She didn’t know she’d said it out loud until a voice that seemed to come from the coffee urns said, “Indeed. How do you?” It was a woman’s voice, and Sadie was surprised to realize it was one of the servers who had spoken.
The girl with the dark hair turned to lock a false smile on Sadie, ignoring the interruption from the server. Sadie saw she’d been right; the girl—her name tag read “Flora”—was pretty. And entitled. “What I meant was, if we can go into anyone’s minds, why this population? What can we learn from them?”
Flora had addressed Sadie, but it was the server who answered. The woman stepped away from the wall and began making her way through the group toward the front. She was tall and thin, but she moved as though she was accustomed to cutting a wide swath through a crowd. As she passed, Sadie smelled leather and roses and wood smoke.
“You might as well ask why we send snobby, self-centered teenagers instead of adults,” she said. “The answer to both questions is the same. I wanted to get things done, fix things in communities that needed fixing, and I knew the old men already in office were too entrenched. Too many people sticking bills in their G-strings.” The woman had reached the front of the room and turned to face the Fellows.
Sadie gasped, and a low murmur came from the group as everyone else let out a surprised breath at the same time. This was Miranda Roque, who had built her father’s chemical company into a global multinational worth billions and then withdrawn from public life, dedicating all her money to aggressive philanthropic missions no one else would even consider. Miranda Roque, famously reclusive, was standing there, right in front of them.
Talking about G-strings.
Her hair was a silver helmet, and her eyes were cool sapphires, but there was a glint in them, and she paced restlessly, as though the contained exterior were a false front over a blazing furnace.
She talked as she moved, in a precise, clipped way, as though every sentence was an order. “I decided to empower a group of young leaders and give them a tool their elders never had. When their minds were still pliant, I’d send them into the trenches to observe their counterparts at the riskiest moments of their lives.” Miranda had to be at least eighty, but she seemed to buzz with restless energy. “You, all of you, will finish high school next year, go on to college, get jobs. For you, a risk will be getting drunk the night before midterms. But these kids, a year or two out of high school, most of them are adrift. No school; boring, dead-end jobs. There are other options, of course: scholarships, gangs, everything in between. Through Syncopy you will know everything they think, everything they feel, every wish and desire and superstition. I want that information. I want to know them.”
Her eyes moved to Flora, and she glared. “Not every one of my initiatives works. And not every one of your Subjects will live to be notable—or even live. But I can assure you, young woman, there’s not a single Mind Corps Fellow who would say that his or her Subject was anything short of exceptional.”
Miranda pointed toward the bouquet of flowers in the center of the table. “Every one of those flowers is a species I developed myself. Three of them shouldn’t grow here, two shouldn’t be that color, and four of them, like this one”—she reached through the group to pluck a white flower with a single red spot on one petal from the arrangement—“started off as weeds. Despite what my enemies say, with the right care and vision, civilization can be cultivated anywhere.” The eyes beneath her high brow shone, and Sadie felt ignited by their fierce challenge. “In case you haven’t figured it out, I’m Miranda Roque. This is my house. Make me proud.”
She tucked the flower into Curtis’s buttonhole, then made her way toward the door behind Sadie. It slid apart as Miranda approached, only now there was no sign of the thick green carpet, no scent of wood polish and flowers that had been there when Sadie entered. Instead it opened onto a sterile, cream-colored hallway with a sign that read FLOOR −14. BADGE RULES IN EFFECT.
“Where are we?” someone behind Sadie asked.
“Home sweet home. Subbasement fourteen,” Curtis said. “Welcome to Mind Corps.”
CHAPTER 3
A decade earlier Miranda Roque had built the finest research facility in the country, staffed it with the top scientists and academics in the world, and buried it beneath the ground. Each of the twenty subbasement floors was headed by a different researcher and dedicated to cutting-edge specialties like geocorporation, cipherlogistics, and infodemiology.
Syncopy, which grew out of late-night coffees on several different floors, now took up all of subbasement fourteen with fifty-three staff members, four state-of-the-art laboratories, and the most advanced nanochip research facility in the world.
The Fellows’ tour guide, Catrina Devi, told them this as they walked from one cream-on-cream corridor into another. Catrina had dark hair styled in a pixie cut, high cheekbones, luminous brown eyes, and almond skin. She was what Decca would have called “one of those,” meaning one of those women who are so naturally beautiful they could wear a piñata—or in this case an ankle-skimming lab coat and no jewelry except a single gold bracelet—and make it look like they were dressed for a chic party.
Curtis had introduced her as soon as they got off the elevator. “Catrina was one of our first Mind Corps Fellows five years ago,” he told them. “Now she oversees our Stasis Center. She’ll be doing this next part of the tour. For the six weeks you’re in stasis, your life is in her hands.”
A smattering of nervous laughter. Sadie watched Curtis give Catrina a warm smile and wondered if their relationship was more than just professional. If she’d been a Mind Corps Fellow five years earlier, she would have to be twenty-one or -two, Sadie calculated.
A tight cluster of Fellows peppered Catrina with questions as she led them down the long hallway, most of which Sadie thought were designed more to get attention than answers.
The guy with the southern accent asked, “Could stasis be used to perform surgeries without anesthesia?”
“That isn’t something we’ve explored yet,” Catrina told him.
A girl with dark hair to her waist: “How old will our subjects be?”
“They’ve all been out of high school for at least a year, so usually between nineteen and twenty-two. Never older than twenty-five.”
The walls of the corridor curved gently, the floors absorbed the sound of their footsteps, and the light was buttery, shadowless. Everyone’s voice sounded slightly more pleasant, their movements more graceful, and Sadie was struck by the tranquility of the place. It reminded her of her home, but even more calm and orderly. It was, she felt, a place where nothing bad could happen.
They passed departments of bioethics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and chemical engineering, things she’d expect, but there were also unfamiliar specialties like neuronutrition, chronogeography, and bricolage.
As far as Sadie could tell, almost no one involved with Syncopy or Mind Corps was even close to thirty. Which made more sense when the boy with the perfect part asked, “How do you get a job here?” and Catrina answered, “By being the best in your field or by being a former Fellow. Usually, of course, those are the same thing.”
A few Fellows laughed, but Catrina’s tone made it clear she wasn’t joking.
Sadie wondered if she ever laughed.
They turned into another corridor, and Sadie was surprised to see an old-fashioned painting hanging on one wall. It was a portrait of a striking man dressed in nineteenth-century attire. Pausing, Sadie saw that a little metal plaque screwed into the frame identified the man as Judge Montgomery Prester Roque. It would have fit in perfectly upstairs, but down here it seemed strange, almost jarring.