Response #1 to Chain of Command
Sydney rarely got sick. Not from natural causes, anyway. Sometimes she’d cry herself sick, or she’d get sick after having her head held under water by an angry intelligence agent/terrorist/family member/all of the above, but she didn’t just fall sick from some bug in the air. She could count on one hand the number of times that had happened.
The first three were between the ages of four and seven. Sydney realized that her mother treated her even more lovingly than usual when she had the sniffles, so she took off her jacket when she played in the rain, and she played with Jennie when Jennie was sick.
The third time was after her father got back from prison, and after weeks of being treated distantly, she’d gotten herself sick in the hope that he would pay attention to her. That seeing her ill would make him love her again. It didn’t work, and so she stubbornly didn’t get sick again for over a decade.
The fourth and final time was during her training at SD-6, and she considers this also to be the most important. Francie, her roommate at the time, had caught the flu and, not knowing she was sick, had shared a pint of ice cream with Sydney. Sydney’s hearty constitution had kicked in almost immediately, but still she had been too sick to come into work for her agent training one day.
When she came in the following day, sniffling and tired but otherwise all right, her trainer had said, “Well, I’m afraid you just missed the most important day of training.” He’d winked as he’d spoken, and she’d known everything was okay. Forever after, though, even knowing that they’d made up any missed training in the weeks that followed, she wondered whether she had missed something important.
Sloane, when she came to work directly for him, seemed to find it funny that she couldn’t help but apologize for the one day she had missed in her six months at SD-6 so far. Later she learned to regret having told him about it-though surely he’d have noticed the detail in the reports of her training-because after her third mission, in which she had disobeyed the orders of her partner, who was senior to her, and rescued a contact from certain death by blowing her own cover, Sloane had looked at her with his reptilian gaze and said, “Clearly the day that you missed was the day we covered chain of command. We’ll have to teach you.”
Sydney knew the technical rules of the chain of command, of course, but they seemed less important than other rules, like “don’t leave anyone behind” and “protect the country at all costs.” And, when push came to shove, chain of command was the first thing she was willing to toss out the window. Sloane wasn’t happy about it. Nor, in later years, were her father and the CIA. But Sydney, perhaps superstitiously, never regretted missing that one day.