I carry her inside.
The apartment is exactly as depressing as I’d imagined based on the exterior—four hundred square feet of warped hardwood, yellowed walls, and the kind of fluorescent lighting that makes everything look like evidence. The bed is immediately visible because the space is too small to hide anything. A mattress against the far wall, sheets twisted and half-pulled from the corners, the blanket crumpled on the floor as if kicked off during a violent exit.
The sheets are damp.
I set her down on the mattress, adjusting the pillow beneath her head with hands that are steadier than my pulse. The dampness in the bedding confirms what the soaked clothing already suggested—she’d been sweating before the water, the kind of cold sweat that accompanies fever spikes or the particular thermoregulatory chaos of a heat cycle fighting chemical suppression.
She’s close to her heat. Or her body thinks she is. The suppressants are failing and her biology is staging a coup, andthe system can’t decide whether to burn or freeze, so it’s doing both.
I press my palm to her forehead.
The heat beneath her skin is immediate and alarming—not the gentle warmth of a low-grade fever but the radiating, structural heat of a body whose internal temperature regulation has gone critically off-script. Her skin is clammy beneath the fire, the contradiction of cold sweat and hot flesh creating a tactile paradox that my medical training flags as dangerous.
Too hot. She’s running too hot and her body doesn’t have the resources to bring itself down.
My pager buzzes in my coat pocket.
I check the screen. The station. Probably one of the officers—whatever’s left of them after the fire department clears the scene—calling because the chief is required on-site and the chief is currently unconscious in my arms with blood running from her nose like an open faucet.
I ignore it and head for the bathroom.
The medicine cabinet is where it always is in apartments like this—above the sink, behind a mirror that’s developing age spots from moisture damage. The bathroom itself tells a story I wish I didn’t have the training to read. The shower floor is wet. A towel lies in a heap inside the glass enclosure, soaked through, positioned where someone who was sitting on the floor would have dropped it. The rack outside the shower is missing one towel—the one on the floor.
She was in there. On the floor. Before I arrived.
Drenched in cold water by choice, not accident.
I know this pattern.
Know it because Roman does it too, though he’d rather eat his own badge than admit it to anyone except the two men who’ve shared enough late-night operations to witness the aftershocks. Three a.m. showers. Ice-cold water. The body’sdesperate attempt to override whatever the brain is replaying, drowning the sensory memory of trauma beneath a physical stimulus intense enough to break the loop.
PTSD. Nightmares. The kind that don’t end when you open your eyes.
What happened to you, Officer Hazel? What did they do to you that made cold water feel like mercy?
I open the cabinet.
And the contents rearrange my understanding of Hazel Martinez’s situation with the diagnostic clarity of an autopsy report.
Suppressants.
Not the standard, over-the-counter variety that most Omegas in their twenties cycle through—the mild formulations designed for temporary use during professional obligations, the pharmaceutical equivalent of turning down the volume on biology without unplugging the speakers.
These are heavy.
Three separate prescriptions from two different providers—a combination therapy that I recognize because I work with the special division. The unit that handles Omega cases. Or more accurately, the unit that handles Omegaretrieval—the recovery of bodies that have been found in bathrooms, bedrooms, and office floors after the suppressant cocktails that were supposed to manage their heat cycles instead shut down their cardiovascular systems.
They’re dropping like flies.
Omegas across the globe, dying from the side effects of the very chemicals designed to make them functional in a society that treats their biology as an inconvenience. Cardiac events. Neurological failure. Hemorrhagic episodes that start as nosebleeds and end as cerebral hemorrhages. The pharmaceutical industry calls them “adverse reactions.”The death certificates call them “complications of hormonal management.” My case files call them what they are.
Casualties.
And the ratio between Alphas and Omegas—already skewed by genetics, already disproportionate enough to make Omega scarcity a genuine societal concern—is getting worse with every body we recover. Not that the government gives a damn. Omegas are a demographic inconvenience, a biological variable that complicates the workforce metrics and the military enrollment projections and the economic modeling that treats human reproduction as a line item in a budget.
I stare at the bottles in the cabinet.
The dosage on the primary suppressant is higher than any I’ve encountered in a living patient.
