Telepath (Hive Mind Book 1) (19 page)

There was a long pause
before Adika spoke again. “Going underwater with the child.”

I felt his anxiety, the
cold of the water, and the relief when he surfaced and handed the child to the
waiting Strike team. Adika took one desperate gulp of air before grabbing an
airline from Rothan and swimming down to the drain again. As he surfaced inside
the pipe, the pump started, sending a jet of fresh air out of the airline.
Adika filled his lungs from that, before dropping the airline and crawling on
through the pipe.

After a minute or two, there
was a groan from my ear crystal. It sounded like Forge, so I went back to him. “The
fresh air must be reaching Forge,” I reported. “He’s waking up.”

“Amber, I fell off the
rail,” Forge’s voice sounded weak and confused. “Keep going. You can make it
all the way. Ride the Hive!”

“Forge, I did make it all
the way. You’re in the tunnel, remember? Crawl back to the entrance. Adika’s
coming for you.”

“I remember.”

Forge started crawling, met
Adika, and they both headed back towards the drain entrance. I alternated
between their minds as they swam up through the chill of the water. They surfaced,
and reached for outstretched, welcoming hands that pulled them into the boat. It
was over.

The emergency run was over, but the
discussion afterwards dragged on for hours. That didn’t just involve my own
team leaders, but direct audio links with worried Tactical Commanders from the other
Telepath Units as well. None of them had ever had an incident like this, where
a wild bee didn’t seem to be aiming to harm their original victim, but to use
them as bait to lure rescuers into danger.

On the positive side,
Forge and the child were both going to be fine. There’d been a lot of
excitement on the Hive news channels about the trapped child, but everyone
believed the cover story about a freak accident when a drain collapsed. Nosies
were, temporarily at least, almost popular.

On the negative side, we
hadn’t just failed to bring back a target; we hadn’t even got a sniff at one.
Keith kept sending his Tactical Commander messages, insisting Gaius interrupt
the discussion to point that out. I guessed that Keith was feeling sensitive
about the fact he’d dismissed area 600/2600 as perfectly safe, and was criticizing
us as a way of fending off potential criticism of him.

After Gaius wearily
recited the fifth message from Keith – the one that said Amber’s failure to
locate the target proved she was an inadequate telepath who’d been rushed
through training too fast – Adika lost his temper. He said that if Keith sent
one more message insulting me, then he’d go over to Keith’s unit and personally
bang Keith’s telepathic head against a wall.

Gaius instantly started defending
his telepath, saying that Keith was making valid points. Since Lucas seemed
unwilling to argue with either Adika or his old boss, Megan had to intervene
and calm things down before it turned into an inter-unit war.

When everyone finally ran
out of things to say about the situation in area 600/2600, I took Lucas back to
my apartment so we could discuss a more personal crisis. I sat on one couch,
and he dragged another across so he could sit on it facing me. His mind was
like a room with all the lights off. He couldn’t keep me out of his thoughts,
but he could do his best to stop thinking except for the top level of pre-vocalization.

“I need to explain about
Forge,” I said. “We knew each other on Teen Level.”

“I worked that out from
what he said when he was suffering from the effects of the gas,” said Lucas.
“You rode the rail together at the end of Carnival. Forge fell off. You made it
all the way. You rode the Hive. Congratulations.”

Lucas was shutting me out.
His words, his thoughts, his body language, all condemned me unheard. Anger hit
me.

“I’m not like you, Lucas. I
can’t put myself, faults and all, on public display. And please, don’t point
out the double standard that I’m a telepath reading everyone else’s secrets,
but I can’t handle them knowing mine. I’m fully aware of it.”

“So what was the fault you
were hiding?” asked Lucas. “Forge is handsome and intelligent. Yesterday, he proved
he was heroic and tough as well. That’s not exactly an ex-boyfriend to be
ashamed of, or is the real truth that he isn’t your ex at all? I can understand
him wanting to prove he has a place on the Strike team on merit, rather than have
them thinking he’d only got in because he was the telepath’s boyfriend. Well,
he’s proved that now, so you can stop keeping your relationship secret.”

“Forge isn’t my ex! He was
never my anything at all.” I knew I was ranting at Lucas, but I didn’t care. “Forge
was besotted with my best friend, Shanna, for all our years on Teen Level. I
had this weird obsession with him back then, and a peculiar repeating dream
about him.”

I shrugged. “Forge never
knew about that, and he still doesn’t. I never told anyone because I was horribly
embarrassed, and then the whole obsession thing suddenly stopped just after I
came to this unit. That’s all there is to know, Lucas. Enjoy it!”

