Kuba, Maja, and Filip spend a night in White Hills Reserve to investigate the animals vanishing from the forest. When strange lights appear and something starts moving toward their hiding place, the night turns far more dangerous than expected.
The White Hills Nature Reserve lay just beyond the edge of town, pressed against an old forest that seemed to change with the hour. By day it was all pine resin, birdcalls, and the snap of branches under hikers' boots. By night it went still in a way that felt deliberate.
Kuba, Maja, and Filip had known those paths since they were children. They had raced through them with school backpacks bouncing on their shoulders, hidden in the birches during summer storms, and sat on the same weathered bench arguing about everything and nothing. At seventeen, they came back differently. Older. Quieter. And lately, increasingly uneasy.
Animals were disappearing from the reserve.
At first it had been one fox, then a roe deer, then a badger caught on a trail camera and never seen again. The staff claimed the footage showed nothing useful. No broken fences. No blood. No sign of a struggle. Just empty paths, blank screens, and tracks that ended as if the ground itself had swallowed whatever walked across it.
People were starting to talk. Poachers. Stray dogs. Wolves, though no one serious believed that. Kuba had been reading every report he could find, trying to spot a pattern. Maja tracked the rumours online and saved screenshots of every post that sounded useful. Filip, who trusted machines more than gossip, built a homemade night-vision camera from parts he had ordered in secret.
By dusk, the three of them had made their decision.
They would spend the night in the reserve.
They packed fast and said very little while they did it: sleeping bags, torches, snacks, spare batteries, warm sweatshirts. Kuba printed out a map and marked a route with a red pen. Maja brought a notebook and tucked it inside her jacket. Filip carried the camera as carefully as if it might break if he breathed on it too hard.
They reached the old clearing before midnight and settled in beneath a stand of black pines, where the last fox had supposedly been seen. The air smelled damp and metallic. Every sound seemed to travel farther than it should have: a branch tapping wood, a leaf sliding down bark, water dripping somewhere in the dark.
For nearly an hour, nothing happened.
Then Filip froze beside the camera.
"Look," he whispered.
On the screen, tiny lights flickered deep among the trees. Not one or two, but several, scattered in an uneven line that shifted and tightened as though whatever made them was moving with purpose. Maja leaned over the display, her face pale in the glow, and saw shapes behind the lights too large to be rabbits, too uncertain to name.
Kuba reached for his phone.
A twig snapped beside him.
All three of them went still.
The line of lights vanished. The forest swallowed its own silence. Then, from just beyond the clearing, came the soft crunch of footsteps pushing through dry leaves, slow and careful, as if whatever was approaching already knew exactly where they were hiding.
A second later, two pale eyes opened in the dark directly in front of them.