Telepath

  “Nice job, everyone,” said Adika. “You’ve successfully completed your first emergency run.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  I went back to my apartment and tried to get back to sleep but couldn’t. I felt strange, numb, shaky. In the end, I gave up, rolled out of the sleep field, dressed in luxury clothes, drank luxury drinks, ate luxury foods, and then wandered round my luxury accommodation.

  My unit was in the mandatory twenty-four hour recovery time after an emergency run. We were all supposed to relax and unwind, but I was failing miserably. I’d just been faced with the reality of my new life. That chaotic emergency run was why I lived in this luxury, why everyone pandered to my whims, and why I was notionally in charge of this unit. It was all to bribe the freak, mutant girl into being carried round like a piece of luggage, eyes closed and mind sharing the thoughts of someone on a killing frenzy.

  And I’d done what the Hive wanted me to do. We’d hunted our wild bee, and we’d caught him. I’d been worried that I wouldn’t be able to do my job, but I’d succeeded. I’d saved a girl’s life, so why did I feel so odd? Why was I trembling?

  The comms system chimed. “Amber,” said Lucas’s voice. “I’m outside your front door. Can I come in?”

  I didn’t want to see anyone, not even Lucas. I replied over the comms system. “I was planning to catch up on my sleep now, so maybe another time.”

  “I’ve nothing else to do, so I’ll just sit out here.”

  I checked the security images from outside my door. Lucas was sitting on the floor, arms folded, leaning against the corridor wall.

  I wandered round my apartment for fifteen minutes, before checking the security images again. Lucas was still sitting there.

  I did one more lap of my apartment, cursed all Tactical Commanders, and then told my front door to open. The security images showed Lucas bouncing up to his feet and coming inside. I didn’t go to meet him. This was his idea not mine, so I lay on a couch, eyes closed, and let him come and find me.

  “Hello, Amber.”

  I heard the sound of a chair moving. Lucas would be sitting down, facing me, studying me.

  “You’re not reading me.” His words were a statement, not a question. “How are you feeling?”

  “I feel I want to be left alone. Go away.”

  He laughed, which made me open my eyes and turn my head to glare at him.

  “I can’t go away.” Lucas smiled maddeningly at me. “Leaving you alone to brood too long is a bad idea. Someone had to come and talk to you. Normally, it would be Megan, but she and Adika decided to send me.”

  “I’ll fire the lot of you,” I threatened without conviction.

  He ignored that. “Stunned, dazed, numb. Reduced energy level. Reluctance to discuss the event. Wishing to avoid the people involved in it. Sound familiar?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “It’s after the crisis that’s most difficult,” he said. “When the danger’s over, and you come down from your adrenaline high. The first time is always the worst. Lottery selects the Strike team for their job because they have the right personality for it. If you threw that lot at a wall, then they’d bounce right back at you. It’s the rest of us that suffer badly from reaction.”

  He waited for me to speak, but I didn’t.

  “People on Teen Level could have died,” said Lucas, “but the hasties were there ahead of the target. The girl hostage could have died, but we knew exactly when to send in the Strike team. You made the difference, Amber. Focus on that. You saved lives today.”

  I still didn’t say a word.

  Lucas sighed. “Reaction can hit people in a variety of ways. If you’d talk to me, I could help you a lot better.”

  I finally spoke. “I thought you could read my body language.”

  “Not well enough. You aren’t just suffering from reaction like the rest of us. You’ve been tapping into the mind of a wild bee for the first time. That must be strange.”

  I made a peculiar noise, the offspring of a laugh and a sob. “You have no idea, Lucas. Absolutely no idea.”

  “Tell me. Please, Amber.”

  I tried to explain the unexplainable. “The first time I read Megan properly, below the pre-vocalization level, it was …”

  I faltered, and Lucas tried to fill in the words for me. “A shock? Megan said you were deeply affected. She thought you’d still believed you were hearing words until then.”

  I lifted my head and stared at him.

  “Megan was wrong?” he asked. “That wasn’t the problem?”

  “You don’t know? Isn’t it obvious? It was Megan’s grief.”

  Lucas frowned.

  “One minute, I was a bewildered, eighteen-year-old, desperately trying to do what the Hive wanted of me. The next, I was Megan, grieving for my husband and the children we’d never have now. Of course I was shocked, waste it! Megan hadn’t warned me it would be like that.”

  Lucas was silent for a moment before replying. “You were Megan? You felt her emotions so strongly that you identified yourself as actually being her?”

  “Yes. It hadn’t been like that reading her pre-vocalized thoughts. The next couple of levels down were just words too, but when I reached the fourth and fifth levels all the emotion hit me.”

  “Fourth and fifth levels?”

  “Thought levels,” I explained. “They’re multi-layered. How many levels changes depending on the person and their situation. Most people only have a maximum of five between pre-vocalization and the true subconscious, but I’ve seen you have as many as fifteen, and even your subconscious levels aren’t as … amorphous as in other people. I don’t mess around in the subconscious very much. The feelings run wild down there. Not just the sexual ones, but other emotions too.”

