They looked up at me. Astride Maraud—her mouth open and dripping hot, hungry saliva—I must have been an imposing sight. For a split second, they were afraid. Then they remembered their guns, their power, the city that supported their abuse, and the fear melted away.

“What’s it to you?” said one of them. The woman pushed her shopping cart off and hurried down the street, turning only once to mouth Thank you at me. Her velociraptor, scuttling beside her, made a guttural noise that Maraud echoed back.

I didn’t have a good answer for him. So I did what I tend to do in stressful situations: I took a picture.

It’s an instinct. If you stop to think, you’ll miss the shot. And since selling a photo to the Clarion often meant the difference between eating and starving, I tended to take the shot.

Problem is, cops hate having their pictures taken.

“Hands up!” they hollered.

My hands went up.

“Drop it!” they said.

“It’s not a weapon!” I called, bending my knees, holding up the camera. “It’ll break if I drop it, and I can’t afford to replace it. So I’m going to put it down very slowly, okay?”

“I said drop it, you—” And they called me a whole bunch of superhorrific names. Fine. It gave me time to set the camera gently on the ground the instant before they walked up and punched me in the stomach. And kept on doing so, until I fell to the ground beside my camera.

“Somebody needs to learn to mind their own damn business,” the shortest cop said, picking up my camera. He inspected it, deciding it probably wasn’t a weapon after all. He held it out to me, but when I reached for it, he pulled it back and let it drop. Something cracked. I bit my lip to keep from exploding with a string of curses. Maraud huffed and stamped her foot, sharing my anger.

“What’s your ability, punk? You a watersider? You have something to do with that robbery last week, down by the docks?”

There was no use trying to deny that I was an othersider. Nobody else would be walking around this part of town at night . . . with an allosaurus. It’s why they call us monsters, because we’re not afraid of the creatures that walk the streets of the city. “I don’t know what my ability is,” I mumbled.

Lady cop laughed. “You expect us to believe that?”

“I don’t expect anything from the fine upstanding police officers of Darkside,” I said. “Not when law-abiding othersiders get jumped every day by goons, and you never do a damn thing about it. Not when those attacks are on the rise and y’all never seem to notice.”

Unfazed by my attitude, dude cop continued, “We run your name, we gonna find anything? Prior offenses, associations with illegal organizations?”