Forge hung tightly on to his board, and nodded at where the other members of the Strike team were sitting. “It’s not just your neck, Amber. They’d all be in the water after you, trying to help, and …”
I groaned in defeat. “Yes, if I do something stupid, I could drown half of my Strike team. I’m just so tired of the pressure to do what the Hive wants, be what the Hive wants. Lottery was supposed to allocate me an ordinary profession, not anything like this.” My simmering resentment broke surface again. “And I’m not going Outside!”
Forge cowered at the mere mention of the word. “Adika told us not to talk about that.”
I dipped into his mind and saw the memory there. Adika forcefully lecturing the Strike team. No one was to mention Outside to Amber. Not ever. Inconsistent of me to resent that, but I did.
“It really happened, Forge. I went Outside and it was horrible. I’m not imagining it.”
He gave me a pleading look. “Amber, if Adika finds out that I talked to you about this, he’ll fire me.”
Forge was genuinely scared of losing his place on the Strike team. It wasn’t fair to drag him into this.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just angry with the whole world at the moment, and furious with Lucas.” I repeated my earlier words, because they summed up my feelings so well. “He thinks too much.”
“Lucas cares about you,” said Forge cautiously. “He worries. It’s not easy to stop thinking about things that bother you. I wish it was. I’d like to forget Shanna, but I can’t. Being here on this beach reminds me of the old days. The surf team. The competitions. You and Shanna cheering for me.”
I pulled a sympathetic face. I would probably regret offering this, but … “I could try to get Shanna a job in the unit. On the Liaison team perhaps. I can’t guarantee anything, but I could try.”
“What would Shanna do on the Liaison team? Give everyone fashion advice?” Forge shook his head. “It doesn’t matter anyway, because I don’t want Shanna back, but getting over the past is difficult. She was such a huge part of my life on Teen Level. Now I know she never really cared for me, it messes up all my memories.”
I gave him a hug. “Do you think we could have a swim without creating hysterical panic among the Strike team?”
“Yes, let’s swim.”
Forge left his board on the beach, and we swam out into the waves. As we turned back to the shore, I could see Lucas was standing there and watching us. I reached out with my mind to touch his thoughts and winced. He’d seen me hug Forge and was thinking … Waste it, he should know better than that.
I swam faster, losing myself in the cold sting of the waves until I was weary and had to head for shore. Everyone threw on clothes over their swimming costumes after that, and we went back to the unit. It was a silent trip. The Strike team were feeling wet, cold, and tired, and were nervous of talking given my mood and Adika’s threats. I missed the ebullient Eli, who was still in our medical area along with Rafael and Dhiren, recovering from the sedatives in the darts. Eli would have chatted away however awkward the situation.
When the lift arrived at the unit, Lucas slouched off in depression. I chased after him. It was probably a mistake, we’d just have yet another row, but I couldn’t let him walk away like that.
“I’m sorry that I’m oversensitive about the Outside thing,” I said, “but it terrified me, and it hurts that you believe I imagined it.”
“I don’t believe you imagined it.” Lucas stopped walking, and spoke each word with paranoid care. “I keep trying to work out what happened, why we can’t find any record of it, and all the possible answers keep running through my head whether I believe they’re right or not. I can’t stop thinking about puzzles. It’s what I do, the way I am, the reason Lottery gave me this job. Whatever happened, it must have been when you were very young.”
“Lucas, please just accept it really happened and forget it. The details don’t matter. Yes, I was very young, and I was terrified when my skin started falling off.” I shuddered.
Lucas was frowning. “Your skin started falling off? That’s the first time you’ve mentioned that detail.”
I pulled a face. “It didn’t happen until a day or two after I was Outside. My skin was peeling off. It was revolting. Let’s forget it.”
“The sun burnt you. Your skin peeled afterwards. Sunburn!”
