Borderline (Hive Mind Book 4)

by Janet Edwards

  Lucas stood up. “Amber needs to rest now.”

  “Call me at once if you want a counselling session, Amber,” said Buzz.

  “I will.”

  I was feeling dreadfully tired and depressed, but forced myself to stand up, and Lucas took my arm to support me. Megan and Adika were waiting in the corridor and looked expectantly at us.

  “Tobias is to be transferred to the nearest Therapy Unit for full assessment and treatment,” said Lucas. “He must be kept under maximum security conditions until his memory has been reset to remove his imprint, all knowledge of this unit, and particularly all knowledge of Amber.”

  “Agreed.” Adika pointed down the corridor. “I’ve got a prisoner transport pod ready.”

  I turned and saw something that looked like a medical cocoon, except that it wasn’t white but coloured red and black. “You’re going to shut Tobias up in that box to be transferred?” I asked in horror. “He’ll get claustrophobic.”

  “There’s no need to worry about that, Amber,” said Megan. “Tobias will be under deep sedation for the journey.”

  I ran my fingers through my hair. “I thought prisoners were just escorted to their destination by hasties.”

  “Ordinary prisoners are,” said Buzz, “but maximum-security prisoners are transported in pods with an escort of specially selected guards. Tobias is only being transferred a short distance, so he’ll be travelling through Level 20 on the regular belt system, and he’s far too lethal to be allowed to mingle with other travellers.”

  Buzz was right. I gave a resigned grunt and watched Adika tow the prisoner transport pod away down the corridor. How Tobias was transported to the Therapy Unit didn’t really matter. The real issue was what would happen to him once he’d been assessed.

  I hated the idea of tampering with anyone’s memory, but I’d supported resetting Olivia’s memories when her fragmentation made her a danger to the Hive. Now I was supported resetting Tobias’s memories, because he wasn’t just a danger to me but everyone else in my unit.

  Chapter Twenty

  That afternoon, Lucas called a meeting of the entire unit in the park to discuss Blue Upway. We were walking down the corridor that led to the park doors, when Gideon came out of his apartment, incongruously dressed in a flowing blue robe and wearing a jewelled headband on his white hair.

  He gave me an ornate bow. “If music be the food of love, play on.”

  “What?” I stared at him in bewilderment.

  “I was playing Duke Orsino in a bookette of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night,” he explained. “I’d lost track of the time when my dataview reminded me of the meeting.”

  Lucas raised his eyebrows. “People don’t often go to the lengths of dressing up in a genuine costume to play a part in a bookette. The holos fake your appearance quite well.”

  “This wasn’t a standard bookette,” said Gideon. “You’ve got some of Claire’s old unit members coming in for an assessment tomorrow, so I’ve been feeling nostalgic. When I worked for Claire, a group of us had costumes and put on performances of her favourite plays, and the bookette is of our last performance of Twelfth Night.”

  “Oh, I see,” I said. “I’d love to play the bookette one day.”

  Gideon laughed. “You can play it if you like, but I warn you that we were appallingly bad actors. We had a lot of fun though. There was one performance of Romeo and Juliet where Romeo got his lines muddled up with his lines from Henry V. We just kept going, Romeo ended up winning the battle of Agincourt, and Juliet became Queen of Hive England.”

  I wasn’t sure if I’d really understood the joke, but I smiled anyway.

  We headed on to the park, and found the rest of the unit members had already gathered in the picnic area. Whenever we had a meeting of the whole unit, there was a tendency for people to cluster together in their teams. I noticed that Zak was standing with the Alpha Strike team, and pulling comic faces at where Rafael was with the Beta team. Rafael was desperately trying not to look at him.

  Lucas climbed on top of a picnic table, and started speaking. “By now, everyone should be well aware that the Teen Game Blue Upway is causing increasing problems across the Hive. While most Teen Games never spread outside their home zone, and reach a maximum size of about fifteen hundred players, Blue Upway has gone Hivewide and grown to a terrifying thirty thousand players.”

