Seventeen-year-old Igor and his friends slip into the sealed basement of an old Prague high school and find a machine that should never have been there.
Igor moved through the corridors of the absurdly old high school in Prague with the same familiar mix of boredom and unease. It was late autumn. Rain rattled against the windows, and the weak light that seeped through the dirty glass made the hallway look even longer, even emptier.
He stopped at the cellar door and glanced at the key in his hand. He had taken it from the caretaker's bag that morning, and now there was no turning back. Marika and Daniel were waiting in the shadow beside the stairs.
Marika pulled her hood lower over her hair and gave him a sharp look. Daniel kept shifting his weight, gripping his LED torch so tightly his knuckles had gone pale.
"If we're doing this, do it now," he whispered. "Before he comes back."
Igor fitted the key into the lock. It turned with a reluctant click.
The basement air hit them at once, cold and stale, thick with dust and old plaster. Their footsteps echoed as they made their way past rows of sealed storage rooms and rusted pipes until they reached an iron door set deeper in the wall. No sign on it. No plaque. Just a frame blackened with age, as if the school itself had tried to forget it existed.
The key fit there too.
The room beyond made Igor stop dead.
Books lay stacked on the floor in leaning towers. Loose cables snaked between benches covered in metal parts, glass tubes, and coils of wire. In the centre stood a capsule-sized machine with a curved steel shell and a ring of buttons glowing faintly red, green, and amber. Along one wall hung a line of clocks, each one ticking at a different pace, their hands moving in opposite directions.
Marika stepped closer first. She reached out and touched one of the buttons.
The machine answered with a low hum that vibrated in Igor's teeth. The air thickened. Dust lifted from the floor and spun in slow circles. Daniel bent over a screen set into the side of the capsule, his face lit blue by rows of dates scrolling past so fast Igor could barely read them.
"Marika, don't," Igor said, but his voice sounded thin even to him.
Then every clock in the room struck twelve at once.
The sound hit like a hammer. Light flared white around them, the machine shuddered, and something inside it opened with a violent metallic groan. Igor stumbled forward, reached for Marika's sleeve, and felt the floor drop away beneath him.
For one blind instant there was only noise, heat, and the sensation of being pulled apart.
When he opened his eyes, the room was gone.
So were the walls, the pipes, the basement, the school.
Marika and Daniel were somewhere behind him, blurred and distant, as if he were looking at them through water. Igor tried to breathe, but the air felt wrong, sharp and unfamiliar. Shadows moved in the darkness ahead, and then a voice came out of it, low and almost calm.
"You shouldn't be here..."