Borderline (Hive Mind Book 4)

by Janet Edwards

  “Yes, I’ve worked that out,” said Lucas. “We can remove all knowledge of Gregas’s encounter with a wild bee from his mind, Wesley’s mind, the Captain’s mind, and in theory from the minds of everyone in our unit. What we can’t do is remove it from Amber’s mind, because tampering with the mind of a telepath can damage their abilities.”

  He paused. “If Amber doesn’t read Gregas’s mind now, then she’ll spend the rest of her life wondering exactly what happened to him. Every time she’s on an emergency run where a wild bee encounters a bystander, she’ll be imagining those events happening to Gregas.”

  Buzz gave him a startled look. “Lucas is right. It’s better to live with one unpleasant truth than a thousand nightmare possibilities, so I agree that Amber has to read Gregas’s mind.”

  Megan sighed and led the way on to the next holding cell. Adika and the bodyguards waited outside again as the rest of us went through the door. The room was identical to the last one, except for the crucial point that the boy on the couch wasn’t Wesley but Gregas.

  My brother looked curiously vulnerable lying there with his eyes closed. A forgotten childhood memory awakened of my first sight of newborn Gregas, and how he’d kept impatiently kicking off the tiny socks he was wearing.

  Megan repeated the same words as before, with just the name changed. “Gregas, I want you to think about what happened when you went into the air vents. There’s no need for you to be afraid. You’re in a perfectly safe place with me, just thinking through past events.”

  Lucas dragged a chair nearer to me, and I sat down. I’d hesitated before reading Wesley’s mind, and studied its shape and texture. I just closed my eyes and dived straight into Gregas’s thoughts though, eager to get the ordeal over with as fast as possible. I found Gregas reliving a memory sequence, its events both identical and glaringly different to those I’d seen in Wesley’s mind.

  “The game group is entering the air vent inspection hatch,” I said. “Gregas isn’t fantasizing, so I’m seeing the Captain go in first, then Wesley, and finally Gregas. They’re crawling on through the air vent now. Gregas keeps stopping to peer into side turnings and inspect the alcoves with the ladders running up and down. He gets left behind and has to chase after the others.”

  I shook my head. “Everything seems very unfamiliar to Gregas. He may have been somewhere with a game group before, but not in a maintenance area. He’s torn between fear and enjoyment. The maintenance mesh is uncomfortable beneath his hands and knees, and the air blowing through the vent is cold. Gregas is thinking that he should wear thicker clothes next time he does this.”

  “That’s a surprisingly practical reaction,” said Lucas.

  “Gregas can be very practical about some things,” I said. “Free food, for example.”

  Lucas laughed.

  “There’s some conversation that wasn’t in Wesley’s memories,” I added. “The Captain seems to be feeling guilty about taking Wesley and Gregas into the vent system. He’s doing his best to help them cope by explaining things. Telling them that you need a special tool to open an air vent cover from the inside, and warning them that some air vents have dangers like sudden drops.”

  “If the Captain is feeling guilty about this, why has he taken Gregas and Wesley into the maintenance areas at all?” asked Lucas.

  I shrugged. “He said something about the Game Commander offering bonus points for taking low-ranked players in there.”

  Lucas made a despairing sound. “So that’s why we’re getting this rush of game players in maintenance areas.”

  “I think the group must be getting close to where they meet the wild bee,” I said. “The emotional overtones of the memory sequence are changing like they did with Wesley. Gregas is clearly anticipating what’s about to happen next, but there’s an oddity. With Wesley, the emotions shifted from glorious adventure to something ominous. With Gregas, the shift is from curiosity to tense excitement, and …”

  I broke off that sentence and started another. “The Captain has just whispered that he can see someone further down the air vent. Gregas can’t see anything ahead because both the Captain and Wesley are in the way. Now the wild bee must be coming towards them, because there’s the same sound of a strange male voice shouting as before, and the Captain is yelling orders about climbing a ladder.”

