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matter. Her body started to cool, very much like water having boiled in her kettle. A twinge here, a ping there.
     
      The chair creaked. “Who,” he asked disinterestedly, “is Richard?”
     
      “None of your business. Look, this is my dream. And I’m ending it. So get lost. I can have sex—good sex I might add—by myself any time I like. I don’t need some figment of my imagination manipulating me.”
     
      “You’re wet. On the brink—”
     
      “Yes. And yes. Most uncomfortable. But not fatal. Don’t you have some other dreamer to annoy?”
     
      She sensed rather than heard him sigh, then jumped at the unexpected brush of his hand across her eyes when he’d been safely across the room. “Close your eyes, Eden,” he said softly.
     
      She flinched at the brilliant flash of light beyond her closed lids. Well, shit, she thought indignantly, the son of a bitch killed me after all.
     
     
     
     
     
     

     
      THURSDAY9:35A .M.
     
      “This still feels too weird. Does it still feel too weird to you?” Marshall Davis, Eden’s assistant, demanded as the inner door opened.
     
      “It’s bound to feel odd without them,” Eden answered, preceding him into Verdine Industries’ computer lab in the Tempe, Arizona, head office. High, narrow windows flooded the stark room with morning sunlight.
     
      Marshall was a tall, almost gaunt young man, who looked, and frequently behaved, years younger than his actual age of twenty-two. Like Eden, he’d been on an accelerated learning curve. His black hair always looked as though it had been chewed off instead of cut. Choppy and uneven was made worse because Marshall tugged at his hair when he was concentrating, so it usually stood straight up in ragged steps around his face. The bane of his existence was his acne, which usually translated into a debilitating shyness around women.
     
      He didn’t exactly consider Eden a woman. She was his idol. His leader. His mentor.
     
      “Weird,” he repeated, looking around.
     
      “Weird” summed up the bizarre dream that had wakened her in the early hours of that morning. Sex and violence. Crazy dreams and brutal reality. Each profoundly disturbing in its own way.
     
      It had been just over two weeks since her mentor, Dr. Theo Kirchner, had been murdered, and the prototype of their top secret Rx793 robot stolen. There was no evidence now of either crime. The trashed computers and equipment had all been replaced with dizzying speed. The crime scene people were long gone. There was no taped outline in the small kitchen where Eden had discovered Theo’s body that night, no smudges of black fingerprint powder dusting every surface.
     
      She’d been told to take two weeks off. She’d reluctantly done so. After spending two days cleaning her apartment she’d been out of her mind with boredom. Bored enough that she’d hopped a flight to Sacramento and gone to see her mother.
     
      The visit had been better than expected. Of course, Eden thought wryly, her mother was interested in the murder, something that wasn’t about her daughter’s work. They loved each other, but they were so dissimilar that it was hard to sit down and have a real conversation, although they always tried.
     
      Eden was pathetically grateful to be back at work.
     
      The lab was once again pristine. No wonder her subconscious was freaking out. How could she pretend that things were normal when they were anything but?
     
      Theo wasn’t just “gone”; her eighty-six-year-old mentor had been murdered in cold blood. He should have died in his own bed. Peacefully. Instead, he’d been shot and filled with terror, his last words to her: “Destroy everything. Trust no one. Promise me.”
     
      Though Jason Verdine had provided round-the-clock bodyguards to ensure her and Marshall’s safety, Eden was nervous as hell. She had wiped all the data from the computers, as Theo had instructed. But 80 percent of their