Sobek demonstrated the walk twice in the time Tokyo knew him, both times from the stage in the training hall. They were in a disused primary school, all undersized desks and metal radiators.
—You see by now that spirit matter is all around you, in areas where people have lived and worked. Your talent to perceive it is rare. Yet an advanced mind can shape it to form the physical. Temporarily — a matter of seconds — for its substance is always in flux.
And without fanfare he stepped off the stage to stand in the air, level with its surface. Tokyo gasped. Sobek paused for a moment, then stepped back onto the polished wood.
Tokyo stared at the vapours where Sobek’s feet had been, but they were formless, shifting, like nothing had happened. The wily old tutor turned away. His face was a mask, cool and detached, but Tokyo could see the crocodile grin hidden underneath.
He mounted the stage to face his tutor, and saw sweat glisten on the old man’s forehead.
—You must dissociate yourself from the physical, Sobek said. —Allow yourself to step halfway into a ghost world as your foot steps out upon the air.
Tokyo composed himself on the stage, looking down across faded lines for basketball and badminton courts. He allowed his mind to float on the pool of spirits which filled the space ahead. And only when he had truly let go of the floor already beneath him did he allow his foot to move forward, to step in the air.
Of course, he fell. The wooden boards bruised his knee and made his nose bleed.
Sobek so often made light of the training that...