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When Amber called, I was in my bookette room.
I was trying to decide between my two bookettes. Hive England had offered me any bookettes I wanted — truly any bookette; one of my Admin staff had even started to offer trading with another Hive that traded with Hive Genex if there were any new bookettes I would miss, but they saw my face and stopped.
I didn’t want anything from Hive Genex. None of us did.
When my mother was kidnapped, she was under the influence of their imprinting. She didn’t say goodbye to her family or try to pack. All she brought was the bag she had packed for her Lottery, which had two of her favorite bookettes of myths and legends.
Those two bookettes were all my brothers and sisters and I watched, growing up. Even our cousins watched the bookettes. They weren’t our genetic cousins, of course, but when Hive Genex removed my mother’s imprint, the first thing she did was go looking for others from Hive England, to see if she was the only one. She wasn’t. There were two others from Hive England, and many others from other Hives.
When my mom turned twenty-five and Hive Genex started threatening her and the other two from Hive England into having duty children, they talked, and decided that they would raise their children together, speaking the language of Hive England. They didn’t want their children being adopted out to Hive Genex families and never knowing about their home Hive. So I grew up in a family of eighteen children, in a way — each family had their own apartment, but we spent our time running in and out of one another’s spaces, playing bookettes and talking and telling stories.
Hive England was willing to do anything to keep us happy, including coming up with eighteen separate copies of the well-worn bookettes we had watched as children. But tonight the familiar plots weren’t soothing. I didn’t want new stories either. I had spent so many years as a child longing for new stories, but now I found them an uncomfortable reminder of how drastically my life had changed.
Being at Hive England felt like being alone in a room full of people who should have known us. Everyone spoke our language, but nobody seemed to understand what had happened to us. My Unit Administrator had brought in a counselor, but the counselor had been so upset at hearing my story that I hadn’t been able to keep telling her the truth. Her face had stayed impassive, but I was a telepath — she couldn’t hide the turmoil inside her mind.
I was staring at the bookette room controls when my dataview rang.
Just a one-word message. “Alone?”
Strange. I looked, but didn’t see the source.
I tapped out a reply to confirm I was alone, hoping that it wasn’t a loyalty trap. Hive Genex had been fond of those. I hadn’t seen anything about loyalty traps in the minds of the diplomats from Hive England, or from the minds of the staff in my new unit, but I knew all too well that the people with true power would avoid their Hive’s telepaths.
There was a pause, and then the bookette room displayed the image of a slight woman with dark hair, wearing a nice dress. She looked a little younger than me.
“Hello, Geo,” she said. “I’m Amber.”
Amber! One of the other true telepaths. I had seen people in my Unit thinking about her.
“I thought Hive England didn’t let true telepaths meet,” I blurted out, without thinking.
“Does Hive Genex?” Amber looked both intrigued and worried. “But no, we’re not supposed to. This is an unofficial back-channel that none of our Unit staff know about. It’s terribly important that you don’t let them know.”
“I won’t,” I promised. I wouldn’t have anyway. I could read every one of their minds, but I still couldn’t bring myself to trust them.
“I know you’ve been working as a telepath for six years,” Amber said, “so there isn’t much I can tell you about telepathy. But I felt that someone should welcome you to Hive England.”
She seemed reserved, like there was something she wanted to say but couldn’t find the words for. “It’s nice to meet you,” I said cautiously. “I’m Geo, but you already knew that.”
“Is that a traditional name in Hive Genex?”
“It’s short for George,” I explained. “My mother wanted to name us all after the most English people she could think of.” My brother Arthur and I had been teased for it in school, although it was nothing compared to what my sister Boudicca went through.
“I know of another Geo, but I’ve never met someone named George,” Amber said, bemused.
I found myself explaining about the bookettes, and the stories on them. “It sounds silly, but it was important to us,” I said.
“It doesn't sound silly at all,” Amber said. “And we’re very glad to have you here. I’m sure you’ve seen everything about our current telepath crisis in the minds of your unit staff. We appreciate having you working with us very much.” She paused. “Well, except for Keith. Be careful of Keith.”
I shrugged. “He’s the crack-talent, right? I’m not worried about him.”
“Crack-talent?” Amber asked.
“Someone whose talent cuts out,” I said. “Does Hive England have a different word for it?”
“Keith’s the only one we’ve ever had,” Amber said. “And you should be worried about him. He’s caused a great deal of chaos. But even he is expected to abide by the rules of good manners.”
She explained them to me — rules that kept conflict between the telepaths at a minimum. With so few telepaths, each one was precious, and Hive England couldn’t risk losing a single one, or risk two telepath units in conflict with one another.
“Is Hive England what you expected?” Amber asked, once she had finished her explanations and I had finished dutifully nodding along.
