next useless tactic.

            Exhaling, she made another move, knowing based on Bridget’s understanding of the falsified crime that holding still for too long would only result in another impact anyway.  This time she actually moved in the direction of her friend’s still-prone foot, hoping the delay in its rise would allow her to try ducking to the side.

            This assumption proved incorrect as well as when the entire row of toes arched up and the bus-sized foot lurched forward with a sticky pop of suction from the floor, reacting just as soon as Alexandra had made a decision.  Curling downward, the hovering toes bulldozed into the girl like charging defensive linemen, sending her flying back several feet yet again, where she landed painfully on her arm.

            With a yelp Alexandra flopped flat on her back again, huffing and puffing to get over the keen burn of it, though was forced back onto her stomach by a hard nudge from Bridget’s big toe that nearly bruised her ribs.  She fought her way back to her feet and dashed forward again, only to be instantly met with a splayed assault from the first appendage which arched lithely upward at the last second, and Alexandra slammed directly into the rosy ball of Bridget’s foot.

            The pattern continued onward innumerable times in what was almost like a pathetic dance by this point, with Alexandra trying a new maneuver each time she rose to her feet for fear of being pinned back to the ground and having the wind punched from her lungs.  Every single attempt was met with a speedy flick of Bridget’s toes or a floor-vibrating slam of her heel down on the ground mere feet away from the cowering Alpha.

            Finally, realizing with some consternation that she wasn’t going to bring about a change no matter how quickly she ran or how alert she tried to keep her senses, Alexandra bit her lip as hard as was necessary to redirect her focus from her desire to cry and sat down cross-legged on the floor like a petulant child before an omnipotent goddess.

            Bridget’s expression remained unchanged as her feet slowly came to rest back in front of the chair, facing forward.

            Her heightened breathing managed to slow itself to a healthier rate at this sight, and Alexandra allowed herself the luxury of some tentative optimism.

            Was it over?

            A rush of wind followed that watered Alexandra’s eyes as both immense bare feet rocketed toward her on either side, creating a low canyon of peachy flesh that instantly trapped her in the middle.  Before she could even consider trying to run toward the parted toes, the only remaining exit, Bridget’s feet were closing together and sealing the Alpha inside with a terrified squeal.

            Satisfied with her grip on her cornered best friend, the enforcer then lifted both feet off from the ground, keeping her legs parallel with the floor, and got to work kneading them together in gratuitous circles.  Her toes were curled against one another, her heels nudged together, and the only remotely open space in the pocketed arches of her feet was occupied by the overwhelmed and emotionally drained body of her friend.

            The walls of wrinkled pink sole were merciless in their barrage.  Alexandra knew they were all that was keeping her from plummeting down to a final fate as a splintered pile on the floor, but the churning of skin on skin, with her thrashing form sandwiched between it, made her realize what a true loss of bodily control was like.

            Even in Bridget’s clenched fist, and pinned under her toe, she had options.  A tilt of her head, a turn of her wrist.  Something.

            Here, there was nothing, and gravity was almost irrelevant.  The Omega had her utterly in her control and at her alarming lack of mercy.

            Alexandra didn’t care anymore about trying to get away, and fully realized the point Bridget was making.  Focus and determination weren’t going to save her, not when someone more powerful than her on such a laughable scale was so intent on making her into personal putty.  The rough rhythm of the skin, the earthy musk and cottony residue from the shoes, and the omnipresent heat working up a sweat in Alexandra as much as it was creating a frictional glaze on its owner as well: it was all unavoidable and inescapable, maybe even inevitable.  The power was more palpable than anything the Alpha had experienced in her life.

            And all Alexandra could do was wish harder than anything she’d ever wished for in her life to understand why her best friend was doing it to her.

            The tears flowed freely and became instantly lost in the grinding shuffle of the Omega’s warm and repugnant flesh, damning in its force and unforgiving in its everlasting imprint on the innocent girl’s tortured mind.

            The end of the session was abrupt and savagely silent.

            As the time reached thirty minutes exactly, Bridget lowered her clasped bare feet back to the wooden surface of the floor and released her ravaged captive from between her sweltering soles with a gentle thump.

            Crumpled into the fetal position, Alexandra just sniffled, closing her eyes and no longer caring in the slightest that her friend was seeing her like this, so vulnerable and humiliated and stained with tears.  She didn’t even bother flinching when Bridget plucked her up between a thumb and index finger with refreshing gentleness and deposited her back into the cell on the corner bed.  The Alpha’s only reaction was hugging the mattress to her body for comfort, as she knew full-well by now such a feeling surely wasn’t coming from any other nearby source.

            “I’ll be back later, and we’ll have that conversation.  For now, get yourself… cleaned up,” Bridget instructed dryly, each word like poison on her tongue, and she felt her voice cracking again, her hands trembling at her sides, though thankfully neither was noticed by her quietly hysterical best friend.

            Alexandra managed only a tilt of her head even as she buried her face in the bed and continued to cry.

            As soon as Bridget had marched militaristically back across the house and sealed herself in her bedroom, she stumbled with weak knees into the adjoining bathroom and turned the shower on full-blast to fill the room with the dull crashing roar against the basin.

            With adequate auditory cover, then, she dove onto her bed and buried her face in her pillow just in time to drown out the pent-up echo of the distraught howl that had been threatening to rip its way from her body for the past three hours she’d spent having to process what Alexandra had done and then subsequently reprimand it personally.

            Bridget screamed into the muted surface of the pillow until her anguished cry became an ear-splitting shriek, and then finally died down into hoarse gasping as she unsuccessfully fought back the sobbing.  Her placid shell had been on the verge of cracking as it was, but at this point, after what she’d just done to Alexandra, she was barely holding it together.

            She hadn’t believed it at first, not for an instant.  In fact, when the report came through that High Command had approved Alexandra’s arrest and placement with an enforcer, she’d been unable to move and fumed silently at her desk with fire in her green eyes and her trembling knuckles tightened to a pale white.  Even before she was able to move, she’d received a couple of uneasy glances from enforcers Kyle Rodgers and Claire Lindon, who, as the only others present, had clearly seen the report too, though both knew it would be ill-advised to say a word about it to Bridget as a storm began visibly brewing inside her.

            Though she was well-known as a caring and gentle soul unflinchingly dedicated to absolute justice and the preservation of peace whenever possible, it was an unspoken rule that all bets were off when it came to her best friend Alexandra.  The two girls were positively inseparable, more tightly bound to each other than any other living soul, and though it had never been tested up to now, it was simply understood that should a single malicious finger ever be laid upon the smaller girl, there would be very serious hell to pay.

            Once the Omega had managed to catch her breath and slow herself down from pure rage to mere incensement, she stomped directly into the office of Senior Enforcer Hart, who’d processed the report.  Shoving the tablet he was working on to the floor, she’d had to clamp her shaking hands behind her back to prevent herself from hooking him in the jaw for having dared allow such a thing to go through.

            He calmly placed the item back on his desk while she glared at him, her hands now on her hips.  Hart had explained to her that he had given very careful consideration to it all before sending the report to High Command.  When the fury didn’t dissipate from her expression, he offered to show her his reasoning for it.

            With a scowl, Bridget had agreed, taking a seat in front of his screen and crossing her arms, hardly able to keep from quivering as this sad façade continued onward without recourse, knowing that her friend would be arrested very soon and brought to Aegis where she would be placed in a cell to await processing.

            Alexandra.  In a cell.  It didn’t seem real.

            The first thing Hart showed her was a recording from an Aegis security feed over a mixed race shopping area taken the night before.  It was faint from the distance, but six Betas were clearly seen in the light walking along an elevated walkway into the alley in close quarters.  Emerging from a store in the center of the view about four minutes afterward was an Alpha who was easily identified as Alexandra when she turned her head nonchalantly in the direction of the camera, batting at her dark hair and swinging her shopping bags over her shoulder.  At first walking toward the path that led to a stairwell down into the parking garage, she paused for a moment, pressing a hand to her lips, then made off in the other direction around the side of the building and into an alley, where the camera’s view couldn’t reach.

            The feed resumed at a time four and a half minutes later on the opposite end of the alley, which Hart pointed out was only about sixty feet long.  The film quality was grainier, as the camera was operated by a Beta clothing store located near the corner of the alley, but it was still unmistakable.  Alexandra emerged from the dimmed lighting of the path, hopping on one leg as she struggled to put her left shoe back on without having to stoop.  Successful, she sauntered more confidently toward the staircase.

            The final clip was from the parking garage, which showed Alexandra stepping into her vehicle, among the last in the lot, and driving off.

            The Betas never emerged until emergency services could arrive to collect them.

            “So what?” Bridget had sneered.  “What is this saying?  That she took her time walking through an alley?”

            “Watch,” he had instructed, pointing back to the screen.

            Next up was a recording from an Aegis debriefing room, where five Betas were huddled together in a cluster of chairs in front of a table where they were delivering their story to a worker of their same class who normally handled recently trauma cases.  Bridget idly wondered why there were five and not the six seen entering the alley.  They were shivering, twitching at every other word spoken gently to them, all with at least several bandages and a couple of them in casts, and as Bridget leaned in closer to examine the image on the screen, she could see a few of them were caked with spatters of blood on their clothes.

            “It’s all right now,” the Beta interviewer had said sweetly from behind the camera.  “You’re safe.  You’re at Aegis now, where no one can touch you.  Are you ready to speak?”

            “Yes.  Y-Y-Yes…” sputtered one of the young men, who looked no older than twenty.

            “What’s your name?”

            “N-N-Nathaniel T-Tyler.”

            “Thank you, Nathaniel.  You can begin when you’re ready.”

            “Okay,” he said blearily, his eyes shifting nervously all around the room.  His jet-black hair was matted down against his forehead in a bloodied crust and there was an unmistakable thousand-yard stare glossed over his eyes.

            It made Bridget’s skin crawl to see someone so scarred just trying to get his composure together sufficiently to speak.  What could possibly have disturbed someone so?  She knew the Betas had a hard existence, even with Omega protection, and that was no secret to anyone.

            This was beyond that, even.  There was something simply wild in his eyes.  Feral and terrified, like he’d been backed into a corner and been stripped of his humanity.

            “We were walking on the upper path,” he began.  “D-Down the road, in that alley.  And… and it was just us, m-minding our b-business, quiet, and suddenly the girl… t-that one you showed us, the picture, her f-face…”

            “Alexandra Warren?”

            “Y-Yes, her.  S-She came up b-behind us, and just p-picked us up, all in one h-hand, and…”

            “Did she say anything?  Make any sound at all?” asked the Beta worker.

            “N-Nothing, just… g-grabbed us, and put us on the g-ground…” he managed, slamming a hand on the table before him and tightening it into a quivering fist while taking another hard swallow.  “Then she took off her s-s-sh… shoes… and started walking.  After us.  We d-didn’t start r-running right away, we were t-too confused then, but then she put her toe on Andy’s l-leg, and…”

            Nathaniel’s account stopped here as he covered his face with his hands and began hyperventilating.  One of his friends wrapped her arm around Nathaniel and hugged his head to her shoulder while one of the less physically shaken Betas took over the story and choked through the horrendous and eventful remainder of it.  The others steadily chimed in too with their own grim ordeals whenever someone needed confirmation.

            Bridget wanted to look away.  She wanted to look away so badly that she tried closing her eyes and turning her head in the other direction, but her sense of duty and bleeding compassion forced her to remain locked on the nightmarish things coming from the screen.

            And then just for good measure, Senior Enforcer Hart pulled up a quick photo that had been snapped of the sixth Beta before her transport into emergency surgery, a nineteen-year-old named Iris, where she was apparently now stabilized but still not looking positive.  She looked like she’d been run directly over by a car.

            That was just about all Bridget could take.

            “That’s enough,” she quietly huffed with her hands in her lap, significantly more docile than when she’d first arrived in the office.

            “They didn’t see the footage, either, of Alexandra walking back.  They described her, all in pretty accurate detail, on their own, and we confirmed it with the feed.  Outfit, hair, facial features, shoes.  It all matched what we had on camera.  They described the event as taking place in under five minutes, which matches the footage on the camera,” Hart said with an uncomfortable nod, scratching the back of his neck.

            “H-H-How, though,” Bridget swallowed, clinging to whatever hope she could desperately grab onto that her friend was still innocent.  “How do we know it wasn’t just a…”

            “Mark of an Alpha assault all over it.  The bruises on some of those guys under the bandages?  Wide impacts, consistent with their story of what hit them.  The one in the coma says it all, though,” Hart sighed.

            “Why?”

            He nodded grimly with his hands in his pockets.  “Broken hip, and then her skull was fractured on the landing.”

            “Landing.”

            “Yes.  She… was dropped.  From a pretty good height for her, definitely over two feet.”

            “More than knee height for…”

            “Exactly.  A Beta wouldn’t have been able to do that, and according to the cameras, no one else went in there during that time.  Just Alexandra.  They were all fine when they went in, but had to be taken out on stretchers.”

            The silence was deafening, excruciating in its longevity to Bridget.  It was as though she’d gone catatonic.

            Not Alexandra.

            Not her.

            She couldn’t.  She wouldn’t.

            “I know it’s hard, Cade.  I respected her, too.  A lot of people did.  She was a great kid.  But…” Hart sighed.

            “Don’t,” Bridget gasped, a few tears already flowing icily down her cheek, though she quickly wiped them away.

            “I’m sorry, I really am.  It kills me too.  But… this?  This is open and shut,” Hart groaned resignedly.  “There’s nothing I can do for her.  Alexandra… did this.  Herself.  Somehow.  I don’t know what came over her, what’s happening to her, but we’re going to find out.  You saw High Command approved this already, and asked me to select an enforcer to handle it.  I was thinking of putting her with-”

            “Let me do it,” Bridget uttered under her breath, barely audible, interrupting the Senior Enforcer.

            “Pardon?”
            “Let me do it,” she repeated, finally looking up from her death stare with the screen.  “Let me be her enforcer.”

            “Cade.  Look.  You’re an excellent enforcer, no one has to tell you that.  But because of how you know her… well.  She’s a friend.  Let’s face it.  It wouldn’t exactly be an unbiased dispensing of justice like we all swore an oath to follow.”

            “I can do it,” Bridget continued with an unsettling chill in her voice.  “You know I can.  Give her to me.”

            “How do I know you’ll be able to maintain control of the situation?  You know the purpose of this system is to rehabilitate violently deviant Alphas. This isn’t supposed to be a time to hug and make everything all better, at least not until she’s served every last second of the time she’s earned for herself by doing what she did to those Betas.”

            “I know.  And she’s going to serve it.  With me.”

            There was an awkward silence as both parties realized Bridget was going to win the debate.

            “Don’t blow this, Cade.  You know it’s going to look strange already that I’m giving her to you, so you need to make sure this is done without the slightest deviation,” he warned.

            “Don’t worry,” Bridget said simply.  “It will be.”

            Now, as the determined Omega wept into her pillow until it was practically soaked through to the other side, she bit into the fabric to try and quell her agonized anger.  She had known almost as soon as they arrived home that this moment of recuperation would be necessary after the session, and was glad she’d been able to judge it as such and leave the Alpha in the living room to allow herself some necessary privacy now.

            The truth was that her reasons for demanding to be made Alexandra’s enforcer were selfish, and she knew it.

            It wasn’t that she intended to go easy on her friend for what she did; Bridget had seen so few looks of genuine disturbed mania in her life like she’d witnessed in Nathaniel’s eyes, and after seeing Iris’s crumpled and purple form after the final blow she’d received, it was all she could do to keep herself from applying just a little more pressure when handling the young Alpha she once thought she knew so well but had so clearly been mistaken about.

            No, her real reason for taking the duty was simple: she knew she would never sleep soundly again until she was able to discover what had happened to her best friend, and if any part of her was still left inside the tiny monster currently laying in the cell.

            As she at last managed to slow her breathing down into the pillow and clutched it tightly to her chest, Bridget knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was prepared to do absolutely anything necessary to squeeze the truth from this wretch that had so catastrophically distorted the closest thing she had to a sister.

            Anything.

Alexandra was certain she had cried out every last drop of moisture in her body as she sobbed hoarsely into the cushioning of her bed.  Her dark hair was matted with anxious sweat, her limbs ached from almost every angle, and her extremities were cold enough that it made her cringe to touch them to her burning forehead, though she had no idea if it was from the temperature in the room or simply the byproduct of all this insanity.

            She couldn’t imagine a time in her life she’d been as frightened, save for the events immediately preceding her meeting Bridget for the first time.  Every Omega she’d ever met had treated her with the utmost respect, some of which she assumed came out of piteous sympathy over the well-known sacrifice she’d made at the age of ten, but nonetheless, she had lulled herself into a complacent sense of security over the years.  Nothing could touch her.

            And now, in the span of a single morning, she’d been ripped from her home with no real explanation, placed in a cell for ninety weeks, and subjugated under her best friend and essential adoptive sister’s relentless toes, with the promise of it being made even worse unless she took ownership of an event so sadistic it made her sick to imagine it ascribed to anyone, let alone herself.

            In fact, if she hadn’t just spent the last hour of solitude weeping herself dry, she was sure she’d have to crawl over to the toilet and heave into it as a side effect of the physical trauma she’d endured beneath Bridget’s muscular soles, but primarily for the toxic realization that was slowly but surely creeping its way to the front of her mind.

            No one was going to help her.  Not Aegis, not those Betas who had apparently fingered her as the culprit, and certainly not the most important person to her on the whole planet.

            The leaders of the world had unanimously taken a look at whatever evidence had been present and stamped her as a pariah before passing her off into the hands of someone for whom she was to be merely a shrieking exercise in Omega justice for the better part of two full years.

            There would be no second chances, no questioning, no opportunity to go before them and beg with her face to the ground that they take a closer look.

            She was alone, and she finally knew it wholeheartedly.

            “Have you cleaned yourself up yet?” Bridget asked with sedation as she padded back into the room.  Her curly hair had been tied back behind her head in a messy bun, and her skin was slightly rosier than when the pair had parted after the session.  Her cheekbones seemed even tighter than before, as though she was biting the inside of her lips, but at this point, Alexandra had stopped giving into to such paranoid searches for mercy in her friend’s face.  It was very clear what she was going to do, regardless of any cloying doubts Alexandra tricked herself into recognizing.

            Barely tilting her gaze to the side enough to see through the glassy cell wall, Alexandra shook her head wordlessly.

            “It doesn’t matter.  This next part is actually your choice, anyway,” Bridget announced as she stood back over the box and hung her fingers over the edge, tapping at the surface gently.  “These conversations are entirely optional.  It’s to your benefit to participate and impress me with your answers, but it is up to you whether you stay in there now.  What do you think?  Are you ready to talk, Lexi?”

            With a heavy gulp, Alexandra nodded in the affirmative, knowing this was important without even understanding fully how.  They could put her in a box.  They could hand over her rights to someone.  They could lock her up and throw away the key.

            They would not take away the truth from her, even if she was the only one on earth who believed it.

            “Good.  I figured some fresh air might make things a little more relaxing after… earlier, so if you’ll just hold still for me…” Bridget continued calmly as she reached into the case and curled her fingers around Alexandra’s limp form.

            A shiver ran up the Omega’s arm to experience the feeling of her friend’s body sitting so lifeless and defeated in her powerful grip, but she stiffened back up immediately afterward.

            Cupping the Alpha into her palm and no longer constricting her in the coiled skin, she sauntered out to the porch past the sliding door and took a seat in a chair, resting her elbow on the arm of it while her charge pulled herself into a reclined position against the flattened fingers.

            Despite her fear, Alexandra had to admit to herself she felt infinitesimally better being able to simulate a more normal seating arrangement with her titanic friend.  She gazed out at the massive expanse of the backyard, an entire ecosystem unto itself, and in her desperation for something hopeful to latch onto, caught sight of the creek that babbled over loose stones and logs.  Merely glancing at it brought on enough bittersweet memories of the pair of them playing alongside it as children that she had to force herself to look away again.

            “Here’s how these… chats will work, Lexi.  I’m going to ask you some questions.  Answer them as honestly as you can, and at the end, you’ll have the chance to say something yourself.  Clear?”

            “Yes.”

            “Thank you.  If we can get started, then, I… want to know what you say happened last night after you finished your shopping.”

            Noting this as a startlingly positive sign, Alexandra nonetheless didn’t allow herself to perk up as she answered, though because of her less threatening position in Bridget’s open palm, she managed to get the words out without much more difficulty than a weary croak lingering after the earlier tears.  Her confidence in the preservation of her personal dignity, if nothing else, made it easier to speak: “I paid, I took my things, and walked outside and back to my car.  Didn’t talk to anybody.”

            “There was a security feed showing you stopping on your way out of the building near the front, then turning around and doubling back to the alley instead of going down to the parking area.  Why?” Bridget pressed with practiced flatness.

            “I realized it was faster to go the other way, even though I had to go through the alley.  So I went back,” Alexandra said.

            “The camera didn’t have footage of the alley.  How long were you walking through it?”

            “How… how long?”

            “Yes.”

            “I… I don’t know.  Maybe thirty seconds.  I just walked like normal.”

            “I see,” Bridget answered, her brow furrowing slightly as her lips pursed.  “Another feed showed you coming out on the other side almost five minutes later.  Are you sure you didn’t stop to go through your bags?”

            “I didn’t go through my bags,” Alexandra said.  “I… can’t think of anything that happened in there.  I just walked.”

            “And what about your shoe?”

            “My shoe?”

            “Yes.  You were putting it back on as you left the alley.  Why?” the Omega continued, struggling to keep her successive questions from sounding like demands.

            “Oh.  I… I remember.  Yes.  I… I stepped on a piece of gum on the path.  It was fresh, so it stuck and pulled my shoe partway off.”

            “And you stopped for five minutes to put it back on?”

            “No.  Maybe a few extra seconds.  I didn’t even stop walking.  Someone could go to my house and see it.  I scraped most of it off, but there’s still some left on the bottom,” Alexandra responded floridly, managing to keep a stiff upper lip through it all as she steadily retaught herself to look Bridget in the eye.  As uncomfortable and painfully weak as it made her feel, another side effect of the session, she knew it was necessary if she was to have a single strain of hope in her words being taken as genuine.

