Rebuilding a mind was not exactly an easy task. Especially with no telepathic ability of your own, and the next best thing is working through a psionic conduit. Yuri was a surprising help. His psionic gift gave him a remarkable amount power to work with. And while normally scattered in his thoughts and behaviors, Yuri was unusually focused. It was almost enough to make Mischa forget that Yuri was a man that couldn’t remember to bathe himself.
They had practiced with psychic links when Mischa and his team were younger, free men. Yuri’s older brother, Anton would link Yuri to Mischa, and their captain would issue orders to them through the link. They would sometimes train in Mischa’s mind, the telepathic Utkin brothers attempting to uncover some piece of information in his mind. The Utkins were highly skilled agents, working carefully and with precision. The operations they played at were designated neuro-intelligence, though the team never had an opportunity to exercise their skills in any official capacity.
Nearly everything Mischa had learned about telepathy and neuro-intelligence came from Anton Utkin’s research and study into the topics. A born telepath himself, Anton Utkin had been the foremost philosopher of vlast’ – the Russian term for gift, serving under the scientific branch of the Spetsnaz division Prizrak Rytsarya. The Prizrak Rytsarya were the policing group that registered Prizrak – gifted people, accredited training facilities, and expanded Russia’s knowledge of their emerging new Prizrak community. However, the Prizrak Rytsarya was also a military organization that fought for their country, investigated situations that involved Prizrak, or sentenced criminal Prizrak.
Anton had been locked away in a laboratory until Mischa had picked the elder Utkin for his team, the Spetsgruppa Yaysto. The oldest, and not the most athletic of the team, Anton had often sat out of military exercises while he studied the vlast’ of his team mates. He was most fascinated with Mischa. While his tracking was unique, it was Mischa’s mental barrier that piqued Anton’s interest.
Most formally trained telepaths had learned to build mental barriers, Utkin had explained to Mischa. There were a few competing schools of thoughts on the how the barrier should be built and maintained, but they were standards just the same. Mischa’s mind was different. He was not a telepath, nor had he been formally trained. Instead of the strong main defense, with fail-safes for insurance that most telepaths started with, Mischa had several barriers of varying strengths, false locks, decoy defenses and traps protecting a collection of departmentalized and fragmented thoughts and memories. Even the skilled Utkins often had difficulty getting to the places Mischa didn’t want them to explore, and they were operating with the advantage of being in a complicit mind. They would go in for an address of an embassy and only find grocery lists. Anton was astounded by the complexity of Mischa’s mind. He would be just a fascinated by Yuri now if he ever had the chance to study him.
Through Anton and Yuri, Mischa learned that every mind was structured differently – telepathic or not. It was all a matter of how the person, or host, thought of themselves, how they saw themselves and how they wanted to see themselves. It was hard to hide yourself from a telepath that was in your mind. Mischa’s mind was laid out like computers file system, heavily encrypted and difficult to crack with too much junk data to scrub to make use of anything. Anton’s mind had been laid out like a library, years of knowledge memorialized in books to be studied over and handed down. Malena’s mind, Anton once told Mischa, was arranged like a scrapbook. Each memory in her mind cherished and preserved, a life lived well and full of love. Yuri had one of the stranger minds Mischa had been in, and the only psionic mind – he’d never tried to connect to Murroh. Yuri’s mind was a spider’s web, strands of silk connecting one thought to another, and another, and several more. Strings knotted and over lapped. It was deceptively open and misleading. Destroying one part of his thought web often caught a telepath trapped in another portion, while only serving to gain Yuri’s attention.
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Looking For A Legend (Book 1)
Mystery / ThrillerA young telepath is unexpectedly left with leading his class when his teacher takes leave. One of Elijah's new students Valentina leads him down a path where mysteries only get more mysterious and nothing is as simple as it looks.
