The first time Clarie saw him run, she dropped her champagne glass and it shattered on the marble floor of the foyer. Nobody looked. They were all too busy pretending not to watch the new boy in the corner.

But she had looked. She had watched him cross the Long Island estate in what she could only describe as flight—not the jogging of a farm boy, but something else. Something that made the ground seem to push him forward rather than him pushing against it. Ten seconds, maybe less, from one end of the lawn to the other.

"Who is that?" she asked her grandfather.

Major Robert Whitfield looked up from his newspaper. "Eli Crowe. I found him."

"Found him where?"

"In the Adirondacks. Living in a cave, I'm told. No memory of anything before he was eight."

"Eight?"

"Eight. He speaks. Barely. But he runs like a man who's being chased."

She found him the next afternoon on the roof of the stable, sitting cross-legged with his back to the sky. He was watching the highway—two miles away—and she could tell by the set of his shoulders that he was counting cars.

"Can you count them?" she asked.

He turned slowly. His eyes were dark and flat, the way a lake is flat when it's too deep to see the bottom. "Forty-seven," he said. "In six minutes."

"That's impressive."

"I don't know what impressive means."

She sat beside him on the roof shingles. He didn't move away. Good sign. "It means you're really good at something most people can't do."

He thought about this. "It's not good. It's just what I do."

"What's the difference?"

He looked at her for a long time. Then: "If you're told to do something and you do it, it's not good. It's just what you do."

She laughed. He didn't.

Summer arrived with the jazz season. Clarie danced at parties in Manhattan until three in the morning and slept until noon when she returned to Long Island. Eli was always there—walking the perimeter of the property at dawn, running through the woods at dusk, sitting on the roof watching the cars.

She began leaving food for him on the roof—a sandwich, an apple, a bottle of water. He always took it but never said thank you. Instead, he started leaving things in return: a perfectly straight branch placed on her pillow, a feather from a bird she hadn't noticed, a smooth stone from the beach.

"Are you trading?" she asked, holding the stone.

"I don't know what trading means."

"Like giving something to get something."

He considered this. "No. Like giving because there's nothing else to do with it."

Major Whitfield called her into his study one evening in July. She found him sitting behind his desk, a file folder open in front of him. The folder said PROJECT AEGIS in block letters.

"Grandfather," she said, "what is this?"

He closed the folder. "A piece of history. An uncomfortable one."

"About Eli?"

"About a lot of things. Eli is the last one. Eleven are dead or broken. He is the only one who is... functional."

"Functional?"

"Trained to survive in wilderness conditions for extended periods. Enhanced physically and perceptually. It was a World War project. We thought we could create soldiers who could operate behind enemy lines for months without supplies or communication. We were wrong. You can't create a soldier by stripping away everything that makes a person human."

She sat down slowly. "Eli isn't human?"

"Eli is the most human person I know. He's just been trained to act like something else."

She went to the roof that night and found Eli sitting where he always sat. She told him everything.

He was quiet for a long time. Then: "How many others?"

"Eleven."

"Where are they?"

"Most are institutionalized. A few are dead. One—I don't know. He was listed as 'transferred' but nobody knows where."

She reached out and touched his hand. It was the first time she had initiated contact. He did not pull away.

"Do you want to find them?" she asked.

"No."

"Do you want me to find them?"

He looked at her. In the moonlight, his face was older than seventeen. "You should go to parties," he said. "You should dance. You should be young."

"I want to be useful."

He stood up. He was taller than her. He had always been taller than her, but tonight it felt different—like a distance opening between them that had nothing to do with height. "You're useful already," he said. "By being you. That's the hardest thing I've ever seen anyone do."

She didn't understand what he meant until three weeks later, when Major Whitfield received a call from Washington and went pale. The program was not officially dead, he explained. It had been reclassified. And someone in the new administration wanted the survivors brought in. "For debriefing."

The word made Eli flinch. She had never seen Eli flinch before.

That night, he was on the roof one more time. She brought him a sandwich and sat beside him.

"They're coming for me," he said.

"When?"

"Soon."

"Can you run again?"

He smiled—a real smile, the first she had seen. "I can run everywhere."

She held his hand. He let her.

He ran the night before the government men arrived. She woke to find his room empty and the window open. She ran to the roof—he was gone. She ran to the stable—he was gone. She ran to the edge of the property and stood at the tree line, watching the Adirondacks disappear into darkness.

She never saw him again. But sometimes, when she hears a story on the radio about an anonymous whistleblower who leaked classified military documents to the press, she thinks of him. She thinks of him running—not away from something, but toward something. And she is no longer sure which.

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Author Note & Copyright:

Author Note & Copyright: