Castelain had grown up with access to reams of knowledge and training unavailable to virtually everyone. It had been uncanny when he started speaking Julius Paine's words. He had become aware of it himself in his early teens and reported it to his teachers' teachers. His memory was unusually good, and his teachers had immediately gone silent when they heard the name of the man he was channeling.

The next few weeks of his education had been very different. His teachers' professionalism had never wavered. They still taught him secret keeping, meditation, and to recognize his inner voice, but they had never before seemed hesitant in his presence. A few weeks later the reason had become clear.

Castelain had been one of the youngest ever to discover that his parents were more than rich socialites. The order they were part of required that he ask the right questions in the right way. He had done so at a younger age than anyone for two hundred years.

He remembered the pride in his father's eyes on the day that he asked in the same way that he remembered the fear on the day his dad opened the door to their study to reveal the Free Agent. It was Castelain's 15th birthday.

The man had been standing relaxed in the most secure corner of the room. With clear sight-lines to both bullet-proof windows and his father's large desk constructed with ultra-dense wood. It provided excellent cover against everything lighter than uranium shells: it was the position that his father took when greeting guests with a proven tendency towards violence.

His father had stashed an eighteen-inch long carbon steel blade and a .45 caliber loaded weapon within a reach of where the man was standing. When he first walked into the room, with his father's fear fresh in his memory, the proximity of the man to the two best weapons in the room was alarming to say the least.

Neither spoke first. Castelain was certain that the other had received every ounce of training he had, and more besides. Part of that training was to reveal as little as possible of your intentions. It was one of the few rules which couldn't be overcome. Another agent should gain nothing by being in a trained agent's presence. His father had drilled that message into his young brain along with a dozen other lessons.

The key first lesson was to know your purpose. He was totally on board with his order’s stated purpose of protecting and perfecting mankind.

The second was to know your enemy. He knew nothing about this man besides that his father and mother trusted and feared him.

Somewhere after those but before ‘always keep an eyeline to both the bathroom and the exit’ he had learned that giving nothing away meant different things to different people. There were some that would take an impassive face as a stronger message than surprise. Sometimes the best message to give nothing away was to send a false one.

Impassivity had always been the easiest message for him to send, so his mother had arranged acting lessons. Then, after a few lessons had filled him with enough confidence to lie to her, she had been the one to show him just how much he still had to learn. Castelain had always been a calm child, and nothing in his teenage years had changed that.

Looking at the man standing in front of him, something in his gut told him whatever false message he tried to send would give more away than if he did what he did best, and gave nothing away. So, he was content to wait, projecting nothing.

Calm was not just a face that Castelain wore. It was a part of him. Many of the things that he had been taught about quieting his mind and listening to the pace of a conversation had come so naturally to him that it had hardly seemed like learning at all, just a formalization of so many things he had always done.

He was 16 the first time his parents exposed him to a true psychic. They hadn’t warned him outright, but he had picked up on some tension in his father that warned him some test was coming. It had been in this same room, but on that occasion he and his father were sitting behind the desk and the psychic had walked in to meet them.

He had felt the otherness on the edges of his consciousness nearly right away. It was an unmistakable feeling of mist blowing across the back of his neck. In his quiet mind he emblazoned the feeling into his memory. If he was going to be a person of worth in the circles in which his family moved he would need to be immune to psychic intrusion. Without prompting, he had deflected his attention towards memories of doing calculus.

Standing facing his father's desk, he felt the Free Agent press against his mind. It wasn’t the same brush of mist as the first psychic. It was a vortex of angry wind pulling up on the edges of his mind.

Of his parents, his mother was the stronger mentalist. When he had tried to describe the feeling of a touch on his mind she had listened gravely, but with a twinkle in her eye. When he had finished, she had let the silence stretch for a moment. It was her way of emphasizing the words to come, and this silence had stretched longer than most of her lessons. "The touch of a mind" she began, "will always tell you what is in it."

