“At the expense of your health?” my father asks from the back seat. “If you had gone to medical school—“
“That wasyourdream. Not mine.” I meet his gaze in the rear view mirror briefly, then return my focus to the road and merge onto the freeway. “Ilovewhat I do, Dad. My work… There’s an orchid that only grows in Guatemala and one specific region of Mexico high up in the mountains. It produces a rare phytotoxin in its roots and flowers, but one of my colleagues at Johns Hopkins thinks he can use it to help create a treatment for Parkinson’s.” I pause, hoping they’ll understand the importance, but despite losing my grandmother to that horrible disease, my mother’s still giving me the side eye. “The orchid’s in danger of extinction. Most of its habitat has already been lost to coffee farming, and it’s so rare, poachers make a fortune selling it. Without proof it has more value than being one flower amid a host of others, it’ll be gone in under a decade.”
“We did not leave Syria and seek asylum in America so our daughter could risk her life studying aflower,”my father says.
Anger flares up, bright and hot. This is his favorite argument, but it’s also one I can refute easily. “No. You left Syria so your daughter could decide for herself what she wanted to do with her life. I want to study this orchid. Preserve its existence.”
“And how does working all hours of the day and night help this?” The judgement in my mother’s voice grates on my nerves, but despite her nagging, she’s always come around in the end and has been my biggest fan—as long as I could justify my actions. She convinced Dad to stop pressuring me to go to medical school, supported me when I told them I was moving from Mountain View, California to Edgewater, Maryland to take a job at the Smithsonian, and I know I can sway her now too.
“If I get this grant, I’ll be able to take a team of graduate students with me down to Mexico and study the orchid in its natural habitat. With the information we’ll get there, we might be able to find a way to preserve its existence. Reliably grow it in the lab or cross-breed it with a hardier variety. And we’ll bring back enough samples for Johns Hopkins to work towards a clinical trial.”
My words spill out over one another in my excitement, and I know I’m rambling in ways my parents didn’t fly across the country to hear. They just wanted to spend a long weekend with me. But I can’t help myself. “If we visit the grow sites, we can take air, water, and soil samples, install equipment that monitors all those variables year-round, and maybe even convince the Mexican government to do more to stop poachers from stealing the flowers and selling them illegally.”
“You want to studypoisonousplants? In the mountains of Mexico?” my father asks. “Mikayla, that does not sound safe.”
“It is. I promise. The poison is only active when the flowers and roots are dried, and we always wear protective equipment when we handle the samples. And it’s not apoisonousplant. It’s a plant that could potentially help millions of people. That just happens to be dangerous when dried.”
“You would be hiking? Up in the mountains? Alone?” My mother rests her hand on my shoulder. “I do not like that idea.”
Traffic grinds to a halt. A heavy summer rainstorm combined with rush hour doesn’t make for ideal conditions, and as I stop the car, I lock eyes with each of my parents in turn. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The research papers I’ll be able to publish alone off of this study will make my whole career. And if I can work with Dr. Branch—he’s my colleague at Johns Hopkins—on his paper… Mom, I could save lives.”
She’s softening. I can tell from her expression, and emboldened, I take a deep breath. “I promise I’ll be careful. I’ve started using the stair machine every day trying to get my lungs in shape, and my graduate students…they’re working their butts off designing experiments and thinking up new ways we can possibly save anentire species. They deserve this as much—if not more—than I do.”
For a full minute, no one says a word. Traffic starts crawling slowly, and I return my focus to the road just as my father clears his throat. “You know we love you, Mikayla. We are simply worried. It’s what parents do.”
Mom settles back into the passenger seat. “Your father is right, Mika. We worry because we love you.”
I flash her a quick smile, and the tension in my little Prius evaporates almost immediately. “I know. I love you too. I worked so late last night so I wouldn’t have to go in again all weekend. And I bought all of the ingredients forkibbeh bil sanieh. Tomorrow, we can cook together.”
“You mean tomorrow I will cook and try to stop you from eating all the pine nuts.” Mom huffs out a breath, but her lips curve into a smile.
I laugh, letting work fade into the background for now—and hopefully for the rest of their visit. “You won’t have to. I bought double what we need, so I get to eat as many as I want. Dad can too. And I picked up a box of those chocolate caramels you love. We all get to indulge this weekend.”
They only visit twice a year, and my work has kept me so busy, I couldn’t fly out to see them during Ramadan. While I’m not a practicing Muslim, Mom and Dad are, and I know they were hurt when I couldn’t even make it for a weekend trip during the holiday. For the next few days, I’ll do my best to put work out of my mind and enjoy my time with them. And hopefully, in a couple of weeks, the grant will come through, and so will my dreams of making a difference.
Austin
Standing in the doorway of my empty apartment should stir more of a reaction. I want to feel…something. Anything besides this hollow, restless sensation that’s haunted me for weeks. Since the attack in Islamabad.
We were targets from the moment we stepped foot in Pakistan. For six months, my security team worked their asses off. Until the United States Ambassador showed up for an unannounced visit. We scrambled. Mistakes were made. And when we escorted her back to the Embassy, we were sitting ducks.
I got her and her teenage son out of their burning vehicle and laid down cover fire until two of her escorts got her to a mosque down the street that sheltered them.
But the second blast killed three members of my security detail and left Griff, the only one who survived, with permanent hearing loss and only half his left arm.
“Pritchard. I can’t feel my fingers,” he’d croaked as I’d dragged myself over to him and tried—despite three bullet wounds to my shoulder and back—to keep firing until help arrived. “Shit. I can’t…there’s something wrong with my hearing. It’s so quiet. Fuck. Am I dying? Don’t let me die, man.”
Every night when I try to sleep, I hear him. See him. His arm crushed under the remains of that heavy stone wall. Blood covering the left half of his face. The desperation in his eyes.
Outside of Ryker McCabe—a retired Special Forces detachment commander—and his team, Griff has the best damn instincts of anyone I’ve worked with in more than twenty years, and now…he’ll be lucky to ride a desk, let alone go out in the field again. Nothing will fix his hearing. And while I called in some favors to get him consults with the best prosthetic clinics in the country, it’s not going to give him back his arm.
He saved my fucking life. Shoved me out of the way of a collapsing concrete wall—only to be trapped himself. I wish my gratitude could do him a damn bit of good. But I’m out. Clarke pushed my retirement papers through while I was still recovering, and now…I’m a civilian for the first time in more than twenty years.
At least I kept my pension. Wren—Ryker’s wife and the best damn hacker I’ve ever met—carefully scrubbed every single piece of video evidence tying me to Venezuela and the fall of their government. Without her help, I’d be in a military prison right now.
Training won’t let me leave a single footprint on the carpet I meticulously vacuumed after I cleaned the place top to bottom, so I stand at the threshold, wishing I knew what to do next.
A couple of days with Mom and Dad in New Haven. That’s a given. Dad knows everything now. My sister, Dani, told him while I was in Pakistan.Aftershe brought Trevor home for a long weekend.
