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them?
    Laura shook her head, annoyed that she was not being honest with herself. They may not have run
surgical
tests on the twins, as she was sure was the intention of the Flight Trust hawks in the States, but they were
drugging
them. It couldn’t be right.
    She had bonded with Rachel and Adam and was sure that they felt the same way. She wanted to protect them, but there was no denying that they were the most important scientific find of the century. Maybe the most important scientific find
ever
. The project needed to keep the kids under control, she accepted that, but they had insisted on keeping them sedated for
four
days already while they didthe scans. Today had been the twins’ first day awake, and Laura could see that Rachel and Adam were disorientated and not quite up to speed. Laura had protested but the project was still tranquilizing their food. At least they had agreed to reduce the dose.
    She slammed the lid of her laptop closed and stared at the wall. This wasn’t archaeology; this was a violation of the kids’ rights. Their childhoods had been hijacked, and she knew that she was one of the hijackers.
    She’d thought her life would be very different…
    She remembered the sun-bleached days of her own childhood in Perth. While her sister had played with dolls, Laura had walked around the yard in Subiaco, giving the rocks names and memorizing every dinosaur from the Triassic Period to the Cretaceous.
    Even then, she had known that her future would revolve around her obsession with the past.
    She remembered hunting for fossils, and how that had got her interested in the Aboriginal sites, the Songlines and the Dreaming stories. Invisible maps of the ancient landscape that the tribesmen kept alive in their heads or in songs and stories. They held the past, the present and the future in their
minds
. In time she had become intrigued by sacred sites in other parts of the world: in caves and long-forgotten tombs, in Bronze Age burial-grounds.
    And one day, some odd pieces of information had started to add up.
    That had been when the American guy at the University of Western Australia had approached her to work for the Hope Project. He’d read a few of her papers and had said that they were working along the same lines. In return for open access to her work, the Hope Project had offered Laura complete freedom to continue her research wherever she chose, saying it would open doors for her where necessary.
    As someone who hated the red tape involved in gaining permission to dig foreign sites, Laura had welcomed the access-all-areas ticket that the Hope Project had seemed to offer. And while it had never been a priority, it had to be said that the large sums of money which appeared in her bank account overnight had made a big difference to someone who had lived on educational grants for ten years. Looking back, it had seemed like a golden opportunity.
    And now she was complicit in the drugging of children.
    Laura opened her computer again. She checked her email and then clicked on to her webcam. She was glad to see Rachel up and about and pacing her room, rather than lying dormant as she had been for the past six hours.
    Laura watched for a few minutes. She slurped at the coffee she’d made earlier, but it was stone cold.
    Rachel appeared to be looking for something, waving her hand in front of light bulbs and the air-conditioning vent. She looked as if she was searching for a bug … or a camera. No sooner had Laura thought it, than Rachel spun round and looked up to the corner of the room and staredstraight into the hidden lens of Laura’s webcam.
    Laura Sullivan felt herself flush hot, exposed, as Rachel climbed on a chair, then, waving a single finger in front of the camera lens as if to say “caught you,” plugged up the spy hole with a wad of chewing gum.
    Laura let out a sigh of annoyance as the picture on her screen went black; at the same time, she felt a sneaking admiration for Rachel that was stronger