"...I understand why you did it." 

"Yeah, but you still deserve for me to acknowledge that it's fucked up." 

"If you don't want me reading your mind and you can't shield you'll need to give me some physical space, I don't have control yet. Maybe they'll help me figure that out, I can dream."

"That would be nice. If you want me out of your space I can exit your space but I don't, personally, mind."

Fewer barriers between people's minds is viscerally satisfying to Edie; keeping her telepathy bottled up is annoying, but it's a relatively minor irritant and she's lived with it for a long time. There isn't any conflict about it in her mind; if you have to wear an itchy sweater to avoid violating someone's boundaries, you keep the damn sweater on. 

"You don't need to give me space for my sake."

"The inside of my head isn't always a pleasant place." 

She tries to avoid dwelling on ways it isn't a pleasant place, but she can't help but think of glimpses of people being killed in horrible ways by terrifying humanoid machines. 

"I have enough control over my attention not to see troubling detail even if the information is available to me."

"Oh, that's good then." 

"What is it you do, exactly...? If it isn't prying."

"In my country there are five magical people called primes, representing the five elements, each of which has two aspects, one a part of the self and one a part of the world. I'm the sweela prime, fire and mind. There's only one at a time - I inherited the title from my great-aunt when she died - and the powers are also idiosyncratic between people, I don't have her exact set of powers. So I have fire- and heat-related powers, and also I involuntarily read nearby minds, and I can do some things to them and have done so when begged to by for example addicts, but I have had no training and while I can go off somewhere and experiment with the fire..."

He winces. "Oh, yes. I see." 

"Plausibly if you messed up I could fix it, but no, it's not the sort of thing one wants to have to test."

Her telepathy is not restricted to communication and mind-reading; her control over the human mind is both comprehensive and largely theoretical. She has been able to practice skills on consenting subjects, such as copying languages out of one person's head and into another, but only a very limited number. One of them, however, is the ability to hold a person's precise current mindstate in her working memory, and then overwrite their mind with it a few minutes later. Used primarily for people who had to do extremely unpleasant tasks (like, mercy-killing a loved one unpleasant) and wanted something more comprehensive than a relatively simple memory excision.

"- interesting application, huh. I guess if I fuck up rescuing a townie - or a student - I can see if you can patch it."

"If you fuck up rescuing someone the best I can do about that with that technique is putting them back in an unrescued state."

Depending on what various kinds of mind control end up looking like, it's possible she might be able to remove them without even looking at the underlying mind--the mental image she has is sort of comparable to rummaging through a bucket of marbles with your eyes blurred so you can't make out details and picking out the cubes someone else dumped in there. 

"Yeah. But then I guess I could try again. Or get someone else to try, maybe."

"I have a feeling it won't be that easy with any victims of the teachers.'"

"Well, if the teachers routinely prey on the student body the entire premise of being here is kind of shot, so."

"Mesmerra said the teachers aren't allowed to enslave the students, but I was thinking about the townies."

"Good point. I guess we can ask Mesmerra if that's common, she said we could ask any number of questions."

"I am slightly concerned about the possibility of giving her ideas."

"There've been how many hundreds of these sessions?"

"The concern is less that she might not have thought of the possibility of encouraging teachers to take townies; the concern is that she might identify this as a useful lever to get us to do more mind control."

"I guess, but I feel like putting townies in harm's way is already a pretty obvious tactic."

"Yeah...maybe we're overthinking this."

On the other hand, it's only paranoia if nobody is out to get you.