Empire Reborn (Taran Empire Saga Book 1): A Cadicle Space Opera A.K. DuBoff (guided reading books TXT) 📖

Why would that matter? She had to risk rooting around. As carefully as she could, she peeled back the layers of his subconscious mind, praying to the stars he didn’t notice the intrusion. There was something about preventing outsiders from interfering. Just a little more—

“Lexi, are you all right?” Oren’s voice brought her back to the present.

She quickly withdrew from his mind and realized that she must have appeared to be staring off into space. The delve had only been a few seconds, but any length of time was awkward for someone to be sitting there expressionless in the middle of a conversation.

“Yes, just contemplating all the wasted time and wishing I’d come to you sooner,” she said.

She hadn’t gotten enough. She needed to go deeper, in spite of the danger. If I could distract him with something while I dig…

Before she could think of a good question to prime his mind, footsteps sounded behind her, followed by a knock on the door frame.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Josh said. “There’s been a change in the timeline. Operation Nova needs to commence right now.”

“That’s two days early!”

“I’m only passing on what I’ve been told. They expedited processing.”

“Shite.” Oren shoved his chair back from his desk abruptly and stood up. “Do you have what you need?”

Josh held up a sealed case in his hand, which Lexi recognized from their contentious pickup with Niko a couple weeks prior. “I’ll manage.”

What is Josh’s part in this? Lexi could only catch the briefest gleaning of a command console from his mind. Some kind of logistics coordinator?

“Get in position. I’ll make the other arrangements,” Oren instructed. “Lexi, we need that communication plan ASAP. Don’t let me down.”

“I won’t.” She was reluctant to leave his office with so many unanswered questions, but she wasn’t in a position to protest.

Josh rushed toward the door leading to the storage tunnel.

Could that be where the control room is? If he was involved in the logistics, he might have as good of a sense of what was going on as Oren. “Hey, anything I can do to help?” she called after him.

“Your part,” was his only reply.

During the brief interaction, she caught a mental flash of the space surrounding Duronis.

All of these pieces, but how do they fit together? She needed to go somewhere she could think. And to get as much other information as she could.

Stars, I swore I wouldn’t do this! Telepathy was the only thing that could give her an edge right now. She couldn’t bear the thought of more lives being lost if there was anything she could have done to prevent it.

Lexi jogged upstairs. At the top, she slowed her pace and sent out a low-level telepathic probe to search for relevant thoughts on the surface of the minds nearby. She wasn’t particularly practiced with the technique, so a flurry of images and sounds came back as a jumbled mess. She winced at the sudden din. That’s not going to work.

Her only other option was to skim the thoughts of everyone she could find, one by one. Dangerous if they caught her, but she was desperate.

She kept her gaze down and opened her Gifted senses she had ignored for so long. It was like finally being able to take a full, deep breath again after wearing a too-tight shirt—allowing her to pick up on details in her surroundings that she’d missed after months of staring at the same walls. Background mechanical sounds, distant conversations, scents of cleaning supplies and body odors. Even the colors seemed more vibrant.

The most striking aspect of the sensory expansion, though, was the atmosphere in the place. Her subconscious had picked up on part of it, when the mood was particularly happy or serious. Now, she caught the nuances to it. People were charged up. The focus toward a common goal, and there was a noticeable energy to those unified thoughts. A buzz in the air. As she assessed the feeling, she realized that some individuals had a sort of glow to them. After coming across a few people with that distinctive aura, she realized that all of them were at the meeting where Magdalena had spoken. They’re the ones who are in on the plan!

That narrowed down her efforts considerably. She began tracing the energy fields throughout the office, searching for those buzzing with excitement.

There weren’t as many as she would have liked to collect a broad sampling of information, but anything was better than nothing. The gleaned snippets didn’t make much sense on their own. The cargo ships—those came up a lot. A nav beacon. Weapons. A shuttle. Riots. How everything fit together, though, was elusive.

As she walked through the halls and common rooms, Lexi tried to keep her gaze away from the person she was targeting. Even so, telepathy had the potential to give people the feeling that they were being watched, especially when delving deeper than surface gleaning. Some were more sensitive to it than others, likely due to their own genetic potential for abilities as a dormant Generation. So far, everyone had seemed perfectly oblivious. It emboldened her to dig deeper with the hope of finding information to tie all the threads together.

One woman had a bright aura around her, and Lexi zeroed in. The blonde woman was in front of her, facing away, making it an ideal setup to dive deeper without detection. Lexi started to peel back the layers, picking up thoughts about the cargo ships and snapshots of a plan for an armed group to secure the dock.

The woman whipped around stared directly at Lexi. “What are you doing?”

Lexi pulled back her mental probe and instinctively snapped up a telepathic wall around her own mind. Shite! The woman was more sensitive than most, apparently. Way