THE EIDOLON CODE

THE BOY WHO SAW TOO MUCH

The best place to hide in Portmorris was in plain sight, and Troy Mercer had learned that lesson before he'd learned to read.

At fifteen, he was small for his age—a fact that had saved his life more than once. Small meant fast. Small meant fitting into spaces where adults couldn't follow. Small meant being underestimated, and in the slums, being underestimated was the difference between eating and starving, between sleeping safe and waking up with a knife at your throat.

Tonight, he was hiding in the shadow of a container crane at Dead Harbor, watching a transaction he wasn't supposed to see.

The harbor had been dead for a decade, ever since the shipping conglomerates moved their operations to the deep-water port thirty miles up the coast. The docks were a graveyard of rusted containers and collapsed warehouses, the water black and still, reflecting nothing. The city had declared it a redevelopment zone and then forgotten about it, which made it perfect for the kinds of business that needed privacy. Drug shipments. Weapon drops. And, apparently, whatever was happening inside the container that had just been unloaded from an unmarked truck.

Troy had been living in the harbor for three weeks, ever since the shelter on Molloy Street had kicked him out for fighting. The shelter's rules were simple—no violence, no stealing, no drugs—and Troy had broken the first one with a chair to a older boy's head. The older boy had been trying to take his shoes. Troy had decided his shoes were worth more than a bed. He'd been right, but the shelter didn't see it that way.

Since then, he'd made a home in the stacked containers, the ones near the back of the yard that even the scavengers had picked clean. He had a mattress made of cardboard and a blanket he'd stolen from a laundromat, and he had his memory, which was better than any weapon.

Troy remembered everything. Not in the way most people remembered—fuzzy outlines, reconstructed details, the gist of a conversation. He remembered exactly. Every word. Every face. Every number on every license plate of every car that had ever passed him on the street. It was a gift and a curse, this eidetic memory, and it had kept him alive in a world that chewed up kids like him. He remembered which shopkeepers left their back doors unlocked, which shelters served hot meals on which days, which cops took bribes and which ones still believed in justice. He remembered the faces of everyone who'd ever hurt him, and he remembered the faces of everyone who'd ever helped.

Right now, his memory was recording a man in a grey coat who was signing a clipboard while two dock workers unloaded a metal case from the truck. The case was about the size of a briefcase, reinforced at the corners, with no visible markings. The man in the grey coat moved with the practiced economy of someone who'd done this a hundred times. Military, Troy thought. Or something like it. The dock workers moved like men who were being paid not to look at what they were carrying.

Troy crouched lower behind the crane's massive wheel, his breath misting in the cold air. He'd been drawn to the harbor tonight by the same thing that always drew him: curiosity. The truck had arrived at 2:00 AM, an hour when even the drug dealers were asleep. It had driven past the main gate and continued to the north end of the yard, where the containers were stacked four high and the security cameras had been smashed years ago. Troy had followed, keeping to the shadows, his worn sneakers silent on the cracked asphalt.

The man in the grey coat finished signing the clipboard and handed it back to one of the workers. Then he opened the metal case, just a crack, and checked its contents. The dock workers looked away. Troy strained to see, but the angle was wrong—he caught only a glimpse of something that gleamed under the crane's sodium lights. Glass, maybe. Or metal. Or something else entirely.

And then the man in the grey coat dropped a piece of paper.

It was a small thing, an accident, the kind of detail that most people would have missed. The paper slipped from the clipboard and fluttered to the ground, landing in a puddle of oily water near the truck's rear wheel. The man didn't notice. The dock workers didn't notice. But Troy noticed.

He waited until the truck drove away, until the dock workers dispersed, until the harbor was silent again except for the distant cry of gulls and the lapping of black water against the piers. Then he crept out from behind the crane and retrieved the paper from the puddle.

It was a manifest. A shipping document, printed on letterhead that had been partially torn away, listing the contents of the metal case. Most of it was codes and abbreviations that meant nothing to him—*Item 47-A, Transfer Protocol 9, Clearance Level: Vermilion*—but one word jumped out, repeated twice, in a font that made it seem important.

*Eidolon.*

Below it, a string of phrases that looked like gibberish: *Eidolon rising, sky falling. Subject responds to primary trigger. Secondary trigger held in reserve.* And at the bottom, a date stamped in red ink: the following Tuesday. A delivery was scheduled. Someone named "Mosaic" was listed as the recipient.

