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Alex Hughes Short answer? Yes, absolutely, you're dead on.

Long answer? Ability is a hereditary trait for certain, which is why the Guild highly encourages strong telepaths and other Abled folks to procreate. (Note: with the exception of certain odd ones like firestarting, all Ability seems to start from the same general sets of genes. A telepath and a teleporter can have a telekinetic child with neither of the parents' gifts, though it's not as likely as inheriting a similar gift as a parent.) If Cherabino's nephew has a strong ability, then there is a gene or gene trait that runs in the family, though it may be a recessive trait. Ability is also a continuum, with very few true "nulls" and the majority of the population on the very weak Abled side, with fewer and fewer people from the population registering as the Abled scale gets into stronger numbers. To have created Jacob even from recessive genes, Cherabino's family is likely to have several people with weak Ability, who live as normals with occasional hunches, intuition, or strong empathy for other people. This also helps explain why he's relatively well-adjusted considering his other challenges, since the family does understand some of what he needs on an intuitive level. Cherabino isn't a null, which as you point out we definitely know from the Link she and Adam were able to make. She's able to "borrow" some of Adam's mindpower on occasion to read him through the Link, so she's also slightly stronger than your average normal. But she's still definitely in the weak scale, nowhere near Guild ratings. Her strong reaction to Adam reading her probably has more to do with her refusal to accept her own small intuition/Ability than it does anything else. You'll notice that the characters in the book who are true nulls rarely have a strong reaction to Adam one way or the other, unless it's philosophical in nature.

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