"Right, well, continue not reading my mind. You are allowed to know that I have one. I am not sure where between these extremes whatever you're doing to determine that I don't 'feel like a mutant' falls, please explain."

"Okay, so the metaphor I usually use is that it's like I'm walking through a library, and without deliberately looking I see the spines of the books, the way they're bound, the title, whether it's a hardcover or paperback. Reading minds is like picking a book up off the shelf and reading it, except that I'm much better at keeping away from specific things in peoples' heads or only looking at certain things than most people are at doing the same with a book. Mutant versus not-a-mutant is roughly a hardcover versus paperback thing."

"And what here stands in for the color of my spine and how many pages I have and so on?"

"English doesn't have words for telepathic aesthetics but everyone has a unique mental signature--if I saw you again in a very good disguise I could still tell it was you, but that doesn't give me information, for the most part, about what 'being you' means. Pages could I guess be roughly analogous to mental horsepower--people whose brains are more active are sort of synaesthetically brighter. Not that I have synaesthesia, mind, it's just that English really doesn't have words for it. And it is mental activity--someone whose brain jumps from subject to subject and can't pay attention may well register the same as a scientific genius."

"I'm flattered. If you're really scared of having your mind read against your will you might want to hang around the Institute for as long as you're here, though; we have a few other telepaths but we all have the same standard of ethics. There are other telepaths in the world who are less scrupulous. And one thing telepaths can do is shielding minds from other telepaths' intrusions."

"Is this a mutants thing? How does a genetic wobble of any magnitude yield telepathy?"

"I mean, telepathy isn't the strangest thing any of us can do; we have teleporters and people who shoot plasma beams and shapeshifters and telekinetics and people who look like telekinetics but actually work some other way and all sorts of things."

"Which is news to me. How does genetics do any of that? I mean, maybe shapeshifting, if they just take really conveniently after their cephalopod distant relations, but..."

"Of the three shapeshifters I'm aware of, two can look like arbitrary other people and the third turns into diamond."

"Two cephalopods and one for the what-the-fuck pile, then."

"Does magnetism fall under 'cephalopod' or 'what-the-fuck'? asks the other teenager, who up until now had been silent.

"What the fuck," says Cam. "I mean, if you do more than sense it. I think birds can sense it, so that's at least loosely biologically conceivable. You can talk! I had wondered."

"Well, I don't always have to. Edie knew what I was thinking about what was going on, and if had turned out you were hostile it might have been helpful to have one of us not attracting your attention."

"So you could magnetize me?"

"So I could restrain you. With metal. Which I would magnetize."

"I see. For future reference, although you should definitely not summon randomly selected unbound daeva ever, ever again, if you two encounter a random unbound daeva that wishes you harm, go directly to psychic warfare."

"Noted. In my defense, we thought you were a teleporter. In fact, both of the other teleporters of our acquaintance look like demons too, so that supported the theory."

"Could a teleporter not get out of a metal cage or whatever, in your experience?"

"In my experience a teleporter who made a grab for my best friend who teleported out of restraints would no longer be inches from grabbing my best friend. And if they continued attempting to grab either of us restraints would quickly drop off the menu."

"Ah."

"I'd rather not hurt anyone, but I'd more rather not get kidnapped."

"Naturally."