The Zero Signal, Part 7: Someone Is Watching Us

The Zero Signal, Part 7: Someone Is Watching Us

The Story Begins

The morning cold still clung to the school’s back entrance, even though it was already after eight. Lea stood by the wall, her hands in the pockets of her black denim jacket, and watched a video load on Denis’s phone.

It took seven seconds.

The shaky clip showed an old storage building behind the sports grounds. Tami’s copper curls flashed in the corner of the screen. Then the image trembled. A metal can on the floor slid a few centimetres by itself, as if an invisible hand had pulled it. In the next shot, Denis was suddenly closer to the door, though moments earlier he had been standing by the wall.

The video ended before anyone could make sense of it.

“Is that all?” Tami asked, leaning over his shoulder.

“That’s all,” Denis said. “And about a hundred people have seen it already. Maybe more. Someone sent it to the second-years, they passed it on, and now everyone’s acting as if they found aliens in the broom cupboard.”

“It’s blurry,” Viktor said quietly.

“That’s not good news,” Lea replied.

The boy shifted his old wired earbuds from around his neck onto one shoulder. “I know. I’m just saying that at first glance, it could look like some weird filter.”

“At first glance,” Lea repeated. She paused the video at the exact moment a thin bluish line appeared on the metal door. It was so faint that most people would dismiss it as an image glitch. But she knew what she was seeing. Current. Her current.

Her stomach tightened.

Tami folded her arms across her chest. “Great. Until now, we were the weird group. Now we’re the weird group with a trailer.”

No one smiled.

The night before, they had typed a few simple rules into Lea’s phone: no testing their abilities around people, no needless risks, and no solo actions. At the time, they had sounded sensible. Now they felt like a paper umbrella in a storm.

“Where exactly did you find it?” Lea asked.

“Mark sent it to me. He said it landed in a group chat.” Denis frowned. “And no, I haven’t asked him. Yet.”

“Yet is an important word,” she warned him.

The back door opened, and two first-year girls came out. The four of them fell silent at once. The girls did not even look at them; they were laughing at something on a phone. Even so, Lea waited until they disappeared around the corner.

“This isn’t ordinary gossip,” she said then. “Someone knew what to film.”

Viktor looked at the frozen frame again. “And from where.”

During the long break, they hid by the lockers at the end of an empty corridor. A history teacher’s voice drifted from one classroom, and somewhere nearby came the smell of instant soup and wet jackets.

Viktor played the video on his old phone. He enlarged the image until it broke into coloured squares.

“The camera wasn’t handheld,” he said. “The shot moves, but not like someone walking. More like something was propped against the wall and vibrations shifted it now and then.”

“A phone on a bench?” Tami suggested.

“Maybe. Or a cheap tablet. Or an old camera.” Viktor tapped the corner of the screen. “Look. The angle is low. By the storage door. Exactly where we thought no one could see us.”

Denis pushed himself away from the locker. “So someone was near us and we didn’t even notice. Great work, team.”

“Don’t play commentator,” Tami said more sharply than she intended. Then she lowered her eyes. “Sorry. I just… don’t want to imagine someone watching.”

When Things Start to Change

Lea understood. Back then, they had not been strong or ready. They were only testing what their bodies could do, and they were afraid of it. Tami had created a circle of silence so powerful that her ears rang for half an hour afterwards. Denis had nearly stumbled into a metal shelving unit during his repeated jumps. Viktor had sat on the floor with his hands at his temples because too many signals at once were pressing into his head.

It had been their weakest moment.

“First, we find the source,” Lea decided. “No questioning people in the corridor. No chasing anyone. Denis, no heroic shortcuts.”

“I don’t take heroic shortcuts.”

Tami raised an eyebrow. “You are literally a person who takes shortcuts.”

This time, the corner of Denis’s mouth twitched, but the smile did not last. In the end, he only nodded.

After school, they went outside together. The sky was grey, and the wet asphalt reflected the car lights. More people than usual stood at the bus stop. Someone was complaining about a late bus, a small child was kicking a bag, and the scent of pastries drifted from a nearby stall.

Lea spotted him first.

The man stood across the street by the window of a closed hair salon. He wore a dark coat, a plain grey scarf, and his hands were in his pockets. He was not old. Maybe in his thirties, maybe younger; it was hard to tell. He did not look like someone trying to hide. That was exactly what made it bad.

“Don’t all look at once,” she said so quietly that only they could hear.

Denis looked immediately.

“Excellent,” Lea muttered.

“What?” he asked, but he had already seen the man too.

Tami adjusted the hood of her dark green hoodie. “That man with the face of someone waiting for the dentist?”

Viktor went still. His pupils widened for a moment. There were too many phones around the bus stop, Wi-Fi from the café, signals from cars and traffic lights. Usually, he felt it all as pressure from every direction. Now, among it, he sensed something regular. A soft pulse that repeated whenever the man moved his hand near his coat.

“He has a device on him,” he whispered. “I don’t know what kind. It isn’t just a phone. Something is transmitting… or listening.”

“Then I’m going after him,” Denis said.

Lea grabbed his sleeve. “No.”

“He’s watching us.”

“Maybe. But if you rush after him, the only thing we’ll know for certain is that there are four of us and we look suspicious.”

Tami drew a slow breath. “I can try something small.”

Lea nodded.

The girl closed her eyes. The noise of the bus stop seemed to draw in around them, as if someone had covered the world with a thick blanket. It did not disappear completely. It only focused into a narrow direction, the one toward which Tami turned her head.

The man pressed a finger to the earbud in his ear.

“Still,” he said.

