Nultý signál, časť 9: Keď sa sily pomiešajú

The Zero Signal, part 9: When the Powers Cross

The Story Begins

At the shelter beside the old playground, not a single lamp was still on. Yellow rectangles of light fell from the windows of the apartment blocks onto the wet pavement. Lea stood by the wall with her hands in the pockets of her black denim jacket and looked at the paper map Viktor had laid on the bench.

“So, once more,” she said. “No feelings. Facts.”

Denis folded his arms. “Fact number one: we crawled under the old transmission tower. Fact number two: we found tech there that had no right to be there under any normal law. Fact number three: next time we send in an archaeologist with a helmet.”

“That’s not a fact,” Tami said, though she gave a small smile. She grabbed the headphones hanging around her neck and turned her phone in her other hand. In her notes she had short points written down: metal boxes, unknown cables, blinking lights, a strange pressure in the air.

Viktor pushed one of his old wired earbuds back into his ear. “Those boxes were not normal transmitters. Some cables were unplugged, but I still felt… activity. Weak. Broken.”

“Signal?” Lea asked.

The boy was quiet for a moment. “More like its trace. Like after a storm, when you can still feel electricity in a socket, even if everything is off.”

That did not sound comforting. After the city blackout, when their phones had caught the zero signal, they had already learned that ordinary things could hide something strange. Even so, it was hard to accept that the tower on the edge of town was not just a broken building behind a fence.

“I saw the same symbol as on that panel,” Denis added. “A circle that looked like a broken zero.”

Tami lifted her phone. “I wrote it down. We all saw it, right?”

They nodded. That agreement calmed them more than any proof. If they had only imagined it, they would not all remember the same scratched button, the same blue diode, or the smell of dust mixed with ozone.

Then the air around them tightened.

It was not loud. No explosion, no light from the sky. Just a short pressure under the ribs, as if the city had held its breath for one second.

Lea jerked her head up. Along with the usual faint cyan threads of electricity she sensed in wires and lamps, something else appeared. The space under the shelter split into soft, dark layers. Every move Denis made left a trace there. Tami’s quick breathing showed up as faint circles in the air.

“Why… can I see sound?” Lea heard herself say.

Tami clutched her headphones tighter. “And why can I feel electricity?” She stretched her hand toward a lamp that was not lit. Between her fingers there seemed to be an invisible thread pulled tight. “It’s pressure. It’s coming from here to the box and then… there.” She pointed straight at the cable on the ground.

Denis stepped back. But his body moved faster than he wanted. He started to pull away and, in a split second, ended up two meters farther off, his shoulder hitting a metal post.

“Great,” he hissed. “My skip just opened its own account.”

Viktor pressed his palms to his temples. His pupils widened. “Too many layers. Mobile data, Wi-Fi, traffic lights, something from the tower… all at once. I can’t separate it.”

The impulse vanished as suddenly as it had come. Denis leaned against the post, Tami let go of the headphones, and Lea closed her eyes. Under her lids, the dark echoes of the space stayed for a few more seconds.

When Things Start to Change

“Okay,” she said, though her voice was not fully steady. “That was not normal, even by our already very not normal rules.”

“Maybe our powers just got a trial version swap,” Denis suggested.

No one laughed.

The next morning, they all acted like it was just a school day. The halls were full of wet jackets, the smell of sweet pastries, and voices bouncing off the linoleum floor. That noise bothered Lea the most. With every door slam, a dark, wavy map of the space opened in her vision, as if someone were drawing sound in charcoal right through the electrical lines.

During physics, she noticed a thin cyan thread under the old socket by the window. It should not have been there. It ran toward the wall and then disappeared under the floor.

At the same time, a distant whisper from the hallway passed through her. Not as words, but as shape. A thin, nervous tremor.

“Lea?” the teacher lifted her eyebrows. “Do you have something to say about the problem?”

The girl straightened. “That socket probably should not be used.”

The class laughed. The teacher looked at the socket, then at her. “That is a useful warning, but it does not solve the resistance of the wire.”

Lea lowered her eyes to her notebook. Her hand was trembling a little, even though she had not touched any power at all.

Meanwhile, Tami was sitting in another classroom during group work. Her classmate Klára was explaining something, but the words came in a strange way. Not as sound. More like points of tension appearing between the desks and moving toward her.

“Tami, are you listening?” Klára asked.

“Sure. It’s just… your voice today walks through space like a shopping cart with a bad wheel.”

Klára blinked. “What?”

At that moment, Tami got scared of her own confusion and instinctively turned on her silence. The sound around their table dropped. Pens stopped scratching. Laughter from the back rows was cut off as if someone had closed glass doors.

But then she could barely hear anything at all. A sharp ringing stayed in her ears.

Quickly, she let the field go. “Sorry. I think my brain glitched.”

“I can see that,” Klára muttered.

In the hallway, Denis turned a corner and someone called his name just then. He only meant to turn around. Instead, his skip triggered on its own. The started movement pushed him forward and sideways. He ended up by the projector stand, which swayed dangerously close to the floor.

He caught it at the last second.

“Nice parkour,” said a passing first-year student.

Denis forced a grin. “I’m training for the Olympics in saving school equipment.”

Still, when he turned away, his face was paler than usual.

In the computer room, Viktor lasted only ten minutes. Monitors, the router under the desk, phones in bags, the teacher’s wireless mouse, the signal from the street — everything pressed on him like a crowd that was too dense. He could not see messages or passwords. He could not hack anything, even if he wanted to. He only felt directions, density, and unpleasant layers of connection.

By one monitor, he got dizzy.