“Lucas! What does it take to stop you thinking? I’ll get the Strike team to knock you out.” I gave a despairing laugh. “No, even that wouldn’t work. You analyze things in your sleep, so I’m sure you’d analyze things when you’re unconscious as well.”
“I do?” asked Lucas. “In my sleep?” He considered that for an instant, and then he was off again. “You got sunburnt. Your medical records mention an allergic reaction to face paints causing a skin rash when you were three years old. Why does your record say it was an allergic reaction if it was sunburn? Why do your parents think you’ve never been Outside? Why …?”
Lucas broke off, and stared at me. “I’m a fool! We’re all fools! We’ve been asking other people, and we should have been asking ourselves!”
I checked his thoughts and they were like a stampeding mob. I recoiled out of his head before I got flattened, saw Lucas sprinting off towards his office, waved my arms in despair, and ran after him.
I realized after a moment that I’d been wrong. Lucas wasn’t going to his own office, but to the Liaison area. By the time I caught him up, he was already shouting at a startled Nicole.
“We did this ourselves. We called sunburn a skin rash. We hid the fact Amber was taken out of the Hive, because it’s standard procedure to cover up the actions of a wild bee.”
“What?” I stared at him in shock.
Lucas glanced at me and forced his voice back to more normal levels. “You were kidnapped as a child, Amber, and a Telepath Unit covered it up. Just like we did with that child in the park. We don’t want people to live in fear, so we pretended she’d been trapped by accident.”
I checked his thoughts. Yes, he was serious about this.
“Nicole, check all the Telepath Unit records for fifteen years ago,” said Lucas. “You’re looking for a three-year-old child who was taken out of the Hive. It should be easy to find. We don’t have many incidents as bad as that.”
Nicole pulled herself together and started frantically looking things up. “One of Morton’s cases. Fifteen years ago. The target took a hostage. A three-year-old girl. Amber 2514-0172-912.”
Nicole broke off and gave me a wide-eyed look. Yes, that was me. Name and identity code.
“Time for a team leader meeting,” said Lucas. “Call the others, Nicole.”
He took my arm and tugged me off to meeting room 4. Lucas sat me down at the table, and took the chair next to mine. “You were quite right to be angry with me. I should have guessed at once.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “How could you guess something like this?”
Nicole, Megan and Adika walked into the room together. By now I’d learned that Nicole’s health condition varied from day to day, so sometimes she would walk rather than use her powered chair. This was clearly one of her better days.
The minute everyone had sat down, Megan broke into anxious speech. “It’s a bad idea for Amber to learn what happened.”
“Amber is being affected by the buried, distorted memories of a terrifying childhood experience,” said Lucas. “If she learns what actually happened back then, it should help rather than harm her.”
“It’s a risk.” Megan was practically wailing the words. “We could trigger old traumas.”
“We’ve already triggered them, Megan.” Lucas’s voice was savage now. “We tried to persuade Amber to go Outside, and when she refused we kept worrying about it. Every time she read our thoughts, it must have created havoc in her subconscious. The way Amber has been acting lately, desperately trying to defend herself, was a huge warning signal. I was just too stupid to recognize it.”
He
slammed his hands on the table in frustration. “We’ve already done just about all the harm that’s possible short of physically dragging Amber Outside.”
Megan gestured helplessly. “I’m still not sure we should tell Amber what happened.”
“What other option do we have, Megan?” demanded Lucas. “Amber is a telepath. Once we know the details, she’ll read them in our minds.”
“Do we need to know?” asked Megan.
“Yes!” Adika joined the argument. “If I don’t know then I can’t do my job properly.”
“That’s doubly true for me,” said Lucas. “Besides, if we don’t know what happened, we’ll keep guessing, and Amber will be reading our thoughts about it. May I point out that my imprint, Adika’s imprint, and the imprints of the entire Strike team include explicit details of everything wild bees have been known to do to children they’ve abducted. Adika and I are busily thinking about a dozen gory possibilities right now. The more we try to stop ourselves, the more we’ll do it.”
