"Talk to you then, over." Xaiden waited for a few minutes to see if they'd reply again, then rushed out and ran back to the fence line. Once he'd slipped past the gap in the fence and ran a couple hundred feet away, he tapped frantically at his imprint while catching his breath. "Call Jax," he ordered aloud while he bent over gasping for air. I should do more cardio! he thought as he calmed his burning lungs while the phone rang.
"Hello?" Jax answered on the last ring, his voice groggy.
"Were you sleeping?" Xaiden asked, surprised, then quickly continued on, "Never mind that! You need to come right now! It's urgent. I found Reader."
Time was passing quickly as Jax and Xaiden waited in the cabin. Xaiden was studying the radio shorthand table Jax handed him, while Jax was groggily yet frantically tweaking different things with the radio. Jax's occasional sniffles and sneezes worried Xaiden a bit. He hoped that Ewen's and now Jax's sicknesses weren't catching. It was an odd time of year for colds, and allergies during Flowering were extremely uncommon but they did spend a lot of time around dust from all types of materials breaking down, so it could just be from all the time spent in the cabin too.
"You sure you should be tweaking with this right before we speak to them again?" Xaiden cautioned as Jax unplugged some wires and moved them around.
"I know what I'm doing here," Jax said firmly. "I'm just making sure we have enough signal here to support transmitting and receiving vocal frequencies." He adjusted some dials and added, "You clearly haven't paid attention to anything I've told you about this thing."
"Hey, I'm sorry. I honestly didn't expect this to happen, and certainly not while you weren't here. I mean, did you? Honestly?"
Jax shook his head. "No, and I know. I'm not mad or anything." Jax sighed, which turned into a cough. "But I did tell you that we can't do vocal range yet and you just had to go and promise it on a short timetable no less."
"I genuinely don't remember that." Xaiden apologized. "I'm really sorry, I'm sure we can just explain it to them and keep using morse. It'll be much easier with two people anyway. You don't need to push yourself and the machine, we risk losing them entirely if things go wrong."
"It's okay, I'm done now." Jax said as he plopped down limply into the mattress from the top bunk, still strewn on the ground of the bunker. "Good thing I had already figured this out since last time we talked and had the parts with me," he said groggily.
"How do you know if it'll work?" Xaiden asked, hoping he wasn't planning on sleeping through the meeting with Reader. He must be really sick for him to be acting like this. Xaiden thought worriedly.
"Go ahead and test it." Jax waved his hand towards the desk with the radio. "Maybe she's still around and will answer you earlier than you agreed."