Page 141 of Off the Rails

But in reality, she just wanted to incriminate me further, to make it harder and harder for me to rat if I ever did leave Feverpoint.

When she was far away, I bit my lip and turned to Nash. “How is she okay with all of this?”

Nash looked around the warehouse. “What? The dealing?”

“Yeah, because of her parents.”

I still remembered why she’d ended up in Heirs of Promise. Both of her parents had been incarcerated for dealing, child neglect, and possession. With no one to take care of her, Cyrus was surrendered to the state by her uncle.

She was young, rebellious, and clearly queer. Even to me then.

Her uncle had claimed that Heirs of Promise would set her on a “path toward God.”

So much for that.

More like leaving her with abandonment issues and religious trauma.

Nash thought about her answer for a while. “There’s a few reasons. For one, she doesn’t have kids so there’s no chance of them getting involved or hurt in the process.”

“Fair enough.”

“But, she’s always been firm on what we could sell. There were always rules about how addictive the substances could be, how often we sold to repeat customers, what we’d sell to the college kids.” Nash leaned over and took a closer look at the test strip. “Negative.”

Grabbing another brick from a new palate, she repeated her steps with the same meticulous energy.

“How did all of this start?” Now was my chance, if I wanted to be let in.

Looking around the warehouse, it was obvious this wasn’t their first year on the job. They’d been gaining power and control in Valemont and all of Greene County for years.

Nash shrugged. “We needed money and none of us had our legal working papers. So we took odd jobs. Blade would go to job sites and do construction, I tried to sell my art, and Cyrus… She could sell a desert to a thirsty man.

“Eventually, she realized that Atwood was getting nasty drugs from nasty sources. And she decided to fix that, tired of reading news stories about teenagers ending up in the hospital. It all just kind of grew from there.”

“Right.” I licked my lips, my eyes growing heavy with exhaustion.

Standing up from her chair, Blade yawns. “All negative over here.”

“Same.” Nash said after checking the final test strip.

Cyrus grumbled as she shoved her phone back into her pocket. “No one has information. Everything’s a dead fucking end.”

Crossing my arms over my legs, I shrugged. “How did she get something so potent?”

Blade scoffed. “It has to be him.”

“Who?” Nash whipped her head around to look at Blade, “Rubin?”

In a mocking voice, Blade held her hands to the sky. “The all holy Messenger.”

“It was the last place she was seen.” I added.

“And the only place we can’t search.” Nash stood, gripping her metal seat in her palms.

Cyrus wasn’t buying it. “No. We don’t know that. It was the last place we saw her. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t come down from Mount Sinai and get a bag from someone. Fuck, she could’ve gone a few towns over to get it.”

“But why? You said DMT is hard to find. Was she using it before? And if she wasn’t, how did she get enough to OD?” None of it was adding up in my mind. There were too many holes, like a colander of information.

Shaking her head, Cyrus snapped. “She freaked out when we brought her to Violence. She wanted nothing to do with it. Maybe Rubin doesn’t let addicts live there.”