            Bridget seemed to consider the suggestion and nodded.  “I’ll make sure someone checks it out.”

            “Thank you,” Alexandra said simply, fighting back a sigh of intense relief, despite the victory being so small.  She knew it would mean almost nothing to anyone, given the circumstances, but it gave her a flutter in her heart to hear Bridget at least acknowledge something she’d said rather than tossing it aside like an outright lie.

            “But you had to have seen them there,” Bridget continued abruptly, seemingly shifting gears, having recognized the relative softness of the moment and apparently disapproving of it.  “You had to have seen the Betas walking through.  That path is chest height for you.  They passed in just a few minutes before you.”

            “It was dark, and I was looking straight ahead.  I don’t even think I looked at the Beta path.  I don’t remember anyone there.”       

            “At a walking speed, you still would’ve left the alley sooner, but the issue is that we saw them on the feed go in first and then never come out, after you passed through and fixed your shoe.  No one else went through except you.  It happened in that window.  You have to see our problem with that, Lexi.”

            “I… I do…” Alexandra whimpered, her confidence wavering for just a moment, knowing she was steadily beginning to lose an uphill battle now.  “I do see it.”

            “So how can you explain that?  How can we believe that you didn’t see them?  There were six of them, close together.  You probably would’ve at least heard them talking.”

            “No.”

            “Nothing,” Bridget said disbelievingly for confirmation.

            “Nothing,” the Alpha repeated with a gulp.

            “I just have one last question for you, Lexi,” Bridget said with a defeated sigh.  “And then you can say whatever you want.”

            “Okay.”

            “Why?” the Omega hissed desperately with a rattle in her throat.  She leaned her face in a few feet closer until Alexandra could feel each resigned exhalation wafting against her legs.  “Why?”

            “I don’t know why it happened.  I just know I didn’t do it.  I would never touch a Beta without asking, and I would never, ever think of-”

            “Just get it over with!” spat Bridget venomously, her hands shaking now as she fought back the trembling in her voice.  Alexandra was nearly spilled from her palm as the massive fingers curled inward slightly like claws.  “You’re making this so much harder on yourself.  Why can’t you just-”

            “BECAUSE IT’S THE TRUTH, BRIDGE!” screamed Alexandra, crawling forward in the palm and propping herself up on the heel of Bridget’s upturned hand.  Both young women flinched in the immediate wake of it, though the Alpha quickly crossed her arms defiantly.  “Yes, I know.  Enforcer Cade or ma’am.  Do what you have to now.”

            “No,” grumbled Bridget with a frown.  “I’m not going to this time.  But I don’t know what you think I’m supposed to do here.  I’m trying to make this as easy as possible for both of us, and you won’t stop fighting me.”

            “Figure out what happened, like you always do.  That’s what you’re supposed to do.  I shouldn’t be here, and you know it.”

            “Lexi… just tell me, if this… all of it… was about something else.  Anything.” 

            “No.”

            “Look, we both know you’ve had a… history with Betas.  That’s not a secret to anyone.  Maybe it was the straw that broke the camel’s back and…”

            “No.”

            “Or maybe a way to finally make things… even.  For your…”

            “Don’t,” Alexandra spat with steely abandon, dredging the strength to make it clear.

            “…for your mother.”

            “Don’t you dare…” the Alpha cried, her voice cracking with every syllable in tandem with the quaking of her limbs.  “…talk to me about her.”

            A fractured silence followed, with neither girl surrendering to blink or break their taut concentration on one another.  At long last, though, Bridget bit her lip and conceded.

            “All right.  Those were all my questions.  Do you have any-”

            “No,” Alexandra answered immediately, still not quite caring what the reaction for interruptions would be.  “I’m done.”

            Bridget leaned her chin down a little lower, unable to meet her friend’s gaze for a few seconds and clearly impacted by the gravity of the moment.  If nothing else, she knew she could believe Alexandra on this final point.

            “Lexi, if you… want to spend a little more time outside right now, for a few minutes anyway, you could… I mean, it would be all right.” Bridget continued, only partially able to hide her guilt over having felt the need to broach that final subject.  Her eyes, too, passed over the expansive backyard and couldn’t help but be flooded with pleasant sensations that seemed too distant to ever truly reclaim.

            She remembered wading through the creek with Lexi safely cupped in her hands and kicking the waves up into the sunlight, the pair of them giggling at the splattering display.

            She remembered plucking berries by the bushel between her fingertips and gingerly lowering crimson handfuls of them toward her friend to share, who would smother herself in their purple juices for the pure hilarity of it while Bridget doubled over with adoring laughter.

            She remembered planting tree in the soil around the house while Lexi set down tiny flowers around the bases, lighting them up with vibrant color that only grew louder when people walking by took the extra time to examine them.

            “No,” Alexandra whispered at last after considering it by replaying the exact same sights in her mind.  “Just take me back to my cage, please.”

            “That should be just about it, Mrs. Brayer.  Once the rest of your family gets here, we’ll be ready to finalize the adoption,” Bridget said with a gentle smile down to the Alpha standing atop her desk at Aegis, her fingers neatly crossed together a few paces away on the surface.

            “That’s wonderful,” the woman answered as she gazed up at the colossal figure before her, relief evident in her words.  She placed a hand over her heart.  “After all the… horrible things that have happened, you know, I had so hoped this would be able to go through without any problems.”

            “I understand,” Bridget said truthfully, shuddering in memory of the file that had been placed before her a week before.  Casey Ross, an eight-year-old Beta, had been abandoned by her Alpha parents in their home, which they’d fled without a trace and without a word of explanation to their child after emptying their savings.  The young girl had been left alone on the kitchen table for five full days with only a few scraps of food and a low dish of water to sustain her, until the concerned Mrs. Brayer and her husband, knowing of the girl’s incredibly strained home life, had come by to check on the lack of communication with Casey, who happened to be their Alpha daughter Esther’s only friend.  After the abused Beta had received medical attention, the decision was quickly made with Casey’s and Esther’s enthusiastic support to adopt the essentially orphaned girl.

            The case had caused something of a stir the day it came in to the facility.  A couple of the enforcers had even started looking into tracking down the Rosses to ensure they received their comeuppance to the fullest extent allowable by the law, and probably then some, though nothing had shown up yet.  Meanwhile, Bridget had been handed the case after an emergency had arisen for its previous handler, though the speedy transition for the family to help put Casey back into a safe place as soon as possible, surrounded by the only loved ones she had left in the world, was already in its final stages.

            “Mrs. Brayer, I do need to ask one final thing.  As your case worker now, it’s my job to make sure every… possible eventuality is accounted for,” Bridget prefaced with a casual glance over the rest of the pristine white office, empty save for the two of them.

            “Yes?”

            “Esther and Casey are very close, aren’t they?”

            “They’re inseparable,” Mrs. Brayer said with a warm chortle.  “Honestly, I… I couldn’t be happier.  Esther’s had such trouble making friends at school.  She’s always been more of a loner, and then when she met Casey… well, I guess you could call them kindred spirits.”

            “And Esther is seven years old, if I’m not mistaken?” Bridget said, quickly thumbing through the file for confirmation.

            “Yes, she is.  Why?”

            “I’m aware that they spend a great deal of time together, and that she has had plenty of practice in handling Casey.  Of course, there is no mandated test or licensing issue for her handling a Beta.  I just… have to ensure, for the sake of Casey’s complete safety…”

            “Oh, absolutely,” Mrs. Brayer said with a nod, realizing where this was going.  “My husband and I decided that the three of us are going to be taking a short course, for the extra practice of handling her.  Esther will go too, of course, but I have to say, she’s become so wonderful at it in such a brief time, I think she’ll hardly need it.  Whenever we go somewhere with Casey, actually, she always just wants to be held by Esther.”

            “That is good,” Bridget answered with an amiable smirk.  “I’ll make a note of it.”

            “You’ll see when she gets here.  Esther’s really quite marvelous.  She would sooner let herself trip and fall than see a hair on Casey’s head harmed.”

            “I see,” said the Omega with a reassuring nod, warmed by this added explanation.  “I guess there’s absolutely no cause for concern on our end, then.”

            “None at all.  I think they should be getting here any minute,” Mrs. Brayer said.  At that moment, a blue light blinked on Bridget’s desk with a soft “ping” to alert them of the elevator’s arrival across the office space.

            “Perfect timing.  We can go pick them up, then,” Bridget said, laying her palm flat on the desk for the woman to board, which she did gingerly over the massive outstretched fingertips.  The sound of the sliding doors shutting quietly echoed in the otherwise empty room.  “All set?”

            “Yes!”

            “Great.  Now, we’ll just…” Bridget said, rising slowly to her feet and keeping her arm rock-steady with practiced focus, when her eyes met with the person entering Aegis, and she paused, biting her lip.

            “Is something the matter?” Mrs. Brayer asked sweetly, instantly noticing the startled look of anxiety on Bridget’s face.

            “No.  Sorry about that.  Let’s go pick up your family,” Bridget said, returning her attention entirely to the eager Alpha and making her way toward the pick-up zone, ignoring her mother Evelyn for the time being, who silently took a seat in an empty desk and began waiting patiently for the enforcer to return.

            In short order, Bridget had Mr. and Mrs. Brayer loaded up in one hand from the elevator, and Esther and Casey in the other.  She noted that the Beta seemed to tremble briefly at the sight of someone so comparatively monumental as Bridget, though with a delighted tingle, she caught sight of Esther whispering something inaudible to her friend that got her to relax again almost immediately.

            Once they’d returned to her desk, Bridget had to keep tearing her eyes away from the sight of the girls to avoid appearing peculiar to the Brayer family, though it was awfully difficult.  If Mrs. Brayer’s glowing review of her young daughter’s handling hadn’t utterly reassured the correctness of this family union, then seeing Esther and Casey with her own eyes for the first time certainly did.

            Even with the difference in their scale, Bridget could tell immediately that Esther’s form was perfect.  Despite being seven years old, her arm was clearly trained by now to barely wobble in any direction side to side or up and down as she held Casey in her upturned palm.  Her fingers were curled in just enough to provide a protective barrier, yet they still allowed the Beta room to move about freely.  Her eyes darted down regularly to make sure her friend was still secure, but the rest of the time she appeared calmly alert about her surroundings.

            Bridget wouldn’t admit it to anyone, but her years of personally unwavering dedication to the safety of every being of all sizes on the planet had made her an intensely critical judge of handling techniques.  Most Alphas and Omegas held the belief that anyone could learn to be good enough to keep smaller beings acceptably safe, but she didn’t share that sentiment.  She’d often have to hold her tongue when she’d see an Alpha’s hand quivering or tipping even slightly when a Beta was on board.  It struck Bridget as sloppy and selfish.

            She had no such critique to make of Esther.  The girl clearly cared a great deal for her friend, and evidently was aware of the responsibility in taking a life equally as significant as her own into her hand, however briefly.  It was subtle, and something most wouldn’t be able to distinguish, but Bridget’s keen eyes noticed it, and it warmed her heart tremendously.

            The Omega hadn’t seen dedication like that since…

            “So are we all set?” Mr. Brayer asked with an earnest smile, interrupting Bridget’s train of thought as she had to pull her gaze away from the adorable pair of young friends and soon-to-be sisters again.  The Alpha couple had just finished making a few taps on the screen of Bridget’s tablet to officiate the adoption.

            “Yes.  All set,” Bridget confirmed.  “Congratulations to all of you.”

            “Hear that, Casey?” Esther gasped, positively quivering with glee but, incredibly, still keeping her hand absolutely steady.  “It’s done!”

            “We’re sisters?” peeped the enthralled squeal of Casey’s voice such that even Bridget could hear it, her miniscule arms flapping enthusiastically.

            “That’s right,” the Omega replied with a smile, careful not to let her voice boom too powerfully as she directly addressed Casey.

            The young Alpha brought her palm up close to her cheek and nuzzled the Beta against it, who in turn stood up and hugged herself against Esther’s face.

            Bridget was almost certain she’d melt into an emotional puddle if she didn’t force herself to blink and return her attention to the Brayers, though she was unable to keep a goofily happy smile off her lips.

            “Thank you so much,” Mrs. Brayer said with another relieved laugh, obviously noticing the look of shared joy on their case worker’s billboard-sized face.

            “If there’s anything else you need, please don’t hesitate to contact me.  We’ll check back with you in six months, and the best of luck to you all,” Bridget promised with a convivial twinkle in her green eyes, glancing again at Casey and Esther, who were still lovingly managing the closest version of a hug they could.

            As soon as the elevator containing the newly expanded Brayer family was boarded and descending to the subway system below, Bridget felt her mother’s hand on her shoulder.

            “Bridge…” Evelyn Cade began as gently as she could.

            “Please don’t call me that, Mom.  I’m not ten anymore,” the enforcer requested with a stiff upper lip.

            “All right,” the woman replied, knowing perfectly well that the real reason for her daughter’s sudden distancing from the shortening of her name had nothing to do with her age.  “Can we talk?”

            Taking a deep breath, Bridget wanted nothing more than to cut off the oncoming subject with her mother and never speak of it again to her, but knowing there was no real escaping it forever considering the pair of them would soon be living under the same roof as Alexandra for the better part of two years, she bit her lip and realized it had to be dealt with sooner or later.

            “Why don’t we go sit at my desk?” Evelyn suggested tenderly, wrapping her arm around her daughter’s shoulders and leading her in the right direction.

            Bridget’s eyes darted furtively toward the entrance to Aegis, fearful that someone else would join them in the room and she’d be forced to discuss the matter in front of anyone other than her mother, but luckily there was no one in sight.

            The pair silently took a seat near the corner of the massive office space, where the elder Cade worked as an urban planner for Aegis, with a focus on designing structures and thoroughfares that safely accommodated mixed class commutes.  A tablet with a partially constructed blueprint onscreen sat on her desk, but she quickly waved it away and casually placed a fist over her lips to study her daughter.

            “Well,” Evelyn sighed.  “Is she home already?”

            “Yes,” Bridget said as she leaned against her mother’s desk.

            “And I’m guessing, then, you already started her…”

            “Sessions.  Yes.”

            The woman placed a hand over her eyes, stroking her forehead, then threaded her fingers through her own yellow locks, just a few hues brighter than her daughter’s but without the curls.  “Then you probably already know what I’m going to say.”

            “Go ahead anyway,” Bridget conceded.

            “Are you sure you’re up for this?” she asked.  “You know I and everyone else would understand if you just…”

            “Yes, I’m sure,” the enforcer cut in confidently.

            “Honey, there’s no need for this.  You don’t have to… prove something to anyone, or her.”

            “I’m not trying to prove anything to anyone,” Bridget lied through her teeth, crossing her arms indignantly and leaning further back as she sat on the edge of the desk.  “It’s just a job.  I’m doing my job.”

            “No, it’s not just a job.  And you’d be a pretty poor enforcer if you’d convinced yourself otherwise,” Evelyn continued with brutal honesty.  “But you’re not.  You’re one of the best they have.  So why are you doing this?”

            “Because a lot of innocent people were hurt by someone I know… used to know… wouldn’t put a finger on anyone without asking twice first,” Bridget scowled, less at her mother and more at the return to the painful subject, before adding with a rhetorical huff: “What am I supposed to do?”

            “Let someone else handle it.  That’s what.  You’re going to let this eat you up, and don’t pretend you’re not.”

            “I’m a big girl.  I can take it,” Bridget declared.

            “You are.  You’re incredibly strong, honey, but that’s not what this is about.”

            “Then what is it about, Mom?”

            At that moment, the sliding doors opened up across the room and Melody King entered, her hair done up in a ponytail.  She gave the pair an acknowledging nod and somewhat embarrassed grimace, fully aware of whose custody Alexandra was in, before making her way to her desk.  Taking a seat, then, she delicately deposited what appeared from that distance to be a pill onto the surface a few dozen feet away from her hands and got to work.

            Despite knowing the gently reserved Omega wouldn’t dream of eavesdropping on the conversation purposefully, Bridget took the sudden prompting of additional company to seal her lips and slide off of Evelyn’s desk, effectively ending the exchange.

            If nothing else, this conversation had shown her just how it important her next moves with Alexandra were going to be, and how vital it was to stay the course with unflinching resolve.

            Silently, she renewed her vow.  She would have answers and justice for all in equal measure.  That much was certain.

            “It’s about you wanting everything to be like it was again.  Believe me, honey, I love her as much as I know you still do,” her mother explained in a hush after an agonized pause, her eyes pleading with her daughter almost as much as her strained words.  “It’s about you getting hurt over something that might not have a happy ending, no matter how much you want it to.”

            “I don’t get hurt,” Bridget answered frigidly as she turned her back on her mother and marched toward the sliding doors.

Ten-year-old Alexandra Warren sat on a cushion atop the vast expanse of Evelyn Cade’s pearly-white Aegis desk.  With knees pressed to her chest and her arms wrapped around her shoulders, she rested her cheek on her forearms and rocked slowly back and forth to unsuccessfully reach some kind of equilibrium.  Her upper lip quivered, desperate to let the trembling metastasize and turn into full-body heaving that would inevitably be followed by agonized sobbing, but her mind was far too paralyzed for her to do anything other than silently shake.

            She gazed numbly around the unbelievably huge Aegis office.  Alexandra had never been inside any building constructed for Omegas before, let alone what was essentially the city’s central command center.  The sight ordinarily would’ve captured her sense of wonder and prompted her to test out the distance with a few delighted shouts rebounded as echoes.

            No such impetus was inside her as she hardly attempted to process what her eyes were actually seeing at the moment, with her mind’s eye still trapped firmly in what she’d witnessed a mere half hour ago.  She was beyond weary, exhausted after the evening’s events, and desired the sweet embrace of sleep, but it seemed the nightmarish vision of it all would never again permit such a luxury.  Alexandra was almost positive of this, in fact, and that was enough to scare her into further quivering.

            “Yes, you heard me,” Evelyn Cade whispered anxiously into her phone on the other end of the room, in an effort to minimize what the traumatized Alpha could hear.  “She said she ran, got chased onto the subway, and then just showed up here at the elevators.  No one else is here now, otherwise I would’ve put her with… yes, yes, I know, someone will be up to process her, but I’m going to need an enforcer to come here now to help handle this too, all right?  There’s something else they need to hear.  Thank you.  What?  Fine, fine…”

            Aegis’ urban planner continued pacing as she waited for another answer, chancing a glance back at her desk every few seconds to ensure Alexandra had remained where she’d placed her to try and calm down after she’d carried her back to the desk inside a transportation car.  Evelyn could tell, though, with a single look in the tiny girl’s hollow eyes that such a peaceful outcome would probably just be optimistic thinking, considering what the Alpha had managed to describe to her before falling utterly silent and immovable.

            Alexandra’s eyes began to water, not yet from tears, but from her having forgotten to blink as she continued staring off into the glowing white space of the room.

            Their pleas.  Their screams.  Their faces.

            She wouldn’t have believed any living thing could look like that until she’d seen it with her own eyes and subsequently wished she could spend as many hours as was required to scrub it from her memory.

            Their faces.                         

            “Mom?  I thought you said we could go home at ten, I…” Bridget Cade piped up, blonde curls bouncing against her shoulders as she bounded around the corner toward Evelyn’s desk, though she stopped in her tracks when she noticed the only occupant, about the size of one of her fingers, curled up in a trembling ball on the desk cushion reserved for visiting Alphas.

            Alexandra heard the voice but didn’t bother turning to look at its twelve-year-old Omega owner, and probably couldn’t have repeated back what was said an instant later from memory.  All she could do was keep replaying the images and sounds of those Betas again and again on a continuous loop.  They were tormenting her ceaselessly, and with each repetition, it only got worse.

            “Hi there,” Bridget said sweetly to her unexpected companion as she sauntered slowly up to the desk, still keeping her distance at the sight of the guarded Alpha stranger.  She looked across the room and spotted her mother, who had her back turned to them as she continued talking on her phone, then returned her attention down to the occupant of Evelyn’s workspace.

            Immediately sensing the dire tension surrounding the unknown little girl, Bridget carefully kneeled down next to the desk so that only her head was fully in Alexandra’s view, then gingerly gripped the edge for support without rattling it in the slightest.

            No response came from the Alpha.

            “Are you okay?” the Omega asked apprehensively, hushing her voice lower so as not to spook the girl.  She cocked her head to the side curiously, unable to comprehend the show of wallowing before her in such a small, delicate form.

            Blinking at this second direct address, Alexandra was pulled just enough from her hateful mental slideshow to glance over at Bridget’s face framed by the cascading curls.  She flinched at the first meeting of those enormous swimming green eyes, but relaxed almost instantly when she saw only concern in them.  Compassion, even.  It was a refreshing replacement to briefly focus on instead of the haunting visages of recent memory.

            She still didn’t speak to respond, but found herself keeping eye contact with the Omega, and for a few stunted moments, the shivering stopped.

            “My name is Bridget,” the Omega whispered with an earnest smile out of the corner of her mouth.  Upon meeting the stranger’s eyes, she was immediately startled by the raw grief evident in them, but refused to let it show in her face.  “What’s yours?”

            “L…” the Alpha peeped after a dry silence.  “L-Lexi.”

            “Lexi.  I like your name, Lexi,” Bridget repeated back amiably.  “Is something wrong?”

            Alexandra considered trying to open her mouth again to explain, but after the ordeal of summarizing everything to Evelyn in a blind and stupefied panic before completely collapsing in on herself from the magnitude of it all, the words weren’t exactly on the tip of her tongue.  She simply nodded her head in the affirmative as she continued leaning her cheek against her huddled arms and legs, with her sweat-matted long dark hair in a tangled mess.

            “I’m sorry,” Bridget cooed, biting her lip.  “Is there anything I can do?”

            Alexandra had to frown at this, and was shaken even further from her emotional paralysis out of pure bewilderment.

