Telepath (Hive Mind Book 1) Read Online Free

in
confusion, unsure now if I’d actually fallen asleep or not. When I got back to
the hall, it was almost empty. The display on the end wall announced a rest break,
and said that refreshments were available in a side room.
    I wandered through some
open double doors, picked up a tray, and joined the end of a queue. There was a
startling range of luxury food available. I’d hardly eaten the previous day, and
only had half my usual breakfast this morning, so I was starving hungry. I
waited impatiently until I reached the head of the queue, loaded a plate with a
spoonful from each of twenty different dishes, added a bread roll and a glass
of my favourite melon juice, and found a place at a table to eat.
    There were plenty of spare
seats, since half of my fellow sufferers had only collected drinks before retreating
back to the main hall. Those at my table were obeying the Lottery rules by
eating in silence and carefully ignoring each other, but a girl behind us was
talking to herself in a ceaseless, barely audible monologue. It was obviously
just her way of reacting to stress, but it made me feel uncomfortable.
    I’d nearly finished
eating, when the boy next to me suffered his own individual reaction to stress
by throwing up on the table. I abandoned what food was left on my plate and
retreated, feeling queasy, into the hall.
    The end wall was displaying
the standard instructions again. After a few minutes, my name appeared on the
banner, and I was sent to do a test involving putting groups of pins into tiny
holes, which I was fairly sure was about dexterity. Next came what seemed like a
straightforward running speed test, and then I had a long wait before being
sent to room 11. I was greeted by a young man with red hair, whose professional
smile kept lapsing into a casual grin.
    “Hello, Amber.” He handed
me an over-sized dataview. “You’re going to try to solve some puzzles. Don’t
worry if a few of them make no sense to you. I’m not sure what half of them are
about myself.”
    I took the dataview and
sat down on the chair provided. I saw a sample puzzle and solution appear on
the wall opposite me. The first real puzzle followed it, and I selected what I
thought was the answer on the dataview. The comedian settled down in his own
chair by a technical display, and appeared to fall asleep from boredom.
    The first puzzles were reassuringly
simple. Little diagrams where I had to choose the odd one out. There was a
pause and then I got a new batch where I was supposed to pick the next coloured
diagram in a sequence. After that, it got more involved. There were some tests
that I understood, so I was confident I’d be choosing the right answers. On others,
even the instructions seemed to make no sense at all, and I just picked answers
at random.
    Eventually, the wall went
blank. The comedian gave a yawn, took back the dataview, and connected it to
his technical display. “Thank you, Amber, you can …”
    He was interrupted by a
soft chime and lights flashing on his display. I saw him turn and stare at it.
“Please wait here for a moment, Amber.”
    He went out of the room,
and I turned in my chair and stared at the door closing behind him. Something had
happened, but I didn’t know what. I looked back at the technical display by his
empty chair, but it just showed a meaningless jumble of letters.
    After long minutes of
suspense, an older man entered the room. “Hello, Amber. We don’t have the facilities
here for your next recommended test, so we’re sending you to another centre.”
    He handed me a new
assessment card, and I stared blankly down at it.
    “Don’t worry,” he added.
“This is perfectly normal. It’s impossible to equip all the centres for every
test, so sometimes people are transferred.”
    There was no point in me
asking what had happened in the last test. The Lottery rules stated that
candidates should never be told the reason for a test or the results of it. At
the end of my assessment, I’d