After Dark Read Free Page A

use tuned amber to resonate with the dangerous psychic illusion traps that had been left behind by the long-vanished Harmonics. Being able to de-rez the nightmarish snares practically guaranteed that a person would end up in the field of paraarchaeology. The alternative career path was dealing stolen antiquities.
    Until six months ago, she had been advancing quickly through the hierarchy of the academic world. It had been only a matter of time before she made full professor in the Department of Para-archaeology.
    And then came the disaster.
    Her only clear recollection of what she privately called her Lost Weekend was that of coming to in a Dead City catacomb and discovering that not only was she alone but she had somehow lost her amber. Without it she faced the nearly impossible task of finding her way to one of the exits.
    But Fuzz found her. She had never figured out how he got out of the apartment, let alone prowled the Dead City until he discovered her. But he had. He had saved her life.
    She was not the first strong para-archaeologist to lose control and be overwhelmed by the alien nightmares enmeshed in the traps, but she was one of the few who had not wound up in an institution after the ordeal.
    Lydia removed Fuzz from her shoulder and dumped him on the bed while she changed clothes. If it weren’t for his bright blue eyes he could have been mistaken for a large ball of lint sitting on the quilt.
    â€œBad news on the client front today, Fuzz. Looks like we won’t be moving into that spiffy new apartment at the end of the month after all. And I may have to cut back your pretzel ration.”
    Fuzz rumbled again. He watched without much interest as she kicked off her low-heeled shoes and climbed out of her business suit.
    She pulled on a pair of well-worn jeans and an oversized white shirt, then resettled Fuzz on her shoulder.
    Barefoot, she padded into her pint-size kitchen, poured herself a glass of wine from the twist-cap jug she kept in the refrigerator, and fixed a plate with a couple of crackers and some cheese. She removed the lid from the pretzel jar and grabbed a handful of munchies for Fuzz.
    When that was done, she carried the makeshift hors d’oeuvres and the wine out onto the minuscule deck. Sinking into one of the loungers, she fed a pretzel to Fuzz, propped her feet on the railing, and settled back to watch the sun go down behind the great green quartz wall that surrounded the Dead City.
    Her small apartment was overpriced, considering its size, the outdated kitchen, and the bad section of town in which it was located, but it had two important features. The first was that it was within walking distance of Shrimpton’s House of Ancient Horrors, which meant she did not have to buy a car. The second, and in some ways more important, feature was that it was located in the Old Quarter, near the western wall of the Dead City. From her balcony she had a tiny sliver of a view of the ruins of the Dead City of Old Cadence.
    It seemed to her that the ancient, mysterious metropolis was at its most hauntingly magnificent when it was silhouetted against the light of the dying sun. She contemplated the narrow wedge of the wall that she could see from the balcony and watched the last of the daylight illuminate the emerald glow of the stone. The nearly indestructible green quartz had been the Harmonics’ favorite building material. The four dead cities that had been discovered thus far—Old Frequency, Old Resonance, Old Crystal, and Old Cadence—had all been constructed of the stuff.
    Aboveground the architecture of the various alien buildings assumed a dazzling variety of fanciful shapes and sizes. No one knew how the Harmonics had actually used any of the structures that were being painstakingly uncovered by the archaeological teams contracted to the university.
    The only thing para-archaeologists could be sure of was that whatever had gone on aboveground in the eerie ruins, it was nothing