Free [Ganzfield 2] Adversary by Kate Kaynak Page A

trainer’s once-white t-shirt. Three metallic-suited corpses lay around him. Despite the fact he was missing his prosthetics, Frank had gone down fighting. They hadn’t expected a man without legs to fight back as fiercely as he must have.
    Dammit, Frank. What are we supposed to do now?
    Frank would’ve expected us to handle this crisis the way he’d taught us: figure out the problem then generate ways to solve it. I squeezed my eyes shut. I had to stop letting my emotions—and the emotions of the others—cloud my ability to think.
    Easier thought than done.
    Next to me, shock and pain emanated from Trevor’s turbulent thoughts. Their families—the people who loved them—they’ll never see them again. They’ll never know why—never know what happened. Ganzfield—our home—had been attacked. Violated. It was a primal association, as though our nest had been disturbed or someone had declared war on our tribe. This was wrong. Deeply, viscerally wrong.
    Evil.
    I forced myself to focus. We needed to clean this up and we needed to keep the police out of this. A secretive enclave—which many locals thought was a cult—filled with the massacred bodies of dozens of teenagers would draw media attention on an unbelievably massive scale. We had to keep this from going public. We were obviously vulnerable, and now half of Ganzfield had been wiped out. Where were the rest? Where were the older G-positives who no longer lived and trained here? We needed to find the living, go to them, find out what had happened, and see what we could do next.
    Regroup. That would work for now.
    Let’s clean this up, and then go find Sean and the other survivors. I still couldn’t make my voice work. Rachel, do you know where they are? How to get there?
    Rachel nodded silently. Her expression had turned stony and her mind seethed with anger and the desire for revenge.
    Tears traced down Hannah’s face. She did the only thing she could for the dead—filling line after line on a sheet of white paper. Names. How did she know all of their names? I’d always considered her shy and not very social. Please, Jesus, help me to be strong, she thought, over and over. Please, give me strength.
    Drew started dragging the scattered corpses together, dislodging them from the mix of blood and partially-melted snow that’d iced up beneath their bodies. He brought them away from the houses and out into the field that led down to the now-frozen lake. The bloodstained corpses screamed out their obscene presence in vivid contrast to the peaceful white and grey of the wintry world. As he worked, Drew stripped off the metallic suits from those wearing them. He placed the dead in a pile—a pyre. Trevor joined him, moving the bodies with his ability. The lifeless shapes seemed to float, two at a time, in a macabre dance.
    Do we need wood?
    Drew shook his head at me. The flames burned white-hot and the bodies turned to ash and charred bones after less than an hour. I thought it normally took much longer—Drew must’ve burned them at an extremely high temperature. I’d known he was strong, but I hadn’t known he had that kind of power. Heated air pushed against us as the snow melted in the surrounding area leaving a circle of bare earth, scorched black near the flames. The foul smell, sizzle of flesh, and popping cracks of bone added to the sickening ambiance.
    We’d known these people. They were our people. This should not have happened. This could never happen again.
    The pain, the anger, and the nauseating horror of the others mixed with my own as we watched the fire swirl like a fiery tornado, twisting toward the sky. The black plume of smoke tilted toward the lake, thinning and dispersing as it rolled away from us. A few flakes of snow began to fall, as though the entire sky was turning to ash.
    Hannah said an enormous silent prayer as we stood there, unspeaking observers to the destruction of our little world. After the flames had turned the remains to