Piotr, Anka, Martyna and Kuba arrive at a deserted Arctic research station, where the cold is not the only thing waiting in the dark.
The school year was almost over when Professor Wójcik offered Piotr, Anka, Martyna and Kuba something none of them expected: a place on a biological expedition to a shut-down research station in northern Norway. It sounded unreal at first, like the kind of opportunity people brag about for years. A trip into the Arctic. Real fieldwork. Something that might matter later. None of them imagined the station would feel less like a scientific outpost and more like a warning.
Svalbard 7 lay far from any settlement, tucked above a frozen fjord, where the helicopter left them with one last roar of blades and then vanished into the white sky. The silence that followed was heavy, almost physical. Snow scraped at their boots. The wind cut through every layer. Ahead of them stood the station buildings, dark windows staring out from weather-worn walls, as if no one had left in a hurry so much as in fear.
Inside, the air smelled of old metal, damp insulation and something faintly bitter, like burnt plastic long since cooled. On the first evening, while they unpacked equipment in the common room, Piotr noticed one of the ceiling lights blinking at uneven intervals. The bulb was new. The wires should have been fine. Martyna glanced up, frowned, and said the cold probably had its own ideas about electricity. Kuba laughed too loudly and called the whole place a perfect setting for a horror film. Anka told him to stop acting brave and admit the station was unnerving.
By the second day, they had settled into routines, but the place never quite settled around them. The Arctic night pressed against the windows in a deep blue smear. Pipes clicked in the walls. Once, Piotr thought he heard footsteps above the corridor, slow and deliberate, though the upper level had been empty since their arrival. Nobody mentioned it until after dinner, when everyone was already speaking more quietly than usual.
Then, just before two in the morning, the station broke apart with a sharp, metallic crash from deep in the hall.
Piotr sat upright so fast his chair scraped the floor. The lamp on the table swung wildly, throwing jagged shadows across the room. For a second, all four of them froze. Another sound followed from the darkness outside their door: something dragging slowly over metal, then pausing, as if it had heard them listening.
Martyna went pale. Anka kept her mug raised, but her hand was shaking. Kuba looked at Piotr, waiting for him to say it was nothing, that the station was old and the noise had come from the storm, from a pipe, from anything sensible. Piotr swallowed, reached for his headlamp, and nodded toward the corridor.
They opened the door into a passage washed in ice-blue light. Frost filmed the walls. The air was so cold it stung in the lungs. On the floor, a wet, shining trail stretched away from them, as if something heavy had been pulled toward the back of the station. It led straight to the laboratory door, the one that was supposed to stay locked.
But now it stood wide open.
Kuba stepped forward first and leaned into the blackness. A faint sound drifted out from the room, low and uneven, like breathing. Or waiting.