The Zero Signal, Part 5: The City Is Listening

The Zero Signal, Part 5: The City Is Listening

The Story Begins

Viktor stood under a streetlamp near the apartment blocks and pretended he was only waiting for a bus. In truth, he held his phone in one hand, wore old wired earbuds, and kept his eyes on the blank screen showing a connection map.

People with dogs walked past him. Music played from an open window on the third floor, and a green light blinked at the public Wi-Fi point. Normal things. They transmitted, responded, and interfered with one another.

For Viktor, though, signals were not just bars on a screen. He felt them as pressure in the air. Wi-Fi had soft, wide edges. Mobile data pushed forward fast and nervous. Bluetooth felt like small pinpricks near his shoulders.

Among all that, the pattern appeared again.

Once. Silence. A second time.

It was not a message. It was not even ordinary noise. It sounded briefly, then vanished, and after a few seconds it returned at exactly the same interval. Only the pressure shifted a little farther each time, as if something were pointing the way.

Viktor stepped two paces to the side. The pattern moved too.

He frowned and opened the list of available networks. Nothing strange. Home routers, the city Wi-Fi, one mobile hotspot called Miro_123. He checked the antenna on the roof of the building across the street. Then the small transmitter box by the crossroads.

The pattern repeated.

This time he felt it more clearly. It was pulling out of the city, not toward the center.

The boy slid one earbud out. The street sounded normal, almost boring. A bus braked at the stop, its doors hissed, and someone argued on the phone. Under all that, though, he felt a steady, cold pulse.

“That’s not random,” he said quietly.

He tried to follow the pattern for longer. At once, the pressure changed. Dozens of other networks rushed into his awareness at the same time, like too many stations playing through one radio. Viktor blinked, stepped back to the wall, and quickly let go of his focus.

His heart was beating a little faster.

He did not know exactly what he had found. He only knew it was connected to that blackout. To the night when their phones caught the pulse after which nothing was quite normal anymore.

And he also knew that this time, their trail had not found them by accident.

That afternoon, all four of them sat on the school steps. The sun was already low, and long shadows from the railing cut the pavement into thin strips. Viktor held up his phone so the others could see.

“This is where it starts,” he said, pointing to the center of the city. “Then it moves here. Not straight. More like… in sections.”

Lea leaned closer. Her straight dark hair slid over the shoulder of her black denim jacket. “That’s the edge near the old industrial area?”

“Probably. The map shows an old transmission tower there.”

Denis snorted. He sat one step lower and tapped a pebble with the toe of his white trainer. “Great. A tower that sends secret ghosts. Sounds extremely normal.”

“You don’t have to come,” Lea said without looking at him.

“I didn’t say that.”

Tami tucked her hands into the sleeves of her oversized dark green hoodie. Her headphones hung around her neck. “So what do we actually have? A dot on a map and Viktor’s feeling of pressure?”

For a moment, Viktor hesitated. “Not just a feeling. It’s a repeating pattern. Under the normal traffic. I just can’t read it yet.”

When Things Start to Change

“Can you find it?” Lea asked.

“Partly. If I try too long, everything else gets too loud.”

Denis raised an eyebrow. “And that means?”

“That the exact position may be off.” Viktor looked at the map, not at them. “We might end up walking through wet grass by a dead tower and finding only a fence.”

“That is a surprisingly weak sales pitch,” Tami said.

Even with the joke, she did not sound cheerful. She glanced toward the road behind the school, as if she were already counting how long it would take to get there and back.

Lea crossed her legs. “If we go, then no heroic ideas. No climbing fences. No trying powers just because someone is bored. And we turn back at seven.”

“At seven?” Denis looked offended. “Did you just open a travel agency?”

“I have a younger brother at home. If I don’t come back, my mom starts asking questions. And when she starts asking, she asks very specific questions.”

Tami nodded. “I can just say I’m at a classmate’s place. The problem is when my mom asks which one. I can’t lie with details. Once I said I was at Zuzka’s, and my mom asked whether they had fixed the elevator in her building yet. They didn’t even have an elevator.”

Denis gave a short smile, then it disappeared. “Dad expects me to help in the warehouse tonight. So, great. Secret tower plus a family audit.”

Viktor nervously rubbed the cable of his earbuds. “We don’t have to go. I just… think we should know where it’s coming from.”

This time nobody answered right away.

