Three friends begin to notice strange things at school and realise they may be the only ones who can see them.
Poplar Tree School looked normal from the outside: weathered red brick, tall windows, and corridors that always smelled faintly of chalk and wet coats. But that morning, something was wrong.
The bell for first lesson should have rung five minutes ago. Instead, the hallway filled with a soft green flash, quick as a blink. No one else seemed to notice. No teacher looked up. No one stopped talking. Only Lena, Igor, and Maks froze where they stood.
Lena had spent months pretending not to notice the odd things about herself. She sometimes understood what the dogs in the yard seemed to be thinking, and when she touched the maple tree behind her house, it felt warm, as if it knew her too. Igor could react before anyone else had even moved, snatching flying balls out of the air in gym class like he’d guessed their path before they flew. Maks had a gift with machines so strange it made the teachers shake their heads. Radios hummed when he passed, paper planes he folded sailed farther than they should, and lately his phone had started showing notifications a second before they appeared.
At recess, the three of them slipped down to their hiding place under the stairs, the tiny space they called their base. The green flash kept replaying in Lena’s head. Then, in the hush under the staircase, she heard it again: a whisper, thin and cold, as if the air itself were speaking.
Find what you can’t see.
Igor tried to laugh it off. “Maybe the bell’s broken.”
But Maks had already pulled out his phone. The screen went black, then lit up with a strange blue glow. A map of the school appeared on it, and a single green dot began to pulse just below the biology room.
Maks swallowed. “I didn’t open anything.”
Lena stared at the glowing screen, then at the dark corridor beyond the stairs. Somewhere nearby, footsteps hurried past. Another sound followed, slow and careful, stopping right outside the biology room door. Then the handle turned.