Jessica was already floating to the 82nd floor, skipping past Monarch and rooms of his subordinates. They were scrambling—so far as she could tell—to secure and search every nook and cranny of Goliath Headquarters. Beelz and her team had to be above the rest.

Past the sensations of weightlessness and wind, she entered the 82nd floor through a gaping hole in the wall, to land on scattered chunks of more wall. She was welcomed by metal muzzles, again, the assault rifles of Gemini Squad. Clad in dark greens and their weight's worth of gear, they lowered their weapons as soon as a black figure stepped at their behest. 

Slick plates on long legs leading up a waist clenched by a utility belt of magazines and other gadgets. The figure wore black sleeves, a black vest, and the sleekest headphones over red hair. Her eyes were a burning evergreen. Beelz, stoic, pensively tapped the barrel of her handgun against her forehead goggles.

"Let me guess; 'You're lucky we didn't shoot you'?" Jessica mocked. "That's what you were going to say, right?" She stood and faced down Beelz's entourage. Meanwhile, Shannon and Valerie tumbled inward, pedaling frantically to control their gravity boots until they unceremoniously hit the floor on either side of her. The fall failed to discourage either of their gripes.

"Do that again, Jess, and I will murder you!" Shannon said.

"You crazy ass Puerto Rican!" Valerie jeered.

Neither voice could muffle the sound of encroaching airships.

"Step away from the windows," Beelz ordered.

Eyeing the redhead, Jessica and her friends stepped further into the damaged room and watched as two gunmen set a mysterious box on the floor. A button-press later, the box sprouted a tripod with a mounted turret.

Beelz pressed her ear. "We're transmitting the data."

Since Beelz wasn't on comms, she likely contacted Amon and Boros on a separate line. It may have had something to do with the operative on the computer behind her, stealing data. The redhead was still thinking ahead, about the long war.

"Ships will be in range soon," somebody warned.

"Engage noise dampeners." Beelz clicked her headphones. Her squadmates pressed the hidden buttons underneath their helmets, spawning blue LED lights on their visors. Their commander then gestured with a two-finger point, as soon as she made eye contact with Jessica, and warned, "There's an Asgard squad above us." Two squadmates took cover by the turret, the rest scattering throughout the room as she lowered her goggles.

A series of loud bursts carved new holes in the ceiling from which multiple grenades dropped. Jessica dived with Shannon and Valerie behind the nearest desk, evading the bangs that shook rumbled the floor. The grenades began blowing smoke when lines of rope unraveled from the ceiling and windows.

"Asgar—"

Beelz thrust Jessica to the ground and tossed a grenade with the other hand. "Cover your ears!"

Jessica punched her own earlobes when the sphere bounced from the ground to the ceiling to the wall, around the room, at high velocity. It fiercely echoed and stirred the eardrums so terribly that, when Asgard descended via cables, their surroundings devolved into a chaotic quagmire. The enemy covered their ears and yelped, one after another blasted off the cables by Gemini's gunfire. The action was so automatic, Jessica almost scrunched her shoulders into a fracture. Beelz's team gunned down every Azarean despite the smokescreen.

The gunfire eventually stopped, and Beelz's voice reentered comms. "Our units on the ground are going to have trouble."

From all around, airships descended and hitched beside the occupied floors to retrieve anyone who would not or could not stay. Their proximal engines stirred mild tremors along the tower support beams.

"We'll be sure to assemble a warm welcome party for Asgard's arrival," Monarch relayed.

Jessica poked her head out of cover and discovered all the rebels alive and well. Valerie did the same, scowling through her rifle's sights. Shannon shivered while peeking more carefully. 

"Is it over?" she asked. 

"Worst comes to worst, we'll disable the elevators and access points, but don't expect that to stop them," Monarch continued. "Godspeed, Lynx, Beelz."

He said that like he's not coming back.

When the smoke finally cleared, Asgard corpses littered the 82nd level, in a variety of awkward positions. Some lay sprawled over the furniture; others still hung and swayed back and forth on their cables. Everywhere else, nothing but bullet holes and seared remnants. 

"Data extraction complete," said Beelz's hacker.

Beelz turned to Jessica. "Lynx."

"Beelz"

"Tell me you used that scanner I gave you."

