The rain in Los Angeles does not wash things clean. It makes them worse. It turns the dust of Hollywood into mud, the mud into something that sticks to your shoes and won't come off no matter how hard you scrape it on the pavement. I was sitting in my office on Sunset Boulevard, watching the rain blur the neon sign across the street, when she walked in.

She smelled like cedar and bitter almonds. I know bitter almonds because I've smelled them before—in the hospital, in the mouths of boys who had eaten something they shouldn't have have. She was about thirty, maybe less, with eyes the colour of jade—no, not the colour of jade. Jade is a stone. Her eyes were alive. They moved. They watched you the way a snake watches you before it strikes.

She put a photograph on my desk. A young man in a hospital gown, curled on a bed like a man in pain, except he wasn't in pain. He was curled like a snake.

"His name is Samuel Hayes," she said. "He disappeared from a facility in the San Gabriel Mountains three days ago. I need you to find him."

I should have told her to get out. Women with emerald eyes and bitter-almond perfume never bring good news. But she said something else, and it was this that made me stay:

"I know what you're looking for, Morana. You're looking for a transformation too."

I didn't answer. I lit a cigarette and watched the smoke curl toward the ceiling like a question mark.

The Emerald Protocol was a program that did not exist. That was the first thing I learned. There were no records of it in any government database, no budget allocations, no personnel files. It was a ghost program, and the facility in the San Gabriel Mountains was its body. I found this out from a drunk former Navy guy named Ray who used to work security at the facility and who told me everything over three whiskeys at a bar in Pasadena.

"The Protocol wasn't studying drugs," Ray said. His hands shook. The whiskey didn't help. "They were creating them. A hallucinogen that makes soldiers believe they're animals. Snakes. Eagles. Wolves. Dr. Voss—ex-Nazi, brought over through that Return Pin thing—believed that if you could make a man forget who he was, he could become any weapon. No identity. No memory. No past. A perfect soldier."

I went to Samuel's apartment. It was a small place in East LA, the kind of place where the landlord doesn't know the tenant's real name. I searched the floorboards behind the kitchen cabinet and found a stack of journals. The last entry read: Jade knows the truth. She was part of the program, but she wanted to destroy it. Be careful of her, because she is the serpent too.

I broke into the facility at 2 AM on a Thursday. The security was surprisingly light for a government installation—perhaps because the government didn't know it existed, or perhaps because the people who knew didn't want anyone else to know. I found the entrance through a drainage tunnel that smelled of chemicals and something else—something like fear.

Underground, three levels below the surface, I found the Emerald Protocol.

The laboratory was vast, and it was full of cages. Dozens of them, arranged in rows, and in each cage was a soldier, curled on the floor like a snake, wrapped in blankets, eyes closed. Some of them were muttering. Some of them were not moving at all.

Dr. Voss stood behind a glass window, watching them like a man watching fish in an aquarium. He turned to me when I entered the observation room. His face was thin and sharp, his eyes bright with an intelligence that had never been tempered by conscience.

"Mr. Morana," he said, as though he had been expecting me. "You are here about the girl."

"Jade," I said.

"She was my assistant. The best I ever had. But she developed... sympathies. She began to question the ethics of the work. I told her ethics were irrelevant. Survival is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the Protocol." He pressed a button on the wall, and a panel in the far cage slid open.

Inside, a thin woman lay curled on the floor. Her skin was covered in emerald tattoos—snake scales, covering her arms and neck and the sides of her face. She was breathing slowly, rhythmically, like a sleeping animal.

"She wanted to destroy the data," Voss said. "So I destroyed her. Or rather, I helped her become what she always was. A serpent. She is perfect now. No identity. No memory. No pain."

I did what I could do. I burned the data—three years of research, hundreds of experiments, gone in a fire that filled the underground laboratory with black smoke. I carried Samuel out over my shoulder—he was lighter than I expected, like a bird—and I left him at the edge of the property and walked back to Los Angeles in the dark.

I did not save Jade. I could not save her. Voss was right about one thing: she had become something that cages could not hold, but cages were also the only thing that could protect her. I chose the fire. I chose to destroy the laboratory and leave her inside. It was the only choice I had. Or perhaps it was not a choice at all. Perhaps I simply chose the side of the serpent.

Samuel was returned to his family. The Prometheus Corporation claimed the laboratory fire was an electrical accident. No one investigated further. No one asked about the cages. No one asked about the soldiers who had disappeared and never reappeared.

Sometimes, in my office at night, when I light a cigarette and watch the smoke curl in the darkness, I think of what she said: You're looking for a transformation too. Maybe she was right. Maybe everyone is. Maybe we are all trying to become something other than what we are—something that cannot be caged, cannot be named, cannot be controlled.

I opened my drawer and found a scale. Emerald green. I do not know where it came from. Perhaps it was part of the hallucination. Perhaps it was real.

I closed the drawer. The rain continued to fall on Los Angeles, making the dust worse instead of cleaner.

OTMES-v2-9D4A72-073-M5-315-7R6510-2E9C E_total: 10.12 | Dominant Mode: M5 (Suspense) | Dominant Angle: 315.0 degrees M_vector: [6.0, 0.0, 3.0, 2.0, 4.0, 9.5, 4.0, 0.0, 3.0, 2.0] N_vector: [0.6, 0.4] | K_vector: [0.3, 0.7] | Irreversibility: 1.0 TI: 72.8 (T2 幻灭级) | Theta: 315 degrees (讽刺/黑色型)