The Fall

The scanner in Callum Reece's tow truck crackled at 11:42 p.m.

"Structure collapse, Route Nine elevated platform, multiple casualties reported—"

He didn't wait for the rest.

Seven years since he'd worn a company badge, and his hands still knew that road better than his own driveway. He turned the wheel before he'd decided to.

Traffic backed up half a mile out. Red and blue light bounced off the underside of the rail line, chunks of it hanging where a platform used to be. Steam, or maybe dust, drifted under the floodlights.

He parked on the shoulder and walked the rest.

"Sir, you can't be here." A cop, young, tired.

"I used to work for Anchorpoint." Callum didn't look away from the wreckage. "Bracket seven-B. Southbound support column."

The cop blinked. "How do you know that?"

Because he'd written the report. Because he'd stood in this exact spot with a corrosion meter and a camera and told them, in writing, twice, that the load-bearing bracket was rated for a fraction of what the city was running over it.

Because they'd told him he was wrong, and then they'd told him to pack his desk.

"Just a guess," he said.

Above the wreckage, a support arm hung at an angle no engineer would call structural anymore. Callum had drawn that exact angle in a diagram once. Nobody had filed it.

His phone buzzed in his jacket pocket.

UNKNOWN NUMBER, then under it, small, the caller ID resolved from an old contact he'd never deleted: ANCHORPOINT RAIL — FRONT DESK.

He stared at it through three rings.

Nobody had called him from that number in seven years. Not to apologize. Not to explain. Not once.

He answered on the fourth ring.

"Callum." The voice was thin, out of breath, like the man on the other end had been running. "Callum, it's Foster. Foster Lang. Please — don't hang up. We need you back tonight."