4308.266 · September 22, 1988 AD
The One Who Hears the Dead
Midnight. A window eased open. A girl slipping through darkness toward iron gates that hang crooked and waiting. The cemetery is where Violet keeps her most dangerous secret—not the journal, not the map, but him. Ethan Mitchell, the man the town calls strange. The man who claims to hear the dead. Tonight, beneath the old gum tree, he tells her something that turns her blood to ice: the whispers have started speaking her name.
"The whispers speak it, the same way they speak yours. As though the earth has claimed you both already."
There are secrets Violet keeps from her friends. From her family. From herself, if she's honest. But the deepest one waits in the Broken Hill Cemetery, beneath a gum tree older than the town itself—a young man with dark eyes and a gift no one believes in.
Ethan Mitchell hears things. Voices that don't belong to the living. Whispers that rise from the ground like heat shimmer, carrying names and warnings and truths too heavy for daylight. The town calls him odd. Violet calls him hers.
Tonight, pressed together amongst the headstones, he tells her what the voices have been saying. About the mines. About sealed trains moving cargo no one dares question. About uniforms that look the other way and shipments that vanish without record. His uncle saw it. Sally Harlow documented it. And now the whispers are growing louder, more urgent—speaking of blood, of secrets pushing up from the earth, of a girl named Violet who is walking too close to something that swallows people whole.
She should be terrified.
Instead, she kisses him and asks him to keep listening.
