Telepath (Hive Mind Book 1) (25 page)

It took me a moment to absorb what
Lucas had said, and then panic hit me. “No!” I wasn’t sure if I’d shouted the word
or not. “The target can’t have imprinted me.”

Lucas looked me straight
in the eyes. “It’s the obvious answer, Amber. Your recurring dream and your
obsession with Forge are precisely the sort of issues that can happen if the
imprinting rules aren’t followed correctly. The target intentionally broke
those rules so your imprint would include a fixation on him, a compulsion to
obey him, and a reward of happy emotions when you pleased him. It will also
include a set of orders.”

He paused for a second. “The
target took you Outside to make sure he wouldn’t be disturbed during the
imprinting process. I think he was taking you back to the Hive entrance, aiming
to put your bracelet back on and take you back into the Hive before anyone realized
you were missing, when he ran into Morton’s Strike team. The target left you to
be found by the Strike team, and I think at that point he went back to his home
Hive.”

“A set of orders,” I
repeated Lucas’s earlier words. “Orders to do what?”

“The target didn’t try to
take you back to his Hive with him as a child, because he’d got a much better
way to kidnap you. Now that you’re an adult, he’s returned to complete his plan.
He’s been trying to reach you and activate the orders he imprinted in your
mind. Those orders will compel you to request a transfer to his Hive.”

I imagined myself a
willing puppet requesting a transfer to an alien Hive, asking to go and live
among strangers as their slave. I made a soft, gulping sound of horror.

“Shut up, Lucas!” Megan shouted.
“You’re frightening Amber.”

I moistened my lips and forced
myself to speak. “No, carry on explaining, Lucas. We all have to understand
what’s been happening. Especially me. I can’t fight what I don’t understand.”

Lucas studied my face for
a moment, then nodded and started speaking again. “The imprint should have
remained completely inactive all through Amber’s childhood and teen years, so
there’d be no clues for us to spot during Lottery, but she met Forge. The sight
of him, with a birthmark that reminded her of something on her kidnapper’s face,
stirred up some of the imprinted orders.”

“I was able to control my
reaction to Forge,” I said. “A little, at least. Now I know I’ve been imprinted
with orders, it should be easier to resist them.”

Lucas shook his head. “The
birthmark’s effect was only a faint shadow of your imprinted compulsion, Amber.
Once the target activates your imprint, you won’t stand a chance of resisting its
orders.”

I hadn’t had a headache
since Lottery, but I could feel one starting now. I rubbed my forehead to try to
banish the pain. “Surely our Hive wouldn’t just hand over a telepath?”

Lucas’s mind was screaming
as he pictured what would happen. “Now you’re an adult, you have the right
under Hive Treaty to request a transfer to another Hive of your choice. Our
Hive would try to talk you out of it, bribe you, do everything we could to stop
it, but your imprint could make you act in a way that was actively dangerous. If
that wasn’t enough to make us give in, then the target’s Hive could approach Joint
Hive Treaty Enforcement.”

Lucas gave a shrug of total
despair. “They’d complain we’d refused your Hive transfer request. Joint Hive
Treaty Enforcement would send in a team to investigate. Without solid proof
that another Hive had tampered with your mind, we’d be left with no options at
all. We might be able to stall for weeks, even months, but if you insisted you
wanted the transfer then we’d have to let you go in the end.”

He grimaced. “It’s an
utterly brilliant plan. If we hadn’t found out you’d been imprinted, we’d never
have understood what happened.”

I tugged at my hair. “Tell
me more about Joint Hive Treaty Enforcement. I’ve only heard vague references
to it.”

“Hive Treaty outlaws a
host of things like theft from other Hives, kidnapping, and territory violations,”
said Lucas. “All Hives are signatories. Breaching treaty results in severe penalties.”

“So failing to allow my
transfer would breach Treaty,” I said. “What sort of penalties are we talking about?”

Lucas pulled a face. “The
offending Hive faces sanctions, and continued defiance can even result in an attack
by the combined forces of all the other Hives. Things like war, invasion, kidnapping
raids, and other conflicts are always bad for Hives. It’s in the general
interest to make offences unprofitable. The occasional theft of research information
happens because it’s easy to claim it was a simultaneous discovery.”

