[Ganzfield 2] Adversary (4 page)

“No!” she said, cutting me off. Her outburst startled a few people waiting in the purgatorial check-in line.
No charm stuff from her
.

She doesn’t want you to,
I thought to Grace, heading off her intervention. Now Grace was offended and upset, too. I rolled my eyes.
Great—
more drama.

Grace confronted Rachel as soon as the car door slammed shut. “What was that about?”

“I didn’t want to get it that way,” she replied after a cold second.

“Well, now you’re going to have to come all the way back again for the retest,” said Grace.

“You don’t have to come with me,” Rachel snapped.

“Hey! Who’s hungry?” Drew tried to change the subject. We’d all been starving a few minutes earlier, but now my appetite was gone.

Grace exhaled angrily. “That’s it. I’m done. Find yourself another charm for this little ‘superfriends’ thing you have here.”

I was amazed at how quickly the situation had devolved into this. “Grace, you don’t have to—”

“Maddie, I’m sick of it. I stayed for the license run. Now I’m out.”

Ah, hell.
I’d known she was unhappy. I frowned—there was no obvious way to talk her out of this decision. It didn’t seem right; she’d been good about not charming the team members.
Arrgh
! I wanted to yell at everyone to just cut it out and get along.

The uncomfortable car ride back seemed to take much longer than an hour. For the rest of them, it was just awkwardly quiet. I, on the other hand, got to listen to everyone’s mental fuming.

Oh, joy.

Rachel was full of dark-red, angry snarls; Grace felt unappreciated and put-upon; Hannah, as usual, just wished herself elsewhere.

Replacing Grace probably wasn’t going to be difficult—Ganzfield had plenty of charms. But Grace’s decision made me worry about Hannah. She wasn’t comfortable with the training we’d started. Hannah was a gentle, quiet person with a strong Christian faith. The quasi-military exercises and legally-grey nature of some of the things we practiced upset her. Healers were rarer than charms—there was only one other one besides Hannah in training, and Lester kept mentally undressing me when we were in the same room. I didn’t want him on the team.

I needed to find a way to make Hannah happier with the training, but I didn’t know how. And all this drama gave me a headache.

Trevor,
their thoughts are driving me crazy. Please distract me!

An invisible hand started rubbing my neck, soothing me.
Something like this?

I closed my eyes, trying to block out the tension emanating from the rest of them. It didn’t work; it never did. If I was close enough, thoughts hit me whether I wanted to hear them or not. Fortunately, Trevor’s presence buffered their intensity for me.

Why did we wait until now
?
Why didn’t someone tell me we could drive at sixteen in New Hampshire?
Back in New Jersey, the driving age is seventeen. I could’ve taken the driver’s test here months ago. We’d waited until today, my seventeenth birthday, for no reason.

I got mine in Michigan. I didn’t know about New Hampshire. And Drew’s had his for a while now. Besides, you’re a minder so we never think we have to tell you anything.

I pouted. S
omeone should have thought it
.

Trevor chuckled. His laughter always did something wonderful to me. His joy amplified as it came into my mind, filling me with warmth.

A few minutes out from Ganzfield, I felt the touch of two new minds. Fear and hatred flowed blood-hot through the two strangers.
Here come some of them now!

My head shot up and every muscle tensed.
Dead
—they wanted us all dead.

“We’re being watched,” I said aloud.

I felt Trevor’s invisible arms wrap around me. He’d stopped bullets with those arms in the past to protect me. He was ready to do it again.

Drew filled with energy, ready to fight. I suddenly hoped he didn’t accidentally spark anything near the car’s gas lines.

The watchers head-counted us.
“Too many. Wait until we can catch one or two of them alone.”
They had flame-retardant clothing and white-noise-generating earpieces, which meant that they knew what sparks and charms could do. Cold washed down my neck and arms.

The strangers also had friends; one grabbed a cell phone.
“Six of them in the grey sedan, heading back in,”
he reported as we moved out of range.

The gate clanged shut behind the car and I started breathing again. “I need to talk to Dr. Williamson.”

*   *   *

I spent a lot of time in Dr. Williamson’s office on the third floor of the main building. Since I’d started training with the team, I’d stopped attending regular classes but my workload had only gotten heavier. Dr. Williamson had me studying neurology—how to find and differentiate the areas of the brain—fine-tuning my ability to incapacitate.

We worked together to figure out what I was capable of with my ability. If I overloaded the visual cortex, could I blind someone?

Possibly.

Could I overload Broca’s area in someone’s brain? If I did that to a charm, it would render the charm unable to speak for a while. Painless, too—they might not even know what’d happened to them until they tried to talk. It was like a little seizure—just zapping a little extra energy into one part of the brain. No pain. No problem.

Theoretically, at least—it wasn’t as though I could practice brain blasts on volunteers or anything. Who’d volunteer for
that
?

Dr. Williamson and I had a practical one-on-one nearly every day. Between these lessons, training with the team, and my connection with Trevor, telepathy had become second nature to me. My mental range had gradually increased, too; I could now hear people’s thoughts from nearly eighty feet away. However, this still gave me the shortest range of all the minders. Dr. Williamson’s was nearly two-hundred feet, and Seth could feel someone’s presence more than half a mile away, although he had to be closer to get a clear read on their thoughts.

