Los Angeles · Colorado Boulevard · Flea Market Back Alley
November 15, 2023 · 2:17 a.m.
The lamp above the workbench was the same one as always.
A copper base. A green glass shade. The base had cracked three times, and the solder repairs crawled across its gilded surface like age spots.
Elias Blackwood pressed his fingertips against the metal.
Cold. And darker than he remembered—two shades dimmer.
The lamp was older than he was.
In 1927, his grandfather Samuel Blackwood had brought it back from Antwerp, carrying it across the Atlantic and setting it down in this twenty–square-meter workshop.
In 1947, the base was repaired.
In 1952, the wiring was replaced.
On March 15, 1972, Samuel Blackwood died beneath this lamp. The bulb burned through the entire night. No one turned it off.
Fifty-one years later, the lamp was still lit.
Eli withdrew his hand and looked toward the corner of the workbench.
There sat the cigar box.
Cedarwood. Brass corners. The lid was engraved with the Blackwood family crest—a magnifying glass piercing a diamond lattice.
He had once asked his grandfather what it meant.
Samuel never answered. He only locked the box inside a drawer and swallowed the key.
That was in 1971.
One year later, his grandfather died in a workshop fire.
Official conclusion: aging electrical circuits.
Eli was two years old. He remembered nothing.
What he did remember was when he was twelve.
His mother handed him the cigar box and said, "Your grandfather left this for you."
He pried open a hidden compartment in the base.
Inside was no cigar.
Only a palm-sized spectrometer sample chamber, sealed shut with solder.
He had hidden it for fifteen years.
Tonight, he turned twenty-seven.
At 2:17 a.m., the workshop held only him and the lamp.
Eli placed the sample chamber directly under the light and pressed his fingertip against the solder seam.
He pried it open.
The solder cracked. The metal lid sprang up, revealing velvet lining.
At its center lay a shard no larger than a fingernail.
Dark. Matte. Its edges sharp as if freshly cut.
Eli lifted it between his thumb and forefinger.
Light.
Lighter than any mineral he had ever handled.
He turned it over.
On the back, a line of handwriting was etched so faintly it was almost invisible. He pulled the lamp closer. The green-tinted light spilled across his palm.
"For Eli. He can see."
It was his grandfather's handwriting.
Eli stared at those seven words for a long time.
Then the shard sliced his thumb.
Blood seeped in.
No pain.
No burning.
Nothing at all.
Only this—
The surface of the shard suddenly glowed, like a whale opening its eye in the deep sea.
Eli did not blink.
He lowered his gaze to his hand.
The shard was gone.
At seven in the morning, Eli arrived on time at Booth 47 of the Colorado Boulevard flea market.
Bob was already there, polishing a pocket watch with a piece of chamois cloth. He had been polishing that same watch for twenty years. The case shone like a mirror, but the movement still kept poor time.
"Kid, someone sold me a treasure yesterday," Bob said proudly.
He handed the watch over. "Eighty bucks. The old man said it was his grandfather's."
Eli took it.
And then—he saw it.
A thin layer of pale blue mist rose from the surface of the watch, like the first frost forming on a winter lake. The mist flowed and gathered into lines of meaning—not English, not numbers, but information he understood instantly, without effort:
Patek Philippe · 1923 · Swiss Custom Order · Estimated Value: $120,000
He flipped the watch over. The mist appeared again.
Movement replaced three times · Not original · Deduct 15%
Suggested Price: $102,000
Bob kept rambling. "I'm telling you, this thing runs real accurate. I checked it three times against the evening news—"
"One hundred and twenty thousand," Eli said.
Bob froze. "What?"
"This watch is worth $120,000. You paid eighty."
Bob dropped his cloth.
Eli handed the watch back and lowered his head to sort through his own goods—three items he had picked up from a clearance pile yesterday for a total of seventeen dollars: a silver coin, a copper candlestick, and a dusty oil painting.
He touched the base of the candlestick.
Mist appeared.
1857 · Edinburgh · Gilded sterling silver · Church commission
Estimated Value: $38,000
He placed it in front of Bob.
"Thirty-eight… thousand?" Bob's voice cracked. "How the hell do you know?"
"Guessing."
Eli touched the second item—the oil painting. The signature in the corner was blurred, but the mist screamed its answer:
1874 · Barbizon School · Authentic
Estimated Value: $110,000
The third item—a worn bronze sculpture.
