The Zero Signal, Part 3: What a Touch Can Do

The Zero Signal, Part 3: What a Touch Can Do

The Story Begins

The corridor near the technical room was usually empty during the long break. Today, though, several students stood by the door because the lights above them kept flickering from white to yellow and back again.

Lea stopped by the window. For a moment, she thought her eyes were doing something strange again. Then she looked more closely.

Thin turquoise lines ran from the ceiling light to the open electrical panel. They were not bright like lightning. They were more like fine traces of light, visible only to her. One of them broke and skipped near the damaged panel.

"That doesn't look good," Viktor muttered beside her.

"Thanks for the expert report," she said without looking away.

A short crackling sound came from the technical room. The lights along the whole corridor went out. Someone near the stairs shouted, but a second later the lights came back on. This time, they flickered even harder.

The janitor appeared at the door with a flashlight in his hand. "Everyone out of the corridor. Now."

The crowd started moving away, slowly and unwillingly. But Lea saw that one shaky light line from the panel ran farther on, towards the sockets in the classrooms. If it snapped completely, half the floor would go dark. Maybe more.

Viktor caught her eye. He did not need to ask what she was thinking.

"Lea," he said quietly, "you don't have to do this."

The crackle came again. This time it was louder.

Before she could change her mind, she moved along the wall to the open panel. The metal cover hung crookedly. A thin cable with damaged insulation dangled beneath it.

"Hey!" the janitor called. "Don't touch that!"

Lea was already reaching out. She touched the cold metal beside the cable with her fingertips.

The light lines in her vision spread into a delicate web. She felt a faint tingling, nothing sharp, nothing overwhelming. The current had already split inside the device, running along dozens of small paths. One of them could be shifted. Just a little.

She held her breath and, as if with her palm, pushed the thin thread of light aside.

The flickering stopped.

An ordinary silence settled over the corridor. The lights shone steadily. Even the hum of the ventilation returned to the same rhythm as before.

Lea pulled her hand back at once. Her fingers shook so hard that she had to hide them in her jacket pocket. Pain flared behind her eyes, as if a lamp far too bright had switched on inside her head.

The janitor leaned into the panel, then looked at her. "You were lucky," he said, though he clearly was not sure what had happened. "Must have been a loose connection."

"Must have been," Lea repeated.

Viktor got her away before the janitor could ask any more questions. Only around the corner did she stop beside a noticeboard and close her eyes.

"Your hands are shaking," he said.

"I know."

"And your head?"

Lea nodded. "That too."

He was quiet for a moment. Then he casually pulled out an old notebook. "I don't want to turn this into a lab. But we should understand it."

She looked at him sharply. "That wasn't a demonstration for your notes."

"I know." He closed the notebook. "That's exactly why."

After school, they met in the old storage room behind the gym. It had probably once been a club room, but now it held only dusty chairs, boxes with faded labels, and a broken fan without blades. A small window near the ceiling let in grey afternoon light.

When Things Start to Change

Denis sat on a table, kicking a chair leg with the tip of his trainer. Tami played with the headphones hanging around her neck. Viktor stood by the door as if he expected someone to walk in at any second.

Lea stayed by the wall with her arms folded.

"So," Tami began, "you fixed an electrical panel with a touch today. Very casually. That's a pretty big level-up."

"I didn't fix it." Lea frowned. "It just stopped breaking for a moment."

"That's almost the definition of fixing," Denis said.

"Not if you don't know why it worked or what will break afterwards," Viktor said.

Tami looked at him. "You were born with a notebook in your head, weren't you?"

"No. I just don't want anyone ending up beside a broken panel with a worse problem than flickering lights."

The words hung in the air. Lea remembered the pressure in her head and the janitor's voice. If the current had not moved in the right direction, what would have happened? She did not know. And that was what angered her most.

"I'm not trying it again," she said.

Denis jumped down from the table. "You don't have to take apart a power station. We'll find something small."

"That coming from the person who jumps forward just to find out whether he'll hit a cupboard."

"It was one cupboard."

"Twice," Tami corrected him.

Viktor walked over to a box with an old extension lead on top. "We don't have to do anything today. But if we only wait for it to happen on its own, we won't have any control."