The lights went on in a
sudden dazzling display. Lucas’s head was busy analyzing on so many levels that
I lost count. I tried to catch the thoughts as they whizzed by, but they were far
too fast.

“Apologies for the misapprehension,”
he said. “Am I fired?”

“I would fire you, but I
can’t. You’re totally maddening but a brilliant Tactical Commander. I’ll come
up with an alternative punishment.”

I paused to rub my
forehead. “I know I should have told you all about this when we were in Hive Futura,
but I kept coming up with reasons why I couldn’t. I think the real truth was
that something about my obsession was blocking me, preventing me from talking
about it.”

I shrugged. “Now the whole
weird reaction to Forge is gone, and he’s just an old friend. I’ve been wanting
to tell you about this for weeks, Lucas, but you were partially right. Forge
was worried people would think he only got on the team because he was the
telepath’s pet. I promised him I wouldn’t say anything until he’d justified his
position.”

“I think he achieved that
on the last emergency run. Tell me more about your weird reaction to Forge.”

Lucas had bounced back. He’d
gone through rampaging resentment and jealousy, absorbed my explanation, adjusted
his feelings, apologized, and moved on to professionally analyzing the situation.
Going through that whole gamut of emotion would have taken normal people days. It
had taken Lucas a few minutes. He was unbelievable.

I told Lucas the whole
stupid story. My arrival on Teen Level, my first meeting with Forge, the repeating
dream where we were walking in the park, and the compulsion to keep him happy.
Lucas frowned as he listened to it.

“That wasn’t an ordinary teen
crush,” he said.

“I know. Even when I was
on Teen Level, I realized my obsession wasn’t normal. Now I’ve learnt far more
about teen crushes. Most of the unit have suffered them in the past. Hannah’s
got one right now on … Well, never mind that. Half the Strike team have a kind
of crush on me as well.”

Lucas grinned. “They’re fantasizing
about heroically saving their beautiful telepath from certain death?”

I laughed. “I’m not
beautiful, but yes. There’s a lot of exaggeration of my looks. Their own too
sometimes. Anyway, my point is that by now I’m rather an expert on crushes, and
my fixation on Forge doesn’t seem to fit that pattern at all.”

“Agreed.” Lucas’s mind was
still frantically working at the problem, even the pre-vocalized thought level
lapsing into his speed speech. “No current theory. Any recurrence, especially
of dream, tell me immediately.”

“It all seems a little
silly now. I’ve been making a fuss about nothing.”

“Emphatically untrue,
Amber. Anything that affected a telepath so strongly has to be taken seriously.
You’re vitally important to the Hive. Vitally important to me too.”

Lucas paused. “You don’t
have to be embarrassed about telling me things that happened to you on Teen
Level, Amber. My own time there was a total disaster. I was a social introvert,
struggling to cope, rejected by the other teens on my corridor. I got some
measure of acceptance in the end by playing the clown.”

“Did your clown act on Teen
Level make you immune to being mocked?” I asked. “Is that how you manage to be so
open about everything?”

“The clown act plus my
time in Keith’s unit. He teases people about their secrets, and threatens to expose
them to the whole unit. I decided the best defensive measure was not to have
any secrets at all.”

I was horrified. “Keith shouldn’t
treat the people in his unit that way.”

Lucas shrugged. “It’s not
surprising that Keith lashes out at people given the stress of his situation.”

“What situation?”

“You don’t know about
Keith?” Lucas gave me a startled look. “Only the people in his unit, or on the other
Telepath Unit Tactical teams, are fully informed about it, but I’d assumed
you’d seen it in either my own or Megan’s thoughts by now. Keith isn’t really a
true telepath.”

I blinked. “What do you
mean?”

“You know that true
telepaths have full control over their ability, while borderline telepaths just
have random, intermittent glimpses into the minds of people around them. Keith
is the only case we’ve discovered of a telepath who falls somewhere between
those two extremes. He can control his telepathic ability most of the time, but
it occasionally cuts out for minutes, hours, even a full day.”

Lucas pulled a face. “Think
how frustrating that is for Keith’s operational teams when it happens in the
middle of an emergency run. It’s even worse for Keith himself.”

“Oh.” I sat in silence for
a moment. “I’d seen the deep parts of Megan’s mind thinking that Keith was
arrogant and lazy, and brooding on the fact that he could have saved her
husband’s life if he’d done his job properly. When I saw you thinking about the
problems of working with Keith, I thought …”

I let the words trail off.
I’d seen Lucas’s relief at leaving the problems of Keith’s unit behind him, but
skipped the details in his mind, assuming I knew them already. I’d been guilty
of the telepathic equivalent of hearing someone speak but not listening to what
they were saying.