            She didn’t know who this girl was.  Had never even seen her before.  In fact, she could count the number of Omegas she’d ever spoken to on two fingers, and both of those encounters were from within the last fifteen minutes.  Her mother had always been stringent on how many people she had contact with, even among the Alpha community, and outside of her class, the girl was permitted no opportunities to connect.  To Bridget, she knew she was only some stranger curled up and shaking like a leaf, tiny and insignificant.

            What did she care?

            “No,” Alexandra admitted at last with difficulty, her voice half-devolved into a low wheeze.

            “Are you sure?” Bridget followed up as tamely as she could.  She leaned her head forward a few more feet across the surface of the desk, but still kept her distance from the unmoving Alpha child.

            Alexandra bobbed her head before burying her face back against her crossed arms and shivering, feeling the tears finally beginning to trickle down her cheeks and not wanting to embarrass herself even further in front of this perfect stranger.  She appreciated the anesthetizing sweetness of the girl’s words, but there was no way she would allow herself to let her guard down now.  Not after everything she’d seen that night, and might very well still see more of if she managed to track her down here.

            However, in the near-silence of the moment, the Alpha knew her quietly choked sobs could be heard, and listening intently, she could tell the Omega was still waiting with bated breath next to the desk as near to eye level as she could manage.  Alexandra’s barely controlled demeanor was then broken when she felt a fingertip as thick as a tree stroking down from her shoulders to the small of her back.

            The girl flinched, yelping in surprise, and the tremendous fingertip retracted instantly.  It was by no means the strength of the contact that got the reaction.  Bridget’s single caress in its attempt at comfort was actually gentler than most Alphas she had encountered in her life.

            It was simply the first time she’d ever been touched by an Omega.

            “I’m so sorry!” Bridget gasped, still keeping her voice at a respectfully low whisper as she cupped her hands around her mouth.  She laid her fingertips back on the edge of the desk, but this time kept a cautious distance.  “I… I d-didn’t mean t-to…”

            The Omega’s bright green eyes, so eager to help moments before, appeared to be glistening now.

            “It’s okay,” Alexandra gulped with clarity that surprised even herself as she forced herself to look back out at her companion.

            “You j-just looked… so s-sad, I…” Bridget continued liltingly.  Leaning in further over the edge of the desk, she turned her head to the side and rested her cheek against the surface so that the faces of both girls were aligned in the same direction.  “…I’m s-so sorry, Lexi.”

            “No,” Alexandra murmured.  She didn’t know how it happened, but she had became aware that the ghastly images playing through her mind were beginning to fade into the background the more she focused on Bridget’s words.  In this moment of horrifically melded fear and uncertainty, it seemed like the best thing to continue doing.

            “What?”

            “It’s okay.  I j-just haven’t m-met a… a…” Alexandra sputtered nervously.

            “Oh, God,” Bridget exhaled anxiously, feeling guiltier than ever at what she immediately assumed was a very threatening first impression of her class.  “I… I p-promise, I won’t t-touch you again.  Do you want me to leave you alone now?”

            “No,” the marginally relaxed Alpha answered.

            “You’re crying,” the Omega observed dolefully, biting her lip and looking to be dangerously on the verge of tears herself, having decided that this new development must’ve been her fault.

            “No I’m not,” Alexandra responded bashfully, quickly rubbing her wrists over the tiny twinkling trails on her cheeks.

            “Please don’t be sad,” Bridget requested softly.  “They’re really nice here at Aegis.  They’ll take care of you.  They’ll fix what’s wrong, whatever it is.”

            “They can’t fix it,” the young girl said with a stuttered sigh, rocking back and forth anew.  “They can’t.”

            “Why not?”

            “They can’t s-stop her.  She’ll d-do it again, and then she’ll… she’ll f-find me…”

            “Nobody can find you here,” Bridget said firmly, her voice still hushed.  “You’re safe.”

            “She can,” Alexandra gasped as the bloody visions forced their way back to the forefront of her mind.  Her mouth hung open and the tears flowed freely again.  “And then she’ll… she’ll h-”

            “Nobody will hurt you, Lexi,” Bridget reaffirmed with a determined furrow of her brow, absolutely aching at the sight of the Alpha’s suffering.  “Nobody.”

            “How do you know?” Alexandra squeaked, trembling and clenching her eyes shut in a failed attempt to escape the waking nightmare.

            “Because I won’t let them,” the Omega answered simply, and despite the terror gripping Alexandra, the absolute and calm certainty of Bridget’s answer allowed another glimmer of hope to fight its way through the distress.

            “How can you…” Alexandra muttered.

            “What?” Bridget asked, her cheek still resting against the desk.

            “How can you be sure?”

            “Alexandra, honey, are you doing all right?” Evelyn Cade asked daintily as she paced back toward the desk, the mouthpiece of her phone covered by a palm.

            “Yes, ma'am,” the Alpha answered automatically as she turned her head away, not wanting yet another person to see her tears.

            “I have one more call to make, and then we’re going to take you to see some people here that want to help you.  Would you like that?”

            Alexandra only nodded, but it was sincere.

            “Do you need anything?”

            A small shake of the head this time.

            Evelyn briefly made eye contact with her daughter, with knowledge and trust in the girl’s disposition, and only smiled before putting the phone back to her ear and continuing the call as she marched back across the room.

            “Because,” Bridget whispered in answer to her companion once the pair were alone again.  “Anyone who wants to get to you will have to go through me first.”

            Alexandra felt warmth shoot through her nervously chilly skin, and couldn’t help but be soothed by the unmoving honesty in the girl’s promise.  She inherently knew Bridget meant every last word of it.

            “T-Thank you,” the Alpha said with a hesitant swallow, nodding her head and daring herself to fend off the frightful images again.  Steadily, her rigid posture began to relax until she was merely sitting on the cushion instead of cringingly knotted up.

            “You’re welcome,” Bridget said tenderly.

            As she took deep breaths, calming her nerves against impossible odds, Alexandra turned her head away as more tears poured down.

            “Here you go,” the Omega said, slowly extending a pointer finger toward the weeping ten-year-old and stopping about a foot away.  A tissue scrap rested on the tip of her finger.  Reluctantly, the girl accepted it.

            “I’m s-s-sorry…” Alexandra huffed, humiliated to be seen like this as she wiped the trickled moisture from her cheeks and neck.

            “Please don’t be sorry.  It’s okay,” Bridget reassured.  “I just want you to feel better.”

            “Why?”

            “What?”

            “Why?  I don’t… know you,” Alexandra whispered with imperiousness that came from the lasting paranoia at being treated so well by someone from a class she’d been taught to avoid her entire life.

            “Because I don’t like it when people are sad or afraid,” the Omega explained, somewhat confused that the answer wasn’t obvious.  “And I want to protect you.”

            “Protect me?”

            “Yes.  If you’ll let me.”

            “I…” Alexandra gaped, too lost in a haze of simultaneous lingering fear and hope at the girl’s words.  “Why?”

            “That’s what you do for your friends,” Bridget smirked.

            “F-Friends?” the lonesome Alpha repeated back, getting jitters at the mere possibility of such a thing.  Her mother had always lorded over her relationships so tightly, never giving her the opportunity to create a lasting connection with anyone, that the very idea was foreign in her mind as well as in her vocal cords.  For a moment, she considered the possibility that she was being joked with.

            “Uh-huh,” Bridget confirmed.  “If you want.”

            “I d-do,” Alexandra stammered, no longer out of aversion at the idea of danger, but simply with subdued joy.

            “Is there anything else I can do for you now?” the Omega pressed.  “Anything?”

            “I… I want to… get up now,” Alexandra mustered.  “Off the lady’s desk.”

            “Oh,” Bridget said hopefully after an uncertain pause with a lift of an eyebrow as she straightened up her posture again.  “You… you mean you want…”

            “Yes,” Alexandra answered knowingly, nodding her head as she shakily rose to her feet and wrung her hands nervously behind her back.

            “Do you want to ride on the transport car?” Bridget offered, slowly reaching across the desk for the device her mother had left before walking away to make the calls and wrapping her fingers around the handle to demonstrate her aptitude for safe carrying.

            “N-No,” the Alpha said.  “I d-don’t… need it.”

            “You mean… you want me to…”

            “Yes.  P-Please.”

            “All right,” Bridget said, trying to hide the eager enthusiasm in her voice.  She gingerly upturned her hand about a foot from Alexandra’s legs and flattened her peachy fingers against the surface of the desk.  “Are you ready?”

            “Yes.”

            “Don’t be scared,” the Omega wheedled.  “I’ve never ever let anybody fall.”

            “Never?”

            “Never ever.”

            “Okay,” Alexandra said, trusting her first-ever friend implicitly as she took the first quivering step onto the girl’s enormous fingertips.  They were soft and strangely inviting, and suddenly it felt oddly familiar to be climbing into a giant person’s hand to let her pick her up, like being reunited in an embrace with a long-lost relative.  Serenity overtook her almost immediately.

            “I’ve got you.  I promise,” Bridget insisted as her hand began to rise up from the table with its passenger in tow.

            It was a bizarre experience for the Alpha, but for reasons entirely separate than she was expecting.  The malleable floor of Bridget’s fleshy palm and fingertips yielded slightly to each of her footsteps as she made her way to the soft center, but aside from this, it was like standing on concrete as Bridget’s arm ascended.  She doubted she could’ve swayed the stillness of the girl’s hand even if she jumped up and down and leapt from side to side, and it made her feel more secure than she had in years.

            “Comfy?” Bridget asked while carefully observing the girl’s progress.

            “Yes.”

            “You can sit down if you want,” the Omega suggested gently.

            “Thank you,” Alexandra uttered as she lowered herself down into Bridget’s warm palm and crossed her legs together, gazing at the room from her slightly elevated perch with fresh confidence in her security.  The Omega’s thumb carefully arched itself up to provide extra security around the edge of the hand, and Alexandra placed both hands upon it for balance.

            “I’ve got everything taken care of, Alexandra.  We’re going to introduce you to some nice people here at Aegis who are going to help.  Are you ready?” Evelyn asked, placing her phone back in a pocket as she approached the desk again from across the room.  She pursed her lips at the sight of the traumatized Alpha resting in her daughter’s palm, but didn’t say anything about it, having faith that Bridget wouldn’t have touched the girl without express permission.

            “Yes, ma'am,” the Alpha answered with a bob of her head.  Hardly thinking about it, she hugged Bridget’s thumb closer to her stomach, which the Omega’s finger obligingly allowed as it cuddled her back.  “Ma'am?”

            “You can just call me Evelyn, honey.  What do you need?” the elder Omega asked as she looked down at the occupant of her daughter’s hand.

            “Can… can Bridget… c-come with me to see the people?”

            An appreciative smile crossing her lips, Evelyn made brief eye contact with her daughter, who returned her mother’s glance with pleading green irises, obviously desperate to remain with Alexandra as well.

            “Yes, she can.”

            “Please will you s-stay with me?” Alexandra whimpered as she gazed up at the face of her handler, wrapping her arms even tighter around Bridget’s finger with hope and gratefully resting her cheek against the soft pad of the enormous thumbprint.

            “Of course I will,” the Omega promised, cracking a disbelieving smile that such a thing even needed to be asked and getting goose bumps at the sensation of this brave little girl hugging her finger.  Without even knowing Alexandra’s story yet, she could sense how difficult all of this was, and it made her admire her new friend immensely to see her soldiering on.  It seemed the least she could do to stay with her and help any way she could.  “As long as you want.”

            “Bridget?”

            “Yes?”

            “Are… are you… sure nobody can c-come in here and find me?  I… I just…” Alexandra asked as the final wave of tears in the exhausting aftermath of the emotional episode quietly burst forth.  She no longer tried to hide her face from the Omega as she was gently cradled in Bridget’s steady palm.

            “I swear, Lexi,” Bridget vowed solemnly as she stroked her fingertip along her new friend’s cheek to wipe the fresh tears away as delicately as a feather.  “You never have to be afraid again.”

Alexandra sat crossed-legged in front of the glassy wall of her cell that faced out into Bridget’s bedroom, where the small prison had been placed on a shelf shortly after the end of their first post-session conversation seven days prior.

            Now, with gelid hands shivering in her lap, face pale as snow, the Alpha was awaiting the first real contact she would have with her best friend in all that time, and she was dreading it only slightly more than she was subconsciously relieved for it, if only for the fleeting recognition of her consciousness by another living thing.

            The intervening days since Tuesday had been trying, to say the least.  Bridget had provided Alexandra with a set of clothes and necessary toiletries after she returned from work the day of the arrest, but it had been a wordless transaction, and for the first time, the Omega refused to look her friend in the eye for even a moment of the interaction.  Alexandra had silently accepted the offerings, grateful for the chance to change her clothes after how dirty her pajamas had become during the course of the morning, but she didn’t feel any satisfaction from the emptiness of the exchange.  In fact, despite her anger at her friend and the entire situation, she still longed for contact in some roundabout way, even if it was as bitterly disappointing as before.

            Things only gotten worse in the days following.  Bridget brought Alexandra her pre-heated meals at eight in the morning just before she headed to Aegis, at noon for lunch, and again at six in the evening, but they were delivered without any opportunity to speak.

            Alexandra knew that this wasn’t a mandated part of her incarceration; in fact, enforcers were encouraged to carry on conversations with their wards as a chance to expand on their lessons.  Moreover, she knew that Bridget often took advantage of this opportunity in her work to gauge the progress of those in her custody.  This treatment now of cutting Alexandra off from human contact was entirely of the Omega’s choosing, and that cut just as deep as any of the heart-rending abuse.

            The week had proceeded at a snail’s pace, and the Alpha was practically out of her mind that, at minimum, she was looking at another forty-six weeks of this, and that was with perfect remarks from Bridget on her progress, something she doubted would be forthcoming given her refusal to lie about what she’d done.

            On Friday afternoon, Alexandra got another bittersweet reprieve from the mind-numbing solitude when Bridget broke the silence.

            “I meant to give this to you sooner.  It’s your tablet to prepare for your Beta culture and class relations exam next week on Thursday,” the Omega had said as she lowered the fragile piece of technology into the cell between pinched fingers.  She still didn’t allow their eyes to meet, purposefully staring just above her friend’s plain of vision.  “There should be a list of which ones to focus on in the menu.  If you break the tablet, it won’t be replaced.  Do you understand?”

            The prisoner accepted the device from her friend’s fingers and nodded.  She as well as Bridget knew this was just another of the required exercises to hand down, and that the exam itself would be a joke for her.  After all, the Alpha had already willingly read most of the books in the reading list simply as part of her education as a citizen and had been far too moved by most to ever forget them.  It was only a silly formality having it explained to her, and yet again forced the twenty-year-old to recognize how robotic her friend’s words were when rambling through the necessary speeches.  Listening to Bridget speak like this was so eerie that it made her relieved to be left in silence again, however briefly.

            The enforcer had made one additional direct contact with her friend on Saturday to pick up the dirty laundry and return it twenty minutes later, but otherwise had continued on as distantly as before.  Evelyn Cade made no appearances in the room, and Alexandra supposed she couldn’t blame her, if she truly believed the report like everyone else did, though this conclusion didn’t ease the pain any.

            The days stretched on so infinitely that the Alpha had taken to skimming back through the reading material just to stop herself from going mad with the boredom, though it was a pointless activity otherwise, and reliving the vivid literary works added too much to her emotional burden to make her want to try for long.

            Alexandra couldn’t decide what broke her heart more: the total ignorance, or the frosty receptions she got when she was being paid attention at last.

            Now, as she leaned her head against the chilly translucent wall of her cell precisely a week after this whole violent mess, waiting for the inevitable with her stomach tied up in knots, adrenaline and rage kicked up inside her.  She was resolved, however shakily.  Whatever was coming, she would take it because she had to, but she would refuse to take it without a raised chin and defiance burning in her heart.

            It was her truth, and the only truth there was.  That was all.  No one would take it away.

            Bridget marched into the bedroom later in the morning than her friend had been expecting and kicked the door closed behind her with a heel.  She had a strappy blue skirt on and sandals that slapped softly at her heels as she strode, suitable for the warmer weather.  In her right hand was a bright red popsicle fresh from the wrapper.

            “We’re going to get started on your second session now, Lexi,” Bridget announced with eerie calm, the same rehearsed drone evident in her voice, as she came to a stop over the cell and dipped the tip of the popsicle into her cheek.  “Please stand up for me.”

            Alexandra obeyed, resigned to this, but more determined than ever to keep her personal dignity, or at least what remained of it.  The fingers of Bridget’s free hand descended into the cell and the Alpha was forced for yet another gut-churning time in her life to be collected into the Omega’s palm without being offered the chance to embark herself.  She knew she would never, ever become used to this, no matter how many times she was forced into it over the course of her stay here, and she knew with even more certainty that the mere act of scooping her up without the tender requests for permission she had become so accustomed to would burn hotter than almost any session Bridget could cruelly concoct.

            Gripping her friend around the sides and entrapping her in a vice of firm flesh, the enforcer lifted her charge from the cell and casually marched toward the desk of her bedroom, placing Alexandra down on its surface.

            “We’ll just have a quick adjustment to make before we can continue,” Bridget said, keeping her free hand hovering over Alexandra, who lowered herself to her knees to await her fate.  “Hold still, just like that, and we’ll get started.”

            Befuddled by this request, Alexandra was surprised to hear a low rumble begin to emanate from an unknown source, and she flinched at the sight and sound of it as Bridget’s fingers suddenly caged above her into an aggressive claw-like formation.  The Omega didn’t seem to change her stance in the slightest at the commencement of the thunderous echo, as though she couldn’t hear it.  The longer it went on, the sound began to mutate into a wild roar, something far more feral than any animal could muster, and it filled the Alpha with poisonous alarm.

            All around Alexandra, the air was constricting and blurring until it settled into a constant state of motion, like heat waves along a sunbaked concrete road.  It got thicker as the seconds passed indeterminably, encircling her and trapping her, prompting the girl to close her eyes to escape it.  That was when she noticed the seeming abandonment of gravity.

            It was dizzying, as though she was being pulled higher into the air while her feet remained magnetized to the ground, tugged in two directions.  She could feel support around her limbs holding her up that managed to fend off nausea, but it did nothing to assuage her fear at the sheer mind-bending novelty of the sensation.  It was absolutely sickening, and only getting worse in tandem with the accompanying auditory barrage.

            Alexandra desperately cupped her hands around her ears as the roaring built up to higher and higher peaks, though this did nothing to muffle the noise, and suddenly she understood what was happening even though she’d never bore witness to it personally or even found out the details of it from any Omega she knew.

            She was being compressed.

            She was becoming… smaller.

            Smaller.

            Alexandra wasn’t even certain she believed it was possible up to now, but as she finally dared herself to bite her lip and gaze upward, she felt her legs give out, and would’ve almost certainly fallen to the floor in a faint if not for the supportive push-and-pull of the vibrating atmosphere under her friend’s palm locking her in place.

            Bridget’s hand was positively titanic.  Ordinarily, at five-foot-six, Alexandra was about the length of one of her friend’s fingers.

            Now, as she stared up at the expansive sky of soft palm skin that shrouded her in shadow, the entire fleshy canopy trembling more and more violently the longer it held in place, she wondered if she even measured up to the height of Omega’s fingernail now.  She had to doubt it.

            After ten years of feeling comfortable being under the Omega’s care as her closest friend and confidante, Alexandra never would’ve dreamed she could feel the slightest anxiety at the mere sight of her towering adoptive sister ever again.

            Once again, though, her expectations were proven wrong with the emotional force of multiple punches to the gut.

            Bridget was simply godlike.  There was no other word for it.  Alexandra couldn’t even describe her as towering any longer, because it wasn’t enough; she was a veritable mountain of femininity and power now.  She was a living landscape that stretched so high that the Alpha had to crane her neck to make out all of her magnificent form.  Her fingers were not so much colossal digits any longer as mighty pillars that surrounded her on all sides, quaking with the capacity to transform to dust anything they dug into.  Her fingerprints swirled out so far past the width of Alexandra’s body that they resembled ripples in a still river.  Those fingers could lower and liquefy Alexandra from any angle or distance with the most rudimentary application of pressure.  She was an insect, and Bridget was an Olympian.

            And once again, Alexandra remembered what it was like to feel true, biting, unrelenting fear in the rawest part of her heart.

            The roaring ceased into a piercing silence just as soon as Bridget withdrew her hand with a startlingly wrenching effort.  Her teeth gritted, she slammed her wrist down against her thigh instead of the table to avoid jostling the miniaturized Alpha, grunting loudly with pain.  Alexandra fell to her haunches anyway from the shock of being released from the macabre binding of the air, and doubted she had the bravery to stand back up again.

            This continued on for more than a minute as the Omega breathed heavily in and out to quell the apparent agony gripping the arm she had just used to shrink her charge, her eyes clenched shut and her upper lip quivering.  She had coiled her fingers into a quaking fist, and her knuckles were flushed.

            Despite herself, Alexandra felt a flash of concern for her friend’s wellbeing.  She couldn’t remember a time in her life having seen Bridget experience actual, physical pain.  At worst, she’d seen her stub her toe on a boulder in the backyard and recover after the slightest of winces.  In all honesty, Alexandra had often assumed that her friend was incapable of bodily harm.  To see her reacting as such now, after an act entirely of her own choosing, was deeply disconcerting, if only for a moment, before Alexandra’s fear at her newfound stature was able to settle back in to the forefront of her focus.

            Glancing around the already tremendously scaled room was daunting at her normal height of five and a half feet, but now was practically out of the question, even for gauging her new size.  The mere sight of it made her dizzy, as though Bridget’s bedroom had become an infinite canyon unto itself.  Walls containing the open-air majesty of the place seemed so far away that Alexandra was only able to convince herself they were tangible because she’d seen them up close in the past, and even then her faith in this fact was tenuous.

            And though she knew her estimate was shaky, she guessed she now stood at no more than six inches tall.

            When Bridget finally looked up again, still without direct eye contact, she was biting her whitened lips hard enough that she appeared to still be fending off some of the lingering burn but trying very hard to ignore it.  She lowered the arm she’d used to compress Alexandra down between her thighs and squeezed it with her legs for additional attempted soothing.

