Into Focus (Focus Series Book 1) Read Online Free

more than willing to listen once I had explained
the situation to him, and gave me complete, concise answers.
    He didn’t even question how I had managed to
hide in his backseat for a half hour in the middle of the desert.
Or why I was naked. Honestly, that would have been the first thing
out of my mouth if it had happened to me, but at that point, I
don’t think he was thinking about that. He was probably just
grateful that I had gone out of my way to keep his family out of
things.
    But that didn’t stop him from protesting
severely when I told him to strip to his underwear and left him on
the side of the road with a water bottle and stole his car. I
simply leveled my gaze at him and stared for a few moments before
he complied.
    God bless the cowardly.
    I drove the rest of the way in silence,
comfortable in my new disguise. Josh was a lot shorter than me, and
it felt odd to be in such a small, skinny body. It was actually odd
that it even felt odd, considering that I had been a freaking
lizard a little while ago, but my mental state isn’t really all
that important. Anyway, the suit fit me well, and I wouldn’t have
any trouble getting into the Blackstone office. It would be a
couple of hours at least before anyone happened to spot Josh on the
side of the road. He’d be fine as long as he didn’t guzzle the
water down in the first few minutes. The desert got hot really
early, but if he had lived here long enough he’d know what to
do.
    At the end of the day, it really just wasn’t
the guy’s fault. He had a job, and was just a paper pusher. His
company didn’t do very nice things, but that wasn’t really on
him.
    My job wasn’t particularly nice, either. But
it paid pretty well.
     
    ***
     
    People see what they expect to see, and I
managed to get into the Blackstone office without incident. I
flashed an ID badge at the gate, though the guard didn’t even look
twice at me once he recognized the car. I parked, and strolled
right through the rest of the security, and found Josh’s office
from the directions he had given me.
    It was still early, and it didn’t look like
Josh’s bosses, two men named Mr. Roberts and Mr. Plonsky, were in
yet. According to him, they normally rolled in around nine-thirty.
I wanted to be gone by then, so I moved quickly.
    I sat down at his computer, punched in the
password he had graciously provided, and had access to all of the
information I needed. I opened the briefcase I brought with me
(which I had stuck in the trunk of Josh’s car the night before),
pulled out the hard drive I’d be working with, plugged it in, and
started cloning.
    The process of cloning a hard drive wasn’t
exactly fast, but it would’ve been unbearably slow even a year or
two before this. I guess people got tired of spending two days
backing up their pirated movies, and figured out ways to cut down
on the hassle of petty larceny.
    I kept my head on a figurative swivel,
looking around the office building, alert for signs that anything
had gone wrong. If one of the guards had come in late for his
shift—or, God forbid, showed up early—it was possible that they
would be the ones to find Josh. That would be an interesting
conversation, to say the least.
    But I wasn’t particularly worried. It wasn’t
like I didn’t have virtually limitless ways to escape.
    Skinchangers are rarely, if ever, caught.
    I stood up from the chair when the process
was at about twenty percent. It was a few minutes after eight
o’clock, and I still had plenty of time to finish up and be gone
before anyone was the wiser.
    I walked around the office building casually,
keeping an ear out for shouts of alarm. I poked around for a while,
trying to see if there was anything significant that I should know
about. You know, secret labs hidden in the lower levels of the
building in which Blackstone grew hideous biological creatures that
would serve as foot soldiers in a bid for world domination, that
kind of thing.
    But it was just an