Lea drew breath, but he raised a hand.

"It's not pressure. At least it shouldn't be. More like an agreement." He looked at each of them. "Short. Safe. And whoever is testing their ability can say stop at any time. No arguing."

"And no heroic finale involving an ambulance," Tami added.

"That was always my plan," Denis said.

"That's exactly the problem," Lea snapped, though the corner of her mouth twitched for a moment.

At last, she nodded. "One try. Not ten."

Viktor carefully plugged an old desk lamp into the extension lead. Its bulb was weak and flickered a little. The cable's protective covering was damaged in one place, but no wires were exposed. They laid it on the wooden table anyway, and nobody touched it until Viktor unplugged it.

"When it's plugged in, only touch the lamp's metal casing," he said. "Not the cable. If you don't like it, let go."

"I know how letting go works," Lea muttered.

When Viktor plugged the lamp back in, thin turquoise threads appeared in her vision. They ran from the socket into the extension lead and on into the lamp. At the damaged spot, one line trembled just as it had at the panel that morning.

"Can you see anything?" Tami asked, more quietly than usual.

Lea nodded. She placed two fingers on the lamp's metal base.

A tingling ran up to her wrist. The thin line shifted aside. The bulb glowed brighter for a moment, then steadied.

"It's working," Denis breathed.

"Only for a second," Lea said.

She pulled her fingers away. The lamp began to flicker weakly again.

"Once more?" Viktor asked. There was no pressure in his voice. Just a question.

Lea stared at the lamp. Then she gave a brief nod.

The second contact lasted barely two seconds. The light line shifted obediently again, but pain shot from her palm to her temples. Her hand trembled. She jerked back so sharply that she knocked a screwdriver off the table.

An Important Moment

The metal clinked against the floor.

"Stop," she said.

Viktor pulled the plug at once. Tami stepped up to Lea, but did not take her hand. She simply stayed beside her.

"You're the colour of a wall," she observed.

"It's a trend," Lea replied through clenched teeth.

After a while, her breathing slowed. The trembling did not stop at once. Her head throbbed with every sound in the room.

Denis no longer looked amused. "Okay. Two tries are obviously the limit. Maybe one and a half."

"Not the limit," Lea corrected him. "Today's limit."

Viktor did not write it down. He only nodded.

Tami cleared her throat. "So, while we all look like broken equipment… can I try?"

She chose the corner of the room near the door. Outside in the corridor, someone was pulling a cart, and its wheels rattled unpleasantly over the tiles.

"Just that sound," she said. "I'll draw it in here. Into a small space."

She raised her hand. At first, nothing changed. Then the rattling faded. Not completely, but as if someone had closed thick doors between them and the corridor. The hum of the lamp disappeared too, along with the rustle of Denis's jacket and the distant voices.

The silence was suddenly too dense.

Tami frowned. The space around her hand seemed to swallow every small sound. Lea saw her lips moving, but she could not hear a single syllable.

After a moment, Tami lowered her hand.

The sounds returned all at once. The cart rattled loudly again, a door slammed somewhere, and Denis's sharp exhale sounded unpleasantly loud.

Tami clutched both ears. "Great. Now I've got a concert of mosquitoes in my head."

"Can you hear us?" Lea asked.

The girl tilted her head. "If you're speaking through an aquarium, then yes." She tried to smile, but did not quite manage it. "That silence was… too much. I don't know where I stopped holding it and started forcing it."

"Then don't force it," Denis said.

"Thanks, coach of life choices."

Despite the joke, Tami kept her headphones around her neck and spoke less than usual for the next few minutes.

That clearly was not enough for Denis. He stood at one end of the narrow clear stretch between the boxes. "My turn. Short run, no cupboards. I'm a grown man. What could go wrong?"

"Lots of things," Lea and Tami said at the same time.

He ran. After two steps, his movement skipped in a strange way. It was not disappearing. It was more as if someone had cut two seconds out of a video. Denis appeared a few metres farther on, still moving, and stopped short by the wall.

"See?" He turned with a grin. "Clean."

He tried it again. Then once more.

On the third jump, his eyes did not find the door straight after he landed. For a moment, he stared into the corner as if he expected something else to be there. His knees buckled only slightly, but Lea noticed.

