The Zero Signal, Part 4: The Invisible Minute

The Zero Signal, Part 4: The Invisible Minute

The Story Begins

By eight in the morning, the school hall was already stifling, tense as before a test. A large screen hung on the wall. Beneath it stood two borrowed speakers, while teachers, ninth-graders, and members of the school media club hovered around a table with a laptop.

Today was the project presentation for parents, the city office, and a few people from a local company. For most of the school, it meant missing regular lessons. For those who had worked on the projects for weeks, it meant far more.

“If this goes wrong, Mr. Kováč will be giving a funeral speech over the projector,” Tami whispered, adjusting the headphones around her neck.

The image on the screen had just jumped. For a second, a presentation about cleaning the river appeared, then a green chart, then grey stripes. The speakers crackled so sharply that several people flinched.

“That wasn’t normal,” Viktor said quietly.

He stood by the technical table, gripping a cable between his fingers. There was no panic on his face, only growing concentration. Around him buzzed mobile phones, the school Wi-Fi, wireless microphones, and who knew what else. To Viktor, it was more than noise. He sensed signals as pressure in the air, as if invisible bubbles were filling the room and pressing against one another.

“Is there too much interference?” Lea asked.

“Yes. But this isn’t ordinary interference.” He looked at the wall sockets. “Something keeps coming back. At regular intervals.”

Mr. Kováč bent over the laptop and tapped the keys nervously. “Where is the network administrator? And why isn’t even the backup cable working?”

Denis stood a little apart, his hands in his jacket pockets. Outwardly, he looked as though it had nothing to do with him. But his gaze kept darting from the projector to the cables, from the doors to the technical table.

“You’ve got about three options,” he said. “Turn it off, turn it on, or stare at it for a long time. So far, we’re doing all three at once.”

Lea looked at him over her shoulder. “Don’t try to be funny.”

“I’m not trying. I’m just mapping the situation.”

Just then, the image went completely dark. An unhappy murmur rose in the hall. Through the doors, they could already hear parents arriving.

Denis straightened. “Fine. Then let’s speed this up.”

Lea caught his sleeve. “What exactly do you want to speed up?”

“Everything. The cable is at the back, the second adapter is in storage, and the administrator is somewhere at the other end of the building. By the time those people agree on anything, it’ll be lunchtime.”

“You’re not a courier with turbo mode,” she reminded him.

“Maybe I’ve just been thinking about it the wrong way.” Denis gently slipped free of her grasp. “After the last few attempts, I found something out. If I repeat it more often, I can catch the moment better. Like the skip… charges up.”

Tami raised an eyebrow. “That sounds like the line in a game right before a red warning appears and half your health bar vanishes.”

“Very encouraging.”

Viktor let go of the cable. “I’m not sure it’s charging. I think you’re only getting used to the movement. And if you overdo it, you could get stuck in—”

“I know what happened last time,” Denis cut in. “I haven’t forgotten.”

Then he pushed away from the wall and ran down the corridor.

His ability was not teleportation. He did not vanish in a flash and appear on the other side of the building. When he moved in a certain direction, his body seemed to skip briefly forward along its own path. Two steps became six. With the right timing, it looked almost natural.

When Things Start to Change

First, he returned with an extension lead. A moment later, he appeared by the open storage room, where a teacher was carrying a box of spare adapters. Then he dashed past the doors and caught a falling microphone stand before it hit the floor.

“See?” he called over his shoulder. “It works.”

“Your luck works,” Lea shot back.

Meanwhile, an indicator light on the technical table came on, then went out at once. Mr. Kováč plugged in the second adapter. The projector started for three seconds, but instead of an image, shaky blue lines appeared on the screen.

Viktor pressed a hand to his temple. “That pressure again.”

“Then we’ll disconnect it,” Denis said.

“Wait,” Lea said. “First find out what’s plugged in where.”

But he was already moving.

