“When we’re chasing someone, those details can help us locate the target,” Adika added. “I think Amber is ready to move on to phase four. She’s noticed things in my mind that I didn’t even know I was thinking about.”
“I agree with Adika.” Lucas bounced to his feet. “Amber moves on to phase four, which means we can expect to head back to the Hive in about a week.”
Megan didn’t seem too happy about the decision, but accepted it. She walked us to the door of her apartment. Adika jogged off down the corridor to the right. Lucas and I turned left and walked down the corridor to his apartment.
“Megan’s watching us and imagining lurid things,” I whispered, as Lucas opened the door.
“How lurid?” asked Lucas.
We went into the lounge and I sat on the couch. “Hugging, kissing, everything up to and including me sharing your bed. She’s trying desperately hard not to think about it, because she knows I’ll see it in her mind, but that just makes her think about it even more.”
There was a short silence. Lucas couldn’t read my mind, but he was imprinted with behavioural analysis techniques. I watched his thoughts busily analyzing the fact I’d raised this subject, and saw my own face through his eyes as he studied my expression and body language. He dropped into speed speech.
“Preferable delay discussion topic.”
“I don’t see any reason why we can’t talk about this now. I’m attracted to you, Lucas, and I know you’re attracted to me.”
I saw his thoughts abruptly turn savage, and instinctively recoiled from them. “Lucas, different levels of your mind are arguing with each other about me. What’s going on?”
He sighed, and came to sit on the floor facing me. “Megan has good reason to be concerned about what’s happening between us. Lottery divided you from your friends. You spent days being tested, and sitting among crowds of silent strangers. After that, you were alone in Hive Futura with Megan. Once I arrived, someone close to your age, you naturally liked to spend time with me.”
“Yes, I was lonely, but it’s more than that. I only met you just over a week ago, but the telepathy makes a huge difference. I know you as well as any of my friends on Teen Level, probably much better, and you’ve become very important to me.”
“When I first met you,” said Lucas, “I found you desirable. I knew you’d see that in my head, so there was no point in trying to hide it. You seemed to like me in return, I thought that was as a friend, but you’re obviously thinking of our relationship developing into more than friendship.”
“Yes, I am.”
He stared down at the carpet. “In a few days’ time, we’ll go back to the Hive, you’ll meet a lot of male eighteen-year-olds, and you’ll find them all far more attractive than me. I mustn’t start building expectations on something that’s going to vanish from under my feet.”
His underlying thoughts startled me. “What? Lottery chose my Strike team to …?”
“It’s standard procedure,” said Lucas. “The second we locate a telepath, the process of staffing their Telepath Unit begins. Some positions have to be filled by people who’ve the benefit of actual experience as well as imprinted knowledge, but most of your staff will have been chosen by Lottery. One of the factors considered in their selection is the necessity of providing potential partners for the telepath.”
“Lottery has been choosing potential boyfriends for me! Why?”
“Logical option,” said Lucas. “Compensation inevitable issues missing optimization.”
“I don’t understand. Your mind is …” I broke off. His mind was fighting multiple internal civil wars over what was good for the Hive and what was good for him. It was a confusing and extremely unhappy place. “Explain properly. Include all the words.”
Lucas pulled a face and painstakingly spelled it out for me. “Teens fear Lottery because they have no control over what happens to them, but the system doesn’t blindly hammer square pegs into round holes. With a hundred million people to play with, the optimization phase of Lottery can give people not just necessary work that they can do well, but work they really enjoy. That’s better for the people and more productive for the Hive. I was terrified entering Lottery, I didn’t see what they’d do with a misfit like me, but I love my work.”
I could imagine Lucas as a weird teen entering Lottery. At a different time, I’d have smiled.
