Free Talent Chronicles 2 - Impulse Control by Susan Bischoff Page A

me. I barely heard me. She was already facing front, and I was looking at her honey-brown braid again.
    You know what you learn when you can read minds?
    Karen “asked.”
    I heaved a heavy mental sigh. Lots of things that aren’t your business, I’d imagine.
    Boys are idiots.
    Don’t you have anyone else to pick—?
    They’re coming.
    The door opened and three people entered the room.
    One was the armed guard who would stand in the corner and look bored the entire time our instructor was in the room.
    One was the instructor for this class. The class was called Mental Defense, but the instructor had never told us his name. Lots of NIAC personnel didn’t give us their names.
    We called him Sir. The third was a guy about the same age as Karen and me.
    He was on the tall side, pale and really skinny, and his hair was cropped so close to his scalp you could hardly tell what color it was. Brown, I guessed. He walked kind of strangely, one foot dragging a little with each step. The instructor didn’t tell him to take a seat. As the kid stood at the front of the room, it seemed he had a tick that caused his head to tilt to the side a few times a minute.
    “This,” the instructor said with a tone of suppressed excitement in his voice that made me kind of nervous, “is Anderson. He’ll be helping us test the telepathic blocking techniques we’ve been working on.” I definitely didn’t like the sound of that. “Anderson has come to us from Delta Facility.”
    That announcement broke through even our rigid discipline. There were a bunch of gasps, even whispers. The instructor pounded his fist on his desk, looking really pissed off at the outburst. What did he expect? Delta Facility was the proper name for what the NIAC personnel more casually referred to as Detention. It was the worst threat of punishment available to them, the nightmare of every kid in State School. It was a place few kids ever came back from, and no one ever left the way they went in. It was a place of free experimentation where life had no value and pain wasn’t a concern. Rumors of unending torment, yet a territory vastly unknown. It was Talent Hell. We called it Everlast.
    Across the room, an empath groaned loudly and his chair scraped against the floor. From the corner of my eye I could see him grab his head and twist in his seat.
    “Use your blocking, Kenneth,” the instructor snapped.
    I tried to pull my emotions back, to calm down, to put Everlast and the concern about what the Anderson kid was here to do aside for the moment. I hoped the rest of the class would do the same and give Kenneth a break, poor guy.
    “Can you continue without disrupting us?”
    “Y-yes, Sir,” Kenneth gritted out. He folded his hands on the desk in front of him, arms trembling, knuckles going white. They told the public that they took us from our families to train us to control our abilities, protect us as well as them. Since we were never allowed to communicate with our families, since no one ever went home, it’s hard to believe that anyone on either side of the electrified fence believed that. We were training to be government operatives and they didn’t like to see weakness. If you couldn’t handle the strain, you weren’t going to hack it as a soldier. And if you couldn’t hack it as a soldier, the next best use was lab rat.
    “Glad to hear it,” the instructor said curtly. “Anderson has been a successful part of an experimental trial involving an important new technology that may someday aid all Ability-Affected persons. What brings him to our Mental Defense class, however, is his inborn ability: Compulsion.”
    Even I could feel another shift in the energy in the room. Compulsion and Influence Talents were pretty rare. At least they were in the State Schools. NIAC didn’t trust kids who could affect their thoughts. No wonder he’d ended up in Everlast.
    “As we have discussed on numerous occasions, there may be a time when you will be faced with