Nultý signál, časť 4: Neviditeľná minúta

The Zero Signal, part 4: The Invisible Minute

The Story Begins

By eight in the morning, the school hall was hot and tense, like before a test. A big screen hung on the wall. Under it stood two borrowed speaker boxes, and teachers, ninth graders, and members of the school media club moved around a table with a laptop.

Today was the project presentation for parents, the city office, and a few people from a local company. For most of the school, that meant no normal lessons. For the people who had worked on the projects for weeks, it meant much more.

"If this breaks, Mr. Kováč is going to give a funeral speech over the projector," Tami whispered, adjusting the headphones around her neck.

The image on the screen suddenly jumped. For a second, a presentation about river cleaning appeared, then a green chart, then gray stripes. The speakers crackled so sharply that several people flinched.

"That was not normal," Viktor said quietly.

He was standing by the technical table, squeezing a cable in his fingers. There was no panic in his face, only more and more focus. Around him, mobile phones, the school Wi-Fi, wireless microphones, and who knew what else were buzzing. For Viktor, it was not just noise. He felt signals as pressure in space, like the room was filling with invisible bubbles pushing against each other.

"Is there too much interference?" Lea asked.

"Yes. But this isn't ordinary interference." He looked at the sockets on the wall. "Something keeps coming back. At regular intervals."

Mr. Kováč bent over the laptop and pressed keys nervously. "Where is the network admin? And why isn't even the backup cable working?"

Denis stood a little apart, his hands in his jacket pockets. On the outside, he looked like it had nothing to do with him. But his eyes kept jumping from the projector to the cables, from the door to the technical table.

"You've got about three options," he said. "Turn it off, turn it on, or stare at it for a long time. So far, we're doing all three at once."

Lea glanced at him over her shoulder. "Don't try to be funny."

"I'm not trying. I'm just mapping the situation."

Just then, the image went completely black. An unhappy murmur rose in the hall. Through the doors, they could already hear parents arriving.

Denis straightened up. "Okay. Then let's speed this up."

Lea caught his sleeve. "What exactly do you want to speed up?"

"Everything. The cable is at the back, the second adapter is in storage, and the admin is somewhere on the other side of the building. By the time those people agree, it'll be lunch."

"You're not a courier with turbo mode," she reminded him.

"Maybe I just framed it wrong." Denis gently pulled free. "After the last few tries, I found one thing out. If I repeat it more times, I can catch the moment better. Like the skip… charges up."

Tami raised an eyebrow. "That sounds like a line from a game right before a red warning pops up and half your health disappears."

"Very encouraging."

Viktor let go of the cable. "I'm not sure it's charging. More like you're getting used to the movement. And if you push it too far, you can get stuck in—"

"I know what happened last time," Denis cut in. "I didn't forget."

Then he pushed off the wall and ran down the corridor.

His ability was not teleportation. He did not vanish in a flash and appear on the other side of the building. When he moved in a certain direction, his body seemed to jump forward for a brief instant along its own line. Two steps became six. With the right timing, it looked almost natural.

When Things Start to Change

At first, he came back with an extension cord. A moment later, he appeared near the open storage room just as a teacher was carrying a box of spare adapters. Then he rushed past the doors and caught a falling microphone stand before it crashed to the floor.

"See?" he called over his shoulder. "It works."

"Your luck works," Lea shot back.

Meanwhile, a light on the technical table blinked on and off. Mr. Kováč plugged in the second adapter. The projector started up for three seconds, but instead of an image, shaky blue lines appeared on the screen.

Viktor grabbed his temple. "That pressure again."

"Then we disconnect it," Denis said.

"Wait," Lea said. "First find out what's plugged in where."

But he was already moving.

He skipped to the cables by the wall, then to the door to push a table out of the way, and then back again. He wanted to bring a screwdriver. He wanted to stop a teacher who was about to unplug everything at once. He wanted to be at the laptop before the picture disappeared again.

After the third quick skip, the floor felt strangely slanted beneath him.

Not really. At least, that was what he told himself first. But the door that had been on his left a moment ago felt too far away. Mr. Kováč's voice came from somewhere behind him, even though the teacher was standing right in front of him.

Denis stopped so suddenly that his trainers slid on the linoleum.

"Where is…" he began, but did not finish.

The corridor was full of familiar things: a notice board with photos, a fire extinguisher, a window, a drinks machine. Even so, none of it seemed to fit. The space around him was not moving, but his brain could not decide where things were coming from.

Lea found him leaning against the wall.

"Denis?"

"I'm fine."

"Was that for the wall, or for me?"

He closed his eyes. "Where are the hall doors?"

Tami, who came running up behind Lea, stopped smiling. The doors were barely two meters from him.

"On the right," she said more gently. "All the way right. Don't do anything, okay?"

"I'm not doing anything." He tried to pull away from the wall, but then he grabbed it again. "Everything just… got mixed up."

Viktor reached them last. In the crowded corridor, he looked paler than usual. "Don't skip again. Please. I can still feel more than one movement trail on you. Like you're in several places at once, but not properly."

"Perfect," Denis muttered. "I'm a broken map."

Another crackle came from the hall. Then someone called that the presentation would start in ten minutes.

Lea turned back toward the technical table. For a moment, she hesitated. She could stay with Denis and check whether he was getting worse. She could also run back and save the projector. Neither choice was good.

"Tami, stay with him," she decided at last. "Viktor, come with me. Slowly."

"Slow is a deeply underrated luxury today," Denis said, but his voice shook.