“I’m not sure what I expected,” I admitted. “It’s strange. Telepaths are terrifically important here.”
“They aren’t important at Hive Genex?” Amber looked shocked. “I assumed they were stealing telepaths because they didn’t have their own!”
“Hive Genex has many telepaths,” I said bitterly. So many that they’d kept me, a full telepath, on the crack-talent squad, with the unreliable telepaths whose talents shorted out, who patrolled the common areas of the Hive with only a few body-guards. Coming to Hive England and suddenly having two teams of twenty people dedicated to protecting me had been disorienting and strange.
I sometimes wondered if I would be more valuable to Hive Genex dead than alive. My twenty-fifth birthday was approaching, and it was risky to imprint a true telepath’s mind to make them think they wanted children. But if your true telepath happened to die accidentally, you could record his marriage to a wife just before his death, and allow her to opt into the duty child program on his behalf. I was sure whoever they chose to be my “wife” would be very convincing and sad, and our children would know nothing about their heritage from Hive England.
All of my mom’s kids, all of my cousins — none of us wanted kids at Hive Genex. None of us wanted more hostages to Hive Genex. We’d talked for years about applying to move Hive before we eldest kids turned twenty-five, but we knew Hive Genex would remove my siblings’ and cousins’ imprints. And Hive Genex had been clever. They’d chosen to imprint them all with roles involving telepath units, and telepaths, and borderline telepaths, to provide the most possible cross-over between their work imprints and their families. Removing their imprints would have meant removing many of their memories of us, as well.
Some of my siblings and cousins would have chosen to make that sacrifice. But that meant leaving my mom and the other parents behind. Moving Hive voluntarily was something you only got to do once in a lifetime. Hive Joint Treaty Enforcement showing up and giving us all the choice to move Hive had been like a miracle — a miracle I still wasn’t sure I could trust.
Amber stared at me. “How can Hive Genex have that many telepaths?”
Belatedly, I remembered the thoughts I’d seen when I read the Ambassadors from Hive England. The investigation that had brought them there had started when Hive Genex tried, and failed, to kidnap a true telepath from Hive England.
Hive England only had four other true telepaths, not counting the crack-talent. Hive Genex only tried kidnapping people just after their Lottery, a time when people already disappeared to their adult levels or even other Hives with scant explanation. The telepath who’d stopped the kidnapping had to be Amber.
No wonder she looked so horrified. She wasn’t thinking about this like my counselor had — as a terrible story that happened to someone else, in a place far away. She had almost been kidnapped herself. She was imagining herself in my mother’s shoes.
“You must have guessed some of it,” I said awkwardly. “They couldn’t imprint you with their language without risking your telepathic talent, so you couldn’t have worked for them as a true telepath. They didn’t want you. They wanted what was in your genes.”
They must have wanted her genes very much, to risk kidnapping someone who had manifested as a true telepath. They probably had read her genetics and expected her to be a borderline telepath.
“That’s — upsetting news.” Amber looked unnerved. “I’d ask why Hive Genex is doing this, but I’d imagine I don’t want to know.”
She didn’t. I did know, and I wished I didn’t.
Hive Genex had been clever when they imprinted my siblings and cousins with roles in telepath units — perhaps too clever. My sister Elizabeth had been imprinted as a Telepath Geneticist, and I had read the whole story from her mind.
It went back to the epidemics, the population collapses. Hive Genex had genetically tailored their population more than most Hives, and faced a huge population collapse. But the other genetically tailored Hives all merged with other Hives to create stable, viable populations. Hive Genex had refused.
Two hundred years on, Hive Genex was facing a new population collapse — not immediately, but within another hundred to two hundred years. The geneticists could see it coming. They knew they couldn’t bring in enough outside genetic lines to stave it off — but working in secret, they could kidnap enough borderline telepaths to breed true telepaths from them.
I wasn’t sure, but I thought that was why they let my mother teach us English. Once I had my duty children for Hive Genex, I could have been traded off to one of the other Hives speaking English. My children might have been traded even earlier. And in return, Hive Genex could take their pick of the other Hives’ human genetic stock — and all within the rules. Nobody would blink an eye at a Hive being willing to trade a hundred or more highly-valued members for a true telepath. As long as Hive Genex kept their duty child records scrupulously clean, they wouldn’t attract attention from Joint Hive Treaty Enforcement.
And then one person had brought their whole plan tumbling down.
I looked at Amber with respect.
“Thank you,” I said. “I know you’re the reason we’re here.”
I wasn’t sure I trusted Hive England yet — the scars from Hive Genex went deep, and it would take many years for all of us to heal. But coming here had given us a new life. New chances. I intended to make the best of it.