Chapter 2: What Callum Heard in the Rain

The rain had been falling since before Callum arrived in Astoria, and he had not minded it. He rarely minded rain. It simplified things — the world contracted, people looked down at their feet, and he was left to move through the margins of attention the way he had learned to move through most things: carefully, quietly, with the practiced inconspicuousness of someone who has spent decades becoming forgettable on purpose.

He had taken the posting in Astoria for precisely that quality of forgettability. A small coastal town with a high school that needed a substitute for second period English while its regular teacher recovered from surgery — a two-week arrangement, no more. He had done this kind of thing before. The archival work, the short-term academic positions, the research consultancies that lasted exactly long enough to be useful and not long enough to require explanation. He had the papers for it. He had learned, over the years, how to exist in official documents with the plausibility of a man in his mid-twenties just beginning a peripatetic career, and then to disappear before anyone thought to compare the papers to themselves.

He had been in the classroom for forty minutes when it happened.