“Lottery works,” Lucas repeated, “except for the one in a million people who have some ability so vital to the Hive that they never enter optimization phase. You’re one of those, Amber. The Hive needs you to fill a dangerously stressful role, whether you’re suited to it or not. You know what the pressure of that did to Olivia and York. You know we try to compensate for that by doing everything we can to help you be relaxed and happy outside your work. Part of that is allowing you the possibility of having a relationship with someone.”
“I don’t mind getting indulged with a huge apartment and luxury food,” I said, “but choosing potential boyfriends for me is going too far.”
“You’ll be living in your Telepath Unit, totally isolated from the rest of the Hive. If potential partners don’t exist in your unit, how would you meet them? If you did meet someone, and they worked outside Law Enforcement, there’d be huge security issues.”
Lucas paused. “You’re already uncomfortable about having to lie to your parents. That problem would be far worse with a partner. You’d be constantly lying about your work, inventing reasons why you get called away unexpectedly, and being embarrassed by bodyguards following you on dates and lurking outside your partner’s apartment when you spend the night there.”
“I wouldn’t need bodyguards if I was going on a date.”
“Adika wouldn’t agree with that,” said Lucas. “If your relationship progressed to the point of you wishing to live with someone, they’d have to move to your Telepath Unit. That would mean you had to tell them the full truth about yourself, and they might not react well to the news you were a telepath.”
I thought about myself a few months ago, pictured how I’d have reacted to a boyfriend telling me he was a nosy, and winced. “I suppose it would be difficult.”
“Very difficult and potentially even dangerous for you. Lottery tries to avoid these problems by running tests to find out the new telepath’s preferred type of partner, and making sure some are included among their unit staff. In your case, it was very simple. You’re attracted to men, particularly the sort of athletic, muscled male that makes an ideal Strike team member. All that was needed was to add a few extra constraints to the standard Strike team selection criteria. That candidates should have a certain facial bone structure and black hair.”
I shook my head. “Strike team candidates should be chosen because of their abilities, not because I like their hair colour.”
“Lottery found thousands of people with the ideal physical and mental characteristics for your Strike team,” said Lucas. “Since a Strike team member has to be able to run at top speed while carrying the telepath, most of the possible candidates were male. The female candidates would primarily be considered for either Morton or Keith’s Strike teams anyway, because their preference is for female partners.”
“The Hive does this sort of thing for Morton and Keith too?”
“As I said, it’s standard procedure for all telepaths,” said Lucas. “Our unit needs two Strike teams because we must never be in the situation where the telepath is ready to respond to an emergency but the Strike team are not. Adika is already choosing his twenty Strike team members for the Alpha team. When they’re trained and operational, he’ll pick his Beta team. That’s a total of forty Strike team places.”
I’d worked out that my Telepath Unit was going to be bigger than the Research Unit where my parents worked. I revised my estimate of its size up even further.
Lucas was still talking. “Lottery will have considered thousands of candidates for those forty places. It will have imprinted a couple of hundred of
them, to allow for rejections, sudden vacancies in other units, and because there are a few other Hive roles that overlap with Strike team imprinting. Rather than choose the final two hundred candidates randomly, Lottery chose them to be men that you’d find attractive.”
“That’s … humiliating.”
“Would you prefer to be carried round by men you find repugnant?” asked Lucas. “Think that through, Amber. It’s not just being carried. In some situations your Strike team will be physically protecting you with their bodies. That can get very intimate. Keith is heavily built, so it’s impossible to make his Strike team all female, but he reacts badly to close physical contact with men. That causes huge problems for his staff.”
I waved a dismissive hand. “This is all irrelevant. However good looking my Strike team are, I don’t believe that meeting them will change my feelings for you, Lucas.”
He didn’t say a word, but his answer was laid out for me in his head. He’d no self-confidence in this area. Girls had never been interested in someone so bewilderingly unconventional and incomprehensibly bright. Lucas had never really tried to overcome that problem. He couldn’t see the point when he knew his initial physical attraction to a girl would soon change to boredom anyway.