“Yes, but …”
“No, Megan,” I interrupted her. “Lucas is right. I must know what really happened back then.”
Adika glanced at Megan. “We’ve no choice here.”
She gave a sigh of what seemed to be reluctant acceptance.
Adika turned back to face me. “I’m sorry, Amber. Your abduction happened years before I joined Morton’s team. I had no knowledge of it.”
“Nobody knew,” said Lucas bitterly. “Not even Amber’s parents. Telepath Units cover up incidents too well. The truth is only held in our confidential records. It’s the best thing for the Hive, it reduces the chance of future incidents, but it was disastrous in this case.”
He shrugged. “Nicole, look up the details for us. Amber, promise me you won’t read any of our minds while Nicole explains what happened. If there’s something bad, it’s much better for you to just hear it as words, without adding the burden of the emotion and images in our minds.”
That made sense. I’d already seen some images in Adika’s head that sickened me. “I promise.”
Nicole gave Megan a nervous look, then tapped the table to make a data display appear in front of her. She looked down at the flowing text, and took a deep breath before speaking.
“There’s only the standard report from Morton’s unit. It happened during Carnival. Morton and his Beta Strike team were responding to an emergency call, but the local hasties got the situation under control before they arrived. Morton checked they’d arrested the right target, and the team started heading back to the unit, but Morton picked up something strange on the way. He wasn’t sure whether it was a real target or not, but they tried following it to be on the safe side. They must have had a problem doing that, because they rode the belts for ages without catching up with the target.”
“A chase wouldn’t be easy during Carnival,” said Adika. “The belts would be packed with people in silver and gold Carnival outfits, most of them wearing masks.”
“The problem seems to have been more than that,” said Nicole. “Morton knew the target was a man, but he wasn’t getting a name or any clues on what he’d do next. He couldn’t even tell if the target knew he was being followed. Eventually, they reached 511/6126, and the target went into a park that was running a Carnival event for children. There were thousands of wildly excited small children and just a scattering of adults.”
I must have been one of those children. I tried to remember a party in the park back then, but I’d been to a lot of Carnival events as a child. The earlier ones were just blurred, excited memories of dressing up in costumes, playing games, and chasing balloons. The strange thing was that I had no fear of parks at all. It was only the thought of Outside and the Truesun that bothered me.
Nicole pulled a face. “It was a nightmare situation for Morton’s Liaison team. Before they could work out how to evacuate the park, Morton said the target was moving again, heading up in a lift, and he had a small child with him. The child was tagged with a bracelet of course, so Liaison got her identity and started tracking her.”
Nicole paused, and gave me a nervous look before continuing. “Tactical decided the target knew he was being followed and had taken a hostage. The bracelet signal went straight up in the lift to Industry 1. Since this was Carnival, all the working areas were empty apart from the odd person watching essential systems. Morton’s team were preparing to go for the strike, when the target took the child through a maintenance exit and out of the Hive. That caused a major delay.”
Adika frowned. “Why? Were the Strike team scared of going Outside?”
“Tactical wouldn’t let them go through the maintenance exit,” said Nicole. “Morton wasn’t getting anything at all from the target now, and the child’s bracelet signal was right outside the door. Tactical thought the target had been terrified by finding himself Outside, and was sitting there, frozen in panic. They were worried that if the Strike team charged out of the door after him, then the target might harm the child.”
She shrugged. “Eventually, some of the Strike team went out through another exit, aiming to sneak up and take the target by surprise. It took them over an hour to do that. When they finally got there, they just found the child’s bracelet, open but undamaged.”
“How could the target have taken off a child’s tracking bracelet without damaging it?” asked Megan. “Only approved medical staff have access to the codes to unlock tracking bracelets.”
