Three teenagers discover a hidden passage inside ordinary screens. When they follow the green light, they step into a strange world beneath a living dome.
Nela lay on the garage roof and stared at the sky, letting the warm boards press into her back. June rain still hung in the air, sharp and clean, and from the gardens below came bursts of laughter, the clatter of plates, the lazy thud of a football against a fence. Everything felt ordinary - except for the reflection in her phone.
At certain angles, her face vanished. In its place, the screen showed a stretch of something else: a dome covered in dense green growth, its surface curved and distant, like the roof of a giant glass greenhouse hidden behind the light. Nela had blinked hard, tilted the phone, rubbed the glass with her thumb. The image always returned. And once, when she touched it, a cold shiver had snapped through her fingers, quick as an electric spark.
She told Jonah and Maja two days later, back on the same roof, where the faded paint was peeling in long curls and weeds pushed through the cracks. They laughed at first, then stopped laughing when Nela showed them exactly how to hold the phone. Maja saw it immediately - the green dome, the strange curve of light, impossible and clear. Jonah tried to play it off with a grin.
"Probably a glitch," he said, but he kept adjusting his grip, squinting at the screen like he expected it to betray him.
It didn’t.
By the end of the week, they had tested every angle they could think of, turning their phones toward the roof tiles, the rusted gutter, the sky, each other’s hands. Nothing. Then, as the sun dropped low and the light went gold, Nela shifted her phone one last time. The reflection changed. The dome sharpened. Her breath caught.
This time she didn’t just see it.
Her finger slipped into the screen.
The others froze as a band of emerald light pulsed under her skin and swallowed her hand to the wrist. Nela gasped, half in fear, half in wonder, and Jonah grabbed for her arm while Maja clutched her own phone as if it might explode. The screen flared white-green. The roof tilted. The world lurched sideways.
Then the three of them were falling through cold light and damp air, landing hard on slick earth beneath a towering ceiling of green glass. The place smelled of wet leaves and soil and something metallic, something alive. Around them rose impossible plants with twisting stems and translucent leaves that trembled without wind.
Before any of them could speak, a crash echoed deep inside the dome.
Something was moving through the darkness beyond the plants, faster now, closer with every second.