Broken Code. Part 1. English Edition

Chapter 1

The eyes watched.

Calmly.

Patiently. It was as if time itself had frozen in their bottomless depths for centuries.

They had witnessed the birth and fall of great empires. They had seen light rise to meet a timid hope, and darkness cloak the world in its cold embrace. They had seen brutal wars born of blind fear, and the fragile peace that arrived only through profound understanding.

Those eyes had been witness to countless eras. They knew all too well that light does not always bring good, and darkness does not necessarily spawn absolute evil. Yet, relentless time revealed something else entirely. From the fierce clash of light and shadow, something greater was born—something neither side had anticipated.

And so, in this very moment, that ancient, wisdom-filled gaze swept across the countless intertwined threads of human fate, settling upon just one. Upon a woman who was walking down a bustling street in Los Angeles, genuinely believing this day to be as mundane and dreary as any other.

If only she knew how many unseen eyes were tracking her every step.

If only she had any idea who she was destined to become…

But the morning had turned out far too ordinary. And it was precisely this ordinariness that irritated her most of all.

Eva walked leisurely down the street of Los Angeles, entirely oblivious to both the blinding sun and the ever-rushing crowd around her. Time and again, her thoughts kept racing back to the recent incident.

Her light, ash-blonde curls shimmered softly in the midday sun. Oversized dark sunglasses safely concealed her icy-blue eyes. To any bystander, the image she projected was flawless, almost ideal: delicate, chiseled features, impeccably fair skin, and a noble, somewhat distant, cool beauty.

All around her, the usual city hustle and bustle was in full swing. Passersby moved in a frantic, automatic rhythm—everyone hurrying somewhere, each utterly absorbed in their own life. No one paid attention to anyone else. It was a gray, predictable routine… and right now, Eva was desperately clinging to it like a lifeline.

“This will be over soon,” she whispered to herself, barely audible.

The car. She just needed to pick it up from the auto shop, and then everything would finally fall back into place. No more suffocating public transit, no more perpetually late taxis, and no more strange, suspicious people around. Finally, her sense of control would return.

Eva took a slow, deep breath, as if carefully testing her own state of mind.

She was calm.

She was composed.

She was still in full control of everything.

Almost…

But at that exact moment, her ruthless memory struck yet another devastating blow.

***

The loud, furious rain rattled against the windshield with sheer force.

The wipers worked frantically at their absolute limit, yet the cascading streams of water blurred the road ahead all the same.

Eva drove fast, but with steady confidence. She had always considered herself an excellent driver. Always in control of the road.

Suddenly, a bright flash cut through the darkness of the cabin—her phone screen lit up with an incoming notification. Just some stupid message… She lost focus for merely a moment. Literally for one brief second.

A loud car horn. Sharp. Piercing. Deafening. Too close! The blinding glare of headlights struck her eyes full force. A flash. The screeching grind of metal. Her entire world flipped upside down.

And then—a deafening, dead silence. Her fingers were still gripping the cooling steering wheel to the point of pain. But there was only one sound ringing in her ears—her own heart pounding so violently and loudly that it completely drowned out the rest of the world.

“I’m alive…” burnt through her mind.

That was her first, clearest thought.

The front of the car had been reduced to a heap of crumpled metal.

Yet, something about all of this was deeply wrong. Some sinister, unnatural abnormality. The impact itself… it simply couldn’t have happened like that. It was as if an invisible hand had rewritten the laws of physics and altered reality itself at the very last moment.

“Are you hurt? Hey, are you okay?” a voice called out from somewhere outside, breaking through the haze of shock.

Eva didn’t answer. She couldn’t move, staring ahead as if spellbound—through the cracked windshield, out onto the night road.

An absolutely empty road…

The car she had just collided with head-on had vanished without a trace. No debris, no skid marks.

“Miss, can you hear me?”

Eva blinked frantically.

And the illusion dissolved. In that very instant, the other car was back. It stood right there—tangible, wrecked, terrifyingly real.

“Yes…” she squeezed out, barely audible. “I’m fine.”

***

It was a total lie.

The haze of memories receded, snapping Eva back to reality.

“Mom?”

Eva flinched, startled.

