Burnt Offerings
Max didn't sleep the night after seeing Patient Zero.
The boy's face stayed with him—eyes like blank stars, posture too still, too quiet. And then the flash. The bodies. The vanishing.
He'd seen a lot in his life. Blood in alleyways. Limbs snapped like branches. Fires that left men blackened and twitching. But this was different. This was systemic. Organized. Deliberate.
Liberty Flame wasn't a failed experiment.
It was planned cruelty.
---
He returned the next morning.
He didn't want to. But he needed to know how deep the rot went.
Agent Dunn met him in the same hallway, hands folded.
"Changed your mind?"
"I want to help," Max said. "But not like this."
Dunn led him to a debrief room. No windows. Cameras in each corner. One table. Two chairs.
"You're not going in the chair," Dunn assured. "We're past that. You're stable. A success. That makes you valuable."
"Meaning you won't kill me."
"Meaning we'll use you properly."
---
They assigned him a handler—Dr. Ellen Krause, a sharp-eyed woman with ink-stained fingers and a clipboard filled with diagrams of his muscle fibers and scans of his nervous system.
"You don't respond to adrenaline," she muttered during one test. "Your cells are already operating at peak efficiency. Like a lion always mid-sprint."
"Why am I like this?" Max asked.
She looked up. "We don't know. You're the only one who wasn't given the serum but became what the serum was trying to make. You're natural. Or... anomalous."
"So I was born wrong."
"Or right."
---
They sent him into the field. First to retrieve a failed test subject who escaped into Newark—Batch 18, a sixteen-year-old who'd developed full-body bone armor but lost his mind.
Max found the boy under a bridge, surrounded by police tape and broken cars.
"Stay back!" the kid screamed. "I'll crush you!"
Max walked forward, hands up. "You don't have to do this."
The boy charged.
Max sidestepped, grabbed him by the back of the neck, and drove him into the concrete with just enough force to knock him cold.
He carried the boy back in his arms.
They took him without a word.
---
Next, they sent Max to shut down a rogue lab in Detroit—ex-Liberty doctors who went off-book and started testing on addicts. What he found was a slaughterhouse. Corpses soaked in glowing fluid. One survivor, eyes burned shut.
"What were they making?" Max asked the man.
The man just whimpered. "More."
Max left them all in a pile. Burned the place down.
Dunn didn't ask questions.
---
But it wasn't just missions. They were building something bigger.
Max saw folders labeled FLAME INITIATIVE, and a list of names:
"Forge" – fire manipulation.
"Ghoul" – bone growth.
"Blink" – partial teleportation.
"Zero" – status unknown, presumed at large.
"Field team," Krause said one night. "A dozen candidates. All unstable. But with you, we can fix that."
"They're all kids," Max said.
"They're assets."
"No. They're victims."
---
Max returned to his apartment that night.
He pulled out the old mask. The blue one with the white lenses. It still smelled like sweat and sawdust.
He put it on. Stared in the mirror.
He wasn't their soldier. He wasn't a mistake. He was something else.
Something they couldn't control.
And if Liberty Flame wanted war?
He'd show them what fire really looked like.