Edge Read Free Page A

person just a few breaths earlier, a living person thinking about the day ahead, a thousand small concerns and perhaps the meaningful events of life, images of lovers, children, parents, all of it shut down in an instant. Suzanne stepped between her and the corpse, blocking the view.
        "Are you hurt?"
        The woman couldn't speak, but she was flapping her hands, staring through Suzanne as if the body were still in focus; and in a very real way it was, but Suzanne dared not deal with that until she was sure the woman was not bleeding. She ran her fingertips down the fragile neck, the narrow torso, while checking by sight. Physically, everything seemed intact.
        "Let me help," said a man's voice.
        "We need to get her inside." Suzanne reached under the woman's armpit. "Come on."
        With the man's help – she had a glimpse of blonde hair, a suit: a thin, thirtyish man – she got the woman moving slowly towards the mall. The entrance was mostly undamaged. All I wanted was a coffee. They led the woman into Seattle's Finest, then Suzanne sat her down while the man fetched bottled water.
        "I'm Adam," he said.
        The woman did not respond.
        "And I'm Suzanne." To the woman: "What's your name?"
        "You saw him?"
        Her eyes focused on a point in space, seeing the same thing in her mind, over and over. From the pupil dilation and involuntary twitch, she was recreating the mental picture in vivid, moving colours. It was a textbook precursor to post-traumatic stress, but this wasn't a case study – it was a suffering person, in need of help. So help her. Usually Suzanne met clients long after the traumatic event when the memories had been laid down – and replayed over and over before finally seeking help. This should be even easier to deal with, except that she herself was shaking in reaction. Or perhaps she could help herself and the woman at the same time: the point wasn't to kill the flooding emotions, just dampen them enough to prevent future nightmares.
        "Just breathe," she said. "Concentrate on blowing the breath out."
        The man, Adam, looked at her, then slowly put down the unwanted water. He gave a nod, seeming to recognise that Suzanne knew what she was doing. At least I'm supposed to know.
        Synchronising her breathing with the woman's, Suzanne began to alter her mental state. In a coffee shop at normal times, you would see friends chatting, their gestures tending to phase-lock, performing a subliminal dance, its intricacy obvious only to trained watchers. Now, Suzanne was using the process deliberately, entering physiological rapport, before leading the way to a different neurological state. She raised her hand before the woman's eyes.
        "Look at my hand," she said, her voice a living thing, every nuance of pitch and rhythm and timbre keyed to some aspect of the woman's physiology. "See the changing focus of your eyes and in a moment you might blink, that's right, and before you enter trance now" – the woman's eyelids fluttered – "you can hear the silence between sounds like time to sleep and my voice will go with you as you close your eyes… now… and sink deeper… and deeper… into a soft relaxing daydream state… That's right."
        The woman slid into trance.
        She went fast and deep, while Adam's jaw dropped. In Suzanne's office, the portable fMRI would have shown the brain's activity profoundly altered: the anterior cingulate diminished, the precuneus nucleus in spectacular, multicoloured overdrive on the monitor display. Even to an untrained observer like Adam, the effect was obvious. He remained riveted as Suzanne completed the induction, taking the woman back in time, inside her mind, to situations where she felt secure; and each time the state was at its deepest, Suzanne touched the woman's shoulder.
        "Now in the whirlwind, step outside yourself, like watching a screen, then drain the colour