“It’s not surprising that Megan
blames Keith for her husband’s death, at least on the unconscious level,” said
Lucas. “The real truth is that the poor man was doing his best, but his telepathy
cut out at the worst possible time.”

I pictured myself on an emergency
run, my telepathy cutting out, and one of my Strike team dying. “How did Keith
manage to carry on working after that happened?”

“He’s always had to
struggle against his problems. He can have nine good runs in a row, and then on
the tenth his telepathy randomly cuts out and he loses a target. The biggest
problem is that his staff can’t help thinking about it, Keith sees that in
their heads, and takes it as criticism. That’s when he loses his temper, hits
back by threatening to reveal their secrets, and goes into his arrogant superior
telepath act.”

Lucas sighed. “Keith’s
been having an especially hard time lately. Dean’s death was a nightmare for
him, and then Lottery discovered a new, highly gifted true telepath. Keith naturally
feels jealous and resentful of your abilities, Amber. That’s why he kept making
Gaius interrupt our meeting with those petty messages about you.”

Lucas yawned, and slid
sideways to stretch out on his couch. “I hope you understand why I didn’t want
to argue with Gaius over that. He’s Keith’s Tactical Commander, so he has to do
whatever’s necessary to support Keith through these problems.”

“I do understand. I wish I
could help Keith to …”

I stopped talking. The
thoughts in Lucas’s head had changed tempo and were less crisply defined. He’d
fallen asleep. I watched, fascinated, as his thought patterns seemed to drift
down a few levels into the subconscious and then started working away again at
trying to make sense of my repeating dream. Lucas did analysis in his sleep!

I hesitated, wondering
whether to wake him up and send him home, but decided against it. Lucas
desperately needed some sleep. I needed sleep too. There’d been the strain of
the emergency run, the long hours of discussion afterwards, and it had been emotionally
taxing to tell Lucas about the whole Forge business. I headed to my bedroom, undressed,
sank blissfully into the embrace of the sleep field, and went to sleep.

I’m not sure how long I
slept before I suddenly woke in panic. I itched deep in my head. Something was dreadfully
wrong, I didn’t know what, but I automatically started running circuits. Dipping
into each of the Strike team’s heads in turn for a fraction of a second.

Adika was dreaming of
running, chasing after …

Forge was dozing
restlessly in a room in our medical area, troubled by ghosts of Shanna.

Eli was thinking about
girls.

Matias … Matias had been
stabbed!

I reached instinctively
for the panic button next to my sleep field, and pressed it to open the emergency
sound link between my apartment and Adika. “This is Amber,” I screamed. “Someone
just stabbed Matias!”

The unit intruder alarm
started its staccato beat, and Adika’s voice responded over the emergency link.
“Amber, stay in your apartment. Do you have a target? Strike team, armour,
guns, move! Bodyguards to Amber, everyone else with me to Matias’s apartment.”

My eyes were closed. My
mind was searching. Nothing. No strangers, just familiar minds. “I can’t find a
target.”

“Sofia?” Adika made the
name into a grim question.

By now I knew only too
well that relationships could sometimes turn violent. I searched for Sofia’s
mind in a blind panic, worried that I’d made a dreadful mistake in bringing her
to the unit. Reading her thoughts had told me she was fiercely passionate about
her art, but I’d seen no clue that …

I found Sofia’s mind. She
was alone in her apartment. She’d been woken up by the alarm, and was anxiously
picturing Matias searching the unit along with the rest of the Strike team.

“It wasn’t Sofia that
stabbed Matias,” I said.

Fabric mesh touched my
skin and Lucas spoke from next to me. “Urgently suggest you put on your body armour,
Amber.”

“Is that you, Lucas?”
Adika asked. “You’re with Amber? Bodyguards, don’t shoot Lucas!”

I rolled out of the sleep
field, opened my eyes, and pulled on my body armour. As an afterthought, I
grabbed a random dress and dropped it over my head. Lucas grabbed my crystal
unit from its shelf and handed it to me. When I put it in my ear, I briefly
heard Rothan’s voice before he was drowned out by Adika shouting angrily at
someone.

“Get back in your
apartment before you get yourself shot!”

Eli’s voice came next from
my ear crystal. “Full bodyguard team now in position outside Amber’s apartment.
Amber, open the door.”

I checked the minds
outside my apartment, and ordered the front door to open.