Chapter 10: Mickey
I was flexing my Ability as I was walking the streets. Making snowflakes dance in the air, as though on the invisible current of wind, making the noise of oncoming traffic a little bit louder, extending my senses to envelop surrounding buildings, and feel their pressure.
It was something I did when I felt threatened, a way to reaffirm my ability to influence the world. To someone like me, the world was more malleable than to most, and there was a certain comfort in that. But influence didn't translate to power. It was almost like Newton's third law applied to life: for every action, there was an equal opposite reaction. The more you were able to affect the world, the harder the world hit back. The more influence I had, the more danger I was in.
Adrenalin was rushing through my blood, because the thing I was about to do had the potential to be dangerous and stupid. I was going to travel into wraith territory.
Wraiths weren't supposed to interact in mass. I mean, the PA had no rules against it, but it was just common sense: after all the trouble they went into to protect our identities from the human population, gathering in large groups was like painting targets on our backs. Avoiding each other was a smart thing to do, and we did, for the most part. But it was one of those strange rules that everybody knew, but almost no one followed. In the end, the need to interact with someone of your kind drove wraiths to seek each other out. As a result, there was a small, secretive community of genetically altered people, hiding in plain sight among oblivious humans.
Not every wraith in the city was a member of this community. I, for example, didn't want anything to do with it. Putting myself at risk to socialize with others like me wasn't that appealing. And besides, they weren't really like me. Hiding the extent of my Ability from the PA was hard enough; hiding it from other wraiths would probably be even harder.
But I needed to find the man with blue eyes. I needed information. And there were only two places to find information about a wraith: the PA's archives and the wraith club.
I knew where to find it from my early days of living on my own, when I was stupid enough to believe that there was someone out there to help me. I came to rethink that position after a couple of visits, and haven't been there since.
#
The place where wraiths met was hidden in a big office building on the outskirts of the town. It wasn't supposed to be invisible, just extremely boring. There was an old door with peeling paint, accessible from the parking lot, and a small sign with 'Local Postmark Collectors Association' written in a barely legible font.
Behind that door, there was a narrow staircase leading deep into the guts of the building, and another door, even less noticeable than the first. The club itself looked like it existed outside of the normal flow of time. There were tables and dusty chairs, probably older than I was, and stands with old stamps glued to yellow paper. On the far side of the room, a small window led to the kitchen. For a small price, you could get tea, coffee or cheap beer, and something to eat if you were desperate enough.
The owner of the club, an old, solemn man named William, was standing behind a reception desk, reading a newspaper. There were maybe half a dozen people inside: some were drinking beer, talking in quiet voices, others were watching a game of Death Pilgrimage, possibly waiting for their turn to play the winner.