Chapter Text
“Did you hear that?” Cole asked, putting his arm out to stop Kai next to him.
“Hear what?” Kai strained his ears to hear whatever Cole was talking about before glaring slightly. “Cole, it’s creepy enough here without you doing that.”
Cole shook his head and scanned their surroundings for any movement in the shadows. “I know I heard something… Some sort of cry or something?”
Kai pressed his lips together and glanced around, forming a small flame in his hand to help cut the shadows. “Well, what ever it is, I don—”
He was cut off by a small yelp that both of them were able to hear that time, along with a rattling of metal.
“There it is,” Cole said, pointing at a door down the hall. “It sounds like it’s coming from that room.”
Cole barely even finished talking before Kai was rushing ahead and grabbing for the door in question, and Cole just sighed and ran after, catching up right as Kai slipped into the room.
“Oh, that’s… You’ve gotta be kidding…”
The room was darker than the hallway had been, but before Kai’s fire went out in his movement to the corner, Cole was able to make out the shape of a cage with a person in it. “Is that seriously what it looks like?”
“There’s a lock on the cage,” Kai said instead of answering the question posed. “Think you can break it?”
Cole didn’t think twice before grabbing the padlock and ripping it apart with a surge of power, allowing Kai to open the cage with minimal fumbling. “Uh, do you mind if I ask what exactly your plan is here?”
Kai continued to ignore Cole’s questions, all his focus on the kid curled up in the cage. “Hey, buddy. We’re gonna get you out of here, okay?”
Yeah, Cole should’ve seen that coming. Still, he didn’t stop Kai from gently pulling the kid out of the cage, carefully arranging the blanket he had around himself so he stayed covered in his arms. “I’m not sure we’re going to do much more investigating with you holding them like that.”
“We weren’t finding anything, anyway,” Kai said, carefully standing up with a firm hold on the kid. “I’m not leaving them here.”
Cole shook his head as he stood up with Kai. “Of course not. I just was hoping we’d find… More, I guess?”
“This is plenty. Plus we don’t know what the others found.”
Unable to disagree, Cole nodded and pressed his finger against the comm unit in his hood to contact the others. “Hey, guys. How's the computer search going?”
“We've found a few things,” Nya said over the comms. “What about you guys?”
“We definitely found something. We're ready to rendezvous if you guys are.”
“Uh, yeah, we can do that.” Before Cole could even begin to question it, Nya suddenly continued, “Wait, Jay, what are yo—”
Cole blinked at the sudden cut off from (presumably) Nya releasing her comm button before looking at Kai. “Sounds like Jay may be doing something stupid.”
“You needed to hear him on the comms to figure that out?” Kai chuckled and moved a hand to cup the back of the kid’s head. “Let’s just head back to the van.”
Even handicapped by Kai carrying the kid, their group made it back to their van hidden in the neighboring alleyway before any of the others did, though not by much, with Zane, Nya, and Jay walked up as Cole opened the side door. “How’d the computer search go?”
“We got this!” Jay announced, holding up some sort of metal piece and looking way too pleased with himself for how Nya was glaring at him. “It’ll be easier to decrypt it at home.”
Cole pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. “Please tell me you didn’t fry it in the process.”
“That stands to be seen…” Nya answered, still glaring.
“Many of the files on the computer we found were damaged,” Zane said. “Most we could find was something a Subject 770-YD, but we were unable to find too many details before you contacted us.”
Kai hummed and adjusted his hold on the kid in his arms. “Think that’s what we found?”
That drew everyone’s attention to what Kai was holding.
Jay, ever the expert at keeping his mouth shut, was first to respond. “Is that a kid? Where’d you get a kid?”
“Found him in the lab.” Kai rubbed a hand along the kid’s back as the kid turned his head to look at the others with red eyes. “Pretty much the only thing we found, and whatever they were doing with them couldn’t be good.”
“Agreed,” Cole said. “Let’s get back home and go from there.”
Kai didn’t need to be told twice before he was climbing into the back of the van, making sure to keep one arm carefully wrapped around the kid as he sat down on the bench seat along the side. Jay and Nya climbed in after and sat down on either side of him.
And with the interior lights of the van on, everyone was able to notice something about the kid.
“Uh, Kai?” Nya asked, leaning over to better see what they had noticed just barely poking out of his hair. “Are those horns?”
“… It definitely looks like it. And I think there’s something else…” Kai removed the blanket he had over the kid, revealing a pair of black wings folded on his bare back.
“Looks like Lloyd is some sort of genetic experiment or something,” Jay said. Seeing the raised brows from the others, he added, “Look, I’m not calling a kid by an ID number.”
Well, no one could disagree with that.
“Don’t know where you got that from, but I guess it works,” Cole said with a shrug. “Kai, I take it you’re good with him for the ride home?” When he got a nod in response, Cole turned to Zane and added, “Let’s get going, then. We can get home and do a debrief with Wu, and then you guys can check out the hard drive tomorrow.”
When he got four responses of agreement, he shut the van door he was next to and went to climb into the front passenger seat while Zane climbed into the driver’s seat and started the van. Despite the interior lights of the van having been turned off, Cole still turned in his seat to look back at Lloyd as Kai adjusted the blanket back around the kid.
Hopefully they’d be able to figure out what Lloyd had been doing there soon.