Strangers drawn by the same dream meet on a rooftop in Warsaw, each carrying a power they barely understand, until a stranger appears and something below the roof breaks loose.
A warm, black-blue evening lay over Warsaw. On the flat roof of a crumbling tenement, strangers gathered in the half-light, each of them sleepless, each of them pulled here by the same impossible dream: drifting lights, a voice just out of reach, and a certainty that had not let go of them all day.
Sophie, a philosophy student with tangled hair and a habit of looking past people instead of at them, sat on the roof’s edge and stared into the narrow streets below. The city should have sounded distant from up here. Instead, every breath, every footstep, every pulse of life seemed amplified. She had not only noticed the boy by the chimney; she could hear his heartbeat, rapid and uneven, as clearly as if it were in her own chest.
Bartek stood a few paces away, rigid with the effort of pretending he was not alarmed. An IT specialist with a face trained into seriousness, he kept folding his arms across his body as if that could contain whatever was happening to him. For days, electricity had gathered in his hands in pale, restless snaps. Lights had flickered when he passed. Phones had died. A kettle in his flat had boiled dry without being plugged in. He had come tonight because he no longer trusted being alone with it.
On the lowest tier of the roof, half-swallowed by shadow, Ola sat in a hoodie with her wrists wrapped around her knees. An owl tattoo curved over the inside of one wrist. She watched the others and the dark sky above them, trying not to think about the moments when everything around her seemed to slow, as if the air itself had been held by the throat. Time, maybe. Or something close enough to make her afraid of naming it.
No one spoke. In the distance, the Palace of Culture glowed against the skyline like a warning kept lit out of habit. Then a flare tore across the sky, brief and white-hot, and the whole roof flashed into hard light. For one electric second, the air tightened around them all.
When the brightness faded, someone was standing in the middle of the roof.
No one had seen her arrive.
She wore a coat the colour of rain-slick asphalt. Her gaze was calm and cold enough to silence the roof itself. She looked at each of them in turn, as if she already knew exactly what they were capable of, and spoke in a low, steady voice.
"Forgive me for intruding, but the world needs your powers more than you realise."
Before anyone could answer, the entrance gate below them exploded inward with a metallic crash. All four of them turned at once, and in that split second Sophie heard something else beneath the noise - a second set of footsteps, rising fast up the stairs.