Hope grabbed her cell phone and car keys, dashing out the door. "I'll be back for dinner," she yelled at her parents. She didn't wait for an answer. If she had waited, she would have been forced to write down every move she would be making in the next two hours. She understood why her parents were so protective of her, but she was seventeen years old. There was no need.

Plus, she could take care of herself. She had started with the simple skills her Uncle Will had taught her in the few months she spent with him three years earlier when her mother was missing. But she had built upon those skills every spare chance she had. Her parents still didn't know how good she was, and she didn't plan on telling them.

As soon as her eighteenth birthday came around, they would know, though.

She planned on marching right into CIA headquarters and demanding a job as soon as she legally could. That was a day she was both looking forward to and dreading. Her grandparents and her parents would kill her, but at least she'd finally be doing what she wanted to do.

And then she wouldn't have to sit back and worry about this damn prophecy on her life coming true. She could actively fight it.

Right on time, her cell phone began to ring. The skateboarder she had been seeing lately always seemed to call at the exact same time every day. It was slightly annoying. "Hey, Viper," she said into the phone, ignoring the display.

"Whoever Viper is, I am not him," the voice on the other end said.

"Well, then, who the hell are you and how did you get my number?" Hope asked, not fazed by the new development.

"I've been watching you for a few years now. You're very good at what you do."

"And you're very creepy and in deep trouble. My parents monitor this phone's frequency at all times. They probably have a team on the way to take you out right now. And that's not an empty threat."

"Knowing your parents, Hope, I don't doubt that. However, I took the time to block all the necessary channels. They don't even know your phone is in use."

"You're creepy," she reiterated.

"I get that a lot. It doesn't mean that you're going to hang up on me. If I know you, you're intrigued by me already."

"Yeah, I get that from my dad. What do you want, Mister Man?"

"I want to offer you a job."

She laughed into the end of the phone. "You are ridiculous. Amusing but ridiculous."

"Think about it."

As soon as she heard the dial tone ringing to signal the person on the other end had hung up, she threw the phone onto the passenger's side seat. Weird things had always been happening to her since she was little, but this almost took the cake when it came to weird. "I should probably tell Mom and Dad," she said to herself, cranking up the radio. She looked over at where the phone lay on the seat. "When I get home," she corrected.

Tyler gathered up his papers and gave his students a quick smile before leaving the classroom. Taking the teacher's assistant position for the communications department had been one of his better decisions in the past three years. He had worked hard to gain success at UCLA, and all he had gotten from it was an uncertainty of where to go with his life.

He thought being in the States would help him figure that out in a way that staying in Fiji would not.

Sighing, he nodded as a few of his students passed him. It was the group of girls who seemed to be present in the front row of all the classes he had been teaching since getting the assistant position. He wasn't stupid. He knew that they weren't there because they wanted to become communications majors. He knew that most of the girls in his classes just took them to be able to see him on a daily basis. It was something he mostly chose to ignore.

As he turned the corner, he was so distracted by the girls still giggling at him that he almost ran straight into the man standing before him.

"Sorry," he said, apologizing to the stoic man before trying to step around where he stood.

The man shifted so that he could not get around him. "Not a problem, Tyler."

His instinct kicked in, and he felt himself shift into a defensive stance. "How do you know my name?"

The man looked him up and down before smiling kindly. "It's good that you shifted into that stance so easily. Seemed almost effortless. Your parents must have taught you that."

"You know my parents?" he asked hesitantly, still not easing out of his position. This man wasn't really scaring him, but he still had no idea what was going on. His life had been such chaos for his first eighteen years. He had been slowly waiting for the relative calm he had achieved for his three years in California to be ripped away. He was waiting for the old chaos to come back.

"I'm their boss," the man said, holding out his hand. "Marcus Dixon."

"You're Dixon?" Tyler relaxed his guard slightly. "I've heard a lot about you."

"You don't fully believe I'm who I say I am."

Tyler stared for a moment. The man certainly looked like the Dixon his parents had described. But then again, there had been many stories by Lennox while he was growing up about traded faces and a certain program that ruined a lot of people's lives. Those were one of the few times when he could get information on the person his mother had been when she was still alive. Realizing that Dixon was waiting for him to respond, he put on his best smart ass grin. "Like you said, my parents taught me well."

The man reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. He held it out to Tyler. "Go ahead and look through. There should be a CIA id badge in there, driver's license, pictures of my family, pictures of me with your family. Plenty of proof I am who I say I am."

Tyler flipped through for a moment before his eyes rested on a picture. It was a rather attractive young girl with almost jet black hair. She looked about fifteen or sixteen. Her face was incredibly familiar. "Who is that?" he said, holding the wallet out so Dixon could see.

Dixon grabbed the wallet back harshly. "I'm not here to walk down memory lane with you, Tyler. You haven't spoken to your parents in months. They sent me here to talk to you about that."

