Telepath Read online

  He grunted a reply, but didn’t seem convinced he was going to have fun. To be honest, I wasn’t too convinced myself. It was vital to make friends during your first few weeks on Teen Level, and Gregas wasn’t very sociable.

  “When you move here,” I added, “spend as much time as you can in your corridor community room. Everyone on your corridor will be new like you, and they’ll all want to make friends. Remember that it’s horribly rude to ask what level they came from, or mention what level your own parents are. Your family background doesn’t matter once you’re on Teen Level, because all teens are Level 50 and equal.”

  Gregas grunted again, and I gave up. I’d done my best. I’d told him the right things to do, and warned him of the one social blunder he mustn’t make. There was no need to emphasize the point about taking part in activities. Gregas would have had plenty of school lessons about the importance of using your time on Teen Level to prepare for Lottery.

  I didn’t want to talk about the activity sessions anyway. I’d dutifully attended every type my local community centre had to offer, but failed to discover any especial gift for painting, costume design, or a hundred other things. My instructors had said that wasn’t a bad omen for the future, because the activity sessions mainly focused on work involving creative skills. Lottery would test all my innate abilities, and search among tens of thousands of other possible professions in the Hive to find the one that was perfect for me, so I still had every chance of becoming high level.

  Back when I was fourteen or fifteen, I’d accepted those comforting words were true. Now I was heading into Lottery, I found them far less reassuring.

  “I’ve got a long way to go,” I said, “so I’d better get started.”

  My parents nodded. “High up to you,” they chorused.

  “Thanks.” I ended the call.

  I gave one final, nostalgic look round the room where I’d lived for five years. Once Lottery was over, I’d come and collect my belongings from the storage locker, but maintenance workers would already be overhauling the room itself by then.

  I pictured them painting over every familiar scuff mark and scratch on the walls, eliminating every last trace of my residence here ready for another girl or boy to move in. It might even be Gregas who came to live in this room next. Teens were always allocated rooms in their home area, so the support of parents was just a lift ride away.

  I picked up my bag and went outside. My door slid closed behind me for the last time, and I hurried down the corridor. At the first crossway, it met a wider corridor with a slow belt lane. I stepped onto the moving strip and rode it to the nearest major belt interchange.

  Once there, I took my folded dataview from my pocket, tapped it to make it unfurl, and checked the instructions I’d been sent. Lottery testing was done in the Teen Level 50 community centres, but teens were always allocated to centres a long distance from their home area to make sure they wouldn’t be assessed by a friend of their family. I had to travel all the way from my home area of 510/6120 in Blue Zone, to the area 110/3900 community centre in Yellow Zone. I glanced at the overhead signs, and stepped onto the northbound slow belt, before moving across to the medium, and then the express.

  Once I was on the express belt, I put my bag down and sat on it. My old friends would all be riding the belt system too, making equally lengthy journeys to different community centres.

  It was like a sad echo of the wild ride yesterday. All the Carnival decorations had been taken down, leaving just the usual amateur wall paintings of Teen Level to brighten the corridors. Everyone’s Carnival costumes had been replaced by standard teen outfits too, mostly leggings and tunics emblazoned with the emblems of favourite singers or sports teams, though some of the girls wore the fashionable tops and skirts that Shanna adored.

  The eighteen-year-olds dotted the express belt, sitting on their bags like me, while the younger teens stood by the corridor walls and watched us go by. I’d been a watcher myself in previous years, wondering what the travellers were thinking. Now my turn had come, and my thoughts were a confused, dejected jumble. I wished the trip was over, but I didn’t want to arrive.

  “Warning, zone bulkhead approaching!” A voice boomed from overhead speakers, and red signs started flashing countdown numbers.

  On any other level, people would start moving across from the express to slower belts, or even get off the belt system entirely so they could walk across the boundary between the two zones.

