Page 33 of Duty Preserved

Donovan was watching me. I could feel it without looking.

“What just happened?” he said.

“Nothing. I’m finishing up.”

“Something changed.”

I busied myself repacking the monitor kit, organizing the instruments by size, wiping down each one before slotting it into the case. I didn’t need to do any of that right now.

“I’m focused on the animal. That’s my job.”

He was quiet long enough that I almost looked up. Then he stepped back and gave me the space I was asking for, and I was grateful for that. And underneath the gratitude, something ached at how easily he’d read me and how quickly I’d made him stop.

We stood apart in the clearing and waited. The reversal agent worked through her system, and after a few minutes, her ear twitched. Then her legs.

Then her whole body heaved, and she was lurching upward, finding her balance on those massive legs, swaying once before she steadied. She stood there for a moment, the collar snug, her sides moving with deep, even breaths. Then she turned and meandered into the grass.

I watched her until she was gone, just the grass moving where she’d pushed through it, and then there was nothing. An empty clearing, the equipment at our feet, and the space I’d just put back between us.

“She’s something,” Donovan said.

“She is.”

He was quiet. Then in a low, gruff register he added, “So are you.”

I picked up my field kit and started packing. “We should head back. I need to file the collar data before the satellite window closes.”

He stood there another second. Then he picked up the gear and carried it all to the truck without another word.

We loaded in silence. He started the engine, and we took off back to camp.

I kept my eyes on the road and my hands in my lap. His face when he’d said so are you was right there every time I blinked, landing in the exact place the old voice had just hollowed out. He’d tried to open a door, and I’d closed it before the air could get through.

Chapter 9

Donovan

Four days in, and the obstacle course was doing exactly what we’d built it to do.

I stood at the edge of the clearing with Andrew and Cole, coffee in hand, watching the rangers run it. Each time through, they got more efficient than the last.

“Here they come,” Andrew said.

On this particular run-through, they arrived at the ten-foot wall not as a scattered team spread out along the course, but as a tight-knit group ready to work together. Baraka hit the wall first, jumped, and got his fingers over the top edge. Two rangers behind him braced and boosted him the rest of the way up. He swung a leg over, turned, and reached down. The next man grabbed his wrist, and Baraka hauled him up like he weighed nothing.

A few days ago, a wall like this would have stopped them cold. A few days ago, Baraka would have stood back and waited for someone else to figure it out. Now, he was the one reaching down to pull the next man over.

“I’m glad they seem to have gotten their uniform standards straightened out too,” Cole said.

He was right. Every man out there was in full kit. Shirts buttoned, boots laced, weapons carried correctly. It hadn’t been ordered this morning. A silent shift had happened, and the men stopped thinking of themselves as individuals and started carrying themselves as a unified team.

At the low-crawl lane, two rangers hit the dirt and pulled themselves under the cargo net in tandem, elbows working, keeping pace with each other without a word exchanged. At the island crossing, three of them had the plank sequence down to a system—pass, brace, cross, pass—smooth enough that I wouldn’t have reworked it.

I watched Jomo come through the balance beam. He was slower than the others, the clubfoot dragging his left side through every step, but he didn’t fall and he didn’t stop. When he reached the end, the ranger waiting at the wall didn’t look at his foot. He just held position until Jomo was ready, then braced for him.

Before, they would have left him on his own. Now, they made a concerted effort to keep him with them, because somewhere along the way, they’d figured out that Jomo solved problems the rest of them couldn’t see coming.

I wouldn’t have called it acceptance. Nobody was inviting Jomo to sit with them at meals. Nobody was walking beside him on the ruck march. But the obstacle course required teamwork, and Jomo turned out to be the one who could rig a knot or unstick a jammed plank or see a mechanical problem three moves ahead of the man standing in front of it. When the island crossing seized up because someone had set a drum wrong, it was Jomo who fixed it without a word.