Chapter 2 Page 2

Elian's memories weren't like photographs-they were scents, flashes, whispers half-buried in his dreams. On certain mornings, he would wake to the taste of thunder on his tongue and the phantom chill of mist clinging to his eyelashes. Sometimes he thought he heard the distant tapping of droplets on a tin roof that no longer existed.

There was one memory that returned to him most often: a moment of perfect stillness in his childhood. He stood beside his mother, both of them barefoot on a wooden porch. She had her eyes closed, face tilted upward. Rain soaked her hair and traced the curve of her cheek. "Listen," she whispered to him. "Can you hear the stories?"

But when he told this to others, their eyes would narrow with worry-or worse, pity.

His teachers marked his essays with red slashes, dismissing them as creative delusions. "Weather," they corrected, "is a regulated concept. Sentimentality distorts history."

Counselors gave him pills to "balance the fog."

His classmates called him Drenched.

Still, Elian held tight to those elusive fragments. He would sit in the attic long after dark, sketching raindrops he had never touched, painting storms from memory alone. He collected strange objects: a cracked weathervane, a book of forgotten cloud names, a barometer with a single drop trapped behind its glass.

He didn't know it yet, but he was not alone.

There were others who remembered.

And the rain had begun to listen.