I

The woman who came to my office on a Tuesday in March 1947 was wearing black silk and had eyes like winter water. She sat down without being invited, placed an envelope on my desk, and told me to look inside.

The envelope contained five hundred dollars and a photograph. The photograph showed a young man—dark hair, thin face, standing in front of a tenement building on the Lower East Side. He looked like he had been running and didn't know where he was going.

"Find him," the woman said. "His name is Danny. Danny Russo."

I looked at the envelope, then at her. "I'm a private eye, lady. Not a social worker. What's the job?"

"Find him. That's all. I don't care how."

Her name was Evelyn St. Clair, and she moved like someone who had never been told no. I took the case because five hundred dollars was five months' rent, and because something about her made the hair on my neck stand up—the way she looked at the photograph, the way her hand trembled just slightly when she set the envelope down.

I found Danny Russo in three days. He was dead.

The coroner's report said "acute blood failure." I knew enough about coroner's reports to know that was a polite way of saying they had no idea what killed him. But I also knew that five hundred dollars' worth of sick people don't die from "blood failure" unless something else is going on.

I started asking questions on the Lower East Side, where the streetlights don't work and the buildings lean toward each other like drunk men sharing a secret. The answer came from a man called Old Dog Morales, who ran blood collection out of the back room of a taqueria on Alamo Street.

"Young guys come in," Morales said, counting cigarettes on his counter. "Twenty bucks a pint. Sometimes thirty. They need the money, I give them the money."

"Twenty bucks a pint?" I said. "What do you do with it?"

He looked at me with flat, tired eyes. "I sell it. To people who need it."

"Who needs blood?"

"Rich people." He said it like he was telling me the sky was blue. "Very rich people. They pay good money for young blood. Good blood."

I should have walked away then. But I didn't. I asked for the name of the buyer.

Morales thought for a moment. "They don't have a name. They just call it—what was it? The serum."

II

The serum trail led me through a maze of corruption that connected Hollywood stars, politicians, police captains, and Italian mobsters. Everyone was involved. Everyone was profiting. Everyone was silent.

The serum itself was a clear liquid in a small glass vial. It was injected once a month, and it worked. The people who used it lived longer, looked younger, felt stronger. But the raw material—the young blood that made it possible—came from the Lower East Side, where kids were selling their blood for twenty dollars a pint until their bodies gave out.

I traced the serum to a man named Dr. Victor Lance, a former military biologist who had disappeared three years ago. His name kept appearing in connections I couldn't quite see—payments to offshore accounts, property leases under shell companies, a lab somewhere that I couldn't find.

The breakthrough came from a woman in a red dress at a club on Sunset Boulevard. She was a nurse at a private hospital in Santa Monica, and she told me about the serum in confidence, over whiskey that cost more than my hourly rate.

"Dr. Lance invented it," she said. "Or his son did. I don't know which. But the serum is real, Mr. Black. I've seen what it does. People who take it—they don't just live longer. They change. They get colder. Smarter. Stronger. But colder."

"Where's Dr. Lance now?"

She leaned closer. "Under the beach. There's an old submarine base down there—abandoned since the war. He's got a lab underneath it. I've seen the trucks going in and out. Medical supplies. Chemicals. And bodies."

"Bodies?"

"Experiment subjects. Young guys from the East Side. They go in healthy. They come out—" She made a gesture with her hand, like something growing. "I don't know what happens to them. But they don't come out the same."

I paid for another whiskey and started thinking.

III

The submarine base was exactly where she said it was—hidden behind a concrete wall covered in graffiti, down a set of steel stairs that led into the dark. I went alone, with a flashlight and a .38 in my coat pocket.

The lab was impressive. Stainless steel tables, glass centrifuges, rows of vials on shelves. And in the center of the lab, strapped to a chair, was a man who looked like he had been carved from stone. His skin was gray, his eyes were sunken, his breathing was slow and mechanical.