            The room remained in turgid silence save for Bridget’s elevated breathing.  The Omega raised her other hand back up to her lips, still gripping the popsicle stick, and slid the frozen crimson treat, now the size of a rocket to Alexandra, back between her lips, and quietly inhaled on the moisture.  Shivering, the Alpha could hear every massive droplet, even from this far down, being swished through the unknowable vacuum of her friend’s mouth.  Terrifying like it had never been before.

            And yet the moment still managed to feel not so foreign.

            “Are you sure you don’t want one, Lexi?” twelve-year-old Bridget asked as she chewed timidly on the end of her popsicle while reclining in a lawn chair in the backyard, her best friend perched on her own miniature seat secured to the arm.

            “I think it’s too big for me, Bridge,” the young Alpha replied sheepishly.  “I can’t hold it up.”

            “We could cut one up for you.”

            “That would probably just make a mess,” Alexandra said.

            “I guess,” shrugged Bridget with embarrassment.  “Do you want anything else?  We have other stuff.  Mom would find you something.  Or I’ll find you something.”

            “I don’t need anything right now,” the Alpha reassured as she folded her arms behind her head, simply enjoying the beaming atmosphere and the warmth against her skin.  She could hear the melted red liquid being slurped down the Omega’s gullet.

            “Wait,” giggled Bridget as she brandished the stick again.  “I have an idea.”

            “What?”

            “Now,” Bridget whispered at last, her hushed voice reverberating through Alexandra’s eardrums with the cadence of stadium speakers.  “I’m going to need you to stay still there.”

            Holding the tip of the popsicle in front of her lips again, the Omega’s tongue darted out and lapped along the slick curvature.  She clearly was taking her time, perhaps to let Alexandra try and get acclimated to her newfound state of being just barely double the height of a Beta.  Or maybe she was simply letting her drink in the gigantic visage of omnipotence that sat before her licking an icy treat large enough to splatter her with a single bounce if Bridget accidentally dropped it.

            Alexandra was trying very hard to swallow, but her mouth so dry she could hear a faint rattle in her throat every time she inhaled.

            With a final, very deliberate oral caress along one side of the popsicle, Bridget lowered the colossal tower from her lips, and suddenly the hand was descending toward the desk, closer and closer to Alexandra until it was deftly casting a shadow that absolutely dwarfed the miniaturized Alpha, close enough that even at six inches in height she could reach up and touch it if she’d had a shred of bravery left in her paralyzed psyche.

            “Here,” Bridget cooed pleasantly, gingerly lowering the half-eaten popsicle over her friend’s chair.  “Have a lick.”

            “Really?” laughed Alexandra.  “How?  Look how big it is.”

            “I’ll hold onto it.  You can just stand up and taste it.”

            “Okay,” the Alpha agreed.  She hoisted herself up on the arms of her tiny lawn chair and craned her neck up for a drip of the melting monstrosity that hung above.

            The ceiling of the sticky cylinder continued to loom closer until it was level with Alexandra, ready to bowl her over with a flick of Bridget’s tremendous fingertips.  She thought it pointless to move, given that the popsicle was the size of a building to her now, and even if she’d resolved to fight back like in the first session, there was no convincing her legs to move this time.  She was glued to the desktop.

            There was no more hesitation on the enforcer’s part.  A wall of gooey crimson rammed into the Alpha with a very deliberate motion that only just managed to not topple the delicate little woman to the ground, though it was strong enough in its bracing impact to attach Alexandra’s entire backside to the popsicle like a fly in a web.

            She struggled briefly by tugging at her arms and legs, more out of a survival instinct than legitimate faith in her capacity to perform literally any feat of strength at this size.  Resisting the gummy wall only made it worse, though, binding Alexandra’s clothes more tightly until the small of her back and her shoulder blades were flush against the frosty tower.  Though the surface was warm for a few moments, fresh from being dragged along Bridget’s broiling tongue, it quickly cooled again, gelling the Alpha along with the layer of slicked spit onto it like cement.  The iciness of the treat instantly robbed her body of its heat and she felt her jaws rumbling with chattering teeth, her limbs shivering, though it was hard to allow the full range of quaking motion due to her body being all but bloodlessly crucified on Bridget’s popsicle.

            She could only make out the Omega’s face by turning her head all the way to the side and looking backwards.  As usual for the past week, Bridget’s face was stoic stone, her green eyes narrowed slightly with the focus of making such surgical movements to collect her crumb-sized best friend up from the table using just a few dribbles of her saliva and a popsicle.  No more cracks appeared in her armor; she was wired.

            There was a sudden rush of wind under Alexandra’s feet as she kicked hopelessly to liberate herself from the arctic adhesive of Bridget’s saliva coating the surface so thickly.  They were going back up.

            And up.  And up.

            She couldn’t help but let a small scream erupt as the ground spun below in the spiraling rush.  Alexandra clenched her eyes shut as the popsicle returned up to the level of Bridget’s enormous mouth, willing herself not to look down as she practically felt the bottom fall out of her stomach from the mere glance she’d chanced down at the vertical cascade.  Soaring weightlessness flooded her every vein as though she’d been pumped dry of blood, and her brain was on an aggressive spin cycle.  Sweat dribbled down the nape of her neck and almost instantly froze again in her clothes and tangled hair.

            Bridget’s hulking fist was still coiled around the stick far below and would indeed catch her fall if the sticky pull of the Omega’s frozen saliva finally gave out, but to Alexandra the drop was more than five stories below, with nothing holding her up.

            Dangling in a frigid void.

            She knew that compression allowed her body to maintain its normal durability, meaning it would only result in a twisted ankle at worst if she tumbled down to Bridget’s hand.  Unfortunately, the more accidental glimpses Alexandra caught of the plummet, the more impossible it became to believe in this fact.

            And then Bridget’s mouth opened again in an incidental spritz of saliva as her mammoth tongue unfurled soggily from the blackness.

            “You got it?” Bridget snickered as she held the popsicle horizontally over her friend’s chair.

            “Almost!” laughed Alexandra as she extended her tongue to the tremendous bulk of the thing.  She flinched at how cold it was and retracted a few inches down again, but once accustomed to the temperature, she leaned up again and licked at the sticky goodness with more confidence.

            “Have some more,” encouraged the Omega.

            “I don’t want to eat your whole popsicle,” the Alpha said sheepishly, wiping a hand across the sugary film that had been left over the bottom half of her face.

            “Lexi, if you could actually eat this whole thing, we’d probably have a problem, cuz you’d just pop,” Bridget said, trying not to laugh harder at the comical sight of her friend’s sticky chin.

            “Yeah, I guess,” agreed the girl with a shrug, taking another insignificantly tiny lick at the massive popsicle.  “Thanks, Bridge.”

            “You’re welcome!”

            Bridget’s taste buds undulated like individual organisms unto themselves on the monstrous pink landscape as it descended toward Alexandra, who was fairly certain she could grip each individual one in her fist, so great was the scale of it.  The tongue licked along the tip far above first, the entire popsicle trembling in Bridget’s grip with each muscular lap and rattling Alexandra from skull to toe.  Each slide of the muscle along the popsicle left a glistening trail of residue that wrapped around half of the freezing cylinder, until Bridget set about caving an entire side of the popsicle into the sweltering fold of her tongue.

            That was when Alexandra felt the first drop.

            It began slowly at first.  As the monstrous organ wound its way around the crystalline tower, gallons upon gallons of the melted crimson liquid began pouring down the unevenly dissipated spires in syrupy rivulets.  Alexandra gasped as the first few splotches soaked icily into her clothes and settled into her skin, staining her with a sickly pink and freezing again after a few moments, but it wasn’t long before her body was forced from the shock of each freezing trickle to expect an eventual downpour.

            With each repetition, it was like having a bucket of ice water poured over her petrified form again.  And again.

            And again.

            All the Alpha could do was tremble in the hollowing frigidity as waves flooded over her in cataracts of red, practically blending her in hue with the icy wall.  Soon, the remaining parts of her body unattached to the popsicle from her fingers to the ends of her hair were fastened as well.  She was utterly immobile.

            A few chance glances upward allowed her to see the popsicle steadily shrinking as Bridget’s magnificent tongue worked relentlessly over the mountainous cardinal landscape, cooking down the mighty tower with just the heat of her mouth and allowing it to descend in endless gooey waterfalls that forced their way up Alexandra’s nose as she gasped for breath during the worst of the descents.  These glances never lasted for long, though, before a fresh gushing of algid liquid was splattering into her eyes and throat again.

            As the minutes ticked by at a murderously glacial pace, Bridget’s tongue began to gloss lower and lower along the popsicle, never quite coming into contact with the trapped Alpha, but obviously intending to suggest such a thing, and a shudder almost powerful enough to break her away from the popsicle rocked through Alexandra’s body each time the writhing, oozing mass of muscle the size of a whale slithered so mercilessly close to her in a flying rampage of sloshed red sugar and frothy spit bubbles.

            “Lexi,” came the droned whisper that rumbled through Alexandra’s skeleton and seemed to individually tingle at each joint.  “Look at me.”

            “How is it?” Bridget asked, finally lifting the popsicle out of reach of her friend as Alexandra slumped back into her tiny chair.

            “Soooooo good,” Alexandra drawled quietly, wiping her wrist over her mouth a final time but missing most of the mark anyway.  She laid a hand over her gurgling stomach.  “I… think I had too much, though.”
            “Are you sure?  I can’t even tell that you had any!” Bridget giggled, rotating the seemingly untouched popsicle in her grip for study just to confirm this fact before shrugging and admitting the treat back between her lips.  “If you want any more, just let me know, ‘kay?”

            “Uh-huh,” groaned the over-satisfied Alpha, wrapping her arms over her abdomen for dramatic effect.  “How about if I can ever walk again, then I’ll have some.”

            “You don’t have to walk again.  I could just carry you everywhere.”

            “No you couldn’t,” Alexandra said with a snicker.

            “Yes I could,” Bridget countered, still half-laughing herself, but with sincerity in her voice again.  “You know I could.”

            “Yeah, that’s right.  So if I never, ever walked again, you would just carry me?” the Alpha pressed with a playful roll of her eyes.

            “Uh-huh.  Why not?”

            “What if you wanted to do other stuff?  You’d have to put me down sometime,” insisted Alexandra.

            “No, I wouldn’t.  I’d find a way.  Besides, we already do all our other stuff together,” insisted Bridget gently.  Clearly, she was entirely serious.

            “I bet it would get boring,” Alexandra said and hung her head bashfully, unable to get the embarrassed smile off her face no matter how many muscles she contorted.  She knew it was a joke to imagine, but all the same, there were so few things in the world she appreciated as hearing her best friend and adoptive sister talk like that, because no matter hyperbolic or impossible it seemed, she knew the Omega wasn’t lying about a single word that came out.

            “What, boring?  With you?” Bridget answered with a disbelieving snort.  “Not a chance.”

            Neck stiff and eyes puffy from the amount of popsicle goop that had leaked into them, Alexandra forced herself to stare blearily up at the gaping source of the words, as Bridget’s eyes were a little too high up at this proximity to make out easily.

            “You could stop all this.  Right now,” Bridget uttered, deliberately keeping her syllables curt to avoid blowing too much wind onto her miniscule inmate, though regardless, each delicate exhalation brought with it a hot gale that spilled around the Alpha’s quivering form.

            Despite her lowered state of awareness from the continual exposure to the freezing liquid over god-knew how many cycles, Alexandra’s ears perked up slightly at this, though no additional muscles twitched in her face, save for those already in motion from the cold.

            “All you have to do is tell the truth.  You’d have to finish your sessions, but I could give you good reviews, and you’d be doing community service in half the time,” Bridget continued slowly.  “And nothing like… this would happen again.  Ever again.  You decide when it ends.”

            For the briefest flutter of a heartbeat, Alexandra wanted to do it, just to escape this torment.  To say it all just like she knew Bridget would need to hear to follow through on her promise.  She wanted to open her mouth and scream that, yes, she’d pulled those Betas off the road.  Yes, she’d stepped on them, beat them, bruised them, broken their legs, teased them with the possibility of escape before stealing their hope again, and dropped that poor innocent girl as though she was a crumpled up piece of garbage.  Yes, she’d done all those things, and why?  Why?  For no reason.  Because she was bored.  Because they were there, and she was bored.

            No.

            No, she wouldn’t.

            Her truth.

            There was a wordless exchange, where neither Omega nor Alpha moved another inch, but both understood fully what the answer was, and the moment to make a connection was sealed off again.  Both understood what was coming next even before either had guessed it would happen.

            Bridget’s jowls widened impossibly, high enough that Alexandra guessed she could’ve swallowed a house scaled to her, and then descended again with heart-squelching speed.  Engulfing what remained of the ravaged sludge on a stick, the Omega’s teeth clamped into the red cliffs of the popsicle below Alexandra’s body and sealed her into the unknowable murkiness.  The Alpha’s lingering breath caught in her chest as she inhaled her last clean lungful of oxygen.  With the massive lips finally settled over the selected bite, a gentle murmur of flavorful satisfaction sounded out.  Bridget slurped the icy chunk along with her microscopic best friend into the steamy darkness of her mouth.

            The rest was a tactile blur.  Alexandra felt like she’d been thrown into a limbo where heat, slime, and flesh had all melded into one existence of a single emotion.  She had no idea where she was as she felt herself sloshed through a river of saliva, thrown head over heels in the current, before being dexterously scooped into the indent of Bridget’s tongue.  The remainder of the popsicle juices were melted almost immediately from her body and washed into the soggy onslaught as the residue was sucked from her body with just a few pulses.

            She felt the taste buds vibrating against every inch of her soaked limbs and through her soggy clothes.  A rush flooded her stomach as she slid down the valley before being tossed again.  Alexandra couldn’t be sure, but she guessed that she met the wall of both of Bridget’s inner cheeks a half a dozen times, bouncing between them with a flick of the tongue.  At one point, she felt her feet brush rapidly along a wall of molars, though she never crashed into them with the kind of violent impact she knew she would if the swishing motions she was obviously being expertly directed in by her friend’s tongue and saliva were off by a few inches.

            But they never were.

            With her senses thrown into such an indistinct jumble where reality could hardly be distinguished from nightmarish assumption, Alexandra became startlingly aware of one thing above all else: that Bridget’s entire mouth was moving.  Bobbing, even, up and down, as though the Omega were nodding her head in intent intervals like a perfect metronome, counting by the second.  She was keeping time.

            Fifty-seven.  Fifty-eight.  Fifty-nine.  Sixty.

            The expulsion from the dark and muggy purgatory was instantaneous as light flooded Alexandra’s eyes and cold wind met her limbs.  She was flying oh-so-briefly in a spray of saliva before meeting the cushioned landing platform of her friend’s palm, now more akin to a valley of creased flesh than the luxuriously warm armchair she was accustomed to.

            The Alpha landed on her hands and knees and remained there, despite knowing that Bridget was more than capable of holding still enough to let her stand up, even at this scale.  More important, she didn’t look up.  She couldn’t.

            She would not give anyone, even her best friend, the satisfaction.  This was just the price she promised herself she would pay in favor of abandoning her principles, and she was paying it in full.

            The Alpha didn’t even have tears this time.  She doubted she had the energy to conjure them up anyway, but either way, Alexandra had entered a different state now.  Hollowness, all-encompassing, was her being in this moment.  It made her colder than when she’d been glued to Bridget’s popsicle, and yet it was still preferable to a molestation of the absolute truth.

            Alexandra collapsed on her stomach and vomited from the motion sickness of the entire episode, but still didn’t look up.

            Every person she cared about in the whole world believed her to be a vile criminal monster.  That truth was all she had left.

            And no one was taking it away.

            “Hello, Alexandra,” Evelyn Cade sighed mutedly as she allowed the door of her daughter’s bedroom to swing gently open, granting her entry.  Though dressed in her Aegis uniform, her posture was relaxed, and her hair was tied back.  Her eyes, hazel rather than her daughter’s striking green, were no less piercing in their unmoving stare as she made her way slowly to the shelf upon which the incarcerated Alpha’s cell rested.

            The imprisoned girl leaned forward on her bed where she’d been sitting motionless for the past two hours and her mouth couldn’t help but hang slightly open at the intimidating visage of the woman who’d essentially been her adoptive mother for the past decade.

            “Ev… E-Evelyn,” Alexandra peeped meekly, gazing up at her looming face as the elder Cade peered inside.  She couldn’t have said whether her weakness was due to shock or simply the secondhand dredges of joy at the mere sight of the woman after a full nine days with no human contact other than Bridget.  As Evelyn’s fingers curled nonthreateningly around the edge of the cell, tapping softly at the glassy surface, the Alpha was tempted to feel relief. 

            Almost immediately, though, Alexandra hung her head, deciding it was best not to look the Omega directly in the eye.  The fact that Evelyn had managed to enter the room and strike up a conversation in her normal hushed and amiable tone didn’t change the fact that she obviously believed the crime that had been pinned on Alexandra, or she otherwise would’ve shown her face sooner to proclaim her intent to fight for the justice Bridget obviously was blind to now.

            This couldn’t possibly have been a mission of mercy, like the Alpha so desperately wished it could be at the automatically comforting sight of her mother-figure.  At best, it was probably a peace-making attempt when Bridget’s more forceful attempts at coercing a confession hadn’t exactly produced the most promising results.

            After the second session, where Alexandra had been compressed down to six inches, she’d remained in abject silence during the following days following the regaining of her previous height a few hours later, even at a couple of paltry attempts on Bridget’s part to engage in conversation on the alleged crime.  It simply wasn’t worth it any longer.

            “If I take you out of there for a little while…” began Evelyn with a labored swallow, blinking several times.  “…will you talk to me?”

            “I…” Alexandra murmured bashfully, perfectly willing to talk, but almost certain that the Omega’s definition of “talking” in this case didn’t line up with her own.

            “Will you?”

            “Yes,” the Alpha grunted, sliding off of the bed and taking several steps into the center of the cell, placing her hands obediently at her sides to make the surely inevitable snatching go over more smoothly.  It seemed the best way to begin a conversation that was surely fated to rapidly go downhill at the first insistence that she wasn’t, in fact, a murderous Beta-bashing psycho.

            To Alexandra’s surprise, though, Evelyn’s hand laid palm-up on the floor of the cell a couple feet away from where the Alpha stood.  Wondering if it was a trick, she eyed the unmoving fleshy floor with hesitant suspicion.

            “You can climb in,” Evelyn offered, instantly recognizing the issue.  “I’m not just going to pick you up.  You don’t have to come out if you don’t want to.”

            Alexandra had to frown as she boarded obediently into her adoptive mother’s inviting palm and took a seat.  Of course she had to come out even if she didn’t want to.  Evelyn would be well within her rights here to pluck the Alpha out by a leg and dangle her upside down one hundred feet above the ground.  The only choice she would have in the matter would be whether to scream or not.

            Apparently this fact was generously going ignored by Aegis’ urban planner, though, as she lifted Alexandra out of the cell and held her at chest height with a hand nearly as rigidly steady as her daughter’s, though not quite.

            “Where is Br- I mean, where is Enforcer Cade?” Alexandra asked demurely, still not making eye contact.

            “She’s working,” Evelyn answered, knowing instantly what the real question was.  “She doesn’t know I’m in here.”

            “Oh.”

            “I don’t know if she said anything, but they did go to your house and saw your shoes,” Evelyn said quietly.

            “They… they did?”

            “Yes.  And there were traces of gum on them.”

            “Can they… I mean, can…”

            “They’re going to run a couple of tests to see if they can prove it came from that road, but…”

            “It’s not going to be enough,” Alexandra whimpered.

            “No, it’s not.”

            “What do you want to talk about, then?” the Alpha asked after a pause, not so much emboldened as simply drained of all emotional fortitude or humility.  She still couldn’t bring herself to look up at the woman.

            “I wanted to see if I could convince you to tell me what happened.”

            “Okay, if that’s what you want,” the girl said with a shrug.  “I went shopping and walked straight through the alley to my car and drove home.  I didn’t talk to anybody or stop to look at anything.  The end.”

            “I see,” Evelyn said, biting her lip and nodding painfully.  “And that’s all you’ve got to say about it, I suppose?”

            “Yes.”

            “Please, Alexandra,” the Omega stated, her hazel eyes on the verge of glistening.  “You… must’ve heard the real circumstances explained.  You must understand how hard it was for anyone to believe this about you, and that it only came to this because there simply is no other explanation.”

            “It can’t be that simple, because otherwise, they’d know I didn’t do anything,” Alexandra said, finally summoning the courage to look up into the agonized irises of her surrogate mother.  “They’d know I could never.  Hurt.  Anyone.”

            “They did know that, Alexandra.  They… they used to know it very well.  I did.  And so did Bridget.”

            “Did,” repeated back the Alpha, clenching her fists together with bereavement and working very hard to keep from screeching with unimpeded acidity.

            “I’m… going to go back to work.  And I’m going to leave you here now,” Evelyn said.  “If you decide you want to talk more… in-depth about what happened, with me or… Enforcer Cade, then both of us are still more than willing to hear it.”

            Evelyn’s hand lowered back into the cell, trembling slightly with emotion but not jostling its passenger, and her upturned palm stopped against the floor, where the Alpha could clamber out and scamper back to the seeming sanctity of her bed.

            “If in-depth means me saying I hurt those Betas,” Alexandra gulped, her words now trembling just as much as she choked back a new onslaught of sobs in her throat.  “Then you’ll both be waiting a really long time.”

            “Alexandra,” Evelyn breathed gently as she backed steadily toward the door.

            “Yes?”

            “I know this might not mean anything to you.  I wouldn’t blame you if it didn’t, or even if it made you angry, but… I just thought you should know, because Bridget wouldn’t say it to you, I know.”

            “What?”

            “She had an oversized training doll in her… mouth every hour of every day for the last week practicing, over and over and over,” Evelyn said, her words quavering with sadness at the recognition of what had clearly transpired but still confident in some distantly redeeming factor of the statement.  “To… be absolutely sure that she could do it.  Without it hurting.”

            “Guess that didn’t work,” Alexandra uttered pitifully under her breath as she glanced down at her body, physically uninjured from the second session, and felt a fresh wave of tears finally welling in her eyes just as Evelyn softly shut the door of Bridget’s bedroom again.

