In the basement of an old villa, Kasia and Michael open a locked iron box and trigger a device that throws them into a future they do not recognise.
Ever since Kasia's family moved into the century-old villa on the outskirts of the city, the house had been keeping its own counsel. Doors stuck for no reason. Floorboards sighed in the night. In the cellar, beneath the smell of damp stone and old coal, there were stacks of boxes no one had bothered to sort through. Kasia meant to leave them alone. She had said that to herself more than once. But that evening Michael came over, and curiosity, as usual, won.
They had both just turned nineteen, both studied computer science, and both liked the kind of history that still had teeth. Dinner barely ended before they went downstairs with a torch and two mugs of cold coffee, stepping carefully as the stairs creaked under their weight. Near the back wall, half hidden behind a broken chair, they found an iron box sealed with a brass latch. On the lid, a sentence had been scratched in Latin: Tempus non revertitur.
Kasia pulled out her phone and translated it under her breath. Time does not return.
Michael leaned closer, eyes bright with the dangerous interest he always tried to pretend was reason. The lock looked old, but not ordinary old. It had grooves too precise to be decorative, and when he touched it, the latch gave with a click that echoed through the cellar like a dropped coin. Inside lay a rounded metal object, dense and polished, the size of a large watch but covered in tiny dials, short hands, and buttons no human hand should have needed. A small screen along one edge flickered awake, scrolling numbers Kasia did not understand at first: 2032. 1997. 1492.
"Michal," she said, and there was already fear in her voice, "don't touch anything."
He was still staring at the device when she saw the brightest button pulse once, like a heartbeat. Kasia reached for it before she could think better of it. The moment her finger made contact, the cellar vanished. Light tore across her vision. The floor dropped away. Something hard and invisible jerked at her shoulders, and the world came apart like a film burned through with flame.
When she could breathe again, the air smelled different. Not dust and stone, but rain on hot pavement and ozone. Traffic roared around her. Screens flashed from the sides of buildings. Drones hovered above the street in neat, obedient lines. Cars she had never seen before slid past in silence, their windows dark as water. The city was still there, but sharpened into a stranger version of itself, all glass and light and motion.
Kasia found Michael's hand and held on until her fingers hurt. The device was still in his grip, faintly warm, humming like something that had no intention of stopping. "Something's wrong," she whispered.
Michael did not answer. He was staring past her shoulder.
She turned.
In the middle of the crowd, walking straight toward them, were two people who looked exactly like Kasia and Michael, only older by more than a decade. Their faces were leaner, harder around the eyes, as if they had already lived through whatever this was. Kasia felt the blood drain from her face. The older woman saw them first and stopped so abruptly that the people around her flowed past like water around a stone.
A warning blared from a loudspeaker mounted high on a lantern post: "Attention. Space-time disturbance detected. Report immediately to the Time Control Point."
The older Kasia took one step forward.
And the device in Michael's hand began to count backwards.