  This was Teen Level, so we just stood up and picked up our bags. The bulkhead approached, its massive blue and turquoise striped doors wide open as always. I saw the boy ahead of me toss his bag across the narrow gap between the end of the Blue Zone belt and the start of the Turquoise Zone belt, then leap after it. A second later, it was my turn. I braced myself, hurled my own bag ahead of me, and jumped.

  The safety bar between the two belts made it impossible to fall down the gap, but there was always a fractional difference in speed between two express belts. I staggered on landing, swayed for a moment, but managed to stay on my feet.

  “Eight!” screamed a set of voices from over to my left.

  There were always some self-appointed judges giving points on how well you managed the zone boundary jump. I didn’t turn my head to look at them, just retrieved my bag and sat down on it again.

  The watching younger teens wore clothes decorated with the turquoise emblems of Turquoise Zone sports teams now. I travelled on through more bulkheads, crossing from Turquoise Zone to Green, and Green Zone to Yellow, before changing to a westbound belt.

  When I finally reached the community centre in 110/3900, I double and triple checked I’d got the right number and the right place, then dug my assessment card out of my pocket and slid it into the slot beside the door.

  “Welcome, Amber, you are now registered for Lottery assessment,” it said, spat the card back out at me, and the door slid open.

  The inside looked exactly like the community centre back in my old area. All the chairs were out in the main hall, and some teens were already sitting on them, each with a large bag at their side. The huge display wall at the front of the hall was filled with instructions. I picked a chair as far away from the other teens as possible, sat down, and started to read the text.

  “Lottery welcomes the candidates of 2532. You should wait in this hall between tests, but are advised to avoid interaction with other candidates. Do not be concerned if your tests are not following the same sequence as those of others. Every candidate follows an individualized test progression, where the results of each test determine what other tests should follow. There may be a delay at times until staff and facilities are available for a key test.”

  A banner flashed into life at the top of the main screen. “Ricardo, please go to room 17.”

  A gangly lad scrambled to his feet, looked at the map of the centre on the side wall, and scuttled off down a corridor. I went back to reading the general instructions.

  “Do not be concerned if you appear to perform badly on any particular test. Your weaknesses are not important. You will be allocated to a profession that matches your strengths, with priority going to professions harder to fill and more vital to the Hive.”

  That was the end of the instructions. I focused my attention on the banner now, getting nervous as the minutes went by without my name appearing. The instructions said there could be delays, but …

  The banner was showing my name! “Amber, please go to room 23.”

  I stood up, checked the map, and headed to room 23. A smiling blonde woman was waiting for me inside what looked like a standard medical room. She asked me to roll up my sleeve, and then held a metal gadget to my arm.

  “I’m taking a blood and tissue sample. This will feel cold, but it won’t hurt.”

  I’d had blood and tissue samples taken at every one of my annual medical checks. The next bit was just like an annual medical too. The woman turned on a scanning grid, and I stood inside the field while it made m
urmuring noises.

  “Your medical records show you had an allergic reaction to face paints at age three,” she said, “and another allergic reaction to the contraceptive pellet implanted in your arm at age sixteen.”

  I frowned. Would a history of allergies damage my chances in Lottery? “I haven’t had any problems since they changed the pellet to a different type,” I said hastily.

  “You also have occasional headaches. Any other health problems, Amber?”

  “No.”

  The woman turned off the grid. “That’s all for now, Amber.”

  I went back to the hall and sat down next to my bag. It was a quarter of an hour before my name appeared on the banner again, sending me to room 9. This held a central chair facing a wall covered with randomly moving, glowing clusters of colour. A young woman was studying a small technical display in the corner of the room. She only looked a year or two older than me. It wasn’t long since she’d been the one being assessed to decide her future career, and now she was assessing me.

  “Please sit down, Amber.” She gestured at the central chair.

  I sat down, and she gave me the same blandly reassuring smile as the earlier woman. Did the information imprinted on the minds of medical and assessment staff include the correct professional expressions?

  “I’m taking baseline brain activity measurements.” She came across to position a metal blob on each side of my forehead, and then returned to check her technical display.