I was different. The only person Lucas had ever met who could keep up with his high speed conversations. The only girl he’d ever met who fascinated rather than bored him.
“You’re afraid that we’ll move on from being friends,” I said, “and then I’ll meet my Strike team and dump you.”
“It would be difficult to continue a working relationship after that.” His head was busy lining up the stakes involved. The pain he’d feel at investing in a relationship just to have me turn away from him within weeks. The risk of losing not just my friendship but possibly his position as Tactical Commander as well. He couldn’t stay in my Telepath Unit if I was uncomfortable with him being there.
I sighed. “We’ll do this your way then. Wait and see what happens when I meet my Strike team.”
Chapter Nine
My mind was focused on my relationship with Lucas, so it took me until the next morning to think of the obvious point. Lottery had chosen my Strike team members to match my preferences in a partner, and Lucas had said something about muscled men with black hair. There was something ominously familiar about that description.
I had breakfast, left the dirty dishes strewn across the table, and headed towards Lucas’s apartment. Halfway down the corridor, I abruptly stopped. It would be much simpler for me to get the information I needed from Adika.
His apartment was in the opposite direction, so I turned round, and was just in time to see a girl opening my apartment door. That was Hannah, one of the general staff who worked for Megan. She’d been brought here a few days ago, when the untidiness of my apartment reached crisis point.
It was somehow symbolic of how my life had changed, that Megan hadn’t made the slightest complaint about how a pristine luxury apartment had turned into a disaster area. You don’t argue with the telepath, tell her to tidy up, or even suggest she stops throwing her clothes on the floor. You don’t leave her to live in a garbage heap in the hope she’ll eventually clear it up herself. You make no comment about it at all, just bring someone in to clean up after her and deal with her laundry.
My reluctance to have a cleaner invading my private apartment was hugely outweighed by my reluctance to do the cleaning myself, so I’d welcomed Hannah’s arrival. As an extra bonus, the girl was fresh from Lottery like me. I’d naively pictured us chatting together, but our first encounter had been horribly awkward. I was feeling uncomfortable about having to read Hannah’s mind to approve her appointment. She was utterly overawed to be in the presence of someone as critically important to the Hive as a telepath.
Since then, I hadn’t seen Hannah at all. Each day, I’d leave my apartment in chaos and return to find it magically restored to perfect order. I grabbed my chance to talk to her again, hurrying back towards her and calling her name. “Hannah!”
She guiltily swung round to face me. “I’m sorry, Amber. I thought you were going out. I’ll come back later.”
“No, please don’t go.” I smiled at her. “I wanted to thank you for cleaning up my apartment. I’m afraid it was in a dreadful state when you arrived.”
She flushed nervously. “It was a pleasure. I love tidying up and cleaning places.”
I knew that was true. When I was reading Hannah’s mind, I’d felt her delight in arranging things, polishing things, and bringing out the natural beauty in rooms. I’d even been inspired to try some cleaning myself, but my second-hand enthusiasm hadn’t survived for more than five minutes of throwing rubbish into the waste chute.
“I was imprinted as an office cleaner,” Hannah continued, “but working in your lovely apartment is even more satisfying. I …”
A frosty voice interrupted her. “Hannah, you shouldn’t be wasting the telepath’s precious time with your chatter.”
I turned to face Fran. “I was thanking Hannah for tidying my apartment. She’s done a wonderful job of …” I broke off as I realized Hannah was scurrying away down the corridor.
“There’s no need for you to thank a Level 57 Law Enforcement Office Cleaner for doing her work adequately,” said Fran. “Hannah is remarkably fortunate that her discretion and loyalty to the Hive have gained her a position in a Telepath Unit. She’ll have accommodation above the standard she’d normally be given, along with many additional privileges.”
She didn’t give me time to reply to that, just rapidly changed the subject. “I was disappointed to discover that you’d excluded me from yesterday’s meeting about your training progress.”
