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Someone fumbles with the door of the van, and Riley looks up from her computer, startled. The boys have been radio-silent since they went in, lest they trigger an alarm, and it’s too soon for them to be back. Isn’t it? It’s only a few minutes after 8pm.
But the door cracks open. “Riley,” Mac says, out of breath, an intensity in his tone that makes her scramble across the open space and throw the doors open wide for him.
She’s not expecting to see his face smudged with blood, and Jack slumped against his side. Mac has Jack’s arm around his neck and has his own arm around Jack’s back, holding him up.
“Oh my god,” Riley says, crouching down to thread her own hands under Jack’s arms, helping to support him.
Mac gives her a grateful look and shuffles his grip, and Jack groans, his head lolling but awake. He’s biting his own lip hard enough to leave indents, and he’s gone abnormally pale and sweaty.
“I’ve got you, Jack,” Riley says, softly.
“Help me lift him,” Mac tells her, and then, “This is gonna hurt, buddy.”
Jack yells out when hoist him up into the back of the van. Riley drags him inside and they roll him over so he’s lying on his back. Now his jacket falls open and she can see the dark stain all over his black t-shirt and the dark, oozing center.
She feels frozen, looking at it, at the way blood leaks out with each labored breath. Jack’s losing a lot of blood. “Is that a bullet hole?” It’s a belly wound, probably below his ribs. There’s a lot to hit down there. Jack’s face is tight with pain, his eyes squeezed shut.
“Yeah,” Mac confirms, pulling the van doors closed and reaching for a cabinet, pulling out a folded towel. He lays it over Jack’s wound and presses down. “Can you drive? And get a hold of Thornton and make sure she knows he’s been shot.” When Riley doesn’t move, he reaches forward to touch her arm, to break her out of her paralysis, and she flinches back from the sight of his bloodied hands.
“I can drive,” she says.
Jack opens his eyes to watch her. “Steady, Ri,” he says. “I’ll be okay.”
She throws Mac a questioning look, and she can tell by the way his brows are furrowed and his mouth pulled into a line that Mac is scared. He gives a little shrug of his shoulders that says he’s not sure. But it’s not like she’s going to contradict Jack, so she just gives him a nod before she stumbles to her feet.
Mac frees one of his hands, reaches for the first aid kit, and pulls it off the shelf onto the floor of the van. He starts rummaging through it with, still holding the towel over Jack’s wound. “Do you remember where exfil is?”
For one moment, as she squeezes into the driver’s seat, she doesn’t; her mind is blank and panic layers on panic.
She knows the job is dangerous. She’s seen people tortured in South America, shot in Malaysia, and they all almost got blown up in Moscow. But those were other people. People she didn’t know.
This is different. This is Jack bleeding out in the back of a van, and she’s just sitting here, letting her team down because she’s panicking.
Take a deep breath. Jack used to tell her that when she was a kid, and upset. That’s what he tells Mac now. That’s what he would tell her to do if he wasn’t half-conscious right now.
She takes a deep breath and the map forms in her head. She’s never driven here before, but she knows what roads to take. They’re all supposed to study the map before they arrive, even though Jack always drives. Now she knows why. “Yeah, I remember,” she says.
She dials Thornton’s number and puts her phone on speaker before balancing it on the dashboard.
The keys are in the ignition and the van comes on immediately, but she fumbles with the shifter before she gets it into drive, and has to take another deep breath before she releases the brake and steers away from the side of the road. There’s a bump as she pulls off the shoulder and onto the pavement, and she checks the mirror to see Mac swaying with the movement, one hand on the towel and the other on the floor to steady himself.
Thornton answers on the first ring. “Riley. What’s the situation?”
“Jack’s been shot. We’re heading for exfil.”
“Your exfil will be at the rendezvous in eleven minutes,” Thornton tells her. “The exfil team includes medical support. How bad is it?”
Riley glances back at Mac. “Gut wound,” he says, his voice raised to carry. “He’s bleeding pretty bad. It’s been about ten minutes and his pulse and respiratory rates are up. He’s going to need a hospital.”
“All right,” Thornton says. “We’ll find an available ER and warn them. The op?”
“Successful,” Mac says.
