"I have Kai."
The voice on the other end seemed to be using a voice changer, and somewhere in the background was a mechanical whirring.
Cole silently switched over to speaker phone. "Okay then."
"If you want him back, you'll have to do a few things for us."
As the voice detailed their threat, Cole pulled up an app for recording phone calls.
"Sorry, can you go over that again – you know, so everyone's clear?"
Their demands seemed random and unrelated. They wanted Jay's memory machine, for one. How they knew about it was almost a mystery considering how little Kai had seemed to understand before.
Though he was shushed early on in his protests, Jay kicked up a bit of a fuss upon hearing this. He had spent countless hours working on the contraption. Cole mouthed that they'd talk about it later, and luckily he seemed to catch on.
The list also contained a handful of scrolls, which they noted down though they had no intention of fulfilling their demands.
A young child screeched in the background of the call.
"What was that?" Cole asked.
Instead of replying, the caller hung up.
"That sounded too young to be Kai," Nya noted. "You don't think they have other kids there too, do you?"
"Goodness!" Jay exclaimed. "Those poor babies. We need to rescue them."
"We don't even know where they are," Zane interjected, "but we need to have a plan before they come to pick up their ransom."
[Author's note: I'm bored in quarantine, so here's a poorly written break from my scholarship essays.]