Troy didn't know what any of it meant. But he memorised it—every word, every code, every number—before folding the wet paper and tucking it into his jacket. He memorised the man in the grey coat, his face sharp and angular, his hair cut close to the scalp. He memorised the truck's license plate, the time it had arrived, the exact sequence of movements the dock workers had made. He memorised it all, because that's what he did, because information was the only currency he had.

And then, because his survival instincts were screaming at him to move, he ran.

---

He ran through the container yard, past the rusted hulks of dead machinery, past the collapsed warehouse where a family of feral cats had made their nest, past the fence with the hole in it that led to the drainage canal. He didn't stop running until he reached the slums, until the container yard was a mile behind him and the familiar stench of the city—exhaust, garbage, rain—replaced the salt-and-rust smell of the harbor.

Only then did he stop, doubled over, gasping, his heart hammering against his ribs.

He'd seen something he wasn't supposed to see. He knew it the way he knew when a mark was carrying a weapon, when a cop was looking for an excuse, when a situation was about to go bad. The man in the grey coat had moved like someone who killed people for a living. The manifest had used words that sounded like they belonged in a classified file. And the name "Mosaic"—it wasn't a real name. It was a code. A designation.

Troy had survived this long by knowing when to be invisible. Tonight, he'd made a mistake. He'd been curious when he should have been blind.

He pulled the manifest from his jacket and read it again, committing every detail to the permanent archive of his mind. Then, after a moment's hesitation, he didn't throw it away. He kept it, folded into a tight square, tucked into the lining of his shoe. Evidence. If someone came looking for him, if the man in the grey coat realised what he'd dropped, Troy wanted proof that he'd seen what he'd seen. The kind of proof that might buy him protection. Or get him killed.

The slums were quiet at 3:00 AM. The streetlights were mostly broken, and the ones that still worked cast pools of sickly yellow light that only made the shadows deeper. Troy navigated the alleys with the ease of long practice, avoiding the corners where dealers did business, the doorways where addicts slept, the open stretches where he could be spotted from a distance. He moved like a ghost through the geography of his survival.

He thought about going to Una at the Salt & Vice. Una was the closest thing he had to a friend—a woman who didn't ask questions when he needed food, who let him sit in the corner booth and warm up on nights when the cold was too much. But Una had rules. No trouble. No attention. If he brought her a piece of paper with the word *Eidolon* on it, she'd burn it and tell him to forget he'd ever seen it. She'd be right to.

So he went to ground instead, crawling into a dry culvert beneath the overpass, the one he'd lined with scavenged blankets and plastic sheeting. It was cold and it smelled of mildew, but it was hidden. Safe. For now.

He lay in the dark, listening to the distant rumble of trucks on the highway above, and tried to understand what he'd seen. The manifest was a shipping document, but it wasn't for a commercial shipment. The codes, the clearance levels, the recipient name—this was government work. Black ops. The kind of thing that showed up in the conspiracy forums he sometimes browsed on the library computers.

And the word *Eidolon*. He'd heard it before, somewhere, buried in a news article he'd read months ago. A journalist had been investigating something called Project Eidolon before he'd died in a boating accident. The article had been scrubbed from most of the internet, but Troy had found an archived version, and his memory had held onto it the way it held onto everything.

The journalist's name was Caleb Merrick.

Troy closed his eyes, the manifest's codes burning behind his eyelids, and tried to decide what to do. He could forget what he'd seen. He could throw away the manifest and pretend tonight had never happened. That was the smart choice. The survivor's choice.

But Troy had been a survivor his whole life, and he was tired of it. Tired of running, tired of hiding, tired of being invisible. The journalist who'd died—maybe he'd been looking for the truth. Maybe he'd found it. And maybe, just maybe, the manifest was the key to something bigger than a container in a dead harbor.

Troy didn't know the answers. But he knew someone who might.

He waited for dawn, and then he began the long walk across the city, toward the condemned high-rise called The Splinter, where the ghost of a dead journalist was said to live.

Behind him, invisible in the grey morning light, a black car with no license plates idled at the curb, its driver watching the boy with the eidetic memory disappear into the city's veins.

The hunt was already beginning.