Free Initiation of the Lost (Book 1) by M.R.

be.
    "I've stopped influencing your field. But it will take time to recover. Even though your feelings were not prompted by an actual physical experience, your psyche will never completely tell the difference. You will always at least have these feelings as a memory, unless you forget. And I assume you are a good enough man to not forget. Stay here, gather yourself, and go to bed. Daniel asked me to inform you that you would not be needed at this meeting."
    And she walked around her desk, the coach, and slipped into negative space.
    <<>>
    Daniel sat in an overstuffed leather armchair. Before him was a disc projecting a beam of light and the hologram of a news broadcast. When Cassandra entered, the news anchorman disappeared. She sat opposite Daniel on a pale cream love seat, the column of light between them. Through the hazy illumination, employer and employee saw each other, half in light, half in shadow, wondering if their gaze was contemplating one another, or some place else entirely.
    "Will you be attending the funeral?" she said.
    "No. I think it best I maintain distance."
    "Of course."
    He was immune to her readings, but she knew him. She knew what he wanted to say, but she had opened the door to let him say it anyway. Times likes this reminded everyone of how burdened they truly were.
    "Damn it, Cassie." Daniel ran his hands over his hair. He tilted just enough for Cassandra to see how much more grey had come into his hair. "If they were where they needed to be, a mission like this would've been child's play. It would've been beneath them. You had a responsibility to push these kids, make them become their best."
    "Their best meaning child soldiers?"
    "They'd be alive."
    "No they wouldn't." They? One had died. But it didn't matter–not at that moment. Losing Connor made everything, everyone, seem lost. "Doing things your way, we would've buried them years ago. Or worse, we would've locked them up for their own protection." She lifted the arm to her love seat, revealing a compartment filled with bottled water, glassware, and a cup of lemon wedges. She fixed a drink with a squeeze of lemon and brought it to Daniel. He took the glass:
    "Something a little stronger?"
    "No."
    She returned to her seat and fixed her own drink. He wanted to smile but even after all these years he never knew how to act around her. Her student had died, her team was sleeping in a lab to recover, and yet she was calm. He never interacted with the children; he avoided attachments. She essentially raised them, but was so cold.
    "Everything has gone to plan," she said, crossing her legs and easing back. She sighed. "I told you the initial years would be slow as we emphasized structure, creating a safe world for the children to work through their traumas and live blossoming childhoods. And look, look at the rapid progress they've made. Every week they discover greater and greater depths and breadths to their sympathies. Raising soldiers was not the answer. They would've been driven by anger, explosive and reckless. They never would've developed the moral and work ethic, the stability, the creativity, the personalities to manifest, harness, and evaluate their full potential and use of their inherited gifts and talents."
    Daniel swigged the last of his water. Reaching into his suit jacket, he pulled out a golden flask engraved with a bull grazing in a pasture. Like any businessman, he had the urge, the thirst, for security, independence, to be in control of every government, economy, and person who could ever take away what he had achieved. But he resisted, with much assistance from Cassandra, the kind of egomania that crippled visionaries, turning their legacies against them; yet still there was a fast talking presence inside of him, needing everything to happen faster–"Now!"–confusing "getting things done" with "getting things done right ." He reminded himself of the futility of acting unprepared, without having gone through the necessity of