Page 140 of Off the Rails

My chest felt heavy, like one of those pallets had been placed on top of it. I couldn’t help but feel responsible. Maybe that guy had something to do with it. If we hadn’t gotten involved…

“Don’t think about that.” Cyrus snapped as she met my eyes. “It’s not our fault. People use. We do our best to take care of them. We did what we could for her that night. It was the right thing to do.”

“We couldn’t stand by and let a woman get hurt.” Nash’s temple tensed as she stared down at her fullbore boots.

Shrugging, Blade let her hand run along the brick wall. “Maybe we should have made her stay longer.”

I bit my lip. “She was scared of us. We couldn’t force her to talk.”

But when I looked at Cyrus, her knuckles were turning white as her fingertips dug into the lip of the metal desk.

We should have looked harder for that man. It’s his fault. I know it.

I wasn’t sure why, but everything in me told me it was true. Maybe it was because she had been tied to Rubin and his mountaintop compound. Or maybe it was that I hadn’t gotten a look at her assaulter's face. But it was all starting to feel too connected.

Our silence was interrupted by a ping on Cyrus’ phone.

Without a word, she opened the email and scanned it. “Toxicology is back. Hallucinogen.” She took a moment to read before her face scrunched tight with confusion.

“What?” Blade pushed, bothered by the silence.

“Dimethyltryptamine.” Cyrus looked up from her phone. “DMT.”

“How the fuck?” Shaking her head, Nash pushed off the door. “We haven’t seen that shit anywhere. Not a single warehouse…”

Cyrus gritted her teeth together. “How could we? That shit is on lock down. No one has it.”

Waving my hands, I scoffed. “I’m sorry, can someone please explain? I’m not some drug lord.”

Blade bit her lip, her metal labret piercing slipping into her mouth. “It’s the chemical in Ayahuasca. Highly hallucinogenic. In its concentrated form, it gives you crazy visions and shit. But it’s short.”

“Having access to it is difficult enough, but to have overdosed… whoever gave this shit to her had a lot of it.” Nash continued.

Cyrus slammed her hand into the metal table. “And they managed to slip it past us. Someone else has a drug route into Valemont. And it’s more dangerous than we thought.”

75

TESS

With my chin in my palm, I sat and watched as Nash worked.

She grabbed a brick of cocaine off the top of a palate and placed it on the metal table on the warehouse floor. A few yards away, Blade did the same at her own station.

With the blade of a black, tactical knife, Nash ripped into the shrink wrap. She took a scoop of the white powder and used an old credit card to crush it finer. Once it was even, she poured some into a tub with water. Swirling it around, she let the coke mix in.

We’d been at this for hours, testing every palate in the warehouse for laced drugs.

Nash stuck a long test strip into the tube, before pulling it out and letting it rest on the table.

Rubbing her forehead, she set a timer on her phone as she leaned back. “This is ridiculous. We already test everything that comes in here. It’s not us.”

“I know.” Even from a few hours inside their operation, it was clear to me that the Freaks took their operation seriously. But everyone would sleep better tonight if we knew — again — that what killed Jane hadn’t come from this warehouse.

It did leave them with more questions.

Cyrus paced the edges of the warehouse, making calls and testing palates between. She demanded every single platform in the place be retested, even if it took all night.

There was a part of me that was surprised she’d included me, that she’d let me see her big secret.