Abruptly a Bear (Suddenly Shifters) by Elva Birch

Author:Elva Birch [Birch, Elva]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-09-05T16:00:00+00:00

13

Logan settled down at the other end of the couch from Anna—just in case he suddenly went all bear again—and paused just long enough to filter through how much of the gritty daily details of a water treatment plant were necessary for his explanation. “Since I was willing to do all those extra hours at the plant, they’ve been training me to take over Brad’s job; he wants to retire, but no one could run the plant without him. They’ve been trying to cram it all in my head the past few months.”

“When were you going to tell me?” Anna asked in a mix of delight and outrage.

“I tried to,” Logan protested. “Your eyes kind of glazed over.” He had to admit that he liked the look of admiration that she shot him now. It felt like she hadn’t really looked at him like that for a while.

“Sorry,” she said sheepishly. “Valves and pressure readings and lift tanks are not in my wheelhouse. You said new training, I didn’t realize it was this kind of new training.” She pulled a throw pillow into her lap and tugged on one of the buttons. “It feels like we’ve been kind of...out of step, you know?”

Logan knew too well. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “Yeah.”

“But you were going to tell me about the water.” She continued to play with the throw pillow, running her fingers through the fringe.

“Right. So you know that we test the water a lot. A lot. I mean, a lot, right? You don’t mess around with clean drinking water. Lawsuits and liability and government agencies and oversight and stuff. The paperwork is always squeaky.”

“A very large settlement,” Anna murmured.

“Well, at the beginning of the week, we all got called into a room and were told that they’d been monitoring a heavy metal contamination—they didn’t call it thallium until later—and the samples for the last month or two were all swept up, along with every single scrap of paper. It was like walking on eggshells for a while; we were all wondering why no one had caught something like that in the inlet samples, even if the output water was clean. But the agency came back and said everything was working perfectly, that there was a minor heavy metal seep somewhere, and that our plant was doing exactly what it should and it sounds like we’re all going to get bonuses, or medals or something.”

“EPA agents Lena and Torque?” Anna theorized.

“No, but...that same kind of men-in-black feeling. Only not wearing black. Just looking like normal ordinary people with clipboards who could probably kill you seven ways with a paperclip.”

“Did you get your records back?” Anna asked.

“Yeah…”

“Yeah, but?”

“Yeah, but,” Logan agreed. “I took a bunch of those samples myself. We send most of the testing itself out to a lab, and I get the results electronically, and they’re printed for the files. But I went back to look at them, and they were different.”

“They falsified data entries?”

“Right down to my handwriting,” Logan said.

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