Hive Mind: Telepath begins in the year 2532 with Amber, an 18-year-old citizen of Hive England, about to enter Lottery along with all the other citizens who turned 18 within the past year. She has no idea what Lottery will find for her to do, but she has been reassured that she will be assigned a job she loves and that will be imprinted with all the knowledge she needs to do it well. She says goodbye to her best friends, Forge and Shanna on the day before Lottery; that night, she dreams about Forge, whom she's had a crush on since she first met him. She has a recurring dream where she is Outside the Hive with him and he calls her a good girl, which makes her extremely happy.
She gets some unusual results at Lottery and is sent off to a different testing center. There, she is given tests until she mentions a headache, at which point she is sedated by the woman giving her the current test.
She awakens in a strange place, with the woman who sedated her as the only other person present. She is informed that they are in Hive Futura, a seed hive whose citizens returned back to Hive England during a population crash. Amber has been discovered to be a true telepath, able to read the minds of others at will; the Nosies are fakes that are used for keep the populace in line, while the few true telepaths (Morton, Sapphire, Mira, and Keith) catch those who attempt to act out anyway. Once Amber can control her telepathy, she will be returned to Hive England, where a Telepath Unit will be built around her to help her protect the Hive. The woman is Megan, who will be Amber's Senior Administrator, unless Amber wants to replace her. Telepaths are rare and valuable enough that any particular person in the Telepath Unit can be dismissed by them at the telepath's whim.
Amber learns to control her telepathy, and sees down into Megan's emotions - Megan was recently widowed when her husband Dean, a member of telepath Keith's Strike team, was killed on a mission, and she is still emotionally raw from that.
Amber's other team leaders come over to Hive Futura. Fran is an uptight, ambitious woman who secretly hates telepaths, but has been chosen to be Amber's Liaison team leader. Amber doesn't kick her out because she is still dealing with her own internalized hatred of Nosies. If Amber removed Fran from the unit, she would feel like a hypocrite.
Adika is a large, imposing man who will be her Strike team leader; he previously worked with Morton and Mira, two other telepaths. He is strongly attracted to Megan, and the two of them get into a Slap-Slap-Kiss relationship, where they are both interested in each other but Megan is not ready to move on from Dean yet.
Lucas is an extremely clever 21-year-old man who previously worked with Keith, and will be Amber's Tactical Commander. His mind is extremely attractive to Amber, glowing and flowing on more levels than anyone else she's seen. Amber suggests a relationship to Lucas, but he declines because he believes that Amber will toss him aside as soon as she reaches her Telepath Unit; her Strike Team has been chosen to be exactly what Lottery thinks she wants in a partner.
Amber returns to her unit and meets the candidates for Adika's deputy: five young men fresh out of Lottery have been imprinted as Strike team leader. She sees that one of them is Forge, and she wonders if he is telepathic in some way, and that is why he has a weird effect on her. She looks into his mind and sees that he's just an ordinary person; when she can't see him, the weird crush she has is gone. She meets him and tells him that she had nothing to do with him being chosen for this position. They agree to keep their friendship on Teen Level a secret so that he can earn a place on the team on his own merits. She scans the other four (Rothan, Eli, Kaden, and Matias) and confirms that they are all acceptable as well.
The team trains, and Amber and Lucas consider starting a relationship. Forge injures his cheek and has a birthmark removed; Amber finds that her infatuation with him is gone. The night before the team is supposed to go operational, an argument between Fran and Lucas escalates until Fran calls Amber a mutant freak. Amber fires Fran and names Nicole, her 19-year-old deputy, acting Liaison team lead.
The team goes operational and Amber learns how to use her telepathy in concert with the rest of her unit. An emergency run to a park in Orange Zone, 601/2603, discovers that somebody has deliberately set up a trap for Amber's unit, using a three-year-old girl named Amber as bait. The girl is rescued but the fact that Forge and Amber knew each other previously comes out; fortunately, Forge has proven his abilities and the explanation that he wanted to earn his position on his own merits satisfies Adika.
Another run to the 601/2603 park turns into an ambush, where a park safety camera was augmented with a tranquilizer dart gun. Amber and the Strike team flee back to her Telepath Unit.
Amber tells Lucas about her weird dream about Forge, as their previous friendship is now known, and Lucas recognizes it as an imprint of some sort; the person who made the imprint probably resembles Forge in some way. Amber realizes that her obsession went away after Forge's birthmark was removed, and suggests that that was what caused the resemblance. A check of Telepath Unit records finds that Amber was kidnapped at age 3 and brought Outside; the resulting sunburn was explained as an allergy to face paint. Some other Hive kidnapped her and imprinted her, probably to make her transfer to that Hive when she became an adult.
Amber and the Strike Team go outside to confirm that Amber can operate outside. Lucas uses hypnotic suggestions on her to tease out information on the imprint's key so that they can try to remove it. After he leaves, Amber opens up a package from her mother and sees a symbol on it that activates the imprint.
After a time spent feeling like she's trapped inside a bubble in her own mind, Amber wakes up to find the entire Telepath Unit short on sleep; Lucas managed to remove the imprint after several days of continuous effort. While the imprint was controlling her, Amber had requested a transfer to Hive Genex. To keep Amber under control, Forge had worn a fake birthmark, which made her call him Elden and do whatever he said.
Amber and Lucas have a Relationship Upgrade after she realizes she has to live for the future. They find Elden's nest, in the 600/2600 support pillar, and a transmitter connecting him to the Hive's computer systems; Elden has gone outside to wait for the transfer. Amber declares that she's going to go Outside and track him down.
Amber, who has been training with a gun, has a training duel with Adika in a holographic training room, during which Adika says that he wants to make Rothan and Forge his deputies, with Rothan in charge of the Alpha Strike team and Forge in charge of Beta. Amber agrees to this. During the duel, Amber manages to wing Adika just before he "kills" her; he proclaims her one of the deadliest combatants he's ever faced, as the only people who have ever managed to hit him at all in a duel were experienced Strike team leaders.
Amber leads her team Outside to track down Elden. After several days, she spots a strange mind in between the two major trails to the sea. Pursuing, they find Elden; he is on the far side of a river, up in a tree, and sees them. Eli shoots him, but is hit by return fire and knocked into the river, unconscious and with a broken leg. Elden escapes as Eli is evacuated back to the Hive for surgery. As Amber scans Elden, she realizes that his brain is overloaded with imprints, and seeing that she has removed her imprint has broken him, sending him into cascade failure. She catches an image of Gregas, her younger brother, in his head, and realizes that with nothing left, Elden will attempt to kill someone dear to her to get his final revenge before he dies.
The team returns to the unit and those that Elden might attack are brought into the public areas - Amber's parents, Gregas, and Shanna, who uses the opportunity to try to get back together with Forge; having been dismissed by her earlier, he wants nothing to do with her.
On Halloween, Elden is spotted. Amber and her team chase after him in Halloween costumes, with Amber as the Light Angel, Forge as the Dark Angel, and Adika as Justice. They catch up with him on level 6. Forge shoots him on stun, but realizing that his mind is broken and that Joint Hive Treaty Enforcement's interrogation will be a Fate Worse than Death, Amber shoots him on the kill setting to give him a Mercy Kill.
Several weeks later, as Eli returns to the team, Amber and her team head out on an emergency run where somebody has already died, with Amber thinking about how she was not punished for killing Elden - she couldn't be. She was too valuable to the Hive for them to risk upsetting her, and thus was effectively beyond the rules.
