Trapping Zero

“Honey, I’m sorry.” Reid rose to hug her, but Maya got there first. She wrapped her arms around her younger sister as Sara sobbed into her shoulder. There was little Reid could do but stand there awkwardly and watch. No words of sympathy came; any expression of endearment he might offer would be little more than putting a band-aid on a bullet hole.

Maya grabbed a napkin from the table and dabbed gently at her sister’s cheeks, smoothed her blonde hair from off her forehead. “Hey,” she said in a whisper. “Why don’t you go upstairs and lie down for a bit, huh? I’ll come and check on you soon.”

Sara nodded and sniffled. She rose wordlessly from the table and shuffled out of the dining room towards the stairs.

“I didn’t mean to upset her…”

Maya spun on him with her hands on her hips. “Then why did you go and bring that up?”

“Because she’s hardly said two words to me about it!” Reid said defensively. “I want her to know that she can talk to me.”

“She doesn’t want to talk to you about it,” Maya shot back. “She doesn’t want to talk to anyone about it!”

“Dr. Branson said that opening up about a past trauma is therapeutic…”

Maya scoffed loudly. “And do you think that Dr. Branson has ever been through anything like what Sara went through?”

Reid took a breath, forcing himself to calm and not argue. “Probably not. But she treats CIA operatives, military personnel, all manner of trauma and PTSD—”

“Sara is not a CIA agent,” said Maya harshly. “She’s not a Green Beret or a Navy Seal. She’s a fourteen-year-old girl.” She ran her fingers through her hair and sighed. “You want to know? You want to talk about what happened? Here it is: we saw Mr. Thompson’s body before we were kidnapped. It was lying right there in the foyer. We watched that maniac cut the throat of the woman from the rest stop. Some of her blood was on my shoes. We were there when the traffickers shot another girl and left her body lying in the gravel. She was trying to help me free Sara. I was drugged. We were both nearly raped. And Sara, somehow she found the strength to fight off two grown men, one of whom had a gun, and she threw herself out of the window of a speeding train.” Maya’s chest was heaving by the time she was finished, but no tears came.

She wasn’t upset reliving the events of last month. She was angry.

Reid lowered himself slowly into a chair. He knew about most of what she told him by virtue of having followed the trail to find the girls, but he had no idea about another girl being gunned down in front of them. Maya was right; Sara was not trained to deal with any such things. She wasn’t even an adult. She was a teenager who had experienced things that anyone, trained or not, would find traumatizing.

“When you showed up,” Maya continued, her voice lower now, “when you actually came for us, it was like you were a superhero or something. At first. But then… when we had some time to think about it… we realized that we don’t know what else you’re hiding. We’re not sure who you really are. Do you know how frightening that is?”

“Maya,” he said gently, “you don’t ever have to be afraid of me—”

“You’ve killed people.” She shrugged one shoulder. “Plenty of them. Right?”

“I…” Reid had to remind himself not to lie to her. He had promised he wouldn’t anymore, as long as he could help it. Instead he only nodded.

“Then you’re not the person that we thought you were. That’s going to take time to get used to. You need to accept that.”

“You keep saying ‘we,’” Reid murmured. “She talks to you?”

“Yeah. Sometimes. She’s been sleeping in my bed the past week or so. Nightmares.”

Reid sighed dolefully. Gone was the untroubled, content dynamic their small family had once enjoyed. He realized now that things had changed for all of them and between all of them—maybe forever.

“I don’t know what to do,” he admitted softly. “I want to be there for her, for both of you. I want to be your support when you need it. But I can’t do that if she won’t talk to me about what’s going on in her head.” He glanced up at Maya and added, “She’s always looked up to you. Maybe you can be a role model for her now. I think that getting back into a routine, a shot at normal life, would be good for both of you. At least finish your Georgetown classes. Besides, they’re not likely to let you in if you flunked an entire semester.”

