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I awoke in the caressing warm air of a sleep field, and lay with my eyes still closed for a moment, confused by the scent of flowers and sound of birdsong. Then my memories came flooding back. Lucas and I had followed the main path through the expansion section, and found ...
Well, I still wasn’t sure how to describe this place. I’d slept in tents Outside. I’d visited buildings at the sea farm called houses. This was something between the two. A one-roomed house, with a glass wall that could be partially opened, or folded away entirely.
I turned to look at the glass wall. It was closed now, and had changed from plain glass to an abstract design in blue and green, which let the park sunlight through into this room. I rolled over in the sleep field, and saw Lucas was lying next to me, studying his dataview screen.
“Ah, you’re awake.” He put his dataview aside. “How are you feeling?”
I considered the question. “There isn’t really a word for how you feel after throwing all the invading influences out of your head. It’s empowering, and there’s a strange sense of clarity. I’m still not sure if that clarity is part of the process of getting rid of echoes, or the result of it succeeding.”
I shrugged and changed the subject. “Why has the wall changed to blue and green?”
“Megan’s new deputy, Nora, messaged me an hour or so ago. The planting teams have a lot of work to do, and the animal care teams need to check how the animals and birds are settling in and put out fresh food at the feeding stations.”
He paused. “I knew that you’d want the animals and birds cared for, but you looked solidly asleep. Rather than wake you up so you could put some clothes on, I closed the wall and set it to picture mode before giving permission for people to start work.”
I closed my eyes while I scanned the expansion section. “There are two people near us, but most are working down the end nearest the park.”
“How does their presence affect the feel of this place?” asked Lucas.
I opened my eyes again. “It changes it to be more like an ordinary park.”
“So you couldn’t get rid of echoes while they’re here?”
“No.”
“The main installation team has already left,” said Lucas, “but the planting and animal care teams will be working here until the New Year festival. After that, there’ll only be two of their people staying to do the routine maintenance until we recruit our own permanent staff. We could easily get them to leave the expansion area if you needed to be alone.”
“I wouldn’t need people to leave when I’m just relaxing, but I would if I have to deal with echoes.”
“How do you think you’d feel about Buzz being present?” asked Lucas.
“However comfortable I am with Buzz, I think I’d need her to leave too. Dealing with echoes is deeply personal. I think Buzz understands that because she didn’t try to come in here with us last night.”
“But you dealt with the echo of Tobias while I was with you.” Lucas smiled. “I feel incredibly flattered by that.”
I was oddly embarrassed and hastily pointed at his dataview. “What’s been happening during the night? How is Caleb? Has he had his surgery yet?”
“Yes, Atticus arrived at about midnight to do the operation. His report said it was straightforward, and Caleb should be back on active duty within two weeks. Since Eli was in charge of your bodyguards, he’d come back to the unit with you, so Atticus could take the opportunity to do his operation as well.”
“Eli’s had his surgery! Was that straightforward too?”
“Everything went perfectly. Both Caleb and Eli are recovering in our medical area.”
“Eli must be so relieved that his surgery is over. Is Atticus still in our unit? I’d like to thank him.”
“Atticus has already gone back to Morton’s unit. If you want to call him to say thank you, then you’d better wait until this evening, because he’ll be catching up on his sleep. Megan was assisting with the surgery, and is now asleep too, which is why Nora messaged me about the work in the expansion section.”
I hesitated before asking the next question. “Has Tobias been reset yet?”
Lucas nodded. “When Buzz got my message saying you’d dealt with his echo, she went to the Therapy Unit to supervise Tobias’s memory reset, and then gave him his first therapy session. He responded as planned, so she handed over his further treatment to the Therapy Unit.”
I sighed. “It’s sad that I just feel numb when I think about Tobias being reset. I seem to have burnt through all my emotions where he’s concerned, and only care about Caleb getting better.”
“That’s exactly how you should be feeling,” said Lucas firmly. “Buzz, Rothan and the rest of the Alpha Strike team who were guarding Tobias only arrived back at the unit two hours ago, so I expect they’re some more people who’ll be sleeping now.”
He gave me a thoughtful look. “I notice that you haven’t asked about Keith.”
I wrinkled my nose. “There isn’t much point in me asking about Keith, is there? I’m sure you’ve reported the details of Keith releasing Tobias to Gold Commander Melisande by now, but we’ve already established that she and Gaius have no effective way of dealing with Keith.”
“I’m afraid that’s true. Gold Commander Melisande and Gaius confronted Keith and accused him of sending that release order to the Therapy Unit. Keith just admitted it and laughed.”
“Of course he’d laugh.” I groaned. “As I’ve said to you before, I’m a telepath, effectively above the law and untouchable, but so is Keith. Do you remember how we hunted Hive Genex’s agent during the last Halloween festival? The Hive wanted to hand Elden over alive to Joint Hive Treaty Enforcement, so Adika ordered the Strike team to shoot him on stun, but I shot Elden on kill setting.”
“It’s not the sort of thing I could forget,” said Lucas drily.
“Nobody punished me for killing Elden. Everyone carried on as if it had never happened.” I shook my head. “Even you’ve never said a word to me about it.”
“I didn’t say a word about it because I knew you’d shot Elden out of compassion, and that nothing I could say would stop you doing the same thing again in similar circumstances.”
“What amazed me was that Adika didn’t stop me taking a gun on emergency runs.”
Lucas looked amused. “Adika believed that you’d taken revenge on Elden for what he’d done to you. He wasn’t going to criticize you for doing something he’d wanted to do himself. He certainly wasn’t going to take your gun away when you’d just proved you were capable of taking down a target in a crisis with flawless accuracy.”
