memories. Unfortunately, his orders were clear cut and not open to interpretation. “Prepare the implant,” he said tightly. “That way it’ll be ready if we see it’s necessary. In the mean time, we’ll keep her under close observation.” “ What do you suggest?” Koryn asked slowly. Tariq glanced at him sharply, feeling his belly tighten with reluctance. He swallowed with an effort against the knot that rose in his throat, a mixture of frustration and disgust and anger. “What the hell happened here?” he growled. It was a rhetorical question Koryn made no attempt to answer. None of them knew what had happened, had so much as an inkling. They’d been trying to find answers to their questions since they’d arrived weeks earlier to find a garden of Eden bereft of the children left in her care. “ Study her personality and try to work up something as close as you can,” Tariq said tiredly. “I think there’s a good chance that she had a military background and, if that’s true, she’s the first we’ve recovered that might have some of the answers we’re looking for.” * * * * Emerald was so sleepy when she finished drinking the soup that she immediately suspected they’d laced it with something to knock her out. She discarded the thought after a few moments’ reflection. She hadn’t noticed anything ‘strange’ about the taste and she felt sure she would have if there’d been any sort of drug added. For a while, she resisted the pull, too unnerved by her situation to feel safe to sleep, but it was a losing battle. Finally, she got up, climbed into the bunk and yielded. She had no idea how long she slept, but she woke feeling far more alert than before and not nearly as weak. Deciding the soup and the nap had been beneficial, she got up and explored her cabin. There wasn’t much to explore, unfortunately, but she did discover that there was a private facility that included a shower attached to the small cabin. The long, hot shower sapped a good bit of the energy she’d woken up with, unfortunately, even while it seemed to ease some of the soreness from her muscles and invigorate her. Wrapping up in the sheet again when she’d dried off, she returned to the main room and settled in a chair to think. She’d had another nightmare. Unfortunately, from the moment she woke it was just as elusive as the one before except that it left her with the sense, right or wrong, that it wasn’t just a ‘generic’ nightmare. She struggled with her memory for a little while and finally gave up. She couldn’t be certain the nightmare had any basis in reality at all. It might, as she suspected, be the result of something she’d experienced, but she had no way of determining that even if she could remember the details of the dream. She didn’t know what to think about her situation. It just seemed too pat that aliens had come to visit the Earth and run across her and decided to rescue her even if not for the fact that she could tell they were withholding a great deal from her. It was possible, she supposed, that the Anunnaki were a benevolent race and such things were commonplace to them—assisting others—and yet she couldn’t imagine that they would travel so far merely to ‘visit’. They would almost certainly have an agenda. She just couldn’t figure out what that might be. She knew, though, that they’d traveled a tremendous distance. Even if not for the fact that that ‘felt’ true, they’d implied it themselves. So, they were here for a reason. Did she have anything to do with that reason, she wondered? Or had they come across her purely by accident? It seemed to her that she could safely discard the suspicion that they were enemies of the people of Earth. What would be the point in taking care of her if they were? They’d said she wasn’t a prisoner—or Koryn had, although there’d been something about Tariq’s manner that made her question it. They certainly hadn’t treated