            “Thank you for coming back,” the middle-aged Beta said with a grimace to his only visitor, adjusting his glasses on the ridge of his nose as he leaned over the countertop of the clothing store he operated before running a clammy palm over his balding head.  “I… didn’t want to say anything over the phone.”

            “It’s fine, but can you make it quick?” Nathaniel Tyler said under his breath, his arms crossed defensively as he leaned against a rack of inch-long pants.  Finally, he took a step forward and buried his hands into the pockets of his brown jacket.  “Even though you’re closed now, it’s best nobody sees me around here too much.  You know, just to keep things clean.”

            “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, though,” the man swallowed.  “Keeping things… clean.”

            “What’s the problem?  Everything went over perfectly.  You played your part well.  I paid you for your daughter’s fancy overseas school programs… thing.”

            “That, too.  I mean, how did you ever come across that kind of money?  Someone of our class, I would’ve expected-”

            “Well, it’s not like it’s any of your business, but my parents worked their asses off so they could save up, and I ended up with a pretty decent inheritance after they went,” Nathaniel sneered.  “But we’re not talking about me right now.  We’re talking about you.  All you had to do was jump your security feed forward a few minutes, and nobody suspects you of anything.  I promise you that.”

            “No, no, it’s… it’s not that.”

            “Well, what is it, then?” Nathaniel pressed with a concerned frown as he approached the countertop, his eyes darting past the racks of clothes and to the door to ensure no one else was coming in.

            “It’s… everything, really.  I know you explained to me what you… thought was the good of it, but… I just don’t know anymore.”

            “Don’t know what?”

            “I can’t sleep anymore, all right?  I just can’t.  I thought it would be easy after the things you described to me, what that girl and her mother did all those years ago to your p-”

            “We’re not talking about my parents right now,” Nathaniel cut in icily, his black hair hanging low enough to nearly cover his right eye.

            “Sorry.  But look, even given that, I… well, I’ve become a part of something I didn’t intend to.  No matter what it was that happened, I helped you get that Alpha girl in trouble for something she didn’t do.  That’s the bottom line.  And now she’s off with Aegis, and judging by what they think she did, she’s probably getting far less sleep than I am.  I mean… she didn’t do anything to any of you!”

            “Maybe I didn’t make something clear enough to you the first time we spoke,” Nathaniel said with an exasperated sigh, now leaning across the counter as well and stroking his chin thoughtfully.  “I’m well aware that she didn’t touch me or my friends, let alone break anyone’s bones.  That doesn’t matter.”

            “How could it not matter-”

            “Because what did happen to me went unpunished for ten fucking years,” growled the young Beta, grabbing the storekeeper’s shirt collar aggressively and contorting his mousy face into a sneer.  With a muted yelp, the man wrapped his hands around Nathaniel’s wrists to try and free himself, but the latter’s wiry strength allowed him to keep a firm grip.

            “Please…”

            “I’ve had to live with that, you know.  All this time.  She not only got away with what she and her mom did, but was praised for being the one to tell someone about it.  They made Alexandra Warren a goddamned hero for what she did!” Nathaniel continued through gritted teeth, flecks of moisture spitting out between words.  “And you’ve got the nerve to tell ME that YOU can’t sleep anymore?”

            “What about the other girl?” the storekeeper wheezed nervously, finally relaxing in his attempts to pull away from Nathaniel.  “The one you were with.  Iris.”

            At this, the Beta mastermind scowled, his upper lip stiffening and his eyes practically going bloodshot.  He released his grip on the fabric and socked the storekeeper across the lower jaw with a bony knuckle, but grabbed him again before he could pull backward to safety.  Tightening his quivering fists on the man’s collar, he slammed the unfortunate accomplice downward onto the countertop with a hard crash that instantly robbed the man of air and toppled him to the floor behind the counter, his glasses knocked off his face from the force of the blow.

            “That wasn’t supposed to happen to her, and you know it, because I told you about the plan.  We had no intentions of her having to come to… that kind of harm.  But, in a way…” Nathaniel pontificated with an unsettling calm after what he’d just done as he strolled around the counter to stand over his fellow Beta, still sprawled anxiously on the ground with his hands wrapped protectively around his stomach.  “…in a way, it worked out better than we could’ve dreamed.  And I think Iris will agree when she wakes up.”

            “How could she possibly agree with what you did to her?” the shopkeeper interrogated boldly as he squinted up at the blurred visage of his aggressor, his anger at the twenty-year-old far outweighing his timidity in the heat of the moment.

            “Can you really not see it?” Nathaniel responded with a chuckle as he crouched down on the ground so his face could be made out.  “This way, it’s guaranteed to stick.  Before, we were just going to come away with some bruises.  After what happened to her, we realized how much better it was going to look if we were all… well, you know.”

            “What happened there on the path?” the man demanded softly.  “How did you-”

            “Just like you, she started to have second thoughts,” Nathaniel interrupted with a shrug.  “Like I said, we had no plans for anything like what happened to her to actually happen, but we did have a plan, and she was bound and determined to wreck it at the most crucial moment, so we had to improvise.”

            “How?  By… by throwing her off the… the…”

            “Improvisations are never perfect.  That’s why they’re improvisations,” Nathaniel answered coldly.  “Besides, we didn’t throw her.  It was self-defense.  She took one of the… items we were about to use to give the scene some authenticity for Aegis, started threatening us with it and was going to run off and use it to make sure we were all put away.  So we did what we had to.”

            There was an aching silence as the storekeeper mulled this over fearfully, closing his eyes after having become too intimidated by the ironically towering sight of the three-inch-tall criminal.

            “Cheer up, old man,” Nathaniel said brightly after a few moments, patting the storekeeper gently on the cheek before snatching up the glasses that had landed just out of his reach after being struck on the countertop.  Gingerly opening up the temples of the spectacles and blowing on the lenses to clear away any dust, he slid them back over the man’s ears, allowing him to see clearly again.

            “How?”

            “What do you mean, how?  You could try smiling every once in a while.  And they say laughter’s good for the soul or some shit, don’t they?” Nathaniel suggested, grasping the man’s hand and helping to pull him to his feet, where he patted him amiably on the back.

            “That’s not what I mean.  I mean how are you so calm about all of this?”

            “It’s simple.  I just think about all the good I’ve done for our class.”

            “But… but this isn’t necessary anymore.  Aegis has been doing so much so quickly for all of us.  They’ve made it so we can have lives, so that we don’t have to be afraid anymore!” the shopkeeper declared almost pleadingly, making sure to keep a safe distance from the edge of the countertop now in case the young man tried anything again.

            “Right.  And do you want to know what happens to fools who are naïve enough to stop being afraid of what’s out there?” Nathaniel groused, rolling his eyes as he began marching toward the front door of the clothing store.  “They get their fucking legs snapped off.  Aegis doesn’t do anything until after one of us has been beaten and squeezed into a pulp for some Alpha’s breakfast juice.  If we don’t watch out for ourselves, we’re as good as dead, and the sooner you realize that, the longer you’ll live.  I’ve just done you the biggest favor of your whole pointless existence.”

            “But-”

            “You want to know how I’m staying fucking calm about this, huh?  I’ll tell you how.  Because finally, things are happening in the right order.  For once, we’ve got them working for us.”

            “No-”

            “Oh, and one more thing,” Nathaniel said as he opened the door to leave, pivoting to give one last glance into the store.  “If you can’t sleep, you might try sleeping pills.  A lot of sleeping pills.”

            “Are you sure your friends are here, Mom?” Alexandra asked, scratching her head curiously.  The ten-year-old had been glancing around the nearly deserted corner of the mixed class shopping center for the better part of five minutes, her hands folded behind her back as they trembled.  Her mother’s insistence that she accompany her on one of her various nighttime ventures for the first time ever had filled her with glee, and she was doing her very best to not embarrass herself by appearing too eager, but it was difficult, to say the least.

            “Oh, I’m sure, dear.  Positive,” Alma Warren answered with a smirk as she gingerly placed a fingertip over her daughter’s lips.  “Now let’s just make sure we keep our voices nice and quiet.”

            “Why can’t we see them?”

            “They just like playing hide and seek, Alexandra.  Keep your eyes open, or we’ll lose the game,” the woman insisted as she peered cautiously around the corner of a brick wall, keeping her eyes level with the shadow-ensconced Beta walkway.

            “The game?” the young girl whispered excitedly, enraptured at the notion of such a thing involving her normally no-nonsense mother.  “We’re playing a game?”

            “You bet we are,” Alma replied as she took her daughter’s hand and slowly led her around the corner and into the darkness.  “And I think we’re about to win.”

            It had occurred to Alexandra to feel confused when the evening had first begun and Alma informed her daughter of their goal: to have a rendezvous in the shopping center with two friends of hers who happened to be Betas.  It was like something out of a bizarre dream; after all, the older Alpha had spent the entire decade of her child’s life casually dropping stinging epithets with regards to the smallest class, and making her general distaste for them clear whenever the opportunity arose.

            Alexandra had always ignored these statements as best as she could, having never met a Beta and therefore having no cause to feel this way toward them, and had gelled under the assumption that Alma had a reason for feeling the way she did.  This particular case was not something easily ignored.  Nevertheless, the thrill of spending any kind of meaningful time with her mother far outweighed this oddity, and Alexandra was quick to put it out of her mind.

            “Really?  Then where are the-” the girl began, before pausing, her mouth agape as she squinted into the dank alleyway they had entered.  It took a second for her eyes to adjust, but once they had, she was able to make out a solitary tiny figure stalking carefully in their direction along the raised Beta path.  “Is that your friend, Mom?”

            “It sure is, dear.  Stay right here,” Alma commanded, her attention hardly on her daughter now as she held stock-still against the wall.  Then, taking a shallow breath, she moved over the distance in the alley with four long strides, and a heartbeat later she was upon the Beta, her arm darting out from her side as though she were drawing a weapon from a holster.

            Alexandra heard what reminded her of the soft squeak of a baby animal before it was silenced again, and her mother was moving swiftly again, but further down the alley this time near the back entrance of a convenience store.

            “Mom?” the young Alpha peeped.  “Did… did we win the game?”

            “Almost, dear,” Alma answered as casually as she could, though her voice was far less fluid now and hardened with intent as her gaze swept back and forth along the Beta path.

            “Do we go home now?”

            “We just have to find one more friend, and then we can go,” the woman said as she placed her hand lithely atop the path and began moving it back and forth as if inspecting for imperfections in the surface.  “Why don’t you help me look?”

            “Okay,” Alexandra squealed earnestly at the request, still keeping her voice to a dull murmur at her mother’s request, and tiptoed deeper into the darkness of the alley.  Far off in the distance, she could hear the dying hustle and bustle of the various shops that lined the street, though they had grown fainter after how far into the outskirts of the mixed class area Alma had led the pair so covertly.

            “Just don’t move too quickly and keep your voice down, dear,” Alma suggested sweetly as she continued her mechanically focused search.

            Alexandra nodded and began peering more closely along the path, which was lined with a few benches and dumpsters used by the Beta back exit for the store, all of which seemed to be in a slight state of disrepair and in need of replacement.  Her curiosity was at all-time high as she engaged in this activity with her mother such that she was blinded to the explicable bizarreness of it, and felt closer to the woman than she had in years.  More so than this peculiarity of seeming growth in their relationship as mother and daughter, though, the girl was excited to have the chance to interact with Betas.

            All her life, she’d been shepherded away from opportunities to interact with them on any level, just as it was with Omegas.  She’d hardly seen any Betas, and even then just from a distance, let alone having the chance to hold one, which was a prospect she desired so dearly.  They all looked so adorable from afar, so earnest in their designs to work and make lives for themselves, despite the disadvantages presented by their small stature, and it was something the young girl admired the class immensely for.  Of her schoolmates, she had gathered she was the only one not to have the chance to touch or even speak to one, and it stung, but those were her mother’s wishes, and she intended to follow them as far as was necessary.

            Now, she could see her strict adherence to Alma’s parenting laws had paid off in full.  She was finally getting the chance to sate her curiosity about Betas, and perhaps best of all, she was out doing something with her mother.  She could hardly stand still from joy.

            “Wait,” Alexandra breathed, leaning in closer to a thin gray pipe that rounded on the path and made its way below, offering an even darker shadow under its small curve.  The structure was only a few inches wide, but underneath the bend, her eyes had caught something.  Her senses were a steel trap, alerted to any movements.  A tiny flash of light had appeared, only visible for a moment, but her eyes were keen and more than anything, she was anxious to please her mother.

            Another second passed and there was a tiny hiss from under the pipe.

            “What?” Alma whispered, creeping closer to where her daughter stood and lowering herself down to observe the path more carefully.

            “I think I see… under the pipe,” the young Alpha drawled, moving her hand forward with her fingers extended toward the low-hanging line.  Gently, without any fear with her mother standing shoulder-to-shoulder with her, Alexandra dipped her soft fingertips into the darkness and instantly met with a tiny shuffling form as it scrambled backward in the blackness.

            “Grab her, dear,” Alma commanded with gentle firmness, and so attuned was Alexandra to the moment, she didn’t hesitate to question her mother’s potentially rude request, and unfurled her fingers, easily snatching up the tiny thrashing Beta and scooping it into her palm.

            A warm rush ran down Alexandra’s spine, and her hair stood on end as she slowly withdrew her gingerly balled fist from the path under the pipe, with the female Beta pinned awkwardly under her thumb.

            “Well done,” the elder Alpha whispered, planting a kiss on her daughter’s cheek in the warmest token of affection the woman had offered since Alexandra had learned to walk.

            “Where should I put her?” Alexandra gasped with wonderment, drawing the woman closer to her face.  In the back of her mind, it occurred to try and say something to the little living thing contained in the confines of her hand, but she was too embarrassed to come up with anything.

            What if the woman was irritated to have lost the game to a ten-year-old?

            “Just put her in your pocket,” Alma said.

            “What?”

            “Now,” her mother insisted more harshly, the word all but impossible to resist as she wrapped her hand around her daughter’s thin wrist.  Taking the cue from swelling nervousness and bewilderment, Alexandra ignored her pre-conceived notions of manners.  She lowered her hand toward her pants and tucked the Beta woman into her pocket, keeping her fingers protectively caged around her without moving as Alma took her by the shoulder and led her briskly out of the alley.

            In the darkness, ten-year-old Nathaniel Tyler was curled up in the deepest corner he could reach against the wall where his mother had shoved him for protection, his eyes puffy with tears and a scream unable to escape his petrified lips.

            “Can I let her out now, Mom?”  The girl’s hand was still buried in her pocket, her fingers gingerly curled around the Beta for protection.  She was too afraid to wrap her palm around her for fear of appearing rude to someone she’d never met, but safety came first.  At first, the tiny body pressed up against the skin of her hand had been squirming about, but had shortly settled into a vibrating quiver.  The Alpha supposed this just meant the woman was becoming more comfortable with her surroundings, and this made her very happy.

            “Take a seat, Alexandra,” Alma instructed coolly, ignoring the question and scooting out a chair at the kitchen table with a hard scrape on the linoleum for her daughter before sliding easily into one on the opposite side.

            “Okay,” Alexandra answered obediently, hopping into the chair, but careful not to jostle her pocket too hard.  She cupped her palm under the woman in her pocket to ensure nothing happened to her in the shift, and kept it there defensively while maintaining respectful and nearly unblinking eye contact with her mother.  Even if she hadn’t been trying to make a positive impression on Alma, it was a reaction that most had upon meeting the thirty-four-year-old’s gaze.

            Alma Warren was infrequently without a mysterious curve in her lips like a Mona Lisa smile and a glint in her dark irises that sat eerily on the border between bemused and ravenous.  Her hair, holding the slightest suggestion of rouge in its auburn waves, would fall over the right side of her face when she dipped her chin low enough, concealing one of her eyes.  Stock still and stone-jawed whenever she wasn’t speaking, like a jungle cat on the prowl, the woman would appear to be eyeing her surroundings with deceptive disinterest but was never unaware of what went on around her.

            “Good girl,” the elder Alpha said at last with a muted sigh as she dipped her hand back into her pocket.  “You made me proud tonight, Alexandra.  I want you to know that.”

            “I… I did?”

            “Absolutely,” she answered with a curt nod.  “You followed my instructions perfectly.  You stayed quiet and kept your eyes moving, and you helped us win the game.”

            “Really?” Alexandra squealed as quietly as she could.  “Does this mean I get to come play more games with you?”

            Alma studied her daughter for a moment, her lips pursed tightly and her eyes narrowed, before she nodded again.  “Yes, I think it does.  You’re growing up, and it’s time I started including you in my work.  It’s time I started being more honest with you.  Would you like that, Alexandra?”

            “Yes!” the girl cried with a relieved laugh.  She threw a hand over her lips as soon as she’d said it, blushing with embarrassment.  “I mean, yes.”

            “Good,” Alma said with the closest thing she could muster in the way of a chuckle, obviously pleased in her own way with her daughter’s enthusiasm for the night’s activity.  “I realize it may have confused you at times.  The way I’ve raised you.  The way I’ve kept you from going near the Omegas or Betas, or from making very many friends because of how often we move.  And I apologize for that.”

            Alexandra froze up, having to keep her mouth from hanging open.  She’d never heard her mother speak this frankly, and it simultaneously filled her with excitement and anxiety.

            “But you must understand,” Alma swallowed hard, bowing her head lower.  “It was all to prepare you.  Everything I have done was to make sure you were ready.”

            “Ready for what?” Alexandra asked with anticipation, her throat dry, goose bumps running along her skin.

            “For your birthright, my dearest,” Alma whispered lovingly, finally drawing her occupied hand back above the table and rested her arm on its surface.

            Alexandra flinched at the sight of the tiny man squirming between her mother’s precise fingertips.  This was the clearest view she’d ever had of a Beta, given how dark the alley was where she’d scooped up the woman, and it was a joyously novel sight to see the persistent little life in person, though somewhat soured by the visage of the man laying rather uncomfortably in Alma’s fist.

            She wondered why her mother hadn’t put him down yet.

            “My what?” Alexandra whispered with a suspicious frown, at last forcing herself to confront the curiosity of this whole night.  If these two truly were friends as Alma claimed, it seemed evident that they were not best friends.  Friends couldn’t possibly treat friends this rudely.  “Are you going to put the man down?”

            “Alexandra, I need you to forget about this, and the one you have in your pocket for a minute, and listen to me,” Alma snapped quietly as her eyes indicated toward the figure in her fist, instantly refocusing her daughter, who now had the chill of mysterious fear gnawing at her insides.  “You want to work with me, don’t you?  You want to play more games?”

            “Y-Yes.”

            “Then you must understand something first, and understand it well,” Alma continued,  clearing her throat and bringing her fist up closer to her face and leaning her chin against her knuckles while the three-inch man’s arms and legs continued wriggling in the spaces between her firm digits.  “The reason why I’ve never brought you with me before is to keep you safe.”

            “Safe.”

            “Yes.  I never wanted you to have to be afraid of it, but the time has come for you to know about it, so that you can begin to do your part.  Alexandra… we are at war.”

            “War.”  At this point, the young girl could only manage to repeat back individual words that seemed to expand in her throat like hot metal.  Her soft fingers curled firmly around the woman in her pocket, though whether it was for the woman’s protection or her own, Alexandra couldn’t possibly have said.

            “Yes, war.  A war that’s been going on for the better part of seventy years, back when our world was first wrenched from us and we were made into the slaves of society that we are now.”

            “S-Slaves?” Alexandra choked out confusedly.

            “Yes.  The Omegas have squeezed us and made us into puppets of their fantasy universe until nothing of our way of life remained.  Make no mistake, Alexandra.  They are the enemy.  And we are among the last still fighting for the old world.  But now, we have our chance to make things right, one Beta at a time,” Alma declared authoritatively, and with a shift of her wrist, her fingers unfurled around the tiny man, whose face Alexandra now realized had been pressed into the heel of her mother’s hand to silence him.  As he sprawled in her palm and pulled himself awkwardly to his knees, his eyes darted back and forth across the cavernous room like a severely traumatized mouse.

            “Where am I?” he asked, his voice on the verge of quavering but his volume confident.  “Why have you brought me here?”

            “To fulfill your purpose,” Alma deadpanned.

            Alexandra’s lips hung open and she frowned, her eyes unable to unlock.  There was something in his face, subtle due to his size, but unmistakable nonetheless.

            Horror.  Like nothing she’d ever seen, compressed into those tiny eyes that screamed with darkness and shifting light.  As though he’d been hollowed from the inside out, his dead shell of skin and hair ready to flap in the breeze.

            “We can settle this peacefully.  We want no trouble with you,” the man stated as diplomatically as possible, but his voice was already shaking, and on the final word, there was something in his tone that suggested he knew exactly who was holding him.

            “Don’t even try your filth on me,” Alma barked.  “You’ll have to think up a new trick.”

            “Where is my wife?  What have you done with her?”

            “Oh, she’ll be here directly,” she answered simply, raising her other hand toward her opened palm with her pointer finger extended until it was pressed against the man’s right arm.  As the tip of it neared the man, he cringed and scooted back on his haunches across the fleshy expanse, but paused when his little feet dangled over the edge, craning his neck to gaze fearfully down at the drop to the tabletop.

            That was when Alma’s thumb came into contact with his arm as well and compressed in, powdering the man’s bones with a motion no stronger than would be needed to break a crunchy leaf into confetti.

            Alexandra’s scream melded with the man’s in a gruesome, cloying din, and the girl threw herself back against her chair, scooting several steps back with the same hard scrape on the floor and grasping the seat to ensure she didn’t fall out.  Her throat was on fire and eyes felt like they were being pulled from their sockets.  Her body crawled with the sensation of thousands of insects creeping over her, but her skin felt as though it had become separated from the rest of her as she stared with abject terror at the sight of the man’s bloodied limb dangling limply from his shoulder.

            A damp crimson sheen glistened on the pads of Alma’s thumb and forefinger, and she drew them both to her demonically curled lips and inserted them, sucking the moisture off.  She giggled in a low rumble that seemed to rattle the legs of the table as well as Alexandra’s bones.