Nicole shook her head. “The report doesn’t say anything else about the bracelet. Morton’s team were concentrating on finding the target and hostage child. They couldn’t involve Outside maintenance workers in a search for a potentially dangerous target. The Strike team had to do all the searching themselves, they were struggling with conditions Outside, and running out of time. When the Carnival event ended, the child’s parents would discover she was missing. Eventually, the Strike team heard a child crying, found her hiding in some bushes, and took her back into the Hive for medical checks.”
“What did the medical report say?” asked Lucas, in an unfamiliar harsh voice.
“The child was terrified,” said Nicole, “but completely unharmed. Her only problem was sunburn. It had been a very hot and sunny day Outside. The medical staff treated that, gave her sedatives and a new tracking bracelet, and delivered her back to her parents telling them she’d had an allergic reaction to face paints.”
Adika and Lucas seemed to relax slightly. I cheated on my promise a little, telling myself Nicole had finished her explanation, and skimmed the surface of Lucas’s thoughts. I didn’t just see his relief, but some of the possibilities he’d been braced to hear. I winced, and told myself to forget those dark images. If Nicole was telling the truth, then I hadn’t been harmed. I dipped into her thoughts for a moment to reassure myself. Yes, she was telling the truth.
Lucas groaned. “I know the medical staff would have been under time pressure, but they should have given Amber proper psychological treatment after such a traumatic experience. What about the target? Did the Strike team keep searching for him?”
“No,” said Nicole. “It sounds like the Strike team had hit their endurance limit. There were no more searches, but they posted hasties at all the Hive entrances in that area for the next week. No one came in from Outside, so they assumed the target had got lost and had an accident. They closed the case after that. If a target had deliberately left the safety of the Hive and got himself killed, it wasn’t their problem.”
She paused, frowning. “There’s one other thing. It must be just coincidence, but Morton’s Strike team first started chasing their target in area 600/2600.”
Chapter Twenty-four
There was a long silence after that. Oddly enough, I felt quite calm, as if I’d been expecting to hear Nicole say those words, even as if I was glad to hear them. Maybe I was just relieved to have a solid reason for the fear that had had me snapping at people for days.
I glanced round the table. “Area 600/2600
again. Coincidence?”
Nicole looked like a frightened mouse. Adika and Megan seemed unable to speak. I turned to Lucas.
“Extremely unlikely,” he said.
I wrinkled my nose at him. “Wrong answer, Lucas. The right answer, the comforting answer, is that it’s obviously pure coincidence.”
“It’s impractical to lie to a telepath.”
I checked heads. Lucas was fighting his anger, trying to concentrate on analyzing the situation. Megan’s mind was practically hysterical. Adika was lost in grim and dangerous thoughts. He’d always had an obsession with the possibility of his telepath getting kidnapped. The news that she already had been wasn’t helping at all.
I sighed, and asked the truly scary question. “You think our current target in 600/2600 is the same man that kidnapped me, Lucas? Despite the fifteen year time gap?”
“Yes. The child in the booby trapped drain was also a three-year-old girl.”
I hadn’t thought of that. “He chose a girl of the same age both times.”
“More than just the same age,” said Lucas. “The girl in the drain had the same name as you.”
“What?” I shook my head. “I didn’t know she was called Amber.”
Lucas pulled a face. “We avoided mentioning her name during the run. Talking about two different Ambers was liable to cause confusion, and it didn’t seem significant at the time. Now it’s clear it is. The target is playing games with us, deliberately picking a hostage who’d remind you of yourself fifteen years ago.”
That sounded seriously creepy to me. “So everything that’s been happening in area 600/2600 is about me. The target is hunting me again.”
“I believe so,” said Lucas.
Adika woke from his trance. “There would have been over a million three-year-old children in the Hive back then, and the target kidnapped the only one who would grow up to become a true telepath. That couldn’t be random chance.”
“It seems highly unlikely to be random chance,” said Lucas, “but if it wasn’t then the target had a way of identifying future true telepaths at three years old.”