On the first day of summer holidays, Lena, Maks, Julia, and Szymon slip beneath Krakow’s Old City and find a hidden passage that should not have been opened.
June pressed down on Krakow like a held breath. The air smelled of warm stone, dust, and the storm gathering somewhere beyond the rooftops. People vanished into cafés and shadows, but Lena, Maks, Julia, and Szymon had waited all year for this day. School was over. The city was theirs.
They met by Florian Gate, where tourists lined up for photos and street musicians tried to outplay the heat. Lena had her sketchbook tucked under one arm, Maks swung his camera from his neck, Julia moved with the restless energy of someone who hated standing still, and Szymon looked as if he had been born with the Old Town already mapped in his head.
"I told you there was something here," he said, leading them into a narrow alley he had mentioned more than once over coffee. "After that fire years ago, people found an entrance to tunnels. Not a legend. Real passages."
The alley seemed too ordinary to hide anything dangerous. Ivy crawled over a cracked stone wall. An iron door leaned in its frame, black with rust and almost swallowed by shadow. Szymon shoved it with both hands. For a second nothing happened, and then the door gave way with a long, scraping groan, as if it had been waiting for someone brave or foolish enough to open it.
The darkness beyond felt thicker than a basement, alive with damp air and the smell of old brick. Their footsteps echoed too loudly. Maks raised his camera, but the flash only caught flashes of wet walls and jagged stone before the tunnel swallowed the light again. Lena touched the rough brick with her fingertips and felt the chill sink into her skin.
After a few metres, the corridor split three ways. Left. Right. Straight ahead. Faded tiles lined part of the wall, and above them, half-erased marks ran in a pattern that looked less like graffiti than a warning. Julia leaned closer, and something clicked deep inside the wall.
A low metallic sound answered her touch. Everyone froze.
Then, from the left-hand passage, came the faint glow of a light and the unmistakable echo of footsteps moving toward them. Not running. Not wandering.
Coming straight for them.
Lena looked at the others, and in the narrow band of darkness between the three tunnels, every choice suddenly felt like a mistake.