Mind Blind by Lari Don Read Free Book Online

senior readers wouldn’t mind one of us coming homewith a few bruises and minor broken bones, if we all learnt a useful lesson. Especially not if I was the injured one. Efficient violence is a skill our family teaches, rather than discourages.
    So I needed to get away before they worked out where on the course I was. If I played this right, I might manage to avoid a kicking
and
get back to base before them. I could be lying on my bed like a good boy doing my essay when they all trudged in, having failed today’s test.
    But I didn’t get up and run right away. Once they were closer, I could tell how many cousins were there, and which way I should run.
    I might even be able to work out if I could cheat. Because I was unlikely to beat Daniel and the rest of the fourth generation if I played fair.
    As they got closer, I counted eight minds, most of them relishing the excitement of the chase. But one familiar mind was anxious and uncomfortable. So Daniel had brought Roy.
    Now they were at the clubhouse. Was I worth the cost of eight teenagers playing 18 holes? No, they were going to break in too.
    There was a moment of focus as Daniel instructed his troops, then they moved around the fence towards the trees.
    I got up. They would find the bent wire soon, and by the time they got in, I needed to be hiding in the tall grass at the edge of the course, not out here in the open. I sprinted towards the fence.
    This was a risk: I was running towards cover, where I’d be hidden from their eyes, but I was also running towards their minds, and the nearer I got, the easier it would be for them to sense me.
    However, I had a plan. I was going to try an experiment. No, not an experiment, just an idea I’d been considering recently. We can’t cover our emotions like we can cover our thoughts, but I’d been wondering if I could deliberately change the emotions I gave out.
    Daniel and his team would be searching for prey feelings, victim feelings, possibly even fighter emotions, and the familiar mind of their pathetic cousin.
    So all I had to do was pretend to be someone else.
    All I had to do was feel like a golfer.
    As I ran, I imagined myself starting a round of golf, grasping the club, swinging it. I felt a bit bored, slightly frustrated, mildly competitive.
    I made it to the rough without any of my cousins recognising my mind. I dropped to the ground just inside the fence, 100 metres from the broken section. I lay in the long dry grass, feeling smug. I was trying to feel smug like a middle-aged golfer though, not smug like someone getting one over on his cousins.
    They were so close now, I could hear Daniel’s voice as he bossed them about.
    I concentrated on mild golfy thoughts – a ball curving away from me, hole in one, checked trousers – as Daniel sent Martha, Kerr and Sam away from my hiding place, past the clubhouse, and announced he would lead Laura, Becky and Josh in the other direction, towards me. He left Roy, the one Paterson he never trusted, to guard the exit he was sure I was nowhere near.
    Then Daniel strode towards me, with three Patersons behind him. And I realised I’d made a massive mistake.
    I couldn’t stay in the grass feeling like a golfer, because golfers don’t lie down when they’re playing. If Daniel sensed someone in the rough grass, he’d come over to investigate. Then he’d beat me to a pulp.
    So I had to make my mind invisible. I had to stop thinking or feeling at all.
    I’m not sure how I did it, but I found the nearest nothing in my head: the dark quiet nothing of Vivien just after she stopped being afraid. Just after she stopped feeling anything. Exactly when her thoughts and feelings switched off.
    I dived into the moment of her death.
    I joined Vivien in her dark nothing.
    So I didn’t feel the earth under me, the danger passing me, the grass tickling my nostrils. I didn’t feel anything.
    Eventually I became aware of just one sensation. The feeling of grit under my fingers. Hard poky