“Me either,” Maizie called out softly from above Kenna. “But I have something you probably want to see.”
Kenna shifted to the edge of the chair. Zeyla came over with her hand out. Kenna clasped her forearm, and Zeyla helped her stand. “Thanks.”
Zeyla saluted her with coffee. “I’ll put the oven on and start the bacon.”
“Don’t smoke out the RV like last time.”
Zeyla grinned. “I’m happy to make breakfast, but you have to accept the consequences.”
Kenna turned away and reached up to grab the ledge by Maizie. There was a ladder, but she tucked it up there with her overnight so it wasn’t in the way.
Maizie leaned over and looked down at her. “Just don’t start doing chin-ups. Everyone already thinks you’re a superhero. You have nothing to prove.”
“I could if I wanted to.”
Zeyla said, “I highly doubt that.”
Kenna frowned at her. “Shh.”
Zeyla snorted, hitting the button to ignite the oven. Kenna heard the gas whoosh to life. “Crack the window, at least.” When she turned back to Maizie, she said, “What did you find?”
“I couldn’t sleep because I was thinking about what you said. You know, about theDominatussoftware that lets them fake a voice call. It’s probably a whole lot easier on the phone than it is with a video because you don’t have to worry about lag. You justtype in the response, and the computer sends it in the person’s voice.”
Kenna bit her lip. “I really didn’t want to believe the phone call was faked and I wasn’t really talking to Ellayna. I don’t know if it would be better or worse for me to be right. They’d still be gone.”
“And they would likely be with people we would’ve said we trusted,” Zeyla pointed out.
“I still don’t have enough information to let it go.” She asked Maizie, “Do you have a strong reason to believe the call was faked?”
Just the question left an odd taste in her mouth.
It certainly did sound like this was some kind of test. If MSI really was working withDominatus? She didn’t even know what she was going to do. Ramon had been fed to the wolves. Ellayna and her family were caught in the cross fire.
Maizie shifted her laptop far enough to the edge that Kenna could see it and bent the screen forward. “Look at the audio.”
On the black screen were two thin horizontal white lines. Between them was a red scribble of waveforms.
Maizie said, “This is her talking, leaving you that voicemail. I stripped out only her voice, and there’s nothing else.”
“Like the mic just picked up her voice really well with no outside background noise.”
“That’s basically impossible. At the least, it would pick up the air moving when she breathed. But she said her brother was there, right? How was he totally silent while she was leaving this frantic message?”
Zeyla said, “Maybe he was asleep.”
Kenna frowned. “It’s hard to believe it was literally silent wherever she was.”
“Seems more like the recording was made in a soundproof booth of some kind. That’s the only explanation for why there are no background sounds. No noise. Nothing ambient.”
“Or someone worked on the recording after and stripped it out.”
“I’d have to record a call live to be able to analyze that, but it’s possible they recorded the message and then sent it to your voicemail.” Maizie scrunched up her nose. “But how did they do the phone call? That was live. You’d have noticed an odd delay.”
“There wasn’t one.” Kenna lowered her arms before her hands went numb. “Maybe they used the voicemail to create a baseline to then fake the call. But why do any of this? They were taken, and we know it’s MSI who is behind it. They’re the ones harassing us.” She flinched. “Are they the ones who killed Gabby? Because that’s insane.”
“Same SUVs, right? That’s what Jax said.” Zeyla lifted the butter knife she was holding and stuck it in her mouth to lick off whatever was on it. Looked like sauce she’d been spreading on white bread.
“The same kind. There are a lot of SUVs in the world.”
