Page 69 of Duty Preserved

She didn’t look up from the kit. “We agreed to take a break.”

“When?”

“Couple days ago. Mutual decision.” She shrugged one shoulder. “It’s been coming for a while. You know that.”

I did know that. The slow cooling between them had been visible for weeks, and the Daniel I’d seen the past couple months wasn’t someone I could advocate for anymore.

“Don’t worry,” Alyson said. “We’re still professional.”

Zayn glanced in the rearview but didn’t comment.

We found the lion in a clearing bordered on three sides by dense whistling thorn. The collar signal led us to him. He was lying on his side in the short grass, and even from the vehicle, I could see the gash along his ribs. The wound had changed since the last time I’d seen it through binoculars. The edges were swollen and dark, the skin around it tight with infection. His ribs moved in shallow, labored pulls.

He didn’t lift his head when we pulled up. That wasn’t a good sign.

Alyson loaded the dart gun. She checked the dosage against her notes, confirmed the weight estimate from the collar data, and seated the dart. She rolled down her window, braced the barrel against the door frame, and fired.

The dart hit his hindquarter. He flinched. His head came up for a second, then dropped back down.

“Now, we wait,” Alyson said. She pulled her window up and set the gun across her lap. “Fifteen minutes. Nobody gets out until he’s fully under.”

We sat in the vehicles and watched through binoculars. The drug worked slowly through him. His head stopped moving. His legs, which had been drawing up in small reflexive movements, went still. His breathing evened into a nice slow rhythm.

At fifteen minutes, Alyson lowered her binoculars. “He’s flat. No muscle movement, no ear response. We’re good.”

Everyone got out.

The rangers moved first. Zayn positioned himself and Baraka in a loose arc around the site, their attention split between the sedated lion and the country around it. Their job was everything Alyson couldn’t afford to think about while her hands were on the animal.

Daniel took the backup dart gun from the second vehicle. He loaded it, checked the action, and took a position between the vehicles and the lion, covering Alyson’s approach. If the lion came out of sedation early, the vet not performing the procedure was the one who put the second dart in.

Alyson moved toward the lion. She approached from behind, staying clear of the head even though he was fully under, and crouched beside his rib cage to check the respiratory rate. Then she turned her attention to the wound.

I stayed back with Cole. Twenty meters behind Alyson, far enough to keep a wide view but close enough to get to her if she called.

“What’s she doing now?” Cole asked.

“Making sure he’s stable. Heart rate, breathing, temperature. If his system can’t handle the stress of treatment, she needs to know that before she touches the wound.”

Alyson’s hands moved over the lion’s ribs with a high degree of focus. She pulled supplies from her kit and arranged them beside her on the ground.

“Once she’s confident he can take it, she’ll clean out the wound. All the dead tissue, the infection, everything. Get antibiotics into him. Twenty minutes if it goes well. After that, the sedation starts wearing off and the clock runs out.”

“And if he wakes up during?”

“That’s what the backup dart is for. Daniel’s covering her.”

Cole looked at Daniel, standing in position with the dart gun braced against his shoulder. Then back at Alyson, who was leaning over the lion’s flank, her hands already working at the edge of the wound.

“She’s right there,” Cole said. “On top of him.”

“That’s where the work is. You can’t treat a lion from a distance.”

Alyson settled into the procedure. I watched her work, her hands quick and certain, doing what she did better than almost anyone I knew. She was talking to the animal in a low, constant murmur the way she always did. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t hear her under sedation. It was habit and it was⁠—

The lion moved.

The whole animal moved. A violent, convulsive surge that took his body off the ground.