John Wilson was a medium and a fraud, operating out of a rented parlor in New York where he ran séances for grieving families with enough skill that he rarely had to work very hard. He was a natural cold reader — fast, observant, good at locating the specific shape of someone's loss and reflecting it back to them in a form they could hold onto. He had told himself for long enough that the comfort was real even if the mechanism wasn't that he had largely stopped examining the argument.

What he had not examined, and probably should have, was why he was so good at it. He had always been sensitive to things he couldn't account for — a particular attunement to emotional atmosphere, occasional knowledge he couldn't trace to any observable source. He had explained this away as the sharpness of someone who had learned to survive by paying close attention to other people. The meteor removed whatever had been standing between him and the full weight of that sensitivity. The séance he was performing on January 18th became briefly, catastrophically real: the room filled with actual spirits, drawn to him with a magnetism he had no framework for, and John — who had built a career on pretending to speak to the dead — discovered he wanted nothing to do with the genuine article.

The entourage has followed him since. Fifty to eighty spirits on a given day, loud and overlapping, with an old man named William as the most consistent and manageable presence. John is perpetually exhausted in a way that sleep does not address. He is also, underneath the jitteriness and the charlatan's deflection, more capable than he presents — a man who spent years making people feel that something impossible was happening has turned out to be reasonably well-suited to a world where impossible things happen constantly.