I watched him from the corner of my eye as he sat across from me in that cheap diner on Sunset Boulevard. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting a sickly green pallor over everything. Victor's face was a map of scars, each one a story he'd never tell. His eyes were the worst part. They were the eyes of a man who had forgotten how to see people and only knew how to see targets.

I used to be his friend. Before the Protocol. Before we both walked out of that place in the desert and I chose to keep my soul while he chose to keep his life.

My name is Jack Morrison. Call sign: Zero. I was the first trial in the Black Scalp program—a CIA black site project that ran from 1943 to 1945, somewhere in the Nevada desert. They took men like us—soldiers with nothing to lose and bodies that could take a beating—and they broke us down and put us back together wrong.

The program had a dozen subjects. Twelve men who volunteered, or were volunteered for them. Half of them died in the first phase. The second phase took three more. By the time the war ended, there were four of us left: Victor, myself, a kid named Tommy who shot himself six months after we got out, and me.

I'm the only one who made it to thirty-five and still recognized himself in the mirror.

Victor stirred his coffee. He didn't drink it—he never drinks anything. The chemicals they put in his system make his stomach reject ordinary food. He survives on nutrient paste and protein tablets, administered twice daily. I know because I used to administer them. Before I defected.

"Jack," he said. His voice was flat, like a man reading from a teleprompter. "You shouldn't have come."

"I had to," I said. "You're not well, Vic."

"I'm fine."

"That's what you said last time. And the time before that." I leaned forward. "How many days has it been since you took your medication?"

Victor's eyes flickered. Just for a moment—a glitch in the machine, as if the man beneath the programming was trying to surface. Then it was gone.

"Doesn't matter."

"It matters to me."

He looked at me then, really looked at me, and for a second I saw the boy he used to be. Twenty-two years old, from Detroit, with a laugh that could fill a room and a heart that was too big for his ribs. Before the desert. Before the needles and the dark rooms and the men in white coats who turned him into a weapon.

"Jack," he said, and his voice cracked. Just once. "I can't go back."

"I'm not asking you to go back," I said. "I'm asking you to come with me. To Chicago. To Dr. Whitfield. He worked on the program's medical side, but he's not— he's not like the others. He wants to help us."

Victor laughed. It was a dry, humorless sound. "Help us? Jack, they made me into a killing machine. There's no helping that. There's only maintenance. And the maintenance is running out."

He was right. I'd known it for months. The chemical suppressants that kept the programming at bay were losing their effectiveness. Every month, Victor became less of a man and more of a weapon. Every month, I lost a piece of my friend to the thing they'd built inside him.

"Please," I said.

Victor looked away. Out the window, at the rain-slicked streets of Los Angeles. At the neon signs reflecting in the puddles. At a world he no longer belonged to.

"I can't," he said. "They'll find me. They always find me."

"Who?"

"The people who made me."

I should have pushed harder. I should have grabbed him by the shoulders and shaken him until something inside him woke up. But I knew he was right. The people who had made Victor were still out there, and they were still looking for their property. And when they found him—and they would find him—they wouldn't ask nicely.

"Okay," I said. "Then I'll stay. Until they come."

Victor looked at me, and something passed between us. Something that wasn't words. Something older than words. Brotherhood, maybe. Or grief.

"Jack," he said. "When they come, run."

"I'm not leaving you."

"You have to." He stood up, and for a moment he looked like the man he used to be—tall, broad-shouldered, with a warmth in his eyes that the scars couldn't quite erase. "You're the only one who remembers who I was. Don't let them take that too."

Then he walked out of the diner and into the rain, and I sat there drinking cold coffee and wondering how many good men the war had really taken.

The answer, I knew, was more than anyone would ever count.

---END_OF_STORY---

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