In a city that never sleeps, Veronica, Kacper, and Nadia uncover powers they barely understand - and a stranger on a ruined rooftop suggests they are being hunted.
Neon City never really darkened. Even after midnight, its towers burned blue and white against the sky, traffic streamed through the avenues like veins of light, and music leaked from rooftop clubs far below. Above it all, on the skeleton of an old shopping centre left to rot after the blackout years ago, three figures stood with the wind cutting between them.
Veronica reached into her bag and drew out a steel cylinder no longer than her forearm. It was cold enough to sting through her fingers, but the metal throbbed faintly, answering her breathing as if it were alive. She held it up, found the hidden seam, and pressed her thumb to a recessed point.
Fog spilled out in a thick, silver wash.
Nadia swore under her breath as the rooftop vanished around them, swallowed by white. Then she blinked, and the haze sharpened into layers she could see through as clearly as glass. Kacper took one step back, then froze. The air had changed. It pressed against his skin, dense and charged, and every sound seemed to rise out of the dark with cruel precision: the scrape of Veronica’s boot, the rattle of loose gravel, the distant snap of a sign in the wind.
Nadia looked down at her own hands. Blue fire flickered across her knuckles, thin and restless, bright enough to make her pulse jump. She clenched her fists until the flames faded to sparks.
None of them had asked for any of this. The powers had come first as accidents, then as warnings, then as something harder to ignore. Lately, the city itself had begun to feel watchful. Reflections in glass showed shapes that were gone when they turned. Their phones lit up with messages from numbers that did not exist. And every time one of them tried to talk about it, the air seemed to tighten around the words.
Veronica kept her eyes on the horizon, but her grip on the cylinder had gone white-knuckled. “Tonight,” she said, her voice barely carrying over the wind, “we stop pretending this is random.” She glanced at them one by one. “The three of us aren’t the only ones anymore.”
A heavy sound rolled through the stairwell door behind them.
Not a bang. Not quite. More like something large shifting its weight in the dark.
Nadia turned first. The fog thinned near the stairwell, and a figure stepped out of the light with the slow, deliberate ease of someone who knew exactly where they were standing. Long coat. Hood low. Face hidden in shadow.
Veronica’s cylinder began to tremble in her hand.
Kacper felt the air thicken further, as if the rooftop itself were bracing for impact.
The stranger lifted a hand, and the blue glow from the city below caught on something silver in their palm.