Maya was silent for a long moment. At last she said, “I don’t think I want to go to Georgetown anymore.”

Reid frowned. Georgetown had been her top choice of colleges since they’d moved to Virginia. “Then where? NYU?”

She shook her head. “No. I want to go West Point.”

“West Point,” he repeated blankly, completely thrown by her statement. “You want to go to a military academy?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m going to become a CIA agent.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Reid balked. He was certain he had heard her right, but the combination of words that came from her mouth made little sense to him.

She’s winding me up, he thought. She was expecting an argument and I resisted. This was just youthful angst. It had to be.

“You… want to be a CIA agent,” he said slowly.

“Yes,” said Maya. “More specifically, I want to attend the National Intelligence University in Bethesda. But in order to do that, I would first have to be a member of the armed forces. If I go to West Point instead of enlisting, I would graduate as a second lieutenant and be eligible to attend NIU. There I can get a master’s in strategic intelligence, and by that point I’d be over twenty-one, so I could enroll in the agency’s field-training program.”

Reid’s legs felt numb. Not only was she very obviously serious, but she had already done some thorough research to find her best course of action and education.

But there was no way in hell that he would ever let his daughter choose that path.

“No,” he said simply. All other words seemed to fail him. “No. No way. That’s not happening.”

Maya’s eyebrows shot up in unison. “Excuse me?” she said sharply.

Reid took a deep breath. She was headstrong, so he would have to deny her more carefully than that. But his answer was an unequivocal and emphatic “no.” Not after everything he had seen and everything he had done.

“It hasn’t been all that long since… the incident,” he said. “It’s still fresh in your mind. Before you make a decision like this, you need to consider all angles. Finish your classes. Graduate high school. Apply to colleges. And we can revisit all of this later.” He smiled as pleasantly as he could muster.

Maya did not. “You don’t get to dictate my life like that,” she said heatedly.

“Actually, I do,” Reid countered. He was quickly growing irritated himself. “You’re still a minor.”

“Not for long,” she shot back. “Let me tell you what’s going to happen. I’m not going back to those classes at Georgetown. In fact, I’m not going back to school until September. I’ll flunk my spring semester and I’ll have to take all those courses over again. I’ll be seventeen next month, which means by the time I graduate I’ll be eighteen. And then you don’t get to tell me where I can go or what I can do anymore.” She folded her arms to punctuate her point.

Reid pinched the bridge of his nose. “You cannot just skip three months of school. And what about all these study sessions you’ve been doing? All that time would be wasted.”

“I haven’t been going to study sessions,” she admitted.

He looked up at her sharply. “So you’ve been lying to me? After everything?” He scoffed in dismay. “Then where have you been going?”

“After you drop me off, I go to the rec center,” she told him matter-of-factly. “There’s a self-defense class there a few times a week. It’s taught by a former Marine. I’ve also been reading up on counterintelligence and espionage tactics.”

He shook his head. “I can’t believe this. I thought we weren’t going to have any more secrets between us.” Even as he said it, a painful memory flashed through his mind—Kate’s murder, the truth about their mother. He still hadn’t told them, despite his promise to himself to cease the lying and guile. It killed him to keep it from them, but in the wake of the incident it had been too soon to reveal something so horrible. Now, four weeks later, he was afraid it was too late and that they would be angry at him for keeping it to himself for so long.

“I knew you’d react like this,” Maya said. “That’s why I didn’t tell you the truth. But I’m telling you now. That’s what I want to do. That’s what I’m going to do.”

“When you were seven you wanted to be a ballet dancer,” Reid told her. “Remember that? When you were ten you wanted to be a veterinarian. At thirteen you wanted to be a lawyer, all because we watched a movie about a murder trial—”

“Do not patronize me!” Maya leapt up from her seat, standing in front of him with a pointed finger of warning and a glare on her face.

Reid leaned back in his seat, shocked by her outburst. He could hardly even be angry at her, as surprised as he was at the strength her reaction.