At a high school on the edge of the city, Adam and his friends uncover a sealed project in the archives. What starts as a history assignment quickly turns into something far stranger.
Adam had spent almost two years at the school on Gdańska Street without ever really seeing it. To him it had always been a place of grey walls, tired staircases, and corridors that smelled faintly of chalk and dust. The building was old enough to creak in protest every time someone crossed the landing, old enough to make even the loudest students lower their voices in certain corners. But lately Adam had started to feel that the school was hiding more than bad plumbing and forgotten exam notices.
That thought followed him on a miserable April afternoon, when everyone else was already mentally out of class and counting down to the long weekend. Adam stayed behind with Maja, Filip, and Zuzia to work on a history presentation they had been putting off for days. Their teacher had let them use the school archives, which were normally locked to everyone except the secretary and the headmaster. According to legend, the archive room was buried somewhere under the building, behind a metal door in the basement no one bothered to mention unless they had to.
The four of them found it after a short search down a narrow stairwell that grew colder with every step. The key turned with a harsh scrape. Inside, rows of shelves disappeared into the dimness, stacked with folders, yearbooks, cracked photo albums, and boxes tied with yellowing string. It felt less like a school archive than a place where things were sent to be forgotten.
"Why is it so quiet in here?" Zuzia asked, barely above a whisper.
"Probably because no one has been stupid enough to come down here in years," Filip muttered, though his grin looked strained.
They split up between the shelves, pulling out files and shifting through piles of paper that shed dust with every touch. Adam was halfway through a box of old sports records when Maja stopped so abruptly that he looked up at once. She was holding a small metal case, no bigger than a textbook, with two words stamped into the lid in faded black letters: Project Icarus.
There was a padlock on it. Beside it lay a notebook so worn at the corners that it seemed to have been handled too often and then hidden too quickly. Maja opened it carefully, and all four of them leaned in. The first line had been written in a hurried hand, as if the writer had been interrupted mid-sentence: For insiders only. Do not open if...
A sound exploded somewhere in the corridor outside the archive room. Not a footstep. Something heavier. Metal scraped against concrete with a grinding, deliberate drag. The overhead light flickered once, twice, and the archive dipped into a sickly half-dark. Zuzia grabbed the edge of the table. Filip went still. Even Maja stopped breathing.
Then came the rustle from just beyond the open door, close enough to raise the hair on Adam’s neck. He stared at the locked case, at the unfinished warning in the notebook, at the thin rectangle of darkness in the doorway, and understood with a cold jolt that whatever Project Icarus was, they were no longer alone with it.