Dr. Victor Lance. Or what was left of him.

He wasn't missing. He was imprisoned.

A woman stepped out of the shadows behind the lab tables. She was young—maybe thirty, maybe forty, it was hard to tell with the serum running through her veins. She held a revolver with a steady hand.

"Don't move, Mr. Black," she said. "I've been expecting you."

She introduced herself as Evelyn St. Clair. And she was Dr. Lance's daughter.

"My father invented the serum," she said. "He thought he was saving people. He was wrong. The serum destroys empathy. It makes you stronger, smarter, longer-lived—but it takes away everything that makes you human. I've been trying to stop him for two years. I imprisoned him here. I've been destroying his supplies."

"Why come to me?"

"Because you're getting close. And because you've already been injected."

The room tilted. "What?"

"Three months ago, you were shot. In the line of duty. I gave you something to help you heal. You don't remember because I gave you enough to knock you out for two days. But it's in your blood now, Mr. Black. The serum. It's taking root."

I thought back to three months ago. The shooting. The waking up in a hospital bed with wounds that had healed too fast. The energy that hadn't left me. The way a bullet fragment in my shoulder had stopped hurting.

"Show me," Evelyn said.

I looked at my left hand in the flashlight beam. The pupils of my eyes—when I held the light close, I could see it. The color was changing. A faint green, like old copper.

"How do I get it out?"

"You don't." She lowered the revolver slightly. "There might be a way. My father has an anti-formula in the main reactor. It would stop the serum from spreading, but it wouldn't reverse what's already happened. And to get to the reactor, you'd have to go through the company—the people who are producing the serum on a massive scale."

I looked at Dr. Lance in his chair. He was breathing, but he wasn't there. The serum had taken him years ago.

"What do you want me to do?"

Evelyn's face was hard. "Destroy it all. The lab. The formula. The serum. Everything."

I nodded. It was the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do.

But as I stood there in the submarine lab, feeling the serum humming in my blood like a second heartbeat, I knew something Evelyn didn't know.

I was already one of them.

IV

We destroyed the lab at dawn. I used explosives from the military surplus store to blow the steel tables, the centrifuges, the rows of vials. Evelyn burned Dr. Lance's notes. The serum that had been killing kids on the Lower East Side turned to ash and chemical sludge.

Then I went back to my office on Wilshire Boulevard, sat down in my chair, and looked in the mirror.

My left pupil was definitely green now. A faint, metallic green, like the patina on an old statue. I turned my head, and the light caught my right eye—it was still brown. One brown eye. One green eye.

I picked up the phone and dialed Detective Captain Harry Kovacs, the corrupt cop who knew too much and said nothing. I told him everything. The serum. The blood trade. The lab. Evelyn. My father. All of it.

He listened in silence. When I finished, he said, "You're a fool, Black."

"Probably."

"If you're infected, you're one of them now. You can't unlive that."

"I know."

"Then what are you going to do?"

I looked at the mirror on my wall. I looked at the two glasses on my desk—one for whiskey, one for water. I looked at the rain pressing against the window, the neon sign from the diner across the street casting red and blue reflections on the wet glass.

"I'm going to keep working," I said.

I hung up and walked to the bathroom and picked up a hammer from the cleaning closet and smashed every mirror in my office. Glass rained down on the carpet. I stood in the broken reflection—fragmented, distorted, one brown eye and one green eye looking back at me from a thousand pieces of glass.

The rain kept falling. The neon sign kept flashing. And I sat at my desk with a cup of cold coffee and a changing body, and I waited for the next case, because that's what you do when the world is broken and you're part of the breakage—you keep working, you keep playing the game, you keep looking for the next name in the phone book, because the alternative is looking in the mirror and seeing what you've become.

My left eye was green. My right eye was brown. And somewhere under the beach, in a chair that nobody would ever find, a man who used to be a doctor was breathing slowly and dreaming about nothing at all.

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