At a science high school where pranks are starting to get weird, Nadia, Bartek, and Zosia stumble onto a mystery involving a microchip no one can quite explain.
Seven in the morning at Stanislaw Barei High School of Comedy was its own special punishment. The corridors smelled of vending-machine coffee, chalk dust, and whatever passed for mathematics humour before sunrise. Nadia was fighting a jammed locker with the patience of a saint and the expression of someone who had already lost an argument she hadn’t started, when Bartek slid past carrying a pocketful of wires and the kind of grin that usually meant trouble.
"If anyone asks," he muttered, "it was Murphy's Laws again."
That was Bartek: self-proclaimed inventor, accidental disaster zone, and the only student in school who could make a gadget pen, a toaster, and the canteen fire alarm all feel personally insulted in the same week. Before Nadia could reply, Zosia appeared beside them, phone in hand, already editing a meme she had clearly not yet seen but would somehow make worse. She was mid-comment when the physics-room door flew open and Mr Boris stumbled into the corridor, purple tie crooked, eyes wild.
"Has anyone seen my quantum calculator?" he asked, as though asking for a missing calculator and surviving the morning were equally urgent.
Then the lockers started coughing up popcorn.
Not a few kernels. Buckets of it. Popcorn poured across the floor in a white-yellow avalanche, bouncing off shoes, skittering under doors, and turning the whole corridor into the aftermath of a prank no one had voted for. Nadia stared. Bartek stopped grinning. Zosia slowly lowered her phone.
No one at Stanislaw Barei had that kind of timing, that kind of access, or that kind of nerve. Well, almost no one. Bartek opened his mouth to protest, then shut it again when a sentence blared from the notice board behind them in blinking red letters:
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING.
CURIOUS WHO'S NEXT?
By lunchtime, the three of them had made a pact they didn’t quite say out loud: if someone was using a microchip to turn their school into a circus, they were going to find out who. The trail, as ridiculous as everything else that morning, led straight to the robotics lab, where a packet of exotic transistors had been signed out under a name nobody recognised. When they pushed the lab door open, something rustled behind the cable pile.
Then a hooded silhouette stood up.