Free Minders by Michele Jaffe Page A

until Sadie couldn’t see anything.
    As his mind blacked out, it flooded with a roar of such force it seemed to have mass and density, some thick, heavy substance that filled every corner, every gap, taking all the available air. The space that had seemed infinite only heartbeats ago now shrank to nothing, trapping Sadie inside of it.
    The air was crushed out of her lungs. She gasped for breath and felt herself choking as though she was drowning, flailing. I have to get out of here, she thought, panicked . I have to escape. The darkness was suffocating her, pulling her in like a constricting vacuum, twisting the breath, the life, out of her.What was happening, what was this sensation, what —
    Anger , she thought, claiming her first emotion.
    Everything went black.

CHAPTER 6
    S adie awoke to a guy’s voice saying, “I was at work all day. I told you, babe.”
    “Sorry, I must have forgotten,” a girl answered. “I figured since it was Sunday—
    “Overtime,” the guy interrupted. “Day shift, noon to eight P.M.”
    Sadie, waking fully, recognized the guy’s voice as Ford’s. She opened her eyes and saw a living room. And a girl. Or at least her nose, since the conversation was being whispered while they kissed.
    All the signals Sadie was getting from Ford felt subdued, as though everything was covered in a layer of dust. It was more all-encompassing than the dimness before, making not just his vision but his voice seem muffled.
    Was it because she’d passed out? Sadie recalled Catrina at lunch discussing how “Syncsleep”—moments when the Minder’s consciousness got overloaded and temporarily withdrew from Syncopy—was common during the first few days of Syncopy. “It usually happens at times of intense emotion for your Subject, distracting you so much you forget to breathe.”
    Intense emotion , Sadie repeated and shuddered at the memory of the clawing, suffocating darkness of his anger.
    If it was after eight now, she’d been in Syncsleep for at least four hours. During that time, Ford had been at work doing—
    He hadn’t been at work, she realized, at least not when she was awake. Which meant he was lying. To the person who was presumably his girlfriend— Cali , Sadie remembered, adding it to the list of his associates’ names in her mental notebook.
    So you’re a liar, Ford Winter , she thought with a twinge of disgust, before reminding herself that she was supposed to be objective.
    Maybe the lying accounted for the dusty quality of his thoughts, a sort of film between him and reality. Tying it in with the way things dimmed when someone was bluffing, she added Lying interferes with vision to her mental notebook .
    Cali was sitting on the arm of the sofa, with Ford standing between her legs. He pulled her toward him and kissed her forehead. Her eyes closed, but his stayed open, giving Sadie a chance to look around.
    The room they were in was small, with a single window in the same wall as the front door. The walls were light blue, the carpeting beige. An old wooden footlocker served as a coffee table, which, with the navy slipcovered sofa, gave the room a sort of a nautical feeling. Behind the couch was a short hallway that led, presumably, to the bedrooms and bathrooms. The wall facing the couch had a wide arch opening into the kitchen, and half of a bricked-up fireplace mantel. The other half, along with part of the plaster medallion in the ceiling, disappeared into the wall.
    Between the arch and the fireplace hung a medium-sized television showing Cookie Wars Deluxe , the picture completely framed with Ad-Spaces. Like everyone in their neighborhood, Sadie’s parents paid to outsource their ad watching to other people so their content was always ad-free. Intellectually she understood that gave other people the chance to watch extra ads in exchange for less expensive television, but she’d never considered what that really meant until now. The Winters’ television screen was so crowded with