Izzy was probably only a few years older than him and his sister, but this wasn't her first project with Helio. Her answer was solid and informed, and he found he was willing to learn the ropes from her.
“But the panels don't break open,” Cage said. “I mean, they aren’t supposed to. We don’t break them open each day to make them work.”
“True, but the breakage problem is twofold,” Izzy replied, placing the mouse she’d just tagged back into his container and making her notes on the corresponding sticker as she talked.
It was all second nature to her. And Cage, who’d almost let a small batch back into the field without recorded tick-checks, hoped he would grow as confident as she was, and soon. He turned back to his lab notebook, double-checking everything and making sure that his conversation wasn’t degrading his work quality. Melinda wouldn’t stand for that.
As he opened another lid and placed the proper marks on that sticker, he listened to Izzy. “And the F6 tornado that just came through Alabama would have likely cracked open some panels on a field like ours.”
“But that didn’t happen here,” Cage replied.
“Right, and that’s part of why we're building here. But F6 tornadoes do now exist.” She turned to Melinda. “Do you know if that one hit any solar arrays?”
“There aren't many solar arrays in Alabama to begin with,” Melinda lamented as she tapped on the computer, entering her own latest round of data.
“Anyway,” Izzy went on, “tornado or not, what's inside is dangerous. The second issue is what happens once a panel’s life is over. The older solar panels—dating back to the ‘70s—aren’t in use anymore. And they're so toxic, it’s horrifying! In general, the panels do last a long time, but we still don’t know what to do with them when they’re spent. And the protesters don’t seem to understand that the pollution from what we're doing is far, far less than the environmental damage caused by things like coal and fracking.”
She paused just long enough to take a breath and Cage found himself smiling at her happily delivered lesson.
“Right now I, personally, think water is the cleanest energy source. But it's not going to be enough, so here we are with solar.”
“So what about our panels? Are they dangerous when broken?” Cage asked.
“That’s exactly the point of all this research,” Melinda chimed in. “Specifically, that’s on us as the environmental team.” Melinda smiled at him. “Once we're finished cataloging the wildlife, we get to crack open a few of these bad boys and see what damage the inside causes.”
Cage raised an eyebrow. He hadn’t known that.
“The trick is to make the most solar energy with the least amount of environmental damage,” Izzy said. She went on about cadmium and landfills and drainage problems.
It made sense and, while it was more than what he’d asked, he loved a good, nerdy conversation. Putting the lizard he held back into his container, he double-checked the sticker against his notes … again. Though he'd finished the six that he’d brought into the tent with him, field workers had arrived with fifteen more animals while they'd been talking.
Melinda didn’t tell him to leave, so he picked up another specimen as Melinda countered Izzy. “But none of that is happening here. So yes, the solar array is going to cover part of the field and it is going to change the environment a bit. And it is an eyesore. But barring a massive accident, the protests don’t make sense.”
She offered a heavy sigh. Maybe because she’d had to face down one of the most intimidating of the protesters this morning. “All this work we are doing is to keep the array going—producing power for them—even in the event of harsh weather or other heavy damage. So all the things you’re talking about, that’s still not happening here.”
Izzy seemed increasingly frustrated. Cage grasped his field mouse tightly so that he wouldn’t have to watch it as he looked up to see her expression. Her tight, dark curls were scraped back into a ponytail and her T-shirt proclaimed that “Penguins don’t smoke weed.” It made Cage question the snarky shirt he’d thought about wearing today. He’d rejected it for being even more unprofessional than his national park T. Maybe he could have gotten away with it.
Izzy waved her hands—luckily without a creature in her grasp—and seemed not to notice that Cage was watching her more closely now. But her tone matched her face in aggravation.
“Those protesters weren’t protesting general pollution in the future! It wasn’t a ‘save the environment from the evil corporation’ thing. They were acting like our very presence here is tainting their water, their Earth, and their sky.”
“Well,” Melinda sighed, “there's enough truth in it and enough questions that, when they look stuff up, it seems reasonable. A good Google search will support that. There is antimony and cadmium in most solar panel glass, so I get that. However, the real problem with the protest here isn’t any of that. It’s that it's personal.”
9
The knock at the door was hard and heavy, so Joule took extra caution as she pushed herself out of the deep leather couch and headed toward the front of the house.
The night had grown so dark, she wasn’t able to see who was on the porch, other than that it was someone relatively large. The only way to find out was to open the door.
She threw the bolt as the pounding continued. She was speaking even as she pulled the thick, wooden door back. “Hello?”
“Where is she?” the man demanded, his head craning one way and then the next, trying to see past Joule. He looked vaguely familiar, but the threat in his voice was more concerning than