“I didn’t exclude you.”
“You told Megan that you didn’t think my presence was necessary.”
It was true I’d said that to Megan. I’d known that Fran would hate having to sit smiling through a discussion of my telepathy. I’d thought she would be relieved to be excused the ordeal. I hadn’t allowed for the fact that she might be glad not to be at the meeting but still resent not being invited.
“Yes, but …” I tried to think of a tactful answer. “I didn’t think you’d be interested in attending since I don’t need to work telepathically with my Liaison team.”
“You don’t need to work telepathically with your Tactical Commander either, however Lucas was present in the meeting.” From the acid tone of her voice, Fran was obviously aware that I spent a lot of time reading Lucas’s mind.
“If you prefer it, you can be included in future meetings about my telepathic training.”
“I prefer to be included in all future meetings whatever the subject,” said Fran.
I held back a groan. “Then you will be.”
“Thank you.” Fran gave a stiff nod, turned, and walked away.
I sighed, and headed on to Adika’s apartment. I pressed the chime button next to his door, but there was no response. After a second press of the chime achieved nothing, I reached out to Adika’s mind and found him watching me on the image from the door camera.
Come in, Amber.
I gave a despairing laugh and opened the door. I was trying to win the approval of both Fran and myself by setting boundaries, rules for when I should or shouldn’t read minds. Megan, Lucas, and Adika were all encouraging me to break those boundaries, by pushing me to constantly read their thoughts.
I followed the glow of Adika’s mind to the bare empty room he used as a gym. He was weight training, which explained the edge of fatigue in his thoughts. I let him put the weights down before I spoke.
“My first job back in the Hive will be to check your candidates for the Strike team. I thought I could prepare for that now by taking a look at their holos and records.”
Adika nodded, his face blank and incurious, and the top level of his thoughts concentrating on the mechanics of getting a data cube and copying the relevant records. Deeper down, his mind was busy speculating.
… spending a lot of time with Lucas, but she surely can’t be leaping into his bed when he looks nothing like …
… unshakeable if Amber supports him as well as Megan. Waste it! How can I trust the judgement of a Tactical Commander who acts like a small child? He’ll be ordering me and my team into danger and …
The level below that was torn between his wish to tell Megan exactly what he thought of Lucas, and his desire to keep on good terms with her and … I pulled out of that train of thought hastily. I still found it disconcerting to be sucked into male reactions.
Adika’s low opinion of Lucas was painfully obvious to everyone. Lucas was deeply amused by it, and mischievously fuelling the poor man’s fears by playing the fool in front of him. I considered reassuring Adika that Lucas was brilliant, but that would only convince him that we were a couple. In the current circumstances, it seemed an extremely bad idea.
I kept quiet, accepted the data cube, and headed back to my apartment to start viewing the holos of Adika’s twenty preferred candidates for Alpha Strike team. My suspicions were quickly confirmed. The Lottery tests had been affected by my fascination with Forge. The candidates had skin tones that varied from pale to even darker than Adika, but they all had black hair, and there was something subtle about their cheekbones that reminded me of Forge.
I skipped on through fifteen holos, estimating each young man’s resemblance to Forge, and was relieved that I felt no compulsion to sit staring at their faces. As far as I could tell, I was merely reacting to them with the natural interest any girl would have in good-looking young men who would be working closely with her.
I stopped watching the holos when I got to number sixteen because there was no point after that. Number sixteen didn’t just look like Forge. Number sixteen was Forge.
Chapter Ten
I sat there, staring blankly at the holo of Forge, telling myself I was a fool to be so shocked by this. I’d known Forge was strong and a natural athlete. I’d known he was addicted to taking risks. I’d even known Lottery had assigned him to Law Enforcement. I should have realized there was a high risk of him showing up on my Strike team. There might be thousands of other candidates just as well qualified, but Lottery had made the final choice based on their resemblance to Forge, so he’d naturally be selected.
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