He skipped to the cables by the wall, then to the doors to push a small table out of the way, and immediately back again. He wanted to fetch a screwdriver. He wanted to stop a teacher who was about to unplug everything at once. He wanted to reach the laptop before the image vanished again.

After the third quick skip, the floor seemed to tilt beneath him.

Not really. At least, that was what he told himself at first. But the doors, which had been on his left a moment ago, seemed too far away. Mr. Kováč’s voice came from somewhere behind him, although the teacher was standing directly in front of him.

Denis stopped so sharply that his trainers skidded on the linoleum.

“Where is…” he began, but did not finish.

The corridor was full of familiar things: a noticeboard covered in photos, a fire extinguisher, a window, a drinks machine. Yet none of it seemed to be in the right place. The space around him was not moving, but his brain seemed unable to decide from which direction things were reaching him.

Lea found him leaning against the wall.

“Denis?”

“I’m fine.”

“Were you telling that to the wall or to me?”

The boy closed his eyes. “Where are the hall doors?”

Tami, who had run after Lea, stopped smiling. The doors were barely two metres away from him.

“To the right,” she said more gently. “All the way to the right. Don’t do anything, okay?”

“I’m not doing anything.” Denis tried to pull away from the wall, but immediately grabbed it again. “Everything just… got mixed up.”

Viktor was the last to reach them. In the crowded corridor, he looked paler than usual. “Don’t skip again. Please. I can feel several movement trails from you. It’s like you’re in several places at once, but not properly.”

“Perfect,” Denis muttered. “I’m a broken map.”

Another crackle sounded from the hall. Then someone called out that the presentation would begin in ten minutes.

Lea turned towards the technical table. For a moment, she hesitated. She could stay with Denis and make sure he was not getting worse. Or she could run back and save the projector. Neither choice was good.

“Tami, stay with him,” she decided at last. “Viktor, come with me. Slowly.”

“Slow is an underrated luxury today,” Denis said, though his voice trembled.

There were more cables by the sockets than there had been that morning. Someone had connected a backup lamp, someone else a charger, and an extension reel lay beside them, with its cable running beneath the carpet. Lea bent down.

To her eyes, the current appeared as delicate cyan threads. They were not bright like lightning. They resembled thin lines of light flickering beneath the plastic and through the copper wires.

“Here,” she said.

One cable was stretched so tight that its plug sat only halfway in the socket. Every time the carpet shifted, the connection broke for a fraction of a second. Yet from time to time, a faint bluish flash appeared around it, coming from neither the adapter nor the socket.

An Important Moment

Lea reached towards it, but did not touch it straight away.

“Can you see it?” she asked Viktor.

“Not with my eyes.” He covered one ear with an old headphone, though nothing was playing through it. “But yes. Whenever it flashes, it squeezes all the signals in the room together for a second. As if someone were closing a fist.”

The flash came again.

Viktor flinched and had to brace himself against the table. “That isn’t the school Wi-Fi.”

“Wonderful,” Lea muttered. “An ordinary fault would have been far too boring.”

Carefully, she placed two fingers on the plastic cover of the power strip. Cyan lines traced themselves around her knuckles for a moment. She could not feel power she might create. Only the current that already existed, and its reluctant direction.

“I need nobody to move the cable,” she said.

Tami appeared in the doorway. “Denis is sitting down. He’s staring at the drinks machine and says he’s never seen it before.”

“Can you hear us?” Lea asked.

The red-haired girl nodded, then pressed a hand to her ear. “For now. Everyone here is shouting at once.”

The hall was filling up. Teachers were trying to seat the guests, students were asking what was happening, and every few moments a speaker spat out a brief, unpleasant crackle.

Tami took a breath. “Give me half a minute. Maybe a minute, if my head doesn’t go on holiday.”

She spread her hands at her sides.

The sound did not disappear completely. It only drew back around the technical table, as if someone had thrown a thick blanket over the noise. Voices suddenly sounded distant. The crackling faded. Lea could hear her own breathing and the soft rustle of Viktor’s sleeve.

