Cosega Sphere (The Cosega Sequence Book 4) Read Online Free Page A

had also encountered Topper, an old family friend killed by Vatican agents, “out on the plane,” as they called the part of the Sphere where they found the dead.
    Gale didn’t call them dead anymore. She preferred “departed,” since they seemed to have only left Earth but still existed somewhere. So far Gale had not encountered the Stadler brothers, two more friends lost to the fight to save the Sphere, but she’d had several long talks with Larsen.
    Larsen had been Rip’s closest friend, and technically the one who really found the Sphere. He and Gale had also dated for a brief period before she met Rip. Gale recalled the first time, after Larsen’s death, when she had encountered her old friend inside the Sphere. He had appeared as a projection from the Eysen-Sphere, and although Gale believed in life after death, she had seen him shot to death by a Vatican agent only a few feet away from her in the old Las Trampas church in New Mexico only months earlier, so the initial jolt left her stunned.
    “I wondered if I’d see you and Rip again,” were Larsen’s first words.
    Gale gasped, and then just stared.
    “Don’t be so surprised,” Larsen continued. “You should know by now that the Eysen contains everything.”
    “Rip’s asleep,” Gale had said. “Should I wake him?”
    “Next time. He’d only be jealous.” Larsen smiled. “Rip thinks he’s an archaeologist, but one day he’ll realize that he’s just wandering in the dark, limited by the physical.”
    “Where are you? What’s it like?”
    “I’m not sure how to answer that. The earthly plane is like a pinpoint in the universe. I’m everywhere, as well as being there, just not physically. And Gale, it’s good. I can see and feel everything. I explore time. It’s beyond anything I could even make you understand.”
    Larsen swirled around and split into billions of points of light.
    “I am able to appear as you remember me by connecting our auras at a subatomic level, the makeup of human form as occupied by the energetic particles far smaller than what physicists call quarks and leptons. I mean infinitely tinier.”
    His voice filled with excitement, but still came out as a loud whisper. Gale couldn’t decide if it was a dream.
    “The soul is real, and it consists of trillions of universes within each of us. It’s a circle both within us, and what we are within.”
    And then he was gone.
    Her thoughts went back to Rip and what they still had to do. ExSpheriences were one thing, but somehow they needed to find the missing layer of the Cosega Sequence and answer the five Cosegan mysteries.
    Recent discoveries by Rip and the team in Hawaii might bring them much closer to all of it, as well as the solution for stopping the Death Divinations. Rip had made his latest trip to confirm the new theories which might finally grant them full access to the ultimate power contained within the Sphere.
    It holds everything ever , Gale thought. Surely it can save my daughter, too.
 
    —O—
    Harmer, a cigarette held tightly in her lips, met them on the helipad. The stocky woman, who looked older than her age of thirty-nine, was like a second mother to Cira. A special bond had formed as she escorted her to and from school every day.
    Always on guard, always knowing there were threats that could destroy them in a blink, Harmer had never figured the incident would be a kid with scissors on the playground. Gale could see the pain in her eyes as Harmer relayed everything that had happened and then stamped out her cigarette.
    Kruse checked the sky again as they ducked inside the modern, one-story building. He knew time was working against them. While they probably still had a couple of hours, there could easily be a surprise at any moment.
    He eyed everyone they passed. Anyone could be an agent, a leak, a mistake. He could feel it all crashing in on them. They were wasting time. They needed to get Gale out of there. The only thing working in their favor was