Mira was looking up at her with big blue eyes—far too serious and attentive for a seven-year-old child.

“Are you thinking about what happened again? The thing that wasn't actually real?”

Eva involuntarily frowned. “It was real, Mira.”

“No,” the girl replied with total calmness and an unchildlike gravity. “At first, it wasn't.”

A heavy pause hung in the air.

“And then suddenly, it was.”

Eva felt an icy chill run down her spine, a painful knot tightening inside her chest.

“What… what do you mean by that?”

“I don’t know,” her daughter shrugged serenely. “It just feels that way to me.”

Lately, Mira’s strange behavior had been causing Eva an inexplicable sense of dread more and more often. But in the very next second, the girl acted as if nothing had happened: all the way home, she chatted non-stop, enthusiastically recounting how "childishly" she had resolved a brewing conflict with a classmate.

“—...So anyway, I just told him it was wrong to do that, and took my pencil back!” Mira summarized proudly.

Eva lowered her eyes, trying to hide an involuntary smile.

“I'm glad you're learning to stand up for yourself,” she began gently, but quickly added in a firmer tone, “but be more careful next time.”

Mira scoffed with dissatisfaction:

“You're being strict Mom again.”

“I just want you to think about the consequences of your actions in advance.”

“Mom,” the girl drawled, squinting slyly. “What if those consequences aren't at all what we imagine them to be?”

Eva frowned, but chose to remain silent. Her daughter had been asking these strange, unsettlingly mature questions almost every single day.

And suddenly, a vague sense of unease washed over her body. It felt as though something subtle had shifted in the very rhythm of the street. The movements of the passersby had become somehow unnatural.

“Just exhaustion,” Eva commanded herself mentally. “Too much work, this endless rush.”

And yet… The midday sunbeams suddenly felt blindingly bright, and the footsteps of the people around her slowed down, as if locked in a lazy stop-motion frame. Eva tried to shift her focus, running through routine everyday chores in her head, desperate to escape her frightening thoughts.

“It seems Mira is getting completely out of hand. A little more, and she really will poke someone’s eye out with that wretched pencil… She's becoming utterly uncontrollable… Maybe if her father were around, everything would be easier? Stop. No. I can handle everything on my own. Just like I always do. We don’t need that bastard.” The vile word—one she had erased from her life long ago—echoed in her chest with a bone-chilling cold.

A strange optical illusion snapped Eva out of her mental numbness: the air before her eyes shivered almost imperceptibly, revealing a faint, unnatural glitch.

“Mom, something really weird is happening here,” Mira said quietly.

“Everything is fine,” she replied mechanically, though deep down in her soul she already knew with chilling certainty: their familiar world would never be the same again.

Mira was uncharacteristically chatty today.

“Mom… don’t you ever feel like the whole world is intentionally tweaking itself to match whatever we're thinking about?”

“And what do you call that, Mira? Magic?” Eva tried to smile.

“There’s no such thing as magic for us…” The girl paused for a second, then stubbornly protested, “But I still don’t get it: why did the teacher first say my project was ‘a bit mixed up,’ and then went and mixed up all the papers himself?”

On their way home, they sat down on a bench in a small park, just a short walk from their house. Eva silently watched her daughter attempt to neatly fold the sheets back into her backpack.

“Have you fixed it already?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Mira nodded. “But it’s still weird… Why did everyone make the exact same mistake?”

Eva sighed wearily and brushed away the intrusive thoughts:

“People make mistakes all the time, Mira. Don't look for hidden meaning where there is none, and don't turn it into something mystical.”

Her daughter looked up from her backpack and stared intently at her.

“Mom, what if those mistakes aren’t accidental at all?”

Eva flinched inwardly, but fought with all her strength to keep a serene expression and manage a smile:

“Well, then we're all in grave danger. And it looks like you'll have to teach me math all over again.”

The girl offered a brief, polite chuckle. Yet her gaze remained dead serious, heavy with an unchildlike weight.

Once again, a distinct icy chill ran down Eva’s spine.

This was definitely not a figment of a hyperactive imagination. Something in the very foundation of reality had shifted, and Eva felt it with every cell of her body.

A bird, gliding smoothly above the treetops, suddenly froze dead in midair, as if its silhouette had been crudely cut out and pasted into a frozen frame.

