The Zero Signal, Part 6: The Cost of a Power

The Zero Signal, Part 6: The Cost of a Power

The Story Begins

After the final bell, the school hallway poured out like water from a burst pipe. Doors slammed, someone laughed far too loudly, and people were already lining up at the bus stop outside the building.

Lea pulled the sleeves of her black denim jacket down over her hands. Between the ad boards and the shelter roof, she could see faint blue threads of electricity. The lights over the road, the phones in students’ hands, the display on the departing bus. Everything was connected to everything else.

"I feel like the city is speedrunning its way into a migraine today," Tami said, sliding her canvas headphones lower around her neck.

"You get migraines from Monday too," Denis shot back.

"Monday deserves one."

Viktor stood a little apart. Old wired earbuds hung from the pockets of his dark-blue shirt as his gaze moved over the street. The density of signals at the stop pressed on him like the air before a storm. Wi-Fi from the café, data from dozens of phones, buses linked to dispatch. It all blurred together in an unpleasant hiss.

"We shouldn’t stay here long," he said quietly. "It’s… crowded."

That was when Tami stopped.

Nina from the other class stood by the glass wall of the shelter. The small girl with the blue backpack gripped its strap so hard that her fingers had gone pale. Three older boys were hanging around in front of her. They were not hitting her or touching her, but they stood too close. One copied her shaky voice, another was filming on his phone, and the third laughed hard enough to make several people turn around.

"Go on, say it again," the boy in the red cap taunted. "Say the noise makes your head spin."

Nina opened her mouth, but no sound came out. A bus rounded the bend with its brakes screeching. Someone by the ticket machine shouted to a friend. Noise pressed in from every side, and the girl curled in on herself.

Lea noticed that Nina had begun breathing fast and shallow.

"Tami," she warned. "Wait."

But the copper-haired girl was already stepping forward.

"Hey," she called. "If you want to make content, at least make something that doesn’t look like a broken advert for boredom."

The boy with the phone looked at her. "What’s it to you?"

"Today? Plenty."

The crowd at the stop shifted. Denis breathed out through his nose, as if he had expected exactly this.

"This is going to be super subtle," he muttered.

Tami stepped between Nina and the boys. At first, she only wanted to drown out their voices. A small space, only a few steps around her. She had done it before: muffled a classroom when someone was shouting, or sent sound away from the teachers’ door.

But Nina trembled again. The bus noise, the people, the laughter, the girl’s own fear — all of it clung to Tami at once.

And she pushed harder.

The sound did not stop with a blast or a flash. It simply seemed to break.

A moment earlier, the stop had been full of clatter. Then the bustle changed into a thick, unnatural silence. Tami felt the space around her widen. Not two metres. Not five.

The entire bus stop went silent.

The boy in the red cap moved his lips, but no one could hear him. The bus glided along the kerb without a squeal. Its doors opened, but their hiss had vanished. Even the lights of cars beyond the glass wall seemed farther away, as if the city lay beneath a thick layer of water.

When Things Start to Change

Nina drew in a sharp breath. She looked at Tami, who now spoke slowly so the girl could understand without normal sound.

"Look at me," she said. She could hear her own voice only faintly, as though through a pillow. "Breathe in. Good. Once more. You don’t have to explain anything."

The girl nodded. After a moment, her shoulders stopped rising in jerks.

Meanwhile, the three boys looked far less brave. Without laughter and without their own voices, they suddenly looked rather foolish. One put his phone away. Another said something to the others, but when he could not hear even himself, he only frowned. At last, all three backed away and disappeared among the people boarding the bus.

Lea watched Tami, tension written across her face. The blue threads of electricity around the stop were still there, but it was as if sound had been cut loose from them. Denis took a step forward, ready to jump over to them if something went wrong. The pressure of the signals changed abruptly for Viktor. It was not weaker. It was strangely flat, like someone had muted a video while the picture kept playing.

"Tami, enough," Lea said.

Tami did not hear her.

Only when Lea touched her shoulder did the girl jerk her head up. She tried to pull the field back. She imagined rolling the silence up like a carpet. Instead, a deep pressure spread through her head.

Suddenly, the world sounded again.

At first, it was muffled. Then it became far too sharp. The bus engine roared, the doors clicked, someone laughed loudly. Tami grabbed the glass wall of the shelter because the ground seemed to tilt beneath her for a moment.

Nina looked at her once more. She was breathing more calmly now.

"Thank you," she said.

Tami saw her lips move, but caught only half the words.

"Sure," she answered automatically.

Nina boarded the bus and disappeared among the passengers. Only when it pulled away did Tami realise she still could not hear properly. Everything sounded as though it had been knocked against sharp edges. Lea was saying something, but her voice came from the wrong direction.

"What?" Tami asked.

Lea stood directly in front of her. "I’m asking whether you can hear me."

"Sort of." Tami tried for her usual grin. "Maybe my dream finally came true. The world has a mute button."

The joke did not land. Denis stopped looking amused.

"That isn’t good," he said.

"Discovery of the year."

Viktor stepped closer, but did not raise his voice. "Tami, how many people can you estimate are around you without turning around?"

She blinked. She could sense movement behind her, but could not tell whether someone stood one metre away or five. It was not only about hearing. The silence had erased the edges of space.

"I don’t know," she admitted.

This time, she was not joking.

