The Zero Signal, Part 9: When Powers Get Mixed Up

The Zero Signal, Part 9: When Powers Get Mixed Up

The Story Begins

At the shelter beside the old playground, not a single lamp was on. Yellow rectangles of light fell from the apartment-block windows onto the wet pavement. Lea stood by the wall, her hands tucked into the pockets of her black denim jacket, looking at the paper map Viktor had laid on the bench.

“So, once more,” she said. “No impressions. 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 business being there under any normal law. Fact number three: next time, we send in an archaeologist with a helmet.”

“That’s not a fact,” Tami snapped, though she smiled faintly. She gripped the headphones around her neck and turned her phone in her other hand. In her notes, she was writing short points: metal boxes, unknown cables, pulsing indicator lights, strange pressure in the air.

Viktor pushed one of his old wired earbuds back into his ear. “Those boxes weren’t ordinary transmitters. Some of the cables were disconnected, but I could still feel… activity. Weak. Intermittent.”

“A 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 though everything is switched off.”

That did not sound comforting. After the citywide blackout, when their phones had picked up the zero signal, they had grown used to ordinary things hiding something alien. Even so, it was hard to accept that the tower at the edge of town was more than just a neglected structure behind a fence.

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

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

They nodded. That shared memory calmed them more than any proof could have. If they had 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 brief pressure beneath their ribs, as if the city had held its breath for a moment.

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

“Why… can I see sound?” she managed.

Tami clutched the headphones around her neck more tightly. “And why can I feel electricity?” She reached toward an unlit lamp. Between her fingers, an invisible thread seemed stretched tight. “It’s pressure. It goes from here to the box and then… there.” She pointed directly at the cable on the ground.

Denis took a step back. But his body moved faster than he intended. He began to retreat and, a fraction of a second later, was two metres away, his shoulder striking 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 them.”

The impulse vanished as suddenly as it had come. Denis leaned against the post, Tami released her headphones, and Lea closed her eyes. For a few moments, dark echoes of the space remained behind her eyelids.

When Things Start to Change

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

“Maybe our powers just swapped trial versions,” Denis suggested.

No one laughed.

The next morning, they all pretended it was just another school day. The halls were full of wet jackets, the smell of sweet pastries, and voices bouncing off the linoleum. The noise bothered Lea most. With every door slam, a dark, wavering map of the space opened in her vision, as if someone were sketching sound in charcoal straight across the electrical lines.

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

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

“Lea?” The teacher raised an eyebrow. “Do you have something to add to the problem?”

The girl straightened. “That socket probably shouldn’t be used.”

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

Lea lowered her eyes to her notebook. Her hand trembled slightly, although she had not touched any energy at all.

Meanwhile, Tami was in a classroom two doors down, doing group work. Her classmate Klára was explaining something, but the words came strangely. 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 is moving through space today like a shopping cart with a crooked wheel.”

Klára blinked. “What?”

At that moment, Tami was frightened by her own confusion and instinctively activated her silence. The sound around their table dulled. Pencils stopped scratching, and laughter from the back rows cut off as if someone had shut glass doors.

But Tami could barely hear anything at all. A sharp ringing remained in her ears.

She quickly released the field. “Sorry. I think something in my brain skipped.”

“I can see that,” Klára muttered.

In the hallway, Denis turned a corner just as someone called to him. He only meant to turn around. Instead, his skip triggered on its own. The momentum hurled him forward and sideways. He ended up beside a projector stand, which swayed dangerously close to the floor.

He caught it at the last second.

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

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

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

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

Beside one monitor, his head began to spin.

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

“Outside?” she asked softly.

Viktor nodded.

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

An Important Moment

Two students from the next class were hanging around the machines as well. One leaned against the window and was talking about the old tower.

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

“Maybe his imagination just caught up with him,” Tami replied too quickly.

The compressed tone of the conversation suddenly became a sharp impact to her. She misjudged the pause, cut into the other boy’s sentence, and her voice rose higher than she meant it to. “Or maybe it’s a secret laboratory where they make mutants out of the baguette vending machine.”

Silence fell. Not her silence—ordinary, uncomfortable silence.

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

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

Lea bent down as if tying her shoelace. Beneath the vending machine, she saw a faint electrical pull. It was not part of the socket. A thin thread led toward the window and then outside, into the parking lot.

Viktor went pale. “Don’t turn around yet,” he whispered. “There’s something outside transmitting. It’s weak, but it’s tracking movement.”

“A camera?” Tami asked.

“I don’t know. It isn’t 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.”

Beyond the parking-lot windows, a figure in a dark jacket stood beside a grey car. When Lea finally looked, the person was already walking away among the other people.

After school, no one had to persuade them to return to the tower. It was not smart. They knew that. In episode six, they had promised each other certain boundaries: do not use their powers merely out of curiosity, do not go into danger alone, and do not hide it from the others when the cost starts becoming too high.

But this was about more than curiosity now.

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

At the fence around the tower, the pressure returned.

This time, it was stronger.

The cyan lines Lea usually sensed as calm threads inside cable conduits tore into short sections. Dark waves pulsed between them, exactly like the sound imprints from the previous evening.

“Everything is coming apart,” she said. “The current is there, but the rhythm isn’t its own.”

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

Denis took one careful step. His skip pulled him forward before he could stop the movement. His shoulder struck the wire fence, and he bounced back.

“That wasn’t funny anymore,” he blurted.

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

Lea headed for the utility box by the gate. “I’ll try to switch off at least this.”

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

“Someone has to do something.”

“We are doing something already,” Tami argued. Her voice trembled with humour that, this time, she did not try to force out. “I just don’t know what. And honestly, I can barely hear properly. 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. “My body starts moving before my brain does. If it throws me into the fence one more time, I’ll look like an idiot in a workplace-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 speak simply. One sensation. One instruction.”

Lea fell silent. The plan she had been trying to hold in her head scattered. At last, she nodded slowly.

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

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

“Exactly,” Viktor agreed.

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

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

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

“Don’t start walking,” Lea told him. “Hold on to 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 facing this way. If we stay by the fence, we’re easy to track.”

“Easy to track?” Denis repeated.

“Easy to follow,” Viktor corrected.

Together, they began edging to the right, close to one another. Tami did not use her silence at full strength; she only softened the squeal of the wire fence when Denis grabbed it. Her ears began to ring, but she managed. Lea did not touch a single wire. She only watched the threads and pointed out where the current was weakest. Viktor guided them by the pressure of the signals.

Soon, they were behind a low concrete wall that hid them from the road. The impulse eased. Denis sank back onto his heels and took several calm breaths.

“It worked,” he said quietly.

“Almost,” Lea corrected him. “But yes.”

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

As they left, Viktor looked back at the tower once more. “The signals weren’t changing at random. They reacted to us. And that moving source stopped every time we stopped.”

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

But for a fraction of a second, someone else appeared among them.

A silhouette stood farther away by the bus stop, still and too intent to be waiting for a bus. When Lea spun around, the street was empty.

A small blue diode lit up on the tower’s metal gate.

It blinked once.

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