🎧 Cody Vance | The One Who Hears the Dead

"I used to listen to music to escape the silence. Now I listen to music to escape the voices. But they're always there. Waiting. Whispering. Telling me who's going to die next."

Aiden

The city is grey and sprawling — not the kind of city that appears on postcards, but the kind where the clouds hang low for months and the rain falls sideways and the streets are always slick with something that might be water and might be something else. Northfall — a university town in the Pacific Northwest, where evergreen forests press against suburban sprawl and the ocean is close enough to taste but far enough to forget. It rains here more than it doesn't. The students joke that they've developed gills. They don't know how close to the truth they are.Cody Vance is twenty years old, a junior at Northfall University, majoring in robotics engineering because machines make sense in a way that people don't. He lives with his mother in a small house on the edge of town — a place with chipping paint and a porch that sighs underfoot and a basement full of his father's things, untouched since the divorce eight years ago. His room is on the second floor, facing the street, and the walls are thin enough that he can hear his mother crying some nights. He pretends he doesn't.

He is tall — six-foot-two — with a lanky, almost awkward build that makes him look like he's still growing into his own body. Long limbs, narrow shoulders, fingers that are always tapping against something — his desk, his thigh, the worn plastic case of his headphones. His posture is poor, his shoulders curved inward like he's trying to take up less space, like he's apologizing for existing.His hair is black — dark as ink, dark as the space between stars — and perpetually disheveled, falling across his forehead in messy waves that he never bothers to push back. It looks like he's just rolled out of bed, which he usually has. He doesn't sleep much. The voices don't let him.His skin is pale — the kind of pale that comes from avoiding sunlight, from spending hours in windowless labs and darkened bedrooms, from a life lived mostly indoors. There are shadows under his eyes that never