At last, Lea stood up. “We’re going. But together. And if something feels wrong, we turn back. No arguing.”

“That last part is probably the most sci-fi thing in the whole plan,” Denis said.

Less than an hour later, they were walking through the city. First past shops and bus stops, then between gray apartment blocks where wet towels still hung from balconies after the rain. The familiar streets changed when they were not simply heading home. Every turn could be the right one or a complete waste of time.

Viktor walked a little behind the others. Now and then he stopped, closed his eyes, and turned his head as if he were listening to a sound nobody else could hear.

“Is it still there?” Tami asked.

“Yes. Weaker, but… the direction is holding.”

At a busier road, a long line of cars delayed them. A bus passed between them, a tram rang its bell, and metal clanged from a nearby construction site.

“If we go through there, it’ll be shorter,” Tami suggested, pointing to a narrow passage between garages.

Lea looked into the shadows between the buildings. “Is anyone there?”

“Two people by the bins. And they’re talking louder than a music festival.” Tami pressed her fingers to her neck. “I can quiet it down for a little while.”

“Only for a little while,” Viktor warned.

She smiled with one corner of her mouth. “Yes, sir. Technical supervisor.”

They entered the passage. Tami spread out her hand, and the air around them changed. Not completely. Everything simply lost its sharp edges. Their steps softened. The roar of the road seemed to remain behind thick glass. Even Denis’s jacket rustle sounded far away.

They passed the men by the bins without anyone turning toward them.

A few seconds later, it was over. Tami stopped and clutched one ear.

“You okay?” Lea asked.

“Sure. My head is just ringing, like when you get water in your ears.”

“You don’t have to use it again,” Lea said.

An Important Moment

“I wasn’t planning to. I’m not a battery-powered sound switch.”

Later, they came to an empty parking lot near the warehouses. Between the parked vans, it was hard to see, and the route around looked longer than they had expected.

Denis looked around. “I’ll run to that corner. See if we can get past the fence.”

“Normally,” Lea said.

“Normally would take a full five seconds. Tragic.”

He ran. After two steps, his movement broke strangely. It was not a jump through space, more like a missing frame in a video. Suddenly he was a few meters farther on, by the corner of a van, exactly in the direction he had been running.

Right after that, he grabbed the hood of a car.

“Denis?” Tami called.

The boy closed his eyes. “Nothing. The parking lot just spun for a moment. And my legs feel like they’re half a second behind me.”

“Then don’t skip anymore,” Lea said.

“It was one short skip.”

“And that was enough.”

Denis looked at her, ready to snap back. Then he only nodded. “There’s a passage around the corner. But I really don’t want to find out what twenty of these skips in a row would look like.”

They went on more quietly. Meanwhile, the sky turned deep blue, and the industrial area ahead looked like a different city. Fewer windows, more wires, fences, and empty roads.

At a large crossroads, Viktor suddenly stopped.

“What is it?” Lea turned around.

“This is where it shifts.”

Everything around him pressed in at once. Cables hung over the road, small antennas stood on warehouse roofs, and various devices blinked near the traffic lights. Phones in the hands of people waiting to cross, car navigation systems, wireless sensors by the gate. All of it crowded into his awareness at once.

He tried to filter out the regular networks.

The pressure grew stronger.

First, it hurt behind his eyes. Then it felt as if the air above the crossroads were full of invisible walls moving against one another. The pattern was somewhere between them, but he could not grasp it.

“Viktor,” Tami said. “Hey. Look at me.”

The boy took a step back. Then another. In the end, he sat down on a low concrete wall by the bus stop and pressed his palm to his forehead.

Lea crouched beside him. “Enough. Stop looking for it.”

“It’s close,” he breathed. “I just don’t know from where. There’s too much… everything.”

“Then it won’t be exact today,” she said calmly.

“It might lead us the wrong way.”

“Maybe.”

She did not say it harshly. She simply placed the word between them like a fact.

Denis stood beside them in unusual silence. A moment later, he pulled Viktor’s phone from his hand before it could fall. “Give me that. At least a bus won’t crush it.”

Tami leaned against a pole. The ringing in her ears had clearly not gone away, but she said nothing.

After a few minutes, Viktor lifted his head. Some color had returned to his face, though his eyes were still tired. “The direction is there.” He pointed beyond the crossroads, toward a dark line of trees at the edge of the area. “I’m not sure how far.”

