Scientist Pyotr Shchukin and his graduate student Irina are passionate physicists. They are different, but both are not of this world. Everyone is secretly grateful to the Zone: he for the opportunity to explore “black holes” and other mysterious anomalous phenomena, she for the fact that it is there that she feels special, involved in the great mysteries of the Universe. But one day Irina’s sister disappears in the Zone, and the girl persuades her mentor to assemble a search group. With them are two laboratory assistants from the Physics and Technology Institute and a naughty but talented tracker dog. And the Zone has already prepared a test for everyone. Very soon they will have to, balancing over the abyss, choose between love and betrayal, science and murder, evil and even greater evil...