Page 37 of Duty Preserved

Chapter 10

Sarah

The water source was a forty-minute hike from camp, and by the time the three of us reached it, I’d already sweated through my shirt twice.

Alyson crouched at the bank with her phone angled low, filming the waterline. Daniel stood six feet back with his hands in his pockets, looking at the mud like it had personally offended him.

“This is disgusting,” he said.

Once again, Daniel not happy about his job. No news there.

“It’s a water source.” I pulled the testing kit from my pack and knelt at the edge. “They’re not decorative.”

“The last one we checked was half this size and twice as clean. This one looks like something died in it.”

“Something probably did. That’s why we’re here.” Routine water quality checks—bacterial levels, parasites, anything that could sicken the herds. The animals drank from these sources whether we cleared them or not, so the job was knowing what they were drinking and flagging it before an outbreak started.

Alyson panned her phone across the bank without looking up. “For the record, I’m documenting, not complaining.”

Daniel rolled his eyes.

I uncapped the first vial and dipped it below the surface. The water was murkier than last time, the level noticeably lower. I checked the mark I’d scratched into the rock on our previous visit. The line sat a full hand’s width above the current surface.

“It’s down,” I said. “A lot. More than it should be for this time of year.”

Alyson looked over. “Already? We’re weeks out from when it usually drops.”

“I know.” I filled the second vial and held it up. Sediment swirled through it, heavy and brown. “If it keeps going at this rate, we’ll need to move the herds out of this zone early. Shift them west before the grazing dries out completely.”

“Fun,” Daniel said. “A three-day cattle herd move in the heat. Can’t wait.”

I didn’t respond. Yeah, it was hot, dirty work. But the Ankole cattle with their giant horns were pretty amazing in and of themselves. I sort of looked forward to moving the herd twice a year.

I labeled the vials and packed them into the kit. Alyson had put her phone away and was taking her own samples from a different section of the bank, quiet and efficient.

Daniel, meanwhile, had found a rock to sit on. I ignored it. I’d found out months ago that ignoring the problem was less time-consuming than confronting him about his work ethic.

I pulled the pH strips from the side pocket and ran three of them. Alyson came over and we compared readings, heads together over the color chart, while Daniel watched us from his rock.

“You know what would make this faster?” he said. “If we had the portable spectrometer that’s been sitting in the supply room since February.”

“You could have brought it,” I said.

“Nobody told me to.”

Alyson straightened. “Nobody told you to sit down either, but here we are.”

He looked at her, and the expression that crossed his face was quick and ugly. “I’m sorry, are we taking work advice from the woman who spent the first twenty minutes filming content for her twelve followers?”

“Fourteen thousand,” Alyson said.

“Same thing.”

I watched Daniel lean back on his rock and pull out his own phone, done contributing for the morning. He’d been like this more and more lately. The charm was still there when he wanted to use it, but underneath that veneer, he was becoming someone I didn’t enjoy being around. He did the least. He complained the most.

Why was he even here if he hated it so much? And I had no idea why Alyson stayed with him.

We worked through the rest of the assessment. Alyson and I did anyway. Daniel carried the pack when I asked him to and otherwise stayed on his rock. By the time we’d finished, the sun was high and brutal and my knees ached from crouching.