Four students living in a grim tower block on the edge of the city start developing impossible abilities, and the first signs suggest someone else has noticed.
Living in a tower block was supposed to be boring. Grey corridors, dead lifts, the smell of fried onions from ten different flats, and the same view of the city every morning. But for Franek, something in the building at 17 Zlota Street had started to shift, and the change had a way of finding the right people first.
He was hunched over a physics assignment in his room when a strange tingling ran through his fingers. His pen lifted a few millimetres off the page. Not enough to be impossible, he told himself at first. Just enough to make him stare. Then it slipped from his grip and hit the desk with a sharp clack.
A quiet laugh came from the doorway.
Franek jerked around. Anka was leaning there with her arms folded, her bright blue hair catching the light like a warning sign. She looked amused, but not surprised.
"You saw that too, didn't you?" she said.
Franek swallowed and nodded. For one ridiculous second he thought she had somehow staged it just to mess with him. Then he noticed her expression shift.
"This has been happening to me for days," she said, lowering her voice. "Weird things. I keep knowing what people are going to say before they say it. Not always. Just enough to know it's real."
Franek opened his mouth, closed it again.
Anka pushed away from the doorframe. "I don't think it's just me. Or you."
The next day, they met Ewa and Miłosz in the abandoned common room on the floor below, where the windows rattled whenever the wind rose. Ewa was the first to speak, because she always was. Her phone had powered on by itself after a dead battery and then stayed warm in her hand for no reason she could explain. Miłosz, still pale from the bruises he claimed should have taken weeks to heal, rolled up his sleeve and showed them the fading marks on his arm.
Nobody laughed this time.
Outside, rain hammered against the glass and the entire block seemed to hold its breath. Four stories, four impossible stories, and one growing fear threaded through them all: whatever was changing them had started here.
Then someone knocked on the common room door.
Once. Hard.
The light overhead flickered. Footsteps moved slowly in the stairwell outside. A shadow slid across the frosted glass pane, too tall to belong to any of them.
No one spoke. Franek could hear his own pulse, loud and frantic in his ears, as the handle began to turn.