  I paused. “There’s a lot of clanging going on. Now the Captain’s out of view up the ladder, but Gregas can hear his voice calling down to Wesley, swearing at him and telling him to move. Wesley’s climbing the ladder now, and Gregas gets his first view of the wild bee.”

  I gasped. “I’ve got this strong visual image. A man in torn party clothes, with blood on his face and carrying a hammer. It’s frozen there in Gregas’s mind as if time halted for a while.”

  “That’s unfortunate,” said Lucas. “The sight of the wild bee made such a strong impression on Gregas that he’s never going to believe the man was a maintenance worker.”

  “Time is moving again,” I said sharply. “The man’s too close to the ladder. Gregas knows he won’t be able to reach it without being grabbed. Gregas turns and crawls back along the air vent. He can hear the man chasing after him. He needs to find another ladder. He needs to find another ladder. He needs to find another ladder.”

  I could hear my own voice rising in hysteria, and Buzz spoke sharply. “Amber, you should stop this now.”

  “I can’t stop now!” I shouted. “I can see the next ladder. I mean, Gregas can see the next ladder. He’s reached the ladder now, he’s climbing it, but the man’s following him. The sound of his movements and his breathing is getting closer.”

  ** Insight**

  He wants to kill me. He’s got longer arms than me, so he’s climbing faster. He’s going to catch me before I reach the top of this ladder, then he’s going to kill me. I have to …

  “My brother just had an insight into the mind of the wild bee!” I said in disbelief. “Gregas knows the man wants to kill him, but he isn’t trying to get away any longer. He isn’t climbing. He isn’t even thinking. I don’t understand …”

  There weren’t any thoughts in Gregas’s head at all now. It was his body that was doing the thinking as he wrapped his arms around the sides of the ladder and gripped the rungs tightly. He glanced down at the man who was right behind him now, saw the hand reaching towards him, and made one sharp motion with his right leg.

  “Waste that!” I said.

  “What happened, Amber?” asked Lucas.

  “My baby brother just kicked a wild bee in the head and made him fall off the ladder,” I said incredulously. “Gregas is climbing again now. He’s made it to the top of the ladder, and got across to a larger maintenance crawl way.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “Gregas was panicking earlier, but now his mind is calm and focused. He takes one rapid look back down the ladder, but there’s no sign of the wild bee following him. He needs to find the rest of his group, and that means heading west. He checks the maintenance codes on the wall, and goes west along the maintenance crawl way, hoping to meet the ladder that the Captain and Wesley climbed. Yes, he can see Wesley ahead of him!”

  I paused. “Gregas just had a moment of tense excitement. That’s the emotion that was puzzling me earlier. It was coming from this point in the memory sequence. Now Gregas reaches Wesley. He hugs him and asks where the Captain has gone. Wesley still looks terrified. He points down the crawl way, and Gregas yells at him to get moving.”

  “Gregas is handling this surprisingly well,” said Lucas thoughtfully.

  “He was, but he’s getting worried now,” I said. “Gregas and Wesley are going down the crawl way, but there’s no sign of the Captain. Gregas can’t remember the way back to the air vent inspection hatch, and Wesley’s no help at all. Gregas knows they won’t be able to get out of any other air vents because they don’t have one of the special tools to open them from inside. He …”

  I heard a clanging sound, and was swept up by Gregas’
s alarmed reaction. “There’s the sound of someone climbing a ladder. It’s coming from below and getting closer. It could be the man with the hammer. Gregas is whispering to Wesley, trying to get him moving to safety, but then he sees someone getting off a ladder and entering the crawl way.”

  I gasped. “It isn’t the wild bee, and it isn’t just one person coming. There’s two of them. No, three of them. All coming towards Gregas and Wesley. Gregas has worked out they must belong to Law Enforcement. He’s telling Wesley that they have to give themselves up, but they mustn’t say anything at all about what happened. Gregas doesn’t know how badly he hurt the man with the hammer, and he’s thinking they’re both going to get in a huge amount of trouble.”

  I left Gregas’s mind, and opened my eyes. “The three people coming towards Gregas and Wesley were obviously members of Mira’s Strike team, so we know what happened after that.”

