On a routine tram ride through Warsaw, Ania finds a silver box marked Switch and makes one careless move that bends the city around her.
Ania always took the same tram to school: number 22, heading for Marymont. Mornings were half-sleep and cold metal seats, a thermos of coffee warming her hands while Warsaw slid past the windows in grey streaks. She knew every stop, every jolt in the rails, every place where the doors complained before opening.
That Thursday felt no different until the tram lurched to a stop between Grójecka and Banacha. Passengers shifted, sighed, checked their phones. The driver, his cap pulled low, muttered something about a delay that no one bothered to believe. Ania had just bitten into her sandwich when a woman near the back made a small, startled sound.
Something had rolled under a seat.
It was a silver box, no bigger than a matchbox, smooth as polished metal except for the word engraved on the lid: Switch. Ania leaned forward before she could talk herself out of it. The box was warmer than it should have been. In the middle sat a tiny lever, neat and exact, like a toy part stolen from somewhere it did not belong.
She should have passed it to the driver. She knew that much. Instead, she turned it.
The tram gave a sharp, shivering jolt. For one breathless second the windows flashed white, and the whole carriage seemed to tilt sideways inside reality. Sound thickened, then sharpened: the hiss of the doors, the rattle of coins in someone’s pocket, a dog barking somewhere far beyond the street. The air smelled suddenly of rain, even though the pavement outside was dry.
Ania looked out.
Pole Mokotowskie should have been bare in winter, branches black against the sky, snow crusted along the paths. Instead, the trees were leafed out in a dense, wet green, as if spring had been forced through the city overnight. A cyclist in a bright yellow jacket crossed the road where there should have been no cycling lane. A billboard she’d never seen before glowed above the traffic, advertising a brand that did not exist.
Her phone buzzed inside her rucksack.
It had been dead since yesterday.
Zosia, seated beside her, gripped the edge of the seat. Her face had gone pale, the way it did before exams or bad news. She stared from the window to Ania’s hand and back again.
“What did you do?” she whispered. “Ania, what did you do?”
The driver was watching them now in the tram mirror, his expression hard to read beneath the brim of his cap. Around them, the other passengers had fallen silent in that uneasy, pretending-not-to-notice way people used when something was wrong but no one wanted to be the first to say it.
Ania closed her fingers around the silver box.
The lever clicked once, faint but clear, like a lock turning somewhere deep inside the tram. Then every light along the ceiling flickered at the same time.
In the window beside her, a reflection appeared that did not match the seats behind her at all.