The Truth

What strikes you is not that there is any deep secret about why she is cold around you – there isn’t one, in fact, the only explanation in her brain for it appears to be the tampering of another telepath. You can sense a psionic signature on her brain that indicates that you were not the first pilgrim to land there. What troubles you is that you have no idea who it could be, or, for that matter, why they would block off such oddly specific information. Just in case, you weave the most complex pattern of antipsychic defenses around her mind that you can muster, involving seven million layers of quaternary code that would take even you days to crack (you leave a back door specifically keyed to your psionic signature, so that you can still read her thoughts). By the time you finish the coding, the bus pulls in to the school parking lot, and it’s time to disembark.