            “Keep your voice down, Alexandra.  It’s not becoming a young woman of our class,” Alma stated calmly.  “I know, it can be a little obscene at first, but what you have to realize is that this is no different than what farmers do.  It’s a necessary bit of dirty work in order to make a statement.”

            “W-What?” coughed Alexandra, nausea flooding rapidly up from her intestines and making her feel light-headed enough to float out of her chair if her paralyzed limbs would’ve allowed her to break her death grip on the seat of the chair.

            “Don’t be afraid anymore, Alexandra.  It’s time for you to truly join the family.  Take it out of your pocket,” Alma instructed, casually rolling the flailing, pain-wracked body of the Beta man around between her fingers as he continued crying feverishly in extreme intervals.

            The young Alpha’s lower lip quivered.  She could no longer manage to find the words to form coherent sentences, let alone the monumental amount of fortitude it would’ve taken to actually speak them.  The color entirely flushed from her face as though the blood had been robbed from her body by a swarm of carnivorous insects, the girl’s hand only trembled as it hovered over her pocket, feeling so cold that it practically burned to touch the fabric.

            She couldn’t possibly mean…

            “Listen to me, dear,” Alma droned more loudly, at this point with her wide eyes looking like they belonged on a hunting owl as she leaned further across the table toward her daughter, who sunk lower into the chair.  “Take it out of your pocket now.”

            Barely able to connect her actions with commands from her brain now, Alexandra’s fingers managed to slide into the pocket despite how hard they were thrashing, and curled around the woman once again, drawing her out.

            The screaming in the room doubled almost as soon as the woman managed to fight her way toward the front of the young girl’s enormous palm and witness her husband’s suffering across the expanse of the table.  She wrapped her arms around Alexandra’s thumb for protection, knowing the drop would cripple her, but all the same leaned out as far as she could, at last making eye contact with Alma.  All the young Alpha could do was lock watering eyes onto the quaking life form miraculously sprawled in her hand.

            So small.  So helpless.  So… fearful.  Even at three inches tall, the expression was clear.  The woman’s eyes were bloodshot, her skin soaked with sweat and white as snow, and as she gripped the soft flesh of the girl’s hand for support while simultaneously shaking with revulsion at the prison she found herself in, there was something else the girl noticed in her wretchedly petrified body.

            Hopelessness.  An absolute, all-encompassing emptiness, born out of recognition.  A shell, just like her husband.  She barely resembled a complete person, and the longer Alexandra stared at the pitiful creature in her hand, the deeper she felt the terror icing over her every internal organ.

            At ten years old, there was a great deal that Alexandra still had to understand about the world, but one thing was for absolutely certain: human faces were not supposed to look like that.

            There should not exist a thing in the world that could extract a reaction like that from a living thing.

            “Good, Alexandra, good,” Alma said warmly, her whisper somehow cutting through the cacophony of terrified Beta voices from the shredded throats of their two captives.  “There’s no more reason to be afraid.  All you have to do is do is follow my lead now, and everything will be all right.”

            “All right,” Alexandra repeated with the energy of a coma patient, now just as hollowed and grayed as the woman in her hand, utterly unable to even begin processing the event she was trapped in.  Existence was all she could muster at this point.

            “On the count of three,” Alma continued.  “Put it in your mouth, chew it, and swallow it.”

            Another stone-cold silence.  Alexandra flinched but still couldn’t blink, her eyes once again imprisoned in her mother’s deadly glare.

            She shook her head to the left and then to the right, stopping there due to being almost positive that she would vomit right onto the table if she had to move any more than that.

            “Please let him go,” the tiny woman in Alexandra’s hand wept, and then she turned her attention to the child who held her entire life in the palm of her hand, tears pouring down her cheeks.  “Please, sweetie.  Please don’t.  Please don’t hurt us.”

            The young Alpha’s arm stiffened, and her fingers curled upward protectively around the tiny passenger, who shrieked despite the good intentions and curled up in a ball in the girl’s palm.  The cries of the man across the table continued to echo more weakly as the blood loss sapped him of strength in the stained claw of Alma’s fist.

            “Alexandra,” the elder Alpha sighed.  “These things that we hold in our hands.  Do you know what they’ve done?  They’ve spent their paltry lives on toy podiums, shouting at everyone about a bunch of nonsense that’s distorting our world even further than the Omegas have twisted it.  Speaking as if they have rights, floundering around like they have the strength necessary to survive, and calling us the monsters.  By doing this now, we can put a stop to the real monsters.  We can start to make the world like it was again.”

            Swallowing a lump in her throat that was threatening to choke her at any second, Alexandra clenched her eyelids shut and shook her head once more in the negative.  She drew her hand closer toward her chest, cupping the woman safely into her palm.

            Alma clucked with disappointment.  She twiddled the man between her fingers, laying him across her palm, and then in a flash was swooping her hand toward her mouth and her opened lips, her teeth glistening in the dim light of the kitchen as she passed him over the pink threshold and crunched down just as his front half made it inside.

            “No.  No.  No,” mumbled the woman in numbed disbelief as she clambered over Alexandra’s thumb, clearly unable to convince herself of what she’d just seen.  She tried to leap from the enormous hand, but the girl managed to keep her from making the treacherous leap down to the table with a flick of her index finger.  “NO!”

            Alexandra was locked in time then, her body having forgotten how to regularly inhale and exhale, as she watched a tiny dribble of dark blood roll over the slope of her mother’s lower lip and cascade down her chin, leaving a little trail of liquid carnage in its wake.

            Its splash onto the surface of the table made a deafening crash in Alexandra’s ears, and reactivated all of her senses at once.

            She threw herself backward in the chair to stand up in one swift motion, but the girl’s mother had apparently been anticipating the attempt at escape, because she made her move across the table a heartbeat ahead of Alexandra, and before the young Alpha could rise from her chair with the woman cupped defensively against her chest, Alma’s hand was locked like an iron stock around her daughter’s wrist.

            “No, no, no,” Alma scolded musically, her voice lowered to a frightfully whimsical snarl as she tried to wrench the girl back closer to the table.  “Mommy can’t let you leave.  Not until you’ve become part of the family.  You want to do that, don’t you?  You want to be a part of the family?”

            Alexandra’s throat was iced over, and she knew she couldn’t possibly have spoken up to answer even if she knew what she wanted to say to this monster that currently had its talons clenched around her arm, but she locked eyes a final time with her mother, and in that instant, both understood fully what was meant.

            “Did you hear me, dear?” Alma spat.  “You will eat the thing in your hand, or you will never come with me again.”

            “She’s n-not a t-t-thing,” Alexandra sputtered at last.

            “What did you just say?”

            “She’s a s-she,” the girl insisted, furrowing her brow and pursing her lips.  The ten-year-old had never been so scared in her life, and was operating on pure instinct at this point.  “And you c-can’t h-hurt her.”

            “Dear, dear, dear,” Alma bemoaned with another shake of her head.  “After all this time, I’d have thought you’d have more faith in me than that, Alexandra.”

            With a flourish of her fingers, Alma plucked the Beta woman from her daughter’s immobilized hand, dangled her rapidly thrashing form over her mouth, and dropped her into the dark hovel for the slaughter.  A quick scream was heard, followed by the same wet snapping, and then silence.

            Shriveling up inside herself, Alexandra brought her other hand up from her lap and smacked her mother across the face.  Weaker at this moment than she’d ever felt before, it hardly made a sound, but the gesture from her demure daughter was enough to shock Alma into releasing her grip for just a moment, and that was when the young Alpha rolled out of the chair and scrambled to her feet, darting for the door.

            “Alexandra, STOP!” screeched the enraged Alma as she threw the chair to the side hard enough that one of the legs snapped out of place when it hit the wall and leapt after her child just as the door leading out to the porch slammed closed.

            The screen nearly was knocked off its hinges as the woman threw it back open and pursued Alexandra across the grass and onto the sidewalk.  Once again, no words had to be spoken, and both Alphas knew the intentions of the other without having to make eye contact again.

            “You will STOP right now or you will never be welcome in my house again!” roared Alma as she steadily gained ground, despite her daughter’s determination to stay in a full sprint.  “Do you hear me?  NEVER!”

            Frigid tears were rushing down Alexandra’s steaming cheeks, and she was practically choking on them as she gasped for air, but she tightened her hands into fists and ignored the soreness in her calves as she crossed to the end of the street and neared a shopping center stopover, leaping over a large puddle but not breaking her speed in the slightest.

            “You can’t turn on us, Alexandra.  You can’t turn on your own kind.  You were born one of us.  You deserve what we’re fighting for too!” Alma shouted, having moved on to bargaining in her desperation as she started to slow up just a bit.  “Are you going to throw all of that away for a couple of insects that you never even knew the names of?  Are you?  I TAUGHT YOU BETTER THAN THAT!”

            By now in full sobs that blurred her vision and made her knees tremble as she sprinted, Alexandra ducked into a dark alley behind a dumpster and doubled back as her mother passed her, instead making her way down the main street toward the subway once the coast was clear again.  The few passerby that remained in the shopping area glanced her way as they heard her cries, but shrugged it off and returned to their business as she ran past them without pause.

            Alexandra’s brain was running at precisely the same pace as her pattering feet, and she couldn’t have been asked to comment on any point in the future more than two seconds ahead, but as the scrolling letters “AEGIS” caught her attention on the digital information board in bright neon letters atop the train station as the next destination, a tightening in her gut told her to act.

            Finally allowing herself to catch her breath, Alexandra took the steps two at a time on the subway platform and slipped inside just as the doors were opening to allow in new passengers.  She pressed herself to the wall to conceal herself from view and buried her face in her hands to stifle her whimpering as baffled passengers leaned down to ask her what the matter was.

            “YOU WILL NEVER COME HOME AGAIN, ALEXANDRA.  DO YOU HEAR ME?” Alma howled into the night with cataclysmic magnitude infused into every word, her arms raised over her head, murder in her eyes.  “YOU ARE NOT MY DAUGHTER.  YOU ARE ONE OF THEM.  AND I WILL NOT LET THE MONSTERS WIN.”

            Crying uncontrollably and inhaling more awkwardly than a sickly newborn, her heart railing stingingly against her ribcage as she heard her mother sprinting up the steps to the subway, Alexandra watched with more relief than she’d ever felt in her life as the doors slammed shut and the train took off for the city’s Omega headquarters, announced with a soft and reassuring ding.

            “I’ve been wondering, David,” Evelyn Cade sighed forlornly as she stood over Senior Enforcer Hart’s desk, her arms crossed and her head hung low.

            “What about?” he asked.

            “About all of this.  And… whether it was because of me.”

            At this, Hart fully directed his attention over to his colleague and friend of over half a century.  “You’re talking about Alexandra?”

            “Yes.”

            “How could you say that?”

            “There was obviously so much going on with her, so many problems she needed help with, and I was blind to it all.  And now it’s hurt not only her but other innocent people.  If only I’d spent more time with her, maybe I could’ve seen it before.”

            “You’ve been there for her since that night she first showed up here.  You’re the closest thing she’s had to a real mother.  Probably ever.”

            “I… I know, but… sometimes I think I could’ve done more,” Evelyn continued, her voice cracking in the back of her throat.  For the first time in a long time, the Omega felt an uneasy hollowness: a creeping sense of fallibility she’d hadn’t felt remotely close to since she’d stood at the height of an Alpha all those years ago.  “There’s so much about the way she grew up that she never fully healed from.  I always knew it would take her a long time to work her way back to some kind of normalcy, and… and I know Bridget helped her by leaps and bounds, but…”

            “But what?”

            “She’s seen such awful things for someone so young.  I suppose all these years she’d just been storing that up inside with nowhere to get rid of it healthily, and now she’s just imploding.  Maybe… maybe if I’d just spent more time trying to understand, trying to reach her, maybe this all could’ve been-”’

            “You can’t let yourself think that, Ev,” Hart interrupted.  “I agree, whatever’s happened to the Alexandra we all remember must have something to do with that pain.  And even though she’s got to put in the time now, I know it’s not fair to hang the blame entirely around her neck.  But you can’t place it on yourself either.  You’re not the one responsible.”

            “Why not?  Look at us.  We’re the most powerful beings on Earth.  We’ve been trying to fix the world for eighty years, and still things like this continue to happen.  Who else can be responsible, then?”

            “I don’t know what to say.  We’re Omegas.  Not gods.  Even if we’re going to live long enough to see the entire galaxy populated and big enough to hold a hundred people in our hands, everyone, even Kayla, came from humanity, and that’s a part of ourselves we’re never going to completely lose,” Hart said sorrowfully, the bitterness of the situation evident in his words too.  “Even if we wanted to.”

            “So what good are we if we can’t help everyone?”         

            “Because we can still do our best.  And when our best isn’t enough, we put everything we have into healing.  Just as we’re going to do for those Betas, and just as we’re going to do for Alexandra.”

            Evelyn bit her lip and nodded, her eyes glistening with salty pools.

            “Those… Betas, though.  And that girl, the one who… who…  How has she looked?”

            “They think she… could wake up soon.  Her body’s responding well to the treatment.  It’s much more positive than when she arrived,” Hart answered.  “It will be all right again.”

            “Excuse me.  David?  Evelyn?” piped the voice of Tricia Reynolds from the Alpha path lining the office.

            “Yes, Trish?” Evelyn said warmly, trying to disguise the penetrating melancholy of her mood as she turned to face her comparatively miniscule coworker.

            “There’s an individual over at the entrance bay that I think you might want to have someone come listen to,” she responded as she pointed in the direction of the elevators.

            “Who is it?”

            “The man who runs the Beta clothing store in that alley behind where the Warren attack took place,” the Alpha said with arms crossed.  “He says he wants to talk.”

            “Didn’t we talk to him the night of the incident?” Hart said with a frown, rapidly scrolling through the record of the case on his tablet for confirmation.  “Does he have something to add?”

            “I think he does.  He’s spooked.  Looks like he might start crying any second.  If I was a betting woman, I’d say he knows something he didn’t share before.  He was mumbling something about getting even, and something else about a boy.  I believe I heard the words “that rich little fucker,” but it’s hard to say.  I couldn’t really make it all out.”

            “All right, we’ll… get someone over there,” Hart said uneasily, pulling out his phone.  “If you could take him to an empty debriefing chamber, I’ll see who’s open right now.  Anything else?”

            “I don’t know if it’s anything we need to handle, but he had a couple bruises on his face.  I don’t think anything too severe,” Tricia added.  “Still…”

            “Maybe an Alpha heard he helped with the investigation and tried to even the score?” Evelyn suggested.  “That might’ve been what he was mumbling about.  It might’ve been someone young, too.”

            “Someone who knows Alexandra could’ve tracked him down,” Hart said.

            “Or anyone, really.  There are a lot of people unhappy over all this.”

            “You can say that again.  But I don’t think it was an Alpha who roughed him up,” Tricia continued gravely.  “I didn’t get a real good look at his face, I only carried him over to a different platform, but the mark on his chin was small.  Looked more like it came from a Beta.”

            “Really,” Evelyn said back.  She bit her lip and seemed to drift out of the present as she disappeared into her thoughts.  The words Tricia had heard from the man all seemed like a disconnected jumble, and yet something was gnawing at the Omega in the back of her mind, telling her that it could make sense.  Something she’d stored away long enough ago that she had to think twice.

            “A Beta hit him, hmm?  Whichever medical examiner’s on call right now, could you give them a page while I get someone to take another statement from him?” Hart asked Tricia as he finished dialing into his phone and put it to his ear.

            “Will do, David,” the Alpha responded with a nod before turning on the path.

            “Wait a minute,” Evelyn cut in softly with a wave of her hand, her eyes locked numbly to the floor as she swam through her memory bank for a word or image she couldn’t recall.  “The boy.  The first one to give his statement.  Nathaniel-something.  What was his last name?”

            “Nathaniel… Tyler, I think.  Tyler.  That’s it.  Why?” Hart answered as he covered up the phone’s mouthpiece, repeating it with confidence.  “Wait a second.  Isn’t he…”

            “Oh, God,” Evelyn uttered, her mouth hanging open and her face flushing white.

“What are we doing out here again?” a zombified Alexandra coldly questioned up to her best friend as she sat in the peachy center of Bridget’s enormous palm, knees pulled to her chest in a display of symbolic defense.

            “We’re going to settle things,” Bridget announced coolly as she stepped off the end of the porch and into the expansive landscape that encompassed her backyard.  “No matter how long it takes.”

            “Settle things,” the Alpha repeated back grittily, unable to bring herself to feel dread at such ominous ambiguity.  Even if things could get worse, and by now she knew full-well they could, she didn’t care.

            What did it matter any longer?  What could her emotions count for?  Why bother trying to understand?  Two weeks into her incarceration and twenty minutes overdue for a third session, it was just a waste of energy to feel anything.

            “Yes,” Bridget swallowed as she marched across the loping grass hills and past the towering clusters of trees that didn’t even reach up to her knees.

            Alexandra blinked as the breeze whisked against her skin and into her watering eyes.  She peered across the expanse of the exotic ecosystem making up the Cades’ acreage, her eyes finally locking on her friend’s ultimate destination as Bridget trod across grassy slopes like they were anthills.

            A low-hanging cliff ran along the side of the creek near the back wall of the yard, far too high for Alexandra to have dreamed of reaching on her own, but perfect as a bench for Bridget.  The Omega stretched a leg to cross over the crashing waterway the girls had so long ago spent an afternoon damming up and swung her other limb over, lowering herself onto the marbled overhang.  She allowed her colossal bare feet to slide into the frothy rapids and enjoy the coolness on the skin between her toes, but not deeply enough to block the flow of the water.  Bridget’s elbows rested on her knees and her halcyon locks hung in a canopy above her friend, blotting out the sunlight directly behind her head and making it hard for Alexandra to make out her massive expression through the shroud of shade.

            The violent rush of icy liquid clashed with a quiet trickle that nevertheless managed to have its voice heard amidst the auditory onslaught, and a fine mist was clouding its way even this high up above as Alexandra peered uncaringly over the edge of Bridget’s hands and to the rocky drop below.

            “What are we going to do?” Alexandra said at last, loudly enough that her voice could be heard clearly over the creek’s sputtering.

            “Make everything right again.”

            “So what does that mean?  You’re going to try to hurt me until I agree to lie about everything?”

            Bridget’s face twitched as though she’d been poked in the eye with a sharp stick, but she maintained a steady platform with her palm.

            “No.”

            “Okay.  Let me think, then.  I bet I can guess it,” Alexandra continued, pressing a finger to her chin and tapping it thoughtfully, now neck-deep in apathetic abandon.  “You’re gonna spit on me?  I’ve heard a couple Alphas say that’s what happened in their sessions with other enforcers.  That would be a good one.  That would really teach me a lesson.”

            “No.”

            “Damn it!  All right, moving on.  Let’s see, what would be just… fucking awful, but it wouldn’t exactly cripple me, so you could still feel good enough about yourself afterward to keep on doing this.  Gosh, this is a tough one…” Alexandra simpered, shocked that she hadn’t been silenced with an angry retort yet, but shrugging it off just as easily.

            Bridget forced herself to swallow a volcanic lump in her throat and blinked away a flash of moisture that was beginning to glaze over her irises.

            “I’m not going to do anything to you, Lexi.  Not now.”

            “Oh, good.  What, so we’re just gonna talk it out, woman to woman, until I just give in?  Is that the plan?”

            “Yes.”

            “Great plan!” Alexandra proclaimed enthusiastically, throwing both thumbs up as high as she could reach.

            “Lexi,” began the Omega, fighting back a fresh quaver in her tone, pleading with her agonized green eyes as well as her strained utterances.  “Please.  Please, please, please.  I know you’re in there somewhere.  The real you.  All I want is to understand what happened.  If… you just tell me, we can start to fix it.  I swear, I’ll… I’ll do everything I can to help you, to make this easier on you, but you have got to work with me.”

            The Alpha hung her head.  Somewhere deep inside, she felt a twinge of warmth hearing these impassioned words from her best friend, who sounded like she genuinely did want to start some kind of healing process for the imagined reality she had become so absolutely convinced of.

            And then she was reminded of how little her words meant now.

            “Make me understand, Lexi.  I’m begging you.”

            Closing her eyes now, Alexandra clasped her hands in her lap and exhaled with storied resignation.  She felt exhausted, partially from having slept so little these past two weeks that she probably could conk out in Bridget’s hand if she leaned back too far, but mostly from the fruitless struggle she’d been keeping up all this time.  Why was she fighting so hard?  Why resist when they all wanted the same thing?

            They wanted a monster?

            They wanted a Beta-maiming maniac?

            They wanted the twisted offspring of Alma Warren?

            They’d have her, then.

            “All right, I admit it,” Alexandra announced nonchalantly without waiting another moment, opening her eyes and establishing a militant staring contest with the titanic being above, holding her body stiff as a petrified board.

            “What?” Bridget gaped after a pause, so aghast that she didn’t notice her phone buzzing urgently in her pocket.

            “You heard me.  I did it.  I attacked those Betas on that walkway.  I picked them all up, put them on the ground, and chased them around.  And then when they couldn’t get away, I started stepping on them.  Not like I needed something from them, obviously.  They didn’t do anything to me.  I just… felt like doing it.  It seemed like a lot of fucking fun,” Alexandra continued on, spitting out the last words of this proclamation with grim satisfaction.

            “Lexi…”

            “No, no, I’m ready!  I’m ready for the world to know the truth,” blurted the Alpha.  “I mean, why should I be ashamed?  They’re just a bunch of Betas.  Who gives a shit about them?  Their hopes, their dreams, their lives?  They should be grateful I paid them the slightest attention.  They should be grateful I chose them to entertain myself with.”

            “Lexi, you’re… you’re not…” Bridget tried to object, her throat far too dry and her synapses erupting with far too much emotional bedlam to come up with any better defense.  Her lips hung slightly open as this madness unfurled.

            “Don’t try to stop me, Bridge.  You’ve won!  You’re gonna get everything you wanted out of me.  I’m standing here right now and admitting the truth.”

            “No you’re not.”

