Page 42 of Duty Preserved

“Andrew and I will run the demonstration. You float and observe. I want your read on the ground when we’re done.”

I nodded. Cole didn’t waste time explaining what I already understood. Standard site work. Read the ground, build the picture, work from there.

“I’m coming with you.”

I turned. Sarah stood at the edge of the yard with her field kit over one shoulder, her braid pulled tight, everything about her posture saying this wasn’t a request.

“It’s my reserve,” she said. “My animal. And if there’s veterinary evidence at that site, you need someone who can read it.”

Cole glanced at me. I didn’t argue. She was right. She’d found the kill, and she was a better judge of animal remains than any of us would ever be.

She walked past me to join the column. She didn’t look at me any longer than she had to, and I didn’t look at her any longer than I should have. But something shifted in my chest the moment she fell in with the rangers. A nervousness I didn’t normally have before missions. She was coming into the field with us, and that meant her safety was now something I had to carry.

I shut it down. She was a professional. She’d been working this reserve for a year without me standing over her. If I started hovering, she’d notice. And she’d hate it.

We moved out at first light.

The site was exactly how Sarah had described it. The snare was anchored to the base of an acacia, wire pulled tight in a loop. What was left of the zebra lay beneath it. The hide had been stripped from the hindquarters and most of the meat taken. What remained was swollen and split in the heat, ribs showing through where the scavengers had worked overnight. Flies blanketed the rest in a dark, shifting layer.

“All right,” Cole said, gathering the rangers around the edge of the site. “This is how you work a site. Every piece of ground tells you something. Your job is to listen to it.”

“We’re going to look for where they approached and where they left,” Cole continued. “Evidence of their passing. Broken branches, compressed soil, anything that tells you a person moved through here.”

“And once you find a trail,” Andrew added, “you can start to age it. How much moisture is still in the soil. Whether the vegetation around the tracks has started to recover. That tells you when, not just where.”

Cole and Andrew circled the area slowly, looking for clues, the rangers watching them work, while I stood a short distance away and searched the vista with my gaze.

“Here,” Andrew said, crouching near a section of trampled grass. He pointed at the ground in front of him. “A few different sets of footprints, all clustered around the carcass where they worked to remove the meat. If we memorize these prints, the tread pattern, the depth, we can try to follow these specific ones out from the site. See how far we can track them.”

Cole stepped forward. “Right now, everything you’re seeing is information. Raw material. Footprints, broken branches, drag marks. None of it means anything yet.” Cole held up a finger. “Intelligence is what happens when you take all of that information, evaluate it, and interpret it. That’s where the picture comes from. But you can’t skip to the picture. You collect first, you interpret after. The moment you start drawing conclusions before you’ve finished collecting, you stop seeing what’s actually in front of you.”

Most of the rangers were into it. They crowded in around Andrew, craning to see the tracks he was pointing at, asking questions. Baraka stood near the front, hands on his hips, listening. Three of the younger ones were practically on top of Andrew’s shoulder.

I looked around at each ranger, and that was when I realized I didn’t see Zayn anywhere.

He wasn’t with the group. He’d drifted back toward the snare itself and was crouched beside it, studying the wire. His fingers hovered over the anchor point without touching it, and his head was tilted like he was trying to get an angle that nobody else had seen.

And Jomo was gone too. On any other morning, that kid would have been pressed up close to the demonstration, listening harder than any of them. Instead, his attention was completely devoted to something in the dirt thirty meters away.

I watched Zayn’s head come up. He looked toward Jomo for a long beat, weighing something. Then he stood and walked out to where Jomo was crouched, and the two of them bent over whatever Jomo had found.

Something was there. The way they held themselves told me that much.

I left the training to Andrew and Cole and crossed the open ground toward the two of them. Sarah was close enough that she could see where I was headed, but she stayed where she was.

Zayn looked up as I reached them.

“The snare,” he said. “It’s crude.”

“How so?”

“The wire is looped awkwardly—too loose at the base, too tight at the neck. A real poacher would not set a snare like this. Someone who does this for a living knows how to anchor the wire so the animal can’t work it free, and they know how to set the gauge so the loop closes cleanly.” He shook his head. “This was set by someone who’s never done it before. They got lucky with this zebra.”

I looked at the snare. I’d walked right past it twenty minutes ago and seen it only for the weapon it was. Zayn had seen craftsmanship—or the absence of it.

“And this.” Jomo spoke so quietly I had to lean in. He pointed at the ground in front of him without looking up. “Here.”

I crouched beside him. It took me a moment to see it. The ground was scuffed and tracked over, boot prints and drag marks layered on top of one another.