Manifest (The Darkening Trilogy) by Jonathan R. Stanley

There has to be another answer, because if I have been targeted by the city… there’s little I can do to prolong the inevitable.
    Very quickly it becomes apparent that I need to be asking more informed contacts in other parts of the city.  However, before I leave this house again, I must be healthy and prepared… as prepared as I can be.  Until then, Val will stay here as our early warning system.  He’s no gazer, but I have his unquestioning loyalty and if nothing else, he’s a good distraction for invaders.
    It’s sunrise when Val arrives in a gray jumpsuit, pretending to deliver flowers.  He hangs up his coat in the wardrobe and then turns to face me as I sit in a wheelchair.  My leg is splinted and all other wounds are wrapped.
    “What happened?” Val asks, looking at me with wide eyes.  It’s hard for him to imagine what could put me in a wheelchair.  I’m almost flattered. 
    “I need you here till I get better, then Sabetha and I are leaving for a while,” I tell him.
    “You sure?  Maybe you should, you know, hide , till you heal up and figure out what the hell’s going on.”
    “Hiding won’t do any good, so I might as well be comfortable in my own home.  I’ll be ready to leave by day after tomorrow.”
    “What about Sabetha?  She okay?”
    “Yeah, she’ll live.  I’m having a bloody stop by after sunset.”
    “Takeout, huh?  Poor interns.”
    “Our voucher at the hospital is named Zoe.  I notified the puppies outside too, they’re our backup should something happen, and if I’m not up by then you’ll hear a knock at the door.  Check the camera and use the intercom.”
    “Delano, I got it,” he says confidently.  
    I continue anyways.  “Make sure the bloody runs through the full procedure with a phone call confirming his ID.  Only then can you let him in.  Understood?”
    “Like daylight.”
    “Good.  I left a thousand on the end table by the couch for payment.”  I wheel back to my room and then, before closing the door, look over my shoulder at him.  “Thanks.”
     
    M y body lies flat on a mound of circular silk pillows.  Incense burns nearby, infusing the air with lavender and sage.  An army of very special candles, providing a wealth of kharma, aid me in various mental tasks as I attune myself.  After several hours I will reach a deep state of consciousness known as séance and when I wake, roughly a day after that, my bones will be more or less healed.
    At the level of séance , I am essentially in a state of kharma, a second spectre-like version of myself separated from my physical form and able to fly through the city and sky, unseen by all but the most kharmatically sensitive.  This ability is invaluable for certain tasks but also unimaginably dangerous.  No one, save a captain, would ever attempt séance alone.  
    I drift out of my body and float over my room, the building, and then Gothica itself, though it doesn’t look like Gothica would through an ilk’s eyes.  Instead, I see it in a state of energy and it’s not easily described.  I go higher and higher, deep into the smoggy, uniform, and featureless stratus clouds which hover and swirl around the entire city.  Deeper into the gray haze, I begin to feel the essence of others, their thoughts, feelings, and emotions.  I am entering the collective consciousness, a thriving mass of energy and a replication of the city in thoughts and memories.  In my séance form I draw tremendous power, using it like a straw to suckle manna from heaven and heal my broken body.  
    In this place, as on the physical ground below, there is a constant struggle.  Yet even for all the evil of Gothica, there is some sort of balance and order.  The chyldrin are subject to the sun just as the gazers' are to the moon.  Without some sort of balance, no matter how warped it may be, the city could never maintain its stagnation. 
    Gothica has gone unchanged for a thousand years that I can personally attest to,