When the Free Agent reached towards his mind he felt a vast and precise focus. It was as though this man was trying to hold the whole of the universe and single life in balance simultaneously. The combination was mesmerizing, and his plan to deflect the attention towards something trivial was broken by the man’s intensity. Castelain couldn’t deny his interest in what was to follow.

"I don't suppose there is any use trying to trick you. It is for your support that I have come to meet you today. I am a Free Agent; am I the first you have met?"

To that point in his life, Castelain had never appreciated why most people seemed to pause when they said something they thought was important. The housekeepers were always peppering their conversations with huge dramatic pauses where the other was supposed to laugh or gasp. It was the first time in his life where he understood the impulse to leave such a gap. The other had not left him one.

"No, Your Freedom. But you are the first one from our order." Had he answered quickly enough to hide his shock? He felt the Agent pulling knowledge of his shock from his mind. I will have to be more careful.

"That's right, your father captured William two years ago…” the older man mused, “I was unaware that you were involved with the capture in any way.”

“I wasn't. I simply saw him being moved around our compound." It was a lie, and one that he was fairly certain would escape the other's notice. His father had schooled him to never under any circumstances share the truth of that particular episode of his young life, and they had practiced the lie.

"Fair enough." Castelain felt the other's probe drop from his consciousness as the words hit his ears. He watched as the other poured a golden liquid into two crystal glasses. The other spoke without turning away from his task, "I am free. You have been taught what that means?”

“Our organization places no restrictions on your actions.” Castelain answered carefully. No restrictions meant truly none. He could do anything with no rebuke. Castelain had read the history of some of the Agents that had preceded this one. It seemed the most recent Agent was responsible for the First Iraq War. Those acts and the forewarning that had accompanied them had netted Castelain’s parents nearly eight billion dollars on the stock market.

Sipping from one of the glasses, the Free Agent spoke. “It means that I am free to kill you, of course."

This time the pause was painfully loud in Castelain's ears. This time, he understood the purpose of the pause. Castelain felt fortunate that the Free Agent was not pressing into his mind. He would have had no trouble seeing the anxiety and shock he felt.

"Before I was given my Freedom,” the Agent began, “on the few occasions when I was with the others my age who were being initiated into our order, we daydreamed about what we would do with our freedom. Perhaps it is how few rules we had to follow that makes them such a burden. We bragged about the loss we would bring onto the orders we opposed and the lives we would save among the innocent." He still had not turned from the glasses,though they were full and the decanter stoppered.

"I have done much of both, but that is not what has dominated my Freedom. It is loneliness."

The young man allowed himself to nod gently. As the attractive heir to an immodest fortune, there were few enough who could be considered his equal. As a telepath, mystic, and initiate into sacred mysteries, there were only a handful on the planet who could intimidate him with nothing but words. The man in front of him had already done that.

The other pushed on, "The way that our order teaches us to find equals is to find others worthy of elevation. It has been this way for millennia." Again, the youth nodded. "I have had a vision of what will or can be. That is not the only way. Tell me boy, do you believe in aliens?"

This time he was prepared and gave no insight into his mind. He gave a moment of thanks to his teachers. "Do you use that word in the orders' tradition, or in the common sense, Your Freedom?”

“Answer the question, Castelain.”

For the first time, Castelain felt telepathy push into a mind as well as pull from it. Suddenly, answering the question was an inevitability rather than a choice. Yet Castelain had always pushed against doing exactly what he was told. “Your Freedom, I have seen our records documenting what they would assert is alien intervention on our planet.”

He felt the command on his mind, unstoppable this time.

“No, Your Freedom. I do not believe.” Exhaling a haggard breath he continued. “I always thought that the mysteries they attribute to the divine are better explained by human exceptionalism.”

The Free Agent finally turned to face him. “Good. The work we will do together takes a rational mind, not a true believer.” The pressure on Castelain’s mind increased, until at the very core of the mind touching his, he felt a coldness like the bottom of a frozen lake.

He passed the second glass to Castelain.

“Let’s begin.”