            “Yes I am, and here it is: Betas are all dirt.  Nothing more.  They all deserve what happened to them.  Every single one of them.  Hell, I let those ones off easy.  I only threw one of them, and she might even still live.  I guess I was just being lazy.  I should’ve held her up higher before I let go.”

            “Lexi, that’s enough,” Bridget cut in.  A tremor was running up her arm now, uncontrollable, like a separate entity shaking her to the core, but the Omega managed to quell the motion with her practiced focus.

            “Are you kidding?  I’m just getting started here.  I mean, if we’re going for the truth here, we might as well just have a giant fucking pow-wow and get everything out in the clear, so we both know where we stand.”

            “This isn’t you.  I know this isn’t how it happened,” Bridget insisted quietly, unable to get her voice to a higher volume due to shock.

            “Oh, because you just know me so goddamned well, is THAT it?”

            “Yes, it is.”

            “Well, then try this one on for size, if you think you can read my mind,” Alexandra spat as she rose to her feet, her fists curled into white bundles of hot flesh and fury.  “As soon as this is over?  As soon as you let me out of your pretty little cage and put me back on the street?  I’m going to do it again.  But correctly this time.”

            “L-”

            “Don’t interrupt me when you’re on the verge of uncovering the dark secrets of one of the worst Alpha criminals in the history of the world!” bellowed Alexandra, her voice stone-cold and without a single pause for breath as she wagged a disapproving finger up at her enormous handler.  With complete attention thus achieved, the Alpha’s words lowered into a throaty whisper, tingling with palpable poison in every syllable: “When I get out there again, I’m going to grab every Beta I can get my hands on.  I’m going to eat them.  I’m going to step on them.  Tear their little heads off like berries, smear their guts on their toy houses, and write jokes about the whole fucking insect race with their juices as ink.”

            “Lexi, STOP!” the Omega howled with a sharp crack in her voice, unleashing her feeling at last and nearly bowling her friend over in her hand with the concussive force.  By now, Bridget’s wrist was shaking so hard that even wrapping the fingers of her other hand around it didn’t help much, but she could hardly register it, so focused was she on the unfolding nightmare before her as her friend seemed to come undone at the seams and release a hurricane of unbridled insanity.

            Again, her rumbling phone went ignored.

            “You think you know me?  You think you know what goes on inside this head?” Alexandra challenged with a venomous cackle, laying a hand in her hair demonstratively.  “Everybody was thinking it.  I know.  And now, you can see they were all right.  I am my mother’s daughter.  I’ve finally become what I was supposed to be all those years ago.  I’ve become what I should’ve been before you showed up and tried to tame me.  Like your own little pet.”

            “That’s not true.  N-N-None of that is true,” Bridget contested woefully, hot tears now rolling unchecked down her overheated cheeks.  She’d been restraining for the last few minutes, but at this final smattering of hysteria, there was no holding back.

            “Oh, it’s not, is it, Ms. Omega?  If you’ve got all the answers, then, what is it I’m getting wrong here?” Alexandra demanded, placing her hands aggressively on her hips and stomping her foot on the plush floor of palm flesh.

            “I never tried to… t-tame you.  N-Never.  I just…”

            “You just what?”

            “I just needed you as much as you needed me.”

            “I find that pretty fucking hard to believe.”

            “It’s t-true,” Bridget croaked, shutting her eyes to unsuccessfully slow the salty floodgates as her arm continued shaking with seismic force.  “You think we… we see ourselves as untouchable.  But we’re not.  I don’t know how to help save a world.  But… but then I m-met you, and… and…”

            “Yeah?”

            “You… reminded me how to be brave.”

            “Oh, great.  Just great for me.  So what does that make me in the scheme of your big master plan, then?”

            “You’re my sister.  And I love you.”

            At this, Alexandra froze, internally torn asunder, but she managed to make it through with a desperate grunt.  She was committed now.  And as long as she continued to stand alone in the truth, there was no going back.

            “Well, then, I guess I’m just not who you thought I was,” the Alpha declared with gut-punching finality.  “I guess I turned out to be a little… fucking… freak after all.”

            “NO!” wailed Bridget at the top of her shredded lungs, her cry echoing over a mile radius as she reached the height of her strife, and in a moment that seemed to shatter the flow of time itself in the minds of both girls, the Omega’s shuddering hand experienced one last spasm that bucked Alexandra into the air.

            The Alpha tumbled head over heels, flying outward into the inviting chill that beckoned with the promise of compromising release, and careened toward the violently thrashing current of the creek far below.

            Bridget’s mouth opened again to silently scream out her friend’s name as her brain finally registered what had happened: the breaking of her most vital personal rule.  She plunged toward the ground, crouching as quickly as she could and thrusting her palms out to catch the tumbling Alpha, who passed between them before the Omega had a chance to cup them.

            As though in the distance, Bridget’s ears rang with an urgent shriek, repeating her name again and again and again, but she couldn’t possibly have tried to understand it now as she felt her stinging heart go on strike in her railing chest.

            Alexandra crashed into the water, the force of her fall pulling her directly to the bottom and creating a sickening impact on the rocky basin that was even heard by Bridget over the savage splashing.

            “BRIDGET!” screamed out the voice again, somehow closer than before, but the Omega paid it no heed again as she scooped both hands into the water before the current could take hold of Alexandra.  She felt her friend’s limp body flail against her palms in the icy rapids and she pulled her up, hardly able to keep herself from trembling, the tears having stopped as she entered into a walking catatonic state.

            She knelt down by the creek’s edge in the soft grass and opened her palms as tenderly as she could, allowing Alexandra’s sputtering, soaked body to be delivered safely down.  After a throatful of water spilled from the Alpha’s lips, the semi-conscious young woman opened her mouth and began to moan with exponentially increasing pain.

            Alexandra’s right leg was bent completely forward at the knee.

            “STOP!” Evelyn Cade bellowed in desperation as she finished sprinting across the yard and reached the two girls, though her daughter was lost in a horrified trance above her tiny sprawled friend, too lost in the unbelievable moment to comprehend anything tangible in her reality.

            “Oh my God…” the elder Omega gasped, instantly on the verge of tears herself, as she whipped out her cell and began dialing for emergency services, knowing that trying to handle the greatly damaged Alpha themselves could potentially lead to even greater injury in her weakened state.  “What happened?”

            “It was an accident.  I didn’t mean to,” the words spooled out on a robotic autopilot, the enforcer having barely even noticed that her mother was present, let alone understood.

            “Bridget, we need to give her some space.  Move back.”

            The words went completely unheard.  Bridget’s hands were placed reverently over her knees.  Her body was paralyzed in an upright position, her lips were ashen, and her enlarged irises had become swirling ice water.

            “Alexandra.  Alexandra, look at me.  Stay awake with us,” Evelyn pleaded, leaning over the Alpha, but careful to give her plenty of room.  “Please stay with us.”

            It was like being trapped in a nightmare, but with each stabbing inhalation into her lungs, the Omega realized with metastasizing horror that she wasn’t about to wake up.

            “Bridget, please listen to me,” Evelyn choked out, returning her gaze to her daughter.  “She’s innocent.  Alexandra is innocent.”

            In her state of suspended emotional animation and quaking limbs, there wasn’t much that could’ve yanked Bridget out of the brain-curdling terror of watching her friend cry in the grass with her leg snapped in the wrong direction, but this statement of Evelyn’s was the exception.

            “What?” droned the Omega, her lips merely twitching to utter the word.

            “It was a set-up.  She was framed,” panted Evelyn weakly, crouching closer to the ground to keep her own knees from shaking at the sight of her surrogate daughter wounded and weeping.

            “What?” Bridget repeated, unable to process anything beyond the academic meaning of each word.

            “Nathaniel Tyler.  The boy that was there the night Alexandra’s mother… well, it… it was him.  He and his friends arranged everything to look like they’d been attacked.  They pumped themselves full of painkillers and then beat each other to make it look real.  They even threw Iris off a ledge at knee-height for an Alpha.  That’s… that’s how…” Evelyn continued, having difficulty getting it out herself, and coughing to keep the tears at bay.

            “And the video,” managed Bridget.

            “They paid the man who operates that store to tamper with the records.  That’s how we found out.  He came in to tell us.  He showed us the footage with the real clock, and then we went and found the others he’d gotten to work with him.  They… all admitted it.  Almost immediately.”

            Bridget nodded once, jerking her neck hard enough to almost give herself a crimp.  Her eyes were watering again, but this time because she hadn’t blinked in several minutes as she stared down at the crumpled and mewling form of her best friend and sister.

            “We were wrong, Bridget.  Oh, God…” gasped Evelyn, her voice cracking heavily as she wrung her fingers together until they went pale.  “We were so, so wrong.”

            The enforcer’s eyes widened, her chest heaving as she began hyperventilating, and then, her hands shaking harder than ever before, she approached Alexandra in the grass to pick her up again.

            “We have to take her to the hospital.  They’re taking too long,” Bridget declared sedately.  “Now.”

            At this point, Alexandra’s cries had become meek gurgles in the back of her throat, though the tears continued pouring.  When she saw Bridget’s soft fingertips nearing her as gently as possible, though, the Alpha found the strength to open her mouth and force out the required syllable through gritted teeth: “No.”

            Bridget froze, jerking back as though she’d been slapped, frowning with simultaneous mania and fear.  Obviously, Alexandra couldn’t think clearly enough to realize that Bridget could get her help sooner.  She wasn’t thinking straight.

            “L-Lexi,” the Omega said, her steady tone broken again at the painful mention of her name.  “I’ve… I’ve g-got to get you h-help… p-please…”

            “Don’t.  Touch.  Me,” the Alpha grunted with agony.

            Desperate, ignoring the fresh tears making their way out of her swollen eyes, Bridget looked emergently to her mother for permission to override the demand.  Evelyn sighed and shook her head, silently rejecting her daughter’s desire to act.

            “They’ll be here any minute, Alexandra,” Evelyn whispered.  “Just hold on.  Hold on.”

            Dumbfounded and feeling more lost than ever before, Bridget stumbled backward off her haunches and slumped against the cliff’s edge on the other side of the creek, now giving herself some distance from her friend, half-expecting herself to reach out, scoop up the girl, and cradle her protectively to her cheek on an impulse if she remained in range.

            “That’s it, Alexandra.  Keep looking at me.  Breathe.  Breathe.  In and out, in and out.  Focus on my voice.  Just listen to my words.  That’s all you have to do,” Evelyn coached, directing her attention to the Alpha, who seemed to be making an effort to follow the instruction of her surrogate mother as she began huffing and puffing, replacing the screeches of before.

            Bridget entered a haze as a helicopter the size of one of her childhood toys buzzed into the yard and touched down in the grass so the Alpha paramedics could load Alexandra up.  As she watched them gently lay the girl on a stretcher, she had to look away, too aggrieved to see any more of it, and then looked down at her hands, curled into claws.

            Her hands.

            She wanted more than anything to rend them from her body.

            They were still shaking, her fingers convulsing as though they were submerged in liquid nitrogen.  Bridget balled her fingers into her palms, forming quivering fists and slammed them down at her sides with an earth-rumbling impact before finally retching, sapped of all will to move, down the front of her shirt.

            The fluids from her mouth intermingling with the once-again flowing tears down the crook of her neck, a storm began clamoring in the recesses of her tortured heart.  The face of her friend flashed into her mind’s eye even when she shut her lids as tightly as she could and remained there in full, vivid and violent and full of promise.

            Bridget turned her face up to the gray sky, her cadaverous knuckles clenched into human iron, and screamed with such profoundly world-demolishing might that her previous cry of anguish was by comparison made into a crooning whistle in the wind.

            “Believe me, Nathaniel,” Claire Lindon stated frigidly.  “This will be so much easier for everyone if you decide to start explaining things in the very near future.”

            The incarcerated Beta was seated with his arms folded across his chest atop a high glass tower positioned on a table within the cavernous confines of the Aegis interrogation room, encased in a translucent wall just high enough that it was impossible for him to make any foolish maneuvers to escape.  At the other end of the table sat the junior enforcer with arms folded on the surface, eyes intently trained on the guilty party, who stood at a height of no more than the infinitesimal distance between the creases on her thumb.

            Frowning at his behemoth accuser, whose tanned face and smooth black tresses filled his entire current worldview, Nathaniel Tyler simply shook his head from the left to the right and crossed his legs to get more comfortable.

            Claire’s dark eyes wandered down to the jumble of black mechanical specks propped up on the edge of the table that comprised the A/V equipment, well aware of the number of Aegis employees gathered at the monitors in the other room to witness the events of this conversation with achingly bated breath.

            There was so, so much riding on all of this.

            “Listen.  We have all your friends’ testimonies.  We have the tools you used to break each other down.  We have the real video footage.  And… not that we really needed it after all that, but Iris woke up this morning, and she’s been screaming your name as well as a lot of pretty mean adjectives about you and your friends.  If you’re holding out for a reasonable doubt, I’m afraid you’re out of luck on that front,” Claire continued as coolly as possible, though already her knuckles were turning white from the strain of speaking so peaceably to such a little hellion.

            Nathaniel remained a defiant three-inch island.

            The Omega sighed bitterly.  The revelation of Alexandra’s innocence three days before had ground most of Aegis’ daily proceedings to a halt as everyone available wanted to do whatever they could to help bring swift correction to this absolute catastrophe of perverted justice.  The news had rocked them all to the core with cataclysmic force, and personally, Claire hadn’t felt this remotely close to gutted since that day months before when she’d strolled into the mixed area to pick up her brother, only to find him being reduced to a barely breathing pulp.

            “You should know that we are aware of your history with the Warrens,” Claire breathed at last.  “We know what you went through ten years ago, and it has been taken into account in your prosecution and incarceration.  But it cannot absolve you of what you’ve done now, especially not if you won’t even try to cooperate going forward.”

            “That’s nice,” came Nathaniel’s peeped reply, drenched in toxic sarcasm.  “I really appreciate the support.”

            “See, having a little conversation isn’t so hard,” Claire responded, again having to hold back the coldness in her voice.  No matter her feelings on this matter, it was her duty to offer a single clean chance at legal redemption.  “So how about explaining yourself now?”

            “All right,” Nathaniel said with a bit more sincerity this time.  He brushed a hand over his ratty bangs, his eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep.  “Come closer so you can hear me better.”

            “Okay,” the enforcer agreed uneasily, leaning over the table until her face was looming right over the top of the glass tower, near enough that a simple huff from her flared nostrils could’ve tumbled the Beta out of his chair and flat onto his back.  “Speak.”

            “Ready?”

            “Yes.”

            “Fuck you and your whole bunch of Messiah-Complex freaks.”

            Exhaling calmly and savoring the silence, Claire decided that was enough.  She’d given the requisite chance at a polite confession.  There was no obligation to keep it up indefinitely, though, especially not under these very particular circumstances.

            “In that case…” she sighed.  “…I’ve got someone else who would like to talk to you.”

            Rising from her chair, Claire didn’t even pay the Beta another glance as she turned and marched the several-step distance to the door, knowing she’d only become more infuriated if she chanced a last look at his insolent little form.

            Just as soon as she’d exited, the door swung closed but was instantly reopened to reveal Bridget standing in the frame, a look of somber determination plastered on her face as she folded her hands behind her back with bellicose reserve.

            Even from this distance, the Omega was fairly certain she could see Nathaniel flinch at the sight of her, but he kept his composure.  She wasted no time in closing the distance between them and sliding into the previously occupied chair.

            “Hello,” she said, a steely chill in her tone.  For another moment, there was no sound, as the pair studied one another, a mountainous defender of the city locked onto the dust-sized mastermind.  Bridget steepled her fingers atop the surface of the table and inched forward toward the glass tower.

            “You know who I am, don’t you?” she pressed at length.

            He nodded.

            “You’re the friend,” he said, surprising the stock-still Bridget with his willingness to answer seriously as well as everyone else in the other room.

            “You could say that,” she responded lividly.  “But I’d rather you not, because I don’t think you could ever understand what that means even if we were here for the rest of your life.  Or the rest of mine.”

            “Fair enough,” he reported dryly, his voice suggesting he was only half-paying attention.

            “So now,” Bridget continued.  “You’re going to tell me why you did it.”

            Nathaniel snorted at this and rolled his beady eyes.

            “Really.”

            “Yes.”

            “Interesting,” he said, going silent again.

            Bridget drummed her fingers on the surface of the table and lowered her chin so that her golden hair was draping down over her eyes, gritting her teeth until they ground together with enough might to chew apart steel beams like crackers.

            She had to stay focused.  She had to keep it together.

            “You know Alexandra didn’t do anything to your parents.  She was coerced by her mother Alma.  She’s the guilty one, and she’s been locked away for ten years,” Bridget said quietly.

            “I know that,” Nathaniel replied calmly.

            “She didn’t know what was happening any more than you did.  And I know… you’ve had to live with that for years.  What happened on that night.  Nobody can blame you for wanting justice for it, and I understand you must feel frightened and confused by it all.  But-”

            At this, Nathaniel, who up until now had been maintaining his reticent composure like a slumped-over crash test dummy, started to snicker.  After a few machine gun-like bursts of laughter, then, he broke into full-on peals of cackling, doubling over and clutching his stomach with both arms.

            Bridget, irritated but unprepared to allow such a reaction to deter her quest for righteousness, snapped her fingers loud enough that it got Nathaniel’s attention with another noticeable flinch in his shoulders, though he continued tittering under his breath and shaking his head in disbelief.

            “Care to share the joke?”

            “Oh, absolutely,” Nathaniel agreed.  “It’s just… you.  Just now.  All that “I know you must feel this” blah-blah-blah.  Really, that’s a great one.  You should use it at comedy clubs.  You’ll get a big reaction.”

            “Mind explaining what’s so entertaining about it?”

            “Depends,” Nathaniel said with a shrug.  “How long do you have?”

            Unable to keep up her placid equilibrium any longer, Bridget’s right hand rose up from the table and darted into the center of the glass tower, her thumb and index finger parted just enough to create a thin crevice of less than a foot in length as they barreled toward their target with military precision.

            Nathaniel flinched at the sudden motion and rush of wind that circled with the force of a tornado into his tiny pen, but made no effort to dodge the incoming digits that dwarfed him like jumbo jets as they plucked him up and rose back into the air.

            “I have as long as we need,” Bridget whispered once she had the young man poised in front of the twin emerald pools of her eyes, which seemed to crackle with the energy of an oncoming thunderstorm.  The back of her neck tingled with the sensation of his microscopic limbs squirming against the mighty compressing power of her digits.  “And I’m through playing games.”

            “Okay, great, me too,” Nathaniel grunted, trying unsuccessfully to inch himself into a less threatening position between the titanic walls of Bridget’s finger pads, using the grooved surfaces of her prints for leverage.  “You think I did it just because of the Warrens, don’t you?”

            “I don’t know why you did it.  That’s why we’re here,” Bridget hissed.

            “I want to ask you something, Cade, and since I’m trying to be honest here now, I’m hoping you can do the same.”

            “I’m not promising anything, but okay.”

            “Have you ever been afraid before?”

            Nathaniel watched as the fleshy cliffside that made up Bridget’s brow furrowed deeply at the question, and her billowing eyelashes batted with the simultaneous fluttering of a flock of birds.

            “Of course I have.  The whole last month.  How could-”

            “No.  I don’t mean have you felt sad or mad or screwed up because you think your BFF went and kicked some Betas around,” Nathaniel growled sourly.  “I mean afraid.  I mean have you got the slightest fucking clue what it’s like to wake up in the morning and think to yourself that there’s at least a slight chance that you’ll be in someone’s stomach by the end of the day?”

            “I don’t know what that’s like.  I wouldn’t claim to, nor do I claim to fully empathize with you or any other Betas anywhere,” Bridget answered bitterly, providing the truth he’d requested.  “There’s no way I could.”

            “Let me try to give you the picture, then, for your own personal information,” he continued, craning his neck further upward and digging his elbows into the plush crevice of skin for support.  “The only thing between us and being a goddamned pile of guts to an Alpha is your operation here.  That’s literally all that’s stopping them from turning us back into an integral part of the food chain.”

            “Aegis has been working to protect you and everyone else for a long time.”

            “So what good does your Aegis do when Betas who are living with Omegas still can’t walk alone on the streets in a mixed area without getting torn the fuck apart?” spat Nathaniel at last with exhausted abandon, obviously having had this pent-up for a while.

            Startled by this address of Corey Lindon’s case, Bridget bit her lip and opened her mouth to respond.

            “How do you think we’re supposed to feel…” Nathaniel snarled before she could speak.  “…when the one of us who has a couple of the most powerful things on Earth there to cover his ass isn’t even safe to exist anymore?”

            Bridget pursed her lips, a sharp twinge of sympathy striking her through the caked layers of rage she felt toward the monstrous individual she had precariously pinned between her fingers.

            “I don’t know.  I imagine it must be terrifying.  But what happened to Corey Lindon was-”

            “Yeah, yeah, I know where this is going: an isolated incident because he was enough of a goddamned idiot to go walking out in prime snatching ground where he didn’t belong,” Nathaniel drawled with acidic fervor, rolling his eyes again.  “You don’t have to tell me.”

            “That’s not what I was going to say.  Everyone has the right to be out there,” Bridget snapped, aware that Nathaniel was on a near-hysterical tangent now, but nevertheless unwilling to let such a comment go without correction.  Somehow, she had a feeling the Beta’s idle statement wasn’t particularly well received in the other room, either.

            “Whatever the hell justification you’ve all come up with to make yourselves feel better about it… it doesn’t matter.  The fact is the Alphas don’t give a shit about what you can do anymore.  They’ve just had to be quieter about their games, and then they can still do whatever they want.  We’re still just bugs for them to swat…”

            “That’s not true.”

            “…and if someone didn’t scare them into believing they’re not untouchable again, then mark… my… words, somebody else who’s gotten too comfortable with the way things are would end up on the bottom of an Alpha’s shoe.  Maybe Lindon.  Certainly somebody,” Nathaniel insisted with a feverish roar.  “It had to be done.  For all of us.”

            “No.”

