The night after the photograph, Cael didn't sleep.
He lay in his bunk with his hands folded over his chest, staring at the cracks in the ceiling. Every time he closed his eyes, he felt that shudder again—the rush of cold air, the dizzy flash of foreign light. It was as if the memory itself carried a weight, tugging at him from behind the eyelids.
By morning he had already decided.
He spent the day as usual: breakfast, chores, classes. No one noticed the faint restlessness that hung around him like static. When afternoon came, he slipped into the storage room again, locking the door behind him. The photograph of Paris waited on the shelf, innocently dull in the daylight.
He picked it up and held it at arm's length.
His heart didn't race this time—it waited.
The air thickened, a subtle hum building just beyond hearing.
He thought of the street, the sky, the taste of that cold wind.
The floor cracked.
It wasn't a sound so much as a feeling—a sharp snap in the air, a tremor like thunder muffled inside a wall. The photograph fell from his hand, and he was gone.
The next instant he was standing in the middle of a plaza paved with gray stone, pigeons scattering from his sudden arrival. A few people turned, startled, but in Paris no one looked too long at anything strange. Cael barely noticed them. He just stared at his hands again, at the faint dust still clinging to his knuckles.
He laughed once, breathless. The laugh echoed oddly.
Then the fatigue hit—a heavy drain, like his bones were hollowing out. His knees buckled and the world shimmered. He thought of his room, of the safety of dim light and silence, and the air cracked again.
He landed on his knees in the storage room, panting.
The bulb above him flickered.
The floor bore a faint spiderweb fracture where he had been standing.
The cracks became his measure of progress.
Each jump left one—sometimes small, sometimes deep, but always there, a pale wound in the floor or wall where the air had torn. The first week, he practiced short distances: across the room, into the hallway, back again. The sound was violent, the recoil sharp enough to make his ears ring.
By the second week, he could manage from the dormitory to the roof without falling over. The ground still shuddered each time he landed, but the vibrations grew less intense. He started keeping notes in a small notebook: distance, focus, fatigue, noise.
It wasn't magic to him. It was a muscle.
Every night after lights-out, he trained. He learned to picture a destination not as an image, but as a feeling—the weight of the air there, the angle of the shadows, the texture of the floor. The more precise his memory, the smoother the transition.
After a month, the cracks only hissed instead of splitting open. After two, the hiss was gone entirely.
Now, when he jumped, there was only silence. One moment he wasn't there, and the next he simply was. Like blinking.
He began to wander farther.
First the city—quiet rooftops, empty train stations, the shimmering river under moonlight. He never stayed long, only long enough to see, to take. A pebble, a leaf, a scrap of graffiti peeled from a wall. His treasures. He kept them in a box under the loose floorboard beside his bed, neatly arranged and labeled.
Sometimes he'd sit cross-legged beside the box and run his fingers over the items, feeling the subtle difference each one carried. Every place had its own pulse, a rhythm his skin could still sense. He couldn't explain it, but he liked that they stayed still when he couldn't.
He learned that long jumps—across oceans, between countries—cost him more. His muscles trembled afterward, his breath shortened. But the satisfaction was worth it. He could be in London for a minute, in Tokyo the next, and back in his bed before the dorm bell rang. The world had finally opened its doors, and he alone had the keys.
The power itself was intoxicating, but it wasn't enough.
He wanted more.
He began testing limits.
What if he carried something large—bags, tools, even furniture? At first, objects resisted, dragging behind him, warping. One night he tried to jump with a chair and left half of it embedded in the wall. Another night, the light bulb above him shattered as he vanished, pulled by the pressure wave his departure caused.
But practice sharpened everything.
He learned to center not just himself but whatever he touched, to "wrap" it in intent. Within weeks, he could move small crates, and eventually, the entire wooden box of his treasures. Each success made him hungrier.
The movement itself changed. The tearing sound no longer existed, but he could still feel it—the ripple of energy folding space around him. It used to sting like static; now it brushed his skin like silk. His exits left no mark, no echo. He could appear in a crowd and no one would know.
