Telepath (Hive Mind Book 1) (15 page)

“Still level,” I said.
“Still moving north.”

Adika gave rapid instructions
to the various groups of the Chase team.

“He’s reached a chamber,
about the size of a freight lift,” I said. “It’s a sort of crossway. There are
pipes coming in from four sides, but at different heights. He’s entered through
one of them. The place is cluttered with stuff. Bits of metal. Clothes. Boxes.”

“That’s his nest,” said
Lucas. “He’ll stay there for a while.”

“I’m positioning men to
enter from all four sides,” said Adika.

“Position them but don’t
go in yet,” ordered Lucas. “Will he hear them coming, Amber?”

“It’s noisy here because
of that big fan thing.”

There was a pause while
Adika got the Chase team in place. “We’re ready now.”

“Nicole, any sign of Willow
yet?” asked Lucas.

“We still can’t locate
her,” said Nicole.

“Waste that!” said Lucas.
“Amber, what can you see? What’s Callum doing?”

“He’s sharpening a knife,”
I said. “He finds it relaxing. He’s looking down at the blade now. Big curved
blade. I think it’s home made.”

“I hope no one was fool
enough to forget their body armour,” said Adika.

“I just saw Willow!” I
yelled. “She’s in there with him. Tied up and gagged. Her eyes are open. She’s
alive.”

“Lucas?” asked Adika, the
single word screaming impatience.

“Wait,” said Lucas. “Callum’s
got the knife in his hand. If he hears you coming, the girl’s dead. Check your
guns are on stun and be ready on my command. Amber, is he planning to kill Willow?”

“No,” I said. “She dumped
him for someone else. He’s planning to keep her his prisoner now. They’ve got food
supplies, and he’s tapped into a water pipe, so they can stay there a long
time. Callum’s putting down the knife now. Walking over to Willow. Kneeling
down and smoothing her hair out of her eyes.”

I looked down into the
eyes of my prisoner and smiled at her. She would never leave me again.

“Strike time!” said Lucas.

“Going circuit.” I dumped
the target mind, and swapped to checking my team, touching each of their thoughts
in turn. “Adika, Forge, Dhiren, Rothan, …”

“Target down,” said Adika.
“We stunned him. The girl seems uninjured but terrified.”

“Hasties and a medical
team are on the way,” said Nicole.

I finished my circuit to make
sure all the Strike team were safe, and then checked Willow. “Ugh.”

“All right, Amber?” asked
Adika.

“Yes, but I checked Willow’s
mind and …”

“Get out of her head,
Amber!” ordered Lucas. “Try to forget whatever you saw. Willow probably won’t
remember it herself after today. The medical staff won’t just treat her
injuries, but wipe any traumatic memories to help her recovery.”

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

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?”