  I sat back in my chair and pulled a stunned face. “What happened to Gregas wasn’t nearly as bad as I feared. As you said, Lucas, Gregas handled things surprisingly well, but …”

  I gave a despairing shake of my head. “Gregas had an insight into the mind of the wild bee. My brother is a borderline telepath!”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Lucas glanced at where Gregas was lying on the couch. “Gregas shouldn’t be aware of anything the rest of us say, but he’s currently attuned to Megan’s voice. We’d better move to another room to discuss this.”

  Buzz led the way back outside. “There’s a waiting room at the end of the corridor we can use.”

  “I’ll get two of the medical staff to come and sit with Wesley and Gregas while we’re away,” said Megan.

  Lucas looked at Adika. “I’m sure you’ll want to join this discussion. I’d better call Nicole as well so we can make this a proper team leader meeting.”

  There was a pause while Megan and Lucas took out dataviews and sent their messages, then we all went down the corridor to the waiting room and organized some chairs into a circle. A minute later, Nicole drove her powered chair into the room to join us.

  “I recorded Amber when she was reading the minds of both Wesley and Gregas,” said Lucas. “I’ll play those recordings now, so Adika and Nicole fully understand the situation.”

  The first recording began playing. It was strange watching a holo of myself sitting, eyes closed, reciting Wesley’s memories. I hadn’t realized how much of my target’s emotions was echoed in my own facial expressions. My voice sounded oddly youthful too.

  Once that recording ended, Lucas started playing the one where I was reading Gregas’s mind. That wasn’t strange but genuinely disturbing. I didn’t know Wesley’s face and voice that well, but my brother …

  “I look like Gregas in that holo,” I said. “I sound like Gregas too.”

  Lucas stopped the recording. “Yes. When you’re deeply engaged with a target mind, you take on some aspects of their facial mannerisms and voice patterns. It’s especially striking in this recording because of your family resemblance to Gregas.”

  “I’d no idea this happened when I was reading minds,” I said. “Do other telepaths react like this too?”

  “I never saw any sign of it when Keith was reading minds,” said Megan. “The first time I saw you do it, you were reading Lucas’s mind. I was worried that he had an unhealthy controlling influence over you, but Adika said he’d sometimes seen the same effect when he worked for Mira. I decided it was just one of the many variations between individual telepaths.”

  “Mira’s unit referred to this as reflecting,” added Adika. “It’s far more noticeable with you, Amber, than it was with Mira, and I never saw it happen with Morton at all. I don’t know if it happens with Sapphire or not.”

  “We could try asking her unit about it,” said Nicole.

  “We could ask, but we wouldn’t get an answer,” said Adika. “All Telepath Units are protective of their telepath, but Sapphire’s unit is like a closed-off fortress. She’s notoriously choosy about who she recruits for her unit, rejecting lots of perfectly reasonable candidates, and those she does recruit rarely leave.”

  “Is that because Sapphire doesn’t want them to go, or because they don’t want to leave?” I asked.

  “My impression is that it’s a combination of both those things,” said Adika. “Sapphire’s people are fiercely loyal to her and unreasonably secretive.”

  “After what happened years ago with Keith, Sapphire is defensive of her personal information,” said Lucas. “You can’t blame her unit members for respecting her wishes.”

  He turned to me. “Are you happy for me to play the rest of the recording, Amber? If you find it troubling, then I could summarize the rest of what happened for Adika and Nicole.”

  “I wasn’t troubled by it,” I said. “I was just intrigued. Please play the rest.”

  Lucas raised his eyebrows at me in a sign that he knew I was lying, but started the recording playing again anyway. For the next moment or two, I was focused on the unnerving way I was reflecting Gregas, but then I got caught up in the events I was describing and forgot everything else.

  The recording ended at the point where I opened my eyes, and there was a short silence before Lucas spoke.

  “Amber’s brother is a borderline telepath. That won’t be a surprise to anyone, but it does complicate the situation.”