Then Tami released her ability. Sound rushed back all at once: bus brakes, coughing, a door slamming. She blinked and touched her ear.

“That’s all I got,” she said. “And now there’s an electric bee buzzing in my left ear.”

The man boarded the bus that had just arrived. He did not look back at them. The vehicle pulled away and soon vanished beyond the junction.

On the way home, Denis could not stay quiet.

An Important Moment

“He said still. That’s no coincidence. Someone is feeding him updates, and he’s telling them we’re still here.”

“Or he was talking about the bus,” Viktor said cautiously.

“Sure. A bus agent. A special unit against four people who had bad luck during a blackout.”

“You don’t have to pretend this doesn’t bother you,” Lea snapped. “I can see you’re scared.”

Denis stopped so sharply that Tami almost collided with his shoulder.

“I’m not scared.”

“Fine. Then you’re angry. The result is the same if you start acting without a plan.”

For a moment, only their footsteps on the pavement could be heard. The first windows lit up between the apartment blocks.

At last, Denis exhaled. “So what’s the plan?”

The question surprised everyone, perhaps even him.

Lea answered at once. “Viktor will look at the recording again. Each of us will go over what we remember from the storage building. Then we’ll meet by the old path behind the grounds. If that man appears, we won’t chase him. We’ll watch what he does.”

“That sounds like a trap,” Tami said.

“It’s observation,” Lea corrected her.

“A trap with better marketing.”

Viktor’s room was full of cables, notebooks, and two dismantled speakers. A laptop glowed on the desk. The four of them crowded around it while darkness slowly gathered outside.

Viktor played the video frame by frame. He stopped at a black strip along the left edge of the image.

“Wait.”

He zoomed in. The static broke apart, but beneath it appeared the outline of a small object leaning against a concrete block. It was not a bag. Nor was it a can.

“A phone?” Tami asked.

“An old camera,” Viktor said. “Or a phone in a fixed mount. See that metal clip?”

A chill ran down Lea’s back. During the test, the object had been almost behind the door. They must have walked past it. They must have seen it, but had not given it any meaning.

“Someone left it there beforehand,” she said.

“And then came back for it,” Denis added.

Viktor suddenly gripped the edge of the table. “Quiet.”

“What is it?”

“Not sound.” He closed his eyes. “A signal. For a moment… it was as if something answered. Not from here. More to the north.”

North of the city lay an abandoned plot overgrown with weeds and bushes. A transmission tower had once stood there. The very one near which everything had begun to change during the blackout.

No one said its name. They did not need to.

An hour later, they stood by the old path behind the school grounds. The wall was cracked, and the abandoned plot began beyond it. Wind rustled dry leaves, and the low rumble of the city drifted over from afar.

Lea kept her hands in her pockets so no one would see the slight tremor in her fingers. Denis shifted his weight near the lamps that cast weak yellow circles over the path. Tami pulled her hood lower over her forehead. Viktor held his phone but did not watch the screen. He sensed the pressure in the space around him.

“No jumping,” Lea reminded Denis.

“I know.”

“And no silence until we need it,” Tami added.

“I know.”

“And no—”

“Lea.” Denis looked at her. “I know.”

This time, she nodded.

They waited five minutes. Then ten. Meanwhile, an unpleasant pressure from the nearby networks began building in Viktor’s head. He breathed deeply and focused on a single weak pulse coming from the road.

What Comes Next

“He’s coming,” he said.

The man in the dark coat appeared at the corner of the grounds. He walked calmly, neither fast nor slow. He did not head toward them. He passed the path as if he could not see them at all.

Denis tensed his shoulders.

Without looking at him, Lea laid her palm on his forearm.

Just then, the man stopped by the low wall. He took something small from his pocket, placed it on top of the cracked concrete, and continued on. By the time Denis moved, the stranger was already near the car park, where they would have had to chase him across the road and between cars.

“No,” Lea said.

It was clear she had made the right choice. Though Denis clenched his jaw, he stayed where he was.

A moment later, they went to the low wall. A thin metal tag lay on it, slightly bigger than a coin. One side bore an engraved symbol of three concentric circles. Tiny letters covered the other.

Viktor shone his phone’s light on it.

THE ZERO SIGNAL STILL BREATHES.

THE TOWER. NORTH ENTRANCE. 21:10.

Tami was no longer trying to joke. “This is really bad, isn’t it?”

“Not entirely,” Viktor said, his voice trembling slightly. “It would be bad if they sent it to everyone. This is for us.”

“And that’s supposed to be better?” Denis asked.

Lea turned the tag between her fingers. The metal was cold. “It means they don’t want to expose us right away. They want us to go somewhere. But we don’t know why.”

“That man knew about the tower,” Tami said. “And about the signal. About something no one should know.”

Viktor lifted his head toward the city’s dark northern edge. At that moment, he felt a pressure so faint that on any other day he would have mistaken it for tiredness. A brief pulse. Regular. Alive.

“We’re not the only ones watching it,” he said.

They walked home more slowly. They no longer argued. Denis walked with his hands in his pockets and occasionally looked over his shoulder, but said nothing. Tami carried the tag wrapped in a paper tissue, as if she were afraid to touch it directly. Lea assembled a plan in her mind that would be neither quick nor completely safe, but at least would not be foolish.

At the last junction, Viktor stopped.

A small blue light blinked on the roof of the house opposite. Only once. Then it went out.

From far away, too quietly for anyone else to hear, he sensed a brief confirmation in the mobile networks. As if someone had acknowledged a message.

The tag had arrived.

And someone knew they had found it.