In Solaris, four teenagers receive the same midnight message and discover their hidden powers may be tied to a watcher who knows far too much.
Solaris glowed like a wound that never healed. Neon bled across the glass towers, traffic hissed through the avenues below, and on the roof of a half-abandoned building on Comet Avenue, four teenagers sat in a loose circle and pretended the city did not know their names.
Mila pulled in a breath sharp with cold air and kept her left hand tucked beneath her thigh. Blue light had flickered through her fingers twice already that evening. She had seen it. Leander had seen it. Neither of them had said a word out loud, as if naming it would make it worse.
Leander broke the silence first, holding up his cracked phone. “Did anyone else get the message?”
One by one, they all reached for their own screens, then for the folded slips of paper hidden in pockets and sleeves. The text was identical on every one of them: Meet me at the Crooked Roof at midnight. You have it in you. Time to awaken the power before it’s too late. - X.
Iga let out a short, unbelieving laugh that died almost immediately. “That is not funny.”
“It’s not a joke,” Kris said. He kept staring at the rusted water tank beside him, jaw tight, as if it might move if he looked at it long enough. It had already shifted once that week, when nobody else was in the room, and he still had not told them how easily objects seemed to answer his thoughts now.
Leander rose to his feet and looked over the edge of the roof, into the maze of light and shadow below. “Someone knows,” he said quietly. “About all of us. About what’s changing.”
A gust of wind tore across the rooftop before anyone could answer, hard enough to make them stumble. The ventilation shaft at the far end of the roof groaned, and a figure stepped out of the darkness as if it had been waiting inside the shadow all along. A cloak swept around its shape. In one gloved hand, a device pulsed with a red warning light.
The voice that came from beneath the hood was flat, distorted, and far too calm.
“You already know you’re different,” it said. “The real question is whether you’re ready for what it costs.”