Seventeen-year-old Oliwier finds a damaged pocket watch in an attic, and one turn of its crown throws him into 19th-century Warsaw, where strangers seem to know exactly who he is.
It was a June evening, and Warsaw lay under a humid haze that clung to the Vistula and seeped through the open window of Oliwier’s room in Powiśle. He should have been revising for his final exams, but the notes on his desk had already given way to half-read pages, cold coffee, and the distraction he kept pretending not to notice: a heavy pocket watch he had dug out of the attic the day before.
It looked wrong somehow, as if it belonged to another life. The brass case was dented, the back was carved with a pattern that almost felt like a warning, and beneath the scratches he could just make out an engraved date: 1863. Oliwier turned it over in his palm, frowning, then pressed the tiny button on top.
The watch gave a dry, mechanical groan. The hands jerked, spun, and blurred into a silver circle. Oliwier drew in a breath to curse, but the room vanished before the word left him. The sunset, the desk, the smell of coffee all dropped away at once, replaced by a hard jolt of cold air and the scrape of cobblestones under his shoes.
He stumbled into the middle of a narrow street lined with tall, worn townhouses. Gaslight flickered in the windows. Horse carts rattled past, people in coats and long skirts hurried by with heads down, and church bells rang somewhere beyond the roofs. Oliwier stared at his own empty hands. No phone. No bag. No notes. Only the watch, clenched so tightly in his fist that the edge bit into his skin.
A girl in a navy coat stopped a few steps away. She looked about his age, dark-eyed and alert, with a leather satchel tucked under her arm. Her gaze flicked from his face to the watch, and every trace of curiosity drained out of hers.
“Are you lost?” she asked.
Oliwier opened his mouth, but before he could speak, her expression changed again, sharp with recognition. “Where did you get that?”
He had no answer. Across the street, two men in dark coats had emerged from the crowd and were staring straight at him. They were not looking by accident. One of them had already started forward.
The girl stepped closer, voice dropping to a whisper. “If you want to stay alive, you have to come with me. Now.”
She seized his sleeve and pulled him into a side alley. Oliwier ran because there was nothing else to do. Behind him, the men’s footsteps struck the stones faster, closer. He felt the watch twitch in his hand, then grow hot, as if something inside it had woken up and was listening. In the darkness ahead, the girl glanced back once and whispered, almost in panic, “Whatever you’ve done, they’ve found you.”