Lena can vanish when fear gets too close, but at School No. 17 a glowing watch and a trail of broken footprints may expose her secret.
Primary School No. 17 had always been the sort of place where nothing unusual happened. The halls smelled of wet coats, chalk dust, and boiled soup from the cafeteria. The walls were covered with neat posters, crooked drawings, and rules nobody really read.
Then came one grey Monday, and Lena felt the day tilt sideways.
She was sitting at the end of the corridor by the window, watching the rain drag slow lines down the glass, when a cold shiver ran through her. She lifted her head. The corridor was empty. No footsteps. No voices. Nothing.
Still, the feeling stayed. Someone was watching her.
Lena pressed her hands together until her fingers hurt. She had been carrying her secret for months now, ever since she had discovered that when panic tightened in her chest and she concentrated hard enough, her body could slip away. First her hands would blur at the edges. Then her arms. Then everything. She would disappear completely, as if the air had simply decided to make room for her.
No one knew. Not her mother. Not her teachers. Not even Tosia, who knew almost everything else about her.
She told herself, for the hundredth time, that she had to keep control.
A sharp voice cut through the corridor. “Lena. To the board.”
Her biology teacher was already looking at her from the classroom door, tapping a finger against the frame. Lena stood too quickly and nearly knocked her chair over. Heat rushed into her face. Of course. Today had to be one of those days.
She took one step toward the classroom and immediately wished she could vanish into the floorboards.
The thought was dangerous. Fear was always dangerous.
She knew that now.
Lena moved forward anyway, feeling every pair of eyes in the room settle on her. The blackboard loomed at the front, white chalk marks already crowding its surface. She could feel the familiar pressure building under her skin, that strange, electric pull that came just before the world began to thin around her.
Not now, she begged silently. Not here.
Then a scream tore down the corridor.
Every head in the classroom snapped toward the door.
Someone shouted in the hall, then another voice, high and panicked. Chairs scraped back. Lena caught a flash of movement through the doorway and saw a knot of students gathered near the lockers, their faces pale and stretched with fear.
One boy held something up in trembling fingers.
Even from the classroom threshold, Lena could see it glow.
A watch.
Old, brass-coloured, its face lit from within by a dim green light.
Tosia was standing among the others, one hand clamped over her mouth. When her eyes found Lena’s, fear sharpened there into something worse: recognition, or maybe warning.
A boy near the lockers blurted out, “Someone was here. I saw footprints. And then they just stopped.”
The words spread through the corridor like a spark.
Teachers rushed in from both ends of the hall. Someone started asking questions. Someone else told the pupils to move back. Lena barely heard any of it. Her pulse had begun to hammer so hard it felt as if it might shake her apart.
Footprints.
Her throat went dry.
She knew what happened when she lost control. She had seen it once in a puddle of rainwater outside the school: her shoes, then nothing, then a line of faint marks where no one should have been able to stand at all. Invisible footprints. Proof that something unseen had been there.
The watch pulsed again in the boy’s hand.
Lena took a step backward, but the pressure inside her chest was already rising, fast and wild, like a door being forced open from the other side. The edges of her fingers blurred. The air around her trembled.
Tosia took one step toward her, her expression turning into a silent plea.
Lena backed into the classroom and gripped the doorframe, trying to anchor herself. The room seemed too bright, too loud, too close. Outside, the corridor erupted into overlapping voices. Then, suddenly, everything went quiet.
Not normal quiet.
The kind that arrives just before something goes wrong.
Lena looked down.
A faint footprint was appearing on the linoleum at her feet.
At the same moment, quick footsteps stopped right outside the classroom door, and someone grabbed the handle from the other side.