Makun sat on his couch, staring at the eviction notice on the table. Forty-eight hours had shrunk to about thirteen. His phone said 6:47 PM, Friday evening, and the market in Old Town wouldn't open until midnight, which left him five hours to learn to sense spiritual energy well enough to find it.
This is insane. But what else could he do? Stay here and go crazy from the particles drifting through his apartment, and get thrown onto the street in the morning anyway? At least if I go crazy trying, I'll know why.
He leaned back and watched the translucent masses float through his living room. Human eyes weren't supposed to see particles. Atoms and energy, everything at that scale, had always been invisible. So what had changed? The presence had done something to him. I have already given you a gift. The broken link. Maybe the chains hadn't only been holding him back; maybe they had been holding back his ability to see what was really there, the layer beneath ordinary reality.
He got up and walked closer to one of the streams. The particles in it moved as though they had purpose, even intelligence, not random motion but directed flow. If this is what I can see now, what else have I been missing my whole life? Twenty-three years of everything going wrong. If Zuri was right, and he could learn to use this, maybe his luck could finally change.
First I need to understand what I'm looking at.
He had never meditated in his life, but he had seen the videos online, and these were desperate times. He sat cross-legged on the floor, closed his eyes and tried to empty his mind. Breathe in, breathe out, focus on the particles.
They became clearer once he stopped looking with his ordinary sight. They had weight, density and texture, and some felt heavier than others. Most drifted aimlessly, but the heavier ones moved with direction, flowing in streams like invisible currents through the room. When he tried to reach for them, pain lanced through his forehead, so he stopped reaching and simply watched. He spent forty minutes learning their patterns, the random ones bumping into walls and furniture and the purposeful ones running in rivers, and by the end he had noticed something: every stream flowed east, toward Old Town.
His phone rang. Unknown number. He ignored it, and thirty seconds later it rang again. He answered and got static, a click, and a dead line. The third time, he answered sharply. "Hello?"
"Is this Makun?" A woman's voice, professional and cold.
"Who's asking?"
"This is Rebecca from Atlantic Collections. You have an outstanding debt of four thousand two hundred dollars from Marcus Industries, and we need to discuss immediate payment arrangements."
The tablets. They're actually trying to collect. "I don't owe that money. I was fired for something that wasn't my fault."
"Sir, the debt has been assigned to our agency. Failure to pay will result in legal action. We need to arrange—"
He hung up. It rang again at once, and this time he turned the phone off. Of course. Even while he was trying to figure out mystical energy, the bill collectors found him. Awakened or not, his luck was still shit. Maybe that would change once he understood what the presence had given him.
7:58 PM. He was running out of time. He went back to his meditation, and the streams were still there, flowing east through his apartment and out into the city. The markets draw energy like magnets. If he followed the streams, they should lead him to the source. When he opened his eyes this time his head still hurt, but the pain was bearable, and he realized he could sense the streams even with his eyes open. At the window he could feel them sliding past the glass, heading east.
He grabbed his jacket and checked his wallet. Twenty-seven dollars, everything he had left. It would have to do.
The streams were fainter in the hallway but still there, running past his door toward the stairwell. Outside it was harder; streetlights and neon made a noise of their own, but when he closed his eyes and focused, he could still find them. Don't try to see them. Feel them. He walked east for six blocks, stopping every few minutes to close his eyes and find his bearings, and the stream held steady until Harbor Street. Then it scattered.
Panic climbed his throat. This was his only lead. Stay calm. Do what you did at home. He sat on a bus-stop bench, closed his eyes and emptied his mind, feeling for weight and direction, and beneath the ache in his skull a new sensation surfaced. It was a tug, as if someone had tied a string to his sternum and was pulling him southeast. It was different from following the streams. It felt personal, as if something were calling to him specifically.
He followed it. After three blocks the string had become a rope, and after six the rope had real weight, a physical pull in his chest. It was working, but his head was splitting; the new sense was too raw and untrained, like lifting weights with a broken arm. He rested on another bench for twenty minutes until the pain eased, then went on in short bursts of sensing with rests in between, letting the pull guide him instead of forcing it.
By 10:30 he was deep in Old Town. The streets were cobblestone here, and the buildings looked older than anything else in the city, as if they had stood for generations. The pull in his chest was strong and steady now, pointing toward the heart of the old district.
11:15. Forty-five minutes until the market opened.
Whatever the presence had woken in him was growing stronger by the hour: the sight, the currents, the sense of things no ordinary person could perceive. If it could help him understand why everything in his life went wrong, and help him fight back against twenty-three years of misfortune, he would learn everything he could.
The pull drew him deeper into the maze of narrow streets, and ready or not, Makun followed it into the heart of Old Town.