The word successful echoes in Riley’s memory after she hangs up. She glares through the windshield at the too-long road ahead of them. It’s not wrong that Thornton would ask about the op. It’s not like the director can do much else for Jack from LA. But it feels wrong to worry about whether or not they grabbed that external harddrive now that part of their team is bleeding onto the floor of the van.
“I’m going to have to put more pressure on this,” she hears Mac say. “You still with me, Jack?”
“I hear ya.” Jack’s voice is subdued, unlike him, like he’s only half there.
The noise Jack makes when Mac presses down harder is pure pain. Riley grips the wheel and her vision goes blurry for a minute as she blinks back tears.
Of course getting shot hurts. Of course Mac has to put pressure on the wound. Since starting at the Phoenix, she’s completed an extensive first aid course and started training in self-defense with Thornton, all because this job is dangerous. She knows Mac's already doing most important, and really, the only thing they can do without medical support.
“Gonna– havta– press– harder– than that,” Jack gasps out, and Riley winces again because the result is another agonized yell.
She glances in the mirror again and meets Mac’s eyes. He’s got his arm locked and he’s leaning on Jack, a grim look on his face. Jack is silent, and she realizes he’s gone limp. She thought she couldn’t get more frightened, but suddenly, she is.
“Is he okay?” she asks, her eyes shifting between the road and the mirror.
“He passed out,” Mac says, reaching up to pat Jack’s face while he continues to lean on the wound. “C’mon, Jack. I know it hurts, but I need you awake. You’re scaring Riley.”
“‘M awake,” Jack mumbles. “Sorry, Ri.”
“I’m okay.” Riley throws the words back over her shoulder, glad that the road is straight and empty. She’s driving as fast as she dares, with no regard for traffic laws. “We’re almost there. I think.”
Sure enough, the next turn is only a few seconds away. She slows down so Mac and Jack don’t get thrown around the van. Two more swift turns and they reach an empty field. She puts the van in park and leaves the engine on so she can drive it right up by the exfil chopper when it arrives. Scanning the sky, she can’t see it yet, so she climbs into the back of the van and knees down. “Can I help?”
“You did help,” Mac says, not moving, still holding in Jack’s blood. “You got us here.”
“Yeah, but…” She gestures to Jack, feeling useless now that she’s just sitting. Mac doesn’t need help putting pressure on the wound, and that’s all they can do besides wait for exfil and medical help. Jack’s sucking in short, shallow breaths, grimacing at Mac but she’s not sure he’s really looking at anything. He’s trying to stay awake. For the first time she notices bruises on his face and arm, and wonders what other injuries she can’t see.
Sometimes she misses her angsty teenage years, when she thought her mom’s dumb boyfriend actually sold tile for a living. It was easy to be mad at him when he was just that guy who walked out on her and her mom. It’s harder now that he keeps throwing himself between her and Mac, and bad guys who wanted to kill them.
He’d say it was his job, that he signed up for it. And he did. He signed up to throw himself into danger for Mac, and then invited her to the party. Her mom had always sworn that Jack Dalton was the best man she’d ever dated. For years, Riley had scoffed at that, because it didn’t take much to best most of the other guys in the competition. But looking at him with adult eyes and more experience in the world, she can see why her mother was crazy about him.
Jack has his flaws, but not many people choose to spend their lives keeping others safe the way Jack does. No one else would have gone out of their way to spring a hacker like her from prison. No one else would have welcomed an ex-con onto their team with such open warmth. No one else would have trusted her from the start, the way Jack did. Aside from her mom, everyone else in her life faded away while she was behind bars.
She ends up taking Jack’s hand, and when he looks toward her and gives her a wan smile, she almost loses it. “You’d better be okay, old man,” she says around the lump in her throat that wants to choke her. “I have a lot of things to say to you.”
A thumping sound fills the air. The exfil chopper has arrived, and it’s landing near enough the wind off the rotors rocks the van. It’s moments before the van doors open. A Phoenix medic crawls in opposite Mac and begins to work around his hands. It’s a tight squeeze with four people in the back of the van, and Riley’s in the way, but she doesn’t want to go.
Mac’s between her and the back doors of the van, so it’s not like it would be easy for her to get out. And it’s not like the medic is going to make Mac get out, not while he’s holding in Jack’s blood.