“And what about Gold Commander Melisande?”
“She wasn’t convinced you’d deliberately killed Elden. She thought it was out of character for such a dutiful telepath to disobey orders. Her theory was that you were inexperienced with guns and had got the setting wrong by accident. Melisande said it was a waste of time pursuing the issue further anyway. Nothing would bring Elden back to life, and it was impossible to punish you when the Hive desperately needed you working.”
“Which is precisely the point I’m making,” I said. “If one of my Strike team had defied orders and killed Elden, he’d have been demoted to protein vat scrubber. I was a telepath, so I escaped without any consequences at all. Nobody even took away my chocolate crunch cakes.”
I waved my hands. “Lifts don’t just travel in one direction though. Keith admitted he sent the release order that freed Tobias, but he’ll escape without any consequences too.”
“There will be some consequences for Keith,” said Lucas. “Remember that Keith used Gaius’s codes on that release order. Gaius is utterly livid about his codes being used to free a wild bee that was a threat to your life. He’s going to be checking every movement of Keith’s Strike team with our unit in future, and ensuring all external calls and messages from Keith’s unit go through a verification process.”
The clarity of thought that came with cleansing my mind of echoes told me that Keith would use his telepathic abilities to find ways around any precautions taken against him. Gold Commander Melisande couldn’t stop him attacking my unit. Gaius couldn’t stop him. I was sure that the other telepaths would have contacted Keith by now, but they’d clearly failed to stop him too.
This situation could only end in one way. I was going to have to call Keith myself, but a conversation between us could easily make things worse rather than better, and the thought of that battle to the death between two telepaths was unnerving me. I needed to find a way to get past Keith’s jealousy of me, establish some sort of bond with him, and negotiate a peace treaty between us, but I’d no idea how to do it.
Lucas rolled out of the sleep field and stood up. “Are you hungry?”
“Incredibly hungry.” I sat up and looked hopefully around. “Does this little tentish thing have any food?”
Lucas smiled. “Megan’s plan of the expansion area describes this place as a pavilion. Apart from this sleep field, there’s only a shower room and kitchen unit of about the same size as in rooms on Teen Level, and a tiny cupboard with a second set of the body armour and other equipment you need to go on a run.”
He paused. “The good news is the shower room is working, but the bad news is that the kitchen unit hasn’t been stocked with food packs yet. We need to go back to our apartment to get fresh clothes, so we can eat there.”
I stood up, reluctantly pulled on yesterday’s clothes, opened the door in the side wall, and laughed. “There’s a creature like a fancy rabbit looking at me.”
Lucas coughed pointedly. “I think the idea of having a second set of equipment in the pavilion is that you keep the first set of equipment over in our apartment.”
“Oh.” I retrieved yesterday’s body armour from where I’d abandoned it on the floor. My gun and wristset light were on a shelf. “I’ve lost my ear crystal.”
“It should be in your pocket,” said Lucas.
I checked my pocket. “I hope Hannah will be willing to clean this pavilion for us.”
“So do I,” said Lucas, with a heavy emphasis. “Believe me, so do I.”
I gave a guilty giggle. “I keep trying to reform and become a tidy person, but it never works.”
We walked out of the door, and followed the path towards our apartment. We’d come to the pavilion last night while the suns were dimming overhead. Now they were at full brightness, I could see the expansion section had an unfinished look. The trees and largest bushes all seemed to be in place, but there were expanses of fresh earth still awaiting the arrival of smaller plants, and a scattering of red signs saying “Temporary Nestbox Location.”
It was obvious that Megan had planned for the area around our apartment to be ready first. The nearer we got to it, the closer everything looked to being completed. When we reached the security door, I halted to take a last look around. “I can see there’s more planting and other work to be done, and I expect that things are in a far worse state at the park end of the expansion section, but a staggering amount has been achieved already. I don’t understand how Megan could have arranged it all so quickly.”
“Blatant theft,” said Lucas.
“What?”
“Megan used Telepath Unit diamond priority to hijack all the habitat sections, plants, animals, birds, and other creatures that were intended for two other new animal and bird areas, as well as the necessary installation, planting, and animal care teams to set everything up.”
He laughed. “Randomly throwing resources at this expansion area and pushing for fast results caused a bit of confusion, such as accidentally burying the unit northern emergency exit. That actually worked in our favour yesterday evening though. The animal care team wouldn’t normally have released the animals and birds into a half-completed area like this, but they didn’t want to keep them in cramped transportation caging for too long. They just wedged all the nestboxes into the more finished areas.”
“That explains why there are all the red signs about temporary nestbox locations.”
Lucas nodded. “Everyone working here was wildly curious about what our unit does to rate diamond priority. They saw and heard enough during yesterday evening’s alert to convince them it was something scary though, so they’ve suddenly stopped asking questions.”
I was silent as we went through the security door into our apartment. Lucas’s comment had reminded me that my parents must have heard that alert, and Gregas had seen me arriving back from the run.
I brooded over that while I showered, dressed in some fresh casual clothes, and ate breakfast.
“What’s worrying you?” asked Lucas, as we finished eating.
“I’m going to have to talk to my family about what happened yesterday evening,” I said gloomily.
“Megan went to see them last night. She told them that you were well, just too exhausted after the run to come and see them yourself. It would be a good idea for you to reassure them though. Shall I come along too?”
I shook my head, and stood up. “I think my parents are more likely to be honest about their concerns if I speak to them alone.”
