Through Glass: Episode Four by Rebecca Ethington Read Free Book Online

intruder, my social responses left handicapped
thanks to my years in seclusion.
    I leaned forward as the static seemed
to equalize, the white noise fading into nothing and letting
Bridget’s voice flow free.
    “ Travis?” she asked, her
voice as strained and stressed as I felt.
    “ Bridget? Baby? I’m here.
I’m here. Please tell me you’re okay.”
    “ I’m okay. It was a clean
shot, nothing a little rest can’t heal.” Her voice shook as she
spoke, the low tones making it clear it was probably worse than
what she was letting on, but I knew Travis wasn’t going to let the
thought cross his mind. Not now.
    “ Thank God,” Travis moaned,
the joy that she was okay soothing the tense fear I was sure had
been poisoning him for the last few hours.
    He pressed his head against the phone,
his body curling as he attempted to get closer to her, as if being
closer to the phone could help him accomplish that.
    “ Abran is pissed,” Bridget
continued after a moment, the tones in her voice changing as she
moved to what she obviously called for in the first place. “He
doesn’t believe me and locked me out of the system.”
    “ He locked you out?” Travis
asked, a deep surprise in his voice that I didn’t
understand.
    “ Yeah.” She tried to laugh,
but the sound was weak before she began to gasp for air, the
attempt to laugh obviously making it hard to breath.
    I listened to her gasp, the sound
making my heart pinch in a worry I couldn’t comprehend. Travis
glanced up to me at the noise, his eyes deep and wide before they
returned to the small box he held in his hands. The message in his
look only increased my worry, my knowledge that something more was
wrong with Bridget than what she was telling us.
    “ But he’s an idiot,” she
said as she caught her breath. “You can’t lock out the person who
created the program.”
    “ That’s my girl,” Travis
responded, his pride overtaking his worry for the
moment.
    “ Listen, I don’t have a lot
of time, but I needed to warn you. From what I can tell, he’s
moving up the attack on the main Tar house.”
    “ He’s moving it up?” Travis
asked, suddenly alarmed.
    “ Yeah.”
    “ When?” The soft quality of
his voice had left with that one word, his jaw now only tight and
strained as his back tensed and straightened.
    “ I’m not sure. I’m still
trying to break that encryption. Either that or it’s not in the
computer…”
    My back straightened as Travis’s had,
leaving us sitting still and stiff as we looked at each other,
Bridget’s voice fading to nothing between us.
    “ Are we going to make it in
time?” I asked, my voice shaking as I asked the question I could
see repeated in Travis’s eyes.
    Travis said nothing. He only flexed
his jaw, his teeth clenching together with a snap as he stared at
me, his eyes mulling over every answer, every game plan. I just sat
still as I watched his eyes, watched the thoughts move through
them.
    “ Not only that,” Bridget
continued, her voice breaking through the strained stare my brother
had fixed me with, “but he’s sending the black team after
you.”
    Travis stood at her statement. What I
had perceived as fear and anger in him before was nothing compared
to what I saw now. His hand shook as he held the phone in front of
him, his muscles rippling as he looked away, his eyes darting
through the dark as if waiting for an assassin to come through the
line of light. And judging by what Bridget had said, that was
exactly what was going to happen. The term—the black team—didn’t
sound promising at all.
    All thought of the shortened time
table was forgotten as I watched Travis’s reaction to Bridget’s
words. A slither of fear worked its way through me, twisting my
stomach and tightening my joints.
    “ What’s the black team?” I
asked, fearing the question as much as I feared the
answer.
    “ It’s the elite team Abran
sends when he wants something dead,” Travis answered, his voice a
hard