  He waved his hands. “The size of Blue Upway wasn’t a problem when the Game Commander was setting reasonable challenges. Now those challenges have moved from being reasonable to reckless, and game group leaders are being offered bonuses to take novice players into maintenance areas. Teen Game players are natural risk-takers, so warning them Blue Upway is dangerous would just add to the attraction. Gold Commander Melisande has given us the job of shutting down the game, and we need to do it as fast as possible.”

  Lucas paused to look around at his audience. “Fortunately, we should be exceptionally well qualified to shut down Blue Upway. It’s confession time, everyone. Can all those who were Teen Game players please raise their hands?”

  I wasn’t surprised when a forest of hands went up in both the Alpha and Beta Strike team groups. Adika had raised his hand too and was frowning at Rothan.

  “You’ve never played a Teen Game at all?” Adika sounded quite shocked.

  “I was invited to join several Teen Games,” said Rothan, in a virtuous voice, “but I refused to get involved in anything so rebellious as trespassing in forbidden areas of the Hive.”

  Lucas laughed. “Of course you wouldn’t be interested in playing Teen Games, Rothan. Your family belonged to the Ramblers Association. There wouldn’t be much of a thrill going trespassing inside the Hive, when you’d been doing something far more rebellious by going on camping trips Outside.”

  I finally noticed there were a few hands raised among other groups than the Alpha and Beta Strike teams. One in particular caught my attention. Someone standing with a motley assortment of the Admin team, hand half-raised, and with an embarrassed expression on her face.

  I gasped in disbelief. “You were a Teen Game player, Megan?”

  “Only intermittently,” she said defensively. “My boyfriend on Teen Level was a dedicated player but didn’t like leading groups. When he occasionally needed help with his plans, he took me along with him.”

  Adika looked even more stunned than me. “You’ve never mentioned being a Teen Game player.”

  Megan blushed. “Why would I mention it? I forgot all about Teen Games when I went through Lottery over thirteen years ago.”

  Lucas was obviously struggling not to laugh. I linked to his mind to find out exactly why he was so amused and found a thought train about Megan.

  … irresistibly attracted to dominant, risk-taking men. She had a game-playing boyfriend on Teen Level. Then she came out of Lottery with Keith, and was married to one of his Strike team within two months. When her husband was killed, she moved to our unit and promptly got entangled with Adika.

  Megan’s husband had a strong resemblance to Adika, so I expect the boyfriend was the same physical type as well, and …

  Adika was scowling. “You’ve never mentioned this boyfriend before either. Where is he now?”

  “Lottery assigned him to Hive Defence,” said Megan.

  Oh no. Our Strike team leader has no problem with a dead husband who gave his life in the service of the Hive, but a living boyfriend is triggering his jealous streak. I’d better move the conversation on rapidly before …

  “I’m curious how many of our game players reached the rank of Colonel,” said Lucas aloud.

  All but eight hands went down. Adika still had his hand raised. So did Kaden, Matias, Eli, and Zak from the Alpha team, and Amir and Yosh from the Beta team. They were all staring incredulously at Megan.

  Lucas was fighting off laughter again.

  … never have guessed our sedate Megan was once a Colonel in a Teen Game. She couldn’t get that rank by occasionally helping her boyfriend. She
must have been so besotted with him that she was crawling around air vents every day. Sadly, that’s going to make Adika even more …

  “You were a Colonel?” demanded Adika.

  “Only in the last two Teen Games we played,” said Megan guiltily.

  “A twice-ranked Colonel!” gasped Eli. “High up, Megan!”

  … and it just keeps getting worse. Adika looks as if he’s about to explode.

  “Thank you, Teen Game players,” said Lucas hastily, and faced his Tactical team. “Now, can everyone who was a Game Commander please raise their hands?”

  Lucas’s words shocked me. I pulled out of his head to concentrate my attention on the Tactical team members, and saw Gideon, Hallie, and Kareem raise their hands.

  “You were Game Commanders!” I gave them a reproachful look.

  Gideon smiled. “Don’t look so horrified, Amber. Just as Strike team members often have a history of playing Teen Games, Tactical team members often have a history of running them.”