            “No?  Listen to me now, then, because if nothing else, you need to get this clear.  Until you get all of your giant heads out of your asses and start to realize that you’re not the saviors of the free world you think you are, we’re going to keep on doing what we have to to survive.  That’s all.  Understand?”

            “I’m sorry,” Bridget said genuinely.  “I recognize what that must’ve been like to see for Betas everywhere, but it doesn’t change the fact that what you and your friends did wasn’t right.  Passing along your anger to another innocent isn’t the way.”

            “Okay, okay, look.  I may have put a girl through two weeks of shit when she didn’t do anything to me, I may have made you fuck someone over that you care about, and I can live with whatever you decide to do with me.  Or not.  Hell, push your fingers a little harder together right now if you want and see if I give a single solitary shit,” Nathaniel challenged.

            Bridget swallowed hard, blinking twice, and pushed this thought aside, recognizing for the briefest instant a burning desire deep inside herself to follow this instruction exactly.

            “But I will take my last breath knowing that I was only ever trying to protect my people.  Just like you all claim to do,” the Beta declared confidently at last, puffing his chest up as much as possible given his hazardous position.  “And that’s all I have to say to any of you.  Do whatever you need to now.”

            With that, Nathaniel folded his arms across his chest as though Bridget’s plush fingertips were forming a colossal coffin of peachy flesh for him and his crimes, and he closed his eyes and mouth with certitude.

            Fighting back a choked sob in the back of her throat in a hideous amalgamation of every conflicted emotion fighting a bloody war within her heart and mind, Bridget observed the defiant little being clenched powerlessly between her fingertips, her eyes glazed with tears, and then lowered her hand back toward the tower, depositing him back into the pen.

            “We’re done here,” Bridget stated morosely into the camera and mic equipment.  “I’m done.”

            Alexandra hobbled down the hallway of her apartment building, a crutch under her right arm for support, a bag slung over her other shoulder with a few personal effects and medications.

            It had taken a very long time to convince the hospital staff to let her walk to her apartment alone, and even after an hour of passive-aggressive debating, she hadn’t been allowed to come home alone, with a nurse accompanying her in the car and up to the door of the building just to ensure she could make it, though the care she’d received had put her on a recovery track far more rapid than she might’ve guessed when she was groggily bussed onto the emergency helicopter, right after the last time she’d seen Bridget.

            As she’d laid in that bed for four weeks, she’d had no shortage of visitors.  A few of her Alpha acquaintances from work, a few more from school.  She’d greeted them all with reserved cordiality, though abjectly refused to discuss any remote detail on the events of her incarceration and release, and thankfully, none had been rude enough to even broach the subject.

            Of course, she’d had Aegis representatives too.  At first three Alphas had shown up together, though Alexandra had waved them away as politely as she could muster without cursing at them.  The next week, just one arrived, a woman, wanting to discuss what had happened during her brief stay at the Cades, the full details of her original arrest, and a smattering of options once she left the hospital for pursuing her own justice against Nathaniel and his friends.

            Alexandra had truthfully reassured the woman that she had no intention of creating a ruckus when she was finally able to walk again, and the worker had seemed genuinely relieved, though still incredibly hesitant to leave without the most dragged out and tearful apology the young woman believed she would ever witness, at least for the time being.

            During the final week of her stay, even, when she was judged healthy enough to practice walking on her own, she had taken the exercise of journeying to the hospital roof under the supervision of two nurses, where she was able to have Omega visitors.  Bridget never showed her face, and Alexandra didn’t have to question why.

            Evelyn, however, had come almost daily to visit, falling into a pattern of greeting her surrogate daughter and then having to pull immediately back so her guilty tears didn’t cascade down to the roof and flood the area where Alexandra was trying to maintain her balance.  Their conversations had touched briefly on the tumultuous events of the crime, and Evelyn had only stayed on the subject long enough to reassure Alexandra that at last all had been brought properly to justice, but afterward, the pair had returned to topics they might’ve explored prior to a month before as though it was the most natural thing in the world.  It made the wounded Alpha happier than she’d felt in a while, but it didn’t change the incessant gnawing feeling she had in the back of her mind that she needed something.

            An escape.

            Now, as she trudged up to her apartment door at the end of the hall, Alexandra knew exactly what it was.  Her head needed clearing, and to do that, she had to start moving.  She didn’t know for how long, or where, or if it would help at all.  She was simply resolved, and as she fumbled with the house keys in her pocket, she began mentally running down a list of items she would need for her suitcase.  Her plan was to be gone in no less than twenty minutes.

            Jamming the key into the lock, she was surprised to find the door swinging open on its own, free of her input.  Placing a hand on the knob as she nudged against the frame for better balance, Alexandra took a step into her apartment, instantly noticing a figure standing in the back of the room shrouded in shadow and mesmerized by a square-shaped object in its hands.

            Startling herself with her own lack of fear at the intruder, Alexandra released how little she cared if this person was here to rob or even harm her.

            It wasn’t like there was much more they could take away from her.

            Squinting into the darkness, the Alpha couldn’t recognize the face of the person, who she now realized was a slender woman dressed in a striped button-up shirt, jeans, and what appeared to be a pair of weather-beaten work boots.  Her hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail and a pair of eyeglasses adorned her face.  Through the lenses, despite the darkness of the room, her eyes flared with warm light.  In the woman’s hands, she realized, was a framed photo of Bridget and Alexandra laughing together at a mixed class carnival from four years before, with the former holding the latter comfortably in the palm of her right hand.

            “You two seem so close,” sighed the woman with a final forlorn gaze at the picture before looking up to meet Alexandra’s wondering eyes.

“Who are you?”

            “You’re probably used to seeing me a little bigger than this,” the woman answered as she gently placed the picture frame back on the side table where she’d found it.

            Frowning, Alexandra studied the features of her face with trickling recognition.

            “You’re… Kayla Everett, aren’t you?”

            Kayla gave a single, steady nod of her head before taking a step forward into the center of the apartment’s living room.

            “Okay.  Um…” the Alpha responded hesitantly, the air catching in her chest for reasons she couldn’t explain.  “What… are you doing here?  In my house?”

            “I was hoping to get the chance to speak to you personally, but didn’t want to disturb your healing process.  I’d heard you turned away most of my representatives at the hospital, so I decided it was best to wait,” the Omega responded as she folded her hands smoothly behind her back.  “I apologize if I startled you with my intrusion.”

            “How did you even… I mean, I only have one key, and it’s still…”

            “I have ways of getting where I need to.  You don’t need to be concerned with the security of your home.”

            “Okay.  Fine,” Alexandra said, incredibly off-put by the oddity of the situation and nervous about walking too far into the apartment, despite the woman’s seeming lack of ill will.  “So is there something you want from me?  Because if there is, you’ll probably want to make it quick.”

            “You don’t have to leave, Alexandra.”

            “Yeah?  Who said I’m leaving?”

            “That’s what you want to do, though, isn’t it?” Kayla pressed.

            “Maybe.  So what?  Can somebody not just leave anymore if they want?  Am I still under arrest for something else I forgot about?” Alexandra spoke obdurately as she took the final steps into the room and set her bag down on the kitchen table.

            “Of course you’re not under arrest.  I’m not here to talk about the crime that was done to you.  You are free to leave if you wish.”

            “Well, isn’t that a relief,” the Alpha answered as she limped her way into the kitchenette to root through the drawers for items she’d need to travel with.  She was becoming increasingly aggravated with the lead Omega’s cryptic nonresponses and had already abandoned what little social convention the surprise of seeing someone in her house had mechanically afforded.  “It’s really great of you to not let the only people I had left in the world torture me for another couple weeks.”

            The apartment fell silent, save for the lonely clattering of the drawers as Alexandra pulled the few items out she was looking for and set them on the countertop.  Once finished, she made her way past the monumentally still Kayla and into the adjoining bedroom to collect a bigger bag for clothing.

            “I am so very sorry, Alexandra,” Kayla called out with wistful agony at last, as though each word had been passed along the edge of a blade before reaching her lips.  “I don’t suppose repeating it over and over again will do any good for you, though.”

            “Probably a good guess,” came the pernicious reply from the bedroom as the Alpha began rummaging through her closet and rolling up enough articles for storage in her bag.  There was little attention paid to what was thrown into the case.

            “Would you sit down with me for a moment?” Kayla requested softly, still having barely moved a muscle in minutes as Alexandra reappeared in the living room with a half-filled rolling suitcase.

            “I thought you said I could leave if I wanted.”

            “Of course you can.  I have no desire to stop you.  I only ask that you hear what I have to say before you go,” the Omega insisted gently.  Taking several steps over to the wall, the leader of the world and most powerful being on the planet lowered herself politely onto Alexandra’s old green couch.  “Please.”

            “Why should I?” the Alpha huffed instantly, then at last sighed to let out the inflating fury and try to relax.  It wasn’t that she wanted to spare Kayla’s feelings, but after all this time she’d spent stewing in her pain, she was resolved to put the violent matters out of mind and simply start trying to rebuild some semblance of her reality.  Swallowing, she closed her eyes and steadied herself, repeating back quietly: “Why should I?”

            “I have an offer I’d like to make you.  If you could just sit down with me for a few minutes, I can explain it.  And then you can do whatever you want without another word from me.”

            Biting her lip and nodding with lingering paranoia, Alexandra paused before speaking up.  “I’d… rather stay standing.”

            “All right, then,” Kayla said respectfully as she folded her hands neatly in her lap.

            Despite her position of being seated so innocuously on the worn-out couch, there was a presence surrounding Kayla, an invisible aura of otherworldly wonder and might that made the Alpha feel just uneasy enough to keep her distance.

            “There are certain things I’m afraid I can’t fully explain to you, Alexandra.  About the way Aegis operates, and about the measures at my disposal.  All I can do is provide you with the opportunity.  If you choose to take it, I will take care of everything.  Is that understood?” Kayla continued.

            “Sure,” Alexandra mumbled hollowly, leaning more heavily on the crutch.

            “I… understand that you’ve seen a lot of suffering in your life.  In the midst of that darkness, you found something to cling to, and you were happy for some time.  And I understand you feel now that that’s been taken away from you.  That you have to run because there’s nothing left.”

            “So what are you getting at?” the Alpha interjected with a crack in her voice, the anger alit again at this uncomfortably precise reading of her current state.  “Just say it already.”

            “I have the means to make that feeling go away,” Kayla stated.  “If you wish those memories… the bad ones… could be gone forever, I can do that.  I can make it like those two weeks never happened.”

            “You mean…”

            “I can make you forget it.  Completely wipe it from your memory.  If that is your desire.”

            Kayla, who’d still barely been moving with each soft-spoken proclamation, now returned to her statuesque poise, her florid irises locked patiently to the Alpha.

            The macabre words of outlandish fantasy mulled in a conflicted jumble through Alexandra’s mind.

            So there it was.  A chance at a clean slate.  A chance for a blank on the damaged path of her life.  The idea of it all going away.  The idea of being free forever from the torments that teased through her mind every night and almost every waking moment now.

            Right there.  Hers to take.  Freedom.

            “No,” Alexandra sighed at last, her red eyes welling heavily.  “I… don’t want to forget.  I can’t.”

            A look of somber acceptance crossing Kayla’s face, she nodded once again, as though reassured by alternate confirmation of this resolution.  “I had a feeling.  You really are very alike.”

            “What?”

            “Bridget refused as well.  Immediately, actually.”

            Sniffling softly as a fresh tear tumbled down her cheek, Alexandra gasped quietly for breath.  “Where… w-where is…”

            “Off where she can take a rest from her duties.  She has some healing to do as well.”

            The Alpha shook her head knowingly and began making her way for the door again, resolved to avoid any further distractions from her goal of dispersing into an anonymous sea of faces where she wouldn’t be recognized.

            “Alexandra, wait.”

            “You just keep on dragging this out, don’t you?”

            “This is a card reserved for our special operatives,” Kayla explained, removing a slick white rectangle from her pocket and brandishing the object between two fingers as an offering.  “It’ll ensure you can go anywhere you want, for as long as you want.  No limits.  Please take it.”

            “You can’t just buy everything in the world up.  People don’t work like that,” Alexandra spat, her fire refueled at the woman’s desperation to patch things up.  “Besides.  I already told your lady at the hospital I’m not going to throw a fit at you and your super-justice squad.”

            “I don’t want to buy your silence, Alexandra,” Kayla intoned firmly, at last moving another part of her body with a sudden clenching of her fingers together, which quivered as though they contained the strength to tear the room in half if she had a mind to.  “Nor is this an apology.  I know nothing else I can say right now will convince you.  I only want to help you.  Please let me.”

            Momentarily afronted, the Alpha chewed the words over and found she couldn’t detect any disingenuousness, but at this point, it was beyond mattering.

            “Well, even so,” Alexandra uttered.  “I… don’t need your help.”

            Grasping the handle of her rolling suitcase, then, the Alpha began awkwardly ambling for the kitchen table to scoop up her other bag and make her way toward the door.  “I guess if you found a way to break in without messing with the door, you can get out, too.  Help yourself to some food if you want, but I bet it went bad a while ago.”

            “Lexi,” Kayla spoke with startling warmth and familiarity.  “Please.  You don’t have to be alone again.  You don’t have to disappear into that void.  That’s not where you belong.”

            “How the hell would you know?” Alexandra answered with her back turned, the words so hoarse and concealed under her breath that they couldn’t possibly have been directly heard and understood.

            “Trust me,” Kayla said.  “I do.  And even if you don’t believe me now, I just want to remind you that trusting someone, even in the midst of everything going wrong all around you, even in the midst of unjust strife being placed upon you, does not make you weak.”

            “Then what does it make me?”

            “Human.”

            “Oh, I see.  Just like you, huh?”

            “Exactly.  Please.  Please take the card.”

            Alexandra turned back to face the woman again, revealing her tear-stained face wrinkled into a pained scowl.  “I learned a long time ago what it gets me to have to rely on people.  And then I had to learn it again pretty recently.  I don’t feel like doing it again.  Look what it got me last time.”

            “Look what it got you the first time,” came the soft reply.  “No matter what’s happened now, would you trade any of those years?  Any of that time?  Would you give up a single second of the last ten years for even the most painful week of your life?”

            Alexandra’s knees wobbled.  Gripping the handle of the crutch hard enough to squeeze all the blood from her hand, she wrapped her other arm over her wrist to steady herself from trembling.

            No.

            Of course she wouldn’t.

            Never.

            “Okay,” Alexandra sputtered, wiping a wrist over her swollen eyelids.  “I’ll… I’ll take it.”

            “Thank you,” Kayla breathed as she rose up from the couch and walked to Alexandra to hand it over.  Again, the sight of the reduced Omega approaching her brought with it an air of intimidating magnificence that made the Alpha consider taking another step back, but the glowing benevolence of those eyes overruled such an instinct.

            “Yeah.  Um,” the Alpha muttered sheepishly.  “Thanks.”

            “If you’d like, I can call you a car to take you somewhere.  Anywhere you want.  Just say the word.”

            “No.  No, that’s okay.  I could… use the practice first,” Alexandra reassured with a glance down at her healing leg as she took a few steps back out into the hallway.

            “All right,” Kayla agreed, switching the light off in the apartment and following her host out of the home.  Seeing Alexandra struggling somewhat with the armload, the Omega quickly scooped up the largest bag and slung it over her shoulder as though it was filled with feathers.  “If you’re sure, then this is where I leave you.  That card will get you anything you need, no questions asked, but in the unlikely event that something does arise, or… you simply wish to reach me, for whatever reason, there’s a number you can call on the back.  When my work makes it such that I can’t be reached, you will be able to find someone to help you.  Never hesitate to use it.”

            “All right,” Alexandra agreed as the pair began slowly making their way down the hallway, with Kayla slowing her stride considerably to stay beside the Alpha with every pace.  “Miss… Everett.”

            “Yes, Alexandra?”

            “Please… when you… when you see…” the Alpha exhaled, an overwhelming peace at last overtaking her as though she’d been cradled into a still ocean, and she breathed easier for the first time in what felt like a century.  “Please tell my sister that I love her, too.”

            Miles beyond the outskirts of the city in a sea of dust, concealed behind towering walls of bulletproof steel, armed guard posts, and the homicidal grimaces of four hundred of the world’s most wretched souls, in the cold silence of a metal cell, a woman was hunched on the floor over a pipe in the wall.  The antiquated plumbing hadn’t been worked on in years, but thanks to some severe rust issues, the prison had finally seen to its replacement today.

            Alma Warren had noticed the new type of screw holding the bends together almost immediately upon returning to her cell from the yard that morning, and had set to work without delay on removing them.  It was tightly melded into the line, but thanks to a couple of utensils she’d acquired over the last two years from some resourceful cohorts, removing the screws was now a viable option given enough time.  The forty-five-year-old Beta-killer didn’t know just yet how they could be used, but given their unique shape, any available tool was something she wanted in her arsenal.  Collecting tools for gaining favors and even possibilities of escaping the isolated super max facility someday was never a poor choice, and Alma had all the time in the world.

            Her mind, a mechanically-affected steel trap, had been deprived of real challenges for so long now.  Luckily, constructing solutions from raw material in difficult circumstances had always been a passion of hers, and in her previous line of work, she’d never been bored.

            Unfortunately for her, she found her progress halted with a hard knock on the other side of the reinforced door.  Quickly slipping the objects back into her pants, the woman hopped onto the bed that sat locked to the wall a foot away and crossed her sinewy arms over her jumpsuit-clad chest before blowing up on a stray tuft of hair out of her eyes that had fallen over.  Her cold, black marble eyes darted like a cat’s across each edge of the door, prepared if the opportunity arose to make a move.

            “Soup’s on, Warren,” the guard announced with bored resignation as he opened the door all the way for the woman to fold into the throngs ambling like reanimated corpses toward the dining hall.  “C’mon, let’s get moving before it gets cold.”

            “Well, we wouldn’t want that, would we?” Alma sneered under her breath as she climbed off the bed in one smooth motion and slipped out into the hall.  “I wonder if they made it rat or piss flavor today?”

            “No need for that kind of attitude,” the guard groaned as he locked up the cell behind her.  “The way they provide for this place, you’d think you were just on vacation.”

            “If that’s the case, I could use a vacation from this vacation,” Alma sighed, running a veiny hand through her matted hair and down her waspy face with exasperation.

            No sooner had the two guards finished releasing the row of female prisoners into line to exit when the door leading out to the central cell block wing abruptly slammed shut, the crimson monitor above blinking with neon urgency.  All present immediately burst into chattering speculation.

            Glancing idly around the hall, Alma caught instantly onto the sight of the hall security camera, which seemed to be rotating much further out of its normal range such that it couldn’t see the entire area, and instead was now trained directly on her.

            “All right, all right, everyone needs to keep it down for a minute,” the other guard ordered as he pulled out his radio and marched into the corner of the room to hear better.  “Can I get an update out here?  I’m not seeing any kind of disturbance in any sector, so I’m assuming we’ve got a door malfunction of some kind, if-”

            The man’s droning voice was interrupted by the ear-shredding obliteration of the back wall that sent a rain of crumbled brick and shrapnel spraying across the room, burying the guard closest to it and knocking back a dozen prisoners who’d been huddled too close to the impact zone, though Alma was safely out of range of the explosion.

            Eardrums still ringing mercilessly, she placed a hand over her eyes and rapidly blinked as the dust billowed into the hall.  She pulled herself slowly back to a standing position, above most of the other women who’d dove to the ground for safety or at least crouched down.

            Three figures appeared in the newly created opening, shrouded in the white cloud, and marched without hesitation across the rubble and into the hallway.  The other guard stood up, his gun drawn, but the tallest figure in the back of the trio had already fired into the man’s skull by the time he could steady his aim, putting him back on the ground in a puddle of his own brain.

            “If everyone could remain calm and not make any quick movements, we can get our work done and let you get back to slowly rotting away in here,” the first figure announced loudly to the room, and Alma was surprised to hear that the voice was distinctly feminine.

            With the dust adequately settled, Alma realized the Alphas were comprised of two women and a man, all dressed in black tactical suits with combat boots and loaded utility belts around their waists.

            The woman in front who’d addressed the room had her jet-black hair tied tightly behind her head to keep it out of her hollow coal eyes.  As her gaze flashed over the room, just like the security camera, she locked onto Alma.  A smirk spread over her lips as she crossed the room with a singular purpose toward the incarcerated woman.

            “Alma Warren,” she uttered with reverence.

            “What’s it to you?” scoffed the guilty Alpha.

            “It’s a real pleasure.  I’m very familiar with your work, and I have to say… it’s an honor.”

            “Halle,” coughed the voice of the man from behind her.

            “We’re fine, Roger, relax,” the woman answered without turning around or breaking her admiring concentration on Alma.  Tapping her finger to a tiny earpiece attached to her lobe, she whispered: “Alice, go ahead and give them something to entertain themselves with while we chat.”

            As though in answer, the security camera bobbed up and down, and suddenly the lockdown gate was thrown open again.  Hesitant at first, the spooked criminals all inched toward the door, and after a casual wave of Halle’s glove-clad hand, they all took off unsupervised into the hallway.  Further down the corridor, Alma could hear the rush of feet and the discharging of a couple weapons, followed by several more alarms going off.

            “Good girl,” Halle congratulated softly into the earpiece before returning her attention squarely back to Alma.  “Well, we don’t have very long, so I’ll keep this moving.  Are you at all interested in checking out of this dump early?”

            Uneasy with the mad proceedings before her, Alma squinted unconvinced at the faces of the man and woman behind Halle.

            “What do you want with me?” she posed at last, still as paranoid as ever, but not one to question the opportunity for too long when her other option was to continue shriveling away into nothing inside that mindless metal block.

            “It’s simple, really,” Halle said with a chuckle.  “We’ve got a job offer that we’d like to talk to you about.”

            “What kind of job?”

            “The kind that would ensure your considerable talents don’t have to go to waste any longer.”

            Alma nodded resolutely and took a step closer to the opening in the wall, receiving a delighted grin from the trio.  She balled her hands into tight enough fists that her bony knuckles cracked with a self-satisfied vengeance.

            “I’m listening.”