Jessica scowled. "Yes, I scanned Malvis's eye like you were hoping."

"Then you just made our lives easier. Which doesn't negate as many variables as I would like... but we've wasted enough time." Backpack swung over her shoulder, Beelz crouched and rummaged through the contents. She retrieved an item and raised it in the palm of her hand like a newborn. It was cubic, small, and portable. "Your ideal 3-D printer," she said.

Jessica delivered the rod, and Beelz extracted a microchip from the bottom slit then placed the chip in one of several printer slots. They watched an eyeball manifest on-screen. Several ticks and a beep later, Beelz opened the cube hatch and retrieved what looked impeccably like the real thing. She examined the eye between her fingers as if it were a flawless diamond.

"There's nothing like using your enemy against your enemy" she mused.

"So long as it works," said Jess, wincing at the eye's lifelikeness.

"Too bad it's not the real thing."

Over her shoulder, Jessica caught a mirror of nausea in her friends' faces, nausea that stemmed from battle fatigue or Beelz's cold character. It was hard to tell. Above glass shards, hoping for clues, she decided to fasten her goggles and check the ceiling. However, X-ray vision revealed nothing. "I can't see through the top."

"Y por que no?" asked Valerie.

"If you're utilizing X-Ray vision, which I presume you are, then it's a good and bad sign," Beelz droned. "High chance a lead surface shields whatever's up there."

"Then the laws of mass distribution say there's very little storage," said Jessica.

"Good to know." Beelz gyrated her gun arm.

The tripod turret began firing through the window, almost muffling Monarch's voice when he shouted through comms. "Asgard is landing in force! Back to the chokepoint!" A flick to the eardrums, loud crashes resounded from the bottom of the superstructure, while a muffled cacophony of engines, projectiles, and explosions formed the faintest of tremors.

"Jess, let's go!" exclaimed Valerie, pointing to the bodies trudging up the stairs. 

At the next door, Beelz cracked the security lock then let the grenade loose through a slit. It briefly thumped across the walls before magnetizing directly back into the metal lines of her glove. "Clear!" she said.

In a world where Azareans go deaf and Beelz wears weird-ass earphones, I'm guessing that's an echolocation grenade... with bounceability.

Past sliding doors, Gemini Squad discovered additional dark rooms sealed behind a series of glass screens. Beelz advanced in the middle of it all, in the middle of her armed entourage as they cross-checked their surroundings then came to a halt. They reached inside of their hardshell backpacks.

"Are those what I think they are?" asked Shannon.

Beelz, like the rest of her team, carried bricks of armed charges. "They're parting gifts," she said. "We don't have time to secure more intel, but we can make sure this place and its experiments die."

"The enemy's numbers are growing, Beelz" Monarch's voice boomed. "You have a limited window while we hold Asgard—watch the flank and give it everything you got!" The turret on the floor below them wouldn't stop firing. Through the windows, loud volleys created streaks of deadly light in the dark.

That's our cue to expedite this chaos.

With cat eyes, Jessica surveyed the placement of explosives on every support beam. The LEDs blinked from green to red. 

Beelz and her men repeated the action on the next floor, which housed a grandiose lounge in front of a glossy white conference room. Every corner was home to an animated plant: a swirling stem whose sealed petals housed blue bioluminescence; a cactus-like curiosity with razor-sharp pink petals; a white vine whose stem sprouted dancing dandelions; and fungi with glowing green caps extending over one another like a lava lamp. They were the kinds of off-world wonders Jessica wished would decorate her room, but she had to abandon curiosity long enough to note the gigantic pillars around the conference table – They almost blended into their surroundings, yet were oddly redundant.

Without a wasted beat, Beelz's crew set more explosives and returned to the stairs en route to floor 85. During their upward trudge, Monarch's anxious and heavy breath returned.

"Sub Terra, listen to me! Our Azarean friends have a new gunship. Don't expect this operation to last much longer!"

Sure enough, the view from up high gave an overlook of Monarch's forewarning. Jessica laid goggles on the horizon, utilizing night vision to see a massive aircraft far beyond the limits of the cracked window. Bigger than the rest, its large wingspan carried the promise of catastrophe.

