And that was enough.

Leo closed his eyes. He stopped trying to calculate . He started telling a story.

The void cracked. Leo tumbled backward through the portal and landed on his bedroom carpet. The laptop screen showed a green checkmark and a new score: . A message blinked: “Well done, Leo. You have completed SparxMaths for the week. See you on Monday.” But below it, in tiny, almost invisible text: “P.S. The trains would have met at 7:51 PM. But you knew that.” Leo closed the laptop. The blue glow faded. For the first time, he smiled at the dark screen.

The train problem appeared, but now the trains were real—two ghostly locomotives rushing toward each other in the distance, one blue, one red.

He opened his eyes. “7:51 PM.”

Frustration boiled over. He slammed the laptop lid shut. The room went dark. But not completely. The blue glow bled through the seams of the laptop, seeping into the corners of his room like a liquid ghost. Then, the screen flickered on by itself.

“No multiple choice. No hint. Answer, or be converted into a recurring decimal.”

Leo’s heart hammered. “This isn’t real.”