Three friends enter an abandoned tenement and find a mirror that should not exist, one that opens onto a strange city and a danger they are not ready for.
The old tenement on Sunny Street had been empty for years, its windows dark and its bricks stained by rain. Most people crossed the street to avoid it. Ola, Filip, and Zuzy never had. The building had always felt less like a ruin and more like a locked secret.
That June afternoon, they found the front door standing open.
Filip stopped first. He was usually the one who went ahead when the others hesitated, but even he looked uneasy now. The door creaked as he pushed it wider. A cold smell rolled out from inside, heavy with dust, damp plaster, and something older.
They stepped into the corridor. Their footsteps rang down the hall, sharp and hollow. Sunlight spilled through broken windows and fell across the walls in jagged strips, turning peeling wallpaper into strange shapes that looked almost like maps.
"What if someone lives here?" Zuzy whispered.
Ola gave a small, nervous laugh. "If anyone does, it’s probably a very miserable chair."
They followed the corridor into a front room that must once have been grand. Now it was bare except for a ruined armchair in the corner and, beside it, a tall mirror none of them had noticed before. Its frame was blackened with age, but the glass was clear.
Filip went closer. He frowned, then leaned in.
"That’s not us," he said.
Ola and Zuzy hurried forward. The mirror did not show their reflections. Instead, it showed a city under a lid of grey cloud, with crooked towers rising from the fog and bridges of light suspended high above the streets. The image shifted when they breathed on it, as if something on the other side had noticed them back.
Then the mirror gave a faint sound, like a whisper dragging across glass. A pale thread of light appeared in its centre and began to spin wider, faster, until the surface looked less like glass and more like deep water turning in a current.
The room shuddered.
Zuzy took one step back. "Filip, don’t."
But he had already lifted his hand.
The light flared. The air snapped tight around them. The floor lurched away beneath their feet, and the mirror opened as if it had been waiting for them all along.