Thus, despite every urge of her fascination, she couldn't afford to study Goliath's outer mysteries. One glance teased a myriad of secrets: glass around refrigerated canisters, vials with the image of a T-Rex; just the tip of an iceberg since there was also a robotic arm stuffed in its own cylinder; then a transparent orb holding sentient black goo. From green-glowing meteorite rock to an entire showroom for an antiquated car. Secrets. None of it made sense, and the strange pillars from the last floor erected from the ground, up to this floor, and into the ceiling. Level 86 presented something else entirely.

Level 86 immersed one in its likeness to an alien realm. Dimly lit by trails of neon along slithery black walls, it had an antechamber with magnificent ovals leading left and right. Cautiously, Beelz approached the right before it slid open in four directions. The next room appeared no different. 

Jessica finally understood the purpose of the redundant pillars from the floors underneath. They had secreted their white shells in lieu of black spires spangled with mysterious green energy that flowered into the ceiling. Whatever circuits powered these alien generators powered the current room and whatever else waited above. Still, something stranger landed in front of her.

Curiosity lived in the strange containers littering the four rooms. Curiosity resided in their size. Capsules were scattered across the 86th floor, each with a cable from a wired network that circulated and linked back to the room's epicenter. Valerie and Shannon gaped at the sight, so Jessica knew she wasn't the only unsettled soul. Even Beelz seemed docile, standing in the midst of the charcoal-colored caskets. Her green eyes, their temporary absence, and silence betrayed rumination.

Done contemplating, Beelz wandered further inside. Part of Jessica even hoped she would depart because, when no one was looking, she logged into the central terminal. The process that came next required a bit of guesswork, but she had acquired an affinity for language early in life; human, computer, and otherwise.

"They're human," Valerie scoffed.

"I know," said Jessica.

"I-knew-it-I-knew-it-I-fucken-knew-it."

Shannon, rubbing her arms together, crept closer to one of the capsules. "Sick... Who could these people be? Why keep them here?"

"Experiments? Wait. No—no, the message. That list that Amon pulled from the chip! Whatever the bullshit reason, they can't be left like this."

Beelz unexpectedly doubled back. "There's nothing to be done—" she said, rounding the corner when she stopped and stared grievously at Lynx. "What are you doing?"

Jessica returned a feline glare. Abruptly, the pods simultaneously cranked their tops and propped open.

"We're being overrun!" Monarch cried.

Beelz met Jessica with canines and a death stare. "You weren't supposed to do that."

"I did it," she replied impassively, then tapped her earbud. "Monarch! We're done. Order everyone out and extract us."

"Bullshit!" Beelz pressed her comm. "Monarch?"

No response.

"Are you calling off the whole mission?" asked Valerie.

"I'm getting us out," said Jessica.

Shoulders flexed, darting eyes and forming a fist, Beelz seethed onward. "You don't get to make that call! You're welcome to be a waste of space elsewhere, but Dissent is ending this today."

"These people may be the answer to everything, Beelz! Goliath, the regime, Spearhead, Asgard, Malvis—we can expose all of it. I hope that's obvious, even if we're floors shy of the top. If there's even a one-percent chance of saving these people, if there's even a one-percent chance of their helping, it's worth getting everybody out alive while we can."

"Not all of us will fit in the ships, Lynx."

"I didn't think we would."

With a grunt, Beelz's air of tension faded. Grit teeth to a loose jaw, she rubbed her forehead with the next order. "Help them out of the pods." Her squad followed the order without question. They took after Shannon and Valerie, who were already uplifting strangers from their prisons.

Jessica's friends never lacked the initiative, even in her silence, which was a double-edged sword she had to face down. But as the crew of comatose strangers rose to consciousness, she goggled at a familiar face.

David?

"David?" exclaimed Beelz.

David Mourner was lying feebly in the hands of an operative when Beelz jumped to his side, holstering her sidearm. Simultaneous disbelief colored Jessica's pale face as she crept closer to the sorry sight.

"This is what happened to you..." murmured Beelz, lifting the rest of him out of the capsule. Quivering, David's eyelids slowly opened. Brown irises on a pale face besmirched by utter surprise or shock. Jessica could only imagine the side-effects of hibernation in one of those things. Lumps in her throat, she scrounged the energy to speak. 

"You know him?"

"He was Sub Terra's informant," said Beelz. "He deserved better than this."