  “It was a surprise to me,” I said bitterly. “An extremely unwelcome surprise.”

  “One of the first things you were told in training was that there was a genetic factor involved in people becoming borderline telepaths,” said Lucas. “You must have realized there was a possibility of Gregas being one.”

  “Yes, but …” I ran my fingers through my hair and glanced at Buzz. “You told me that you had intuitions about people as a child.”

  “Yes. When I went through Lottery, the triggering processes made those moments of intuition sharper and more strongly defined, transforming them into true insights.”

  “Well, Gregas has never shown the slightest sense about people,” I said. “It was a long time before he worked out that Wesley’s ridiculous stories weren’t true. Gregas’s shocked reaction to his insight showed he’d never even had a moment of intuition before. How could Gregas go straight from no intuition at all to having a true insight?”

  “The vast majority of borderline telepaths aren’t consciously aware of having either intuitions or insights until they go through the triggering processes in Lottery,” said Buzz. “Those of us with abilities that awaken early …”

  Buzz hesitated. “Well, Gregas’s experience matches mine exactly, Amber. We both had our borderline telepathy triggered by a potentially life-threatening situation. It just happened to me at a much younger age, so my abilities surfaced as intuitions rather than true insights.”

  She hastily changed the subject. “Lucas is right about Gregas’s borderline telepathy complicating things. We can give Gregas any standard therapy we wish, but resetting his memories isn’t an option in any circumstances.”

  I frowned. “Why not?”

  Buzz sighed. “True telepaths are so vanishingly rare that the Hive has limited understanding of their abilities and errs on the side of caution by not imprinting their minds at all. Lottery finds nearly a thousand borderline telepaths each year though, so we have far more information on how things affect them. It’s perfectly safe to imprint the mind of a borderline telepath, but tampering with their personal memories can damage their abilities.”

  “I suppose Gregas being a borderline telepath also rules him out of having a normal combat position,” said Adika. “A pity. I was impressed by his actions on that ladder. Using his height advantage to take down someone much bigger and stronger than him shows rapid, clear thinking. The boy doesn’t have the build to be a Strike team member, but there are other types of combat roles.”

  “Gregas’s favourite programmes on the Hive entertainment channels are thrillers about Hive England Defence teams chasing agents f
rom other Hives,” said Lucas. “I expect Gregas saw that ladder trick in one of those thrillers.”

  “Seeing someone else do it is very different from having the presence of mind to do it yourself in a crisis,” said Adika. “Buzz, do you know if Lottery has any specialized combat roles for borderline telepaths?”

  Buzz waved her hands. “All borderline telepaths have imprints that include some form of Law Enforcement counselling role, how to act the part of a nosy, and basic combat skills to use if you get attacked, but there’s also a personalized section. I’ve only worked with other psychology focused borderline telepaths, so I don’t know about any other roles.”

  “I don’t want my brother having a specialized combat position,” I said coldly. “I want him to have a nice safe life.”

  Buzz studied my face. “And you have the power to make sure your brother has a nice safe life, Amber. You’re one of only five telepaths in this Hive. You’re so desperately needed that you can insist on Lottery blocking Gregas from any position that carries even the slightest risk. Just say the word and Gregas’s record will be flagged to limit his future options.”

  I tugged at my hair. It was tempting to say that word and make sure that my parents and I would never have to worry about Gregas’s work. I couldn’t do that though. I mustn’t do that.

  “No, I can’t use my power to control Gregas’s life. I went through this when I first arrived in my unit and discovered my old friend, Forge, was on my Strike team. I knew I could insist on him being kept safe in my unit, but doing that would destroy his life and make him hate me. I went through it again with you, Lucas, and now it’s Gregas. The person changes but the answer must stay the same. I can’t impose my wishes on other people.”

  Lucas smiled. “You always amaze me, Amber. My imprint tells me that you should have fully realized the powerful position of telepaths by now, and be showing the first signs of distancing. I’ve not seen any hint of it in you at all though. Not a single member of my Tactical team has even said the word distancing.”