Tyler could recognize a harsh, defensive tone when he heard it. However, he figured he would cut Dixon a break and not press the issue of the girl in the picture. "I don't need to keep up constant contact with my parents or with Lennox in order to survive. I'm twenty-one years old and graduating college. I can make it on my own."

"Your mother's worried about you."

"I'm fine. You can tell her that."

Dixon held out his hand and motioned for Tyler to walk. "She just wants you to talk to her. No one's really sure why you won't."

"They refuse to answer my questions so why should I answer theirs?"

"Because their questions are mainly about how you are doing. They just want to know that you're all right."

He took a deep breath, exhaling loudly. "I've spent so much of my life constricted that it's nice to have freedom for once. If I told my parents all the things I was doing and experiencing, they would just be scared for me. They would want me to come back to Fiji, and that's not something I can do."

They stepped out into the California sunshine and made their way down the walkways into the main quad of UCLA. "I understand how you feel. My life was constricted by my job for years. You learn subtle ways to work around it."

"Well, my life is constricted by my life. So there's no way to work around it. There's no real escape from life but death."

"This college has definitely been teaching you pessimism."

"It's the American way," Tyler said with a laugh. "Anyway, I'm doing just fine so you can tell my parents that you did your duty and not to worry."

"I need an update to give them. Your mother knows you're graduating. Tell me what you're going to do when you get out of here. Lauren and Vaughn would want to know."

"I don't know what I'm going to do. I figured I would move to Los Angeles."

"Now you know that's the one place your parents don't want you to go."

Tyler glared at him. "Maybe that's why I'm going. I'm tired of doing the things that everyone expects me to do. I want to start making decisions based on what I want to do. I want the freedom I was never given."

"You need to tread carefully with this, Tyler. Your life has an impact on more people than you'd care to know. You have to think wisely."

"That damn prophecy!" he screamed, attracting more than a few passer-bys attention. "I'm so tired of that damn prophecy. I will not live my life by some stupid old guy's words."

"People have tried to run away from Rambaldi before. You can't do it."

"So then what the hell am I supposed to do?" Tyler half-screamed, half-pleaded.

"Find a way to make it work for you, I guess." Dixon sighed before reaching into his pocket and pulling out a small paper rectangle. He held it out to Tyler. "Come to this address when you've graduated in a few months. Tell them that Marcus Dixon sent you with his personal recommendation."

"What is this?"

"Your free pass into the CIA."

Tyler's eyes widened. "The CIA?"

"Your parents are going to kill me." Dixon sighed and threw up his hands. "This seems to be the only solution, though. You're determined to defy your parents. Your parents want to make sure you're looked after. The only way you can be looked after in L.A. is by me. So, I'm going to keep you close. They might kill me for it, but I can't think of anything else to do."

"I can believe this is happening." Tyler's face was still full of surprise and awe. "I've dreamed of being a CIA agent since I was a little boy. I never thought it was possible. I never thought I could come up with a way to actually do it."

Dixon shook his head. Tyler was already getting ahead of himself. "I never mentioned anything about being an agent. You have to earn that right."

"So, you want me to be a paper pusher than? Filtering your calls and being your personal secretary so you make sure that I don't get into trouble?"

Oh, he had the temper of both his parents. That was for sure. "No, nothing like that. When it's time, they'll set you up as an analyst. You'll be evaluated. Maybe after some training and a hell of a lot of practice, you can become an agent. You have to earn that," he repeated.

"But it is possible."

"It is. It's how your father became an agent. He had to earn it even though his father was one of the agency's best in his day."

"There are no free rides," Tyler said, echoing the words his father had instilled in him practically from birth.

Dixon nodded. "It's the truth. Now go back to what you were doing before I interrupted. It seemed like a nice normal life."

"My parents?" Tyler asked the obvious question.

"Leave that to me. Just enjoy your freedom for now. When you're done here, you are going to become a slave of the United States government."

Tyler laughed and began to make his way back to his apartment on campus. He had exams demanding to be graded. No matter if he was going to become a CIA agent someday, those papers still needed to be graded. And suddenly it didn't seem like such a daunting task.

Hope pulled up in the driveway at ten o'clock that night. She knew that she should have come home in time to eat dinner with her parents, but that weird offer by that man kept her driving for hours. She was trying to think about what it meant. She was also trying to avoid dwelling on the fact that it wasn't almost too good to be true.

"Where the hell have you been, young lady?" Sark asked from his position sitting on the porch stairs.

"Driving," she said, taking a seat down next to him. This hadn't been the first night that she pushed her parent's boundaries. It seemed like no matter how hard she tried, curfew was never really followed. She was a free spirit, just like her father.

"Things to think about?"

"Tons."

