Jeffrey leaned, perched, against a tall leafy tree amidst the afternoon’s mass exodus. He didn’t really watch as parents’ cars circled through to pick up kids one by one. He dimly detected two big buses pulling in to scoop fresh collections a little after three and then just before four. He stayed partly aware of the trickle of teachers and other staff on their way out, including Madge, whom Jeffrey actually did pay attention to as she arranged herself into her tiny blue smart car.

He considered finding a video to watch. But doing so just didn’t feel right, like preparing for exercise by scarfing a box of donuts, or calming down before sleep by picking a long, bitter fight.

Not knowing exactly what he was waiting and preparing for made keeping himself from retching to his device and pods feel especially glum. So, he gritted his teeth, and shifted from foot to foot.

Eventually, all became quiet. Then he really had no idea what to do.

Glancing over at the walkway that joined to the regular suburb street leading away from the school, he second-guessed every conclusion he’d come to that afternoon . . . the sum of those conclusions being that if he indeed had a special ability, and the likes of Finnel and Gel would know when he used it anyway, he might as well put it to the test for himself.

For if tapping into secret knowledge could mean keeping Peck and others off his back, why not at least try?

And if he’d been right in writing off the whole notion as nonsense to begin with, why not prove Gel wrong once and for all?

Each of his reasons and ideals seemed to fail or fall short as he stood alone outside the school with nothing but a stretch of screenless time left until dark.

How was he even supposed to set about testing his powers? How could he start to make himself see the sorts of things he’d never once tried to see before (and always regretted seeing after)?

The oddest factor of all for Jeffrey was he found himself almost wishing to have parents at home who’d be worried if he didn’t show up soon.

He’d never, in as long as he could remember, pined for any kind of “normal” homelife. With his strong, stoic older brother always holed up, unseen, down the hall in the other bedroom, how could he think to ask for more than total freedom to do whatever he wanted, whenever, and basically take care of himself?

Still, the beginnings of a foreign desire to be missed were like flakes of fine gold sprinkled ever so slightly across a patch of worn-down ground.

When was the special seeing supposed to start?

So far, all he glimpsed were trees whose green coverings had been overtaken by yellow, hints of red, and golden-brown. The trees were set in a grid-like line that turned the peaceful street and fronts of buildings into graph paper.

Following the treeline, gazing down to where the town and city rose up to meet the blue sky in the middle, he felt his eyes stretch to take in new details at such a distance.

Jeffrey never normally looked at things outside. To him, surroundings were just space to get through on his way to something else, like classes were time to kill between sessions on his device. He wasn’t fond of nature.

But now experiencing the great expanse between where he stood and that forever distance before him and above was…

Jeffrey dropped softly to his knees, wrenching his awareness away from the sky as if from the claws and jaws of a predator. He had no idea why. Washed over by the fuzziest of instincts to simply not look up anymore (lest he . . . die?), he felt utterly bound by a fear that made no sense.

He noticed a line of ants gliding in both directions on limbs too small to see, moving to and from a tiny hole at the edge of the rich green grass that lined the pathway leading away from the school. The ants were a highway’s worth of cars, each but a small component never conscious of the whole it contributed to, though still wholly sold-out to its role.

The shift from hugeness and awe to tiny, intricate order felt oddly like no shift at all. He only knew himself to be somewhere in between, really the same as both, and…

That’s when Jeffrey left. Or, maybe he entered far, far further into where he was, no longer aware of the school or street details, sky, nor ants on the ground.

In an instant, he sank or rose to what looked like an endless labyrinth of bell-shaped domes, large and small, amidst a backdrop of reddish-black earth that glimmered like cooling lava.

Stolen novel; please report.

Shocked beyond terrified, stunned beyond wonder, the speed at which everything had been replaced made the change unamazingly acceptable in the same way one tends to just go with even the otherworldliest of dreams.

He studied the black ground, curious as to how it seemed to pulsate or breathe nearly in sync with him.

Without taking any steps, he found himself choosing to approach or focus in on the nearest of the silvery domes. Like the rest, this one shone with a pale light of its own, both brilliant and subtle, and in no ways alarming or overwhelming.

For a split second, the exact outlines of all the domes nearby and far away came to map perfectly to a wispy hint of memory, brief and fading, of both the endless sky and ordered ant trail, as two (or three) distinct realms at once got drawn or woven into one.

