Chapter XIV: Myopia and Hyperopia
Night had folded across London like a heavy cloak.
Nathaniel Cross lay awake, not because of study this time, nor because of the throbbing scar that refused to let him forget, but because of the silence between the rain. It pressed against his ears, too exact, too deliberate—as though the city itself had paused to listen with him.
His curtains trembled faintly, though the window was closed.
He sat up, heartbeat quickening.
Across the street, beneath the pall of dim streetlamps, a figure stood.
No umbrella. No movement. No face he could discern. The stranger stood utterly still, soaked in the rain, their shape blurred by water and shadow. Yet even blurred, Nathaniel felt their eyes. Not ordinary eyes. Watching, dissecting, waiting.
He blinked—
The street was empty.
Only wet pavement gleamed beneath the lamp.
Nathaniel pressed a hand to his scar. It pulsed once, like a warning. He whispered to himself, "They're closer."
Sleep did not claim him.
Morning dragged itself reluctantly across the horizon. The sky was the same grey smear, students shuffling across campus with coffee cups and half-zipped jackets. Nathaniel walked among them, every step heavy with the residue of last night.
Theo caught up with him near the steps of the lecture hall. "Cross. You look like death reheated. Did you even—wait—" Theo frowned, squinting at him. "Something's... off. Your eyes."
Nathaniel blinked. "What about them?"
"They look... sharper. Like you've had eight espressos. Freaky sharp." Theo leaned back, unsettled. "You sure you're okay?"
Nathaniel ignored him, turning toward the hall. Yet even as he walked, he noticed it too.
His vision was wrong.
Not blurred—no, sharper than it had any right to be. Letters on a poster across the courtyard swam into perfect focus. The texture of brick two buildings away was as clear as if he touched it. A bird circling far above wasn't a speck—it was feathers, wings beating, eyes scanning.
By the time he entered the lecture hall, he had to steady himself against a desk. His mind reeled, not from weakness but from detail.
Every crack in the blackboard. Every tremor in Pennington's chalk. Every shift of breath in the hundred students around him.
Information flooded him like a dam had broken.
Differential Equations comes up again.
Nathaniel sat rigid, forcing himself to take notes, though the page beneath his pen seemed to glow with clarity too sharp, too perfect. The chalk dust settling from Pennington's hand appeared suspended in air, each mote distinct, delicate, spinning like galaxies.
It was beautiful. Terrifying.
His scar pulsed.
"Mr. Cross," Pennington's voice cut through the haze. "Since you appear distracted, perhaps you can enlighten us on the stability of this nonlinear system."
The board glared with chaos—x', y', parameters tangled like ivy. A problem meant to challenge, to humiliate.
But Nathaniel's vision snapped through it instantly. Variables aligned in his mind like constellations. The path revealed itself—Lyapunov stability, energy function, proof unfolding as though whispered by the equation itself.
He stood, chalk scratching across the board. Step after step, fluid, relentless, each symbol in perfect clarity, until the system yielded.
The room was silent. Even Pennington's scowl faltered. "Correct."
Nathaniel returned to his seat, chest heaving. His pen trembled against his notebook. What's happening to me?
Another period for Engineering Economics.
Davison droned about discount rates and inflation, her words clipped like scissors through cloth. But Nathaniel couldn't focus on her voice.
He could see the ticking of her wristwatch from meters away. The stress lines at the corners of her eyes. The ink smear on her thumb from marking papers.
Every student in the room was an open book—chewed pencils, twitching knees, scribbled doodles half-erased. He saw them all. All at once.
He pressed his palm to his forehead. His skull felt too small to contain it.
Theo whispered, "Cross, you're pale as hell. You need water?"
Nathaniel shook his head. His scar pulsed faintly, a second heartbeat beneath his ribs.
AutoCAD Lab for the grab if not goes for the bud at a pub.
The screens glowed cold, blue and indifferent. Students dragged lines into reluctant order, but Nathaniel's world was no longer lines and angles—it was too much, too far.
His eyes strayed to the window.
The horizon beyond London spread before him in impossible detail. He saw the distant shimmer of rivers, the skeletal lines of cranes in ports, clouds breaking against coastlines. Too far. Too unreal.
He staggered back from the desk. His breath came shallow, quick. His vision stretched, stretched further, until it felt as though his gaze pierced the very skin of the earth.
A mountain. Snow. Waves crashing against cliffs he knew were hundreds of miles away.
And further still—
He gasped, clutching his desk, forcing his gaze downward, shrinking it back to the lab, to Theo's concerned stare, to the cursor blinking stupidly on his screen.
Theo grabbed his arm. "Cross, you're scaring me. What's going on?"
Nathaniel whispered, "I don't know."
But he did. Somewhere deep, beneath denial and fear, he knew.
This was no gift.
This was consequence.
The darkness of sky once again covers the night sky.
Nathaniel sat in darkness, blinds drawn tight, yet his eyes cut through the dark as if it were midday. Every thread of the curtain, every crack in the plaster wall, every drip in the pipes above.
He pressed his palms to his eyes, desperate for silence, for blindness. But there was none. The world insisted on being seen.
The scar pulsed harder, heavier. He whispered, trembling, "What are you doing to me?"
The room answered with silence.
But outside—
On the edge of vision, in the distance his eyes should never have reached—he saw it.
A figure. The same as the night before. Standing. Watching. Not blurred this time, but sharp, impossibly sharp, as though distance did not exist.
No face. Only the outline of someone impossibly still, impossibly patient.
The scar flared. Nathaniel staggered back from the window, chest heaving.
The world had grown too close. And somewhere in the collapsing distance, something had fixed its gaze on him.
And Nathaniel Cross, trapped between classrooms and shadows, between equations and visions, realized the truth.
He was no longer just watching.
He was being watched.
And the further his sight reached, the closer the watcher became.