Page 63 of Strays
We’ve never been to a place like that before. I try to protest, because honestly, the whole thing sounds like it’s made for kids, but with everything she’s going through, I can’t bring myself to say no to anything that might make her smile.
As soon as we get there, she heads straight for the rollercoaster. It’s made of wood. That already feels like a red flag. The whole thing shakes when the car passes, groaning like it might splinter apart any second.
She notices our hesitation. “It’s the Wooden Warrior,” she says, bouncing on her toes. “You have to do it.”
Somehow, we end up strapped in, metal bar across our laps, the world ticking upward one clack at a time. It’s not so bad until Jo lifts both arms off the bar and throws her head back, loose and fearless, grinning like a wild thing.
I panic immediately. “Jo! Hold on to something! The bar! Anything!”
“I am buckled,” she yells over the wind. “You’re supposed to do this part with your hands up!”
Shane is shouting at her, Jay is swearing, and she just laughs the whole way down, arms still in the air like she’s flying.
But on Monday, she’s back at work. She calls us on her lunch break, sobbing again.
“I got a new badge this morning,” she says. “It has a red stripe with ‘gregalis’ printed in bold. Kacy said it’s bullshit, and Jenna went with me to HR and told them it feels discriminatory,” she adds. “But no one else seems to have a problem with how the hospital is treating me.”
Once again, there’s nothing we can do but swallow our rage and tell her how sorry we are.
Guilt floods me like venom, making bile rise, burning all the way to my throat. Our bond made my brother’s and my life so much better in the same way itmade hers so much worse. I was spot on when I feared we would fuck everything up out of sheer ignorance: in our selfish eagerness to show the world she was ours, we didn’t think for a second that the bite marks would out her species too.
As aegis, we could never pass as human. Our size and bulk give us away. But nyras look just like human women. We never even thought about the fact that her disguise was her best protection. And we ruined it.
It’s especially cruel that after so many years of being treated like shit back at the station in Greenster, our situation is finally better, while she’s the one getting that treatment now. It feels wrong to enjoy it.
We met the unit captain on our second day. His name is Peter Sppilgen, and he looks more like a politician than a cop. Cold eyes and careful words, the kind of man who chooses every sentence as if it might be quoted back to him. But he wasn’t hostile to us, and the difference between him and Balls is staggering.
Wilsbone hasn’t warmed to us, and he probably never will, but he’s a fair sergeant. He gives us recognition every time we do a good job, just like he does with the rest of the unit.
With our enhanced sense of smell, we’re getting better at tracking just about everything, and we aren’t even trying half the time. Jay can smell narcotics from across a loading dock. Shane can pick up a scent trail and follow it for blocks. And I’m getting scarily good at spotting hidden firearms.
As the weeks go by, our hearing starts sharpening too. That’s how we catch some officers calling us “the dog unit” behind our backs. But it’s not everyone, only a few of them. And to our faces, they treat us with the usual surface-level respect. The complete absence of the wordstrayin any conversation tells me no one has been told about our background. To me, it feels like a win.
At the end of our first month, we have to go back to D.C. for our first official medical evaluation at the MAB.
The day before our trip, Jo gets home with her eyes swollen and red again. At this point, I’ve lost count of how many days she comes back like this. I think it’s more days than not.
She had gone to yet another doctor, trying to start birth control. This was the fourth one. She’d talked to two doctors she knew from the hospital before, and both had turned her down, saying they didn’t have options for nyras. At first, she thought it might be because of her situation at the hospital, so she looked for doctors outside of it. But the first one also dismissed her, saying he wasn’t prepared to treat non-humans.
This last one was Jenna’s doctor, and she had spoken really well of her, so Jo had gotten her hopes up. But it was just as useless.
“She was polite,” Jo explains between sobs, curled up on Jay’s lap on the couch, “but she said she’s never treated a nyra before, and she doesn’t know any birth control made for us, so she can’t guarantee anything.”
We’d been humming to her for the last fifteen minutes until she was calm enough to talk.
She sniffles. “Said she doesn’t recommend the implant because if it doesn’t work for me, I’d go through all that for nothing. At the end of the appointment, she basically told me to start the pill and just wait to see if it works for nyras or not.”
Jay holds her tight, helplessness all over his face. Shane doesn’t look much different. I wish there were something I could do, anything, but there isn’t. I have no idea how nyras prevent pregnancy. Hell, I don’t know if they even can. The only adult nyra I knew well was my mother, and her pregnancy problem was the opposite.
But I’m not surprised there’s no method made for our species. Jo’s the only gregalis I know who isn’t a housewife, a soldier, a cop, or a fighter, so how the hell would we have ever developed medicine? That kind of stuff is what humans do, and they don’t care enough to inventing something specifically for us.
I rub my forehead with my fingers, and thankfully, one solution comes to mind. “We can wear condoms during your heats,” I say.
Shane exhales, relieved. “Yeah. That could work. We used to use them all the time when we... you know, with human women, and they held up.”
“I mean, they didn’t break or leak or anything.” He adds it awkwardly, clearly uncomfortable talking about our sex history with her.
Jo looks at him, the lemon in her scent turning even more acidic, and I shift my neck, trying to ease the tension building in my shoulders.