  “You go right down to the subconscious?” Lucas was leaning forward, dark eyes wide with excitement. “Keith barely gets the level below pre-vocalization. The other true telepaths can go deeper. I’ve been told Sapphire can reach three full levels below pre-vocalization, but nothing approaching your description. None of the other true telepaths experience emotions in the way that you’re describing either.”

  I stared at him. “They don’t? Do they feel pain?”

  Lucas nodded. “I suppose pain screams at all levels of the mind. Can you read me now? Tell me what’s happening on the different levels of my mind?”

  “I’m not in the mood to read people.”

  He instantly reined in his eagerness. “Apologies. Self indulgent curiosity. Important issue …”

  He broke off. “Apologies again. I should use all the words. The important issue is that you read minds at much deeper levels than the other telepaths, so you encounter emotions. Query. You aren’t mourning for Dean now?”

  I shook my head. “The grief wore off after a few hours, but the effect of having felt it … It’s hard to find words to explain it.”

  “Feeling that way was a learning experience?”

  I grimaced. “Yes.”

  “Do you feel that way every time you read Megan?”

  “No. I try to avoid going into the deeper levels of her mind. It happens by mistake sometimes. Either I’m careless and drift downwards, or the thought level I’m on suddenly merges with a deeper one. The grief flares up then, but I try to distance myself from it.”

  “How do you do that?”

  I waved my hands helplessly. “It’s hard to explain. It’s like pulling down my mental curtain to block the telepathy, except this curtain is only made of net. I can still see Megan’s thoughts and emotions, but they’re a lot fainter.”

  “So, you haven’t really felt you were Megan, experienced her emotions as your own, since that first time. What about with other people? What was it like the first time you read me?”

  I managed a smile as I remembered that moment. “You were filled with wild, nervous excitement. I was catching those emotions too, but I never identified as being you. I was constantly reminded I was just an observer, because
I couldn’t keep up with the speed of the thoughts I was reading.”

  Lucas smiled. “I had a lot to think about on that day. How about with other people? Has the distancing, the blocking, helped?”

  “Mostly, but when there’s something unexpected, like …” I broke off.

  “Yes?” prompted Lucas.

  I was thinking of the first time I’d been in Adika’s head when he looked at Megan. I chose my words carefully. “Being in a male head when the man catches sight of a woman is occasionally difficult.”

  Lucas blinked and suddenly grinned. “Male sexual response?”

  I nodded. “The emotions jump up a level or two, and can catch me off guard. Feeling that way about someone you wouldn’t normally be attracted to is …”

  “Disconcerting.”

  “Extremely. The first time I hit same sex attraction was less confusing. Probably because I didn’t meet that until after I’d worked out the distancing technique.”

  Lucas hesitated. “Please don’t answer if you don’t wish to, but query. Situation when girl is you?”

  “Oddly enough that’s much easier. The girl is me, which reminds me the emotions aren’t mine, it’s just …” I waved my hands in that helpless gesture again. “I get a different view.”

  “The topic raises numerous questions,” said Lucas, “most importantly about this morning’s events. Reading a wild bee was disturbing?”

  I pulled a face. “Yes.”

  “You appeared to cope well. You kept giving us information.”

  “All the training I’d done made that automatic,” I said. “I kept saying where Callum was, what he saw, what he was planning to do, just like when we were training, but the emotions were … And it’s even worse remembering them.”

  Lucas tentatively took my hand. “Remembering the emotions now is worse than feeling them this morning?”

  “Yes. When I felt them, I was in the target’s head and they seemed natural. Now I think of them and …” I shuddered.

  “Tell me. Please. They weren’t your emotions, Amber. There’s no reason you should feel embarrassed or ashamed of what a wild bee was feeling.”

  “The first time I read him there was fury,” I said reluctantly, “but that was fading. He’d stabbed the other boy for stealing his girlfriend, and felt in control and powerful. He was rejoicing about what he’d done, there was blood on his hand and … Oh Lucas, he was smelling the blood!”

  I was crying. Ridiculous of me. I used the back of my hand to rub away the wetness from my cheeks. “He was the one feeling those things, doing those things, Lucas, but I felt like it was me. The way he thought about the girl … That was me too.”

  I paused. “You said that the medical staff might wipe Willow’s memories of what happened?”

  “Yes,” said Lucas. “If they judged her memories would cause long lasting trauma, they’d remove them.”

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. “I suppose that would save her a lot of suffering, but it seems wrong to play around with someone’s memory.”

  “Almost everyone in this Hive has information imprinted on their minds, Amber. Does that worry you?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “Imprinting extra knowledge is very different from taking away someone’s personal memories.”

  “Editing out traumatic memories is a process that mimics one of the human mind’s natural defences. In some cases, a person’s mind can block out an unbearable event, resulting in a temporary or permanent memory gap. The mind can even add an extra level of defence by entering a temporary fugue state, where it shelters behind a new personality until it’s ready to cope with what’s happened.”

  It sounded as if Lucas was quoting from his imprinted data. Normally, I’d have read his mind to help me make sense of his words. I didn’t want to read him now. I’d got an approximate understanding of what he was saying, enough to tell me that I didn’t like it.