  I waved my hands in despair. “Why would you want to run a Teen Game?”

  “It’s fun testing your mental limits by playing what’s effectively a giant chess game with unpredictable human pieces,” said Kareem. “Don’t worry though. Tactical team members have a history of running well-behaved games that keep the danger within reasonable limits. They’d never have caused problems for the Hive.”

  “I expect Kareem was a wildly successful Game Commander,” said Gideon gloomily. “I was a disaster. I tried running two different games. Both times, all my players left in the first six weeks.”

  “They were bound to leave,” said Kareem, in a sympathetic voice. “You’re a defence specialist. You’d have been so careful to avoid your game breaching the boundaries and attracting official attention that the players found the challenges boring.”

  He grimaced. “I had the opposite problem. My game attracted too many players, so it was hard keeping up with the routine work of awarding points. Hallie is our mathematical specialist, so would have been able to set up automation to help her.”

  “I didn’t have any problems running my game,” said Hallie, “but I made some colossal mistakes choosing group leaders. Lucas must have been a brilliant Game Commander though.”

  I looked at Lucas and saw he had his hand raised too. He gave me a nervous smile before replying to Hallie.

  “I was brilliant at what I was trying to achieve. In fact, I think being a Game Commander was the defining experience in my life.”

  I’d thought that I’d broken my link to Lucas’s mind, but I must have been wrong. A sudden surge of powerful emotion caught me, and I was engulfed in an old memory. Lucas was standing in his teen room, tensely facing a man who weirdly felt like both someone deeply familiar and a stranger.

  “You’ve no need to worry, Lucas,” said the man. “The Hive has faith in you. If you have faith in the Hive in return, then you’ll find that Lottery gives you answers that you didn’t know existed.”

  I was still trying to make sense of what I’d seen when Lucas spoke again. “I didn’t start my own Teen Game back then. I invaded someone else’s game, and fought to take control of it.”

  “What?” I gave Lucas an incredulous look. “Why?”

  “Because I knew the Game Commander was putting lives at risk with dangerous challenges. I’d no knowledge at all of telepaths and Telepath Units back then, so had no idea that Keith’s unit was trying to shut down the game as well.”

  He grinned. “The method I used back then was to join the game myself, get a few group leaders to contact me with offers of places in their group, and then respond with suggestions for far more interesting challenges than the Game Commander was offering. Once I’d tempted those players into trying my challenges, they gradually drew their friends into obeying me rather than the Game Commander.”

  Lucas pulled a face. “That approach was painfully slow, and would never work at all in a game like Blue Upway that has thirty thousand players spread across the Hive. I was dealing with a game of fewer than four hundred players though, so I had full control in less than two months. By the time Keith’s undercover players attracted the attention of the Game Commander, that Game Commander was me!”

  Kareem laughed. “What happened, Lucas? Did Keith’s Tactical Commander have you arrested?”

  “No. Gaius had done a timeline pattern analysis of the game, and worked out what I’d done. He didn’t want me arrested at that point, just identified. It ended with Gaius arriving at my teen room and having an unforgettable conversation with me.”

  I blinked. Lucas had first met Gaius on Teen Level. Now I understood why the man in the memory sequence had seemed both familiar and a stranger.

  “Gaius had spotted me as a potential Tactical Commander,” added Lucas. “He dropped some heavy hints about how Lottery could give me answers I didn’t know existed.”

  Lucas shrugged. “Let’s move on to the key point of this meeting. Most of our Teen Game players came out of the last Lottery with Amber. Blue Upway had already been running for a year by then, so we should have some of its game players among us. Did anyone here grow up in Blue Zone and get involved in Blue Upway?”

  Three hands went up. Jalen from the Alpha team, and Forge and Penn from the Beta team.

  “Excellent,” said Lucas. “Jalen, how long were you playing Blue Upway?”

  “I was involved with a different Blue Zone Game for most of my final year on Teen Level, so I only played Blue Upway for about three months before going into Lottery.”

  Lucas nodded. “Penn?”