At the sockets, there were even more cables than in the morning. Someone had plugged in a backup lamp, someone else a charger, and next to that lay an extension reel with a cable running under the carpet. Lea bent down.

In her sight, current showed up as thin cyan threads. They were not bright like lightning. They looked more like narrow lines of light flickering under plastic and through copper veins.

"Here," she said.

One cable was stretched so tight that its plug was only half in the socket. Every time the carpet moved, contact broke for a split second. But now and then, a faint blue flash appeared around it, and it did not come from the adapter or the socket.

An Important Moment

Lea reached out, but did not touch it right away.

"Do you see that?" she asked Viktor.

"Not with my eyes." He covered one ear with an old earbud, even though nothing was playing through it. "But yes. When it flashes, all the signals in the room get pressed together for a second. Like someone is closing a fist."

The flash happened again.

Viktor flinched and had to lean against the table. "That's not the school Wi-Fi."

"Great," Lea muttered. "Because an ordinary fault would be too boring."

Carefully, she laid two fingers on the plastic cover of the power strip. Cyan lines wrapped around her knuckles for a moment. She did not feel power being created. Only the current that already existed, and its unwilling direction.

"I need no one to move the cables," she said.

Tami appeared in the doorway. "Denis is sitting down. He's looking at the drinks machine and says he's never seen it before."

"Can you hear us?" Lea asked.

The red-haired girl nodded, then pressed a hand to her ear. "For now. But everyone here is shouting at once."

The hall was filling up. Teachers were trying to seat the guests, students kept asking what was happening, and every now and then the speaker gave off a short ugly crack.

Tami took a breath. "Give me half a minute. Maybe a minute, if my head doesn't go on holiday."

She spread her hands at her sides.

The sound did not disappear completely. It only pulled back around the technical table, like someone had thrown a thick blanket over the noise. Voices suddenly sounded far away. The crackling faded. Lea could hear her own breathing and the soft rustle of Viktor's sleeve.

"Now," she said.

Viktor pulled the tight cable out a few centimeters so it would not snap. Lea redirected the weak current from one free socket into the extension lead. It was not elegant. It was more like a temporary fix that the school caretaker would probably hate. Still, the projector came back on.

The first image of the river appeared on the screen.

Tami dropped her hands at once. The sounds rushed back all at once, and she frowned as if someone had shoved music straight into her head.

"Ugh," she said. "Now I can hear someone chewing gum two rows away."

"Temporary?" Lea asked.

"I hope so. Otherwise I'm going to start hating humanity before lunch."

The presentation started late. The speakers still were not perfect, so the presenter had to speak louder. The image jumped now and then, but it stayed on the screen. Some parents even clapped after the first successful slide, as if they had just saved the whole city.

Meanwhile, Lea went back to Denis. He was sitting on a bench in the corridor, elbows on his knees. Viktor handed him a bottle of water, and for a moment Denis only held it, as if he was not sure it was really in his hand.

"Now I know where I am," he said without greeting.

"That's a good start," Lea replied.

Denis looked briefly toward the hall. "Is it working?"

"Half and half. So, exactly as well as most school tech."

Tami sat down beside him and carefully rubbed her ear. "Without your extra-fast chaos, it might have worked three quarters of the way."

He expected her to argue back. It was clear on his face. An ironic answer flashed in his eyes, but this time he did not let it out.

"I thought if I did it more often, I'd get into the rhythm," he said at last. "But after a while, I couldn't tell what came before and what came now. Where I ended. Where I started."

What Comes Next

Viktor sat down on the edge of the bench. "That doesn't mean you're weak. It means you have a limit."

"It's my fault for pretending I didn't."

For a moment, the corridor was quiet. Not Tami's kind of silence, made with power. Just an ordinary pause between words.

Lea leaned against the wall. "Next time, you say it earlier."

Denis looked at her. "Next time?"

"Something will go wrong again. It's a school."

Tami smiled, though it was still a little crooked. "And we'll have a plan. One where Denis doesn't do eight things at once and I don't have to shut up the whole building."

"I only shut up a part of the building," she corrected herself. "Technically."

"Technically, you were awesome," Viktor said.

Applause sounded from the hall. The river-cleaning presentation had just ended, and the next team was starting. Mr. Kováč came down the corridor, noticed the four of them by the bench, and only said in a tired voice, "I don't know who did what, but thanks for at least making it work."

After he left, Denis lowered his eyes to his trainers. "You don't have to tell him I broke myself against my own power."

"We won't," Lea said. "But you won't call it breaking yourself either. You just went past the limit."

"That sounds almost normal."

"It's not normal," Viktor said. "But it doesn't have to be shameful."

A little later, all four of them went back to the hall doors. The projector was still on. The socket had been secured with tape, and a temporary cover strip ran over the cables. The network admin finally arrived with a case, looked confused, and immediately started checking the adapter.

Still, Lea looked once more at the power strip.

A thin cyan flash flickered on its surface. It was so quick that a person could have taken it for a reflection from the screen. But Viktor froze beside her.

"Did you feel that?" she asked.

He nodded. "It was the same pressure. Short. And it went… somewhere out."

Denis did not rush to the cables or run after the source. He only stood between them, still a little unsteady on his feet.

"So the school tech is waving at us now?"

Tami looked at the blinking projector. "I hope not. Because I am not doing another talk with electricity today."

Outside the windows, an ambulance drove across the gray courtyard without its siren. In the hall, the presentation went on. Someone laughed, and on the screen a photo of the river at sunset appeared.

Then the flash disappeared.

Only Viktor kept staring at the cables for a while longer, as if something under the school or above the city had just answered quietly back.