I wasn’t following the
words as much as the images in Lucas’s mind. Pictures of our Hive under attack
by hostile aircraft. Housing warrens torn apart, with mangled corpses lying in
the corridors. There was no choice here. No choice at all.

“If the worst happens,
then you have to hand me over, Lucas,” I said. “You can’t risk our Hive being
attacked.”

“Not my decision,” said
Lucas. “Thankfully. Strongly suggest locking me up in that situation.”

“It’s not going to
happen,” said Adika. “The target isn’t going to activate Amber’s imprint,
because we won’t give him the chance. She won’t leave this unit, we’ll go into
lockdown, and Forge will be confined to his apartment under armed guard.”

I frowned at him. “There’s
no need to lock up Forge. He didn’t know a thing about this. I’ve spent enough
time in his head to be absolutely certain of that.”

“If Forge was involved,”
said Adika, “then your imprint might not allow you to tell us. He might even
have given you orders to forget it yourself.”

I opened my mouth, only to
close it again. I couldn’t trust my own mind any longer. I could be ordered to
do anything, literally anything, and I’d do it. Hideous thoughts ran through my
mind. When we were at the beach, I’d had that silly moment, asked to borrow
Forge’s board and go surfing. He’d pointed out then just how easy it would be
for me to drown half my Strike team.

“I hate to say this,” said
Lucas, “but Forge is innocent of everything except cuddling Amber on the beach.
If you want to lock him up for that, then I’m not going to object, but I’m a
little concerned what penalties you’ll inflict on me if I sleep with her.”

I gave a shocked laugh.

“This isn’t a good time to
play the fool, Lucas,” said Adika.

Lucas gave him a pointed
look. “It’s exactly the time to play the fool and relieve the tension. Look at
Amber’s face. She’s worked out what this means. She could be ordered to do
anything, including sending her own Strike team into a death trap, and she’d do
it. How would you feel if you knew someone could take total control of your
mind and make you shoot your own telepath?”

I saw Adika’s face, his
thoughts, and felt sick. The unspeakable horror of a Strike team was letting
their telepath be harmed or killed. To make Adika contemplate being forced to
murder me was brutally unkind. “Lucas, that was cruel.”

“No, Amber,” said Lucas. “If
an eighteen-year-old girl fresh from Lottery can look nightmare in the face, then
a Strike team leader with the experience of a thousand emergency runs behind
him had better be able to do the same. All of us have to accept precisely how
bad this could be, and then work out how to beat it. We’ve been very, very
lucky. We’ve found out about your imprint before the target managed to activate
it.”

“You’re sure about that?”
I asked. “The imprint might be giving orders to my subconscious without my
knowledge.”

“I’m sure, Amber.” Lucas leaned
across and took my hand for a second. “The target wouldn’t want us to know
about the imprint. If it was active, you’d never have told me about the dreams
or the sunburn. Equally, if Forge was working for another Hive, he’d never have
removed the birthmark that let him give you orders.”

I nodded. “All right. That
means we just have to put the unit into lockdown while you remove my imprint.”

Lucas’s thoughts were too
fast and too technical for me to understand the details, but the tone of them
panicked me.

“You can’t remove
imprints?”

“It’s not totally impossible,”
said Lucas, “but it’s never easy. The larger the amount of imprinted data, the
more difficult it is. The longer it’s been in place, the greater the resulting mental
confusion, because personal memories are linked to the imprinted data. That means
those memories are either removed along with the imprint, or become distorted.
In your case, the imprint has never been activated, so your only personal
memory directly linked to it is the repeating dream.”

“So what’s the problem
removing it?”

“Imprints are controlled
by two linked symbols,” said Lucas. “One at the start of the imprinted data
thread, called the key symbol. One at the end, called the trigger symbol.”

He hesitated, struggling
for a way to make this comprehensible without using technical terms. “Think of
the key symbol as the key to a lock. It can be used to remove an imprint, by
unlocking the start of the data thread so it can be unravelled.”

