BUILT ON BONES

Chapter One

The coffee stain on Marcus Chen's shirt was still wet when the floor started to crack.

He stood in the lobby of the Celestial Heights Tower, clipboard in hand, listening to Developer Hutchinson drone on about quarterly projections and brand synergy. The morning sun streamed through the floor-to-ceiling windows, illuminating the lobby's ostentatious design, Italian marble floors that cost more per square foot than most people made in a month, a crystalline chandelier that hung like a frozen waterfall from the vaulted ceiling, and abstract sculptures that Marcus suspected were only there because someone had told Hutchinson they were expensive.

The man had bumped into Marcus deliberately five minutes ago, sending his morning coffee cascading down this shirt, then hadn't apologized.

He just looked at Marcus like he was a piece of furniture that had gotten in the way. A minor inconvenience in his otherwise perfect morning.

Marcus had seen the look before. He was used to it. Twenty-four years old, working for a third-tier engineering firm that got hired for the jobs nobody else wanted, wearing a shirt he'd bought at Target three years ago and shoes that desperately needed replacing. To men like Victor Hutchinson Jr., Marcus was invisible. Disposable.

"—and if your inspection report isn't favorable, Chen, we'll make sure Bridgemont Engineering knows exactly how incompetent their junior inspectors are," Hutchinson was saying, his cologne thick enough to choke on. Something French and expensive that probably cost more than Marcus's rent. "This building opens in two weeks. We've invested two hundred million dollars. Your little checklist isn't going to—"

Marcus wasn't listening anymore.

He was staring at the marble floor beneath Hutchinson's Italian leather shoes, watching a hairline fracture spread across the stone like a frozen lightning bolt. It was so thin most people wouldn't notice it. The crack was maybe a millimeter wide, spiderwebbing out from a point near the base of one of the decorative support columns. But Marcus had learned to notice everything about buildings. The slight settling of foundations. The stress patterns in load-bearing walls.

Because buildings talked to him. When he touched them, skin to stone or steel or wood, they showed him memories and everything that had ever happened within their walls. It had started when he was twelve, after a car accident that left him in a coma for three days. When he woke up, the hospital room had flooded his mind with visions of all the people who had died there, all the lives that had begun and ended within those walls.

The doctors had called it trauma-induced synesthesia. A crossed wire in his brain that made him process spatial information in strange ways. His mother had called it a gift. His father had called it a curse and left when Marcus was fourteen, unable to deal with a son who claimed to see the past soaked into every structure he touched.

Marcus called it a burden. One that had cost him jobs, relationships, and any chance at a normal life.

And right now, the Celestial Heights Tower was in distress. Something was wrong with its foundation, something profound and terrible that went deeper than any structural flaw. Marcus felt it in his bones, a deep subsonic vibration that set his teeth on edge.

"Mr. Hutchinson," Marcus interrupted, crouching down. His knee protested. He'd injured it in college, playing basketball, and it still ached when the weather changed. "When did this crack appear?"

"What crack? Get up, you're embarrassing yourself—"

Marcus pressed his palm flat against the cold marble.

The world exploded.

Pain—

He was falling through layers of time, the building's memories rushing through him like a rip current. Construction workers laughing three months ago, their voices echoing through the empty lobby as they installed the chandelier. Cement being poured. The smell of wet concrete and diesel fuel. The foundation being laid, massive trucks pouring tons of material into carefully constructed forms. Deeper still—

A night when rain hammering down in sheets.

Two men standing in a pit that would become the underground parking garage. One of them was Hutchinson, younger, maybe fifteen years ago. His hair was darker, his face less lined, but those eyes were the same. The other man Marcus didn't recognize at first, he was older, in an expensive suit even then, his face twisted in fear and desperation.

"You can't do this," the older man was saying, his voice breaking.

"Victor, please, I'm your father—"

Hutchinson's face was cold. "You're nothing. You tried to cut me out of the will. Me. Your own son."

"That land trust was your mother's wish....she wanted to help people, to give back—"

"I don't care about Mother's wishes. I don't care about your wishes." Hutchinson's voice was flat, emotionless. "THIS LAND IS MINE NOW. This fortune is mine. And I'm going to use it the way it should be used. Not waste it on charity cases and welfare projects."

The older man stumbled backward, his expensive shoes slipping in the mud. His foot hit a loose piece of rebar jutting from the foundation. He fell, arms windmilling, and the sound of his skull hitting the concrete foundation was like a wet egg cracking.

For a moment, neither man moved.

Then the older man twitched, groaned. He was still alive. Blood pooled beneath his head, black in the dim light, mixing with rainwater.

Hutchinson stood over him, watching him bleed out, his expression never changing. He could have called for help. Could have tried to save him. Instead, he pulled out his phone, calm as someone ordering takeout. "Mike? Yeah, we have a problem at the site. Bring a cement truck. Tonight. And make sure no one sees you."

Marcus gasped and jerked his hand away from the marble.

He was back in the present, on his knees in the lobby, his palm burning like he'd touched a hot stove. The memory-burn was always like this—intense, and leaving phantom sensations that took hours to fade. Hutchinson was staring at him with disgust.

"The hell is wrong with you?" Hutchinson demanded, taking a step back.

Marcus stood slowly, his legs shaking. The crack in the floor had spread another two inches while he'd been lost in the vision. It was pointing like an arrow toward the elevator shaft. Toward the northeast corner of the building.

Toward the grave.

"This building," Marcus said quietly. "is built on a grave."

Hutchinson's face went white, then flushed with anger. "YOU'RE FIRED. You hear me? I'M CALLING YOUR SUPERVISOR RIGHT NOW—"

"The foundation is rejecting itself," Marcus continued, his voice gaining strength. He'd learned to trust what the visions showed him, no matter how insane it sounded. "You poured concrete over a body. Blood and bone mixed into the structural base. The chemical composition is corrupting the integrity of—"

"YOU'RE INSANE," Hutchinson snarled, but his hand was trembling as he reached for his phone. A man whose deepest secret had just been dragged into the light. "Security! SECURITY!"

The crack suddenly split wide open with a sound like a gunshot.

The marble floor buckled. An entire section of the lobby tilted five degrees, the geometric patterns suddenly wrong, lines that should have been parallel now converging at impossible angles. Hutchinson stumbled, his phone clattering away across the tilting floor. Marcus grabbed his arm instinctively, pulling him back from the widening gap.

For just a second, they both stared down into the crack. The lobby was on the ground floor, but the crack seemed to plunge down through multiple levels, past the parking garage, into the very bedrock the building stood on. And at the bottom, in the shadow and darkness beneath layers of concrete and steel.

Something pale, curved like the dome of a skull.

"Oh God," Hutchinson whispered, and in that moment, Marcus saw the mask slip completely. Saw the murderer beneath the developer's polish.

Then the fire alarm began to shriek, and people started screaming, and Marcus knew his life was about to get very, very complicated.