  “I split up with my girlfriend at the start of my last year on Teen Level. By then, everyone was getting wary of beginning new relationships that were doomed to end when we went into Lottery. I lived and breathed Blue Upway for my remaining ten months on Teen Level.”

  “What about you, Forge?” asked Lucas.

  “A card of instructions was pushed under my door, and I ended up playing Blue Upway for just over a year before I went into Lottery. I must have been one of the very first players to join, because I was offered the chance to prove myself to the Game Commander by some daring exploits and skip straight to a high rank.”

  Forge waved both hands. “I had an exacting girlfriend, was a member of a couple of Blue Zone sports teams, and was organizing social events for the other teens on my corridor as well. I’d never had time to do more than a dozen challenges in a Teen Game, and wanted to have a serious try at playing one before I left Teen Level. I decided to take advantage of the Game Commander’s offer, and hoped that doing some exploring in the air vents would be enough to get me promoted straight to Lieutenant or even Captain.”

  He grinned. “As it turned out, I got stuck in the air vents, and was still crawling around them during the massive power cut in Blue Zone twenty-one months ago. Amber will probably remember what happened back then.”

  I glowered at Forge and folded my arms. I had extremely vivid memories of what happened back then, and how much trouble Forge had caused Atticus and me when he got stuck in the air vents.

  “You mean you caused all those problems during the power cut because you were playing some silly game? You never said a word to me about Blue Upway. Did you tell Atticus you were playing a Teen Game?”

  “Of course not,” said Forge. “Atticus would have lectured me for weeks.”

  “And I’m going to lecture you for months,” I said fiercely.

  Forge smiled unrepentantly at me. “It was worth it though, Amber.”

  “Was it?” Adika looked disappointed in Forge. “Despite your efforts to grab an advantage at the start of Blue Upway, you never made it to the rank of Colonel.”

  “The rank of Colonel was completely irrelevant,” said Forge smugly. “Given all the hazards and the darkness during the power cut, the Game Commander awarded me the title of Blue Upway Champion.”

  There was an awed gasp from the other Strike team members, and even Adika looked impressed.

  “So
meone will have to explain that to me,” said Rothan.

  “The Game Commander awards the title of Champion to the most courageous player,” said Eli eagerly. “It’s the highest honour in a Teen Game.”

  Rothan saluted Forge. “Hail, Champion!”

  Lucas laughed. “Did the Blue Upway Champion ever meet his Game Commander, or learn any personal information about them?”

  “I met the Game Commander once to be awarded my Champion badge,” said Forge. “It was the standard arrangement though, with us both hiding our identity by wearing Halloween costumes, and standing at a distance from each other in a night-time park. I couldn’t tell you anything about the Game Commander at all.”

  I was curious enough to check Forge’s thoughts and saw the memory in his head. He’d been standing at the appointed spot in a dimly lit park for about five minutes, when the shadowy figure of the Game Commander appeared at the far end of the path. The two of them had silently bowed to each other, before the Game Commander put the badge on a nearby bench, turned, and walked away.

  Sharing that memory with Forge, I could feel his proud delight that the Blue Upway Game Commander had come to honour their chosen Champion. The moment I retreated into my own head though, it seemed ridiculous. Why bother arranging a meeting where neither of them would say a word to the other?

  “Later, we exchanged some messages about game challenges,” added Forge. “I didn’t learn any personal information about the Game Commander from those messages, but they were very likeable, responsible, and had a great sense of humour. I can’t believe that person would ever send novice players into danger.”

  “My theory is that the original Game Commander of Blue Upway went into Lottery last Carnival,” said Lucas, “and someone totally different is now running the game. My team members will need to investigate that possibility by having a discreet conversation with everyone from Blue Zone who was imprinted for Telepath Unit Tactical team in the last Lottery.”

  His voice took on a meaningful note. “If someone is hiding the fact that they started Blue Upway because they think it will get them into trouble, then they’re entirely wrong. I’d be so pleased to have the original Game Commander of Blue Upway helping us that I’d personally buy them a year’s supply of their favourite raspberry dreamcakes.”