They sat there in silence for a few moments.

"Want to talk about it?"

"Not really."

"Your mother's going to be mad if I don't yell at you for a bit, Hope."

"I know," she sighed. "I just wish you didn't have to."

"Me, too." She could feel his tone and expression shift and braced herself for impact. "But what the hell were you thinking, young lady? Driving around without telling us where you were going or who you were going with! Did you think you could just do whatever the hell you wanted?"

"No, I just had a lot of things to think about."

"And you're going to have a whole lot more once your mother and I have decided your punishment."

They both turned as they heard laughter drifting from the front door to where they sat on the porch. Sydney was standing there watching them. "That was the crappiest yelling I have ever heard, darling." She took a seat between her husband and daughter. "This is why she thinks I'm the mean one."

"You are the mean one," Julian corrected.

"Because she had you wrapped around her finger."

"I do," Hope pointed out.

"That's not helping you in any way," Sark pointed out. "So, Sydney, what do you want to do with her? Yelling isn't going to work. She's too stubborn."

"I want her to tell us what was so important that she had to drive around for half the day thinking it over." She looked at her daughter expectantly. "Spill."

Knowing that she could probably lie and be done with this whole uncomfortable situation, she decided that for once she wanted to tell the truth. For once, she wanted to be able to talk to her parents about the things that she wanted. The things that she felt like she needed. "I decided what I wanted to do with my life today."

"So what is it? Rocket scientist? Brain surgeon? Lawyer?" he teased.

"I want to work for the CIA," she said, bracing herself for a more thorough yelling. She knew by telling the truth, she was signing her death warrant.

"Nope."

"No way."

"I don't think so."

"Why?" she yelled, standing up. "You two have been subliminally telling me that the CIA was off limits as a career path. But I never got a reason why. I have a right to know why I'm being restricted."

"Because it's dangerous," Sydney supplied. "And it takes a lot more concentration than you have."

"I have plenty of concentration," she defended.

"Now when you're fighting for you life every single day."

"I'm not fighting for my life."

"You might not realize it, but you are," Sark pointed out.

"The prophecy about you, Hope. It's creeping up." Sydney hated reminded her daughter of the fact that her life was planned out already, but avoiding it wasn't going to make the prophecy go away.

"It's a bunch of bullshit. I can handle myself."

"Oh can you?" Sydney said, raising her eyebrows in surprise. "Please enlighten me."

"I have your talents and Dad's. I'm practically a pre-programmed spy. All I need is an agency to work for. I figured the CIA would be the only one you would let me look into."

"Honey," Sark said, standing up and grabbing her hand. "You just can't be a part of the CIA. It wouldn't work, and they know better than to recruit you. It's not an option."

Hope was tempted to tell them about the phone call she had received earlier but felt herself holding back. For some reason she wasn't sure she wanted to share that fact that she could get a job as a spy without trying. She also wasn't sure she wanted to explain who she had gotten good enough to be receiving job offers. "You think that I'm not good enough, don't you?"

"You haven't been exposed to any sort of fighting style. We haven't been teaching you anything. For good reason! It's a hard road to take. You don't have the time or energy "

"You don't think I'm good enough." It wasn't a question this time. It was a realization. And Hope found that it stung a lot more than she thought. "I'm your own daughter and neither one of you believe in me enough. You think that I'm not good enough to be a spy."

Sydney rolled her eyes. "You sound a lot more confident that you should be. You don't even know if you're cut out for this life."

She wanted to scream at them that she was confident because she had known for years she was as good if not better than them. She wanted to yell about how Will had started to train her up to the level of the CIA when she was fourteen. She wanted to scold them for not noticing.

Instead of doing any of that, she stood up and pulled the car keys back out of her pocket. "I need to drive and think some more. I won't be out late. I promise."

"Hope. We still need to talk about this."

"We can when I get home." With that, she started walking down the driveway. When she made it a few yards away from the porch, she turned back to look at them. "I've been living the life of a spy for years. You dragged me from one place to the next since I was a baby. I've learned how to keep myself out of the public eye, to keep myself from being noticed. I've been a spy without an organization to work for. I don't see why it's so dangerous for me to want to put my life experience to such good use."

"She sounds like a thirty-year-old woman," Sark observed as Hope started walking away again.

"This prophecy has placed the weight of the world on her shoulders. Of course she sounds mature for her age."

"That's now what I meant. She sounds defeated. Almost like she knows life had dealt her a losing hand and there's nothing she can do to change it."

Sydney just stared at her daughter as she walked to her car and got in. She had no idea when things had gone so wrong with Hope. They had a good, solid relationship, but she suddenly felt like she really didn't know who her daughter was at all.

Hope looked in her phone's memory and hit redial. She took a deep breath as a familiar voice answered. "Hi. I'm going to accept that offer you gave me."