Page 73 of Captive

“I’m refusing your diagnosis. Dr. Cho decides if they unload. If they do, I’ll examine them in the order they need.”

“I’m the veterinarian of record for this shipment.”

“Then your name should be somewhere the state can find it.”

It isn’t. His company is on the cabinet schedule. My name is on everything that carries legal responsibility. He built it so he gets the access and I get the blame.

Five years ago, he did the same thing with a different piece of paper. He’s older now. His hair is whiter. He still thinks being the one talking is the same thing as being right.

“They unload into the marked pens,” Dr. Cho says. “Your paper doesn’t count.”

Warren steps closer to me while Dr. Cho reads the paper. Close enough that the state tech glances up. His voice drops, just for me.

“I heard about the line camp,” he says. “Four nights. And you went back. Sofia, sweetheart. You always did confuse being held with being wanted.”

For five years, a sentence like that would have gone into me like a hook and stayed there.

I look at him. There’s a tremor in his left hand he’s trying to hide by holding the case.

“The man who held me told the county exactly what he did,” I say, loud enough for the tech to hear. “In writing. On camera. In front of his family. You’ve never told the truth about anything you did to me in your life.” I turn back to the trailer. “That’s the difference. Step back. You’re in my lane.”

He steps back.

I don’t let myself feel anything about it until later. But my hands are steady. That’s new.

* * *

The state tech photographs the trailer seal before the driver breaks it. Vale’s two technicians climb down from his truck. One is taller and keeps looking at the cameras. The other stays by the cab.

Somewhere out past the lights, in the back of a county car on the western rise, Cole is watching this through binoculars and not moving.

I know it the way I knew he was on the other side of that bedroom door. I don’t look toward the rise. If I look, I’ll want to know if he’s all right, and I can’t afford to want anything right now except nineteen cattle breathing normally.

But I know he’s there. It helps more than it should.

The first cow steps down at twelve twenty-seven. Nineteen animals come off in fourteen minutes. The count matches the paper. Three ear-tag colors don’t, and two permanent IDs aren’t listed anywhere. None of them cough. None have runny noses.

At twelve forty-three, I open the two water sources, west from the sealed outside tank, east from the tested ranch hydrant. My treatment cart sits ready with the antidote, fluids, catheters, and blood tubes. Unopened. It isn’t a prediction. It’s what I learned the first time.

Vale opens his case. “My cabinet has the treatment inventory. I need access before their temperatures climb.”

“The cabinet stays shut until the investigator photographs the seal and I ask for something from it,” I say.

“You’re wasting time.”

“Then stop spending it arguing.”

* * *

The tall tech moves while Warren has my eyes. He goes behind the vet truck, opens the stainless cabinet marked VHR-C4, and pulls out a coiled black hose. He looks up at the camera over the valve cage and steps sideways into the strip the old site plan would have left in its blind spot.

He doesn’t know I moved that camera eighteen feet.

“Purge the service reservoir,” Vale says quietly.

They aren’t treating anything. They’re trying to empty that cabinet before the state takes it, and they’re using an old drawing that marks the tank line as a drain.

The tech walks around the outside of the cattle’s space toward the old tank branch. Red tape seals the valve cage. My written plan is clipped right there under a clear cover. He tears through the tape with one gloved hand and couples the hose to the service port and opens the line.