He wasn't a boy sneaking through shadows anymore.
He was a ghost slipping between moments.
He discovered something else during those nights of practice: jumping changed his perception of the world. The edges of things seemed less solid. Sometimes, when he stood very still, the air ahead of him shimmered faintly, like heat rising from asphalt. He'd touch it, but nothing changed. Still, the shimmer remained at the edge of vision, like a door half-open.
He didn't try to explain it. Explanation wasn't his nature. He collected, tested, improved. That was enough.
Months passed.
He turned fifteen quietly—no cake, no candles. Just another day spent in silence, refining. The caretakers thought he was reserved. His teachers called him gifted. None of them knew that the boy who answered their polite questions had walked the rooftops of Rome the night before, or stood on the edge of a frozen lake in Norway, watching the aurora ripple above his head.
By then, his jumps were perfect.
No light, no sound.
He would simply appear.
He'd stand in the middle of a city and blend in with the flow of people, his eyes calm, expressionless. Every place he went, he left with something—coins, stones, folded paper. He never stayed long enough for loneliness to catch him.
But sometimes, late at night, he would sit on his bed surrounded by his collections and feel an odd emptiness. He had crossed oceans, seen skylines, touched monuments. And yet the hunger only deepened.
The world was starting to feel small.
It happened by accident again—the way most of his breakthroughs did.
He'd been flipping through an old comic one of the younger kids had thrown away. The paper was torn, but the art caught his eye: a figure standing on a cliff under twin suns. The colors were unreal, the kind that didn't exist in any sky he'd ever seen. He stared at it too long.
The air shimmered.
It wasn't the harsh vibration of his first jump, nor the smooth fold he'd mastered. This was… softer. Thicker. Like standing before a curtain made of light.
He felt something beyond it, vast and unmeasured.
The sensation frightened him—not because it was dangerous, but because it called to him, the way gold might call to a starving man.
He reached a hand out, but the light receded. The comic slipped from his fingers. When he blinked, the shimmer was gone.
That night he couldn't think of anything else.
He sat at his desk under the dim lamp, the comic spread before him. His heart thumped steadily—not fast, just heavy, like it was beating in a different rhythm from his body. He remembered the texture of that barrier, the feeling of his hand brushing against something thicker than air.
He understood then: it wasn't another place within the world.
It was another world.
The realization didn't make him question how. It made him plan.
If pictures could guide him across continents, why not across realities? The difference couldn't be in distance—it had to be in understanding. He couldn't jump into what he didn't truly see.
That was the key.
He turned off the lamp and sat in the dark, whispering to himself.
"If the key is the image… then I'll learn every image there is."
From that night forward, Cael's routine changed.
He still went to school, still did chores, still wore the quiet mask everyone expected. But his free hours became a ritual. He began devouring the world through its screens.
Cartoons first—simple, colorful, easy to remember. Then anime, films, television shows, video games. He watched everything from comedies to science fiction, tracing worlds and faces, memorizing every detail. His notebooks filled with sketches and notes: architecture, lighting, geography, character clothing.
He didn't care about stories or morals. He was studying space.
To the caretakers, he looked like any other teen wasting time online.
To himself, he was building a map of infinity.
He learned to freeze a single frame in his mind and hold it until the edges blurred into life. Each time he did, he felt the faintest shimmer in the air—the same translucent pull he'd felt with the comic. Not yet enough to cross, but closer.
A year passed this way.
Seasons changed outside the orphanage windows.
He grew taller, quieter, sharper.
His box of real-world treasures remained under the floorboard, untouched for months. They no longer satisfied him. The true treasures now lay just beyond that invisible film.
Sometimes, when he stood in front of the mirror, he would reach out as if to touch his own reflection. His fingertips would stop against cool glass, and for a split second, he swore the surface gave way—as though the world were thinner than it should be.
He would smile then, a small, private smile.
"Almost," he'd whisper. "Just a little further."
And then he would return to his screen, the glow of endless worlds reflected in his amber eyes.