When Julek finds his grandfather’s strange watch in an old Warsaw attic, it lurches him into another era. The city is wrong, the air is wrong, and someone seems to be expecting him.
June settled over Warsaw like a lid, trapping the heat between the tenement walls. Julek had been sent up to the attic to look for old winter crates, but he was moving slower than he should have, distracted by the dust, the smell of old wood, and the fact that this building still felt чужy even after weeks of living in it.
He was kneeling beside a stack of German books when he noticed the metal box wedged behind a cracked trunk. It was no bigger than a shoebox. On the lid, scratched into the tarnished surface, was a date: 1901.
The latch gave way at the lightest touch.
Inside lay a pocket watch unlike anything in the antique shops downtown. Its face was black as wet glass. The hands did not sit still, but drifted against each other in uneasy, uneven circles. On the back, a sentence had been engraved with deliberate care: Chronos non dormit.
Julek frowned and ran a thumb over the letters. The metal was colder than it should have been, almost cold enough to sting. Then the watch jerked in his palm.
Tick.
The sound was too sharp for such a small object. He looked up. The attic lamp had gone dim. Somewhere below, the house settled with a long creak, and then the ticking rose again, faster this time, as if something inside the watch had noticed him.
Julek tried to let go.
His fingers would not open.
The wall clock beside the door stopped dead. The outlines of the armchair and the leaning bookshelf began to smear and bend, as if the room had been painted on wet paper. A low rumble rolled through the attic, not quite thunder, not quite machinery, and the floor pitched under him.
He hit the boards hard, breath knocked from his chest. The watch flared white in his hand.
Then everything vanished.
When Julek opened his eyes again, the attic was gone.
He was standing in the middle of a cobbled square, staring at unfamiliar facades washed in pale light. Women in long skirts crossed the street with parasols tilted against the sun. Men in stiff coats and hats moved past carriages drawn by horses stamped in the dust. Smoke drifted through the air, but it carried no trace of petrol or buses or anything he knew. It smelled of coal, damp stone, and something faintly sweet, like incense burning somewhere nearby.
Julek staggered back, staring at the watch. The hands were still moving, but now they were racing backward.
No. Not backward. Toward something.
Panic tightened in his throat. He shoved the watch into his pocket, half expecting someone to grab him for looking like a lost idiot in the wrong century. Instead, a voice brushed the air behind him, barely more than a breath.
“You found him first. Then you have to hurry. Before he finds you.”
Julek spun around.
There was no one there, only a hooded shape where the sunlight seemed to bend wrong, and beyond it, coming straight toward him through the crowd, a shadow that was moving far too fast.