Page 13 of Duty Preserved

If only it had ended there. Then it would be a delightful memory of a handsome man who’d been such a gentleman and walked me to my room. Proof that there were still good men in the world.

Instead, the story ended with proof I couldn’t hold my liquor and me wanting to vanish into a hole even though I was a continent away.

I yanked down the lid on the memory.

By the time the light started fading, the zebra was back with her herd in the low lands. The rain that had come through in the week had pulled a haze of new green up out of the ground, and the herd had spread across it, tails swinging, heads down.

We let her out at the edge of it, and she stood a moment, ears twitching, taking in the open country after days in a pen. Then she was into the herd, a loose scatter of striped bodies closing around her, and I couldn’t have picked her out again if I’d tried, except for the wound.

I stood at the edge of the truck longer than I needed to. Zayn let me have the minute without saying anything about it. Then he drove us home over ground he knew better than any map we had. He dropped me at the cabins as the sky turned a deep, bruised blue right before night came down all at once.

I didn’t go in. I sat on my step instead, where I could see past the last cabin to the place the camp stopped and the savanna started, no fence, no line or marking of any kind, just the grass beginning and going on forever. Something moved out there in it, big and lumbering. I’d stopped flinching at that months ago. Now I knew it was just the reserve animals doing whatever they didn’t want to do during the heat of the day.

This was mine. I’d chosen it, all of it, the six-hour runs, the bad radios, and the animals that came in broken and sometimes went back whole, but sometimes didn’t.

I would choose it a hundred more times. Over any number of skyscrapers or modern conveniences.

The generator cut out somewhere behind me, and the lights in the cabins flickered and held. Out past the grass, the reserve went on breathing in the dark, and I knew I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

Chapter 4

Donovan

The vehicle stopped and the dust kept going. It rolled past the windshield in a red-brown wave, drifted across the hood, and settled over everything within fifty feet.

Ol Pejeta Conservancy. End of the road.

I stepped out. Andrew came around from the other side, stretching his back and glancing around at the camp.

“Well,” he said. “It’s not the Ritz.”

It wasn’t. The main base sat at the edge of a wide clearing. It was a handful of low buildings with corrugated roofs, a water tank on a metal stand that leaned about ten degrees off true, and a cluster of small cabins set back from the rest, grouped loosely together with maybe thirty feet between them. Solar panels on two of the roofs. A generator housing with the door hanging open. Vehicles parked along a dirt track between the buildings, none of them new. One had a cracked windshield. One had no windshield at all.

“The brochure made it look bigger,” Andrew said, squinting at the cabins.

“There was no brochure.”

“That explains a lot.”

He stretched his arms over his head and rolled his neck. “You know, the British ran a POW camp about sixty miles from here during World War II. Italian prisoners. Apparently the Italians started a vegetable garden, and the guards let them because the food was better than anything the Army was providing.”

“Is there a point?”

“The point is I’m starving, and I’m hoping someone here has taken up gardening.”

The land beyond the camp stretched flat and gold in every direction, broken by clusters of acacia trees.

Cole Braddock came out of the nearest building before we’d finished unloading. He looked good. Rested, even, which meant the past two weeks hadn’t been hard enough to wear him down yet.

“About time.” He gripped my hand, pulled me in, and clapped my back. Same with Andrew. “Was the flight okay?”

“Thirteen hours of Andrew talking,” I said. “Do you think it was okay?”

“I was enriching your mind,” Andrew said. “You should be thanking me.”

“He did that the entire way from Nairobi too,” I told Cole. “Something about the Mau Mau uprising and the history of the Laikipia Plateau.”

“It’s relevant,” Andrew said throwing up his open hands to feign innocence.