Seventeen-year-old Lena starts hearing voices under the city’s noise, and one warning suggests she is not the only one who can hear them.
Warsaw at night looked harmless from above, all amber windows and tram lines glowing red through the dark, but Lena had started to notice the pulse beneath it. She sat on the roof of a block of flats on Grojecka Street with her knees drawn up, headphones on, her favourite album drifting through one ear while the city breathed under the other.
The whispers had begun three days ago, so faint she had blamed exhaustion. Then they grew sharper, slipping between the traffic and the hiss of wind, as if someone were leaning close to her ear. Not one voice. Many. Fragments. Edges of thoughts. Fear. Anger. Half-finished lies.
At school that afternoon, when one of her friends smirked at her new shoes and said they looked stolen from a discount bin, Lena had heard it clearly for the first time: You do not need to be afraid. I can see her. I know what she’s afraid of.
The words had hit like a hand between her shoulder blades. Maria had gone pale, then snapped back at her, and before Lena could say anything the girl had pushed past the crowd and disappeared into the hallway, looking like she had seen something she was not supposed to see. Since then, the whispering had only followed her harder.
Up here, the voices came and went with the wind. A woman on the bus worrying about a missed call. A man on the pavement rehearsing an apology he would never make. A child somewhere nearby insisting, very seriously, that the moon was watching him. It was unsettling, then intoxicating. Lena could not stop listening.
Then a new voice cut through the noise.
Lena... if you can hear me, you're not the only one. They're already looking for you.
Her breath caught. She tore one headphone off and stared across the rooftops, every nerve suddenly alive. The street below seemed too quiet. The windows around her seemed to hold their light a second too long.
Somewhere beside the stairwell, a door slammed open.
Lena turned so fast the cold scraped her lungs. Footsteps hit the concrete stair landing. One set. Then another.
Run.