“Mom!” Mira yanked hard on her sleeve, pointing upward. “Look, it’s not flying!”

Eva stared spellbound at the suspended winged creature. She blinked frantically.

“I saw it,” she managed to squeeze out, noticing the bird flap its wings once more. “Just a second, and it kept flying. Everything is fine, Mira.”

But the moment she shifted her gaze to her daughter’s backpack, her heart skipped a beat. The sheets of paper tucked inside shifted to the side all on their own, even though the girl hadn't touched them.

“Mira… are you moving those?” Eva asked, barely keeping the tremor out of her voice.

“No,” her daughter replied serenely. “They’re doing it on their own.”

Eva clenched her fists until it hurt, desperately clinging to the fading remnants of her slipping rationalism.

But the space around them was changing rapidly. The air grew viscous, heavy, as though turning into thick jelly. The familiar hum of the city park became unnaturally muffled, and Eva felt physically how the world around them was beginning to warp to someone's relentless will, shifting slowly and irrevocably… She had denied what was happening until the very last, but deep down inside, she already knew with chilling clarity: this was no longer a stupid coincidence.

Standing up abruptly from the bench, Eva took a firm hold of her daughter’s hand.

“Let’s go home,” she commanded in a dry, exaggeratedly strict tone, trying in vain to pull their frightened thoughts back to the familiar, routine order.

Mira skipped obediently, almost playfully:

“Home? Mom, what if our home became completely different?”

Eva tried with all her might to maintain her composure, even though a suffocating anxiety had completely taken hold of her.

“It can’t be different,” she cut her off sharply, reassuring herself more than the child. “Everything stays in its place.”

They walked down the street, and Eva mentally checked every single step: the sidewalk, the road signs, the streetlights, the front doors. She clung desperately to the details, convincing herself that everything around them had to match her memories.

Yet the harder she scrutinized her surroundings, the more clearly the terrifying anomalies seeped through.

A massive stone bench had inexplicably shifted a couple of meters to the side. A ginger cat, which had just been sitting by a glass storefront, vanished instantly only to reappear on the opposite corner of the building.

The leaves on the tree branches kept rustling frantically, even though the sultry street breeze had completely died down.

“Mom, what if I’m just thinking too loudly?” Mira suddenly broke the silence.

“You’re still a child, silly girl…” Eva tried to soothe her. “Don’t look for hidden meaning where there simply isn’t any.”

“But Mom…” Mira hesitated for a second, and then smiled a bit too carelessly. “…what if I’m the one moving it by accident?”

Eva froze in her tracks, feeling her heart sink into her boots.

“What… what exactly are you moving, Mira?”

“I don’t know!” The girl threw up her hands, flailing them playfully in the air. “Just me! I think, and it changes!”

Eva’s face contorted with creeping terror. She let out a weary, heavy sigh:

“Mira, listen to me. You shouldn’t clutter your head and spend so much time thinking about completely meaningless things!”

“You mean, ‘shouldn’t think out loud’?” Mira interrupted.

“Mira!” Irritation now rang clearly in Eva’s voice. “You can’t think ‘out loud.’ Thoughts are always silent.”

“That’s not true…” The girl shook her head obstinately. “When I think out loud, the whole world starts to change. But when I think quietly, everything stays obediently in its place.”

“What is this nonsense?” Eva’s mind raced in panic. “She’s saying completely wild, terrifying things.” Okay, Mira was still just a child with a vivid imagination. But how could she explain the fact that Eva herself was seeing spatial shifts at every turn? Could these be delayed echo-symptoms of that terrible accident? Or was she simply losing her mind?

Her frantic thoughts were abruptly cut short by a dull thud—a large apple fell heavily from a tree branch, landing right at her feet.

Eva froze, an angry frown crossing her face:

“Brilliant. Now the trees have decided to join in on this farce, too.”

And to herself, with a mixture of anger and helplessness, she thought: “God, I hate these damn apples.”

She bent down and picked up the apple, squeezing it in her palm so hard as if holding on to control over her entire life depended on this single fruit.

“Everything is under control,” she stubbornly chanted to herself. “It’s just a fallen apple. A simple coincidence…”

But Mira was already eagerly reaching her hand out toward her:

“Mom, what if this apple is some kind of sign?”

