In an alternate Warsaw, Maks and Maria discover abilities they cannot explain and are pulled toward a hidden school beneath the city, where one tram ride may change everything.
Warsaw, 2041. Above ground, the city looked ordinary enough: trams rattling over wet rails, traffic lights blinking through the dusk, people hurrying home with their collars turned up against the cold. Below it, buried under streets, pipes, cables, and old concrete tunnels, something else was moving.
The School of Underground Talents existed there, hidden from everyone who had never noticed the wrong kind of miracle. It waited for teenagers whose lives had started to slip out of the rules. The ones who heard a clock tick twice. The ones who saw colours no one else could see. The ones who knew, too late, that reality had already begun to crack.
Maks had been sixteen for three months when time first froze around him.
It happened in the middle of a crowded crossing. One second the light turned red, a cyclist cursed under his breath, and a bus sighed at the curb. The next, the entire world locked in place. Raindrops hung in the air like beads of glass. A woman’s scarf stopped mid-swing. Even the neon sign above the pharmacy seemed to hold its breath. Maks could still move.
He stumbled backwards, heart hammering, and time snapped loose again a few seconds later as if nothing had happened.
He told himself it had been exhaustion. A glitch. Stress. Anything but the truth. But the freezes kept coming, sharper each time, and he learned the terrible, thrilling edge of them: the silence before the world restarted, the weight of being the only moving thing inside a stopped city.
He told no one. Not his mother. Not the school counsellor. Not even Maria.
Maria noticed strange things too, only hers looked different. Around some people, she saw a shimmer in the air, coloured and restless, like heat rising off asphalt. A grey wash around fear. A bright, hard gold around arrogance. Red sparks when someone was lying. At first she thought she was imagining patterns where none existed. Then the patterns started answering her.
After that, she spent nights digging through forums, archived articles, old books, half-forgotten blogs. Most of it was nonsense. Then she found a single line buried in a cracked forum thread:
Talent is an invitation. Answer carefully.
She showed up at the tram stop the next afternoon with that sentence still burning in her head.
Maks was already there, hands shoved deep into his pockets, looking like he had not slept properly in days. He glanced at her once, then away.
“I need to tell you something,” he said.
Maria opened her mouth to answer, and stopped.
A tram rolled in with a metallic groan, its windows fogged from the inside. The doors slid open. Among the usual commuters sat a girl they had seen before in the corridors of their school, always alone, always as if she had stepped out of a different kind of weather. She wore a long graphite coat and black gloves. Her stare was so fixed it felt like a hand closing around the back of Maria’s neck.
The girl looked straight at them.
Then, as Maks and Maria hesitated on the platform, she leaned forward and said, almost casually, “If you want to understand what you are, get off with me in two stops. This is your only chance.”
Maria felt the air around her flicker.
Around the girl, the aura was unlike anything she had ever seen - black as a sealed tunnel, bright as a scatter of distant stars.
The tram shuddered forward. The station lights outside blinked once, twice. Maks’s watch jerked on his wrist and the second hand stopped dead.