He stood, and the domes also moved, especially those closest to him. And lifting, the domes morphed from shiny grey to an empty blank white.

He almost stumbled back, and probably would have faltered and fallen had the pattern of angles not also adjusted from having matched nature to now taking the form of the same grinning face from Finnel’s office the day before.

Something about seeing the blank whiteness of the risen domes/face contrasted against the breathing red-black ground convinced Jeffrey (in a way no one could argue with) that he was witnessing something close to the essence of Finnel himself . . . or its residue . . . occupying everything here like some hyper-blown-up version of an animal marking its territory.

Now gliding along without taking a step, swerving past domes and crags, he found himself crossing through to enter a length of hallway very much like that at the school, its other end undetectable.

He continued to hurtle along, picking up impossible speed.

The hallway walls looked to be the same blank white as the domes, but were covered in puzzling symbols and shapes scrawled in a black darker than any mere absence of light could account for. Flying by, he saw half-circles with dots and lines leading to alien equations and indecipherable patterns stretching on and on. It felt like sleeping and dreaming while wearing headphones blasting a thousand foreign podcasts, audiobooks, videos, and chats all at the same time. Some other advanced species’ internet was being gibbered and downloaded into parts of his mind he couldn’t quite reach.

It wouldn’t stop. The hallway carried on, but his sense of direction had gone missing somewhere along the way. Instead of moving forward, he might as well have been blasting up or falling down, forever and ever, and…

No, it didn’t end. It wouldn’t end. There was nothing else.

Jeffrey had lost touch, and blanked out, and slipped into madness where his existence consisted only of the relentless intrusion of something else’s means of communication.

Was he actually in motion? Could it be the figures on the walls moving . . . those flashing before his eyes, bombarding him . . . and not Jeffrey, himself?

Had there really ever been any such thing as physical propulsion in the first place?

It went on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and…

The last thing to go, slowly, was time, which was sort of silly and fun to think about (as much as thinking could even make sense).

The symbols merged on every side to a single steady, unchanging image of total completion, and total…

He didn’t know what it was, but saw that it was everything.

There was no hallway. There were no domes fit to match either nature or that altogether unnatural face from Finnel’s room.

But when time started up again, everything began to break back down to its former frantic shifting parts.

All slowed, and with the slowing came a sense of hope. For seeing anything that wasn’t everything meant Jeffrey might eventually find a way to perhaps set about considering the prospect of maybe, possibly…

The hallway ended. The white walls disappeared, as if the cryptic black writings had grown enough to fuse together and become a single expanse of pure nothingness with no space left to fill, and no potential for even any possibilities at all.

Jeffrey stood (or hovered) somewhere very much like Finnel’s doorway, though he saw no tri-station desk nor spindly bookcase up ahead.

Without knowing how, he knew two things for sure: first, the hallway he’d just traveled through was not the one that led to Finnel’s lair in the school; and second, the same grinning greatwhite-toothed, thoroughly irregular face was about to appear again and…

Jeffrey sat outside on the pavement ground.

The soft engine moans of vehicles gently rolling by were about as peaceful and part of the environment as the trickling line of ants he saw anew.

He felt as unalarmed at having returned to his everyday world as he had about leaving.

But what did cause a fresh twinge of panic to rifle through, maybe like looking into a hole and seeing the face of a curious snake appear too close on the other side, was who he suddenly detected standing next to him above: Finnel.

Jeffrey realized he’d never once heard word of any outdoor Finnel sightings, ever. And today’s charcoal coat and tar-colored tie, blending with hair of similar to lighter shades, didn’t seem to sit right before a backdrop of red-and-yellow-to-green trees and blue-to-violet sky. The doctor resembled an antique model of a person, somehow much smaller than usual, even taking into account the added height of the massive hunch, which towered over that old-tv-show-spectrum’s worth of hair.

“Seen anything unusual, boy?” Finnel bellowed, stray coughs squeezing through with the words like eager dogs around their owner out the door.

Jeffrey watched as greyish lip corners upturned into hooks while tiny pellet eyes remained about the same, skewering the doctor’s face into something only a lifeform with no context for human smiling might assemble and put forth (proudly) as a good replica of a smile.

Unready to respond, Jeffrey felt taken aback by the undeniable fact that Finnel’s smile in no way matched the toothy grin seen yesterday, and (almost) once more just now, in the darkness.

Neither said anything else.

The doctor spun and shuffled away.