my parents are responsible.
“Why did we move to Waterford?” I ask.
“Andrews thought it would be a good fit,” my father recites, “mountains, fresh air, skiing—”
“Stop lying!” I shout. “I know there’s more! We could’ve gone anywhere, since it was never truly over. Why Waterford?”
For so long, I’ve always accepted their deviations from the truth, their lies of omission, because I felt that by accepting them, I was playing along too. I never felt betrayed, but, rather, that I was somehow part of the secret, because I kept it.
Knowing they’ve deliberately deceived me is like being knocked unconscious. “There is no retirement in our field, Sophia. There aren’t enough of us. A terrorist needs only an ideology and an afternoon to train. We need a decade. We can’t afford to let our operators phase out. In Waterford, we were as close to retirement as we’ll ever be.”
“And?” I prompt, sensing his hesitation.
“Our enemies—terrorists, arms dealers, dictators—multiply each day. We can barely find enough special units, let alone covert operators. But occasionally, someone emerges who is a perfect fit for the way we function: discreet, capable, motivated, and easily taken off the grid …”
How did it take so long for me to realize it? To connect it? To see the truth?
He continues, speaking faster now: “We didn’t know when we arrived. It was weeks before we learned his name.”
I am starting to hyperventilate. I don’t want to hear it.
My entire life I have been trained to trust my instinct, and from the day we arrived in Waterford, my instinct warned me.
Nothing is a coincidence.
“Recruitment?” I choke out. “The phase of retirement you entered was recruitment?”
“Yes, Sophia.”
“We moved to Waterford for you to recruit Aksel?”
My mother swallows. “Not quite. We were running Rec-S, recruitment surveillance, on Aksel, it’s not the same—”
Fury erupts like a volcano within me. “You had video footage of Aksel’s house! Of us!”
“Only after he turned on the video security system, Sophia. We didn’t turn it on, although we should have, and we didn’t access it until we had to!”
“So, I should thank you?!”
“We didn’t want to invade your privacy, Sophia, but we had to protect you. It wasn’t an easy position—”
“You’ve been underwater for four minutes, trapped in razor wire, and you figured out how to survive! But you didn’t know what to do when Andrews told you to spy on my boyfriend?! On me?!”
“We wanted you to have a life in Waterford, make friends, go to school, have fun—”
“And you gave me this life by spying on us?!”
“You make it sound like we were peeking through his windows with binoculars! That’s not what it is! Rec-S takes years; it’s what makes ON-YX operators unique. We observe personality, reaction time, threat perception, aggression control, survival instinct, emotional intelligence. These traits can’t be assessed in a three-month training camp. Some recruits are watched for years before they’re even approached by ON-YX.”
“But ON-YX has already approached Aksel,” I say. “Right?”
“He’s a once-in-a-generation candidate, Sophia. We don’t turn down Andrews’s orders. It’s how we recruit. There is one difference between highly trained operators and cold-blooded killers and that is knowing when to take the shot. You can’t assess this in an application process, or at a training facility. You can only discern this quality through years of observation—”
“So, if we’d stayed in Waterford, you would have been monitoring Aksel until he graduated?!”
“We only wanted what was best for you, Sophia,” my mother says. “We left the field as soon as your father killed Farhad in Tunis. We didn’t know who our Rec-S assignment was—it could have taken us a year to receive it—but you ran up Eagle Pass in the middle of a blizzard and Aksel brought you home, and”—my mother pauses—“well, he looks like his father. I contacted HQ to get status on our Rec-S assignment, and that’s when Andrews sent us Aksel’s file.”
“All those coincidences weren’t coincidences. Moving to Waterford wasn’t a coincidence at all.”
“The only coincidence is you fell in love with our recruit, and that’s not good for any of us, least of all him.”
I have to find Aksel. Tell him this before he learns it for himself, before he thinks that I knew, or was involved, or complicit …
Outside, I see the train is descending through the Alps.
Abruptly, I yank my leather bag down from the luggage rack. The contents spill onto the seat—a sweater, a copy of Palace Walk I picked up in Cairo, Vichy face wash.
“Sophia,” my mother says sharply. She looks out through the