In a cutting-edge high school in Gdańsk, Igor, Lena, and Wojtek begin to notice impossible things in themselves, and a sealed corridor inside the old wing suggests their lives are about to split open.
Igor's alarm shrieked long before he was ready to face the day. Thursday. June. The block in Zaspa was already holding the heat in its concrete walls, and the city felt sluggish under a pale morning sun. School was supposed to be quieter now, with half the students buried in exam revision, but Igor still met Lena and Wojtek at the tram stop as if nothing had changed.
They were the kind of trio that only made sense to themselves. Igor wrote code for fun and trusted machines more than people. Lena trained like every day was a fight she had to be ready for. Wojtek played guitar, argued about everything, and had started saying things lately that made too much sense to ignore. For the past few days, he had been dreaming events before they happened. Lena had brushed her fingers against a stranger's sleeve and felt a wave of panic that did not belong to her. And Wojtek kept hearing whispers in empty rooms, low and close, like someone speaking from inside the walls.
By the time they reached the old wing of the school, all three of them were on edge. The corridor there always felt slightly wrong, even before the renovations and the new glass-and-steel buildings had been bolted onto the campus. They passed the archive door and stopped at the same time. The key was still in the lock, but twisted sideways, as if someone had forced it and changed their mind halfway through.
Lena touched the metal handle. Her face tightened. Igor felt a sharp buzz behind his ears. Wojtek went pale.
"Something's wrong," Lena said, barely above a breath.
Before Igor could ask what she meant, she pulled the door open.
There was no archive behind it.
A narrow corridor stretched into darkness, its cracked tiles lit from beneath by a faint, sickly glow. The air smelled old and electric, like rain on overheated wires. At the far end, a boy their age stood half in shadow, his outline flickering as if the light could not decide whether to keep him there. He looked straight at them.
And he knew their names.
Then the light snapped out.
The door slammed shut behind them with a sound that shook the walls, and every sense Igor had seemed to lurch awake at once. The silence that followed was worse. On the wall ahead, a digital display glared red in the dark:
ONE OF YOU IS NOT COMING BACK
Somewhere at the end of the corridor, something dragged slowly across the floor.
The boy's shadow vanished.