Hearing those words was like finding the last piece of a puzzle. She panned across the room as more of the docile humans came to. Theirs were faces she had never seen before, but she pondered the stories they could tell, the secrets they could spell. That's before Beelz's watch blinked red.

Beelz noticed it, too. "GET DOWN!"

Fire incinerated the next room. Goliath headquarters had a new gaping hole, outside of which hovered an Asgard troop carrier. Armed to the teeth, an Azarean squad launched into the tower. Beelz tossed her echolocation grenade, and blue lasers began flying in all directions. The strong winds were felt but unheard, debris reigned, and the floor fell in the midst of endless gunfire.

"10:00! 2:00!" Beelz pinpointed tangos beyond the walls. Meanwhile, Jessica kept hers and David's heads down. 

Bolts of light scattered the interior in an exchange of dense fire that carved a storm. Operatives and Azareans fired, fell, and fired again. During one keen instant, a grenade explosion interrupted the spray of projectiles, and a holographic shield flew overhead with the arm still attached.

Then it stopped, and in the reprieve, Beelz scanned the floor for casualties. When the dust finally cleared and the wind once again howled, several operatives lay motionless.

"Where am I?" David mumbled. Apparently, the chaos had revived his awareness and fear. The same applied to the rest of the waking—now excited—prisoners. 

Alert, Jessica trudged across the room, where she found Shannon and Valerie together. "You guys, alright?"

"I am a little bit," Valerie coughed. 

Shannon lay flat on the floor. "I need to go to the bathroom."

Breathing a dear sigh of relief, Jessica stood up and sauntered in the direction of smoke and decay. She found David sitting upright,  looking sober and unscathed but dazed. "Are you alright?" she asked him.

"I don't know." His squinting eyes careened until they fixed on Jessica's face. "You're the Tacquizza girl," he slurred. "There are no deliveries here..."

"There's not going to be much of here left."

Outside the gaping hole in the wall, a charred and battered airship rose into view. Quickly, every man and woman who could still lift a gun brought their weapons to bear, until Raptor poked his head outside the cabin. Through his worn expression, willpower remained, and he invited anyone who could see him. It was time to leave.

Valerie, Shannon, and the Sub Terra survivors escorted Goliath's prisoners to the edge of the tower's new exit. Raptor resided in the first of two airships off which he leaped to help others safely step aboard. The first ship would depart with a cabin full of wondrous and forlorn faces. The second took the place of the first, its pilot delicately balancing its hull over the tower's edge. During that interval in which grateful strangers rambled inward, Jessica watched David carefully.

"I think it's time you quit your job," she told him, offering a hand.

"Wait!" he remonstrated. "This is Goliath, right? Just—."

"We'll make room for you if we have to, David," Beelz said.

David grabbed Beelz by the shoulders. "You're here for something else," he panted. "Sixteen years, I've hung my cap in the enemy's locker. Whatever comes next, with my knowledge of Goliath's global network, I know I can help make it count. And I can..." David flinched over his shoulder and saw Jessica, then returned his pallid face to Beelz and whispered something in her ear. Right then, pensive silence accompanied Beelz's somber nod.

When David turned around, the express resolve in his eyes reminded Jessica of the last thing she needed to address. It started with Beelz, to whom she solemnly said, "I guess you'll be staying until the next airship comes?"

"If," Beelz emphasized. "You don't have to think about that anymore."

The tower ledge bore the view of a horizon beyond New Sumer, dark as it may have been. Against the peak breeze, past the capsules and to the airship, Jessica stopped where Valerie and Shannon were waiting. Raptor waited beside them, and despite fatigue in his eyes and cuts on his stubbled face, determination still accompanied his parting words.

"There's room for a few more!" He indicated the cabin, the huddled group of scared individuals. Some were middle-aged, others were very young, and one... one was Azarean. 

What's the common denominator?

Raptor continued half-heartedly, bending his brow. "In case you didn't realize, you've done more than enough today!"

"So have you and everyone else! I think we have what we need!" She faced her friends, grinning ear to ear. "Tell me you're ready to leave this place?"

"We have to go!" the piloted rushed.

"I'm ready when you are!" said Shannon. "Whenever. Wherever."

"Of course, you are!" said Jessica.

"Jess, are you ready?" Val prodded. "This was your plan, remember?"

"I