“Goddammit, Grace,” she gasped through the double layers of cloth over her mouth, “You went early.”
“I amsofucking high right now,” Grace gasped back.“The tarps weren’t pulled tight on the other end.Gust of wind blew product in my face.Luckytime didn’t stop.I’m buzzing so hard.”
“Shit!Hold still!”
If somebody was overdosing on an opioid, they used Narcan to speed up their metabolism.
If they were overdosing on cocaine—which wasreallyhard to do given how easily the drug was metabolized—their blood pressure was so high they risked stroking out.
So Molly—hell, all of them—were carrying small doses of lisinopril, which was designed to lower the blood pressure, just in case.
She had to grab Grace and force him to stand still to pop two tiny tabs in his mouth and make him dry swallow.
And then she watched him to make sure she hadn’t overdosed him on blood pressure medication, which would cause his heart rate to drop.
They didn’t have time to stare at each other long, because that’s when the other three warehouses went up, a roar like a C-4 lion and a chemical eruption of hell throwing a fireball into the dappled black night of the jungle.
Molly was high enough to scream when they went off, her self-control gone, and Chuck’s voice in her ear was panicked.
“Molly!Are you and Grace all right?Molly!”
“High as a fucking kite, Chuck, but breathing!”
“Grace?”Hunter said, his own voice strangled.
“Oh my God,” Grace said.“If this had happened when I was seventeen, I would have gone back for another face full!”
“Oh God,” Hunter muttered.
“Don’t worry,” Grace said.“It turns out,drugs suck!”
And then he bent over, ripped off his mask and his balaclava, and threw up in the bushes.
Molly held his head and pulled a bottle of water from her cargo pants, and together they went back to hiding in the bushes and listening while Chuck and Hunter did dangerous soldier things that they would ordinarily help with, but picking up a gun right now when their vision was swimming and the world had a fuzzy rainbow edge was a bad idea.
An hour later (or a year or a buzzenteen years later), Hunter’s command of “Everybody back to the exfil.Lucius, start her up!”was met by Lucius’s hearty, “Thank God!”
Molly and Grace untangled themselves from their huddle, as they’d come down from the dangerous high, both of them too fucked up to go grab a weapon and help.Self-awareness was a wonderful thing, and they weren’t so cocky that they believed they were soldiers.They were thieves, and they could use weapons, but not like this.
“God,” Grace muttered.“I’m fucking useless.”
Molly started to laugh.
“What?”he asked.
“When I was seventeen, I would have snorted that off your dick and told myself you were straight.”
It wasn’t funny—it barely made sense—but Grace started to laugh, and then she laughed some more, and together they dragged their sorry asses back to the plane.
Chuck held her as Hunter took off, and Lucius, as though very conscious that Hunter wanted so badly to hold Grace himself, was treating Grace with the tenderness of an older brother to a younger sibling with the flu.
Once they were in the air, Grace said, “So did we do it?Can we move on to phase three now?”
Hunter’s low, rather tortured groan was enough to tell Molly how badly they’d all been scared.
“A break,” Chuck murmured.“We’ve got two weeks to rest and plan in Prague.”
“I wonder if Robert would meet me in Prague,” she slurred, thinking that if she hadn’t been stoned she never would have said it.