1892 · Studio of Rodin's assistant · Signed
Estimated Value: $65,000
Eli straightened and stacked the three items in front of Bob.
"These three. Bought for seventeen dollars. Sell them for me."
Bob stared at the pile of "junk" as if his eyeballs might burst. "Sell… sell them to who?"
"The antique dealer on the corner. Wicks."
"Wicks?! That cheap bastard—"
"He'll buy them."
Eli slipped the Patek Philippe into his pocket. "I'm borrowing this for a few days."
He walked into the depths of the flea market, leaving Bob standing behind his booth, clutching two hundred and ten thousand dollars' worth of trash with trembling legs.
This was the first morning after Elias Blackwood awakened.
He had not yet realized what he had changed.
Only that the world had shifted colors before his eyes.
At 11:40 a.m., Bob's transfer message arrived:
"Sold all three. $213,000. ARE YOU EVEN HUMAN?!"
Eli glanced at it and locked his screen.
His hand brushed against the hard brass corner of the cigar box inside his jacket.
It was empty.
Since the shard vanished, he had never seen it again.
But he no longer needed to touch objects to see the mist.
Now he stood in the VIP section of an underground rough-stone gambling hall, separated by bulletproof glass from seven uncut diamonds on display.
The most expensive one was priced at $5.5 million.
The mist said:
Severe internal fractures · Yield below 15% · Value ≤ $2 million
—A loss of $3.5 million.
The cheapest one, priced at $180,000, sat in the far corner. Rust-colored stains covered its surface like an abandoned child thrown into scrap.
The mist revealed:
Inside sleeps a 25-carat Fancy Blue diamond · IF clarity · Value ≥ $23 million
—One hundred and twenty-eight times profit.
Eli did not raise his paddle.
He leaned against a stainless steel pillar and watched the suited buyers fight like blind gamblers touching an elephant.
One man paid $5.5 million and cut open a black stone, his face drained white.
Another paid $3.7 million and found scattered fragments, barely breaking even.
A third paid $4.2 million and uncovered a 20-carat white diamond. The hall erupted in cheers.
None of them knew they had missed the blue diamond in the corner.
Eli knew.
And still, he never bid.
At eight that evening, Elizabeth Rockwell appeared before him for the first time.
She wore a Chanel suit and twelve-centimeter heels, standing beneath the plastic canopy of Booth 47 like a swan lost in a slum.
Bob was packing up. When he saw her, his cloth fell from his hand again.
"You…"
"Is Elias Blackwood here?" she asked.
Her voice was not loud, yet it cut through the noisy evening wind like an ice spike. Bob instinctively stepped back and pointed toward the alley.
Elizabeth Rockwell crossed the scattered cardboard and plastic sheets without slowing.
Eli was locking the workshop door.
"You were at the stone market today," she said from three meters away. "You didn't buy the five-point-five-million one. You didn't buy the one worth one hundred and eighty thousand either."
Eli slipped the key into his pocket.
"You're the chairwoman of Rockwell."
"Yes."
"You lost seven rounds."
She fell silent.
"The eighth round, four million. Black stone. You ignored my advice."
Her jaw tightened.
"…How do you know?"
"You asked which round it was."
She did not answer.
Eli turned and walked toward the alley exit.
"Ninth round. Third stone on the left. You'll make twelve million."
His figure dissolved into the yellow glow of streetlights.
Elizabeth stood there, watching the worn jacket vanish around the corner. Her grip tightened on her handbag strap until her knuckles turned white.
"I'll come again tomorrow," she whispered.
1:00 a.m. Workshop.
Eli placed the Patek Philippe on the workbench. The lamp cast a warm fan of light across the table. He opened the cigar box. Six velvet slots lay empty.
He didn't know why he kept the box.
Nor where the shard had gone.
He raised his left hand toward the lamp. The cut had healed without leaving even a scar.
He turned his wrist over.
Nothing.
Yet everything had changed.
He closed the cigar box and slipped the watch into his pocket.
Outside, Los Angeles was still.
"Grandfather," he said to the empty workshop.
"I've received your gift."
The copper lamp glowed in silence. The solder repair from 1952 was barely visible under the light.
This was the day of his twenty-seventh birthday.
The day he received the last thing his grandfather left him.
He did not yet know what kind of world these eyes would allow him to see.
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Chapter 2 · The Invitation of the Nine Crowns
The afternoon the auction invitation arrived, Eli folded it into a paper airplane.
"I don't work for anyone."