Eva let out a quiet, heavy sigh:

“A sign? If it is, I’d much rather ignore it completely!”

She shifted her gaze further down the street, and everything inside her turned cold—the city was rapidly losing its familiar contours. A streetlight that had always stood strictly on the corner now towered forlornly a little higher than usual. The glass display window of a shop seemed to skew almost imperceptibly, and Eva froze as she caught a stranger’s reflection in it. From the depths of the dark glass, the faint silhouette of a grown man was staring back at her. She didn't know this man at all, yet at that exact moment, a wild thought pierced through her: on some subconscious level, she remembered him.

“Mom…” Mira whispered, barely audible. “He’s there.”

Eva whipped around and locked her gaze onto the sidewalk. Nobody. Only a faceless crowd of passersby kept moving at their usual pace.

“Who’s there, Mira? Who are you talking about?”

“Nobody,” the girl closed off, frightened. “It’s just… my imagination. Mom… are you sure we left through this side of the house?”

Eva frowned, feeling the ground slip away from under her feet:

“Of course through this side. Where are these questions coming from?”

“It’s just… everything is a little different here. The sidewalk isn’t the same. And the lights are shining somehow weirdly.”

Eva chuckled nervously.

“You’re looking too closely,” Eva voiced her thought softly. “Sometimes the world just… looks different.”

She squeezed the apple tightly, feeling its smooth skin.

“It seems…” she murmured, barely audible. “There’s becoming far too much of this ‘it seems’ in our lives.”

And for the first time in years, a bone-chilling realization pierced Eva: control was inexorably slipping away. The space around them began to shift imperceptibly, noiselessly. And Mira was the cause. Like a powerful mental magnet, the girl was drawing anomalies with her thoughts, her childhood fears, and her fantasies—step by step “pushing” and deforming reality itself.

The next day, everything looked completely normal again.

Even far too normal…

Eva caught herself clinging to the saving thought that yesterday's whole nightmare was merely the result of sheer exhaustion, nerves stretched to the limit, and her daughter’s overactive imagination. She had almost managed to convince herself.

Almost…

A deafening phone call shattered the silence at precisely 10:17 AM.

Eva was sitting in front of her flickering monitor in her loungewear, completely immersed in endless lines of code. Working from home had its perks. But it also meant hustling twice as hard: right now, she was managing projects for several major companies at once, torn between technical specifications. To outsiders, her complex, painstaking job as a programmer seemed incredibly tedious and monotonous. But to Eva herself, this world was a true sanctuary, a safe escape from a chaotic reality. Here, every symbol, every digit, and every algorithm obeyed strict logic without question.

She glanced at the phone screen before answering. It was a call from the school.

“Mira,” Eva sighed. “What have you done this time?”

“That girl should have definitely been born a boy,” Eva thought with a bitter smirk. “Then at least her explosive temper and perpetual headstrong nature could somehow be justified.”

She swiped her finger across the screen:

“Yes, I’m listening.”

“Miss Eva?” The voice on the phone sounded polite—altogether too polite. “You are requested to come to the school immediately. It’s regarding your daughter.”

A brief, ringing pause…

“Did something happen?”

“There’s been a minor… incident.”

The school greeted Eva with its usual mix of fresh paint smells, paper, and deafening children's chatter. But today, this chaos felt somehow different: a strange sense of deja vu was building inside Eva, as if the surrounding sounds were lagging behind people’s movements by a fraction of a second. Reality was once again flaking at the edges, almost imperceptibly.

Eva pulled the handle and walked into the office. Mira sat motionless in a chair, arms stubbornly crossed over her chest. A short distance away stood a sniffling boy, pressing an ice pack wrapped in a napkin to a rapidly bruising eye.

“Mom,” Mira said calmly.

Far too calmly for someone who had just gotten into a fight.

“What happened here?” Eva asked coldly, shifting her gaze from her daughter to the boy’s swollen face.

The homeroom teacher stepped softly into the conversation:

“You see, we had a regular creative assignment… The children were asked to draw their families.”

The teacher placed a sheet of paper on the desk.

Eva lowered her gaze to the drawing.

