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lock, gave it a small pulse of psychic energy, and opened the front door.
    Her pet dust-bunny, Fuzz, drifted toward her across the floor. If she had not been anticipating his greeting, she would not have seen him until he appeared at her feet. None of his six paws made any sound on the tile floor of the postage-stamp-size foyer.
    Fuzz’s daylight eyes were open, glowing a brilliant, innocent blue against his dull, nondescript fur. He was fully fluffed, making it impossible to see his ears or his paws. He looked like something that had just rolled out from under the bed.
    â€œHey, Fuzz, you are not gonna believe the day I had.” Lydia scooped him up and plopped him on her shoulder. Oomph! Been into the pretzels again?”
    The sturdy weight of the little beast always surprised her. One tended to forget that the scruffy, unprepossessing exterior of a dust-bunny concealed the sleek muscles and sinews of a small but serious predator. “Chester Brady got himself murdered in my new sarcophagus. The one I told you I got for Shrimp’s museum super cheap from the University Museum because they had two hundred extra ones in the basement. Plus they owed me, on account of I found a couple of dozen of their best examples in the first place.”
    Fuzz rumbled cheerfully and settled into a more comfortable position on her shoulder.
    â€œI know, I know, you never did like Chester, did you? You were in good company. Still, it’s strange to think that he’s gone.”
    Several months ago she had stopped worrying about whether or not her one-sided conversations with Fuzz were an indication of deteriorating mental and psychic health. She’d had more pressing matters to occupy her attention. Chief among them had been finding a job and stabilizing her personal finances after the disaster.
    Besides, as far as everyone else was concerned, she had cracked up big time after her Lost Weekend. Given the diagnosis she had gotten from the shrinks following the incident, talking out loud to a pet seemed pretty close to normal.
    The disaster in the Dead City six months ago had not only destroyed her career at the university and wreaked havoc on her personal finances, it had also left phrases like “psychic dissonance” and “para-trauma” sprinkled liberally about in her medical records.
    The doctors had recommended that she avoid excessive stress. Unfortunately, that was easier said than done when one was trying to forge a new career on the ruins of one that had crashed and burned.
    For all their pompous-sounding pronouncements, Lydia knew that the rez-shrinks didn’t have a clue about the true state of her mental and psychic health. Neither did she, for that matter. She remembered almost nothing about the forty-eight hours that had passed after she fell into the illusion trap.
    The doctors said she had repressed the memories. They claimed that, given her high-rez psychic profile, it was probably better that way.
    The paranormal ability to resonate with amber and use it to focus psychic energy had begun to appear in the human population shortly after the colonists came through the Curtain to settle the planet of Harmony. At first the talent was little more than a curiosity. It was only gradually that the true potential of the phenomenon became apparent.
    Today, almost two hundred years after the discovery of Harmonic amber, it was routinely used for everything from switching on car engines to running dishwashers. Any child over the age of four could generate enough psychic energy to “rez” untuned amber. Few people, however, could summon enough psi power to do more than use it to drive cars or operate a computer. But there were exceptions.
    In some people the ability to para-resonate took odd, extremely powerful twists. Lydia was one of those people. In technical terms, she was an ephemeral-energy para-resonator. The common term was “trap tangler.” For some unknown reason she could