“Dalton, you need to dodge better,” the medic says after a minute, leaning back. “All right, team, I don’t want him getting up, so we’re going to move him onto the backboard.” She gestures to the door, where two men in tac gear are holding the board. “Let’s get rolling.”
#
Riley ends up in possession of the external hard drive when Mac goes to get cleaned up and changed. That leaves Riley alone in Jack’s recovery room, listening to the soft noises of the hospital and wondering if they ever need security in a place like this. It’s not very far from where Jack got shot. Less than ten minutes by air from their exfil coordinates.
They were lucky with hospitals. They say Jack is going to be fine.
It’s going to be a long recovery, though.
Mac returns and slips into the chair nearer the head of the bed, and she pulls herself up straighter in the other one. “You could go to the hotel, you know,” he says, settling in. “Get some sleep.”
“So could you.”
Wearily, he shakes his head. He’s silent for a minute before he says, “Jack sat in my room for five straight days after Nikki’s goon shot me. I had to wake up so he didn’t collapse from exhaustion.”
Riley sighs at him. Mac and Jack are like two wheels on a motorcycle, you need them both or it just won’t work. Sometimes she feels like the sidecar, easy to leave behind when it’s in the way. But everyone says they were tight with Nikki, before Nikki betrayed them. “If Nikki was here instead of me, would she have stayed?”
“Yeah, she always did.” Mac sighs and the haunted look that always hits him when Nikki comes up slides over his face. Then his brows pull together like he’s had a new thought, and he looks at her. “You’re right. You’re part of the team. Just like she used to be. You just, uh, you just haven’t been with us as long and sometimes things get really awkward between you and Jack.”
“We kind of have an awkward history,” she says, looking over at Jack, who remains in a drugged, oblivious sleep. It’s easier to ignore the past when they’re focused on getting through an op or sitting around Mac’s fire pit, a small group of people she’s beginning to think of as friends. She can pretend to just lump Jack into that group most of the time. “We’re going to have to lie to Bozer about this, aren’t we?”
“Yes,” Mac confirms. He rubs his forehead. “We’ll have to come up with something to tell him, and it can’t involve any bullets or bad guys.”
She knew that—they’ve been lying to Mac’s roommate all along about every mission they’ve gone on. It just seems different when they’re going to be lying about a member of the team. Bozer has known Mac since they were kids, but he’s known Jack for years, too.
“I know why Jack had to lie to me and my mom,” she says. “I still hate it. But I think I get it. I just don’t know why he left.”
Mac gives her a long look. “You’ll have to talk to him about that.”
“I know. Some time I will.” She shrugs, slinking down lower in the chair. “Not right away. I’m not going to ambush him.” She pulls her legs up so her feet are on the edge of the chair’s seat and wraps her arms around them. “I’m glad he’ll be around for it, though.” She can’t help a yawn. They’ve been up all night. “You think he’ll be awake soon?”
Mac ponders Jack before he shakes his head. “Sometimes he surprises you, but I think it’ll be a couple more hours.”
“Good. I need a nap.” She bumps her shoulder against his. “You do, too. Everything’s going to be fine, right?”
“Yeah,” Mac says, and he bumps her shoulder back, then settles back into his chair. “I’m just not ready to sleep. Tell me a story, Ri.”
“About Jack?”
He nods.
“All right. But you tell me one first.”
Mac tells her about the first time Jack saved his life, half a decade earlier, when they were in the army. “He didn’t even like me very much at the time,” Mac insists. She has a hard time imagining that. She could tell she'd like Mac from the first time they met; it was mostly Jack who made her wary.
When it’s her turn, she has to stop and think about what to tell. Jack chasing off her dad comes to mind; she thinks Mac might appreciate that. But she doesn’t want to talk about her dad. She ends up telling him about the time Jack took her to the urgent care when she was a kid and sat with her while she got stitches—in hindsight, his calm in the face of injury makes a lot more sense.
By the time she’s done, Mac’s eyes are half-closed, and she’s sideways in the chair, her cheek resting on the chair back. She watches Mac’s lids shut as he falls asleep. For the first time since he arrived at the van, he looks relaxed. In the bed, Jack does, too. Thanks to drugs, he’s free of the pain he was in earlier.
They’re her team, and they’ve overcome near disaster together—again. She’s not sure how many times they can pull it off, but whatever that number is, she plans to be here for all of it.