Lea stood up. “That’s enough. We’ll go slowly.”

Past the last warehouse, the city no longer looked like a city. The road narrowed, the lamps stood farther apart, and weeds grew through cracks in the asphalt. To the left stretched an old fenced-off area.

What Comes Next

And above it stood the tower.

It was taller than any of them had imagined. The metal structure rose from the dark grounds, rusty at the edges but still sturdy. On a map it might have looked like a small symbol. Here it looked like something that had not belonged there for years.

“Is that supposed to be inactive?” Tami whispered.

Viktor nodded slowly.

The area around it was strangely quiet. Not quiet like after Tami’s power. This quiet was wider and deeper. The phone in Denis’s hand lost its signal for a moment. Music from Tami’s headphones, which she had started by accident, froze and then fell silent.

A chill ran over Viktor’s shoulders. “There’s nothing here.”

“But the tower is right there,” Denis said.

“I mean signal-wise. It’s empty. And it shouldn’t be.”

Lea moved closer to the fence. Behind it lay old cables, some buried in the ground, others coiled near a low technical building. On a rusty sign was a warning that was almost impossible to read, and beneath it, a faded symbol none of them knew.

Tami walked along the fence as far as the overgrown path allowed. “This wasn’t just an ordinary transmitter. Look at those feed lines. They’re thicker than the cables by the station.”

Higher up on the structure, something flickered.

Lea looked up. Between the metal crossbars, a weak bluish light flashed. Once, then it went out. A few seconds later, it appeared again.

“Did you see that?” Viktor asked.

“Yes.”

Denis turned toward the road. “Fine. We have a tower that isn’t supposed to work, but it’s blinking. Seems like a pretty good time to leave.”

Nobody moved.

By the service entrance, there was a small opening in the fence through which they could see the metal door of the technical building. The lock looked old. Too old for something that still used electricity.

Viktor stepped forward and stopped at once. “The signal doesn’t spread here.”

“What does it do?” Lea asked.

“It bounces back. Like… like there’s something underground or inside that building sending it back.”

At that moment, there was a soft click.

All of them froze.

A single tiny indicator light came on beside the door. The light was dull, almost tired, but it was definitely there. A blue dot flashed twice.

Then it went dark.

Lea grabbed Viktor’s sleeve at once and pulled him away from the fence. “Back.”

“Maybe it’s residual power,” Denis said, though he sounded less sure than usual.

“After years?” Tami covered one ear. “And I heard a tone.”

“What kind of tone?”

The girl looked at the tower. “Very thin. It came from there. Like someone calling from the other side of a tunnel, and you can’t tell whether it’s a voice or an echo.”

Viktor took a breath. The pressure that had led him here was weak now, but clear. The tower was not dead. It was only hiding beneath something that muffled its traces.

“It answered us,” he said.

Denis shook his head. “Or your phone. Or Tami’s headphones. Or the wind. I would really appreciate a version where it isn’t about us.”

“None of those options are good,” Lea said.

They moved back into the shadow by the fence. Going inside was not smart. They had no flashlights, no plan, and no idea what they would do if the door really opened. On top of that, Viktor could feel that another attempt to focus might knock him down again.

The End of the Story

“We’re going back,” Lea decided. “Tomorrow we’ll find out who owns the land. And next time, we’ll come prepared.”

Tami looked at the tower, then at her ringing ears. “Next time I’m bringing a flashlight, water, and someone who can lie to parents with details.”

“So not you,” Denis said.

“Exactly.”

Viktor looked back one more time. High above them, between the crossbars, a blue flash appeared. Short. Regular.

Just then, Lea raised her hand.

“Quiet.”

By the road, behind the trees, a light appeared. First faint, then brighter. A car moved slowly, with its high beams off. It did not stop on the main road, though. It turned onto the old service road leading to the tower.

Denis pressed himself to the fence. “That wasn’t here before.”

Without a word, Tami spread her hand. The sounds around them faded: the rustle of weeds, their breathing, the distant engine. The ringing in her ears grew worse, and it showed on her face, but she held on.

Lea pulled them farther along the fence, low to the ground and out of the open. Viktor followed, still feeling the thin pressure from the tower against his back.

The car stopped by the gate.

In the dark, the doors opened.

And the blue indicator by the service entrance lit up again.