Climbing the stairs of the rambling, old farmhouse that had become Ganzfield’s main building, I mentally touched in with Dr. Williamson so he knew I was coming. It’s hard to surprise a minder, so it was more of a courtesy than anything.

Dr. Williamson had developed an informal code of “telepath etiquette” that he thought we all should follow. That little “mental knock” was part of it. So was speaking aloud when discussing things with non-telepaths present. He also avoided using the term “minder”—the short form of “mind-reader”—used at Ganzfield. He didn’t like the secondary meaning—those who watched over the others and kept them in line. It was a little too close to being uncomfortably true.

A middle-aged black man who radiated authority, Dr. Williamson was always impeccably groomed, even when casually dressed in a cashmere sweater, like today.
What did you see?
His thoughts boiled with brooding contemplation. He’d been like this for the past two months—ever since he’d learned Isaiah Lerner was alive.

I’d never met Isaiah. What I knew of him came from Dr. Williamson. He’d shown me his own memories from years ago, before Isaiah had faked his own death and hidden under the new name. I knew from those memories that we were up against a powerful predator—Isaiah was one of two telepaths who could send enough energy into another person’s brain to kill them.

I was the other.

But he had a larger telepathic range than I did—hundreds of feet, at least. And he didn’t need visual contact to “fry” someone, like I did. If he got close enough, he could kill someone with a thought. That was how Isaiah had murdered Elise, Dr. Williamson’s wife and soulmate. Dr. Williamson wasn’t going to know peace until he was
sure
Isaiah was no longer in the world.

Minders usually just framed thoughts to each other to communicate. I’d never heard Seth speak—or even seen him face-to-face. Not only was my mind abrasively loud to him when I got too close, but we also annoyed each other.

That annoyance was mostly due to Seth’s personality.

Now I showed Dr. Williamson what I’d sensed outside the gate.
Think they’re Sons of Adam?
The Sons of Adam were like the K.K.K. to G-positives like us. Luckily, most people didn’t know about us and couldn’t comprehend the extent of our abilities, so their numbers remained small. If our existence became public knowledge, it might be enough to bring thousands of pitchfork-and-torch-wielding villagers down on us—or their shotgun-and-flashlight-wielding descendents, at least.

Sometimes, I felt they had a point. Charms could be the ultimate sociopaths—able to talk people into doing anything. And I really wasn’t one to judge—my own telepathic ability could be intrusive, dangerous, and predatory. I had to be very careful how I used it if I didn’t want to wake up some morning and discover I’d become a monster; at times, I thought I already had.

Possibly.

I startled, but then realized that Dr. Williamson hadn’t been paying attention to my existential ambivalence. He was concerned about the men who’d been watching us.
You saw the earpieces and the fire-resistant gear. Anything else?

I shook my head.
Just that there were more than these two and they know we’re here. They recognized the car and are waiting to catch one or two of us alone.

Dr. Williamson pondered that behind a mental shield.

Think they’ll try to hurt us?

Dr. Williamson didn’t respond, which said it all.

What’s the plan?

I’ll send some charms to have a talk with them—if it’s safe,
he added unintentionally. Dr. Williamson didn’t let things slip often—things must be worse than I knew. If these men were prepared with earpieces and the like, it might be too risky to send our people out to charm them.

Speaking of charms,
we need a new one for the team. Grace wants out.

Who do you want?
Dr. Williamson felt comfortable with the topic change.

Not sure. Any suggestions?

Try John Samuels
.

I nodded, trying to remember which one he was.

Now, let’s see how you’re shielding today.

*   *   *

John lasted two days. He kept mentally undressing Hannah, Rachel, and me, even after I’d warned him to control himself. When he charm-voiced Rachel to “start acting sweeter toward him,” I’d snapped a blast of pain through his brain. After he was able to stand again, he’d left and hadn’t returned.

Okay, I
might’ve
overreacted.

The thing is, I could’ve killed him. I’d already killed five people and I got jumpy when it came to a charm with inappropriately sexual thoughts in his head, especially for Rachel’s sake.

Sarah worked out for nearly two weeks.

Devon lasted three hours.

Sonja quit after four days.

Intellectually, we knew a charm was a very useful addition to the team. We just couldn’t stand being around most of them. 

CHAPTER 4

February fifteenth—Trevor’s eighteenth birthday. At the end of the afternoon, I found Trevor and Drew on the new shooting range down near the sparks’ houses. Hannah shivered unhappily behind a protective cinderblock barrier, giving me a half-wave as I came near. She wore a bulky set of bright blue ear protectors as she tried to read.

My stomach fell as Drew emptied an entire clip directly at Trevor. Rapid-fire shots cracked the air, leaving my ears ringing and freezing a piece of my soul.

Intellectually, I knew Trevor needed to practice stopping bullets. But I still had to suppress the sudden impulse to
make him stop!
Drew wasn’t trying to hurt Trevor. They both wore Kevlar vests and riot helmets with clear visors that covered their faces. Hannah was there to deal with any injuries. And Trevor could handle it. The bullets hung suspended in front of him like a scene from the
Matrix
.

I waited until Drew lowered the gun before I tried to get their attention. Then I forced a cheerful smile over my taut nerves.

“Hey guys. Party time!”

Drew’s grin turned predatory as Trevor blanched.

I snorted.
So you’re cool with Drew SHOOTING at you, but not with him throwing you a birthday party?