Lea made a quick decision. She led them through a side gate into the small yard behind the gym. Between the school wall, the paper recycling bins and an old bench, it was usually quiet after school. Not Tami’s empty kind of quiet. Ordinary, safe quiet, with distant cars and sparrows beneath the roof.

Tami sat on the bench. One hand rested on her knee; with the other, she touched the headphones around her neck, as if they might help her find her bearings.

Lea stood in front of her. "What were you trying to do?"

"Help Nina."

"I know. How much space were you trying to silence?"

"I don’t know. Just… the area around us."

An Important Moment

"That isn’t an answer."

Denis leaned one shoulder against the wall. "Lea, are we seriously doing an interrogation right now? She looks like her brain just lost a boss fight."

"That’s exactly why I’m asking." Lea remained calm, but her voice had a hard edge. "When it happened, we didn’t know what to do. Neither did she."

Tami looked up. "You don’t have to say it as if I’m a broken vacuum cleaner."

"I’m not."

"You kind of are."

For a moment, only the rustle of trees beyond the fence remained between them. Viktor looked at the ground, then pulled one earbud from his pocket and spoke carefully.

"I think the silence didn’t only spread outward. It pulled you into itself."

Tami frowned.

"When I’m deep in signals," he continued, "at first I try to catch everything. Then I can’t tell where anything is coming from. It isn’t only unpleasant. I lose my map of space. Maybe you lost your map through sound."

The girl lowered her gaze. The idea fit far too well.

"I wanted them to stop," she said after a while. "I wanted Nina not to have to listen to their stupid comments. When she started choking up, I knew that if I waited, it would get worse."

"You could have given us a signal," Lea said more gently.

"And what would you have done? Denis would have jumped at them and landed on someone’s foot? You would have turned off a traffic light?"

"I wouldn’t turn off a traffic light," Denis snapped before Lea could answer.

Despite everything, Viktor smiled quietly. Tami did not smile back.

"I know I overdid it," she added. "I just didn’t think I’d get lost in it too."

Lea sat beside her. "Fast doesn’t mean safe. But it also doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have helped."

"So what does it mean?"

"That next time, you don’t have to be in it alone."

Denis pushed himself away from the wall. "That sounds like the beginning of rules. And rules sound like something everyone hates until someone breaks one."

"Exactly," Lea said.

"That wasn’t a compliment."

"I’ll take it anyway."

Viktor crouched beside a crack in the concrete and drew a short line with the tip of his finger. "There don’t have to be many. If a place is risky — a street, a crowd, stairs, anything — no one uses a power alone."

"Our school is a risky place too," Denis remarked.

"Then the school too," Viktor said.

He added a second line beside the first. "If a side effect appears, we say so immediately. Not in the evening. Not when it passes. Immediately."

Tami ran her fingers over her ear. "Even if it’s embarrassing?"

"Especially then," he answered.

Lea added the third point. "And we don’t hide mistakes. We have to be careful in front of other people. Not with each other. If we mess something up, we say it."

Denis shook his head. "That’s just ordinary club rules. All we need now is a ban on chewing gum during secret meetings."

"We can add it," Tami said.

This time, they all laughed, though only briefly. The tension did not disappear; it merely eased a little.

"So?" Lea asked. "Agreed?"

Denis looked toward the stop, visible through the gap between the buildings. "Agreed. But if we ever get rule number four, I suggest we don’t call it club rules."

"Excellent contribution," Lea said dryly.

Tami placed her palm over the drawn lines. "Agreed."

What Comes Next

At last, Viktor nodded too. "Agreed."

A few minutes later, as they walked back past the bus stop, traffic looked normal again. People boarded and left buses, looked at their phones. No one pointed at the spot where the silence had spread earlier.

Only a man in a grey jacket stood by the newsstand. He held a paper cup of coffee and stared at the glass wall of the shelter a little longer than seemed natural. Then he took out his phone, tapped the screen a few times and looked towards the four of them.

Viktor’s shoulders stiffened.

"What is it?" Denis asked.

The boy was silent for a moment. He felt the network around him. The usual pressure of phones, buses and shops. Beneath it, however, something else pulsed — a narrow, regular beat. It was not a voice or a message. It felt more like someone had placed a finger on a map and was watching where it moved.

"I don’t know," he said at last. "But the signals near the stop changed for a moment. As if something had registered… us."

Tami looked back. The man was already walking away, swallowed by the crowd.

"Maybe someone just filmed the weird silence," she said, but there was no joke in her voice.

Lea noticed. "We don’t have to panic about it."

"I didn’t say that," Viktor said. "I just don’t think we should pretend nothing happened."

They stopped at the corner where their paths divided. Evening lights came on one by one, and faint blue lines lit up above the road, clearer to Lea than to the others.

Tami took a breath. "I’m sorry. No qualifiers and no jokes. I overdid it."

Lea nodded. "And I’ll try not to turn every mistake into an interrogation."

"That would be a historic day," Denis said, then grew serious. "I accept the rules. Not as a brake. More like… a safety catch, so nothing falls apart beneath our feet."

Viktor looked at each of them. "When something starts happening, we speak up. Immediately."

"Immediately," Tami repeated.

For a moment, they stood close together, without grand promises and without pretending they had everything under control. It was enough that this time, no one walked away with a secret they had to carry alone.

Then they went their separate ways.

Viktor had taken only a few steps when the pressure of signals passed over the back of his neck again. A faint, regular pulse. Once. Twice.

Behind him, the noise of the city softened for a second.

Not completely.

Only enough to make all four of them turn around.