  I sneaked a look at the display myself. A lot of little lights were bouncing up and down. It meant nothing to me, but my tester seemed happy with it.

  “Your records show that you followed the recommendations to try all the introductory activity sessions at least once during your time on Teen Level.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I need you to watch the colours on the wall now.”

  I sat back in the chair, and watched the colours floating around. I was a ragged mess of nerves, but there was something about the patterns that was soothing. The colours slowly merged to form an image of someone painting a mural on a corridor wall.

  “Did you like painting murals, Amber?” the woman asked.

  “I loved it.” I hesitated a moment. “I was dreadfully bad at painting though.”

  “For the purposes of this test, all I need to know is whether you enjoyed an activity or not.”

  The colours in the image drifted apart, and then reformed to show a man peering into the top of a machine.

  “Did you like embroidering?” asked the woman.

  I’d been frustrated by the painstakingly slow and detailed stitching. “No.”

  “How about working with clay?”

  I’d disliked the faint smell of the wet clay and the touch of it on my hands. “No.”

  “Singing?”

  I smiled. “Yes.”

  The woman tapped at her controls. “I’ve calibrated your responses now, so you can just watch the images without saying anything.”

  I was bewildered, but obediently watched the glowing colours change and merge, shifting between a series of images. They changed faster and faster, the colours moving, blending, separating …

  “Amber, wake up,” said a soft, female voice.

  I jerked upright, hot with embarrassment and horror. I’d fallen asleep during a Lottery test! “I’m sorry. I didn’t sleep well last night. Can we do the test again?”

  “You did perfectly well, Amber. The test was supposed to have that effect. You can go now.”

  I stumbled off 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 simply be told my assigned profession, and be sent for imprinting with the appropriate information.

  I accepted there were good reasons for those rules. It would be hard for someone to live with the knowledge that scoring just a little better on a test could have made them twenty levels higher. I still wished I understood what was happening.

  I turned, went out of the door, and headed back to the hall. Everyone stared at me as I picked up my bag and walked out. There were hundreds of eighteen-year-olds at this centre, and I was the only one leaving. That had to mean either something very good or something very bad, and I didn’t know which.

  Chapter Three

  Once I was outside t
he centre, I had a cowardly urge to run to my parents’ apartment and hide in what had once been my bedroom. New arrivals on Teen Level sometimes ran away, returning to the comforting familiarity of home and parents. Counsellors would follow and coax them back, embarrassed and blushing, to face the ordeal of growing up and being their own person. Running away from Teen Level made those who did it look ridiculous. I’d look even more ridiculous if I tried running away from Lottery.

  I took a deep breath, and headed for the new community centre. I had another long journey to reach it, and of course it looked virtually identical to the last one. I put my new assessment card into the door slot to gain entry.

  “Welcome, Amber, your Lottery assessment registration transfer is now complete.”

  I noticed the different message and was vaguely reassured. I’d never heard of people being transferred during Lottery, but clearly the system was designed for it. I went inside and found a deserted hall with a screen covered in names and room designations. Everyone must have already left for the night, so I found my name on the list, made a note of where I was supposed to be staying, turned round and went back out of the centre.

  My designated room was only a few corridors away. I walked there, still obsessing over why I’d been transferred to a different centre. If it was true the old centre didn’t have the facilities for my next test, that surely meant it was an unusual test for an uncommon profession.

  Was something astonishingly good happening to me or was this a disaster? Was I being tested for an important, high level profession that would give me a glittering future, or for some hideous work deep in the bowels of the Hive? I alternated between excitement and depression, but depression was winning. Even if I was being tested for something high level, I’d probably fail the test and be sent back to my original assessment centre.

  I reached a door with the right number on it, opened it, and took my bag and my uncertainty into an unwelcomingly bare room. I set the wall display to show one of the standard pictures, and brilliant blue cornflowers sprang into three dimensional life. The flowers made me feel a bit more at home, but I still missed having all my old familiar clutter of possessions around me.