"Enough," she said.

"I'm fine."

"No, you're not."

Denis took a step towards the table and hit the box that had been there all along with his shoulder. He looked at it in surprise.

"That was closer," he declared.

"No," Viktor replied. "You're just judging distance badly."

The boy leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. "My brain clearly has weak signal."

Tami smiled, then touched her ear and stopped. All four of them suddenly looked less like people with extraordinary abilities and more like a group who had tried to play a game without reading the instructions.

What Comes Next

Just then, footsteps sounded in the corridor.

Viktor switched off the lamp and pulled the cable from the table. Denis, still a little unsteady, kicked the screwdriver under a box. Tami raised her hand and dulled the sound near the door for a few seconds.

The handle moved.

Lea held her breath.

The door opened only a hand's width. The janitor peered inside. Distant noises could be heard behind him, but thanks to Tami there was an almost unnatural silence at the threshold.

"Is anyone in here?" he asked.

Tami quickly lowered her hand. The sound returned so suddenly that the janitor gave a small jerk of his head.

"We're looking for chairs for a school project," Viktor said calmly.

The janitor studied them suspiciously. Then he looked at the piled-up chairs by the wall. "Then take one and lock up after yourselves. This room isn't a playroom."

"Sure," Tami said too loudly.

When the door shut again, nobody moved for several seconds.

"Playroom," Denis whispered. "That sounded more suspicious than anything we were doing."

"Everything we were doing was pretty suspicious," Lea said.

Later, when Denis no longer felt as if the room was spinning and Tami could hear a little more clearly, Viktor took a small flashlight from his pocket. "I want to show you something. But only if you really don't want to go home."

Behind the storage room, a narrow service corridor led to an old electrical panel. It was low, metal, and scratched beneath layers of old paint. A yellowed label with numbers that were almost impossible to read hung from its door.

Viktor stopped in front of it and went pale.

"What is it?" Lea asked.

"Signals." He held his palm just above the metal without touching it. "A normal school network feels like pressure from several sides. Wi-Fi, phones, cables… this is different. It's weak, but it's still there."

Lea stepped closer. Inside the panel, she could see the familiar faint glow. It was not strong. But it repeated in regular, brief flashes.

Viktor closed his eyes. "I'll try to dim one nearby line. Just for a second."

"If you feel sick, we're stopping," Lea said.

He nodded.

The air around him seemed to thicken. Viktor frowned and made a brief movement with his palm. His phone on the table beside the panel lost its signal for a moment. The signal icon disappeared, then immediately returned.

The boy staggered.

"Stop," Lea said.

This time, he obeyed without protest. He leaned against the wall and took several slow breaths.

Tami shone her flashlight on the label. Beneath the dust, she found a small row of dots and dashes stamped directly into the metal. It was not writing. More like a service marking or an old test pattern.

Viktor took out his phone and opened the recording he had saved from the night of the city blackout. On the screen appeared the graph of the zero signal: a short flash, two gaps, a longer flash, three quick pulses.

Lea looked at the panel. Then at the screen.

"It's the same," she said.

Denis stopped leaning on the wall. "Not similar?"

"The same," Viktor repeated quietly.

Nobody laughed anymore.

They returned to the storage room and wrote several rules on the back of an old box with a marker. Short tests. Nobody continues after the word stop. No trying things alone. And if someone starts to feel sick, the others focus on the person, not the result.

Lea held the marker, but her hand still trembled slightly. For a while, she stared at what they had written.

The End of the Story

"I was scared that I nearly broke something today," she said. "Or that next time I'll break more."

"Maybe we will break something," Denis replied, surprisingly without irony. "But at least we won't make chaos separately."

Tami touched her headphones. "And we won't pretend the limit is just an annoying bug."

Viktor nodded. "We're not a problem that needs hiding. We just don't know exactly what happened to us yet."

Lea looked at him. Then she added the final point: Together.

As they left, Viktor took one more photo of the old label by the panel. On the dark screen of his phone, a small turquoise pulse lit up for a second between the dots and dashes.

Short. Two gaps. Longer. Three quick flashes.

And then it disappeared.