I remembered one of the activities
I’d tried on Teen Level. “A thread? Like the thread you use in sewing or embroidery?
If you make a mistake, put the stitches in the wrong place, you can unravel
them and start again.”

“It’s a very different sort
of thread,” said Lucas, “but yes, the analogy works. At the end of the data
thread is the trigger symbol, the one used to activate the imprint. Normally,
that activation is done immediately the imprint is complete, but in your case
it wasn’t. The target has been trying to reach you to do it now.”

He paused. “The problem
with removing the imprint is we know the key symbol for our Hive’s imprints,
but not the key symbol for the one in your head. Without it, we can’t remove
your imprint.”

I thought about that for a
moment. “Hives trade people. Only rarely, but there’ll be a few people here who
were imprinted by other Hives. One of those imprints could have the same key
symbol as mine.”

“Hives trade people after
Lottery but before imprinting,” said Lucas. “The new Hive imprints them on
arrival.”

“But what about people who
ask to move Hive?”

“If they’ve already been
imprinted,” he said, “then their imprint is removed before they move.”

“You said that could cause
mental confusion.”

Lucas waved his hands in a
gesture of helplessness. “They’re warned about that. Joint Hive Treaty
Enforcement insists on people having their imprints removed before they
transfer Hive. If they were allowed to leave with all the data from their old
Hive intact, then it would lead to people with valuable knowledge being offered
huge rewards to change Hive. There’d be chaos.”

Joint Hive Treaty Enforcement’s
rules seemed barbaric to me, but I had to focus on the imprint issue. “So you
can’t remove my imprint without the key symbol, and you don’t know the key
symbols that other Hives use?”

“Exactly,” said Lucas.

“But there’s got to be some
way to remove the imprint without the key.”

“No!” Megan stood up.

Lucas glanced at her. “Let
me handle this, Megan.”

“Amber’s health and wellbeing
are my primary concern.”

“Mine too,” said Lucas.
“Sit down, Megan.”

She shook her head. “Your
role and priorities are different to mine.”

Lucas sighed. “We’re on
the same side here, Megan. I’d never risk harming Amber. I’m not just professionally
involved, but personally as well.”

Megan finally sat down
again and Lucas turned back to me. “We can’t even find your imprint without the
key symbol, Amber. It’s like a single grain of sand lost on the vast beach of
data in your mind. We don’t know what we’re looking for. Even if we could
locate it, trying to remove the imprint without the key would be like … Like
removing some embroidery stitches by cutting a hole in the material. Like smashing
down a door instead of opening it.”

He pulled an agonized
face. “We’d have to wipe everything in that area of your mind, causing huge
damage. You might not be a true telepath afterwards. You might not even be able
to walk or talk. It’s not an option. Not under any circumstances.”

“It can’t be that bad,” I
said. “People have traumatic memories removed all the time. Like the girl that Callum
stabbed.”

“In cases like that, the
traumatic memories are removed by rolling back time,” said Lucas. “The personal
experience chain is unravelled to a point before the incident happened. Everything
after that moment, traumatic or otherwise, is lost forever. You were imprinted
when you were three years old, Amber. If we reset you to before that point,
then you’d lose all your memories and personal development, and become a small
child in an adult body. We have to be truly desperate before we try that.”

“We have to find the key
to my imprint then,” I muttered. “What are these keys like?”

“Our Hive uses complex
visual symbols for both the key and trigger,” said Lucas. “Audible sequences
would also be possible.”

I took a deep breath. “I
have to go Outside.”

“What?” Lucas gave a
bewildered shake of his head. “Amber, we’ve already established that you can’t
go Outside. Your fear of it isn’t natural or rational. You were imprinted as a
terrified three-year-old, and your terror of Outside and the Truesun became part
of that imprint.”

“I have to do this,” I
said. “We know I was imprinted when I was Outside with the target. We need to
bring back my memories of exactly what happened back then.”

“It’s not safe,” said Megan.
“There could be serious trauma.”

I ignored her, keeping my
eyes on Lucas. He was my unit Tactical Commander. He was the one I needed to
convince. “Is it possible my memories would give you some clues about the key symbol
for my imprint?”