Lea, who had come in for a notebook, noticed how tightly he was gripping the edge of the desk. Without a word, she placed a bottle of water on the table.

“Outside?” she asked softly.

Viktor nodded.

During the big break, the four of them met by the vending machines. They had not planned it, but clearly the same need had brought them there to check if the others were still working normally. That was harder than it sounded.

An Important Moment

Two students from a nearby class were standing there too. One of them leaned by the window and talked about the old tower.

“They say something flashes there at night,” he said. “My cousin rode a bike past it and said he heard a siren.”

“Maybe his own imagination caught up with him,” Tami said too fast.

The pressure in the conversation suddenly hit her like a hard bump. She misjudged the pause, jumped into the other boy’s sentence, and her voice shot up higher than she wanted. “Or maybe there’s a secret lab there where they make mutants from the pastry vending machine.”

Silence fell. Not her silence. Just normal, awkward silence.

Denis laughed a second later, too loudly. “Exactly. And I’m the main mutant. See these reflexes?”

“You’re acting weird today,” said the classmate.

Lea bent down as if tying her shoelace. Under the machine she could see a faint electrical pull. It was not part of the socket. The thin thread led toward the window and then outside, toward the parking lot.

Viktor went pale. “Don’t turn around yet,” he whispered. “There’s something outside that is sending. Weak. But it’s watching movement.”

“A camera?” Tami asked.

“I don’t know. It’s not normal school Wi-Fi.”

Denis tried again to look amused. It did not work. “So we have a fan. That’s nice and not scary at all.”

Behind the glass of the parking lot, a figure in a dark jacket stood by a gray car. When Lea finally looked, the person was already walking away among the other people.

After lessons, nobody had to convince them to go back to the tower. It was not smart. They knew that. In episode six, they had made rules for themselves: do not use the powers just out of curiosity, do not go into danger alone, do not hide it from the others when the cost starts getting too high.

But now it was about more than curiosity.

On the way through the side street, Lea walked in front. Viktor stayed near her, but he did not look at his phone. Denis kept away from the curb and the railings, as if his own legs no longer belonged to him. Tami kept her headphones around her neck, even though she did not turn them on.

At the fence around the tower, the pressure came back.

This time it was stronger.

The cyan lines Lea usually sensed as calm threads in the cable routes broke into short sections. Between them, dark waves pulsed, exactly like the sound prints from the night before.

“Everything is breaking apart,” she said. “The current is there, but the rhythm is not its own.”

Tami lifted her hand. “I feel a direction. To the box by the gate. No, wait… from the box. Like it’s pushing us away.”

Denis made one careful step. His skip pulled him forward before he could stop the motion. He hit the fence with his shoulder and bounced back.

“That was not funny anymore,” he blurted out.

Viktor stopped, his eyes closed. “There’s a dense network here. The tower, devices underground, something by the road… and one more source. It’s moving.”

Lea headed for the technical box by the gate. “I’ll at least shut this off.”

“No,” Viktor said more sharply than usual. “Lea, please. We don’t know what it’s connected to. If you touch it, it could send more power through you than you can handle.”

“Someone has to do something.”

“We are already doing something,” Tami argued. Her voice was shaking with a kind of humor she did not try to force out this time. “I just don’t know what. And honestly, I can’t hear properly at all. Everything is muffled and at the same time there’s a whistle in my head.”

What Comes Next

Denis ran a hand through his hair. “Mine just starts my body before my brain. If this throws me into a fence one more time, I’ll look like an idiot in a safety video.”

Viktor opened his eyes. He was pale, but at last he looked at them. “It’s too much for me. I can’t tell which signal belongs to what. I need you to say things simply. One feeling. One idea.”

Lea went quiet. The plan she had been holding in her head fell apart. In the end, she gave a slow nod.

“Okay. New rule. Whoever feels something says it. Someone else says what we do with it.”

“So, team translation mode,” Tami said. “Less hero stuff, more subtitles.”

“Exactly,” Viktor agreed.

Tami took a breath. “The pressure goes from the box to the gate. If we get closer, it gets stronger.”

Lea looked at the fence. “Then we don’t go to the box. We move back along the fence to the right.”

“My movement wants to skip forward,” Denis reported.

“Then don’t start walking,” Lea told him. “Hold the railing. If you move, do it slowly and sideways.”

Viktor nodded. “The moving source is by the road. I can’t see it, but it’s turned toward us. If we stay by the fence, we’re easy to track.”

“Easy to track?” Denis repeated.

“Easy to follow,” Viktor corrected.

Together, they started to move right, close to one another. Tami did not use full silence. She only softened the squeal of the fence when Denis grabbed it. Her ears began to ring, but she handled it. Lea did not touch any wire. She only watched the threads and showed where the current was weakest. Viktor guided them by the pressure of the signals.

After a while, they were behind a low concrete wall that hid them from the road. The pressure eased. Denis sank down on his heels and took several slow breaths.

“It worked,” he said quietly.

“Almost,” Lea corrected. “But yes.”

Tami pressed a hand to her ear. “Next time I’m bringing a manual. Or at least the archaeologist’s helmet.”

As they left, Viktor looked back at the tower once more. “The signals were not changing by chance. They reacted to us. And that moving source stopped every time we stopped.”

Lea walked past a parked car. In the dark window she caught their reflection: four tired figures by the road, the tower behind them like a black line against the evening sky.

But for a split second, someone else appeared among them.

A silhouette stood farther off by the bus stop, still and too focused to be waiting for a bus. When Lea turned sharply, the street was empty.

On the metal gate of the tower, a small blue diode lit up.

It blinked once.

Then it blinked a second time, exactly in time with their steps.