First, her eyes located herself. Crisp, confident lines. A sharp business suit, hair pulled back into a high ponytail. The resemblance was far too striking.

“The girl is a born artist after all,” Eva thought, not without a touch of pride. She desperately wanted to smile, but had to suppress the urge to avoid losing what remained of her strict motherly authority.

Then she shifted her gaze to her daughter’s figure. Mira was drawn right beside her… But why was she holding an apple?

“Are these damn apples mocking me or something?” A faint, irritated confusion stirred inside Eva.

However, as her gaze slid to the edge of the paper, any remaining good mood vanished without a trace.

Standing next to them was a man.

A tall silhouette.

And he was… wearing armor? “What a vivid imagination this child has,” Eva tried to reassure herself, though her heart began to beat faster. Mira hadn't drawn the stranger's face—in its place blacked a sinister, solid shadow. The exact same shadow from the shop window.

“Who… who is this?” Eva asked quietly, without looking up.

The injured boy suddenly snickered and chimed in playfully:

“Her dad’s a knight!” he burst out laughing. “He probably went to hunt a dragon!”

Mira scraped her chair back with a loud clatter and stood up abruptly.

“He is real!” Mira snapped obstinately.

“Oh, of course!” the boy mocked caustically. “So what, does he live in a castle?”

“Not right now,” the girl replied calmly, but added with that same frightening, adult-like conviction: “But a long time ago, he did live there. Actually, he’s lived in a lot of places…”

Eva stared silently at the grey silhouette on the paper. To her own surprise, she felt no anger or irritation toward her daughter. Inside her, an entirely different feeling was taking root—a cold sense of recognition.

A little later, after the children were asked to wait in the hallway, the teacher closed the door and turned cautiously to Eva:

“We all understand that children at this age tend to have vivid imaginations, Miss Eva. But perhaps… it might be wise to show her to a specialist? A child psychologist, for instance,” she clarified gently.

“Are you suggesting I seek treatment for my child over an ordinary kid’s drawing?” A muffled irritation cut through Eva’s voice.

“It’s not about the drawing at all,” the teacher sighed. “It’s about how blindly Mira believes in her own inventions. She defends them with such aggression that she’s willing to hurt another child.”

Eva snapped her head up and cut her off in an icy tone:

“My daughter is completely fine!”

“Of course, naturally,” the woman backtracked hastily, not wanting to escalate the conflict. “It’s merely a professional recommendation.”

Eva gave a brief, dry nod. She was no longer listening to the woman—her gaze was irresistibly drawn back to the sheet of paper lying on the desk.

And in that very instant…

Her stomach dropped. It seemed distinctly, vividly clear to her that the knight drawn on the paper had shifted his shield ever so slightly, tightening his grip on it.

Eva squeezed her eyes shut and blinked hard.

Just her imagination. The drawing remained static.

Chapter 2

At home, a thick, suffocating silence greeted them.

Mira immediately settled at the table, eagerly starting to draw something new. Pretending to absentmindedly scroll through her phone’s newsfeed, Eva walked into the kitchen, but froze right by the sink and turned around.

“Mira.”

“Yes, Mom?” the girl replied without looking up from the paper.

“Who is the knight in your drawing?”

Mira didn’t answer right away. She slowly set her pencil down, as if weighing her words, and only then raised her completely calm eyes to her mother…

“Daddy.”

Eva’s jaw clenched tightly, her fingers digging harder into the body of her phone.

“You don’t have a dad.”

“I do,” Mira countered softly, but with iron certainty.

“You couldn't possibly know him.”

The girl shook her head almost imperceptibly.

“I saw him, Mom.”

“And where was that?”

“In a dream.”

The air in the room turned palpable, and the silence grew dense and heavy, like the lull before a storm.

“And… what is he like?” Eva asked against her better judgment.

“He’s tall. Very strong. And his eyes are...” Mira paused for a moment, searching for the right words, her gaze going momentarily blank. “It’s like he already knows everything, everything that’s ever happened to him. And everything that is yet to come.”

A slow chill crept down Eva’s spine in a wave. Panic flickered within her, carrying a haunting sense of recognition—as if she had already heard these frightening descriptions somewhere before. Or seen them with her own eyes.