19
“Ready?”
Cage wasn’t. “Almost.”
He pulled the long, slim cylinder from the soil, leaving a three-inch-diameter hole and a few wriggling bodies in its wake.
Cutting earthworms in half shouldn't make him feel bad, but it did. He felt bad when he cut roaches in half, too. And the roaches down here grew to an unusually large size. Cutting them in half seemed a cruel and unusual punishment.
As he pulled the last bit of the long metal device loose—heavy with dirt and half-earthworms—he held it out toward Leah. “Here.”
She stood with a tablet in one hand, waiting. It had taken the two of them almost twenty minutes to push through all the layers of dirt and embedded rock, and even small invertebrates. But it took less than twenty seconds to activate the plunger on the top and release the soil—along with anything that was trapped inside—into the clear, long container Leah had waiting on the ground.
“Hold on,” Cage told her, grabbing his phone and getting ready, as she stepped back and let him take his pictures.
“Got it?” she asked before slowly sliding the metal cylinder out from under the sample. As she did, the dirt fell apart, separating itself as Cage took a few more pictures and noted the measurements.
Together, he and Leah started to poke at the dirt, using thin, pointed metal rods to see what layers would crumble with a little prodding and which simply held their shape.
“We need light,” he commented, looking over toward Micah, who was working in the small tent their team had set up on the far side of the field.
He and Leah each picked up one end of the now heavy container, leaving the tools in the grass. Preserving their sample was far more important than cleaning up.
The red canvas top of the pop-up tent stood out against the landscape, looking as if they'd stolen it from somebody's back patio. But right now, the legs were tied and weighted with heavy-duty sandbags, and the top, though vented, still managed to flap noisily as the winds picked up.
The two of them stood by, holding the sample between them. Just as they arrived at Izzy’s table and placed it under the light, Chithra blazed into the small tent and made a sharp motion that they were to take everything down.
“Now,” she told them, the tension in her voice surprising him. But he didn’t get to ask as she snapped into the general air around them. “Everything!”
“It's barely noon,” Cage muttered it to himself, but Chithra gave him a harsh look, then pointed skyward as though he hadn't been paying attention. The fact was, he hadn't.
The clouds had been dark since last night, but nothing had happened, so he'd gone about his work. But his manager was right. The reason they needed the tent with the light in it to see their work was because the sky was so overcast—even at barely-noon.
Radnor had been reluctant to send them home again after the last time he’d miscalculated, setting them behind. Honestly, they could have worked through the rain. It wouldn't have slowed them down. According to Radnor, a little water wouldn’t hurt anyone. So now, Cage wondered why Chithra had suddenly ordered them to shut it down.
“What do we do with the samples?” he asked.
“Mark them and box them.” But Chithra was already headed to the next team before Leah had said, “But our half earthworms will die.”
Chithra turned back, her harsh words slicing the conversation with Sarah and Kevin. “Put them in the box!”
With a shrug, Cage sent Leah back to the site to pick up their tools while he struggled to label the half-finished work. His eye kept dashing to the sky. Where was his sister?
Despite the strange request, it hadn’t taken him very long to box and mark everything. He was immediately pressed into service helping to take down the tent. It required four of them to get it down with the wind fighting them and attempting to lift the top right off the poles.
Today, he'd worn his jacket over the T-shirt, and it flapped around him the same as the tent. Cage was relatively certain that his clothing would have made a noise if he could have heard it over the harsh thumping of the canvas.
They collapsed the tent accordion style, and as each of the four of them walked their leg toward a center point, he looked over his shoulder and back toward the other side of the field. But he didn’t see Joule.
She was here on site, he knew, but he forced his attention back to the task at hand and let Micah hold the heavy, collapsed tent. He and Izzy used Velcro straps to tie it.
“Where’s the bag?” Kevin asked as he looked at then pointed to the ground at his feet. “It was right here.”
It took a few moments before Leah returned and figured it out. She pointed and commented, “It’s stuck in the tree.”
As Cage turned to see where she was looking, he spotted the red bag plastered halfway up the trunk, the wind holding it in place.
“I've got it!” Leah was running off before anyone could stop her.
Cage’s heart beat a little easier as Leah returned with the matching canvas bag, and the three of them slipped the folded tent down inside, pulling the drawstring.
“What else do we need to get?” he asked, even as he stubbed his toe on one of the sandbags still sitting where the post had been.
“I left the main field bag,” Leah commented, “but we can grab it on the way back.”
Between the tools and tent and sandbags, the six of them could barely manage to carry their gear back to the car as the wind whipped their hair around and plastered their clothing to their bodies.
It might have been fun, had he been younger