  “There’s a crucial difference between someone deciding to edit out their own memories, and a doctor deciding to do it for them,” I said.

  Lucas frowned. “But even when it happens naturally, the person doesn’t make a decision about it. The defence mechanism happens on a subconscious level.”

  “The person is still making their own decision,” I said. “The subconscious is as much a part of someone as their conscious mind. Trust me on that, Lucas. I’ve seen all the levels of your mind, and in all of them, right down into the deepest subconscious, you are still Lucas.”

  He seemed disconcerted. “I can never know minds the way you do, Amber. I don’t know much about how the decision to intervene and remove a memory is made either. My job stops when a target is apprehended. Victim trauma treatment and forensic psychology are specialist roles outside my area, usually filled by borderline telepaths.”

  I was thinking that might make the situation more acceptable, at least it would if the borderline telepath could pick up something of the person’s wishes, but then a horrible thought occurred to me. “If my memories of that emergency run gave me problems, would medical staff want to remove them?”

  Lucas looked shocked by the idea. “No one would dare to interfere with a telepath’s mind. Removing your memories would be even more dangerous than imprinting you. There’s no point in removing memories of an emergency run from Telepath Unit members anyway. They’ll be replaced by memories of another within days or weeks. We have to learn to cope with our encounters with wild bees.”

  Both relieved and disappointed, I returned to my original point. “I could cope with remembering the target’s triumphant pleasure, Lucas. The problem is remembering my own.”

  “Those weren’t your emotions,” said Lucas. “It was the first time you’d met the emotions of a wild bee, and they took you off guard and swamped you. Another time, you’ll be prepared and able to distance yourself. The first time you felt Adika lusting after Megan was a shock, but you distance yourself successfully from that now, don’t you?”

  I gave him a startled look. When I mentioned that example to Lucas, I’d been careful not to mention Adika’s name.

  Lucas smiled. “I don’t read minds, Amber, but I do read body language. Adika’s attraction to Megan is blindingly obvious.”

  “Oh. Well, yes, I’m ready for it now so I can keep a distance.”

  “It should be the same for the wild bees. The distancing may not work perfectly straight away, and there may be future new emotions that catch you by surprise, but as you gain experience you’ll also gain control and separation.”

  “You’re sure? I’m scared that I’ve caught something from Callum’s mind. I’ve tried testing myself, thinking of things that make me angry, and I feel violent.”

  “Everybody has things that make them feel angry and violent,” said Lucas. “You could equally well claim to have gained violent tendencies from reading your Strike team as from reading your target this morning. They’re all as capable of attacking or killing people as him.”

  “No, they aren’t!” I said sharply.

  “Yes, they are,” said Lucas. “Your Strike team members were selected for their work because they have a potential for violence. They could, in the wrong circumstances, have been triggered into becoming wild bees themselves. Instead, their violence has been controlled and channelled into a role that’s needed by the Hive. If necessary they’ll kill, either to defend you, or to protect vulnerable members of the Hive from wild bees.”

  I knew the Strike team carried guns that had both stun and lethal settings. I knew all their training included the possibility of the team being given the kill order. I couldn’t take the idea seriously though. Before Lottery, the only violence I’d ever known was the occasional fight between children. Now I believed that wild bees might kill people, but my Strike team wouldn’t.

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “It’s a fact, Amber. Statistics say that almost all Strike team members will kill a target one day.”

  I shook my head. “I suppose Adik
a might do that if he had no choice, but I can’t imagine Eli killing anyone.”

  “Adika has killed multiple times already, and Eli will too if necessary.”

  I blinked. “I didn’t know that Adika had killed anyone. I’ve never seen that in his thoughts.”

  “You wouldn’t,” said Lucas. “Adika doesn’t agonize over it. Strike team personnel are carefully selected and trained for their work. They do what needs to be done, and then happily carry on with their lives. Problems only arise if a bystander dies and the Strike team feel responsible because of something they did or didn’t do.”

  He pulled a face. “That’s when they get tortured by regrets and need help. The extreme case of that would be if something happened to you. If you got even the slightest injury, Amber, it would have a devastating effect on your Strike team. They would have failed to protect you. They would have failed their Hive.”

  I sat there in silence, worrying about a confused tangle of different things. Getting injured wasn’t one of them. Adika would never let anything happen to me.

  Lucas watched me for a while before speaking again. “Hunting wild bees will change you, Amber, but not because you catch their violent tendencies. All experiences change people. You’ve already done things, experienced things, which you’d never even dreamed about before Lottery. You’ve grown and developed because of them.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Yes. I can see it even if you can’t.” He paused. “Megan, Adika and I, all think Nicole did well during that run. What do you think?”

  “I agree.”

  “How do you feel about making her permanent Liaison leader? She’s suffering badly from reaction. Confirming her in the team leader position now would be good for her confidence, and help to snap her out of the reaction phase.”

  I felt guilty. Nicole had had so much thrown at her and done brilliantly, but I hadn’t spared her a single thought. I rolled off the couch, ran my fingers through my hair, and called her. The holo of Nicole appeared, sitting in an ordinary cushioned chair rather than her powered one, looking tired and strained.