Page 95 of Duty Preserved

I sat up and started pulling my pants on. The engine revved hard. I shoved my feet into the boots by the door, unlaced, and opened it.

Fire.

Across the compound, the vet facility was burning. Flames climbed the back wall and punched through the roof in rolling orange columns that threw shifting light across every surface in camp. A vehicle’s taillights bounced through the dirt road leading out, already fifty meters past the last cabin and accelerating into the dark.

“Donovan—”

Sarah was behind me in the doorway. She gasped in shock.

I ran. I hit the side of the bunkhouse with my fist as I passed it. “Fire! Fire! There is a fire!”

Rangers spilled out behind me, some in boots and some barefoot, all of them running toward the glow. The blaze behind the building lit up the outline, and flames were already eating through the roof. The corrugated metal above the timbers buckled inward.

Andrew came from his cabin at a dead sprint, shirt half-buttoned, and pulled up beside me. We reached the facility entrance together, and the heat pushed us back a step.

Sarah got there after us. She didn’t slow down.

She ducked past my arm and went through the door. The fire hadn’t reached the front of the structure yet, but it was coming. The ceiling above her glowed a deep, pulsing orange.

Andrew and I went in after her. She had the drug safe by its handles and was dragging it across the floor toward the entrance. I got my hands on a crate of surgical instruments and hauled it into the open air. Andrew grabbed the sample refrigerator and muscled it through the door, the veins in his neck bulging out with the effort.

Sarah turned to go back in. I caught her arm, just barely.

“The cabinet,” she said. “The dart guns and the controlled substances are in the locked cabinet.”

She pulled out of my hold and was past me before I could argue. She had the key from around her neck in the lock before I could follow. She pulled the cabinet open, loaded her arms with everything she could carry, and came back out coughing hard, her eyes streaming from the smoke. I took half the load from her and set it on the ground, clear of the building.

The rangers had organized themselves. Zayn was at the water tank, directing two men who carried every container they could find. The rest split the remaining work without discussion, beating at the brush between the facility and the nearest cabin with blankets and shovels, while others dragged crates and supply boxes clear of the heat.

Nobody told them to do any of it.

The accelerant had taken the structure too fast. Water hit the walls and flashed to steam. The roof sagged inward. One of the support beams cracked and dropped a section of metal sheeting into the interior with a crash that sent embers spiraling high into the black sky. The heat rolled outward in a wave that forced everyone back three steps.

We kept at it. Kept pouring water and pulling anything salvageable free. Andrew and two of the rangers soaked blankets and laid them across the roofs of the nearest cabins, buying time against any ember that drifted.

But I knew it fifteen minutes in, and so did everyone else. We weren’t saving the building. We were just trying to keep the fire from eating the rest of the camp.

It took an hour to burn down to embers. The concrete block walls were still standing, blackened and heat-cracked. The roof was gone and the interior completely gutted.

I did a head count. Every ranger present, Andrew beside me. Sarah was standing ten feet from the ruined entrance.

Nobody was hurt.

By first light, the fire had been out for an hour, but the camp was still dealing with the aftermath. Two rangers walked the perimeter of the wreckage, kicking at charred timber to make sure nothing underneath was still catching. Baraka pulled a scorched equipment rack clear of the foundation, the metal still warm enough to need gloves. Everything salvageable was spread across the dirt in front of the ruined building. Instruments and drug cases on one side, supply crates along the far edge.

Not a soul had slept since three in the morning. Coffee sat on the mess tent table where somebody had made it and forgotten about it. It was now cold.

Sarah moved through the salvage spread with a clipboard, cataloging losses. Her face was streaked with ash, and her hair was pulled back in a knot.

I stood at the edge of the wreckage and looked at it in daylight. The whiteboard Sarah used for her daily schedules had buckled off the wall and lay facedown in the ash. The table where we had laid out all our evidence with Faith the day before was nothing more than a smoldering pile of ash.

In the dark, it had all been chaos, and the only thing we could do was react. By morning light, we could more readily understand that this was deliberate. Every camp vehicle was still parked under the lean-to. Whoever drove out last night wasn’t one of ours.

The vet facility was the most visible building from the access road. Maybe that was all it was, the first target the driver saw in the dark. But the facility was also the center of everything Sarah did on this reserve.

Who would do this?

“Donovan.”