“I don’t understand,” I answered.
Why wasn’t he—wait.
Stop.
Think.
Calvin was a soldier. He had a decade of experience working overseas in hostile situations. He would have been trained to survive dangerous encounters. To document the details of his environment. And in the worst scenario imaginable, he would be able to assess whether escape would be possible. Belatedly I realized he wasn’t wasting his time or sparse energy on sweet nothings, nor was he confused and babbling incoherently. He was telling me everything he could about his location. Calvin had already determined he couldn’t escape without intervention.
I jumped to my feet, ran to the desk, and started writing down everything he said on the complimentary notepad. “You can see the sky,” I said, clarifying that I now understood. “You’re high up—higher than the surrounding buildings. There’s old machines. What else?”
Calvin cleared his throat as he tried to speak again. Every unsteady breath he took sent me into a near tailspin, but I had to keep my shit together. If I lost it now, Calvin had zero chance.
“Calvin?” I pressed. “Can you hear anything?”
“Hum,” he murmured.
“Like… like a person humming?”
“Ngh… steady hum.” The phone clattered like it’d been dropped. I could hear Calvin swear from the distance. “Baby.”
“I’m here.”
“It was bumpy.” He sounded as if he’d fallen and was on the floor, close to the phone. Calvin made another pained sound. “Can’t…remember.”
“You’re doing great,” I insisted.
“Bare brick.”
Brick?
Brick helped, actually.
“Calvin—the floors. What do the floors look like?”
He made a sound, as if consciousness was becoming more difficult to hold on to by the second. “Wood. Dusty. Broken.”
Without warning, Calvin gave an unintelligible shout into the phone. There was a struggle, like someone had joined him in an unfair match of human strength—and Calvin was on the losing side. And all at once, the distorted sounds silenced.
“Calvin?” I called. “Calvin?”
An inhumanly deep and robotic voice spoke suddenly—one of those voice distorters. Stereotypical in all the worst ways. “Party C’s behavior is somewhat remiss. You have twelve hours to collect your reward.”
“T-twelve?No!” I shot a look back at the alarm clock. “I still have twenty-four hours. I know what you want—the skull of Edward Drinker Cope. I’ll find it. But I need the full forty-eight hours you promised!”
“Should Party B fail to collect on his sum, will he wage a bitter war against Party A?”
“I won’t fail!”
“It would be such a sensational scandal. Until the very end.”
“Tell me where Calvin is,” I demanded. “I’ll get the skull. I’ll meet you there.”
The robotic voice laughed.
Beep.
Beep.
