At first, he’d thought himself happy with the arrangement with Helio Systems Technologies but now he wondered if he actually liked the work, or if he just liked that it kept him close to Joule. Now, marching across the too-hot and too-humid field, with four plastic containers barely tucked under his arm, he felt that he’d made the right decision for him, too.
The field mice scrambled for purchase in the plastic boxes. His own crappy writing labeled three of the stickers on the containers. Though Alabama wasn't home, the job was becoming where he belonged.
“Hey Cage,” Leah called out as he almost stepped on her. She’d been down in a particularly tall patch of grass, nearly hidden. “Want to take two more?”
Checking his location, he shifted the boxes. Balancing six wasn't easy, but they weren’t heavy, just awkward, and the animals tended to shift their weight suddenly. His job was to not drop them. He’d done that once before and felt like such a shit. So he double-checked this time. “Two more mice?”
“Yup. Tiny little guys,” she replied, holding her containers aloft so he could see inside.
It wasn’t far to the tent now. “I can make it.” He shifted his own containers, letting her stack another two on top. Steadying them with his chin, he continued carefully picking his way to the main lab tent.
“That's quite a haul you've got there,” Melinda greeted him, back to her usual cheerful self after going full badass bitch at the protesters this morning.
“Not all mine.”
“Everything's initialed?” Melinda asked, as though that wasn't the standard protocol, and as though she wouldn't murder them all if everything wasn’t filled out properly and double-checked.
“Of course.” He’d checked each of his own stickers before stacking the boxes. And while he hadn’t made a big show of it, he’d checked Sarah’s and Leah’s work, too, before agreeing to bring their samples in. He’d seen Melinda go off on one of the newbies with improperly labeled catches, and while these weren’t his boxes, he was the one delivering them. That made him equally responsible—and he wouldn’t want Melinda to turn on him the way they’d witnessed that morning.
“We're getting behind,” Izzy called out from the other side of the tent, her gloved hands wrapped around a lizard as she removed him from his box for initial weights and measures. Then she looked up at Cage with a gleam in her eye. “Want to stay in the main tent? Help with data? You know you want to.”
“Sure!” he laughed. He held up one finger, grabbed his walkie, and asked Sarah and Mitch if they needed him more in the field than the tent needed him.
He breathed a sigh of relief when they said they could spare him. As much fun as trapping was, it was in the broad sun. The tent was in the shade. Staying here through the midday inferno would be a blessing.
Within a few minutes, he was elbows-deep in tiny animals, measuring them, weighing them, tagging them. Though Cage found the work interesting, the animals were not fans. He felt for them, and it diminished his joy in the data. He next transferred every number from his notebook into the one of the two laptops set up for statistical analysis.
“Be sure to do a body check for ticks,” Melinda called out.
Shit!
There wasn’t a column for that, and he’d forgotten. But luckily, none of his boxes had been sent back out into the field yet. So three minutes later, he was giving a particularly irritated field mouse a full parasite check when Izzy yelped from the other side of the tent.
8
Cage laughed as Izzy scrambled to catch the mouse that had made a break for it. Her words rang clear through the heavy air. “Little suckers are jumpy today!”
She called out, “Gotcha!” and Cage watched as she covered the little mouse with both cupped hands. Then he laughed again when she jumped as he got away.
“No, no, no!” she yelled, chasing her tiny escapee around the table and down one of the legs.
“Did you get him? Do you need help?” Melinda called out. She and Cage would have both rushed to help, but each had their own tiny animal in their hands.
“Got him!” Izzy hollered out and held the mouse aloft in her victory. But the comedy only lasted a moment before they all turned back to their own work.
Still, the interruption seemed to provide the break Cage had been looking for. Trying to sound casual, he asked Melinda, “So why did the protesters think that the solar array is going to cause water pollution?”
Too much of the protest didn’t make sense to him, but this was maybe the easiest, most straight-forward question to ask. He not only wanted the answer but wanted to see if he got shut down just for asking…
He and Joule had researched Helio Systems before they joined. Staying together was a priority, and Helio offered that, but they hadn’t been willing to join any company that was adding to environmental changes in the wrong direction. He’d seen the damage some corporations were doing, and there was no salary he could fathom that would make it worth his while to be part of that.
Melinda took a moment to answer, and it made him wonder if she knew. She seemed to be hunting for the right thing to say, but even so it came out a little half-assed. “Everything causes pollution. Everything that changes the environment, that is. And this is no exception.”
Though she still held a lizard in her hand, she seemed to have forgotten as she gestured with it toward the open field. The tiny, blue-striped reptile didn't appreciate being waved around, so he wrapped his little claws tighter around her glove. She didn’t notice.
“Is that really it?” Cage asked before thinking. “I was assuming it’s the paint from the pylons leaching into the fields. Or something like that.”
From the other side of the tent, Izzy joined