“Now,” she said.

Viktor pulled the taut cable out by only a few centimetres so it would not snap. Lea redirected the weak current from one free socket into the extension lead. It was not an elegant solution. More of a makeshift workaround that the school administrator probably would not have wanted to see. But the projector came on.

The opening image of the river appeared on the screen.

Tami dropped her hands at once. The sounds returned all at once, and the girl frowned as though someone had switched on music directly inside her head.

“Ugh,” she said. “Now I can even hear someone chewing gum two rows away.”

“Is it temporary?” Lea asked.

“I hope so. Otherwise I’ll start hating humanity before lunch.”

The presentation began late. The speakers were not working perfectly, so the presenter had to speak more loudly. The image flickered now and then, but stayed on the screen. Some parents applauded after the first successful slide, as though they had just saved the whole city.

Meanwhile, Lea went back to Denis. He sat on a bench in the corridor, his elbows on his knees. Viktor handed him a bottle of water, and Denis held it for a while as if he were not sure it was truly in his hand.

“I know where I am now,” he said without greeting.

“That’s a good start,” Lea replied.

Denis glanced towards the hall. “Is it working?”

“More or less. So exactly as well as most school technology works.”

Tami sat beside him and carefully massaged her ear. “Without your extra-fast chaos, it might even have worked three-quarters of the way.”

He looked ready to defend himself. It showed on his face. An ironic answer flickered in his eyes, but this time he did not let it out.

“I thought that if I did it more often, I’d get into a rhythm,” he said at last. “But after a while, I couldn’t tell what was before and what was now. Where I ended. Where I began.”

What Comes Next

Viktor sat down on the edge of the bench. “It isn’t your fault that you have a limit.”

“It’s my fault that I pretended I didn’t.”

For a while, the corridor was quiet. Not Tami’s kind of silence, made by her power. Just an ordinary space between words.

Lea leaned against the wall. “Next time, you’ll say it sooner.”

Denis looked at her. “Next time?”

“Next time, something will definitely go wrong again. It’s a school.”

Tami smiled, although it was still a little crooked. “And we’ll have a plan. One where Denis doesn’t do eight things at once and I don’t have to silence the whole building.”

“I only silenced part of the building,” she corrected herself. “Technically.”

“Technically, you were great,” Viktor said.

Applause came from the hall. The river-cleaning presentation had just ended, and the next team was beginning. Mr. Kováč walked down the corridor, noticed the four of them by the bench, and said only in a tired voice, “I don’t know who did what, but thank you for making it work at least.”

After he left, Denis lowered his eyes to his trainers. “You don’t have to tell him I broke myself on my own ability.”

“We won’t,” Lea said. “But you won’t call it breaking yourself, either. You only pushed past your limit.”

“That sounds almost normal.”

“It isn’t normal,” Viktor said. “But it doesn’t have to be shameful.”

A little later, all four of them returned to the hall doors. The projector was still shining. The socket had been secured with tape, and a temporary cable cover ran over the wires. The network administrator had finally arrived with a case, looking confused, and immediately began checking the adapter.

But Lea looked once more at the power strip.

A thin cyan flash flickered across its surface. It was so quick that someone might have taken it for light reflected from the screen. But Viktor froze beside her.

“Did you feel that?” she asked.

He nodded. “It was the same pressure. Brief. And it went… somewhere outside.”

Denis did not lunge for the cables or run after the source. He only stood between them, still a little unsteady on his feet.

“So the school equipment is waving at us now?”

Tami looked at the flickering projector. “I hope not. Because I am not having another conversation with electricity today.”

Outside the windows, an ambulance crossed the grey courtyard without its siren. In the hall, the presentation continued, someone laughed, and a photograph of the river at sunset appeared on the screen.

Then the flash disappeared.

Only Viktor kept staring towards the cables for a while longer, as if something beneath the school or above the city had just answered quietly.