Part Two: The Price of Peace Karmali had survived a steel rod to the head, discovered that his accident was probably attempted murder, and acquired the extraordinary ability to hear what people were thinking. You would imagine this was enough excitement for one lifetime. Apparently, life disagreed. His wife had betrayed him. His colleagues wanted him dead. His doctors were keeping secrets that could fill a police station. And now he had to rebuild his life. But here was the problem nobody had anticipated. When you can hear everyone’s thoughts, you eventually discover that some people are idiots. And quite a number of them are thinking about you. The question was no longer whether Karmali could survive knowing the truth. It was whether he could learn to live without needing to know everything. Karmali left the hospital through the service entrance, between a delivery of vegetables and a man arguing about an invoice. It was not the triumphant exit he had imagined. But the alternati...
Part One: The Man Who Knew Too Much. Karmali was a university graduate working on a construction site, married to a woman who appeared to love his wages considerably more than she loved him. Then somebody dropped a steel rod on his head. Ordinarily, this would be considered a bad day. But Karmali woke up with the extraordinary ability to hear what people were thinking. His doctors had secrets. His wife had secrets. Even the people who came to wish him a speedy recovery were privately calculating whether he would survive long enough to spend his compensation. And then he discovered something rather disturbing. Perhaps the steel rod hadn’t fallen by accident. By the time a steel rod entered Karmali’s head, life had already been trying to get through to him for several years. It had tried unemployment, poverty, marriage and the cost of cooking oil. None of them had worked. That morning, it escalated. Karmali was a university graduate working on a construction site in a foreign count...